Seventy Times Seven

One

THE CARE OF CHILDREN

One house of the many that make up a city: a pale-yellow house, an hour after sunup in Gary, Indiana. A woman lives here, on Wisconsin Street, with her two daughters. Rhonda is twelve, her sister Paula is nine. It is 1979.

Their mother-her name is Gloria-hustles them outside into the morning light, and then into the dark of the garage and the back seat of her red Chevy Vega. The girls are very young, and they are powerfully tired. They understand what their mother intends to do-she has kept them up all night softly talking then shouting then whimpering to them about where they'll be traveling together, about what must happen next-and they are no longer resistant.

With her daughters inside, Gloria tugs at the garage door until it slides down to meet the concrete. She slips into the driver's side, rolls down the windows, turns the key in the ignition: the engine gives off a deep, thrumming sound. Then she waits for them to close their eyes and fall into that steady rhythm; she can see their faces in the rearview mirror, small and brown and perfect. All three are still, their limbs grown heavy as if underwater.

The engine continues running; the minutes accumulate; the air thickens.

Outside the garage, the neighborhood is awakening. Inside the garage, the girls are passing into an unnatural sleep.

What Rhonda remembers next: she and Paula laying side by side on their bottom bunk, not knowing how they got there. They have not exited the world. Gloria is leaning over them, her daughters: they will be all right, she says. Just before leaving.

Rhonda does not know how much time has passed before she is able to move her body. She rises slowly. A letter is taped to the door, from their mother: She is finishing what she set out to do. Rhonda rushes to the kitchen and calls her aunt, who tells her to run, get their neighbor. Through the window, she thinks she sees exhaust seeping out from under the garage door, into the bright daylight.

Mr. Hollis drags Gloria out of the garage and lays her on her back on the lawn. He drops to his knees and with elbows locked, hand over hand, pushes hard on her chest. Again and again. The neighbor across the street, a nurse, rushes over and takes her turn trying to pump breath back into Gloria's body.

The ambulance arrives, and the fire department, and a medic becomes the third person in line to tend to Gloria. By now, Paula is standing outside, watching. Rhonda sees her younger sister grow hysterical at the sight of this stranger bearing down on their mother's chest, and Gloria not responding, not responding.

Something Rhonda will not forget: no one examines them, the girls. The firemen, the medics-no one so much as takes their pulse. When Gloria is swept off to the hospital, the sisters go stay with their aunt. When after a week their mother checks herself out early, no one asks any questions; when she comes to retrieve her daughters, no one stops her.

For years, Rhonda has said that she does not know what transformed her sister. But now she tells me, as if untangling the question aloud, that this was it. This must have been the start of a change in Paula. "Because you have to understand: We were all supposed to have been dead. That's what we were expecting, that's what we were hoping." But they were still alive. And what now-another day in the yellow house?

The house stands in Marshalltown, a subdivision of the Pulaski neighborhood, integrated by Black working-class families in the 1950s. Theirs is one of a collection of streets lined with neat, ranch-style homes, single-family, with small front yards.

About a mile west of here is Midtown, or the Central District, once the sole, clearly delineated quarter of Gary's entire Black community. And a mile into Midtown is Broadway, which runs north-south the entire length of the city. That four-lane street leads you north into downtown, where the architecture collapses time: an ornate brick department store, now boarded up; a children's clothing store, now boarded up; the former headquarters of a major regional bank, its Greco-Roman façade left to grow tarnished. People still shop here, but more and more, steel accordion gates have been pulled shut across entranceways and display windows and left that way. More and more, businesses have closed up or moved south, into the malls of the white suburbs.

Broadway's final destination in the north, at the edge of downtown, is the Gary Works, along the southern shoreline of Lake Michigan. The United States Steel Corporation dominates the waterfront, the plant's rows of smokestacks darkening the air overhead; at night the compound glows red. At this moment, thousands rotate shifts here day and night, unaware that, within the next three years, more than two thirds of them will lose their jobs. About 150,000 people live in this town, most of them linked to the mill. It is the reason the city exists.

Just three generations ago, this area was all sand and swampland, a great expanse of nothing thirty miles from Chicago. It was the start of the 1900s, and the state of Indiana, shaped like a boot pointed West, was very rural and very white, its nearly one hundred counties distinguished by the sheer number of railway lines crisscrossing through it. Lake County, some six hundred square miles at its northwest corner, pressed against the shoreline. The county's most desolate stretch, along the water, was used as a private hunting and fishing club by Chicago's wealthier men, and as a hideaway by that city's fugitives. Winding rivers and tributaries, dense marshland, the rough terrain of the dunes-territory to pass through. It was here that U.S. Steel decided to buy nine thousand acres. They leveled the dunes, filled a half mile stretch of the lake, packed the marshes, rerouted part of the Grand Calumet River, dug out a mile-long ship canal, and began construction of the mill itself, with its massive blast furnaces and coke ovens. Within a handful of years, the Gary Works was completed, along with the beginnings of a company town.

In the building of every city, decisions are made as to who gets what. These decisions are built into the layout of the streets, the digging of trenches, the laying down of water pipes and sewer drains, the doling out of permits and licenses, the paving of roads and the rolling out of sidewalks, the planning and funding of schools and parks. There are many accidents along the way, the unintended aftershocks of these choices, but a city's framework, the bones of it, is laid down with intent. Some groups of residents are protected and served, while others are left isolated and exposed. This is the tension underlying all American cities, and in Gary this tension was extreme from the start.

Of the two sisters in the yellow house, Paula is a much gentler girl, a wuss, a baby, the biggest chicken-that's how her sister thinks of her-and Rhonda is the boss. They live around the corner from Bethune Elementary, where they're both enrolled, a quick run from door to door. Which is helpful, because Paula gets into fights after school. That is, she starts something she can't finish, and then she races back home with two or three angry girls in pursuit, and she runs them toward her big sister, and Rhonda has to do the fighting. Every time. Paula gets into it with someone, and Rhonda has to come swinging, and some girl ends up yanking at her long hair and making her look a mess. Paula, always a joker, stands in their doorway laughing. This works out fine for her-until one day their grandmother comes to stay with them, and now Rhonda has a witness. Their grandma sees this drama unfold out the front door three days in a row, and on the fourth she pulls Rhonda aside and pushes Paula out the door. "Get your butt out there and fight! Rhonda's not going to help you today. Rhonda been saving you all week!"

Paula can't fight, but she can dance. Whenever it's just the two of them in the house, they play music all the time. Rhonda has a Jackson 5 record from the back of a cereal box, and they play it over and over. Paula tries to teach her sister new moves, but it's a crack-up. "No, Rhonda, the beat is over here. It's over here. Come over here, Rhonda, and get on the beat!"

They like the neighborhood: so many kids around, riding their bikes after school or playing on the block. But the sisters are kept apart from the others. No one is allowed over to the house, and they are not allowed to visit other kids' homes; they can only sit inside. And so they make up games that can be played with friends from their doorway.

Most days and nights, Rhonda is expected to babysit Paula while their mother works long hours as a lab technician at Methodist Hospital and their father is nowhere to be found. She gets Paula up and dressed for school; she makes biscuits for breakfast; she sets a time for homework and cooks dinner. She is made to play the role of the other mother, and she makes sure Paula knows her rank, even if it means tearing through the house fighting. But sometimes they stop playing mother-daughter and have girl time, fix each other's hair, sit in front of the TV together and binge on cake and cookies. Sometimes Rhonda lets Paula turn the dial to The Three Stooges because it's her favorite. She loves watching those grown men squeeze into...