Missed Connection
Barbara had just called the cops because she picked the phone up and thought she heard breathing on the other end. Victor, the doorman at Emily’s apartment building, gave Emily the low down on the building gossip whenever they caught up and this was the latest. Barbara lived on the same floor as Emily. The two had occasional “run-ins” but Emily generally avoided her. Victor warned her about Barbara, saying she was crazy. “Certifiably Batshit” to be exact. He said that Emily should never talk to Barbara or the next thing she knew she would hear a knock on the door at three AM only to find Barbara standing outside her door complaining about the Jewish woman down the street who was running for city council or the fact that the Super had arrived ten minutes late to change her lightbulb last week and, “wasn’t that so goddamn unprofessional of him.”
One day Emily came home from work and found Barbara standing in the lobby, leaning over Victor’s desk. Her soft white hair puffed up like two mounds of cotton candy atop her sun-spotted head. She was venting to Victor about how the mailman now delivered the mail two hours earlier than he used to.
“It’s goddamn ridiculous. After twenty years they suddenly go and change every fucking thing,” she’d said. Victor made eye contact with Emily as she waited for the elevator to come.
He continued to affirm what Barbara was saying with “Mmmhmms” and “Yeahs” and “Rights” all while making eye contact with Emily and shaking his head from left to right. Barbara was too focused on unloading her own frustrations to notice the clear nonverbal message he was sending Emily: ‘I can’t believe I have to deal with her BS, again.’
Emily laughed silently and shook her head in hopes of sending a message of amused sympathy back to Victor. She could have tried to help. She could have interrupted and asked him to check the backroom for the package she knew she didn’t have. He wouldn’t have expected that of her though. He had once told Emily that if she saw Barbara talking at him in the lobby she should walk right on past. “Don’t even say hello. Seriously, save yourself,” he had said.
Emily was simply following his guidance, she justified as the elevator doors closed, leaving poor Victor stuck in the lobby with that loon tune.
But, a few days ago Emily’s successful attempts to avoid Barbara were nearly foiled. Emily was standing in front of her apartment door, digging through the caverns of her purse in pursuit of her ever elusive keys when she heard the jangling of keys around the corner along with a barely comprehensible murmuring of, “Shit. Shit. Goddamn it.”
Emily immediately recognized Barbara’s voice and her accompanying sailor mouth and knew that she should peak around the corner to make sure the woman was okay. She decided against it. Emily was busy. Barbara was crazy. Better to keep those two worlds apart.
If she had turned the corner she would have found Barbara balancing several cans of tuna and a few containers of applesauce in one hand, her chin steadying the top tuna can, as she fumbled with her keys to get the apartment door open.
“Do you need a hand?” Emily would have asked cautiously, trying not to startle her.
The question would have come to Barbara as a clear indication of help and consequent permission to drop her cans to the floor. Barbara would have pretended to lose her balance, letting everything tumble on down.
Emily would have scooped up as many of the cans as she could and walked them into Barbara’s apartment.
“Where should I put them?” she would have asked, unknowingly opening up the doors to this woman’s world.
“Oh wherever in the kitchen. Just don’t put them in the stove or something asinine like that. I hear you young New Yorkers do things like that, turning your stoves into goddamn cupboards,” Barbara would have said as she pulled a sheet of plastic off of her coach.
“I keep plastic on during the day to protect the cushions from the sun,” she would have explained without turning around, fully knowing that Emily would be staring at the plastic curiously and fully aware that protecting a twenty year old couch like this was curious behavior, but behavior that gave her something to do.
By the time Emily would have finished stacking the cans on the counter Barbara would have sat down on her faded jade green leather couch and turned on a silent black and white film that Emily had never seen and wouldn’t recognize. Emily would have taken this as her cue to leave, slipping out of the apartment and back into her own as quietly as she could, a bit surprised that Barbara hadn’t thanked her, but even more relieved that the woman hadn’t talked her ear off.
But, Emily hadn’t done any of this. She’d decided to heed Victor’s advice and keep her distance. And Barbara hadn’t dropped her tuna cans to the floor so Emily had no reason to feel bad about her decision. But, if she had helped, if those tuna cans had fallen to the floor, then...
...the following night Emily would have heard a knock at the door while she was washing dishes. She would have opened the door to find Barbara in a floor length pink paisley night-gown with ruffled sleeves. Barbara would have held out an unopened jar of marinara sauce and Emily would have made note of just how tiny and frail her veiny arms were.
“I can’t open this,” Barbara would have said.
“Those things can be a pain,” Emily would have replied, grabbing the jar out of her hand and turning the lid as hard as she could but to no avail. She would have thought about how difficult it must be for elderly people to deal with these lids.
“These stupid fucking things,” Barbara would have said, sharing Emily’s thought allowed while watching her struggle. “If a strong young thing like you can’t open it, how the hell do they expect me to? Those goddamn...”
Pop. Emily would have gotten the lid to open.
The two would have made eye contact and smiled, a brief but beautiful moment of humanity shared.
“Looks like I’ll be having dinner tonight after all,” Barbara would have said, taking the jar back.
“Glad I could help,” Emily would have responded as Barbara turned around to leave before stiffening and stopping herself abruptly.
“Say, what’s your name?” she would have asked as if Emily were some stranger at her doorway rather than the other way around.
“Emily,” she would have said, extending her hand outward.
Barbara wouldn’t have shook her hand back.
“I’m Barbara,” she would have said as she turned back around.
Oh, don’t I know it, Emily would have thought.
“Have a good evening,” Emily would have shouted as Barbara ambled down the hallway.
The woman would have reached her hand up over her shoulder at a right angle, not bothering to look back but extending a subtle wave of acknowledgement. And Emily would have smiled. She’s an odd one, she would have thought, but there’s something endearingly authentic about her, isn’t there?
Just two days later Emily would have heard another knock at the door. This time Barbara would have asked Emily to help her get a box of letters down from the top of a book shelf. It was high up and hard for Barbara to reach. She needed the box, to be sure, but more importantly, she would have wanted to ask Emily to help her with a pressing project.
“Are you a technologist?” she would have asked as Emily placed the letter box on the kitchen counter.
“Umm, no not really,” Emily would have said, wondering what Barbara was getting at.
“So you wouldn’t happen to know what the cloud is, would you?”
“Oh, sure. It’s a place where you store files and data online instead of in a physical space.” Emily would have explained hoping this made sense to the old woman.
“Could you show me how to put something in a cloud?” Barbara would have asked, her eyes misty and filled with hope.
Barbara would have explained that her high school aged grand-daughter had reached out and asked for her help with an oral history project for her social studies class. She’d specifically asked Barbara to upload recordings of herself to a cloud drive. Emily would have offered to help.
In helping, Emily would have learned Barbara’s history and would have come to understand the woman’s pain. She would have learned that the two women shared a passion for civil rights and that Barbara had taken a bus to Selma as a young college student to march to Montgomery. She would have learned that a picture of Barbara marching had shown up in a Chicago newspaper, much to the dismay of her parents. She would have learned that Barbara had fallen in love with a young black man named Fred during her junior year of studies at the University of Chicago. Fred worked as a janitor at the school and sat in the back of the freshman English Literature class she tutored in the evenings, cleaning as slowly as he could so he could listen to Barbara teach. He wrote an essay on interracial love and put it in the stack of papers she was to provide feedback on. After reading this anonymous extra paper Barbara confronted him after one of her tutoring sessions, saying that she knew he had been eavesdropping all along. When she got pregnant with his child as an unmarried white woman, her wealthy Chicago family disowned her.
Emily would have learned that Fred was drafted into the Vietnam War as part of an all black battalion and that he died in combat shortly after their only son, Walter, was born. After Fred’s death Barbara moved to Brooklyn with Walter to start anew.
Emily would have learned that Barbara and baby Walter moved into a tenement building and that she struggled to make ends meet waiting tables and cleaning houses. After her son caught a bacterial infection Barbara asked for an advance on her pay which she immediately spent on her son’s medicine. For the next few weeks she and poor Walter went hungry, forcing Barbara to make the unthinkable and difficult decision to give up her then two year old boy to a wealthy young couple who owned one of the houses she cleaned. The couple had been unable to have children of their own and promised that Barbara could remain a part of the boy’s life and that he would get the education and comforts of an upper middle class upbringing, the kind she herself had been blessed with but could not offer her son. The couple fired Barbara from her house cleaning job just one day after she turned her son over to them, cutting off her access to the child. They then moved away to another town where she wouldn’t be able find them.
Devastated, Barbara buried herself and her sadness in work, fighting passionately across the city for racial justice reform. “If I couldn’t have Walt, than I at least wanted to help him grow up in a better world and I wanted Fred’s death to have not been in vain,” she would have said to Emily, who would have listened, hanging on to every word of this woman’s story like a loose thread that might slip through her fingers.
Emily would have learned that Barbara had lived her life constantly searching for the face of Walter in strangers, trying to imagine what he might look like as he aged but always coming up short. Barbara had wanted to find Walter, she would have explained, but she believed it selfish. Why should she deprive him of the life he’d built? “I had always thought that if he wanted to find me, he would,” she would have said.
Barbara would have explained that her life turned upside down when, “Just a few days ago, just two days after you helped me with that marinara jar, I received an email from a Delilah Rivers who believes that I’m her grandmother and wants me to help with this oral history project. She wants to keep it a secret from her dad, my Walt! She says she’s going to give it to him as a present.”
In her email, Delilah filled in some of the gaps of Walter’s past, explaining that Walter’s adoptive parents told Walter the name of his biological mother but only after he turned eighteen and only after they had grown tired of his incessant pleading. But, Delilah wrote that she thinks they lied to Walter because they told him that his mother, Barbara, had died by taking her own life and leaving her infant son, Walter, in a bassinet by the East River. Walter had believed them and Delilah had too until she asked her father to help her put together a family tree for her social studies course. Walter had provided Delilah with Barbara’s name and Delilah became convinced that Barbara was not dead because she’d serendipitously seen her picture next to an article that Barbara had published nearly a decade ago about interracial marriage. When I looked at your picture, I saw my dad’s eyes and his smile in your face and then I looked and it was your name and I just knew you must be alive, Delilah wrote.
And so, this is how Barbara would have found herself sitting next to Emily on her green plastic wrapped couch, sharing her life story as Emily helped her make recordings and upload them to the cloud so that the grand-daughter Barbara had only just learned about could hear her story—could learn the truth.
But, of course, this didn’t come to pass because Emily never turned the corner to check on the crazy old Barbara who was struggling with her keys and tuna cans. And because Barbara’s unknown neighbor didn’t come around the corner to help her, Barbara didn’t drop the cans. And because of this missed connection Barbara took the marinara jar downstairs to the lobby to ask Victor to help her open it instead of knocking on Emily’s door. And so, Barbara never introduced herself to Emily and so, when the Super didn’t answer Barbara’s phone call when she needed help getting her box of letters down from the shelf, Barbara decided she couldn’t wait for him to call her back. She wanted to start mapping out the history that she was so eager to share with her newfound grand-daughter and she wanted to start with the letters she and Fred had written to each other during his time in the war.
Barbara paced around her apartment eagerly anticipating what would happen. Her grand-daughter would share the project with Walter who would come running back to her. Her long lost Walt! She would not live her golden years alone after all, she thought, as a smile crossed her wrinkled face for the first time in years. She pulled out her step stool from the closet and climbed up to the top step, reaching for the letterbox. As she stepped down she lost her footing and fell.
And so, when Emily hadn’t seen any sign of Barbara bothering Victor in the lobby after a few weeks she asked playfully, “So, any amusing Barbara stories these days?”
And he said, “Oh, man. Really sad story. She broke her hip. She’s not going to make it. The super says they just sent hospice in.”
And so, Emily thought, ‘that’s too bad,’ and then she got in the elevator and started thinking about which show she wanted to watch on Netflix tonight.
And so, when Delilah never received an email back from her grandmother she thought to herself, ‘maybe she really did die like dad and grandpa said and maybe the woman in the newspaper just happens to look like my dad. We always see things how we want them to be, not how they are. Must just be a coincidence. Barbara Jones is a common name after all.’
Resigned, Delilah asked her dad to record his oral history for her project instead. So, Walter cleared his throat and spoke into the microphone: “You could say my life started in an unorthodox way. My biological mother must have had a rough go at it because she took her own life and left me in a bassinet by the East River...”
Story Origins
I’ve always been fascinated by the origins of the stories I’ve read so I decided to share the origins of this one with you:
The concept of a social butterfly effect, or the idea that our actions and inactions set off chain reaction of events that have profound effects on others in ways we will never and can never know, has always fascinated me. I wanted this theme to be central to the story and thought the structure of telling a story that didn’t happen but could have if it weren’t for one small missed connection was a neat way to illustrate it.
I’m somewhat of a reserved person. I love a good conversation but it’s not my natural inclination to strike up conversations with strangers. My mom is quite the opposite. She’ll talk to anyone and everyone at the grocery store, the gas station, the gym, you name it. I’ve met a few similar people over the past few years who have struck up conversations with me. Several of them have been my seat mates on long bus or plane rides. While my first thought during each of these conversations was, ‘Yikes, I just wanted to zone out and listen to music not talk to this random person,’ I walked away from these chats feeling overwhelmed with joy and gratitude for the people I had just met and the stories we had shared, fully knowing that I’d probably never meet these individuals again. My mom has always said to me that you never know what someone else is going through and if we were all just a little friendlier and more open to engaging with people we don’t know, those small acts of kindness would add up to a big impact. I wanted this idea—that our lives and the lives of others can be enriched if we just take the time to say hello or help someone who is struggling to balance their tuna cans—to come through.
The character of Barbara is loosely based off of a real woman who lived in my apartment complex in New York. Like Barbara, the woman she is based off of swore like a sailor, complained all the time, and was generally regarded as the crazy old lady in our building. I say loosely because that’s where the similarities end, at least to my knowledge. Much like Emily, I never got to know this woman and only heard stories of funny things she had done from the doormen in the building. In some ways, this whole story is my attempt to imagine this woman’s history.
In deciding what Barbara’s history should be, I was inspired by A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a wonderful book I recently read that tells the coming of age story of an impoverished young girl living in Williamsburg during the early 20th century. Francie Nolan, the main character of the book, aspires to be a writer. There is a key moment in Francie's life when her teacher explains to her the difference between fiction and truth. After Francie confessed to her teacher that she had made up a fake story that allowed her to take a pie home for herself, the teachers said, "In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened." For Francie, and likely for the author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, who based Francie’s character largely on herself, this advice proved profound. It also struck a chord with me. I didn’t know the backstory of the woman in my building who inspired Barbara so her history truly is fiction not truth. But, writing about people and events the way they should be, in ways that are compassionate to them, resonated with me. I wanted to make sure that Barbara’s bitterness was explained and that the reader could empathize with her in ways that I and perhaps we as a society too often fail to do for the various Barbaras we encounter in our own lives.
