“Tampax?” JannaRose looked stunned, although nowhere near as stunned as she would be when she thought about the significance of what Nina was saying in terms of their unspoken pact that they told each other everything the minute it crossed their minds.
“Wouldn’t it have been something?” Nina said.
“The fuck do you mean Tampax?”
“Strung together,” Nina said. “I could’ve slid them down into the gas tank of an ice cream truck. Once they got soaked with gas, I’d light the end. Boom! I had a bunch of them already tied together in my pocket.”
“You told me you didn’t even plan the thing with Ed’s car. That it came to you out of nowhere. That we were just on a scouting expedition.”
“Yeah. This was just in case.”
“Just in case?”
What did this all mean? Could it be that from the start, from when they pulled away from JannaRose’s house, Nina had known that if she couldn’t get the gate unlocked, she’d bust it down with the Pontiac, pull out her Tampax string, and blow up an ice cream truck? Read between the lines and could it be you’d see how she had it all worked out? Read between the lines and could it be you’d see that Nina didn’t count on JannaRose in every situation? Maybe it would be a good idea if she was a little more careful about Nina in certain circumstances. “Maybe” — she grabbed Nina’s sleeve — “maybe it’d be a lot safer for everybody if we just wrote a letter to the mayor or somebody.”
Nina blinked a very slow blink. “A letter?”
“About the ice cream company. About getting them to stop calling out the kids’ names and putting pressure on everybody.”
“You ever write a letter?”
JannaRose didn’t say anything.
“To anybody?”
JannaRose looked so close to sinking right into the ground that Nina stopped herself from saying, “So who the fuck are you to talk about writing some kind of fuckin’ letter?” Finally she just said, “I’ve got a feeling it would be a waste of time.” And again she stopped walking. Only this time, she stood completely still, not moving a muscle. An idea as hot as a welding rod had nailed her square in the forehead. “Because,” she said slowly, “because nobody,” she said, “listens to people like us.”
Nina closed her eyes, trying to get the idea cooled down and settled in one place. “So why bother trying to get somebody else to listen?” She grabbed JannaRose by the shoulders. “So why bother with anybody else at all?”
She started hopping up and down. “Who needs them?” she shouted. “Who needs them?”
Whatever was happening in her brain was making her realize something so totally contrary to anything that had ever occurred to her before that she had to struggle to keep from falling over backwards.
“What’s the matter?” JannaRose had never seen anybody who looked so much like they’d just stuck themselves into a light socket and turned on the switch.
“I’m — I’m — I — it — it just came to me.”
“What, for Christ’s sakes?”
Nina drew herself up as much as she could. She looked into her friend’s eyes. She looked so deeply, it was as if she was staring right through her head and out the back. She spoke slowly, and very clearly.
“That being a welfare queen —”
JannaRose nodded. Waiting for it. Ready. “Yes?”
“That being a welfare queen doesn’t have to be a dead end,” Nina said.
Five
Maybe you had to be a welfare queen to get the full impact.
D.S. was the only person Nina knew of on their street, except for Krystal Beach who drove a courier service van, with an actual paying job. Krystal, unfortunately, had gone kind of crazy as a result of the emotional setbacks she kept suffering as a result of being stalked by both her ex-husbands. And D.S. hadn’t been paid when he was off work as a result of injury. Total, the world’s biggest discount store, where he worked as a greeter, said that if he wanted financial assistance for being disabled, he should sue the customers that kicked his head in.
Nina could never shake her suspicion that JannaRose and Ed Oataway were in something like a loving relationship. On the other hand, it did have a financial upside. They got a welfare combo — Ed qualified because he wasn’t suitable employment material. Nobody would hire him because the half a dozen times he’d been in jail for car theft had given employers the idea that he was some kind of habitual criminal. When Nina got her innards twisted because of something or other Ed Oataway did, she’d remind D.S. that Ed’s criminal record was entirely due to him being lousy at stealing cars unless the owners paid him to do it. But the plain fact was that JannaRose and Ed appeared to have feelings that she couldn’t detect in any other relationships she knew of offhand.
She and D.S. certainly weren’t like that and never had been. Not after the first couple of weeks anyway, when Nina stopped believing any of the lies she’d been telling herself. As far as she could figure, they’d only gotten together because everybody they knew was sleeping with somebody except them. And it wasn’t as if either of them had ever been regarded with much interest by anybody else. So they drifted toward each other. There was no denying that even then he almost always had some kind of a paying job, even if none of them ever paid enough for him to move out of his mother’s apartment. With Nina’s welfare cheque, he could afford to live with her in her mother’s apartment.
Nina always said she would rather have been able to find a job, because there wasn’t a job she knew of that was harder work than being on welfare. She said that even if the job was full-time, it wouldn’t have taken as much of her time as being on welfare did. Just keeping yourself on it took every bit of your attention. And if you weren’t on top of it every minute, you were liable to find yourself kicked off. Even if you did manage to stay right on top of it, you were still liable to find yourself kicked off. She said being a welfare queen called for total commitment.
Jarmeel Tolbert, whose little girl was such good friends with Fabreece, worked what Nina considered to be full-time, except the work consisted of trying to get a pension for the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder he came down with in the army. His failure to obtain a pension after having his nerves crippled in the wartime service of his nation was enough to leave him as disabled emotionally as D.S. was physically, and should by rights have entitled him to the disability payments D.S. couldn’t get every time his head got kicked in. D.S. said the difference was that what happened to him at Total was in the private sector, but this never seemed to comfort Jarmeel. Neither did the welfare cheques, which was all he got. He got those for being a single parent who was raising three children he’d had by three different women who all packed up and moved out, abandoning him with the babies shortly after each one was born. Either one of these on its own — that he kept on getting married again, or that he kept on getting abandoned again — was all the evidence Nina and JannaRose needed that he should qualify for far more than the standard disability,