The last cut of pride

"I don't know what I'll do this winter with no socks," Annette says, pulling up her pants leg to show me the borrowed socks she's wearing. Plain white sweat socks, a little too big, the kind you get three pairs to the package. "Someone stole all my socks."

I think about my socks, the blue ones with holes I hadn't gotten around to sewing, the tennis kind my Mom gave me right before school started because I kept taking hers, the long ones you can pull up to your knee in cold weather.

I open my notebook, she goes back to rolling her flowers in colored paper, and we talk. About Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven, where she graduated. The Jewish bakery she worked at while in school and afterwards till it closed down and left town. The factory where she packed paper last Wednesday as a day job. Her live-in babysitting job this summer. She hasn't been able to get a regular job since her unemployment ran out, though she's had an application at Yale for years. "There's a trick to it," Annette is told. "I have to keep on calling. But how am I supposed to keep on calling if I don't have a phone?"

"Sometimes I call my mother from the pay phone to see how she's doing," she says. Collect, I presume, since she's calling Chesapeake, VA. Her mother has a bad heart and recently had an operation. So Annette doesn't want to worry her mother by telling her about her "problem." And she's afraid if she asks her five brothers and sisters, all of whom are also in Virginia, to help out, they'll tell her mother.

It's been three years since this "problem" began, which means it's been at least that much time since she's seen her family. Three years of hiding the most basic facts of her life from those closest to her. She doesn't say so, but I suspect it's more than concern that's keeping her quiet. I think she's ashamed of what we may call bad luck, but what she calls her "stupidity."

Most of us have experienced the illness of a family member. We know what it's like to worry and be helpless to do anything at all. Imagine being unable even to see the person. Unable even to tell them the truth.

I don't think I'd be able to hide so big a secret from my family. But I know they'd accept and love me even if I felt I'd failed in their eyes. Still, it would be excruciating to face their disappointment. Some friends tell me they'd never tell their parents if they were in a situation like Annette's. Never.

How painful to feel the comparison with the siblings who'd made good. Annette's older brother went to college, she told me. To accept their charity would mean to surrender all pride. Could I ask my little sister, all grown up, to send me money for a train ticket to her house? At what cost, beyond money, to myself?

When you don't have money, or a job, or a roof, what do you have left besides your dignity? Annette takes pride in cutting her own flowers and selling only quality. She knows we don't need the flowers. But selling them is a cut above begging. It is giving something back, asserting her dignity in a position where it must be difficult to have any at all.

Sometimes I put the flowers she sells me in a little jar where they bloom for a day or two, but more often I forget and leave them in the library or at lunch. And today I don't even have cash on me to buy one.

But it's just today; I can go to the ATM. Or use my parents' credit card. Annette and I can sit down and talk as if we live in the same world. I can try to see myself in her shoes (or socks), and for a moment feel I've succeeded, but in reality, I can barely fathom the gap between our worlds.

We're sitting on a bench on Audubon Street, sitting the same way, me with a notebook on my lap, Annette with a sheaf of colored paper on hers. I write as she rolls the flowers and talks. All that's between us is a foot of bench strewn with miles and miles of wilting flowers.