On Charity

A woman stopped me in the grocery store today and asked for a ride home. Immediately, I started running down my checklist.

1. Who?

A puffy, middle-aged woman in a somewhat shabby coat, her makeup old, her wallet full of five ones, a five, receipts, various cards, and a ten that she slipped into a side pocket like a street magician with a gold watch. Her ride, a coworker from the toy store, had been shoehorned into a longer shift. She was stuck.

2. What?

A ride home. Just to Salem. In a car that she assumed (or hoped) I had, with the gas she assumed (or hoped) I'd previously pumped, to a place she assumed (or hoped) I knew about. Just a ride, with nobody waiting at the end to take my stuff. Just a quick fifteen-minute hop over to the next town, her and me alone through the dark and slick and chilly streets of the cold Christmas night and its dispassionate police cars moving like unblinking fish among the kelplike lines of the roadway. Just a journey through the night. People never realize how personal that is. Intimate, even. The road at night is a line between a world where you live and a world where your car slips off the road and vanishes. I don't drive around with just anyone.

3. Where?

Salem courthouse - difficult enough to get to at the best of times, this imposing structure is located on a one-way street in the heart of the traffic morass that is downtown Salem. It is also exactly one block from my home. Coincidence chills me much more than purposeful appropriation of my data. Google has my address, but this woman was not Google. Had someone pointed me out? Did she know me? Do I still radiate that special marginal-person vibe that so often accompanies knowledge of courthouse locations? Worst of all - horror of horrors - did she actually live in my neighborhood? Her recently expired drivers' license located her in a town on the other side of the Merrimack Valley. Born 1969. Organ donor. She looked happier in her ID photo. 

4. Why?

The busses are gone. She said she had no money for a cab (obviously a lie) and couldn't get money from the bank until the morning (also possibly a lie, considering that her bank and credit cards were in full view.) So as for why, well, I have no idea. I imagine the story is fairly complicated. But at least it probably didn't involve me unconscious in a gutter sans computer, reader, smartphone and mic. The one or two con artists I think I've run into had their stories in very meticulous shape, and their patter and costume were Broadway-ready. In fact, that's how I ended up picking them out. If they were. (They were.)

5. How?

On one hand, I could give her the ride home. But once I'd determined she wasn't a threat, I felt both oddly disappointed and uncomfortably close to her. Without her own knowledge, she was gushing personal details - the newness of her poverty, the emptiness of her left hand, the naiive and ill-advised search for Samaritans. A driver's license without a car. An education without a job. I did not want to know this woman. I did not want the burden of her gratitude and humiliation. I couldn't bring back her greenhouse or assuage her weight fears. I couldn't give her a ride home.

That's how I overran her protests and shoved the bill into her hands and refused her request for my name. That's how I hightailed it like a coward, clenching my teeth until I felt fairly confident that I'd made a clean getaway. That's how I came to write tonight; slightly poorer, not at all a better person, and thankfully bereft of the responsibility that comes with knowing more about someone than they tell you.

Maybe she was a con artist after all.