I Called Her Methbeth
Caution: a sad and hopeless tale
I called her MethBeth. I have no idea what her real name was, and I never got up the courage to ask her. She lived two buildings down from us with a man I assume was her boyfriend or husband, his gaunt and tattooed mother, and a large, black dog.
Occasionally there were other men who stood outside their apartment, swaying and laughing, chatting in slurred nonsense with the latchkey kids in the neighborhood.
But MethBeth did not laugh. In fact, I never saw her once that she wasn’t pouting or sobbing.
She was skinny and pale, not very tall, and no older than her early twenties. Her long black hair with faded streaks of blue was dirty and often fell in tangled clumps that covered her face and its bright red sores. She walked with her head down, lifting it only to drag on her cigarette or study her phone, neither of which seemed to leave her hands.
Our neighbor Penny told me that one-day MethBeth was sobbing on the swing at the little playground in our complex. Zahara, a sweet neighborhood girl of about twelve, saw this and stepped toward her just as Penny happened by while walking her dog.
“I didn’t know that little girl,” Penny told me, “but I put on my teacher voice, and I made her promise me she would never, ever go near that woman.”
“But she’s crying,” Zahara protested.
“It doesn’t matter,” Penny firmly explained. “She has grown-up problems that do not concern you. You can’t help her, and you need to stay away from her. Promise me you will.”
Zahara promised.
MethBeth indeed had grown-up problems. Soon after that, I noticed the swelling at her middle. She was pregnant. Still, I never saw her without a cigarette.
I prayed naively that the child she was carrying would be the incentive she needed to give up her addictions. Perhaps she wouldn’t be able to stay clean forever, but I hoped she would give birth to the child, allow someone to adopt him or her, and then she could go on with whatever she chose for her life.
I thought of my own daughters and my grandchildren, so healthy and full of promise. I wondered about MethBeth’s mother and whether she was devastated by the terrible choices her daughter was making.
Several times after that, I saw MethBeth getting in or out of a car. Her hair was clean and brushed, her clothes were fresh, and her face was clear. I held on to my hope.
One day, I was walking downstairs from our third-floor apartment, and MethBeth was sitting on the bottom step. Her head was down as she stared at her phone. Even from where I stood a few steps behind her, I could look down and see how round her belly was. She was pretty far along in her pregnancy although the rest of her little body remained thin and frail.
It was a breezy day, and the smoke of the cigarette smoldering beside her wafted lazily around her head. I decided I would talk to her, just a friendly conversation. I wanted to show her some love and compassion. Now I had the chance.
“Excuse me,” I said.
Her head jerked up, and she turned to look up at me. Her hair fell away from her face revealing fresh, red sores around her mouth. Her eyes were wide and unfocused, and she jumped to her feet.
“No, it’s okay,” I said quickly. “You don’t have to get up. I just didn’t want to scare you — ”
But she was already walking quickly away, her voice loud and manic.
“I’m very sorry for getting in your way. I apologize. I’m very sorry!” She stumbled and staggered before disappearing around the corner where the trees obscured her from my view.
“No, really, it’s okay…” But my heart wrenched at the thought of that tiny life inside her, writhing from the drugs, without a moment to experience life outside addiction. I was furious, and I went back up to my apartment and cried.
That weekend, as I was walking my dog past their building, I saw two sheriff’s deputies standing outside their open apartment door, and the maintenance crew waited, shaking their heads as they supervised the eviction. The older woman and her son crammed as many of their belongings as they could into their old car, whose driver’s side window was missing.
I put my head down and walked fast, yanking at the dog’s leash to hurry him away from the scene. When I came back around about half an hour later, MethBeth and her family were gone.
The sidewalk was strewn with odds and ends of furniture, boxes of broken electronics, some old shoes, and worthless clothing, but they had taken the most important things with them.
Among the detritus was a box with a few books and spiral notebooks and a pink tote full of markers, colored pencils, and paintbrushes. I realized that MethBeth was an artist, or she had been before the drugs took that away too.
Now the addiction decided what she needed, where she would live, who she would be. Those things on the ground belonged to her past. She had no use for them.
Next to the box of art supplies, titling to the side in the grass, sat a white wicker bassinet, trimmed in lace.
