Walking briskly to Fulton Street, Elizabeth enjoys the momentary open space of Nostrand Avenue, feels the wind of the tenements blow against her face and her depression wafts away: she feels released, fulfilled, although there will certainly be some pain in her thighs for the next day or so, part of the price of effort. She has good thighs, good breasts, a striking if somewhat affected face — she knows all of this because she has been told so by clients and dates many times — but she knows what they can never tell her: that her best feature is her compassion and she wears it like armor through all the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, listening with amusement to some of the remarks which she hears drifting toward her from men muttering in storefronts, peddlers working under huge umbrellas near the bus stops. Hey baby, they are saying out of their ignorance and desire, do you want to fuck? Dios, would I like to fuck that and so on and so forth; so highly limited and they will never understand her compassion. From compassion she could reach out to them, from compassion she could gather them, even the ugliest to her and say, “If only fucking could solve your problems; if only I could fuck you right here and now to prove to you that the basic structure of your life is untenable and this cheap lust of yours merely an excuse against coming to grips with any of it,” but she cannot; she knows that she cannot do this because she must save what she has for her caseload and so she only passes all of them down two blocks of Nostrand Avenue, a chastened, quiet smile on her face, a swing to her hips, a faint buoyancy to her behind which, she knows, must desperately inflame the poor things but there is nothing that she can do about it … and in daylight, carrying her fieldbook, rape is impossible.
She waits for the bus and goes back to the welfare center. She is due for two more statutory visits these days and a pending application from an old Chinese woman … but they will have to wait. She has nothing more to give; she no less than anyone is entitled to respite. Back to the welfare center she will go and there perform paperwork, the least diverting but most necessary part of her job.