I Never Knew Her Name

She was a regular customer the summer I worked at Bruno’s Bakery on LaGuardia Place, but I never knew her name. She came in each morning with her dog and sat at one of the outside tables. Both she and her dog were remarkably tiny. He would sit on her lap as she drank her steamed milk. The entire time I worked at Bruno’s, a busy café and bakery situated just between Greenwich Village and Soho I made hundreds of cappuccinos and espressos but hers was the only steamed milk.

One night in late October I heard yelling coming from the courtyard at the back of our apartment. The noise had already woken my roommate Julie (her bedroom faced the courtyard, mine faced the street). A woman was leaning out of an open window, and when we opened our window we could clearly hear her screaming about the unfairness and misery of the world. People were yelling out their windows for her to shut up, but she was clearly in some kind of deranged state.  

A few nights later the same voice woke me again when she was on the street in front of my building sitting on top of a trash can having a loud one-sided conversation.  It was then that I recognized her as the steamed milk woman from Bruno’s and she was addressing her absent dog. It turned out she was my neighbor, she lived in the building next door to mine. I hadn’t seen her in some time. I’d never seen her in the neighborhood.

One day that past summer she had arrived at Bruno’s visibly upset. I asked what was wrong, and she told me her dog was very sick. When she came a few days later I asked her how her dog was doing and she got agitated and asked “What dog?” I apologized, thinking I had confused her with another customer, but then she ordered steamed milk. I was nineteen and had no firsthand experience with breakdowns or mental illness. The conversation worried me, but I was her waitress not her friend or therapist.  She never returned to the bakery. I hadn’t seen or thought about her since that exchange.

Through the winter she sat on those trash cans at night talking to her dog or railing at the universe. Sometimes she yelled, most times she just talked. I can’t recall how long this went on, eventually it stopped and I forgot about her again. New York is a loud and hectic place. You encounter more people in a day than many people see in a month.  There is more of everything and everyone, including and especially the people surviving on the edges of sanity.  In the late 1970s drastic budget cuts forced people out of public mental hospitals with nowhere to go, and no one to make sure they stayed on their meds, and the homeless population exploded.

Eventually my tiny steamed milk lady joined them.  A few months after she had disappeared from her perch on my trashcans I saw her on the street, clearly homeless and deeper into her mental illness. There wasn’t much I could do for her. I gave her money when she asked for it, but I only saw her rarely. Some homeless people stake out a territory and you see them in the same place all the time. She was more nomadic, and I would occasionally see her, but never in the same place. Though she was a part of my life for years I never knew her name.