“My name is Molly Reichert,
R-E-I-C-H-E-R-T,” she told us, and the nurse. You could get drunk
from just being near her uneven breathing, that's what the nurse told
me once she was out of the room. But I was too young and too naive
to recognize that, despite semi-debaucherous teen years. Throughout
my Senior year of high school and the following summer, mine was the
disobedience of sneaking small amounts of alcohol out of my dad's liquor shelf. Half-filling water bottles with gin and vodka so that my thievery might go unnoticed were I to run into my father as I
passed through the kitchen, I would run from where he kept the
bottles in the basement to my bedroom closet. I would nervously store my
nabbed goods until there was a bonfire at a friend's house or a road trip to the beach.
I thought I was very rebellious. It
turned out boys had a respect for girls who could drink hard liquor,
or at least found us more interesting. I fancied myself dangerous,
the delinquent you'd never expect, the one who could get away with it
for that very reason. It seemed like Molly had never gotten away
with anything, no matter how far or hard she ran.
She's originally from Wyoming. Came to
New York City for God knows why. I'm still not sure why we were
designed to meet, but I know that it changed me and that I've always
been curious if it changed her, too, no matter how insignificantly.
This is how it was.
The Spring of my Junior year in
college, I decided to join a mission team to New York City. There
were several teams of people sacrificing their Spring Break to
do good works in various locations on the East Coast. It seemed to
me to be an okay way to meet people, albeit a slightly awkward one.
Step one: go to a large meeting. Step two: get assigned to a small
group of people with whom you have avoided eye contact for three
years. Step three: share a small van, a small dorm area, one week,
and intense group dynamics with these people. My group was five
freshmen and two or three upperclassmen, including myself. We took
advantage of the planned get-to-know-you pre-trip meetings and bonded
accordingly. Even more so on the trip up to the city in a fifteen
passenger van that (eep!) our eighteen year-old team leader drove. And the
final bonding stage occurred when we got to our host organization and
shared the living space and mealtimes with what we considered to be
evangelical fundamentalist crackpots from another college. In
reality, I'm sure they were very nice people. To us, they were the
antithesis of our liberal Christian college mentality and as a group
we found endless ways to ridicule their close minded attitudes
regarding philosophy, science, and society.
My teammates and I spent our days going
to various non-profits in the city and volunteering. Cleaning,
cooking, serving food, experiencing, learning, opening up to each
other and the people we worked with. In the afternoons we went to
the projects and volunteered with kids in an after-school program
that was grim - except for the kids themselves. Contrary to my expectations, I liked the kids.
They came from a lot of different ethnic backgrounds and at their
age, they were unconscious conduits of culture to their peers. And
to me as well. I loved being among the
children, I think because it was so wholly different than my suburban
elementary education. So many different cultures in one place, in
the middle of the city that's at the center of the whole world...it
was overwhelming and awesome and so evident in these kids. I missed
the last afternoon, though, and I hope they didn't think it was
because I suddenly didn't want to be there. I had just suddenly met
Molly.
On this last morning, we were at the
last soup kitchen and it ended up having the most interesting people
behind the serving line. The theory was to have people seated and to
serve them on trays, attempting more restaurant-style than
poverty-style. I got behind it wholeheartedly, it suited my holistic
notions of feeding a person emotionally, not just physically. It was
a crazy few hours with a few rotations of guests and I had a lot of
fun shouting and being shouted at, moving fast and for goodness'
sake, no one gets extra crackers for their soup!
When it was all over, we took photos with the staff, everyone
wearing hairnets and staticky, white plastic aprons. We wiped down
tables, flipped them, knocked in their legs and then stacked chairs,
too. At the end of it all, as we were preparing to leave, there was
a small knot of people off to one side, guests and staff, around a
girl.
How old was she? I
ask myself that now. I think I've perhaps reached her age. She
couldn't have been more than her late twenties, I think, but could
you really tell once drugs had leeched the love of her own self from
her skin? She was hunched over, sitting cross legged on the floor
and the people standing above her offering her words of
encouragement, pats on the back, and nervous glances at one another.
A few members of my team and I walked over with some trepidation. It
seemed like she was not in a good place. She kept saying, “They
took my baby. He took my baby.” She started crying, sobbing, and
the words became a wail. “He took my babyyyyy! What am I supposed
to do? What am I supposed to do?”
This was beyond a
group of college kids. She was in an altered state, to put it
delicately. We, too, looked at each other nervously. It was time to get
going. To my lasting shame, I did not decide to reach out to Molly
in that moment of our departure. It was a freshmen, Liz, who
approached her and knelt to hug her. She pulled away, patted her
back, and looked at me helplessly. So I did what felt natural, a way
to end the scene and show solidarity not with Molly, but with Liz and
her brave compassion. I went and hugged Molly, too, murmuring,
“It'll be okay.”
It wasn't true. It
wasn't going to be okay. I couldn't promise that. I was thus
totally startled when Molly responded and wrapped her arms around me.
She started crying harder and clung to me like she had been drowning
and someone had thrown her a lifeline, me. So I did what was
natural, again, and held her tighter. Molly has long, big wavy
blondish-brown hair and it smelled terrible, but I buried my face in
it and stroked her hair and tried to say comforting things. I tried
not to cry, but failed. Her distress in that moment became my
own and the melding of spirit was total.
I was confused and
scared, I didn't know what to do to make things right for Molly. We
were at a church and she wanted to smoke, so we went outside and I
sat with her while she smoked. Eventually, Liz and our team leader
came outside. A decision had to be made about who was going where
this afternoon. Liz said she wanted to stay with Molly and I said I
did, too. Our team leader said he would stay with us since the
others knew how to navigate to the after school program in the projects by themselves. Molly
wanted to use the phone, so we got her some change for a payphone.
Molly needed clean clothes, so we got her some from the church's
clothing donation bins and Liz and I helped her change in a bathroom.
Molly said she wanted to meet with the pastor, so we met with the
pastor and we prayed over her. She was shaking. Withdrawal or the
Holy Spirit or both or neither. She said she wanted to be clean, to
be sober, to get her baby back. The three of us kids and Molly and
the Pastor got in a van and he dropped us off at the nearest
hospital.
“My name is Molly
Reichert, R-E-I-C-H-E-R-T.” The four of us had been hours in the
emergency room, waiting for a bed for Molly. The nurse was not one
to bet money on starry-eyed college dreamers who were going to fix
the world, starting with our friend, here. Molly would stray outside
for a smoke until our team leader hid her cigarettes. She would get
distraught, paranoid, angry, teary, heart-wrenchingly sad, and sorry.
Once she was in a hospital gown and had an IV drip, she quieted down
and even slept some. She woke up and demanded food, so we got her a
sandwich. She slept some more. Five hours after I met Molly, I was
talking with a security guard at the hospital. “She's here now,”
he said, “and as long as she's checked in here, she's not getting
out past me.” It had ended for us, then. Weary, we got on the
subway back to our host organization in the Bronx. The guard had
given us an out, and we took it.
I haven't been out,
though. “...Molly Reichert, R-E-I-C-H-E-R-T.” In the last four
years I've Googled her name a few times, comma, Wyoming. She shows
up back in Wyoming local newspapers, in and out of county jails. I
don't know how she got back there, but I can't help but feel
relieved. The vibrancy and resiliency of the children in the
after-school program is juxtaposed with a maelstrom of urban poverty
and cycles that don't break. Maybe Wyoming isn't a good place to
be for Molly, but I know there was something absolutely dark in the
city that was swallowing her whole.
Molly
was the first woman in trouble that I met randomly. Since then, I
met Aliyah in the airport and Katherine through work. All three have
a common “him”, a shadowy man who has caused serious damage. And all three seem paralyzed, unable or unwilling to make a move to help themselves. As
a Peace Corps Volunteer, I've met women in developing nations who are
second class citizens and somehow, when people say, “It's
cultural,” it almost becomes okay. There's a numbing effect in
numbers. When millions of women are treated as little more than vacuums for abuse and wombs to fill with children, when men assert
that might is right, when women accept that they do not
belong unto themselves, it is a
mistaken opinion that this is acceptable - regardless of how
commonplace these sentiments may be.
Similarly, and to no less
detriment, there are women in the developed world who are drawn into
these unhealthy standards of existence. It is subsidized by a modern
culture that yet has deep roots in class distinctions between men and
women. While it may not reach the overt, epidemic proportions of the
developing world, the answer to this problem remains the same: It is
imperative that women be educated to take ownership of themselves.
It is a necessity that we create a world that allows this education
to have a practical expression. That is my fervent desire for Molly,
that, “He took my baby,” will one day become, “I have a family
that cherishes me and whom I cherish.” That Aliyah's bruises, the
ones deeper than her skin, will heal when she says, “That's not
love.” That Katherine will experience self-nurturing, a certainty
of her own completeness that renders a discerning choice of a worthy life partner.
I have no idea how
to do it. But I'll spend a lifetime trying to.
