Her face will be forever etched in my memory. I see her whenever a homeless person asks me for money or a beggar pleads with me for food. I don’t know her name but I will never forget her sunken face, gray wiry hair, horrid odor and dingy, red coat. The stale stench of the urine-stained subway tunnels and platforms takes me back to the moment I first saw her.
I was eating dinner with my two sisters, their husbands and my boyfriend when she approached us. Moments earlier we had been arguing about the plates of food we had left on our table and who was going to eat them. My brother-in-law had cringed as he sipped his green, organic juice. “I don’t know who would ever want to drink this,” he had said. He sipped my sister’s water and left his neglected juice to the side of the table. We continued bantering about the left over food, all but forcing my boyfriend to eat it.
She had shuffled by a few times, and had hesitantly glanced our direction each time she had passed. I was pretty sure I had seen her on the building steps as we left the subway station. Now she was walking toward our table sheepishly. Her frame was fragile and her eyes were hollow, her posture humiliating, her odor overwhelming.
“Can we give her the food?” my boyfriend asked. None of us really spoke but shifted the plates from in front of us, setting them on the edge of the table where she stood. Her eyes fluttered as she courageously asked my brother-in-law for the remaining sips of his juice. He looked at me for a translation and handed her his cup, compassionately silent as she removed the straw from the cup and gulped down the liquid we had all been too disgusted to consume.
While we exchanged minimal conversation with her, sharing our scraps, the manager of the restaurant stormed outside to the patio where we were dining on the cobblestone and yelled at her in Portuguese. My sisters and brothers-in-law looked to me and Brad as we tried to speak above his yelling in this woman’s defense. She wasn’t begging, we had offered her the food and she wasn’t disturbing our dinner. The only thing disturbed was the concept of compassion and love in my heart. As we watched the woman limp away at the urging of the manager, I held back the anger and tears and translated the conversation for my family. We said very little as we walked around the city the rest of the night; it looked vastly different.
