Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair by Susan Sheehan Page A

wouldn’t have did it again. Diamond dealt in drugs, but he said he was a man what could take care of hisself. He reminded me I could have gotten killed in that apartment and that I had a son. He loved little Daquan. It was easy money, but it was too scary and I was afraid of losing Diamond’s respect for good. I loved that man so muchuntil it hurted.” Crystal sought refuge in the group home on the night of the eighth.
    When the staff of St. Christopher’s learned that Crystal had been in a physical fight, her apartment was searched and her plane ticket found. “I told the social worker some nonsense about my girlfriend’s boyfriend getting shot up in Virginia and she had no one to go with her and she’d pay for my ticket and I’d gone down there—some lame story,” she says. “They suspected I’d done something illegal, but they didn’t know what. I’d broken a rule, because I wasn’t allowed to leave the state. I told them Diamond had hit me because I hadn’t told him where I was going. They acted like they believed that, because he’d hit me hard before.” The agency nurse referred Crystal to a dentist, and she got the cap put back on her tooth.
    C rystal did not return to Cheap John’s: “I was tired of seeing them same old dull faces.” In March, she got a temporary afternoon job in a vast room on West Fourteenth Street, in Manhattan, stuffing and sealing envelopes. Four weeks later, a layoff notice was posted near the time cards. That same week, Crystal heard from Veronica, a girl with whom she had drunk rum-and-Coca-Cola at J.H.S. 109. Veronica was working in the mailroom at an advertising agency on Madison Avenue at Fiftieth Street, and said the firm was hiring. Crystal hadalways liked the idea of “working with the big rich people in the big Manhattan buildings.” On a rainy day, after picking up her last paycheck on Fourteenth Street, Crystal walked around the East Fifties and filled out applications at several firms in the area’s glassy skyscrapers. A month later, she received a call from the advertising agency and went for a job interview. Crystal had already forgotten the job application, and Veronica had quit because one of the outside messengers who came up to the mailroom was pestering her. Crystal was hired as a part-time mail clerk. Her hours—4:30 P.M. to 9 P.M. —enabled her to continue at Satellite, which ended its day at 3 P.M.
    Her first day of work was May 1st. The pay was four dollars and twenty-five cents an hour, not even a dollar above the minimum wage, but the job had an appealing fringe benefit: the company sent employees who stayed at work after 8 P.M. home by car service. That saved two homeward-bound subway and bus tokens per day—ten dollars’ worth of tokens a week, in 1989—and an hour’s travel time. Crystal, who already had her learner’s permit, had always preferred cars to mass transit. In June, although she still needed to complete two courses before she could get her diploma, she participated in graduation ceremonies at Satellite, in a white cap and gown. Big Daquan rented a car for her in honor of the occasion (he has never had a driver’s license or owned wheels of any kind, so Crystal did the driving), and little Daquan and Diamond attended the graduation. Crystal dropped out of summer school (“I couldn’t deal with it in the nice weather”), finished her coursework atSatellite in the fall, and picked up her diploma in January of 1990, shortly after her twentieth birthday. By then, she was working full time at the ad agency, from 2 to 9 P.M. By then, little Daquan was living in the Bronx and was halfway through kindergarten.
    Crystal and Daquan had been presented with an ultimatum in the fall of 1988: Take little Daquan out of foster care or give him up for adoption. No further extensions of placement would be considered; more people are