Eating Words

“You can’t eat no words.”

Jake voiced his displeasure at Louisa’s recent attempt at panhandling.

“If you don’t do better than that, we’ll go hungry tonight,” he added.

Louisa could feel the emptiness in her stomach––the Thanksgiving meal the city had provided the day before no longer filled her. She was used to the gnawing sensation. And after living on the streets for more than a year now, she knew he was right. But his words still rang hollow to her.

She looked at the piece of paper she held in her hand.

“Church of the Redeemer” was scrawled on it, along with a phone number. This is what the man had given her when she had asked for money.

There was something attractive about the words to her. Maybe it was because of the man.

Louisa thought back to the encounter.

His car wasn’t expensive, but it was a late model and clean. And he had a smile on his face. So she walked up to him. He rolled down his window.

“Can you help me out with some money?” she asked.

He hesitated for a moment.

“I’d like to help,” he said. “But I’ve found the best way to do that is through my church. We have a program where you can come in and someone will get to know you and see what we could do that would really be helpful.”

“I don’t have a car, so I can’t get around very well to meet anyone,” Louisa responded. “Some money would be the best way.”

“I tell you what,” the man offered. “Let me give you our number. You can call it or not. But I think we might be able to help you. Not just with money, but also with some friendship.”

He opened his wallet to pull out a piece of paper. Louisa saw his money. Her mouth watered.

A car honked behind them. The light had turned green.

He wrote the information on the paper quickly. He smiled as he handed it to her, then drove off, rolling up his window.

“Jake, maybe we ought to call this church and see what they can do for us,” Louisa asked, anticipating his response even as she spoke. She knew how he felt about churches.

“I keep telling you, church people don’t want nothing good for us. He could’ve given us money. He doesn’t care. I’m the one who cares for you.”

Jake reached into his pocket.

“We’ve got twenty-two bucks,” he said. “There is no way we’re going to be able to eat, buy beer and have a room tonight unless you get back to work.”

The emptiness in Louisa’s stomach began to sour.

While she knew that she was wanted, she didn’t feel particularly cared for. Living on the street is especially hard for women. It seems like everybody wants you. Louisa had been wanted so often when she first went on the street that she’d lost track of the difference between sex and rape. Every encounter had become empty and painful.

Jake had changed that, for a while. He had really seemed to care. He told her that he loved her. The other men left her alone after Jake came into her life. But recently, she’d begun to feel more like a possession.

There are a lot more men than women on the street, and a man with a woman is both admired and despised by the other men. And though Jake cared for Louisa, underneath his feelings for her was a desperate need to keep his prized possession. Though he’d never admit it, even worse than losing her was losing the admiration of the others and being ridiculed because he couldn’t keep his woman.

This is what Louisa had been sensing. But there was more to it than that.

There was a longing inside of her, a thirst, a hunger, that was never filled by beer, food, or sex. Or Jake. No matter how he felt about her.

Yet the other day a preacher man on the corner had said something that seemed to satisfy her, if only for a moment. What was it he had said? “When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight.”

Louisa realized she had just said the words aloud.

Jake responded. “Honey, don’t you understand how much I love you. I’d do anything to protect you. There ain’t nothing that preacher can do for you.”

Yes, Jake did protect her. But she wanted more than a body guard. She longed for a comfort that Jake did not bring her.

She thought of her mother, and the way she used to talk about her father.

“I’m his treasure,” Louisa’s mother would say. “He loves me just because he loves me, because he chose me. I’m the bride he’ll never forsake.

She didn’t really even understand what the words meant. That life was but a distant memory for Louisa.

Louisa didn’t understand how she wound up where she was today. It didn’t make sense to her. She’d come from a good family. They’d gone to church. Her parents had loved her. In fact, they still did. Numerous times she had felt their presence as they searched for her. They had come close. So close that one day, she had actually seen her father. She and Jake had hidden until he had left.

That was the strange part of it, she thought. Why had she hidden? At 21 years of age, he couldn’t have forced her to come home. What was she afraid of?

Thinking back to that day, Louisa felt the fear she’d experienced when she’d seen her father. She had felt so dirty and ashamed. She couldn’t let him see her like that. She couldn’t let him find her like that. Not her father. Or anyone from her previous life. They would never accept me like this, she thought.

But as lost and desperate and ugly as she felt, there was something lingering in her from that distant past that made Louisa attractive to those around her. Jake, the girls on the street, all wanted to be with her. Even the men saw her as more than someone just to use for sex.

Still, they didn’t understand what it was that made her different. And neither did she. Her attempts to articulate the difference to her friends by expressing a desire for her former life were always met with resistance. They didn’t want to be reminded of the difference, and they didn’t want her to go.

“You’re crazy, Louisa. Stay with us.”

It was always the same, “Stay.”

But more and more she knew that she wanted to go. But where? That was the problem.

The words of the preacher were ringing in her ears now. She was tired of starving. She wanted to be filled and satisfied. She wanted a feast; a feast that kept her filled and satisfied longer than had the Thanksgiving meal from the day before.

Gathering her courage, she told Jake she needed to go to the bathroom. She got up from the sidewalk and went inside Caritas, the local homeless services center.

But instead of going to the bathroom, she walked over to the free phones. She took out the paper the man had given her and looked at the words. Their attraction was even stronger than before.

She picked up the phone and dialed the number. Despite what Jake had said, she was going to try to eat those words.