I Have a Secret
Danielle Truscott
Photo by Andre Benz on Unsplash
I have a secret.
My secret is a relationship.
My family doesn't know.
My friends don’t know.
I’ll call him, or her, “Lee.” Lee was homeless, at least for the period of our two-year connection. The Duane Reade on the three-block route between home and my young son’s school was under renovation; low scaffolding overhung its adjacent sidewalk. Lee had set up house beneath: a cardboard barrier of box sides joined with silver duct tape; beyond, a cordillera of myriad-sized bags and boxes, eruptions of disheveled, private-made-public stuff. Lee was always wholly obscured, position changed, perhaps, but burrowed down so deep into the soiled sleeping bag so as to become a package of person, weather hot or cold.
I daily passed Joe Junior’s diner on the trip back from morning school drop off. A few days after I noticed Lee, impulse led me to its counter. I ordered bacon-egg-and-cheese on a roll, large O.J., large coffee with packets of creamer and sugar, and an apple danish. This seemed to cover the bases: wake-up, protein, possible sweet tooth. I laid a small stack of napkins and plastic stirrer over the food, rolled the bag top down to help secure the contents. The checkout guy loaned me his Sharpie. Breakfast for you, I wrote on the bag. Hope you like it. A smiley face underneath.
En route home, I placed it strategically next to the sleeping bag’s head end, quickly, and walked on. I didn’t want to wake someone who surely wasn’t in the habit of getting good nights’ sleeps. I’d also been both roared and lunged at, once simultaneously and with a knife, by a homeless person or two in my twenty New York years. I zipped back to the apartment to start my day.
Lee was gone that afternoon when I collected my son from school. Walking to school the next day, I surreptitiously surveyed. No sign of the bag, or its contents, but Lee, in the sleeping bag, was there.
It became routine. I got the breakfast, made the drop, same time, each day. I didn’t change up the menu and wondered if one day I might catch Lee sitting up or find the previous day’s paper bag or some other piece of paper propped, duct-taped to the cardboard wall, visible somewhere with a communiqué: Don’t like bacon. Maybe an ask for a blanket, or a coat, shoes, or something more fungible: cash.
A chat.
Possibly a hiss or a string of screamed nonsensical quasi-religious vulgarities or a lunge.
But—civil, friendly, neutral, or adversarial—our partnership was not to be conversational, epistolary, tactile, or even visual.
We remained secret to one other.
I never saw even hair on the top of a head. Lee, to my knowledge, never saw me—that was perhaps his or her secret, or not. It was, at the very least, secret from me.
Our secrets are so often heavy, events and information that are not only not known or seen, but purposefully kept unknown or unseen from others. These secrets weigh us down, shanghai our consciences, paralyze us because they are lined with, often claustrophobically entwined with, lies. They recline with lies in unmade beds; they stay in the beds after the beds are made back up again. They can harm the secret-keeper and the person from whom the secret is kept; ruin relationships, careers, lives. We discover, sometimes generations later, secrets which—divulged or held back—ripped parts of our families apart or held them together.
Fifty-five years on the planet, and I’ve never met a soul who’s not had a secret categorizable above. The legendary boutique financier, golden wedding anniversary well surpassed, whose soul still blazes for the artist with whom his affair, decades back, nearly ended the marriage. The architect’s assistant who loathes her boss, steals paper clips from work, arranges them with pushpins into the word “A-hole” on her Brooklyn kitchen corkboard. People live their whole lives keeping secrets: sexual preferences, affairs, second families, addictions, fake identities, offshore bank accounts.
What of the secrets that nourish us? The poet Rilke said “I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.” He didn’t mean the gossipy or lurid secrets. I believe he meant the teenage kiss in the shadows of a Central Park stone arch in autumn, some unseen accordion busker nearby. The crocus never spoken of noticed by the same woman each spring when it pokes its head through the earth. The cheek-known map of freckles and pores in skin, and the almost cartographical outlines of ancient bruises on a back, that only a lover feels? The benediction that blooms between a child, awake before the family, who walks onto the yard’s dewy spring grass barefoot, and the deer it does not startle, but whose gaze instead it momentarily holds?
I kept my secret, the secret I had with Lee.
Why? I’m not sure.
With it, I literally nourished him or her. Figuratively, it nourished me.
It made me feel good to leave the breakfast.
I dreaded the idea of someone thinking of me as a self-proclaimed do-gooder.
It also relieved me of some guilt my privilege dogged me with. I had so much.
I liked having that secret to myself. The act gave me joy, but the secrecy also gave me joy.
It was quotidian and also mysterious.
My motives for not telling anyone are still somewhat secret, even to me.
Even my telling you now.
Danielle Truscott
Danielle, a former poet, journalist, newspaper and book editor, and librarian in Guatemala, currently divides her time between New York City and upstate New York. She is the author of a forthcoming memoir.
