Lottie--A Character Sketch

Once, Lottie McDaniel had long, auburn hair. She used to sit on the the dock or the rockers on the porch and let the breeze blow it silky dry on a summer morning, her mother brushing and brushing it until it crackled like the the apple-wood fires they'd had in the stone fireplace of their mahogany walled living room. That was before years of too much salty sun and never enough fresh water or shampoo had aged it to a brassy red streaked through with lanky, dull streaks of gray. She used to muse that on any other woman, the streaks would be gilt silver, but then she’d smile, knowing that silver to spare, even in the hair department was beyond her grasp. She had pale, lemony-green eyes, tan, leathery skin and, as she liked to think, she was eminently dumpy. Too much time spent eating wrong, when she ate at all, the sedentary lifestyle of one who eats too little to expend much energy doing much of anything and a glandular problem inherited from a mother long gone. She'd become a creature of her environment and a caricature of her former life on the South Shore.

She’d been on the streets for thirty years now, often living down in the steam tunnels, under the 14th Street T, or sometimes out near the bay in Quincy when she could scrabble up the buck fifty for the Red Line train to get her there. Winters were spent either in the tunnels or sometimes she’d get into the shelter out on the island; not often though, because she was scared to death of most of the crazies out there. She scrounged trashcans and dumpsters up Newberry Street way when she could. The rich folks up there had habits that, quite frankly, bewildered her, but then, as she was often the recipient of the impetuously tossed clothes, often with price tags still attached, she was alright with that. She could turn the discarded clothes and shoes into the consignment shop in Southie and get enough money to keep her in food for another few days.

Currently, she was living, if one could call it that, in an unused storage shed behind the consignment shop. Excepting in the dead of winter, she had a spigot for water, four walls that almost met in the corners and an old chaise lounge that she’d rewoven with scraps of cloth not good enough to turn in for cash. Best of all, it had a lock. And she had the key.

Lottie, dressed in layers, as she preferred to keep most of her belongings with her even if she did have a door that locked, wasn’t much different from many of the street folk she met. Landing on the streets with her mom after her dad had lost the house and then lost them, they’d managed until her mother looked at Lottie one day and didn’t know who she was. Sometime later, she’d wandered off and they found her, dead, one morning in the middle of I 95S. No ID, no address, and no family to speak of meant Lottie could end up lost in the system, or lose herself, fast, in the warrens and labyrinths of Boston; she’d opted for the latter. The one thing she had from clear back in her high school days, the one thing that meant more to her than anything else, was a beat-up, filthy, jean jacket with patches of faraway places sewn on it, little pins and a real Parisian silhouette sewn on the breast pocket. Her mother had brought it to her from a second honeymoon just before the world turned inside out. She’d been told some lady left it behind after jumping in a cab. Her mother had waited to see if the woman would come back, but she hadn’t, and her mom knew it was something Lottie would like.

And she had. The jacket spoke to her of dreams and exotic places. Snuggled in it at night, she would lull herself to sleep thinking of the different cities and countries the jacket had traveled to and dream of just maybe, someday, getting there too.

Lottie wasn’t stupid or uneducated, but in her world, street smarts were what counted. Knowing who and when to trust and knowing when to run or disappear. She loved to read and regularly checked out the laundry mats, the library dumpsters and those Newberry Street trash cans. She had quite a library in her shed. She read everything from National Geographic to romance novels. She even had a an Algebra II textbook that she had read from cover to cover. She’d worked every single problem too. Lottie was good with numbers, with math and could do it all in her head, which, was handy as paper was usually in short supply. When she dreamed, it wasn’t always of the exotic. Sometimes, she just dreamed of someday, of someone trusting her enough to give her a job.

Lottie was, at the advanced age of forty five, still a virgin. Granted, she looked years older—street life can do that to a soul—but she wasn’t the type for hooking up with anyone just for a quick cuddle only to wake up dead the next morning. Out on the street, there was trust and then there was trust. She couldn’t see the right kind of trust getting her too far out here. She grew up fast after her Mother died, and just kept going. She’d never found anyone like the men she read about in her romance books, but didn’t want to settle for less. Romantic heroes had better things to do and better places to meet women than skulking around the less desirable parts of town. However, she longed for that kind of love and knew she’d never find it on the streets. It would seem wonderful to have nice clothes and to sleep in a real bed with clean, fresh smelling sheets again, to feel safe and protected and to eat restaurant food bought with earned money. Granted, she was strong, and independent. She could defend herself, make herself almost invisible and knew every alley and tunnel in Southie. Besides, she’d loved and lost both her parents; one to a drunken crossing of I95, the other to fear or longing or a need to seek out something different. She’d learned that nothing was permanent, that everything changed, and that nothing was ever guaranteed. All she could truly rely on was what she, herself, did or did not do. She figured that she was her own best companion.

Sometimes she would squander a dollar on a lottery ticket and then spend a week dreaming about what she’d do if she won. She wouldn’t waste it. Never that. With money, she could become respectable again, have a real place to live and just maybe, get to see Paris and the Eiffel Tower someday. She could have real bookshelves and afford to buy new books that weren’t full of ripped pages with dog-eared corners. Her days wouldn’t be measured in sun hours, for she would have lamps and lights to keep the dark, lonely nights at bay. Of course, she never won, but it was more the moments of hope, the minutes spent dreaming that the dollar bought, than any real thought that she might actually win. Having too much ‘stuff’, too many items, would, in her current situation, just invite thieves and she couldn’t see as how it would be any different if she had money and a place to keep all the things. It still would invite others to take what she had.

She didn’t have much, but she liked what she had and once, several years back, even that had been taken from her. A late spring snowstorm had kept her from her shed as the cold had forced her to seek a shelter for the night. When she returned, she’d found the chain broken and her pitiful few belongings gone in the bags of some other wanderer. She was just glad she’d had her jacket with her. The rest was just stuff, but the jacket, brought back from Paris, was all she had, really, that she could equate with her life before being on the street.

Lottie didn't really have what she would consider to be friends, but she had a wide circle of acquaintances. The guy at the consignment shop still talked to her as if she were regular people. Dewey would share his coffee with her and he was always good for a quick joke. Top-hat was another one, who, on a good day, would share a long, involved story about 'how things used to be.' Time would fly by as she listened to his stories, never hearing the same one twice. But he was a talker, and never seemed to want to listen to anything but his own voice as he held court at the Alewife Station until the cops ran him out. Not that many of the street folk shared much of life before. It was, after all, ancient history. There was the lady at the soup kitchen who always talked about God and who always seemed to care about Lottie, but then that lady always went home to her five kids and a warm house. The closest to a friend she'd had on the streets was Sarmi, who was impossibly young, far too pretty and who died pregnant and with AIDS after too many five minute love affairs. She'd had a cat, a mean, old, lop-eared tom, who kept her warm at night until he fought one fight too many. But he'd gone out fighting and that was the best one could hope for. Jimmy Two-teeth, Carmelita, JohnnyBo, Sammy and Mick were all ones to nod good morning to or smile at, but not much more. Vendoskov, Finsky and Levawitz played music down on the Prudential Platform days, and she enjoyed listening their 60's songs, but they always gave her dirty looks because she never threw change in their guitar cases. No, friends were hard to come by, rare and scattered, but she was acquaintance rich.

Still, Lottie was never one for feeling sorry for herself, at least not for more than a few occasional ‘rainy moments’ as she would call them. She couldn’t see much point in that. Instead, she focused on the sun-shiny things. There was delight in the tinges of green returning to the trees in the Common every spring and the flower mosaics in Boston Garden. The blue palette of the bay and sky washed clear each morning. The circus of a Saturday morning spent at the edges of Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. Bright-eyed children looking in Christmas windows at Macy’s and Filene’s. She would share what little she might have with someone who had less than she, and was known on the streets as both a good listener and one who wouldn’t repeat what she’d heard. She was considered an ‘up-street,’ one of the homeless folks that wasn’t a druggie or a drunk and one who had the gumption to keep going, who would never go ‘down-street’ and give in or give up. Lottie was a survivor.






Contest prompt:
Create a new character in your mind. One that you have never used in a story before. (Or, if you have a character that still needs development for a story, by all means, develop them with this method!) Then answer the following questions about this imaginary person - you might be surprised at how real they suddenly become:

1. What does the person look like - all the way down to the last detail? Do they have any scars? If they do, where'd they come from? What other odd traits might they have?

2. What happened in this person's past to make them who they are today? Were they divorced, abused, loved, cared for, pushed away, etc?

3. What kind of temperament do they have, and why? Does it have something to do with their past?

4. How would they react in the following situations?
a. A divorce (Fantasy: the disappearance of a spouse)
b. Someone cheating on him/her
c. A robbery
d. Finding out that someone s/he love loves him/her back
e. Winning the lottery (what would they do with the money?) (Fantasy: Happening upon an unusually large amount of money.)
f. S/he has been wronged in some other way - does s/he forgive easily?

5. What kind of friends do they keep, if they keep any? Does s/he actually trust his/her friends, or are they there for convenience?