When I leave the shelter for the homeless where I work a handful of nights each week, I see a woman’s white tennies sticking straight out from the booth where she sleeps. She sleeps on her side so her legs are side to side, one on top of the other and their stiffness remind me of a railroad crossing bar—the ones that lower, keeping traffic from going over the tracks until the last railcar has cleared the intersection.
She doesn’t have to sleep in a booth. The shelter provides mattresses, 6 inches thick with slip-covers of heavy, pine-green, vinyl. I imagine these mattresses are twin size despite looking longer than any twin size mattress I have ever slept on. There are several mattresses like these in a closet in the back of this room which is used for multiple purposes by day and emergency shelter by night. The closet is the size of a kitchen in a small apartment and inside, the mattresses rest on their long edges leaning on each other waiting to be pulled from their slumber for the slumber of another.
The room is called The Chapel and it is where on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, worship services are held. A hodge-podge of furniture lines the perimeter of the room—an upright piano of the Sunday school classroom-variety: honey-butter wood with a matching rectangle bench; squatty shelves leaning in every direction balancing Bibles and hymnals donated by local churches as per the markings on many an inside cover; and booths. Booths like the ones found in a 1950s luncheonette, sixteen or twenty of them lined up against the north and south walls. There is at least one cross and maybe a crucifix—a message to those served who consider themselves Christians that all Christians are served: those who have fallen from the path and those who are not born-again Christians and even Catholics.
It’s the booths which are problematic in that at first glance, they cause confusion. Surely a donation from a local malt shop or a highway diner, they are powder-pink and gray vinyl with silver glitter vinyl triangles along the backs. They make the room look like a woman who has dressed for the evening in everything she has fine and shiny—but it’s all wrong—she looks discount, like she’s trying too hard. Shelter residents assigned to rooms, use the booths during the day to complete a crossword puzzle or read the newspaper or knit and visit with each other. They clear out by evening, leaving the room empty for those who are checking in for the night. The incoming take a mattress from the closet and along with their belongings (the extent of which varies greatly by guest) they stake a claim to an area of carpet. Staff gives each incoming woman and her children (if she has them with her) a full set of bedding and towels and by the time it is lights-out, the floor is a maze of beds and bags and sleeping bodies. Since I was so new the first time I saw the white tennies sticking straight out from the seat of a booth, I thought perhaps the need was so great in this shelter that emergency shelter meant exactly that—make yourself a bed on the seat of a booth and call it a night.
I see her in the early evening when I’m about to start my shift and she is coming back to check-in for the night. Because she is in emergency shelter, she has no room assigned to her, yet. The shelter has no place for the homeless during the day. There is no courtyard in which to loiter; no café with stools and tables and chairs where one can pass the hours. The staff asks emergency shelter guests to checkout after breakfast and check back in at night. They are allowed to come throughout the day for meals but after meals they are expected to leave until 8:00 PM.
Leaving the shelter by 8:00 AM, emergency shelter guests walk over the viaduct which connects West O Street to O Street and leads them to downtown. Those who are feeble, old or disabled take the city bus for the half-mile ride over the viaduct and around the downtown loop, getting off the bus at the main stop on 11th Street, between O and N Streets. From there, they wander around downtown until the last bus runs. Sometimes I see them downtown, sitting under a bus stop shelter, or weather permitting, on a city bench. Some of them—the older ones—spend entire days in the public library; not reading, just lounging in one of the chairs meant for the comfort of card-carrying library patrons in the event they may want to browse a chapter in a book before checking it out. I’ve watched shelter guests occupy the chairs. Their bodies, slow moving flesh and bones, settle into the form making the chair look like a cupped hand facing upward, cradling a body—in the way a hand might hold up a tender fruit for inspection before the decision to purchase is made.
I don’t know where the white tennies go during the day. As I said before, I see her in the evening at the start of my shift. I don’t know much about her as she doesn’t stop in the shelter office very often. She doesn’t seem to have the usual wants—no medication or late passes; she hasn’t complained of bedbugs and she seems to remember when meal times are so her needs from us are limited. She’s not very tall and part of her body—the middle part, mostly—is round and heavy. In an attempt to describe to my youngest son her sunny disposition—how by the quality of her smile in concert with her clear eyes which sparkle like something shiny spotted under shallow water— she makes you smile inside causing a certain warmth to come over you, I said to him, “Imagine a bowl of mini-marshmallows left on a table with no note, no instructions—doesn’t just thinking about that bring a smile to you? Doesn’t something pleasant spread through you?”
And he said it did, adding his own take, “like strawberries, Mom, when you slice them and sprinkle sugar on them and you put them in that white bowl and leave them on the counter before dinner. It’s not time to eat and already just looking at those strawberries makes me feel good inside.”
She is deaf. I forget this about her. She stops in the office one night and wants to know if she can leave her bags in the Chapel even though it is not yet 8:00 PM. She wants to take a walk with her husband and she’s tired of carrying the bags, she says, as she points to the clock over my head to show me it’s only 7:40 PM.
She has good eye-contact when she speaks and though her speech is unmistakably that of one who has a hearing loss—nasal and muffled— it’s not so much that it grates on the ears of the hearing. The sharp and hard sounds of some of the consonants are absent from her spoken language but when she speaks she says her peace and grins and smiles and wanders your face for a sign that you have understood what she has said. Her face remains in perpetual positivity as if it doesn’t truly matter to her whether you have understood. She goes on grinning and smiling and nodding her head as if all that affirming can will the listener into understanding her words.
Her husband is a guest at the shelter but because they are not rightfully married—not by a church or a court of law, just common law—he is housed in the “men’s side” of the shelter. They also have a curfew and on this night she wants to spend a few more minutes with him.
I’ve never seen her husband. Well, no. I have, in a way seen him, once.
I was driving to meet a friend for coffee at a shop not far from the shelter and off at a distance I saw her leaning on the edge of a retaining wall. Her bags, two white plastic trash bags—the 13 gallon size, tall kitchen bags with red plastic loops atop tied like the red yarn around the ponytails of little girls—rested next to her legs and a man, large in stature and girth, was standing next to her. He had something wrapped in paper—like deli paper or meat-cutter’s paper—a roll of pork tenderloin?—about that size and shape. He was fingering the edges, spreading the paper apart. While I waited for the light to change, I watched how she looked over the paper and how he lowered the package so that she could get a good look at this fine thing he had unwrapped for her eyes. Whatever it was—the magic of it pulled her in closer as if he had a length of thread running from his hand—maybe from his pinky finger—a barely there knot in this thread invisible to the eye but which drew her nearer to him. Her head tipped up towards him—the morning sun made her squint—his lips moving and her face moving from the package to his face. I could see her lips were parted and I knew she was smiling, on her face: wonderment so great its essence wafted my way and I wondered, as I saw her look back at the package—what treasure was this—what delight had he, for her, unwrapped.
