In Detroit

It was a cheap, nondescript hotel that rented out rooms to a hodgepodge of people.  I lived there for two years, beginning in 1968, while I attended Wayne State University.  There were long-term residents on social security, short-timers, and graduate students, like me.  My apartment was on the second floor.  It was plain and uninspiring.  It had a small living room with an open kitchen at one end. There was a little table against the wall placed near a 1950’s orange vinyl couch.  There was a secondhand easy chair.  There were windows on one side that faced the Detroit street below.  

In the bedroom, I had a bed and not much else.  The curtains were those flimsy, colorless cheap things that feel grainy to the touch and always slightly dirty.  They were there when I rented the place, and, out of sheer laziness, I kept them. 

I was twenty-three. It was the first time that I’d ever lived in a large city.  It was new and exciting to live in that neighborhood and in a building where the people were unlike any I had ever met.  Ann Arbor, where I’d been an undergraduate, was pastoral, insulated.  Detroit was open, gritty.  As I got used to the difference, to the newness of urban life, I grew to like it—was inspired by it.  Detroit was its own school. Nothing educates like a city.

There were women.  There are always women when you were young and in college, especially when it was the 1960s.  This woman was different.  I don’t recall her name, but I wish I did, because she deserves to be remembered by her name.  Let me call her Amy. I have never forgotten her, though.  She was slim and tall with long brown hair. I said my bedroom was stark.  It certainly was, and I did very little to change that.  When I took Amy to bed, she began to shiver.  It was summer, the windows were open, and the warm breeze blew the cheap grainy curtains over us.

“Is something wrong?” I asked her.

“These curtains are just like the ones they had at the home,” she said.  Her body tightened.

“Home? What home?”

“Where I went to have my baby,” she said. 

“You had a baby?”

“Yes.  I gave it up.”

“What was this home?”

“A place for unwed mothers.  It was so depressing.  And they had these kinds of curtains. Why don’t you do something about this?  Why don’t you get some decent curtains?” 

She was right.  They were ugly.  They were depressing.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“That place was so bleak, so unloving. I had my baby, and there was no one I knew, not a single person there. It was run by nuns. They were mean to me. They treated me like dirt.”

She was so young to have gone through all that. I was startled by her pain. I had never met a woman who had given up a baby. I thought of her there, all alone. In a moment when you shouldn’t be alone. I felt a deep sense of helplessness.

She began to cry. I could feel the hurt coming from her. I held her slim body, but she was somewhere else. When she left the next day, I never saw her again.

What did I know of the world? 

I brought no happiness to her. I wish there was some way I could, even now. To go back in time and change those curtains to something beautiful that would give her peace and be a balm. They would be made of fine cotton, white and clean, so when the breeze caused them to brush lightly across her, they would make her feel safe and loved.