Light and dark provide cues vital to wellbeing. Make your bedroom a sanctuary where you control their influence.
—“Home” with Meg Mogrin, Grand Junction Style
The moment belonged in light and she had always kept the photograph where the sun could find it. Her sister’s soaring exuberance and Meg’s bemused distraction overlapping and forever fused into a third, inscrutable presence. The image and her memory also flew into each other. Both were fading now.
A sand-footed retaining wall charcoals a flat horizon against a dull grey sky. A lie told in black and white; the sky was a cloudless sapphire. The shoeless lookalikes in winter-hued summer dresses scrawl their crisp shadows across the concrete—one galloping, the other poised, heron-like. Helen flies at the camera, hanging in midair, arms spread, chest thrust forward, bared legs coiled, an exploding halo of trailing hair, while Margaret (Meg came later) perches with one hand locked in an Indian grip with her sister, her other hand anchored atop the wall.
Margaret’s wariness seems self-preserving rather than protective of her younger sister. Her knees are pressed together, her right foot probing and her left planted, as if she intended to slither down the five feet to the ground. Their father’s camera had beautifully captured Helen’s blissful leap and foretold Meg’s unmooring, yet it was a deceptive photograph. Meg was certain she had laughed, too, as they tumbled into the sand.
On the winter day she discovered her house, this sunlit room had been a selling point. July sun, however, was brutal and the gates of hell yawned in August. To reduce the bleaching, perhaps she should let the photo summer on the bookcase away from the windows. Clearing a new place, she discovered a dust jacket spine had been bleached green from its original brown. The mauve cover next to it ripened to bright blue when she slid out the book. To her dismay, the chair, the carpet, everything had suffered sun damage. Moving Helen into the kitchen’s northern exposure would safeguard her image but make a point about domesticity she didn’t care to press. Her bedroom? Unwise to seed her dreams with a glimpse of the fallen.
A tubular-bell gong in the hallway broke her from indecision. She’d long meant to install a more cheerful timbre, but the reminder came so rarely. She stood in shadow where she could judge the visitor’s silhouette through the door’s frosted glass. A woman. Meg placed the photograph on the entry table and opened the door.
Pandora Cox, her amber streak now a bluish-black. Minus her stage presence, too. Hands joined primly over her belly, she planted one foot, the other toed, her thighs pressed together.
“Pandora! Come in. What a surprise.”
Pandora turned back toward the street and waved to the driver in a white pickup with a cab-over camper.
“I thought it was best to thank you in person,” she said, stepping just inside the door. She peered around as if in search of the powder room. “I knew you’d have a beautiful home—oh, for cute! Is this you?”
“My sister and me.”
Pandora lingered over the image. “Which is which?”
“I’m the…pensive one.”
“I knew it!”
Process of elimination, no doubt.
“I loved your ‘America the Beautiful.’ I’m sorry I missed you at the event.”
“Me, too.” Pandora bit her lower lip, released it. Despite the scholarship between them, they were still strangers. “I was wondering if there was any way I could get some of the money now.”
Meg looked out at the truck, its running lights on and the diesel clattering. She closed the door.
“It doesn’t quite work like that. The money goes to the school directly. CU-Denver will get the payment when you enroll.”
“Oh.” Pandora twisted the bottom of her t-shirt. “Well, I’m not going there, it turns out.”
It turns out? This might be the fastest washout yet.
“So where would you go instead?”
“Williston. Cody’s getting a job on a rig in North Dakota and I’m going with.”
“I meant college. The money’s for school, you know.”
“Oh, I know. There’s a college there—Williston State. The cash would just be for gas and get-started money. I can pay you back once he gets his paycheck.”
“Have you thought about where you’ll stay? Winter in that camper won’t be much fun.” According to a recent news story, a one-bedroom apartment in Williston averaged close to twenty-five-hundred a month if one could be found.
Pandora’s smile was a sly one. She squeezed the fingers of her left hand. A band with a minuscule chip of something shiny. “Cody thought of that already. I applied for family housing at the college. It’s only seven-fifteen a month. If we don’t get a student apartment, I’ll get a dorm room. It’s perfect!”
Well, at least it was clever.
“He told me I was crazy to ask for the money now, but I said you believed in girls following their passion.”
Yes, if the girl knows where it leads.
“You’ll be following him to a small town overrun with oil workers. And if Cody’s working and you’re in school, you won’t see much of each other. Does Williston have the music program you wanted? It won’t be like in Denver with all its opportunities. You have something to offer the world but talent has to be developed. You should go where you can learn and connect with other musicians.”
“Whatever talent I’ve got, I’ll still have it in two years.”
“This is about more than the next two years. The choices you make now can affect the rest of your life—that’s all I’m trying to say.”
“Oh, I get what you’re saying.” She turned toward the door. “But you don’t even know us. Cody’s smart but he can’t just go off to college. He helps support his mom. There’s no jobs here that pay even close to the oil patch. Up north, he can still send her money and get his own start. And he loves me. He’ll take care of me if I ever need him to, which I won’t. We were just asking for some temporary help, that’s all. A little bit to get us started. I really thought you’d understand.”
Oh, the days when love mattered more than anything, when immortality seemed more likely than failure. “No. I’m sorry, but no. The money is for college, not…”
There was no reason to complete the homily. Meg’s big sister act had rarely worked, and now she was sounding like a mother. The girl was right. Meg did not know her, certainly not from the application process, her color-shifting hair or the venturesome rendition of one song. Who was she to say how Pandora should pursue her dream? Even good decisions contained a kernel of risk. Pandora was approaching the age when she had a right to choose badly. This choice didn’t necessarily mean abandoning music, but Meg didn’t have to endorse it.
Pandora retreated down the walk. The girl’s shape shrank in the cloudy glass of the closing front door, warping and then dissolving. The truck’s door slammed and its headlight haloes lurched away.
Meg rediscovered the picture in her hands. Her house was too full of things coupled to other lives, including the one she no longer led. When she sold it, she would winnow the books, read and unread, sweep out the plants and sell the furnishings. Vestiges of current ownership were almost always a negative, even a source of mirth. Prospective buyers didn’t respond to houses that remembered. They needed to project themselves onto an idealized blankness. They were Pandora on the road to Williston.
She brought the leaping sisters back into the living room. The end table bore a darker, ghosted smudge where the frame had sheltered the sun-blasted finish. She replaced the picture exactly. Everything fades, she thought. It’s the price of being in the light.
It’s easy to form a bad impression of a good neighborhood.
—“Home” with Meg Mogrin, Grand Junction Style
Promoting the potential of spaces, the beauty of landscapes and the vitality of communities was Meg’s livelihood. Homelessness didn’t exactly fit her brand. It didn’t fit anyone’s brand, unless you were Catholic Outreach. But Eve had told her, You’ll be fine. For a ti
me, she had been. Not a cause she would have chosen except as a favor for a friend, the Homeless Coalition was just another civic duty that might someday pay her back. Oh, she felt sorry for the people who had to scramble for shelter and food each day. She was proud of the town’s efforts to help them find housing. But the coalition’s charge was to end homelessness in ten years. End it here in Grand Junction, as if no tentacles of hardship could ever again penetrate this happy valley once the magic spell had been cast. Ten years was a lifetime in the business cycle. Even presidents weren’t expected to serve that long. New construction had showed its cracks by then. In that span, newlyweds went searching for bigger houses and first graders started driving to school. It was foolhardy to believe thousands of lives would change for the better and none would change for the worse.
But the unreachable goal was not what burdened Meg’s climb to the second-floor conference room. The sight of Amy Hostetter on the ground in the tamarisk had rendered suspect her instincts about familiar places. Her hometown’s darker fringes became foreground. If squatters could appear at the Reiner house, where else might they lurk? A week ago, Yoga Man’s sugar packet forest would have enchanted her; now it struck her as a symptom of downtown littering. Meg had even sensed something sinister about Pandora’s boyfriend waiting for her in his truck. This was not how she wanted to think or feel about her town.
The coalition met in a former church cinder-blocked and subdivided into a hive for secular do-gooders. The groups listed in the office directory were homegrown and locally funded, at levels ranging from a bootstrap to a shoestring. Their building served as neutral territory, away from the outsized authority of city politics, government human services agencies and the Catholic Church—although not beyond the influence of Sister Rose Lavelle, director of Catholic Outreach and chair of the coalition.
Sister Rose appeared, sparrow-like, next to Meg as if alighting from some higher branch. Her eyes were bright and penetrating. “I always enjoy your articles in the magazine. What will you be writing about next?”
Her close-cropped grey head inclined toward the answer.
It had never occurred to Meg that Sister might read her “Home” column. Grand Junction Style did not target those who’d taken a vow of poverty.
“It’s about ways to expand your home without major remodeling—multiuse rooms, taking advantage of outdoor spaces, that less-is-more kind of thing.” It sounded so trivial when she said it to a nun. Maybe she should add a few lines about being content with what you have.
“I look forward to it.” A half bow and Sister Rose resumed her glide of inquiry around the room.
Not a bird, Meg thought, a queen who had renounced her crown.
Sister Rose settled in a chair at the large conference table. As if a bell had rung, the pre-meeting shuffling halted and Meg joined the committee members finding their places: mental health and social case workers, social justice advocates, shelter and housing officials, representatives from the library, the school district, the hospitals, legal services and veterans affairs. No members of the City Council’s Vagrancy Committee appeared this time, and Meg sensed a growing void between them and the rest of the coalition. Two visitors, neither of whom Meg recognized, occupied the outer ring of chairs against the wall. Meg felt a new affinity with Zack Nicolai after their experience on the river, and she took a seat between him and Tony Martin, Amy Hostetter’s partner on the police outreach team. Sister Rose unclasped her hands, and without further declaration, the meeting came to order.
Tony Martin offered a brief update on his partner’s condition. Amy was ready to go home, he said, still annoyed at herself for missing the tripwire and eager to start rehab. So mild and considerate, he scarely seemed like a cop, even in uniform. He would make an excellent undercover officer, should the department ever have to investigate an accounting firm or a ring of flight attendants.
Sister Rose introduced one of the guests, co-founder of a group called Rescue Our Parks. Jennifer Barnes appeared capable of rescuing parks all on her own. Probably a business major who’d aced her courses, found the right man and planned to resume playing professional beach volleyball after her kids started school. When Jennifer stepped to the front of the room she seemed to Meg prepared to spike something.
Jennifer began by acknowledging that the Rescue Our Parks Facebook page featuring a fake homeless man and his bottle sprawled next to a playground reinforced an unfair stereotype, and she promised to take down the image. “Our group is not anti-homeless. The name Rescue Our Parks is meant to provoke discussion about objectionable activities in the parks.”
“Great!” Zack Nicolai didn’t speak for the coalition but the others at the table were happy to let him take the lead here. “Let’s start with a discussion about this statement: Our parks are being used as personal living rooms by people who scorn society. You realize that people who live in a shelter don’t have personal living rooms—so they sort of have to do their personal living in public.”
Jennifer retained her cool. “I get that this is a tough, multidimensional issue. We have nothing against those who are homeless through no fault of their own. My heart breaks for people who don’t deserve to be in that situation.”
“That’s wonderful. My question is how you can tell the difference between a person who scorns society and a person society scorns? Or does your ability to detect undeserving homeless people only work in the park?”
“Excuse me?”
“If I get laid off and lose my apartment, it sounds like I’m a deserving homeless person. What if I’m drinking because I got laid off and lost my apartment?”
“All right, Zack, you’ve made your point,” Sister Rose said.
“The last time I took my daughter to the playground at Hawthorne Park, a woman was asleep wedged in the bottom of the slide tube. When I asked her to leave the play area, she became belligerent. This is only one in a string of threatening experiences in the parks and on river trails—people relieving themselves, unleashed dogs, demands for money. People shouldn’t be afraid to use public places or take their trash into their alley. We love our neighborhood because it’s near a park but it’s gotten so we’re about ready to move.”
Liz, the shelter manager, scrunched her face as if seized by a toothache. “I believe you’re sincere when you say you’re not anti-homeless. At the shelter we enforce rules against drinking and throw people out based on their behavior. But as a community we don’t judge whose suffering is most worthy. We should recognize why people need the park, for good or bad reasons. Exclude them and the issues just surface somewhere else. Help people in crisis and maybe the parks won’t need rescuing.”
“I wonder if some of the fear comes from criminalizing more of the poor’s turf,” said Eric from legal services. “Once you define resting in public as loitering, the public’s more likely to regard someone who’s tired as being dangerous. It’s perception.”
Meg was only beginning to learn the continuum between discomfort, perceived threat and actual danger. She knew from Officer Martin’s reports that the outreach team spent most of its day dealing with homeless people in distress, disorderly conduct that caused alarm in others and petty theft. Actual crimes against the general public were very low, compared to the cases where the homeless were victims, often of each other. She understood how Jennifer Barnes felt; she’d been in the same place only a few months ago, and as a woman, would never be able to fully let down her guard.
Sister Rose made the clasping gesture again and addressed Jennifer. “Your family is rightly your first priority. And your love for them naturally provides all kinds of nurturing and support beyond food and shelter. If only everyone had loving and intact family ties. To help the dispossessed of the community, we must enlarge the boundaries of kinship.”
Jennifer Barnes’s eyes flashed. “If you’re saying the solution is for my family to form relationships with alcoholics and mentally unstable individuals, I must tell you that is not going to fly.”
> Meg felt embarrassed for everyone. Jennifer had come with concerns about protecting her children only to be lectured for her insensitivity. It seemed a potential ally was about to slip away, perhaps to join more extreme adversaries. Meg caught Jennifer at the door.
“We should talk later. Maybe I can help.”
Jennifer looked at the card Meg had thrust in her hand, shook her head and kept walking.
“Communities can get tired of dysfunction the way families do,” said Sally, a mental health caseworker. “That’s when you start to see support for more severe measures. Some pressure’s good for nudging the hard cases but making them criminals doesn’t produce change.”
Tony Martin bristled. “That’s not what we’re doing.”
Zack held up his hands. “We don’t mean you, Tony. But the police department’s outreach team used to be three and now it’s just you. I don’t see the city’s commitment there anymore.”
“We’re short-staffed. The department’s holding Amy’s slot open.”
“See how it works? Every turn of the dial has a rationale. Not filling the outreach position is a budget and headcount problem. Crack down on panhandling—it’s all about traffic safety. Tear out the camping habitat—river beautification. And now the library, for cripes sake!”
“Banning backpacks was not my idea,” said the library’s representative.
Zack crossed his arms and rolled his eyes heavenward. “Right, it’s never anyone. Nobody’s anti-homeless. The library isn’t banning people. It’s only banning the backpacks holding the valuable stuff carried by people who have no safe place to leave it! Look at the big picture. More and more resources are going from helping people to pushing them around and nobody wants to call it oppression.”
This was where Meg was supposed to speak up and back Zack down, tell him that if he wanted more resources, he should stop treating the business community like robber barons and browbeating mothers worried about their kids. It was like no one was allowed to pursue their own interests as long as Zack perceived injustice. Everyone at the table was there because they believed the town could be better. He didn’t have a monopoly on virtue.
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