The Girl's Guide to Homelessness

by Brianna Karp

  “So arrange to listen in on a conference call from California, or something. Or get written permission from her to contact the doctor with any questions. Yes, I understand you want to keep her happy, but I’m afraid this is going to give her hope. I’m not saying that you are, but, in her mind, this is you choosing her over your girlfriend. You do realize that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I guess I do realize that. But you know that I’m not choosing her over you, right? I’m just trying to make it easier for all of us down the line.”

  But he wasn’t making it easier for all of us down the line! I wanted to cry. He was letting her think that she could push and push and push until she got her way. And then it would only be harder in the future, when we were ready to get married. Please, please put your foot down now. Head off her bullshit at the pass. Do it for us.

  I wanted to scream it all at the top of my lungs. But that would be crazy. After all, it was my fault that I was upset, not his. I was being unsupportive. This was his first child. He was already losing out on the whole prebirth bonding process. The listening to the baby via belly headphones, the feeling of a fluttering kick from the womb against his hand. This was all going to be hard enough for him, especially once the child was born. Just let go. Give in. Be the supportive girlfriend, the supportive future wife. Do this for him.

  So I did. He was right. The two of us would need to be the adults in this situation; we would have to make compromises.

  We booked the trip. He would stay in California for one month. On May 20, 2009, I would meet my future husband at LAX Airport in Los Angeles. The butterflies began. It was all about to become so very real.

  Chapter Eleven

  He spotted me first, across the swarm of arrivals criss crossing paths, knocking into one another with their rolling suitcases.

  I wore a green-and-black dress, and was shaking as though it were freezing, though the California spring was out in full force. He was tall and lanky, weedier in person, and his face slightly more creased, a minuscule tad older than the photos had shown. I would later learn that this was because he was exhausted; he hadn’t slept a wink in the two hours he’d spent on the train to Aberdeen Airport, and then the sixteen-hour flight. Later, after he got a full night’s sleep, his face would relax into the smoother, youthful one I knew from the past few months. He had the faintest flecks of gray just beginning to crop up around his temples. I found that distinguished-looking.

  I think we had both imagined an airport meeting in which we rushed into each other’s arms and kissed like we were in a Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks romantic comedy. Reality won out, however. We were both too afraid of what the other was thinking. We walked quickly toward each other, blocking the flow of traffic. I stared up at him. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He’d seen me in photos and video, but what if now, in person, he was thinking he had made a mistake? I couldn’t read anything, but his eyes were kind.

  “How was your flight?”

  “Oh, it was…you know…long. I’m feeling pretty tired.”

  “Right. Of course. Right. Let’s get you back to the motel. You must be exhausted.” I had rented a motel for a week or two with some of my EDD money. It didn’t seem right for me to bring my future husband back to a Walmart parking lot right off the bat.

  We had spoken about what our first meeting would be like, of course. Would I take him to a secluded spot on Laguna Beach and make love on the sand under a blanket, as waves crashed around us?

  Nope. This was real life. He was clearly about to drop from exhaustion. We walked briskly to the parking structure and piled into my car. Then, we just sat and chatted for a while. I can’t tell you exactly what we said for the next ten minutes. Mindless prattle, mostly. Something to fill the void. Just when I was positive that this was all a big mistake and that he was quickly figuring out that he couldn’t stand me, that going on a first date to California that you couldn’t get out of by simply having a friend pretend to call with an emergency was the dumbest idea of his life, he kissed me.

  And it was perfect. We stayed like that for a while, just kissing softly and easing ourselves into this.

  He pulled back after a few minutes. I was trembling.

  “Are you OK?” he asked.

  “Yes. You?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was starting to get worried that you were disappointed by me,” I said.

  “No. God, no. You’re beautiful. Just taking my time. You seemed awfully nervous.”

  “I am. I mean, I was.”

  “Me, too. But everything’s going to be OK now. Right?” he said.

  “Right.”

  “OK. Let’s go.” He squeezed my hand, and we drove back to the Orange County Motel, him stroking my elbow as though it were the most natural thing in the world and we’d known each other all our lives.

  Once at the motel, we checked his bags and got settled, flopping on the bed, propping our heads up and chatting some more. We both knew what was coming, what had been coming for months, but we instinctively knew that some lead-in was required. We just needed to get to know each other in person some more, settle into a new kind of energy, before we took that step. Also, I realized, he was so very tired that he would probably need some sleep before we…

  He reached out and pulled me close, drawing me to him tenderly. I did what I’d wanted to do forever, burying my nose into his chest so that he wouldn’t see my eyes well up with tears of relief and happiness. We took our time, exploring each other’s bodies very slowly, before finally making love.

  I’d never made love before, chiefly because no man had ever loved me. When Matthew Barnes looked into my eyes, his own moistening up, tears running down into the cracks on the side of his nose and plinking softly onto my face, it was the first time any man had ever said those words to me, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  He came inside me, and then held me for hours upon hours, finally drifting off into the soundest of sleep together. He meant it, and so did I. It wasn’t what we had imagined our first meeting would be like in the preceding months, but its essence was everything we could have hoped for and more. We awoke several times throughout the night and made love again and again. It was nothing short of miraculous to us. What we’d felt did carry across the ocean. It was real.

  The following month was wonderful, in every sense of the word. Sure, we were switching between motels and the Walmart parking lot, but every day there was something new for me to share with Matt. He even found ways to share new things with me.

  One day, Matt insisted that we take a walk. He spent all day alone in the motel while I was working, and would go wandering around Tustin to keep himself occupied. I was tired from work.

  “Nooooo, I just wanna toss myself on the bed and rest, maybe read a book or watch TV or have sex. Pleeeeease?” The last thing I wanted to do was walk.

  “Come on. There’s something I want to show you. You’ll love this.”

  Grumbling, I pulled on a pair of jeans and took his hand. He pulled me down the residential back streets of Olde Town Tustin. We walked and walked and suddenly, looming before me, there was an old-fashioned Victorian mansion, framed with giant, luscious oak trees. I gaped.

  “I knew you’d like it. But wait, there’s more.”

  We explored the twisty, winding roads, marveling at houses so beautiful, so old, so anachronistic to their surroundings. I could never have imagined homes like these in SoCal, home of the cookie-cutter Craftsman Bungalow and the Stucco Ranch House, much less in Tustin. Finally, he stopped me at a street corner and pointed.

  “Oh, my god! It has turrets!” It was like my dream house come to life. He stood behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist and whispering in my ear.

  “I knew this one would be your favorite. I saved it for last. We’re going to have something like that house, one day. There will only ever be the best for you, I promise.”

  We
had known that we couldn’t rent motels forever, but it was nerve-racking bringing Matt back to the trailer. I still felt an element of shame about it, even though intellectually I knew that was ridiculous (after all, he too knew what it was like to be homeless), but he put me at ease, cuddling me on the stale mattress and having long talks with me about quantum physics, philosophy and similar high concepts that I’d never quite understood, but that he made elementary. By the time he’d explained it to me, it all seemed within my grasp. He, on the other hand, was astonished and grateful that I could keep up with him, and even hold my own in a debate—often winning, as a matter of fact.

  “I used to try to talk about this stuff with my wife, and she’d just look at me blankly. ‘Use four-year-old language, please!’ she’d say. And there was no point even trying with Lori, of course. Every day you surprise me more and more. You have no idea what it’s like to finally be with somebody so tailor-made for you, someone with intelligence.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  We made love on the stale mattress, until I had to go to work in the morning and he would walk to what he considered the greatest American treasure of all—Denny’s—for a Grand Slam, which he declared positively rivaled any British food ever invented in scrumptiousness. Then he’d trot over to the local Starbucks, buy a coffee and run Homeless Tales from the Starbucks couch, until I could escape work and rush back to him, and we’d twine our fingers absentmindedly and dream about the house on the East Coast—where it was beautiful and full of nature and history and architecture and far, far away from my family and my past—that we’d buy, once we were married and I’d saved up enough from work to make a down payment. Then we’d make love until we slept, and then do the entire thing all over again. It was the first time I’d ever known what true, ongoing happiness was.

  After a few weeks, we couldn’t contain it any longer. Both of us wanted to shout it from the rooftops, and we decided to announce our happy news to my readers, and to Matt’s community at HomelessTales.com. Just writing about it made me a little misty-eyed, and my heart felt kind of weighted, like it was going to throb open. But it was so, so superbeautiful, finally getting to share it with the people following my life.

  The one thing Matt didn’t want to talk about publicly yet was Lori’s pregnancy. In fact, he didn’t even like talking about it much privately, with me. I thought that we should start making plans ahead of time, get things all ironed out before the birth. I figured it was important to talk to Lori about a mutual custody agreement before the baby was born; to get things in writing so that later on there were no problems, no “he said, she said.”

  But I didn’t understand what it was like trying to talk with her, he exclaimed irritably. If he ever tried to talk to her about anything serious, she either spaced out or started to cry and said that they should talk about it later. She seemed to understand about him moving to the States to live with me, and accept that there was no future for them. He had tentatively proposed sharing custody, a rotation maybe every three or six months, but he couldn’t seem to pin her down to putting anything into writing.

  That was all the more reason to deal with it now, I pressed. It would only be harder for her to be objective about sharing custody after the baby was born, and what if she decided to make things hard for Matt later on?

  If he thought she was going to be reasonable, then that was awesome. But get it in writing. I needed him to trust me on this. I had seen a lot of single new moms turn into total ogres after the baby was born, and try to take the father to court, or keep him from seeing the baby, after promising everything would be amicable. I watched an otherwise delightful former friend of mine do just that. It’s one of the reasons we’re no longer friends. I watched her go absolutely nuts after the birth of her baby, and do her utmost to destroy a very good man, and a good father, because she changed her mind about their verbal custody agreement.

  Maybe he didn’t think Lori would pull a stunt like that, and maybe she wouldn’t. I had never met her. I didn’t know. Maybe she was a completely rational person and had no intention of ever taking Matt to court. But we had no way of knowing that. For his protection—and hers—I urged him to make arrangements and get them in writing now, so that we wouldn’t have to worry about the possibility of misunderstandings or court actions later on. I spoke as lovingly as I could, and from the heart, but it only seemed to make him touchier.

  “Look, I’m not like you, OK? I trust people!” he snapped.

  Ouch. I didn’t know what the hell that was supposed to mean.

  “Sure, you have reason not to trust people,” he continued. “I mean, look what your family and the Jehovah’s Witnesses and everything put you through. But that doesn’t mean everyone’s like that! In the UK, things are different. People are different. You can trust people, OK? She’s not the brightest girl, but I believe she’s fundamentally decent!”

  I was stung.

  “I do try to trust people. I do try not to be cynical or overly suspicious. Believe me, I would love to live in that kind of world, Matt! But that’s not the world we live in. I’m not saying grill the poor kid or anything. I swear I’m not. If you think she’s a good person, I’m sure she is. But look—pregnant women are hormonal. New mothers are protective. And people forget their promises sometimes. Hell, half the time I can’t remember conversations I had a week ago. I’m just saying, for the protection of everybody involved—so that neither of you forget later what you agreed on—sit down and hash this out when you go out there for the ultrasound. Look, I even found a binding UK legal form for it.” I pushed it toward him.

  “All you guys have to do is sit down together and come to an agreement on issues like how often each of you gets to watch the baby, how you’ll handle issues like school and religion and all that hairy stuff. Then you fill it all out on this form, get it notarized and boom! You both have it there to refer to later, if there’s any dispute over what you agreed to. Explain to her that this is for her protection just as much as yours, Matt. If she’s as decent as you think, then why would there be any problem with such a basic agreement?”

  He sighed. “I guess you’re right. I’ll give it a try when I get back there.” He broke down in tears and sobbed, pulling me close on the trailer mattress. “I just don’t understand. I wish it was you. I want it to be you having our baby. It should have been you.”

  Right around this time, Matt became somewhat obsessed with the idea of us having children of our own.

  I’d just gone through the very unpleasant process of having a Paragard IUD put in. I had to deal with a rude, unsympathetic Planned Parenthood nurse who treated me like dirt when she read the descriptor “homeless” on my chart. She kept pushing me to accept hormonal birth control, which I’d already learned via trial and error turned me into a miserable, raging bear of a person—an experience I did not wish to repeat. I politely declined, explaining my reasons, and requested the IUD again. The nurse angrily jammed a speculum into my cervix without preamble and opened it all at once, like an umbrella, then refused to place the IUD when I cried out, saying, “Well, if you can’t handle pain like that, you won’t be able to handle the cramping of having an IUD placed inside you.” I’d had my annual Pap smear faithfully, up until this point, always with a gentle gynecologist who’d open the speculum slowly, notch by notch, always careful not to hurt me. Never before had I felt pain during an ob-gyn exam. This woman had very deliberately hurt me. I felt seriously violated. I left the room in shock, arriving at the front counter in tears and shaking all over. The receptionists took pity on me.

  “She’s always like that…don’t worry, it’s not just you. We can make an appointment for you at the Anaheim office. They’ll put in an IUD for you.” I thanked them through my tears. I’d had to wait three more weeks to get the IUD placed. The nurse at the Anaheim office was about my age, very kind and very gentle. There was some minor cramping and wincing, but I didn’t make a peep, and in five minutes it was over. It certainly came nowher
e near approaching the level of pain that the other nurse had inflicted on me.

  I’d gone through all that not to get pregnant. I couldn’t understand why Matt would even consider something so irrational. I was homeless. We were living in a parking lot. What was I supposed to do—raise a kid in a thirty-by-eight-foot box?

  “Do you even know how much it costs to have a kid here? It’s $10K just for the birth at the hospital! And that’s if there are no complications! That’s what it costs just to get the baby out of me, before you even have to start paying to raise it!”

  He looked at me blankly. “In the UK, all that’s covered under Universal Health Care. Everything’s free. I’ll never understand your American system. Do you realize that in the UK, everybody gets free health care, homeless people go on a short waiting list and get a free flat—and you can live there the rest of your life if you want to, never even have to get a job or anything if you don’t want to. That’s why I was only homeless for a short time. It’s all cradle to grave there. We care about our people there.”

  That was all beside the point, though. For one thing, it would be completely selfish of me to have a child before we had a proper home. For another, I was terrified. Terrified of the painful birthing process; terrified of taking care of a tiny, dependent human being that puked and pooped and screamed; and terrified of becoming someone like my mother, of morphing into the kind of person who could abuse and fuck up a child beyond all belief. They say we all become our mothers, right?

  Matt was casually dismissive. “That won’t happen to you. I know you and I love you. You don’t have to become your mom. You’ll be a fabulous stepmother, and a fabulous mother. You can give our children all the things that Lori can’t. I’m not saying I don’t think she’ll be a good mom—I think she’ll love and take care of our kid—but she’s not exactly the nurturing type, you know? There’s not much she’ll be able to do for the baby by way of education, culture, that sort of stuff. And don’t worry about the birthing process. Women wouldn’t keep doing it if it was so unbearable.”