Sara Majka - Cities I've Never Lived In - Stories

In Detroit, I ate in the Capuchin kitchens. They ran two places. One served people in extreme need, mostly men, many homeless, and many with mental illness. The other fed working poor families, many with children. I picked the second kitchen, though it was an hour away on the bus. When I arrived for lunch, I was cold and shaken. I felt that fragile feeling again. There was no sign-in or token system. I walked right in — past a listing of places where you could get a free shower — and stood as volunteers passed my tray down. The last one set a drink on it and said it was real Coke. There were no open tables. I asked a man if I could sit at the table with him and he nodded yes. Many of the people there knew each other. In one corner hung a mix of Christmas decorations and St. Patrick’s Day decorations, though all were green, as if to work for either holiday. Cartons of milk were piled on the table, and the man asked if I wanted them, and I said no, so he took them. I gave him my milk. Another man sat and said, I wish there was cheese on this. I said, I think there’s cheese on it. He took a bite and said I was right.

Eventually another man sat next to the man with the milks, and they had a conversation about drugs, and pills, and Oxycontin, and where to get the different things. I looked at the people volunteering, at how hopeful and kind they looked, and at the thin, spare wood cross on the wall behind them, and also at the people eating, who were kind in their own way. I thought that those few people passing out food — with their hands in little plastic gloves, and their cross behind them — should not be our major defense against this kind of poverty; as a defense it felt hopeful, frail, and largely hidden.

Because I spent a lot of time on the street, I met other people who spent time on the street. If I was traveling between cities and had my suitcase, these people asked for money, which I tried to give each time. I felt I was giving a lot of money, but this money — a handful of change from the bottom of my bag, or a dollar bill from my pocket — didn’t add up to much. I had bought the bodywash from the man on the street, so that was five dollars. But it was also the best bodywash I had ever used. It felt like honey that cleaned you instead of making you sticky. So there was five dollars, and maybe I had given out, to others, another ten dollars, so that was fifteen dollars. Many times I was blessed by the people I gave money to. In Detroit, I gave money to a man on the street and afterward thought he was asking for more. No, I said, that’s what I can give right now. He said he was only saying thank you. He told me a story about a new kind of hearing aid, one so small that others can’t see it. Do you get what I’m getting at? he said. Yes, I said, though I was looking at the gray building behind him and imagining a pale ear over it. Also, I was thinking of whether I could take a picture of him.

At the Chicago train station, a stand sold tacos for two dollars. I stood in line while a man asked people for money. He kept pointing to food and asking the cashier how much it was, and then looking at the money in his hand, which never amounted to enough. I gave him a dollar. I thought of how little I was giving. I could have bought him what he wanted. Or, when I took that picture, in Detroit, of the homeless man, I could have given him the leftovers I was carrying, but I found I wanted them. More than a dollar would be giving money I felt I needed. Of course, none of this would add up or matter. Except that I didn’t give people something that wasn’t easy for me to give. I paid for my tacos and gave the man the change. Bless you, he said.

In Iowa City I walked through a park. It was warm, or the air wasn’t warm, but the sun was. The night before, getting in by bus, was bitter. My throat had swollen and I felt weak, but at least it was warm enough now and nice to walk through the park. There was a sparsely attended fair going on. A man said something that I didn’t understand and reached for my hand. He seemed to ask what it was, what this fair was, and I said I didn’t know. He held on to my hand as I drew it away. Another man tried to get me to sign a petition, but I said I wasn’t from there. There was a table to legalize marijuana, a banner on free speech, and a sign against surveillance, mentioning both drones and what I thought to be strip clubs.

I saw a couple sitting on a bench with a sign saying that they were homeless. I walked up and gave them a dollar and asked where they were from. They had come in from Wisconsin. The woman said that her sister’s husband had just received two life sentences. They were surprised that I hadn’t heard about it. The husband had lit the house on fire and his three boys had died. The wife had gotten out with third degree burns. I looked it up later, and it was true, and the wife’s picture looked like the woman on the bench. They were both large and both had pale round faces and red hair. Articles said the husband was tired of not having money and had wanted to start over. There was also a baby, and the wife had saved the baby, but the husband had tried to put the baby back in the fire. I told the couple I was very sorry. I also wanted to take their picture and thought of that while I was listening, thinking about whether it would be wrong to ask.

I sat on the grass near them. It was nice to tilt my face toward the sun. But it was more than that. I hadn’t asked for the story, and, given it, wasn’t sure what to do. Increasingly, the sadness of the people I met was creating the fabric around me, and everyday life was beginning to recede, to lose meaning. In this world that was gaining meaning there were also churches. They were everywhere and grew in number as I traveled. I wanted to have faith so that I could go inside the churches, hoping they could balance the story of the fire, to be the other side of the story, but mostly I found the buildings beautiful and liked to look at them. I liked best the ones with other buildings attached, so that they went further, deeper into the unknown, creating a cluster of buildings like a small village. Then you had windows and buildings and courtyards to look at.

At the Salvation Army soup kitchen in Iowa City, a man invited me to attend church the next day to hear him play guitar. He wrote the church’s name on a tag that I had ripped from socks I had just purchased. It had been difficult to keep socks clean. We were eating turkey tetrazzini. It was terrible. The man across from us said, The only entitlement you need is to know the god that loves you. I left quickly, while they were in conversation, not wanting to be drawn in, thinking I would see the man the next morning, but it would have meant walking three miles, and a cough kept me up much of the night, and so I didn’t go.

It was a lonely time, and my trip had slowed enough so that I felt it. But what could I do? I couldn’t continue on so fast, doing one city every few days. There weren’t enough cities in the world to make me happy. My lover still wasn’t calling. I was tired of soup kitchens. I wasn’t sure what I’d ever wanted from them, but they were like the cities — simply the same thing, one after another. Sitting upstairs in the library in Iowa City, I looked down to see the homeless walking around the block holding signs. People passed without looking. The woman whose sister had been burned in the fire walked laps with her sign fastened around her neck as if she were a child, and there was something childlike in the roundness of her face. I thought of what it felt like to be near a shelter or kitchen in a city when food was about to be served, and suddenly people emerged, coming down alleys, moving out from behind buildings, walking slowly, in a drifting way, to that one spot, and they seemed sometimes like the dead, or people who had seen the dead.