{"id":144684,"date":"2020-04-30T13:06:10","date_gmt":"2020-04-30T17:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=144684"},"modified":"2020-04-30T13:07:21","modified_gmt":"2020-04-30T17:07:21","slug":"no-shelter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/04\/30\/no-shelter\/","title":{"rendered":"No Shelter"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

\u00a9 Jeff McCollough (AdobeStock)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an elegy for New York,\u201d my friend texts me. She\u2019s just finished my book. It\u2019s the end of February. We find barstools at a packed restaurant bar before a reading at St. Mark\u2019s Church. \u201cWe\u2019re ordering months of medication in case the supply chain fails,\u201d she says, \u201cand hand sanitizer\u2014and masks. Masks, can you believe it.\u201d Like me, she and her husbands are journalists, they\u2019re hearing things from some of our friends in the field. She tells me she thinks people will still read the book, words of reassurance that only provoke anxiety. I think she sounds paranoid, like she\u2019s speaking from a place of some dark cultish extremism.<\/p>\n

The next two weeks change the world. Schools close. We need to rush the audiobook recording into three days, taping over the weekend. I take the subway for the last time, without knowing it, one of only three people in the entire car. Days before, I\u2019d waited on a crammed platform for a train so jammed with bodies we couldn\u2019t all press aboard. Now it feels like a late night in the early nineties, a city of emptiness and dread. It\u2019s warm out, but I wear gloves, tiny red ones that belonged to a friend\u2019s grandmother, calfskin from a different century that had known different fear and trauma and loss. The sound engineer lets me into the building, squeezes nervously into the far corner of the elevator on the way up to the studio. We finish the recording Sunday evening. I wait in a supermarket line for an hour and a half and hoist home whatever I can carry. I write an article about homeless college students who have nowhere to go.<\/p>\n

The book couldn\u2019t come out in the fall; the fall news cycle would be too busy, the election too much of a distraction. April would be perfect. We would publish in time to do university events, but still close enough to the Democratic National Convention, when social issues, like the ones my book explores, would be on the forefront of discourse. The safety net. Housing. Childcare. The minimum wage. The cost of college. Race. Gender. My book follows Camilla, a young criminal justice student, through her first year of single motherhood, and the entire constellation of factors that keep her homeless, despite her tenacity, her ambition, her blade-sharp mind. I wrote this book like a zealous missionary, to grab people by their lapels, to make them feel the irreversible curse of being born poor in America. April was worth the abbreviated marketing schedule, worth the last-minute squeeze into the catalogue.<\/p>\n

Justin, my husband, takes photos of the brokers packing up their computers at the stock exchange. Guards had taken his temperature before they allowed him to enter the building. Normal. But that night his fever spikes. We quarantine from him in the house; he takes the bedroom, I sleep on the living room floor. He changes his clothes before he leaves the bedroom, wears gloves in the kitchen and bathroom, sleeps for two days. My breathing shortens, I feel a boot heavy on my chest.<\/p>\n

During the day, I report. Between interviews I tend to Dahlia, who is desperate for my attention and some semblance of solidity. She\u2019s twelve, navigating her first breakup alongside her first global crisis, while her parents are sick. At night, I\u2019m sleepless, processing the scale of what\u2019s happening. My insomnia gradually pivots to my book. I feel drenched in shame for even thinking about it. The next evening, I completely lose it and scream at Justin and Dahlia like a mother out of Albee.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Morning. I\u2019m bleary and breathless on the living room floor. I reach for my phone. There\u2019s a text from my editor:\u00a0Blessedly, we\u2019re moving publication, to a time a bit later this year when the earth is back on its axis<\/em>. I take the deepest breath I have in days, my chest suddenly unencumbered. At least this will be okay. An hour later: I have just been told that our April directive (that I wrote you about an hour ago) may be changing. Please stand by<\/em>. It\u2019s days before the phone rings to inform me of the publisher\u2019s decision. Over those days, I hear that Amazon will not be shipping books as part of their focus on essential goods. All my beloved bookstores have closed.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d been patient: My editor got tied up in another project after I submitted my draft. Finally, I got notes. I revised. I waited. And just as I was anticipating my next round of edits, the imprint that had acquired my book was shuttered after its most successful year ever. My venerated and venerable editor, a cofounder of the imprint, was out of a job; my book was orphaned. So began a spell waiting to see which editor would be assigned the book at a different imprint. And then nine months awaiting edits on that year-old second draft, only to be rushed into production, squeezed last minute into the catalogue, so it could come out this April. Publishing.<\/p>\n

Privileged problems to have. Our savings had been drained by this book process, but my life was anchored way above the line. My anxiety could crackle through a home to which I held a mortgage, my insomnia borne out beside a committed coparent. I felt left behind by New York\u2019s Gilded Age, but that was in part by choice: to be a writer, and to write about inequality.<\/p>\n

The women I\u2019d met at the Brooklyn shelter where I was reporting had no such choices. Privilege is an inheritance game. They were, for the most part, born poor. And over their young lifetimes, the struggle of poverty had become a tightening noose. These were young women who, for the most part, didn\u2019t grow up in shelters. During their childhoods, a Section 8 check could pay the rent, and rents, while untenable, weren\u2019t yet entirely infeasible, even at minimum wage. No longer. Each of them had found themselves alone, with the crushing responsibility of new motherhood, in the shelter on Fourth Avenue. The shelter, and its soup kitchen, was mainly run by volunteers, who stopped coming once the coronavirus threat became a dire reality. The soup kitchen had served its last meal the week before.<\/p>\n

Back when I reported at the shelter, the buildings nearby were unveiling their offering plans, which included pet spas and stroller concierge service. I followed my subjects through the vast labyrinth of our failed social service system: the welfare offices where people would wait for days on end to settle a single check; the NYCHA offices where they\u2019d vainly apply for subsidized apartments; the WIC offices where the size of a check was dependent upon whether a mother could still nurse her baby. Beyond the system were the bodegas and supermarkets that took EBT cards, the miles of subway track that led to the end of each line, and the buses that ferried New Yorkers far beyond the city\u2019s glittering nucleus. I watched these women shoulder the heavy yoke of administrative burden; I was a witness to what it meant to lose a public assistance case for reasons of bafflingly inconsistent policies, or a letter that got lost in the mail. I watched it happen to my protagonist who was as organized and prepared to take on the system as anyone I\u2019d known; a woman who, as a teenager, had sued her parents for child support and won.<\/p>\n

I saw how literally impossible it was to find stable housing in a city that had handed ten billion dollars of tax abatements to billionaires, a city that housed more millionaires than anywhere else, where even if a so-called affordable apartment came up in the lottery\u2014a lottery<\/em> for housing, my god\u2014as it did for my protagonist, the minimum income was unattainable for anyone under the line. That was during New York\u2019s age of unprecedented prosperity, of skyscraping new developments, of luxury everything, when the people in power decided to shred our safety net instead of strengthening it. In January, 62,679 people found a bed in city shelters, and thousands more slept in private shelters\u2014or on the street. How many will there be now? How many will there be the next time we\u2019re all instructed to stay \u201chome\u201d?<\/p>\n

\u00a0*<\/p>\n

The call comes the next day. They\u2019re going ahead with the book. The pipeline is open, that\u2019s the way they put it. The printer in North Carolina is printing books. The warehouse is shipping them. Amazon will keep stocking and selling, and so will a direct distributor. Fall will be just as bad, perhaps. I ask what the plan will be should North Carolina close essential businesses. We see no sign of that happening, I\u2019m told, not the way the virus is spreading. In my best good-girl voice, I inquire if it might be possible to look into what will happen if the printer shuts down and if Amazon stops selling books. I think about the Amazon warehouse worker I interviewed, who described how in the crammed warehouse there was no space to escape her colleagues\u2019 coughs and sneezes, how Amazon refused to supply masks and gloves. I feel complicit and conflicted.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no relief to realize this book is more relevant than I\u2019d known when I was writing it, that so many elements of the struggle I chronicle soon will be lived out by millions. I know they\u2019re right, that it\u2019s an uncanny moment in which to publish a narrative about individual trauma, about wide systemic failure, about life in a shockingly divided city. I\u2019m so sorry<\/em>, my editor writes me after the call. He was on the line but too sick to speak, in the middle of a fifteen-day fever, gasping at home. Justin has a friend in a medical coma. My heart flutters at a terrifying speed for hours on end; with each half breath, I don\u2019t know what\u2019s panic and what\u2019s the virus. I text my book\u2019s protagonist to check on her. She tells me she\u2019s not worried about getting COVID<\/small>-19. I should drink water with lemon and bicarbonate, she says; she heard it cures the virus.<\/p>\n

My half-capacity breaths suddenly drop to a quarter; I\u2019ve had asthma since I was a kid, I\u2019ve been assessing my lungs my whole life. After I put Dahlia to bed the following night, I feel my breathing capacity drop suddenly, now more like 10 percent. It\u2019s 11:30. We text a doctor for advice. He tells us not to go to the hospital unless we think I\u2019m going to die. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s going to drop again, and if it does, if it will be too late to get me to a place that can help. I don\u2019t know if any place is equipped to help. If this crisis will deem me worthy of a ventilator. We stay home. We cry a bit, not knowing what is going to happen. I tell Justin that at least I won\u2019t have to worry about my book anymore. I apologize for not getting a real job, for thinking that I could make this life work the way I\u2019d hoped. It occurs to me, finally, to feel scared for us, too.<\/p>\n

Soon I\u2019m breathing better, but sleeping less. Motivated by an almost ironic cynicism, I search for coverage of North Carolina\u2019s virus prevention plans. There it is, posted just hours before: the governor has decreed all nonessential businesses close up shop by Monday, until April 29, a day after my book\u2019s scheduled publication. Justin sleeps soundly beside me. I debate opening a bottle for a 4 A.M.<\/small> solitary drink, something I\u2019ve never done before. Instead, until dawn, I just write.<\/p>\n

The data begins to accumulate, the millions newly jobless. I text the women I\u2019ve stayed in touch with, women who were working at Applebee\u2019s, or as home health aides, trying to get through nursing school, trying to offer their children a measure of stability without stable housing. None of them reply. My protagonist isn\u2019t working now, but she\u2019s not worried, she assures me. Her partner offers her a stability the system never did. He\u2019s smart, she texts me, and they\u2019re praying, they\u2019ll be fine. I wonder if she\u2019s trying to convince herself as much as me.<\/p>\n

\u00a0*<\/p>\n

The book was printed over the weekend, I\u2019m told, it should be arriving at the warehouse that afternoon. I won\u2019t be able to hold it in my hands unless I buy myself a copy online\u2014shipping has been limited to retailers exclusively. My publicist emails me a picture of two stacked copies. I stare at the picture like it\u2019s a photo of a lover, tumbled from an airmail envelope at an army base. It\u2019s beautiful. I allow myself to feel that before I check the news. Before I return myself to the numbers, the numbers of jobs lost, the number of deaths. Justin\u2019s friend will soon be one. The book\u2019s protagonist will have finally felt the virus encroach; she will mourn two people lost. The next two weeks blur in a panic of writing and emails, careening between feeling zealous purpose and existential pointlessness.<\/p>\n

My sleeplessness pulls me into novels about the AIDS<\/small> epidemic, about slavery. I need relative traumas, ones that may offer perspective. I know what is coming for anyone struggling in this country, anyone who survives the virus. As a country, we\u2019ve lived through worse, I try to tell myself. But who cares. We could have ended homelessness with a twenty-billion-dollar investment in subsidized housing, we could have listened to every scholar, every think tank researcher, every HUD staffer, who knows that this problem is solvable with a tiny fraction of the stimulus package, or a tiny fraction of the wealth of the billionaires who feign their liberalism. I\u2019ve seen the paralysis and failure of our social services system in what, for some, was the best of times. Now it\u2019s the worst of times.<\/p>\n

Justin, home from making pictures of makeshift morgues in Brooklyn and the mass grave in the Bronx, catches me in a moment of preoccupation about my book, says at least I\u2019m not publishing a navel-gazing novel. I snap at him in defense of navel-gazing novels. We still want to connect, to feel, to bring another person\u2019s inner life into our own, I tell him in less-polite language. I wrote this book from a place of outrage, to move people to confront the horrors we were willing to perpetuate in the near past. The emergency was there all along. Never have Americans so desperately needed the ability to internalize the pain of others, to spur themselves into addressing our many plagues. Pub dates be damned, books are what will provoke our empathic imaginations. Like this one, they\u2019ll continue to be written and published, sold and read, discussed and passed on. Now more than ever, or same as it ever was.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lauren Sandler is the author of <\/em>This Is All I Got: A New Mother\u2019s Search For Home, out this week from Random House<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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