All We Had

My first apartment after college wasn’t much to write home about.  In fact, by the time I moved in to it, I didn’t have a home to write to about it.  Like so many, I believed that once I had my dual degrees in English Literature and Journalism, the opportunities to work in publishing in New York or Chicago would be easy to find.  They were not.  Experience, it turns out, is everything.

I applied and interviewed across the Midwest at small newspapers and magazines, boutique public relations firms and big ad agencies in Detroit.  No offers.

And so it came to pass that my brother-in-law drove his partner’s pickup from Ohio to the apartment I’d shared with two others friends in my senior year at Michigan State, helped me load the remnants of my college career into the back bed, and drove me, through a steady warm rain, to the small town I thought I’d left for good four years earlier. I told myself it was just a stopover, and living with my parents – both of whom were now retired due to health issues – while I looked for a job wasn’t the worst thing.  It just wasn’t what I’d imagined. 

The ride home was enjoyable; I’ve always been close to my sister and loved my brother-in-law from the moment they began dating.  He seemed more a brother than someone who came to the family by way of marriage. They were so young when they wed, but so clearly in love with such big dreams for a simple life in a small town.  He was working in an auto body shop when they met and, by the time he was driving me back to Ohio – acutely aware that this hadn’t been part of my plan – was co-owner of his own small shop.

Once I was back, I interviewed widely, in Ann Arbor, Cleveland, Toledo and Detroit.  I still was intent on city living, and by then held no illusion that a magazine or publishing would be my first gig.  But nothing came of those pursuits.  Everyone assured me I showed promise; but it always came down to a lack of experience. 

Finally, in late July, I saw an ad for a marketing position at a small independent bank, just one town over.  It wasn’t my dream job, but by then I accepted that my first job would serve as the internship I’d never had in college.  Experience would be my stepping stone. 

I landed the job and gained a mentor who, today, though he passed more than twenty years ago, I think of often.  His shared wisdom never failed me.  Before he made the offer, he acknowledged it was a woeful salary, but there was nothing he could do; though he would help me build a portfolio so I could move on to something better.  I’d be a department of one – writing advertisements, the employee newsletter, promoting the Christmas Club, and the new machines that dispensed cash on demand.  Not many customers were comfortable with them but perhaps, he suggested, I could come up with a way to make them more at ease.  They just needed experience.

I accepted the job, with an annual salary of nine-thousand dollars. 

At least I wasn’t paying rent. But I would need a car.  I had been driving my mother’s to interviews, but I was a working woman now, in my field of study no less.  And so, for a thousand bucks that they allowed me to pay over time, my sister and brother-in-law sold me their not-so-gently used Ford hatchback.  It drank a quart of oil every time I filled the tank; but it got me back and forth safely.  It took me each day to work, and to Detroit and Cleveland on many weekends to visit friends from college.  It was the car I drove to Pittsburgh and Columbus and back again to Detroit and Cleveland as I followed a singer and his band who, to this day, still help me believe in the Promised Land. And, eventually, it was the car I used to drive away from small-town life.

I knew my parents also wanted to move, get some place closer to a larger city – close to doctors, culture and highways.  Who could fault them?  Regardless of their health – and blunted careers that were part of the fallout – they still missed the lure of a bigger city.  They’d been transplanted to our town just a decade earlier, with the intent that the small outpost was a stop on the career ladder. 

The For Sale sign went up on a Monday, about a month or so into my tenure at the bank.  On Friday, I came home to a note on the refrigerator:  Sold the house!  At dinner to celebrate.

I stood alone in the kitchen.  I was on my own. 

I steeled myself with new resolve; nothing was going to stop me from moving on.  I had sixty days to find a place to live.  With less than thirty to go I found a cheap apartment in town.  It was plain, but doable.  It wasn’t infested with mice, as the college apartment had been the previous winter.  The windows seemed thin, and it was electric heat, but I could afford the rent. 

My unit faced a short stretch of worn grass butted by a thin line of trees that the landlord assured me deadened the sound of the trains that frequented the tracks running East to West.  Those trees did no such thing.  The tracks were so close their leaves would shake, and I’d hear the rumble of the train well before it passed. In the middle of the night, when its roar and vibration would awaken me, I’d remind myself this was temporary; I was gaining experience and then I’d move on. 

Fall came and went, and by early January, when the clouds hung low and gray and the temperatures plummeted, I’d often awaken, or come home to, a buildup of ice, from top to bottom, on the inside of the sliding glass doors that led to the apartment’s tiny wooden balcony.  It was so cold that it forced the electric heat to run non-stop.  I hadn’t yet been able to afford curtains, and I would melt the ice with my hair dryer and mop up the water with an old towel, wringing it out several times, each time.  

On his way home from the shop one evening my brother-in-law stopped by and found me melting the ice.  I assured him I was going to be buying some curtains soon – maybe even that payday.  But I had some plastic covering I had saved for to help insulate from the cold.  He made me promise I’d buy curtains by the end of the week, then helped sop up the water and affixed the plastic.  It felt warmer.  We each drank a beer.  He headed home.

On my lunch hour that Friday I withdrew some cash from the ATM that, by then, was gaining popularity, and drove to a discount store on the edge of town in search of insulated curtains.  There were a few sets to choose from; one was light and airy, but still had a backing for warmth. The other was dark brown, reinforced like the other, though not at all attractive.  They looked heavy and somber, even in the packaging.  But the brown set was marked down, and there was no way I could justify the price difference between the pair I liked and the pair I did not. 

I hung them as soon as I arrived home that evening.  A friend was coming to visit next weekend; it was the first time she was coming my way and since she’d be sleeping on the old pullout couch my parents hadn’t wanted, I wanted the room to appear as put-together as possible.   I took my time, ensuring each hook was in the proper clip on the curtain rod.  I stepped carefully off the chair I’d used to reach and stood back.  And that’s when the tears finally came.

It really could have just been the curtains.  They were that ugly.  And they made the small space look and feel like a cave.  But it was so much more.  Where was I?  How had I ended up right back in the place I’d left so long ago?  How much experience was enough to move on and catch hold of a dream, or even a fragment of it?

There was a knock on the door and through the peephole saw my brother-in-law.  I let him in and tried to look as though I hadn’t been crying; I had worked so hard to avoid defeat.  He looked at me.  Looked at the curtains.  Looked back at me and the tears started to drip while I explained that there had been a nicer pair, but they were more expensive, but now seeing these hung, they were so ugly and depressing and I’d probably never make enough money to even move and…I rambled on. And somewhere between ‘nicer pair’ and ‘more expensive’ he had already begun to take down the brown curtains.  He repackaged them neatly; retrieved the bag and receipt out of the trash and then reached in his back pocket for his wallet.  He pulled out several twenties and a few tens.  I told him I couldn’t – but already knew I would.  And he wouldn’t have taken it back anyway. 

I don’t know what bill went unpaid that week, what that money had been intended for or if he ever told my sister once he arrived home what had happened. 

But I told her.  Years on, after their divorce and long after I had moved away, gone to a larger city, met the man I would marry, and worked in a job that would lead to a forty-year career that gave me the opportunity to hold positions of Chief Communications Officer and then Chief Government Relations Officer.  I spent the last half of my career traveling to the nation’s capital advocating for health policy and how crucial our federal safety net is for so many.  I never had to tell them about melting ice off my doors. But I would have.  And I would have added that not everyone has a safety net like my sister and brother-in-law had been for me.

I never made it to New York.  But my niece, their daughter, did.  I like to think I helped plant the seed for her at a very early age, when I would point to the illustration in Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever.  On the page, In the City, was a third-floor window with the sign Book Publisher. On the front of the desk where the editor sat, with a stack of colorful books piled high, I wrote, Aunt Barb.  And when I would babysit or be at their house for a dozen other reasons — to do my laundry, eat a full meal or simply be with my sister and her family, I’d find that book and remind my niece where I would be someday, so she could find me.  Now, it’s where I can find her:  She’s managing editor of a national culture and fashion magazine. 

I’ve had several addresses since that first apartment. Each was nicer than the previous and they all hold memories that, with each passing year and the trick of time, fade a bit more.  Some friends ask us, now that our children are grown and moved away, if we’ll ever downsize from the treasured Colonial we now own.  Not anytime soon.  This isn’t just a house to lay our heads.  It’s our home – the culmination of who we are.  Who we were.  The dreams we realized in exchange for those we let go. How far we’ve come.

My sister and brother-in-law both remarried. We’re all retired now; their youngest recently became owner of the shop that, because of my brother-in-law’s tireless efforts, has grown and succeeded immensely. I don’t see, or talk to, him often. Weddings, mostly, or a note of sympathy and understanding after our parents’ deaths.  Even so, we’ve always known we’re there if needed.  I once took out a loan for him and my sister, when the business was finding its footing after his partner left.  I’d already moved away, and they had moved a few months earlier — out of the small two-bedroom bungalow they bought when they were first married to one that would accommodate their growing family.  I never thought twice about signing for that loan; it would never be as much as those twenties and tens. I loved them as much as they loved me.  You do for family what you can.  Finally, I could do for them what they’d done for me.

He mailed me a check, and sometimes an extra payment, every month. I had hoped my help would ease their other issues.  In the end though, it’s more than money.  It’s so many things all piled on top of the others.  All those experiences that change us, and force us to grow in ways, and directions, we never imagined or bargained for. 

I know they both gave it the best they could for as long as they could.  They had been so young.  At times it was messy and then it wasn’t. They weren’t speaking, then they were cordial. I tried not to keep track because I didn’t want to choose.  I loved them both so dearly.  I still do. 

And though so many memories fade with time, I’ll never forget the love we all shared in those early years.  We would do anything to lift the other.  Even take down the brown curtains. 

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