When there’s no place to live but your car

I’m not going to tell you her name; small town talk, you know how people are. We’ll call her May.

It isn’t that she has things to hide. She lives her life in the open; too much in the open. May lives in her car. It is an old sedan. It is crammed with her stuff. She used to have a place to live. The fact that she does not have another is a failure of the larger imagination of all the helping professions.

We met recently in Newmarket. That’s not her town. She drove there for a meeting about poverty.

How did she come to live in her car? She said there were family problems, and her marriage disintegrated, and so did the discs in her back, and she has fibromyalgia, and there’s a problem with one of her legs, and she is 55 years old. Yes, there may be other problems. We met at an anti-poverty event. If the talk of poverty was abstract, her situation is much too specific.

It’s cold outside. How does she manage not to freeze to death? She said, “I got a down-filled coat. I got two sleeping bags. If I wake up cold, I turn the car on and run the heater for 15 minutes.” I pay my mortgage at the bank; she pays hers at the pump. She said, “You worry about the price of gas.” Where does she sleep? “I park in plazas.” What about the cops? “The police get to know you, they don’t disturb you.” And that may be the only virtue of a life lived in a car in a small town. What does she do if her “home” breaks down? “I have a friend who’s a mechanic. If I have to go to a garage, I have one I’ve gone to for seven years. His way of helping me is to charge me for parts, or not at all.” I know what it costs to heat my house. She said, “It costs me about $125 a month in gas, maybe $150.” That’s a good chunk of her disability cheque. She said, “I just started collecting bottles from the blue box.” Her eyes welled up. “I can get about $10 for three hours’ work.” What does she use for an address, given that her disability cheque comes in the mail? “I use a friend’s address.” She made a face. “I hate lying.” That’s not lying. What did she eat last night, when there was no community supper, in a town where there is no shelter for women? “I had a bowl of soup at Tim’s.” What will she eat today? “I had the meal here.” She was referring to the trays of vegetables and sandwiches for lunch at the anti-poverty event where we met; and when the meeting was over, she would take some muffins, um, home with her. Where does she clean up, and attend to her personal needs? “I get a shower once a week. In between, I take sponge baths in doughnut shops.”

Has she tried to get housing? “I put my name on a list.” She feels others are getting ahead of her in line.

What does she want? “I want a normal life. A place to have as a home. Enough money to exist without worrying, or going to food banks or community meals.”

Her expression was flat. She said, “I was born in Canada. I’ve fallen through the cracks.”

She has no plans. She can’t make plans. She plans to go on. “What’s the alternative? Suicide? That’s not in me. But this is not living.”