“I need to get emergency assistance as soon as possible,” Larraine told the college kid who had replaced Lenny. “I’m so cold….The heat. All I know is I need the heat on.”
“Oh my goodness,” the college kid said without looking up. He was nonplussed. He was learning. The college kid dialed the number to Bieck Management and put Larraine on the phone with Geraldine, the office manager. Geraldine told Larraine that Beaker owed almost $1,000 in back rent. The gas bill was not the only one he hadn’t paid. Larraine sat in the office chair, resting her forehead on her palm. “Please, Geraldine, I need your help. I need your understanding.” After a few more minutes, Larraine hung up the phone. Her best hope of staying, she believed, was to convince Beaker to pay his back rent.
Beaker’s new place was in the Woods Apartments, on College Avenue and Thirty-Fifth Street, across the street from Mud Lake. It was white-wall clean and new-smelling and warm. Larraine asked Beaker to settle his debt with Bieck. He said he could not pay two rents. Larraine said she couldn’t pay last month’s rent because her money had already gone to storage. At this point, Larraine had paid Eagle Moving $1,000.7 Ruben had room to store Larraine’s things, and Lane had a truck. But both said no when Larraine asked them for help.
“Well, I hope you go live with your storage because that’s all—”
Beaker stopped himself. Larraine looked pitiful. She had heavy bags under her eyes, and her hair was a mess. It had been days since she last showered. She refused to ask Lane and Susan to use theirs. Beaker knew his trailer might just as well have been an abandoned shed: the heat, hot water, phone, and cable had been cut off. A helpless, dull silence hung between brother and sister.
Then Beaker said, “Take one of those sweaters.”
—
Larraine had six days to be out of Beaker’s trailer. Beaker had written Bieck Management a letter that read, “I’m moving and will be leaving my trailer to Bieck Management for the money I owe them. I’ll be out…and so will my sister.” Larraine learned about Beaker’s betrayal—that’s what it felt like, anyway—when one of Bieck’s property managers got her on the office phone three days after she had visited her brother in the Woods Apartments. The manager told Larraine to be out by the first of the month. She had pleaded, “Please, I have no place to go,” and “I’m not this bad person,” but in the end she just said, “I see. I see. Thank you for your time, and God bless you.” Larraine sat down. “I don’t know what to do or where to go anymore,” she said. “I have no idea.”
Larraine began looking for a new place to live in the streets surrounding her church. It was the centerpiece of her life; it might as well be the centerpiece of her housing search too. She shuffled gingerly along the icy sidewalks, calling landlords. Then she decided to stop by the housing projects in South Milwaukee, where she grew up. The woman in the office told Larraine they were full and not accepting applications, but she gave Larraine the address to HUD’s offices.
The Milwaukee branch of the Department of Housing and Urban Development was located downtown, on a top floor of The Blue, a grand modern tower with a mirrored fa?ade interspersed with rows of candy-blue glass. Larraine’s wet shoes squeaked on the lobby’s terrazzo floors. The HUD receptionist handed Larraine the Multifamily Housing Inventory Report, thirteen legal-size pages listing all federally assisted rental housing in the metropolitan area. “I have no idea where half of these places are,” Larraine muttered at the long list of addresses and phone numbers. It hardly mattered, since most of the properties were reserved for the physically disabled or elderly. In fact, for years Larraine had assumed that most public housing was exclusively for senior citizens. “And even they, a lot of them, couldn’t get low-income housing,” she remembered. “So I thought, if they can’t, neither can I.” It was why Larraine had never before thought to apply for public housing.
Politicians had learned that their constituents hated the idea of senior housing a lot less than public housing for poor families. Grandma and Grandpa made for a much more sympathetic case, and elderly housing provided adult children with an alternative to nursing homes. When public housing construction for low-income households ceased, it continued for the aged; and high-rises originally built for families were converted for elderly use.8
Larraine found two addresses on HUD’s Housing Inventory that accepted applications for people who were neither elderly nor handicapped and that were located on the far South Side of the city. Larraine did not consider the near South Side to be an option, let alone the North Side. The application asked if she had ever been evicted. Larraine circled yes and wrote: “I had some complications with the landlord, and he evicted me.”
—
On the day Larraine had to be out of Beaker’s trailer, ice spread over the city. An early December snow had fallen, melted, and, when the temperature dropped, froze. Larraine stood in her kitchen listening to the sawing sounds of people scraping their car windows and chipping the ice from their doors. There was a pile of trash on the floor, mainly Beaker’s empty Maverick cigarette boxes and chocolate-milk bottles, and dirty dishes were piled in the kitchen sink. The cold had immobilized Larraine under blankets on the couch—the cold and the question of what to do next. Little had been cleaned since winter had arrived. “I don’t care anymore,” she said, swallowing pain relievers and antidepressants.
Larraine had applied to or called on forty apartments. She had had no luck on the private market, and her applications to public housing were still being processed. Larraine didn’t know where she was going to go. She was considering approaching Thomas, a man her age who lived alone in the trailer park, or Ms. Betty, whom Larraine knew only as an “old lady who lives across the road.” Larraine packed up her remaining things. Her plan was to pay Public Storage $50 to keep them.
Late in the day, Larraine knocked on Ms. Betty’s door. She was a small white woman with crystal eyes and silvering blond hair falling past her shoulders in double braids. Ms. Betty looked younger when seated and enjoying a slow cigarette, but she walked like an old woman, hunched with one arm held close. What the women knew of each other came from passing hellos and rumors. But when Larraine asked Betty if she could stay with her, Betty said yes.
“Sure you can stay with me, until after the winter.” Ms. Betty raised an eyebrow. “I know you’re not as big of a problem as they say you are.”
Larraine smiled. “I’ll be able to take a shower and everything,” she said.
Betty’s trailer might have been the most cluttered in the whole park. There was room for Larraine but little else. Ms. Betty had piled her tables with magazines and old mail and canned food and bottles of soy sauce and candy. In the living room, a tree bent toward the window, shedding its leaves on the floor, and keepsakes were clustered together on shelves next to a picture of Jesus. There was an order to the mess. The bathroom drawers bore a resemblance to the nuts-and-bolts aisle at the hardware store, with all the travel-sized tubes of toothpaste and bobby pins and hair ties and nail clippers grouped together in their own respective compartments. In the kitchen, Betty had hung a sign: SELF-CONTROL IS DEFINED AS REFRAINING FROM CHOKING THE SHIT OUT OF SOMEONE WHO IS DESPERATELY DESERVING OF IT. Larraine agreed to pay Betty $100 a month.
A few days after moving in with Ms. Betty, Larraine heard back on her applications to public housing in the form of two rejection letters. Each letter listed a pair of reasons Larraine’s applications were turned away: “Collections from the State of Wisconsin” and “Eviction History.”