Sable Monroe

I They Were Renovating

They were not renovating.

It took me longer than I care to admit to figure that out.

When I first started visiting the home of a man I was dating, I noticed things.

Cracks in the drywall.

Things that looked unfinished.

A painter’s ladder sitting in the kitchen.

So my brain supplied an explanation.

They must be fixing the place up.

That made sense to me.

The house itself was neat. It wasn’t filthy or overflowing with garbage. Things were put away. Nothing about walking through the door screamed the version of poverty I had apparently constructed in my head.

Then he told me the washing machine was broken.

This was during the first week we were dating.

I heard “broken” and supplied my own definition.

Recently broken.

Temporarily broken.

The washing machine had stopped working, and presumably somebody would eventually repair or replace it.

That was not what “broken” meant.

That washing machine was broken broken.

It had deteriorated to the point where it wouldn’t even properly spin the water out of the clothes.

He was hand-washing his clothes.

He was hand-washing his mother’s clothes.

This wasn’t a temporary inconvenience.

This was how they lived.

And somehow, I hadn’t understood what I was looking at.

Because poverty, at least that level of poverty, was something I understood intellectually.

I had read about it.

I had seen it on television.

I knew, obviously, that poor people existed.

I just had very little experience standing inside somebody else’s poverty.

And apparently, I had an idea of what poverty was supposed to look like.

He didn’t look poor.

He was handsome.

His clothes looked nice. Nothing extravagant, but the kind of clothes that could have come from Macy’s.

And he ironed them.

His hair was long and beautiful.

From across the room, anyway.

If you actually ran your fingers through it, you could feel the damage. Split ends everywhere. His mother trimmed his hair by cutting straight across the bottom instead of giving it a proper trim.

But you couldn’t see that from a distance.

From a distance, he had beautiful hair.

He needed extensive dental work too.

Again, you wouldn’t necessarily know by looking at him.

He looked good.

The house was neat.

That matters.

Because I think we associate poverty with dirt.

We imagine clutter. Filth. Torn clothing. Matted hair. Some visual announcement that tells us:

A poor person lives here.

But poverty can iron its shirt.

Poverty can sweep the floor.

Poverty can have beautiful hair.

Poverty can smell good.

Poverty can be handsome.

And poverty can have a painter’s ladder in the kitchen that some clueless woman interprets as evidence of an upcoming renovation.

That clueless woman was me.

I am not immune to seeing what I want to see.

But here’s where I also have to be fair to myself.

I wasn’t the only one editing reality.

He was too.

When we first met, he told me he was taking care of his mother because she had become ill.

That sentence created a picture in my mind.

A young man had a sick mother.

He stepped up.

He was living with her because she needed him.

Admirable, actually.

What I didn’t understand was that this wasn’t some recent interruption to an otherwise independent adult life.

He had been living with his mother and largely shut away from the world for years.

A lot of years.

So yes, I saw what I wanted to see.

But sometimes we see what we want to see because somebody else has carefully arranged the lighting.

He didn’t have to invent an elaborate story.

He only had to give me the version of the truth most likely to make sense to a woman who had just met him.

“I’m taking care of my sick mother” sounds very different from “this has essentially been my adult life.”

And I believed the first version because I had no reason yet to imagine the second.

There were other clues.

One day, I left a phone charger at his house.

I tend to have chargers everywhere. At home. In my car. Wherever I might need one.

When I came back, I noticed he had unplugged mine.

And do you know where my mind went?

Another woman.

I wondered whether he had unplugged my charger because somebody else might come over and he didn’t want her seeing evidence that another woman had been there.

Perfectly logical.

Except that wasn’t why.

He unplugged it because the electrical system in the house was bad.

He didn’t like leaving things plugged into the outlets unnecessarily.

That explanation should have relieved me.

Instead, I remember thinking:

What the fuck?

Because cheating was something my brain understood.

Faulty electricity in the home of the attractive man I was dating was apparently harder for me to process.

I remember thinking, You have me over here and the electrical system isn’t safe?

And gradually, the picture changed.

The painter’s ladder wasn’t evidence of renovations.

The washing machine wasn’t waiting for somebody to get around to replacing it.

The imperfections in the house weren’t temporary inconveniences on the way to something better.

This was the house.

This was how they lived.

At that point in my life, I barely knew Baltimore City.

I knew the Inner Harbor.

That was Baltimore to me.

I didn’t understand yet how Baltimore worked, how beautiful neighborhoods and struggling neighborhoods could exist remarkably close to each other, how dramatically life could change depending on which direction you drove.

I certainly didn’t understand what severe poverty could look like inside somebody’s home.

So when I finally encountered it, I didn’t recognize it.

Partly because he softened the truth.

Partly because I softened everything he didn’t explain.

That combination can keep a person ignorant for quite a while.

We like to think we see reality objectively.

We don’t.

We see reality through whatever experiences we already have.

When something falls outside those experiences, the brain doesn’t always say:

I don’t understand what I’m looking at.

Sometimes it says:

Let me make this make sense.

The ladder becomes renovation.

The broken washing machine becomes temporary.

The unplugged charger becomes another woman.

The man who has spent much of his adult life shut away becomes the devoted son temporarily caring for his sick mother.

Anything except the explanation sitting directly in front of you.

Sometimes denial isn’t dramatic.

Sometimes you aren’t consciously refusing to accept the truth.

Sometimes another person gives you a carefully edited version of reality, and your own mind politely edits the rest.

And sometimes poverty doesn’t look like poverty until you get close enough to touch it.

Just like his hair.