These last few colors were my favorites. They looked like brides and grooms; the iridescence on the white ones seemed like sequins on a wedding dress; the gray and black ones wore little long-tailed morning suits. (I asked Pigeon Husband to wear one of these suits when we were married. It's been seven years now, and I just connected that choice to my fondness for pigeons.) The pigeons paraded in their formal wear on the fire escape and I sat near the one window in my room, just to the right of the half-shuttered venetian blinds, trying not to startle them. My room was small and dark, my furniture university-issued and heavy as plagiarism, for which I flunked a student. It was the smallest room in my grad student apartment, and as the last of four roommates to arrive, I had to take it without a fuss.
In keeping with its cave-like ambiance, I spent a week or so heaving the heavy furniture here and there, using a monstrous wardrobe as wide and tall as two coffins to create a blockade behind which I could feel hidden, safe enough to sleep in my hard, narrow, virginal bed. The desk, too, with its high stack of shelves on top, made a nice hidey-hole in the corner when turned backward, in which I could type my poems without anyone seeing me. Who would see me? Why? That didn't matter. Somebody might, and I had to keep private or I couldn't think.
The one window looked out on the fire escape, onto which also opened our kitchen door. For safety. Naturally a university-owned student apartment needed a second exit in case of emergency. But we only used this kitchen door to take out the trash, which moldered for a week in a big plastic bin beneath my window until the janitor came to collect it. Its presence, its twin bin (from the neighboring apartment), and the fact that the fire escape hovered over a windy, damp alley, prevented this place from becoming a porch of sorts. Moreover, the next building was so close we might have hit it with a broom handle, so the fire escape was always so shaded it was cold.
This was my view. On the day I met my three roommates, we all smiled nervously at one another. Ready to be friends. They helped me carry my sewing machine up from my car. And then they said, apologetically, that the only room left was the small one. "That's okay," I said. And then I saw the room. My golly, it was small, really much smaller than the others, only half the size of the next smallest room. Who designed the apartment this way? Was this some kind of architectural joke? My suitcases and boxes of books, which had fit fine in the car, overwhelmed the space; I was tripping over them as I shelved my belongings and my roomies stood in the doorway, looking truly sorry. They were nice girls. "It's okay," I said again, and I meant it. (This was big of me. But I was prepared for such an event by witnessing the graciousness of a girl I roomed with in my junior year as an undergrad. She drew the short straw and elected to call a large closet her bedroom in order to have her own space. She was very good about it. She could fit her futon and her boyfriend in there.)
In my dark, crowded, messy little room, I sat by the window thinking about Ohio. Tulip trees in spring. Mittens of sassafras leaves turning orange-yellow in fall. White hundred-year-old houses with real porches floating in a rippling sea of corn tassels, as the crop rolled to the horizon and the sky flung itself upward like a whole bolt of cotton quilting unfurled. In Baltimore, the traffic was so heavy that pedestrians just had to go for it, even when the crosswalk lights were on, and take their chances with the red-light runners. Highway 83 had five lanes of traffic going in one direction and the first time I drove on it I cried, so terrified (and horrified) was I. In Ohio, the big road to my high school saw one, maybe two cars going the opposite way sometimes. People lifted their fingers from the steering wheel in a sort of "hi, there" to the other motorists as they passed. Not waving would have been rude, and you might go another ten miles before you had a chance to redeem your manners. In Ohio, the big road (it had two lanes and a yellow line) had along it some signs that said, "This is farm country. Watch for slow moving machinery," and there was a silhouette of a tractor.
I began to start a lot of sentences with, "In Ohio..." My new friends pointed this out. Baltimore marked the beginning of this homesickness, which lasted through Maryland, Alabama, and the first six years of my marriage. Husband pointed this out to me, too, gently at first, and later with annoyance. Didn't I love California? Ah, it's okay. I still prefer Ohio, still miss Ohio, but I know now that I prefer, over any place, the place that is with him. He is home now. Dear husband. In Baltimore, however, I reeled between towers of concrete. Big blocks of rectangles. Glass and iron. Brick with no ivy--off campus, that is. And what was up with the sidewalks? They went right up to people's front doors! They had no yards! Where did the children play? A new friend from New York City said that he had played in parks, and that when he was born his parents brought him home from the hospital in a taxi cab! Preposterous.
And painful. I sat by my window in my tiny room, looking at the pigeons. Brides and grooms. In every flock I'd pick the handsomest pair and hope for them to stand together, just for a moment, to make a picture in my eye. Pizza crusts fell out of the garbage can and the pigeons ate them, indecorously, tugging at them and pursuing each other in jerky circles. In his poem "Beautiful Ohio," James Wright said he knows what people call it, but he has his own word for it. Me, too. It's the sweetness I assigned to what I found alive amid all that pavement. It's the song I listened for, a hush behind the traffic, the pigeons' low hoody-hoo.
