Between Bad Choices

Women and housing in the United States

When I was 18, I moved into a boarding house wedged between a cemetery and the train tracks. The room I rented was at the front of the old farmhouse and would have originally been the living room: It had a big drafty fireplace and a huge, generous window that opened onto the front porch.

It was a small town, the train rolling through and rattling my dishes but not stopping. The downtown was mostly shuttered and I drove 45 minutes to another town for work. But I had spent the previous year living piled up on top of roommates in New York City, broke and overwhelmed, so I was grateful to be in a place where at least I could smell the grass as the mower moved through the cemetery lawn.

There were fleas though. Fleas so bad that I laid saucers and dishes of water around on the floor of my room to catch them and drown them, trying to thin the herd. And there were fights. The couple renting above me fought long into the night, crashing furniture about and railing on about infidelities. But it was the window that broke me.

The big window had old glass that dappled and warped the sunlight as it streamed into my room. However, I had hung a sheet over it because when I woke in the mornings my landlord would often be on the porch in a chair, positioned only feet from where my…