How We Started by Luanne Rice

Paul and Clare
    Up in a Tree
    When I look back from here, I dream of the beginning. If I think about that, about him, I’ll forget where I am. Paul and I were very young when we became “us.” You couldn’t have pried me off him with a crowbar, and my parents tried.
    I had an older sister, and he was an only child. Sometimes I want to blame the distance between us on that: for as well as he knows Anne, he can’t fully appreciate what it’s like to have a sibling, or understand what I did for her. Our families had things in common—we were Irish Catholic, from the same New York neighborhood, went to the same school and church. We each had father trouble, but it’s different when you’re a girl.
    That explains a lot about Anne, but I don’t want to think of her now. I want Paul. I dream of these bars dissolving, of him standing outside and catching me, taking me away from here. I can almost smell the woods—earth, tree bark, pine needles, new leaves—and hear the birds. Paul taught me hiding places back when we first began.
    We were native New Yorkers. Born and raised in Chelsea—back then a frontier on Manhattan’s wild West Side—we grew up riding the subway, playing stickball in the streets, walking down the shady side of Tenth Avenue in the sweltering summers and the sunny side in the winters—five times more frigid than anywhere else in the city because of the wind howling off the Hudson River two avenues away.
    Our house was built on land that in the 1800s had been a farm belonging to Clement Clarke Moore, reputed to have written “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” My mother used that history to anoint our lives with the spirit of “’Twas the night before Christmas,” casting a sort of magical holiday happiness over the truth: our father was a player who’d rather be out with his lady friends than home with us.
    Paul lived in an apartment building on West Nineteenth Street between Ninth and Tenth aAvenues, and I grew up in a brownstone on West Twenty-second Street and Tenth: four blocks and a world apart. Paul’s block was rugged, next to the Fulton Houses project, and his building was one of those places the
Daily News
wrote about, full of domestic violence calls, tenants complaining about the landlord not fixing broken pipes, drug deals going down in the lobby.
    Our family owned our private five-story town house. My father, Francis Burke, had bought it at auction when it was an abandoned shell, before Anne and I were born. He was a commercial real estate agent with dreamy blue eyes and a silver tongue, who could sell anybody anything. He also had a black heart and cheated on my mother every chance he got. I guess she traded her self-respect for what she told herself was the sake of family, and also for the creature comforts his excellent salesmanship provided us.
    We weren’t rich but we were comfortable, and my parents possessed a pride that is the very definition of “lace curtain Irish.” We really did have lace curtains at the floor-to-ceiling windows and balcony doors, the better behind which my older sister Anne could get undressed, giving passersby a little show, artfully obscured by Battenburg panels.
    There was a little park across the street. Really small, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, with trees and a playground, it had pavement instead of grass. When we were little, our mother would take us there, set us up on the swing set while she’d sit on one of the benches and get lost in a book. She wasn’t much for talking to the other mothers. Like Anne and me, she was a keeper of family secrets, and she stayed to herself.
    The habit of going to the park, the three of us, continued even when my sister and I got to middle school. Anne was already wild—she loved sneaking out to see Harrison Thaxter, a Boston boy she’d met at a spring dance. He was so smitten with her he was bailing on school each