enough, and if you ran it too long it was stone cold by the time you stepped in.
My husband and I both worked long days in cubicles to pay the rent, and some months we had to appeal to the landlord to give us an extra week. The landlord would wait until after he thought I was out of earshot to say to my husband, “You pay me on time, or I throw you out.”
It was during this period of time that more and more people were getting thrown out. Of their apartments. Their jobs. Their houses. Some of the women I worked with talked about how lucky they felt to have their jobs, or their husbands, or their cars. They werejust trying to hang on. But others seemed poised to take advantage of the situation. They talked about the sinking economy, and the tanking of the job market. They’d say things like, “We’re going to wait just a few more months, and then we’re going to snap up a house. People are getting desperate. Soon you’ll be able to buy yourself a mansion for a song.”
I could not, myself, imagine such a song. The song of our bank account was always hovering just under three hundred dollars. The song of our gas tank was always a quarter of a tank. What would such a song sound like? Could it afford lyrics, or would it be played on some kind of wind instrument?
No.
No instrument.
Just wind.
I neither felt thankful for what I had nor hopeful that anything better could be had because others were losing what they’d once had. My husband never spoke about making art , as he used to call it. I wrote no poetry.
It was during this time that I began to get up early to walk through the surrounding neighborhoods on the weekends while my husband was still asleep. I would walk quickly so that I could get as far away from our block as I could, as quickly as possible. Our block and the ones surrounding it were renters’ blocks, seeming always to be over-hung with gray clouds, as if the clouds had gathered on purpose over our rooftops because we couldn’t afford blue sky.
Our blocks were immediately adjacent to blocks that also looked temporary, but not as temporary as ours. There were houses, at least. Boxy houses, some of them divided into two or three residences. Duplexes. Triplexes. Close to bus stops. Convenient to convenience stores, where people like my husband and I bought canned soups and packaged bread at outrageous prices because we didn’t want to have to put gas in the car to get us to the cheaper stores. But there were signs of a slightly more permanent life on those blocks. There would be an occasional bike locked to a mailbox out front, or a plastic pool that hadn’t been used in years.
Beyond this neighborhood, there were a few blocks of houses that had once been owned, it seemed, by people who’d lived in them for many years and taken good care of them but were now being rented out to strangers, or to relatives down on their luck. Screen doors that wouldn’t close properly might be blowing around in the wind. Garbage cans no one bothered to bring in waited at the end of the driveway. But there was a dignity under it. Hollyhocks that might have been planted decades earlier, tended back then, were still blooming here and there along a weathered fence.
These neighborhoods were preferable to ours, but not by much. It was past these neighborhoods where I found my heartache. The farther I walked, the more I discovered to long for, and to admire, and to despise.
Each of these mornings, I tried to take a different route, discover a new little pocket of unbearable, unattainable beauty: Little brick bungalows. Light-blue clapboard. Porches with rocking chairs. Windowboxes stuffed with foliage. Here, in these distant neighborhoods, it was late spring the way late spring was meant to be. The weather was glorious, as if choreographed for flowers. Blue sky. Swirling clouds. The grass was so green it looked as if it might shatter if you stepped on it.
I would not look directly at the houses I passed. I would glance
My husband and I both worked long days in cubicles to pay the rent, and some months we had to appeal to the landlord to give us an extra week. The landlord would wait until after he thought I was out of earshot to say to my husband, “You pay me on time, or I throw you out.”
It was during this period of time that more and more people were getting thrown out. Of their apartments. Their jobs. Their houses. Some of the women I worked with talked about how lucky they felt to have their jobs, or their husbands, or their cars. They werejust trying to hang on. But others seemed poised to take advantage of the situation. They talked about the sinking economy, and the tanking of the job market. They’d say things like, “We’re going to wait just a few more months, and then we’re going to snap up a house. People are getting desperate. Soon you’ll be able to buy yourself a mansion for a song.”
I could not, myself, imagine such a song. The song of our bank account was always hovering just under three hundred dollars. The song of our gas tank was always a quarter of a tank. What would such a song sound like? Could it afford lyrics, or would it be played on some kind of wind instrument?
No.
No instrument.
Just wind.
I neither felt thankful for what I had nor hopeful that anything better could be had because others were losing what they’d once had. My husband never spoke about making art , as he used to call it. I wrote no poetry.
It was during this time that I began to get up early to walk through the surrounding neighborhoods on the weekends while my husband was still asleep. I would walk quickly so that I could get as far away from our block as I could, as quickly as possible. Our block and the ones surrounding it were renters’ blocks, seeming always to be over-hung with gray clouds, as if the clouds had gathered on purpose over our rooftops because we couldn’t afford blue sky.
Our blocks were immediately adjacent to blocks that also looked temporary, but not as temporary as ours. There were houses, at least. Boxy houses, some of them divided into two or three residences. Duplexes. Triplexes. Close to bus stops. Convenient to convenience stores, where people like my husband and I bought canned soups and packaged bread at outrageous prices because we didn’t want to have to put gas in the car to get us to the cheaper stores. But there were signs of a slightly more permanent life on those blocks. There would be an occasional bike locked to a mailbox out front, or a plastic pool that hadn’t been used in years.
Beyond this neighborhood, there were a few blocks of houses that had once been owned, it seemed, by people who’d lived in them for many years and taken good care of them but were now being rented out to strangers, or to relatives down on their luck. Screen doors that wouldn’t close properly might be blowing around in the wind. Garbage cans no one bothered to bring in waited at the end of the driveway. But there was a dignity under it. Hollyhocks that might have been planted decades earlier, tended back then, were still blooming here and there along a weathered fence.
These neighborhoods were preferable to ours, but not by much. It was past these neighborhoods where I found my heartache. The farther I walked, the more I discovered to long for, and to admire, and to despise.
Each of these mornings, I tried to take a different route, discover a new little pocket of unbearable, unattainable beauty: Little brick bungalows. Light-blue clapboard. Porches with rocking chairs. Windowboxes stuffed with foliage. Here, in these distant neighborhoods, it was late spring the way late spring was meant to be. The weather was glorious, as if choreographed for flowers. Blue sky. Swirling clouds. The grass was so green it looked as if it might shatter if you stepped on it.
I would not look directly at the houses I passed. I would glance
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