What did my neighbors think of me? Did they think of me at all? These were just-hanging-on years in every aspect of my life. The years of credit management. Of paying down debt. Of faraway friends breezing through for a visit and being surprised to see their old pictures on my refrigerator, commenting on my freezer full of vegetable potpies.
I visited all of the D.C. historic spots. I went to Mount Vernon and bought a box of flash cards in the gift shop that helped you learn the names of all the presidents and their VPs. There was a small black-box theater where they replayed George Washington’s death with animatronics, black ribbons tied to the ends of the empty pews. Upon leaving, I started to cry hysterically, and later I came to on a riverbank as a dinner cruise sailed past on the Potomac. I felt a police officer’s hand on my shoulder. He asked me if I had anywhere else I could go.
I always kept HGTV on. The calmness of the shows, the predictability, the excitement of choosing a new home, of decorating so that it is fresh, clean, and new. All night long. Did I ever sleep with all the lights out? My life was a back-and-forth, a blur, the comings and goings of work and classes and errands and then back to my apartment, where I’d turn on one of the home-buying shows and imagine my life in three other houses—one, two, or three?
Sometimes I was so tired I couldn’t remember the drive to and from campus. I’d come home exhausted and let Annie go pee on the balcony. Once the German shepherd downstairs attacked Annie and nearly killed her, a bite across her stomach that required twenty stitches. I think I remember that my downstairs neighbor gave me her old mountain bike after that as a way of apologizing. I think I remember that I brought it to pawn when I needed extra cash.
Nighttime. I was in my bed, and Annie lay in her bed across the room. There was a flash of light outside, and I worried that it was an ambulance coming for the ROTC boy again. I drew up the cord of my blinds. As soon as I did, another flash, green, right beside my window. Then suddenly there were a dozen watery-green balls of light in the courtyard. They bounced from the grass to the tops of the buildings, then off of the sides and down again.
I scanned the courtyard. No one with a laser pointer. No one on the playground. All the other apartments were dark.
I wondered if they were balls of gas, and one splashed against my window like water. Maybe they were balloons, but one by one they hit the branches of a tree without popping. I saw them shimmering, saw the luminous outline of them.
I wasn’t afraid. I felt they were for me. It was like watching children playing. Tears were streaming down my face. Happy tears, my mother would have said.
After about a minute it was over.
I looked over at Annie, sleeping soundly in her puff bed.
There were moments of living there that I was not depressed. But I was depressed.
I wanted to tell someone what I’d just seen. And that I had memorized the names of all the roses. And taught myself Latin. That I knew the names of all the presidents and their VPs. That the teaching job made my life mean something again. Each pretty hard to believe. Each, said aloud, sounding crazy.
I kept HGTV on to make sure that the sadness didn’t creep in too hard. The stacks of frozen potpies for the days I didn’t leave my apartment, so I had food. The debt management, watching the other windows in the apartment complex—I was trying. The beautiful green lights bouncing that night. The downstairs neighbor, the balcony, the German shepherd, the bike.
The next day in class, Siri came in smiling, a look to ask, Hello, hej, is this okay?
“The strangest thing happened to me,” I said, a little breathless.
“Tell me,” she said.
THIS IS WHAT I wanted to tell her. Eighteen years old. I returned to the house of my childhood that was so empty, with all its things changed after the estate sale, all those strangers’ grubby finger pads touching and rejecting, touching and commenting, laughing, making small talk while the green and red grapes that my mother and I had bought the last time we went to the farmers’ market shriveled smaller and smaller in the refrigerator.
There was a funeral. I called the friends I thought would come. They were my first calls. My friend Dahlia—we grew up together—was the first person I phoned. She was at her college in upstate New York. She said she had a test, and she was so, so sorry. My friend Nicki from high school spent some time bitching about Dahlia with me, and it felt good for a few minutes, to hear her outrage that Dahlia would not see the gravity of this situation. “Dahlia has always been selfish,” she said. Then: Wait? You want me to come down there? She kept asking me why I had no family, and I kept answering her questions like I was supposed to explain myself. My parents were older. Their siblings were gone before I was born. No cousins? I have two. But I’ve never met them. Her silence blamed me for not knowing them. Where are your grandparents? As though I had simply forgotten all the many loving family members who would help me.
An ex-boyfriend, the one who took me to my high school prom, heard about the accident from his parents and phoned me late at night. “Why didn’t you call me?” he asked, sounding hurt. “You can count on me, Lo.” He called me Lo. A way to make fun of my Long Island accent, the one he’d shed first. “I’ll be there.” He didn’t come. Oh, my God, I’m sorry, they all said. But the distance. But why are you alone?
Two of my high school friends who now worked at nail salons and had their design samples glued to upside-down Styrofoam cups came with black manicures. Other people I knew from high school, my experience a mystery to them, all of them yet without an understanding of loss—they came, going through the motions. Their Italian parents prepared them before they arrived—go up two at a time, you kneel at the caskets and pray, cross yourself as you walk away. They came in suits and dark clothes and stood in groups like they did in my high school’s hallways. I can see them so clearly, but there are times I cannot remember my mother’s voice, my father’s hands. They all took the laminated prayer cards emblazoned with pictures of outside-hearted Mary and Saint Jude. Did they still have them, somewhere in their homes? Or did they throw them away, my parents’ typeset names too eerie to keep, and then forgotten?
I still have the black dress I wore to my parents’ funeral. So many things could have happened to it in the years that passed. It hung in a cardboard wardrobe box, crushed against my mother’s old clothes, for years.
When my college boyfriend wanted to move to D.C., I thought maybe it was time for me to start over someplace new. Nighttime in the Salvation Army parking lot: The store was closed. I’d emptied my dank storage unit and was trying to find a place to leave the boxes. My mother’s suede coat, my father’s books, all those boxes labeled so carefully—I could not even look at them as I unloaded the car. We’d been in the empty parking lot for an hour as I tried to decide what to take, what to leave. My boyfriend was saying, Now, Lauren, if you want to come with me, let’s go, otherwise, I’ll be seeing you. The furniture they used to love—the old patio table we used to lie upon, staring at the stars. How did I even transport it to the Salvation Army parking lot? That table was what my eyes caught as the U-Haul hummed up the entrance ramp to the long, black highway. I saved the wardrobe box. That came.