The neighborhood infiltrated us, penetrated our skin, became an invisible infection coursing in our blood. The narrow streets and cracked sidewalks, those claustrophobic houses with low ceilings, made us who we were: the people who lived on that side of town. Like the trees that somehow found room to grow on the small curb lawns, the neighborhood also grew within us, its limbs crowding our own, tangled roots squeezing our lungs so we could never take a full breath. We smelled of the sulfurous steel plant in the summer and of moldy leaves in autumn. Little by little, we were decaying, seeping into the ground and becoming a permanent part of the place.
The neighborhood knew everyone’s secrets. It still whispered the name of the child who had stolen a toy from the five and dime years ago, and spoke of whose older sister went to visit a relative for months and came home sad and tired. It knew whose garbage can was filled to the brim with empty beer bottles on trash day, and whose car was repossessed because of gambling debts. And it knew that secret, my own, about the day I’d come home from school and found my best friend’s father in a bedroom with my mother. I never told anyone about the shrieked threats and promises made that day, but they live in that house, in the cracks of its dingy walls. They lurk still behind the cellar steps where I hid the day my father discovered the secret for himself.
I meet people who tell me they love to go back to their childhood neighborhoods and relive their earliest memories. Their expressions are soft with nostalgia when they ask if I feel the same. I nod and hope I look wistful while thinking how I fled the neighborhood but never escaped. I’d fooled myself now and then, those scattered years when I was excited about a new job or a new woman, but the neighborhood always tracked me down, put a foot out and tripped me. People recognized my name, remembered reading about a mother who was murdered, a father who committed suicide. One person recalled, “Oh, you’re that boy. The one they found under the stairs.” That’s me; that will always be me.
My children, adults now, have never set foot on those streets, but they bear traces of it, the DNA of those two square miles passed from me to them. The neighborhood shows up in my son’s debilitating self-doubt and my daughter’s recklessness. My therapist tells me to go back, to “just drive around for a few minutes” but I never do. He can’t fathom the grip that place has on me, how it tightens with each passing year.
Still, I sit on his couch and pretend I’m considering his advice. I don’t want him to tire of me and suggest I go somewhere else. I like this office with its bright white walls and high ceiling. There’s an aquarium with small orange fish moving purposefully and calmly through the water. They’re so content living in that glass box, I could watch them for hours. In fact, I’d like to stay here even after the therapist’s gone for the day, when he’s locked the door and I know no one can get in.
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