I used to live in the beige house with dull brown shutters and a thick slab of concrete attached to its waste. A mahogany park bench bristling with painful splinters sat stage right, adjacent to a heavy concrete goose my mother dressed in correlation with the seasons or weather or her mood that day. Sometimes the goose wore a raincoat when it wasn’t raining, and while I often eyed him suspiciously, he never blinked or waddled across the street to visit one of the seventeen other geese that sat on one of the seventeen other concrete slabs attached to all of the houses that mirrored mine in every way, aside from color and perhaps the style in which the hedges were trimmed.
My house nestled between the bright blue house with the manicured lawn and the cat-puke yellow house, which hid behind a yard full of neglected leaves, two large willow trees, and a dreary disposition. Alice, the aging woman who lived in the yellow house for sixty odd years and counting, scared the shit of me. The sad scowl that’d permanently etched itself into her roadmap face made my stomach churn, and she was always quick to inform my mom when the boy with big ears, my first official boyfriend, stopped by on his so-called stolen bike when she’d run to Target. Alice had one daughter, Stephanie, who took the Tarta bus to work each day. Sometimes I’d watch Stephanie click-clack past my bus stop in a pair of dated pumps at dawn, while everyone else sped by in their neutral-colored compact cars. She could recite your birthday or your full name in a steady robot voice, but never said much else.
The blue house was home to a happy couple in their sixties who never forgot to water their plants, and a possessed Collie named Bennett, who bit off Brittany from down-the-street’s hand. I don’t remember the blood, or the ambulance, or any of the details surrounding the incident other than the fact that I’d knowingly warned Brittany not to stick her hand through the chain-link fence that separated our backyard from Bennett’s beforehand, but I was six and she was nine, so what the hell did I know anyway? Actually, I’m quite sure now that there was not much blood and no ambulance, but that’s the way I told the story for a decade afterward and perhaps the reason why I now cringe every time I near a dog with crooked teeth, fat black lips, and stale breath. Sometimes, when we sat down to eat meat loaf and mashed potato dinner at 4 p.m, my mom would instruct my dad to cut her grass the blue house way, and he would always respond the same. “Cut it your goddamn self. I worked twelve hours today! And where the hell’s the milk?” before unbuttoning his belt to make room for forth helpings.
There were two houses between our house and Brittany from down-the-street’s house, and they only mattered on Halloween. I don’t remember much about the inside of Brittany’s house, or what color the shutters were, but I do remember the day a bunch of men in fancy suits with brass badges pinned to their breasts carried her father’s computer down the driveway and loaded it into the back of a large black van. Shortly afterward, Brittany’s dad disappeared and my mom began to ask a lot of awkward questions about him and pictures and taking off my clothes at Brittany’s house, all of which I didn’t understand. I also remember the day my mother’s shiny silver ring went missing while I was in the bathroom and Brittany waited impatiently just outside the door, and that four hours later her mother, who looked like a boy, marched Brittany down to our house with a jewelry box cupped between her hands. Sometimes, when we sat down to pork chop dinner at 4 p.m, my mom would say “that girl has issues” and my dad would mumble “that family’s fucked up” through a mouth full of mashed potatoes that spotted his chin.
The boy I took baths with, Justin, lived in the grey corner house alongside a cornfield that didn’t belong and a wooded area comprised of twelve dead trees that we collectively referred to as “the forest.” There was a plastic tire swing in his front yard and a turtle sandbox in the back where we sat for hours sampling sand and the occasional not so chocolate-covered ant. Justin’s backyard also contained an elaborate swing-set, the kind that frustrated dads’ spend a day-and-a-half assembling with red faces and dwindling six packs at their sides, and an open field where we played baseball and peed standing up. Well, until the day my mom stopped by and caught me with my bright pink shorts in a heap atop my light-up shoes, and started screaming something about how girls just “don’t do that,” which ruined all the fun. Justin’s uncle was a firefighter and he wanted to be one too, so we spent countless summer days in preparation, sprawled across the carpet with knock-off firefighter hats perched atop our sweaty heads, watching “Backdraft” for the six-thousandth time in a row. I always looked forward to the shower scene, the one where the camera panned over a few of the firefighter’s meaty behinds, but sure enough, once my sneaky mom discovered the nudity, “Backdraft” became contraband, too, falling behind peeing outside on the lengthily list of things that little girls just “don’t do.”
The green house next to Justin’s belonged to a snowy-haired man named George, who all the kids’ in the neighborhood loved dearly, including me. George planted a garden lined with fresh tomatoes, carrots and squash each spring, and sometimes, on nice nights, he’d let us take his riding law mower for a quick spin. He also kept a jar full of sugar-coated gummy bears that we’d joyfully decapitate each day. George had a wife, Jean, though we did not see her often. In fact, the few memories I have of Jean are nearly identical; in each she is positioned in an antique chair, crocheting some-sort of colorful pot holder while Jeopardy plays softly in the background. She is always wearing the same drab nightgown and quiet smile, and I am always struggling to tare my eyes away from her sausage toes and swollen legs that never walked. I used to wonder if Jean even knew her husband had a garden; it made me sad to think she may have never strolled among the rows of pretty plants that lived just beyond her back door, or felt a palmful of soft fertilizer sift through her thick fingers.
And just like dirt or sand sifting through fingers, each summer I watched my neighbors move away. until one day, the boxy moving van parked in front of my beige house and we left, too.
Sometimes, when we’re near the old neighborhood, my mom will grow glassy-eyed and say, “let’s swing by Southdale, real quick,” in a sad voice, even though we don’t know anyone who lives there anymore. We’ll ease her Jeep around that familiar curve and creep slowly down the street that housed so many memories and faces that are fuzzy in my brain. We’ll pause before the beige house with freshly painted brown shutters and an absent hedge, staring just beyond the missing bench, into the picture window that framed our lives. I’m not sure what she sees, or what thoughts flood her mind, but I will watch a father and his daughter build a blanket tent on a sticky summer night, and I will know that he did not wake up for work on time in the morning. I will hear my young mother call for me to come inside, and I will feel a thick ponytail beat against my lower back as I run. Grass will grow between my naked toes, and parades of fireflies will illuminate the world I once knew so intimately. My concrete stage, my characters, my childhood; I will roll down the Jeep window and slowly inhale it all, the way it used to be, before we drive off and a mess of memories, blue, green, yellow, grey, melt together.
