19713

A meandering meditation on memory and place. Incomplete, sloppy, crucial.

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Hot brick— no, wait, wrong house. A few square feet of indoor/outdoor carpeting, then the concrete walkway that leads to the driveway, also concrete. This is the old place, the one returned to. The concrete’s still hot, no matter where this is. Hot, but not searing, thankfully ribbed here and there with the shadows of pines. The walk to the mailbox isn’t too unpleasant. Nothing there but circulars and a polybagged assortment of coupons.

Back in the house, advertising dumped in the trash can that’s only ever seen lint and dryer sheets and unwanted mail. Don’t even have to turn on the light in the tiny laundry room to know where to chuck the mail. Close the door behind— room’s almost as hot as the garage it opens onto— down the short hall. Three doors, four if you count the one at the end of the hall, but that feels odd since it’s not to one side or another. So four doors— no, five, laundry— four framed paintings and pieces of needlework. Watercolors, harborscapes, a century and a lifetime old. The needlepoints are only as old as the memories of them and all the walls they’ve hung on. Above the wall hangings, a grate breathes cold air.

The door nearest the laundry room is always closed. The next one on that side of the hall, currently the left, tends toward ajar, an almost-reflection of the door directly across from it: open, allowing the sight of porcelain and glass. The bathroom, where another needlepoint hangs, soaking up steam with invisible decay-inducing frequency.

Why back here?

About-face, across the dust-textured linoleum foyer. Brush against the antique sewing machine, which appeared— when? It wasn’t in all the other old places. The living room opens up, ceiling way up there giving comfortable space. Carpet’s clean enough to see the vacuum tracks, but there’s a handful of VHS tapes scattered on the floor by the TV. Not, thankfully, in the slotted light coming in from the right. Only a rattan, bamboo, wicker, no, it’s bamboo, or cane, chair gets to bask in the sun. Dust motes float in and out of the light, presumably. The recliner earns attention now: an upholstered throne, relaxing just to look at. Flanked by books, two, on the floor, and a properly coastered, sweating can of soda on an end table, the recliner emits a siren song, beckoning with the sweet voice of comfort.

No, move on, but grab the soda on the way to the kitchen, through the informal dining room. The linoleum’s cleaner, one stretch of countertop bouldered with crumbs. The breadbox, closed, admits no guilt, but the box of Swiss cake rolls in the cabinet does, although of a different sort. Outside the valanced window the backyard bakes, grass and cracked wood thirsting for water and varnish. But it’s not that bad, not today. The sky isn’t so severely blue that it hurts to lean over the sink and look up at the shreds of clouds overhead.

Turn to the wood-paneled cabinets, drawers. The fridge, badged with almost nothing. Ice from the built-in dispenser, drop into a glass freckled with dried water spots, resuscitate the soda. Open the pantry, minimally inhabited, and drop the empty can— no, wait, the recycling bin’s in the garage. It can wait.

Why back here?

The memories have to be pasted over with nostalgia. Have to be. But they’re not. The thoughtfulness of now happened then, too, right here, leaning against a kitchen counter, on the alcoved toilet of the master bathroom, key in the front door lock. No, it isn’t nostalgia alone holding this return together. The memories hold true— but the question still remains valid. Why back here?

Why not the one east of here, fifteen minutes’ walk in the unglazed sun, home more sharply definitive weeks and months? Why not the dorm rooms in two different states, or the apartments in two countries that grow more foreign every time they’re thought of?

Night now. Coffee and yellow lamplight and the blessed exhalation so high up the wall. The living room, living, spilling proof of its vitality through the closed blinds. The recliner has won the battle of comfort, though there is grave, furious competition from the sofa (armed with pillows and a familiar blue blanket) and even the floor, where the carpet stull looks freshly vacuumed. The floor promises expanse, unbounded horizontal mobility.

The lamp’s shade either came in that hue or bathed in cigarette smoke long ago, before this thenthere herenow. Cigarettes are a rarity in this place, but the living room is not a complete stranger to small glass ashtrays and shanghaied glassed and cups. The driveway, out there in the dark, is where the ashes are usually scattered, and the bushes by the door are a graveyard of uncounted butts. The lamp, back to the lamp, pseudo-wood and brass, ponderous, well-traveled, an old welcome friend.

Midbrain hum of the television conspires with the last sips of cooling coffee and the blanket— wrested from the exhausted couch— to push away more questions. At last:

“Mulder, it’s me.”