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the 1st

what i remember about that day
is boxes stacked across the walk
and couch springs curling through the air
and drawers and tables balanced on the curb
and us, hollering,
leaping up and around
happy to have a playground;

nothing about the emptied rooms
nothing about the emptied family

--Lucille Clifton


I am picking my way over a crumbling sidewalk on a hot muggy day, on my way to jury duty this morning, when I pass by a blighted brick building with sheets of metal blinding all the windows. Above the front door is a bold white sign that announces the coming of lovely new condos. Luxury living, the sign asserts. And I can’t help wonder what that means, and how they will deliver on their promise. I want to live luxuriously, comforted at night by expensive sheets, filtered air, a master bath beckoning just off the corner of the bedroom. But of course that is luxury defined in simple terms. I want to live luxuriously in other ways, too, but I’m not sure this decayed building, even when it emerges from its makeover, can give me that. Assuming of course that I could afford one of these luxury condos, which I very likely cannot.

I live around lots of wealthy people, and sometimes I grow tired of being poor. And sometimes I like being just where I am. And sometimes—like when I’m volunteering at the food pantry—I feel rich indeed. Filthy, undeservingly, rich. So I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective.

But either way, don’t get on your high horse and tell me about the immateriality of material things. You who don’t know want. I, on the other hand, know what it’s like to be without. Without a roof, without bread, without the comfort of coins jingling in my empty pocket.

So it was a hot and muggy day, very similar to this one, when we went barreling down the highway, certain that he was going to appear like some half-crazed madman bearing down on us in his blue Chevrolet. Ah, but we were young, my two brothers and I—just children—and we hadn’t yet learned that people only chase after what’s worth having. And we were not that for him. And so we barreled down the highway, crying in the backseat, terrified, without any idea of where we were headed. After my father left for work that morning, my mother told us to get dressed quickly and no horsing around. She was jittery, her movements sudden. As my brother and I tugged on our clothes, with the pulse of our hearts throbbing in our ears, my mother came in to extract the suitcase she had hidden under the bed; I was surprised to learn it had been there all along. The baby slept in the crib next to our bed, the window above his crib draped with a pink bath towel. You can each pick out two things to take with you, she said. And that’s it. Put them in here. And be quick about it. And so we did, selecting two things each from our scant pile of treasures. I don’t remember what I took, my choices lost to other terrors. Even though we didn’t know where we were going, my brother and I knew we weren’t coming back...

And then a woman who owed my mother money for babysitting showed up in our kitchen. She too was skittish and kept looking behind her toward the door, kept bending over to search for approaching ankles along the window of our basement apartment. She too did not understand desire: he wasn’t coming back. Later we’d learn that my mother bartered a ride back to that sleepy cold town, back to the housing project where Janie was waiting. She had $1.49 in her purse. That’s it. And three kids. And a half a pack of Tarreytons.

Still, those were the good days, those first few months. Because before that, we also went hungry--but our stomachs growled at night to the sound of my father’s raging and my mother’s screams beyond our bedroom door. Once we got to Janie’s, there was only our rumbling bellies against the hum of TV static after the channels went off the air. He showed up once—about a week after we arrived—to plead his case, Janie slowly sweeping the living room floor as he and my mother talked and I lurked in the hallway. He threatened to put my mother away, which terrified me, but only for a minute because Janie rested one ample elbow on her broom and said with a quiet sigh: you’re not taking her anywhere. And because he wasn’t all that committed to the idea anyway, he was easily dissuaded. Besides, most people knew enough not to mess with Janie and her broom—even a fool like him.

But then shit happened because shit always happens: somebody squealed. Might have been one of Janie’s three kids, I don't know. We were, after all, taking up space in a place where there wasn’t enough of it, our gaping mouths devouring what they needed for themselves. The housing manager said, Get Out. Or else. And my mother figured it was better to have one woman and three homeless children than two women and six homeless children, and so we beat it out of there quick.

It was snowing, I remember. Cotton ball size flakes falling from an ashen sky, blanketing the supermarket parking lot in white, the parked cars becoming muted white hills in a cold white landscape. My brothers and I sat like three small bags of sticky white trash on the bench by the exit while my mother dropped dimes into the payphone. I eyed the heaping shopping carts of food rolling by in front of us—people gearing up for a blizzard—and watched my mother from the corner of my eye. She put the heavy black phone back in the cradle and slumped against the supermarket wall.

I had noticed the woman in the dark green parka observing us from the checkout line, and she made her way over to my mother... Then out to her car, where, after she brushed off the snow from the windshield outside, we rode in silence to a vacant old house she owned on the other side of the bridge. We got deposited, along with several bags of groceries, on the sagging front porch. Inside, the house was unheated, with two rusty spaces--like missing teeth--cut into the kitchen counter where the stove and refrigerator used to be. But it was luxury living that cold winter day—right there on East 3rd Street—without the bold white sign over the front door. And we made do, which make-doers like us are always quite good at. Wearing coats and hats to bed—all four of us together—on a fold-out couch in the living room. Milk and eggs on the back porch, when we could get them. Food warmed on a hot plate. And still my brother and I would run and slide over the empty hardwood floors in our socks, like world class skaters, like kids living a luxurious life. Happy in our luxury living. Happy to be in that big old drafty house on a quiet street in the darkest month of winter.
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