Trash

Less than a year passed before something went wrong with the plans my mother and stepfather had made, sending us back to the house on the hill, with its stained glass and carved wooden staircase. As we drove all our boxes back across the river, I hoped that returning might deliver my old life back to me, whole again.

But that life was gone. Instead, an unfamiliar girl appeared one day on the sidewalk in front of the house, bounding by on a pogo stick. Her feathered blond hair rose like wings after she went up, and the metal spring of the pole creaked as she came down, launching her forward again.

In racing shorts and tube socks pulled up to her knees, she was already growing into her long legs. I was still in the larval state, my torso as solid and round as a pickle.

The girl hopped back and forth, answering my shouted questions. I determined she was a grade behind me in school but eight months older. We’d been in Miss Emerson’s class together. We were, she claimed, the only ones who didn’t cry the first day of first grade. The school had wanted her to skip second grade, too, but her father had said no.

Flying in short bursts, she told me her first, middle, and last name. But as I sit to type it out, the urge to protect her prods me to rechristen her—as if that might somehow save her, as if a new identity offered decades too late could work as a shield against the past.

Up close, Erin had freckles. She let me try the stick, which required more work than had been apparent from a distance. After that, we went together nearly every day to the park.

Quincy Street ran directly over the middle of the hill, splitting the playground in half. The shorter side had a stretch of lawn and a flagpole with a flag that would soon wave above a tank from the Korean War. Across from it, equipment filled the long downward slope of dirt and grass. Along with older swings and a basketball court, the park had a half-globe built from tubular metal triangles, as well as a huge yellow tunnel that looked like a truck-sized barrel laid on its side, shot full of holes, and painted to look like cheddar cheese.

It was the 1970s. No parents knew where we were or wondered when we would return. Teenagers hung out at the park and sometimes deigned to talk to us or offer advice.

“Watch out for the Chicken Lady,” they said.

“She lives over there,” one of them gestured to a small section of woods where a long set of cement stairs led from the edge of the park all the way downtown. “She has webbed feet and will chase you.”

I was sure that chickens didn’t have webbed feet, but after that, whenever I went down the stairs, I scanned the trees on both sides, looking.

Erin was good at basketball, and we both liked to climb. Sometimes we shimmied up the inverted V of the swing set’s iron legs to sit on its crossbar. Other days we stayed in the swings, going as high as we could, passing the height of the bar. It was then—at the end of the arc, just as the seat began to lose momentum but had not yet shuddered—that we leapt into open space.

If we waited, it was too late, and we were already going backward. But by jumping at the highest point, we could keep some control and almost fly. The contest was to see who could travel the farthest from where we started. Distance came with a price, because landings were painful.

More often, we ended up sitting on the swings to talk, pivoting on our toes in the dirt to turn in slow motion. We twisted the chain above, cranking it tight before letting the tension spin us back out.

The park had pine trees, maples, and oaks, plus other kinds whose names I didn’t know. Litter was everywhere: hamburger wrappers or Styrofoam coffee cups, empty beer cans, and the crackling cellophane of cigarette packaging.

Every few days when we were sitting doing nearly nothing, a car would drive on the road that split the park. With the passenger window rolled down, the driver would call out, asking for directions.

The first time I went over, the man sitting alone behind the wheel had a hand down his pants. I saw they were unzipped. He asked for directions to the 7-Eleven. I told him, pointing in the direction he was driving.

He didn’t seem to understand. I noticed he was tugging at his penis, which was by then fully liberated from his pants.

“Tell me again,” he said.

I repeated my directions. I always felt important any time I knew the answer to a question.

“Get in the car,” he said, his voice as harmless as milk. “I’ll buy you something there.”

I understood the situation was not quite right. These men and their exposed penises looked nothing like the people in the cartoon book explaining sex that my mother had given me three years before. I had a general impression that penises should only be depicted in a book, or as cartoons. Outside of a cartoon book, a penis seemed out of place.

The incident repeated on a regular basis. The man and his penis in the book had been round and jolly-looking, like someone’s uncle. These actual men in cars tugging frantically at themselves seemed stranger and more sickly. As they accumulated over time, they seemed boring in their sameness. I felt sad for them.

The command to get in the car became less and less convincing each time it happened. I’d been raised to obey adults and follow rules but nonetheless knew enough not to climb into a stranger’s car. Yet I somehow hadn’t thought through the details of what would follow if I did.

At the time, I missed the entire point of what these men wanted. I had no idea why they grabbed themselves, or why they didn’t seem embarrassed by their nakedness. I remained stuck on the concept itself, which seemed comic to me: an adult seeking directions from an elementary-school child about to start fourth grade, one far too young to drive.

After these interludes, Erin and I went back to swinging. I didn’t think to tell my mother about the men in cars. This was the world she had released me into unchaperoned; it was the world we were both living in. I assumed that she had signed off on all the creatures that inhabited it. And the park seemed safer than home.

 ***

Erin lived with her mother in a nearby duplex. Like me, she had an older brother in the house. When I asked where her father was, she said he’d gone to jail for stealing cars, along with the oldest of her three brothers. The youngest of the brothers had been arrested for the same thing, but being under eighteen, had ended up in juvenile detention—maybe next to our old house over at Hall Acres, I thought.

When the weather turned gray, it was only four blocks to G.C. Murphy downtown on Market Street. If we didn’t have money, we pawed over the shelves of glass and ceramic knickknacks, where my heart was seized by a two-foot-tall rearing black stallion with spray-painted gold trim. I couldn’t buy it with the coins I’d hoarded at home, but I would ask for it for Christmas.

We stood in the aisles to read comics until clerks shooed us away. If we had quarters, we bought Justice League comics, or Richie Rich and Archie. Sometimes Erin’s mom had given her money for a milkshake, too. She knew how to sit at the lunch counter and order by herself without an adult present, a sophistication I couldn’t imagine.

Erin had also heard about sex. After discussing the dubious mechanics—which I’d begun to suspect were more damp and sordid than had been portrayed in my cartoon book—we decided it was disgusting.

***

Some afternoons I went over to her house. Having a husband in prison, I understood, meant Erin’s mother had to work long hours to pay all the bills. But eventually we met. Dark hair brushed in curls high on her head, she had a tiny overbite, making it seem like she was always smiling or just about to. Erin had her mother’s teeth.

An old-fashioned hand-cranked wringer and tub for washing clothes stood guard in the basement and seemed superior to our electric model. A stack of nursing textbooks sat in the kitchen, for an evening course or maybe for the job Erin’s mother had at a retirement home. There was usually some kind of treat on hand. Since my mother had banned normal desserts that year in favor of wheat-germ cookies, I was greedy for junk food and ate as many oatmeal sandwich cookies and Twinkies as I could get away with.

Erin led me upstairs and showed me a closet with a panel she could remove. We slid it aside and climbed through the opening. Inside lay a storage area with an unfinished wood floor.

We made the attic room with its rough boards an indoor theater where we read and acted out stories. We sat on the ground at first. Later, we brought chairs in and traded comics. She explained astrology to me. These were the signs of the zodiac. She was Scorpio, and I was Cancer. I liked drawing the arcane symbols for the signs but felt dubious about astrology itself, wondering if it might be satanic.

Crossing over into that other place, I thought of the secret headquarters in the junkyard from the Three Investigators mysteries. We stayed hidden there whole days into evening. Sometimes I would come home late for dinner.

As far as I could tell, our parents remained oblivious to each other more than a year into the friendship. Then one afternoon, I was sitting at home looking out the window at Erin’s house and saw police cars. Motion farther down the hill caught my eye. Someone ran along the sidewalk before disappearing from view.

After the police left, I walked outside, full of questions. A few people were still milling, stretching out the possibility that a drama might elevate us all from boredom. A neighbor from up the street was smoking a cigarette. What had happened?

Erin’s brother had been high on coke and chased her mother with a baseball bat, he said. All this only led to more questions. Was her mother okay? Did they arrest her brother? For these, the neighbor had no answers.

***

I didn’t tell my mother, but by that night, she’d found out about the police coming. She asked me what I knew, but I had nothing else to add.

“Stay away from now on,” my mother said. “That’s not the kind of house you should go to.”

The next time I saw Erin outside, she was bouncing a superball on the sidewalk. I didn’t ask for more details about her brother or the police. We each had so little to be proud of.

“My mom said I can’t play at your house anymore,” I told her.

She kept bouncing the ball. At first I thought she hadn’t heard me.

She finally spoke. “My mom doesn’t want you at our house anyway. You eat all our desserts.”

It was my turn to not speak. But she hadn’t finished yet.

“She says there’s something wrong with your family.”

Her first statement had stung, because it was true. The second one was also true but didn’t bother me as much. Saying there was something wrong with my family was a neutral fact.

Here, I realized, was a neighborhood dispute in which no argument had taken place and no adults had even spoken to each other. But the worst, unspoken assumptions made by both our mothers seemed completely correct. Each one believed the other family was trash.

They tried to protect us by keeping us apart, pretending that either of us had the power to escape the storms that were descending. Yet neither of us would be the undoing of the other. We were not the problem. Each family held the seeds of its own destruction.

You can read another story in this series about my childhood here.