71. Waiting to Escape

 

If all goes as I intend—I’ve given up planning a long time now—I’ll be away from this block for good tomorrow. Still, it’s a relief, almost, to be here now.

Now I know there’s still at least one place where bricks continue to fade and flake, but the walls they’re in are still standing. Where roof tiles and sides darken with the shade of green copper turns when it’s been left out in the rain. But I know there’s no copper, or any other metal, in those tiles because of the way they curl around their edges and splinter, though they never quite fall apart.

And the people—the ones who still remain—women—are as I expected, though somehow not quite as old. The lady whose name I never knew, still pale and lined but not wrinkled in the way of people who spend their lives in the shadows of their homes. Not much exposure to sunlight—or to rain or wind, either. Her black dress, another ageless but not timeless layer, gathered into neat if not completely symmetrical folds around her waist by some band I can’t see. Just like what she always wore, except that it’s black.

Mrs. Littington, she’s another story. Her jacket sheathes the small mounds of her breasts and falls in a nearly straight line to her hips, which are tucked into pants of the same color, and the same shape, more or less. It makes perfect sense on her, just like the dark hair that reins in the crown of her head and clings in perfectly straight segments that end around her ears and, in the back, just above the collar of her jacket.

It’s not comforting, really, to see her, the lady whose name I never knew, the houses, the yards in shades of gray that end in chainlink fences, a street that ends in a cemetery yard on one end but whose other end cannot be seen from here. However, I’m glad to see everything here for what I assume to be the last time.

Some people leave the places where they were born and raised because they need to know that not all people look or talk like their family members or neighbors, and that not everybody lives in the same kinds of houses. I learned such things, too, but it wasn’t the reason I left. In fact, if I’d learned otherwise, it might not’ve made any difference to me.

Adam left. The man whose body was found in the basement—and whose autopsy has my former name—is gone. And Louis, whom those other boys in school nearly killed. The other boys, who might’ve killed me if Louis hadn’t been there. All somewhere else, I don’t know where. Now mother’s on her way out. I expect I’ll be, too.

None of this makes any difference, really: This block is still more or less what I left. At least, it feels that way. Which, of course, is enough reason to get out and stay away.

Most of all, I’ve got to get out while it’s still safe, at least relatively, for me to be here. The lady whose name I never knew—She’s squinting in my direction again! Hopefully, I’ll be out of here before she starts talking to me, asking me questions: before I find out she’s recognized me.

70. Forgetting

 

Probably nobody has ever remembered any event or person, or even object, completely. What I’ve never understood is why anybody tried.

What I understand even less is when people try to make a scene, recollection or piece of furniture seem older and more enshrouded in a gauze of mist than it already is. Or all those commercials that were shot in grainy black-and-white when film, video and any number of other could reproduce and store the colors paraded in front of them. Why cloud up a clear vision of a day? Why make houses and the things in them seem even more weathered than they actually are?

Mother never talked about the past—hers or anyone else’s. Not even mine. But it seemed that everyone, except her and Adam, who spent more than five minutes with me tried to get me to talk about what was gone, what they could never experience.

Or they tried to wipe out my recall: something they could no more do than to remember their own lives. We’ve all had doctors who told us the needles they stuck in our arms didn’t hurt, or teachers or other adults who told us we weren’t hurt after some bully—or the adult in question—punched, kicked or shoved us.

The result—at least for me—was always the same when any adult condescended or simply lied: contempt, on both sides. Likewise for anyone who tries to blur an already blurry picture. Even the ones who really believe they’re trying to ease my pain, in the end, earn my anger because they’re trying to blunt the edge of my recollections.

By the same token, I don’t try to recall everything, everybody, every moment. Even if I could, I couldn’t keep them, just as I can’t take every article of clothing I’ve ever worn with me. It’s one of the first lessons you learn when you can’t stay some place.

And the moment you begin to move, from necessity, the faces, the voices, the pieces of a house, all disappear into a blur. Or they lie submerged, bubbling through the cauldron of your dreams you don’t remember in the morning.

69. Poverty and Survival

 

In a town like the one where Vivian grew up, next to the sea, the houses of people—like her father –who’ve seen or will see no other place all have the bleached, splintered look of wood that washed up on the beach in some earlier winter. Even the houses that’ve just been sanded and painted seem like flotsam morphed into fixtures, and that is how you can tell them from the cottages of the people who spend a few weeks out of every year in such a town.

Likewise, true country houses—like the one in the countryside near the Rhine where Adam and some people he’d never seen before or would never see again huddled, curled or flopped through a harsh, endless winter—differ from the retreats of city people. The homes of peasants never shed their tattered shawls of autumnal dust and sunsets that abrade window frames before the season’s final rain.

And in a factory town, nothing is ever excavated from the layers of soot that settle on it.

On this block, the air is that of someone—mother, the lady whose name I never knew, any of the women who stayed—or something, like a worn winter coat, that’s survived another season, somehow. Leave for a while, come back, and those same people, their coats, their houses, are still there, looking more worn and a bit heavier, but not any older than you remember.

Survival into the next season. That’s all any of us do, whether we stay on this block or leave it. Survive: It’s the operative word of the uncertain, the desperate, the deprived, the poor. Every mother thought about it—for herself and her child—whenever she gave birth on this block. Mother’s even admitted that sometimes she wasn’t sure of how or if I or she would make it. To this day, I don’t know all of how or what she did. But in spite of the beatings and deaths I experienced here, I wouldn’t say I’ve had a particularly hard life. After all, in spite of everything, I don’t recall having gone hungry.

Still, I’ve always told—and convinced—whomever I’ve met that I was poor. I wasn’t looking for sympathy; I only found myself in situations where I needed to sum up my childhood in a word. And it fit.

Perhaps nobody would agree with it, but I’ve come up with a foolproof definition of poverty. It’s when nobody can give you—and you don’t have any—advice on how to live. All they can tell you about is survival. How they survived. How you’ll survive. How others didn’t survive. They can even tell you of “good” and “bad” ways to die and what’s worth dying for: love, country, god, whatever. But nobody knows how to live, or for what. That’s why one of the few books written by a male that seemed to me in any way truthful was Angela’s Ashes. The guy who wrote it grew up poor by anybody’s definition of the word—including mine. And, by the same token, a poor little prep school boy, Holden Caulfield, is equally impoverished. Only from deprivations like his, or Frank Mc Court’s, is a man capable of speaking the truth.