On Staying
horses and our house
In our twenties, we stayed in Toronto each summer. Cheap flats gave me blisters as I walked, hungover, to my office job downtown. At night we drank in Trinity Bellwoods Park or on a friend’s roof. Concerts by the lake were so loud we could identify the goofy commonwealth bands from miles away: The Proclaimers. Barenaked Ladies. We went into debt going out to dinner. I thought we were grown, could imagine life going on like that forever. That the thought did not disturb me disturbs me now. At twenty-three, I only missed the West when someone mentioned wilderness and meant Muskoka.
Years passed. Landlords said our neighbors had complaints about the baby. Landlords said they needed to tear the façade from the building before it crumbled. Dan got a job in Ohio. The day we drove over the border, infant in the backseat, I thought I would miss the city forever.
Last spring we bought a house from a hundred-year-old woman. She and her two siblings had grown up in the house and never left. The walls are papered with pink flowers and there’s a speakeasy in the basement. We signed the papers in April, left town in May. When we got home at the end of August, my nausea fading, I was astonished to find a stranger’s house full of all our things: postcards from Death Valley, dishes from the curb in Canada, the pictures of us as teenagers about which everyone says, “Dan looks the same.” Now the screen door slams as Wes goes in and out.
Wes says, “The only things I like about Connecticut are horses and our house.”
Did I know, when I convinced Dan to marry me, that I would end up here? Sort of. I knew the humid summers and drone of cicadas and narrow highways choked with luxury SUVs would become familiar. If you’d told me Dan would teach at Yale, I would have admitted that made sense, and if you’d shown me our children’s faces, I’d have gone back to believing in God.
This will be our first summer staying home in years. I’m attached to the road because on the road we’re all together all the time. No one is scheming to leave or rushing to get back for dinner. There are no parent-teacher conferences or birthday parties. No fear that we left the door unlocked, the dog alone too long. And because I need the West the way some people need New York City or central air conditioning. I need dirt roads dipping in and out of valleys, mountains hanging in the sky. I need my mom. I need to check into a motel with a neon sign and methodically unload the car while Wes pulls on his swimsuit, still damp from the last stop.
The only things I like about Connecticut: Italian delis. Small white houses with brightly painted doors. Foxes. Grad students crowding the patio at the ice cream shop. Used bookstores. Clams on pizza. Iced coffee. Carousels by the beach. The waitresses at the diner on State Street who pause, clutching coffee pots, to give Ramona the long look of admiration she deserves. Estate sales. Stone walls dividing old farms.
Have you ever seen a pink sky over Nevada? Who will tell the baby about Nevada?
I try to make the longing into something good. A way of having while not having. Grief serves the same purpose, but I have nothing to grieve. Not here, not now, with her.