This Is the Place

by Margot Kahn

  “I have to go in,” my mother said breathlessly when she returned. She was already scanning the beach for a good spot to leave her clothes. My mother is like me: when the thought flashes into the mind to get into cold water, it cannot be extinguished. This was the only way to fully experience the unusually warm, windless day. The tide had turned, and little waves rolled in. Already my mother was moving like someone cold, taking short, quick steps, a certain giddy nervousness overcoming her. We hurried up the beach to a driftwood tree trunk as if the opportunity to get in the sea might pass, or the will to immerse in water so cold it takes your breath away would soon expire. My mother yanked off her shoes and socks and the rest of her clothes. Then, with arms flapping at her sides, she stepped gingerly across the rocks, letting out a shriek when the first cold wave smacked her shins. She continued into the frigid, murky water, laughing and gasping, her body disappearing under the surface as her arms hovered above. And then she pushed off and swam out, up to her neck in the gray water with her arms swirling rapidly around her. For a moment she was unattached to anything—to the shore, to me, my still-new family, the past, the future. I stood watching her on the beach, chuckling at her jerking strokes and her constant shrieking, feeling something inside me quicken.

  And then I did the only thing I could do. I put my sleeping baby down on the cobble beach and followed my mother into the cold sea.

  Miranda Weiss is the author of Tide, Feather, Snow: A Life in Alaska. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, American Scholar, Alaska Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Homer with her family.

  Vesica Piscis

  Leigh Newman

  There are places that feel like home and places that feel like where you live. The home-feeling ones ruin you for life. I have had the good fortune of a few of these. I grew up in Alaska. Even as a sullen teenager, I thought there was nowhere I’d rather be than my family’s crappy plywood cabin on Shell Lake. The place was surrounded by shoulder-high alders and bears. The only way in or out was by floatplane or snow machine (in the winter), and if you wanted excitement, you could either wait for the flag on an ice-fishing rig to pop up or canoe down to the river’s mouth for trout. At night, the sky was a live astronomy of stars.

  In my twenties, I lived in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and, though my block was run by Dominican heroin dealers whose customers—mostly white, dreadlocked squatters—slumped like a parade of deflated human balloons along the steps to my door, I loved the six-kid families who lived to every side of me and my ramshackle apartment with rogue, smoke-infused wiring. I loved the wild, music-soaked neighborhood where empty lots were filled in with cornfields, sunflowers, and casitas. When the wind blew, you could smell the fishy brine off the East River through the smoke and hustle of the street.

  Another time—and only for six months—I had a room in Paris with a sink and cot and window overlooking the city’s rippling terracotta rooftops. The steeples. The moody gray sky. The smell of sewer and fresh bread. Every day I kissed the dusty tile floor with a sense of joy and belonging—even if I realized I was just another American so enamored with France, I thought I could wish myself into another nationality.

  For the rest of my forty-odd years, however—and most especially now—I have not felt at home in my home. By home I mean the structure in which I live, the land, the vista from the window, the foliage, the flowers, the language, the customs and quirks and character of the environment that either dovetail with your soul—or don’t.

  Home, for many people, means family, friends, pets. And though I think these are part of the equation, they aren’t enough to sustain the feeling on their own. Home, to me, is a place. A physical one. This definition probably has something to do with my spending much of my childhood in the wilderness, bored out of my mind at the time, staring at mountains, digging around in the mud until I lost a boot. There is a fingerprint early landscapes can leave on your inner life. Sometimes it hides for a while, drowned out by the clutter of other, more adult concerns. But when it surfaces, it’s like a bubble of oxygen you didn’t know you were gasping for in the middle of the night.

  Only recently have I realized this. I live in Brooklyn. I have two kids. I am a writer. I bicycle and recycle and speak a few languages and enjoy the occasional artisanal mayonnaise, if I can force myself to part with the six bucks for the jar. All around me are people that blow my mind with their kindness, their intelligence, their jobs resolving conflict in the Sudan or in documentary film, shooting outsider artists. My life is rife with poets and activists and painters and jazz violinists and stay-at-home parents who are also in a band and do stained glass. By any external measure, this 71-square-mile borough is a perfect fit. I like the people. I like the people and learn from them. On any given Sunday, I can go to an avant-garde puppet show I actually enjoy.

  And yet, despite all this, I am not at home. Constantly.

  It all started with my pregnancy at age thirty-three, when the smell of Manhattan garbage made me vomit with such vigor outside a Popeye’s Chicken in Times Square I had to be hospitalized. Around this time, the empty warehouse across the street from my house had an alarm malfunction—hourly. Then there were the perpetually operating jackhammers, as the luxury condo crowd moved into their still unfinished glass towers. Everyone around me told me how beautiful the neighborhood was. And it was: I could see it! The cobblestones! The merry-go-round!

  I just felt—unhappy.

  My husband is an understanding man and went along with me when I asked to move us to another neighborhood—one deeper in Brooklyn, where we still live. The apartment there was cheaper. It came with the miracle of a parking space. We had a wonderful public school and a park with a sprinkler. And yet I walked down the street and felt acutely, like a rash, as if the cement were trying to eat my skin.

  For the first six months, I obsessed about the litter. It was the same litter I had lived with in my twenties, but now it haunted me so that I spent whole Saturdays going up and down our block with a garbage bag picking up bottles and flyers and mashed-up take-out food containers. At the end of our street is a huge gray wall that supports the subway track. I daydreamed of painting it green and began to put this plan into action, buying a ladder and rollers, until my husband informed me that I would be arrested for graffiti. Even if I painted it at night, using a headlight I had bought expressly for this purpose.

  Do you see where these eccentricities were taking me? I didn’t. Because I didn’t want to. Where I was going was leaving New York. I had this struggle earlier in my life, but had told myself the same things I told myself now: (1) My husband loved New York, (2) My husband could only do his job—running a New York engineering and architecture firm—in New York, (3) My kids loved their school and their friends and we had just gotten them settled, (4) I couldn’t support all four of us on my salary if I did move us—to Montana or Alaska or some place with enough natural splendor to silence the angry, trapped-feeling person I had become.

  There were my feelings. And then there was everybody else’s feelings. And then there was the cost of food, heat, and rent. Plus, it wasn’t like I didn’t like where I lived. I just did not—and do not—love it and love, I suppose, is the single prerequisite for feeling at home. You must love your home for it to be a home. You might also hate it, resent it, fear it, or fear leaving it at certain low points. But you also, always, love it.

  There were two options left, and I pursued both. The first was depression—and all the self-loathing and exhaustion that accompanies that condition. The second was our backyard. Backyards are a luxury in Brooklyn. Our apartment came with a roach issue, an ant issue, a mice issue, tile floors, and a faux-brick wall that made you think of a 1960s cocktail smashed against the wall during a marital fight. And yet—outside the door in the kitchen was 20-by-40 feet of cement.

  When we took the apartment—thanks to a generous friend—the area had been teeming with vines and weeds and rebellious daisies. Before we moved in, the Polish landlord
had razed every tatter of green down to the ground. As a gift, he said. For you. Leaves bring mosquitoes.

  I smiled at him that day. I thanked him. I stood out there on the smoking gray moonscape of my life and listened to the F train thunder by. Every seven fucking minutes. I can’t, I thought. And I meant it. I can’t.

  The yard was edged in chain link on one side and scalloped wire on the other—the opposite side of which lay more cement. I took the jade plant from our old apartment outside and placed it haphazardly on a low wall made of even more cement. A friend who had been evicted from his place showed up with ten odd pots of mystery plants, some of them scallions from a long-eaten salad. My kids added carrot tops and lemon seeds. I threw around some wildflower mix and said, “Let’s see what happens.”

  Three weeks later, I arrived at what my family calls my tunnel of happy insanity—a kind of total, maniacal focus that is my perverse notion of joy. A local preschool had put a rabbit hutch on the corner for the garbage man to pick up and I brought it back, planning to raise rabbits for the meat. (This didn’t happen.) I invested in a dogwood, strawberry plants, tomato vines, watermelon seedlings. There was a concrete Madonna sculpture at the end of our yard with a long-dried fountain and I dug her out and filled the pool and watched as the water seeped out into the ground. I lined the pool and watched the water seep out all over again.

  Still, I clung to the idea of pet turtles. And floating lilies.

  An old man often leaned over the fence between our yards. The left side of his face was missing from the ear down, giving his jaw at torqued look. He was short and wizened and enthusiastically gesturing, wearing a beater T-shirt and ripped canvas shorts. The yard he was standing in was not his, but he had adopted it with the permission of the owners, to grow tomatoes. His yard, the next over, had twenty years of grapevines, a meat-smoking shed, a knife-sharpening station, and a hunting spaniel who bayed at the various squirrels and raccoons that jumped off the subway tracks.

  My kids, my husband, my other neighbors—not a single one of them understood him when he yelled over the fence. Mostly because his partly missing jawbone distorted his speech. I would like to think that I was savant for deciphering his messages except that I suspect I had isolated myself so (see: depression) and was so intent on growing any kind of greenery that I paid extra-special attentions to his broken commands: “What are you doing! Don’t water now, it burns. Don’t do dat. Take this pretty, put it over there. See? The soil here is gold.”

  I worked at home and gardened for a half hour at 9 a.m., noon, and five. Plus all day on weekends. He was there at every hour, every day. For a year and half, I didn’t know his name and he didn’t know mine. But when he harvested his own grapes and made wine, he gave me multiple bottles. When I tried to give him some of my tomatoes, he said, “Are you kidding?” and handed me four more baskets of firm, perfectly round tomatoes.

  When I got a tiny hunting spaniel and yelled at her for pooping in the house, he would remind me, “She’s just a baby.” When he left his dog out at night, I would bring her over to my yard and feed her treats. He dug up snapdragons from Sicily and left them on my picnic table. I went to Alaska and brought him back a whole salmon—which he refused, saying, with not a little affection, “We talked about this! Italians have their own food!”

  We sharpened our knives together. He had a place upstate and showed up on Easter Sunday with a trash bag of freshly killed pheasants as a gift. Immediately, I turned around, skinned and processed the birds—which involved a mess of guts and feathers. My writer friends, there for brunch, thought it was wonderful but… uh… a little gross. My kids agreed.

  Sal—which was his name, as I finally found out—had grown up in Sicily and done his best to re-create it in his backyard, from the snapdragons to the mini-vineyard. I couldn’t re-create much of my Alaska due to the warm climate of Brooklyn. But I did plant Alaskan raspberries, Alaskan currants, and native northern daisies. I got a smoker for salmon, like the one I grew up with, and a grill. I set up a fire pit and sat out in the winter around the “campfire” with the kids. I bought plans to make my own kayak in the shed in back (this is still in the works).

  My happiness was connected less to what I was doing and more to the act of doing. My childhood had been spent building outhouses, putting together woodstoves, hauling wood into the house. Sal’s had been similar on his farm, he told me. What we both could not get enough of was that feeling of worth and hands and dirt, the brute self-enforced labor with which we had grown up.

  This year, in June, I was walking home—from the wine store, of course—and Sal was standing in his front yard, tormenting his peach tree. This was a common discussion point between us—me telling him to let the thing free, him laughing as he roped up the branches and winched them tight into perfectly shaped boughs. This day, however, he got off the ladder. The rag shirt. The jack-o-lantern face. He had the cancer again. I did not know he had had cancer before—but, of course—his jaw.

  This time it was in his lungs, his stomach, his intestines. Then he did something I never expected and will never forget. He broke down in sobs and hugged me and said, “I’m not ready.”

  I suggested we drink. A lot.

  He said he couldn’t. The chemo, plus his daughter.

  His daughter was right behind him. A little older. Very nice. We nodded. And we all went home—to whatever we thought that term meant for those few weeks. Every day, I went into my backyard. Every day, Sal tossed over plants. Snapdragons. Tomatoes. Tools. He was giving me his garden—though I didn’t realize it. I had this idea that when you had terminal cancer, it took a year. Or more. I went to Alaska for three weeks and lived in my friend’s cabin nine miles from humanity, which was another way I was trying to get happy—short, choice stints in the wilderness.

  The day I came back, the sink had clogged and I called the super. He came and yanked out the hair in the drain. Then yelled at me that he had a lot going on, he had all kind of jobs to do and the guy next door had died. He’d had to go to the funeral and everything last week! It took a lot of time!

  I stood there blinking. My super’s mouth moved—expressing, I like to think, grief as rage. I waited for him to finish, and when finally he did, I went into the backyard. And cried by myself. Then the kids came out and cried.

  One week later, the owner of the backyard between us—where Sal had grown his tomatoes—came out with cement mixer and poured concrete over the whole yard. He didn’t want the maintenance. While he was at it, he did the front yard too.

  As soon as the cement truck left, I went over to Sal’s. His daughter was there on a ladder with a garbage bag. The peach tree was loaded with small yellowish-whitish-green fruit. She was knocking peaches into the bag with a mop handle. I leaned against the wrought iron grate while my dog pulled against the leash, looking for Sal’s dog, who had been sent away to another relative in the country. “Look,” I said. “I miss your dad.”

  “You know,” she said. “I tell people how I grew up in this neighborhood. In Brooklyn. How it was like a farm in Sicily, with the chickens, the rabbits, the crops Pop put in. How great it was. And nobody understood what I meant. Nobody believed me.”

  She handed me a garbage bag—the big kind—of peaches.

  “I’ll make a pie,” I said.

  “I know you will,” she says. “That’s why I’m giving them to you.”

  About three years ago, wrestling with the same problems, I went to a therapist. “You have a problem with reality,” she said. She was very smart and she was right. I avoid the basic, practical things that end up making your life much easier if you pay attention, such as paying bills on time, defining goals, discussing problems instead of waiting for them to go away. This was why I ended up in messes and morasses and often felt as if my life was happening to me via the decisions of my husband, the needs of my kids, my own up and downs, instead of directing where it was going on my own.

  And yet, I couldn’t help but think—as I still thin
k—that having a problem with reality is also a good thing. Not because reality is so gruesome, but because if you have a problem with it, you’re forced to find solutions that just don’t exist. You might write a book or lose a few days in a novel or build an ark or try to build an opera house in a jungle. Looking back I couldn’t see that my backyard in Brooklyn was a home. It wasn’t. It wasn’t for Sal either. But where our dream worlds intersected, that real-life vesica piscis constructed out of plants, lumber, sunshine, and labor—was a comforting place, a place as homelike as I had felt in a long, long while.

  Now that Sal is gone, my half of the world will go on. I have one of his grapevines going crazy on the chainlink below the subway and, eventually, I will make my own wine. I’m processing Atlantic salmon from Chinatown into Alaskan jerky in my new smoker. I’m still contemplating the rabbits, kayak, and pond. These are chores and fantasies I look forward to. I try to think more about them than about the fact that Sal is not yelling instructions to me from next door. There is no tidy reconciliation to losing him, I suppose, except for the fact that in any real home—even a dream one—there is always some feel of the person who built it, some ghost that is just too alive to be memory.