“I forgot,” I said. “I wanted to return this money I borrowed from Chana. Will you make sure she gets it?”
Her chin lifted again, and I could tell she was about to refuse. We’d never had money as children; the idea that Chana would have had anything to lend me was ridiculous.
“I’ll make sure,” she said.
I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and headed back toward the subway. This trip was only slightly more familiar; this was the one I’d taken the day I’d left, not before or since. It had felt permanent then, and more permanent now. I cataloged the streets, the stores, the faces, knowing this was the last time I would be here.
Once on the train, still not full even in late afternoon when it should have overflowed with students and day workers, I began to feel the burden of the costume I was wearing. I was not me in these clothes and I couldn’t remember now why I’d worn them. Respect? A concession? I hitched the not-me skirt up a couple of inches and studied my thrift store boots, the scuffed toes, the too-long laces wrapped around my ankles. The other time I’d made this trip I hadn’t had these boots yet, hadn’t yet bought my leather jacket or my first guitar, hadn’t known any of what lay ahead, for good and for bad. I pushed the sweater sleeves up over my elbows and wished again that I’d worn my jacket. My armor.
I’d promised my aunt I’d spend the night at her place at the northern end of Manhattan, but it hadn’t struck me at the time we’d made the plan that I’d be re-creating my own exodus. By the time I got to her place, I was a mess. She fussed over me and fed me and made tea and listened as I recounted the visit.
“Oh, sweetie,” she said when I finished. “We can’t control what family we’re born into, but we can choose what to take away from the experience. They love you. They just have no idea how to fit a gay daughter into their worldview. That’s their problem, not yours.”
We sat on her couch, the same couch I’d lived on after I’d left home. It had been donated to her by the nonprofit that had helped her start a new life when she’d made that same journey. In her case, she’d left behind a husband as well.
“Do you ever regret it?” I’d never asked her that question before.
“No.” For a second I thought that was going to be her entire answer, but she sipped her tea and continued. “I miss some things about the celebrations, and some of the melodies, though my new shul community makes up for some of that. I miss family. But I can miss those things and those people and still know I didn’t belong there. Right?”
“Right,” I said. I’d known that when I still lived there, knew it when I left. It was only this extended unmoored moment that had me confused. “I almost apologized to her. I almost said it wasn’t her fault.”
“It is,” she said. “If their worldview doesn’t include their own daughter, they’re the ones who need changing, not you. Anyway, it’s probably good you went. Closure is good.”
“What about you?” I asked. “You’re the one I should be helping, after everything you’ve done for me.”
She drained her cup and smiled. “I’m okay. I promise I won’t be ashamed to ask if I ever need anything. Who knows, maybe someday you’ll move back here, or I’ll move to Maryland to be near you. In the meantime, you earned that money. You should use it to help with your own next chapter.”
Whatever that was.
The next afternoon, I took the bus back to Baltimore. I arrived back at the house to find a half dozen bicycles on the front porch, and the owners of said bicycles inside. The table had been pushed to the side and the chairs arranged theater-style. Jaspreet had tacked a sheet over our graffitied dining room wall to show her friends the project she was working on: a documentary cataloging vacant houses, interspersed with interviews of wealthy residents packing up to leave the city.
“Why are you going?” Jaspreet would ask each interviewee.
“They say it’s better to get some distance between people.” Or “I just don’t feel safe anymore.” Or “People cross the street when they see my pox scars. It’s not like I’m contagious anymore.”
I pictured their grand pilgrimage, their stately moving trucks, an endless search for the place where fear wouldn’t follow them. The homes she documented were a mix: large houses abandoned by the professors who no longer needed to live near their shuttered campuses; gentrified and ungentrified row homes; row homes that had been vacant long before any of the current troubles. Jaspreet gave statistics for the number of homeless people versus the number of available houses, the number of people who’d left in each of the previous four years.
The film was well made, but I was distracted. My mind kept juxtaposing my parents’ neighborhood, where nobody was going anywhere. It kept playing with thoughts of family and community and what makes a place a home, all overlaid with this gathering of people whose lives had collided with mine, the potluck dishes on the table, the things we’d written on the wall, the cheering and the compliments for Jaspreet’s work, their mutual understanding that this film was art and politics and a statement on what it took to stay, and what it took to leave, and what it meant to have no choice in the matter.
People chatted late into the evening, and for once I stayed downstairs, drinking and snacking and getting to know my roommates’ friends. When everyone finally left, I asked Jaspreet a question I’d been waiting to ask. “That street in the scene with the community garden. Where’s that?”
Jaspreet rewound to look at which one I was talking about. “Not all that far from here. A whole block of vacants in pretty decent shape.”
I copied the address and looked it up after we were done cleaning. Then I started researching realty agents. I had a wonderful, terrible idea for how to use my “Blood and Diamonds” money.
PART TWO
15
ROSEMARY
Baltimore
Rosemary’s bus hit Baltimore as the sun began to set, lighting the skyscrapers in pink and gold and purple. She leaned against the window and wondered what it would be like to be in one of those rooms when the light struck this way. She didn’t even know if those tall buildings were still in use. Were they residences or offices, and how were they counted in congregation laws?
“We’ll be stopping in five minutes.” The bus guard’s voice, piped into each locked compartment, was loud enough to make her jump. It had been hours since he had spoken. “Please make sure to collect all of your belongings. Anything left behind will be destroyed.”
They came off the highway exit, passed under a plate scanner, and were spit out beside a crumbling stadium. Two razor-wire fences formed a perimeter around it, even though it didn’t look like there was much to scavenge. This wasn’t one of the stadiums where SportHolo games happened, she was pretty sure. And how were they filmed, for that matter? The players couldn’t all be in individual boxes like the musicians. Rosemary filed that question away for another time.
She remembered going to a baseball game once as a kid, in the Before. The noise, the terrifying drop behind the bleachers, vendors hawking pretzels and ice cream and drinks, the players specks on the diamond far below. She wasn’t sure why anyone used to pay to sit out in the weather and watch tiny people when SportHolo brought them right into your living room, large as life.
SportHolo hadn’t yet taken off when the stadiums shut down, she guessed. Or there was some other aspect she had been too young to recognize, something sociological, ritual. Often when her parents talked fondly about the antecedent to something that was clearly better today, it was because of the nostalgia factor.