Well let me tell you about the way she looked,
The way she acted, and the color of her hair.
. . . please don’t bother tryin’ to find her.
She’s not there.
                          — Rod Argent, b. 1945
                              English singer-songwriter
I didn’t notice it until this morning. It appears that the young woman across the street, the daughter of the man who owns the house, is not living there anymore. She was there when I left in November, putting her two children into her car each morning about seven o’clock. By then the mornings were cold enough that she’d come out five or so minutes before leaving time and start the car. When they were ready to leave, the boy, three or four years old, climbed in himself while his mother loaded the girl, under two, into her baby seat. Then she did all the buckling and belting, slipped herself into the driver’s seat, and was gone.
Sometimes I would witness this routine as I went out for the paper, and the young woman or the little boy would smile or wave. More often I saw it from the window of my study as I booted up my computer while my coffee brewed. It was a little piece of the morning that fit with all the other little pieces that together give structure and stability to our days.
The young woman (can you tell I don’t remember her name?) was an infant when she and her parents moved in across the street. That would make her twenty-six now. I remember that I baked blueberry muffins and took them over, a small welcome-to-the-neighborhood gesture. Another baby girl came along about two years later. I didn’t see much of my new neighbors, and by the time Lynn was born in 1985, the woman (Holly — I do remember her name) and the two little girls were gone.
It wasn’t long before another woman took up residence there. She worked 11 to 7, picked up each night about 10:45 by someone who pulled into the driveway and blared the car horn, its sour note amplified by the muggy air that summer. That woman had a teenage daughter, and the year that I spent at home with Lynn I would sometimes see the girl get off the school bus at the corner and light a cigarette that she dragged on while she walked the half block home. She’d drop it in the gutter in front of the mailbox and squash it out as she pulled out the mail. Then she’d walk into the house and I wouldn’t see her, or anyone else in the household, until the next afternoon.
The teen girl’s mother put a pretty wreath on the door. That disappeared about a year later, and then there was a succession of female residents and regular visitors, one of them a trim, athletic blonde who three or four times a week would be leaving in her snazzy white Corvette about the time I was leaving in my sturdy blue Toyota. Holly had remarried and had a red Corvette that she squeezed the girls and their overnight gear into. I’d see her drop them off sometimes. When she came to retrieve them she’d pull into the driveway, get out of the car and ring the doorbell once, and then get back into the car. Presently the girls, growing taller and lugging more and more stuff, would emerge and walk silently to their mother’s car. The parents never saw each other during these exchanges, although there was one noisy confrontation between them over the girls’ haircuts that spilled out of the house and onto the lawn, witnessed by most of the neighborhood who were all out and about that balmy summer evening.
The day the young woman moved back in with her two children was the day that, once again, many neighbors were standing around talking because Verizon had managed to cut our electricity, our phone service, and our water supply while installing fiber optic cables. I watched a crib, some mattresses, and the little boy’s toys being carried in. Just the young woman and her two kids, living with her father for a while I guessed while she regrouped from whatever had caused her to leave where she’d been before.
And now, after about eighteen months, she’s moved on again, probably while I was in Wyoming. I only noticed her absence this morning, and I can’t say why I didn’t notice it before, nor why I noticed it today. I’m in kind of a melancholy loop right now. I’m still sick and dealing with the side effects of the symptom relievers that relieve not by clearing the symptoms but by giving you a whole new set of concerns: depression, fuzzy thinking, compromised body temperature regulation so that consuming two Hershey’s Kisses make you feel like you have a fever of a hundred and one. I’m headed Saturday to a memorial service for the former colleague who died so suddenly in December, an event that will likely present a number of attendant difficulties. So I’m thinking about the way people come and go in our lives, how nothing stays the same.
I hope the young woman whom I observed first as an infant and later as a single mother appearing to do the best she could for her babies has moved on to a better situation. As much as we love our children, they shouldn’t be living with us when they’re nearing thirty and parents themselves. And yet in a small way I miss that car in the driveway, the laughter that I heard from time to time in the morning, the one tantrum the little boy threw that his mother patiently talked him through. Food for thought as my twenty-two year old makes lists of the things she wants from her room when she moves into her own no-roommates place come graduation 115 days from now.
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