Home
We sit on the porch by the wild overgrown garden to watch night
fall in pink shadows between the houses across the street, a view we've dubbed "Sunset
Alley." I've got my white wine, with lots of ice that chinks cheerfully in
a ceramic coffee mug, Eileen has her bottle of fancy beer. Just about every
night we sit here, after a walk around the neighborhood.
Tonight, she found an abandoned dresser left out on the sidewalk. In
this neighborhood so close to the schools, all summer kids are moving in and
moving out, leaving behind unwanted things: office chairs, desks, old TVs and 45
records from the '70's, lightbulbs, lamps without shades, shades without lamps,
framed posters in varieties of subject matter, china dishes, board games, an
iron, everything she hauls in up the back staircase, with a proud smile on her
face like a cat back from a mouse hunt.
When we came across the dresser on Linden Street, she stopped in
her tracks before the bulky, heavy looking thing. I've learned during our long
friendship to stand by as she makes her appraisals: "Real wood. Mahogany
maybe." She rubbed her hand along the slightly warped surface. "Some
water damage on the top, I think I can sand that out." Her eyes widened. "Dovetailed
drawers, look." Dutifully, I looked, though I never know what I'm looking
at, still I nod approvingly. "I
could paint it pink," she said. Again, I nod.
Soon, we are lugging the hulking piece down the quiet side streets,
and up the two flights of stairs, banging and huffing until finally into the
living room it goes, where it sits with the other foundlings in this orphanage
of oddities. This is the third bureau
she’s rescued so far during my brief tenure of two months. With her hand on her
chin, she thinks out loud, "I could put it in the garden, put plants in
the drawers, something trailing, like those wave petunias, could you see
that?" The garden is a circus of
birdbaths and trellises where climbing sweet peas flower all summer, tall
sunflowers top heavy and drooping, grass as high as your waist, tomatoes
bursting red on tangled vines, cucumbers nestled under broad green leaves,
statues of nymphs and fairies, wicker chairs with busted seats, a Victorian
croquet set hidden in the weeds, a family of rabbits. "Sure," I say.
I get our drinks, grab the cigarettes. When I meet her on the porch,
she has already smoked half a joint and her eyes are closed, the evening sun
makes her hair gleam silver. She passes me the sizeable roach, this one is the
kickass skunky stuff that makes me stupid after one hit, and I always cough. We
sit a while, drowsily, just sit. A few neighbors walk by, Nancy with her
asthmatic pug Julius, who stops long enough to sniff among the cosmos, and the
Martins with their two tots Ava and Rosa in an aerodynamic Swedish designed
stroller. Everyone says hello. A few joggers go by, someone is cooking on the
grill, there's the sound of kids laughing down the street and cicadas singing
riotously. In the weeks since I've been staying here, I've come to enjoy the
neighborhood noise and rhythms of the old three decker houses, so different
from my place, just a mile away in Harvard square.
My tiny condo is undergoing a long-awaited renovation, and Eileen
has offered me her back bedroom for the duration. In her usual generous,
brusque manner she insisted, "You'll stay here." On my street, lined
with condos and massive brick apartment blocks, the residents, mostly grad
students at the law school and summer kids working on their PhDs, don't say
hello, there aren't any young children with their happy play sounds, no one
grills, and the cicadas have nowhere to sing. The contrast between our spheres
is striking, given the short distance, and I am happy to be here for a taste of
living in a real neighborhood. And so, I am another displaced refugee taking
residence on Ashland Avenue in Somerville.
The small bedroom is cute, quiet, with green painted walls and a
hula girl lamp on a random night table, the huge mattress is up on milk crates.
A scarred chest of drawers, a find from the street, houses all my stuff. There's
a crazy quilt and a floral bed spread, feather pillows and striped sheets that
are soft and smell like lavender dryer sheets. I've settled in. My books, ones I've read so far this summer,
and ones I'm going to read, and books I know I won't read but feel bad about
not reading so I keep them, and books ready to be leant out or given away, are
piled here and there. It's home, for now.
The room is also where Eileen's brother Tommy shot the fatal dose
of heroin laced with fentanyl that would
kill him. That was last October. She
found him on the kitchen floor, half in and half out the room, lying across the
threshold, his face distorted and blue. The paramedics worked on him even
though he was past saving, you can still see the dents on the wood floor where
their equipment was thrown down, the defibrillator and the tool box of drugs,
you can see the trace of his prized Frye boots when he was dragged to the
middle of the kitchen, where they hooked him up and did futile chest
compressions.
"I've always been the saver of lost souls," she says,
with her last swig of beer. It's true. There have been a series of stray dogs,
feral cats, friends down on their luck, the temporarily destitute, the bereft.
When tommy was released from prison this last time, where'd he'd spent 7 years
and change for a botched armed robbery, it was no surprise when he showed up on
the doorstep, no surprise when she let him in, again. "He was my brother,
" she says simply.
I helped her go through shoe boxes full of old photographs a few
days after her brother died. They were adorable kids, PJ with his missing front
teeth, Eileen with her mop of hair, and shy Tommy who never looked at the
camera, or the person holding the camera. Still, there the three sibs are
dutifully lined up in Easter outfits, around the Christmas tree, in bathing
suits running through the sprinkler on the front lawn. They seemed to be the
normal family, circa 1960, pastel curtains and floral wallpaper. The smiles
hide the whole story.
Eileen says she watched because she didn't know what else to do,
she stood there and watched them pound and shock poor Tommy, but he was dead
and she knew it. Still she watched, because just maybe-- until a kind detective
got her to go downstairs, got her to sit and lit her cigarette and listened as
she told him how she found him, how she'd just gone to the service station to
get her car inspected a month late and she'd run into the store for milk and
scratch tickets, the tickets were still in the pocket of her work shirt. She
bought the 2% because he likes it in his morning coffee, she was bringing it
into the kitchen to put in the fridge and then she saw him, his face, it didn't
even look like him, but still she knew, she doesn't even remember calling 911,
or crying into the phone. It's ok said the kind detective, who watched as she
wiped her eyes with the tissues he kept on hand for these calls.
In spite of their early years, probably because of them, Eileen has
been trying to recreate home and family ever since. "Tommy never stood a
chance," she has said many times since that awful day last autumn. Beaten
at home from the time he could walk, molested by the parish priest, he ran away,
got in trouble, dropped out of school in the 10th grade, then drifted, skidded.
By the time he died at the age of 57, he'd spent a third of his life behind
bars. The last 11 months of his life he spent here, in the home his sister had
made, the home they never had as kids.
"There was a sweetness to him he didn't show very many
people," she says, "he was embarrassed by kindness, it was not easy
for him to open up." But there's a card still tacked up in the little back
room, the only thing he brought to the space that you might call decorative. It's
a crappy Hallmark knock-off card, a view of a cottage snow covered under glittery
white, lit up windows give the scene a wintry cozy feel. Inside it’s dated Christmas
1991 in the round cursive letters of a young woman, who signed the card
"with all my love, Sandy." Who was she? Sandy? Eileen says she never
knew, he never brought his girlfriends around. This one thing he saved, through
all the wreckage of his adulthood. What little else he owned, the few things he
brought, are mostly gone now, the army jacket, his clothes, the boots he always
wore, the boots he would die in… the paraphernalia of his habit, dirty cotton
balls and bent burnt spoons and tiny empty bags with crystalline residue, needles,
and glass pipes, all that was removed by the detectives. The mattress is new,
the bedding too. But still Tommy lingers, in the one shirt that still hangs in
the closet because she just can’t part with it, in the few photos of him as an
adult. “He always had a shit eating grin,” she says. He is squinting in the
sunlight, still too shy to look into the camera. And sometimes, when I'm
drowsing with one of the books from one of the piles, before I drift off, when
I shut off the hula girl lamp and the room is dimly illuminated by outside
light that glints on the glitter snow of the card, I wonder if he was happy
here, even if just for a little while.
On the porch, I sit next to her. She never says that she is lonely,
that it’s hard for her to be the only one of them remaining; PJ died of AIDS 20
years ago, Tommy has been gone nearly a year, and now it’s just her of the
Nolan kids, from the house on Green Street where they played at happy family. I
begin to understand her need to save the discarded and the displaced.
And so we sit quietly, listening to the neighborhood sounds at
night.
But I should know better to think she might sit still long.
“Where are you going?” I ask, when she is up and off the stoop.
“I’m thinking I need those chairs we saw on Elm, the ladder backs
with the cane seats.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now—come
on before somebody else snatches them."
And soon she is off, to claim another foundling, to find something
else that needs a home.
