When I was 23, they began to tear down all the buildings I used to love. There was an old mansion, the only house on Peripatetic Circle, that had been standing since the mid-19th century. It was built in the center of the woods, at the end of a long driveway that came off Granary Lane. Now it is gone, and so are half of the woods. Beyond those woods is the highway, and now when you look off Granary Lane, you can see the partitions, and the howl of the traffic is not so distant as it once was. And there are still little sheds in the woods, and items taken from inside the mansion and put in cold storage, and there is still Peripatetic Circle, but now it leads to nowhere.
Now there are tarps and wooden palettes stacked atop each other. Now there is dust in the air. Somewhere among the remaining trees there is a small, suffering stream. There is old snow on the ground, and a blanket of broken glass beneath. The deer have not caught on to the change.
Then there is Gorges Court, where all of the houses are built on hills and there are glass brick windows and motion sensor lights. Here there was a condemned house between two okay houses. Tall and thin and rickety, it must have been easy to knock down. Now the lot is vacant and there is only a small tree still standing. The tall grass demarcates the property lines.
I used to walk the dogs in this neighborhood. I would hook all their leashes to a carabiner and take them around towards the graveyard, and then in the direction of Peripatetic Circle, along Granary, past miles of empty field.
Gorges Court was always quiet. Nearby there was an old track. Red rubber gravel and some wooden bleachers, swallowed up in a thicket of overgrowth behind a chain link fence. No one runs there and no one ever has, but it is where I learned to ride a bike, and if you climb to the top of the wooden bleachers, which is only possible in winter when the thicket is all naked branch, you can see the supermarket in the distance. In the summer, you cannot. You can only wade deeper and deeper into the tall grass until you are past the track and into the woods and all around you is dark, lush foliage, aglitter with fireflies.
In Delanoy, they tore down three whole blocks of red brick townhouses from the 1970’s. Blocks I had wandered from time to time on my way to the post office. In their place, they built luxury apartments, glassy and sleek. Bowls of wrapped candy in the lobby. Doormen. A gym.
An old plastic blow-up pool. A sofa with the cushions taken off. A glass pipe. There used to be seagulls all around the tunnel in the pink shopping center. There used to be a thrift store at the end of the boardwalk. There used to be crimes, fights in shops, beheadings on the streets.
The best dog that I walked on Gorges Court was called Cooper, and Cooper’s owner was called Janice, and Janice was under the impression I was a high school student, and she would tip me an extra ten dollars for every walk. Janice had a daughter who was actually my age (23), who had autism. She was called Hailey, and she didn’t like the feeling of human skin. When Janice wanted to hug her, one or both of them had to be wearing long sleeves and gloves. Hailey liked me as much as I liked Cooper, and sometimes would even tag along on my walks, the both of us silent. I have never been much of a conversationalist. But one time, as we were heading up Granary, Hailey started to tell me about the history of the land, something she apparently knew all about.
The mansion I liked on Peripatetic Circle had once belonged to a family with ties to the Church of the Flood, she said. This was actually a church closer to Chancing, but nearly all the members of its congregation lived around Granary. The family that lived in the mansion on Peripatetic was headed by Francis Altman, who was a physician and an amateur beekeeper.
Hailey liked to spend time at the local archives reading old newspapers and piecing things together, a detective of the distant past. She had an overbite and a large brown mole above her upper lip that drew further attention to the overbite. She had a nose like her mother’s, like a broken beak. She’d had a hard time at school. The other kids had made a game of avoiding her, losing her in the library stacks, making plans to meet her somewhere and then not showing up.
Janice told me this tearfully over coffee.
“I know you’re a nice girl and that you wouldn’t do a thing like that,” she said, “but some people… they don’t even notice. Just pay attention, you know. Talk to the children that no one else talks to.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was 23 years old and had not been in high school for half a decade. I nodded, and then later realized that now I could never let her know my real age, which meant I could never mention graduation or the year I was born or anyone in my graduating class whose name she might recognize. I could never tell her my Chinese zodiac. I would eventually have to come up with a story about college, or a gap year. I couldn’t let her talk about me to anyone who actually knew me.
But this was only one of many lies I had to keep track of, and benign as it was, it wracked me with worry and guilt at night. I was living with my parents, but my mother had moved her things into the basement, and my father could sleep through anything, so when I couldn’t relax, I would sneak into his room and out onto the little balcony that overlooked the woods and Peripatetic Circle. I would sit on the rickety railing, my arm looped through the gutter for safety, and I would light up and get high, and I would remember what Hailey had told me about Francis Altman, how he had buried a time capsule underneath one of the many sheds on his property, but no one knew which one or what was in the capsule.
Marijuana gave me severe anxiety. Whenever I was feeling anxious, I would smoke a bowl or a joint and my heart would begin to pound even faster, until I felt so lightheaded I could pass out. And then I would promise myself that tomorrow would be different, that I would find a healthier coping mechanism. I would make lists of them in fact, all the coping mechanisms I could think of. Write. Read. Watch TV. Watch a movie. Take a nap. Make a cup of tea. Open a window. Light a candle. Pee. Drink water. Take a walk. Go outside and sit on the stoop and count the balconies on the condominium complex across the street. Play a game. Play Solitaire. Talk to someone. Call a friend. Bake cookies. Color. Draw. Paint. Play the piano.
But then when push came to shove I would not do any of these things. Because in my mind I would see a vision of an old woman in a rocking chair by a fireplace, and despite the calm of the scene, I would fall into an acute panic. The elderly have always made me deeply uncomfortable.
This is in fact why I stopped playing the piano in the first place, because all of my recitals were in nursing homes. Nursing homes that overcompensated for the decay with bounties of plants, banana leaves and Swiss cheese trees and orchids and lilies, spilling out of pots and onto the yellow linoleum, trickling down from atop shelves and end tables in the milky morning sunlight. Nursing homes that smelled like pink bar soap carved in the shape of an angel, never meant to be used.
Once, after I played, a very old woman in a wheelchair thanked me. She took my small hand in hers and said thank you, with tears in her eyes, and I wasn’t sure whether the tears were tears of joy or sadness or if she was simply leaking with age. You’re welcome, I told her, and then I ran out into the parking lot and cried, and for the rest of the day I was inconsolable.
After that, I quit.