Edgemont

Was it really so terrible,

those prism-perfect seasons, that place,

four-cornered and predictable, where I

learned to love sun dust

carousing in the rays slanting

through my childhood’s gray

venetian blinds? True, everyone

was politely dying,

in undefiant decay behind

heavy ornamented doors

twice locked—there must have been

other husbands stewing beside my father

at South Seas Chinese Restaurant and Bar

instead of at home for family dinnertime.

Mom and I ate at the table, four places set,

with Mrs. Brown, whom we called our

housekeeper, but she raised me

and died sad and alone, perhaps beside

her mysterious daughters, long since

fired and with nothing from me

to show for her years—perhaps a few

of my kindergarten drawings. In childhood

we seed late-life’s great regrets.

But I played outside for seventeen

years, no matter that place was

merely the set for a film about that place

no one would make. Of course my unhappiness

flourished there, molding in the damp

ironic spring, jealous of summer,

drying to a brown patch

in transcendent autumn, finding a kind of

company in old, interminable winter.

But wouldn’t the halls have jaundiced

anywhere we lived? Maybe not,

maybe not, if my parents had been

more joyful, if they had chosen a town

with thinner walls, less-expansive

lawns, nearer neighbors. But people

die alive in apartments, too, communities

only as strong as their least

compassionate families. So much of that life

happened behind doors, evenings,

loved ones doing things other than

talking. Daytime was barren, the kids

all sequestered into one of two

schools, public but small and funded

like private academies by high taxes

on all our luxurious properties.

Between eight and three, the town belonged

to stay-at-home moms, who oversaw

the ornamentation of vast front yards

and sometimes helped out

in their children’s second-grade classrooms—

my mom did one spring, and I woke

like each of those Fridays was my

birthday. But what did the other mothers

do all week? Jerry worked, like my mother—

Jerry was a teacher. I don’t think Folly

did—and those were their real names!

Also Bernice, Sherry, Rona . . . they were

the Nadlers, the Rubensteins, the Breshers,

mostly second-generation European Jews

who’d made good on the promises

of their parents’ hard-earned poverty

having moved this ambitious distance from

the boroughs of New York City. It sounds,

I know, like I’m merely spinning stereotype,

but this was my home—it was true!

This is what the successful offspring

of Holocaust survivors did,

after depositing their parents in Florida

(my grandmother lived there, we visited

at least once a year). This was the 1980s.

There was money and hope that

hadn’t yet run out in our temporary

home built to negotiate with doubt.

Like everywhere else, childhood

lasted forever, miles and miles

of time between yearly checkups.

The day after my birthday, no

next birthday in sight. Days

were lives, ending and beginning,

all deaths and births and TV specials.

Think of all the bugs I met

in the dirt in front of my house.

I can’t recall the last time I sat

cross-legged, digging the ground

with a stick. I was no different from anyone.

Of course school days singed my guts

like slow branding irons. I knew

all the corners and back roads too well

to lose my virginity there, so I kept it until

I could leave. How lonely that made me,

but most people are lonely, and

young time seems always to be

running out while taking forever

to pass. I recall my sense of it

passing, thick air in empty rooms.

Nothing’s so poignant now as then,

and mostly I’m relieved.

We might have been happier, but

my parents weren’t bred

for idle joy by their fallen Jewish families,

those schools of half-hearted compromise.

He drank and ran like his father had.

She worked and made do like her mother.

Though she was extraordinary in her way.

She was, after all, the president

of the recruiting firm she and my dad

co-owned. They found jobs

for 1980s marketing execs, back when

they handed out those jobs like business cards.

It all went to ruin when she died

in ’94. It all went to ruin, but it had

long been on its way. My generation

was taught there was nothing immoral

about sex, it was merely lethal.

Then there was the first President Bush,

the first Iraq war. Soon enough

no one was hiring execs

anymore. They fired Mrs. Brown—

she died to me right then, but kept calling,

creepy and despondent, begging me to beg

my dad for money throughout high school,

my own interminable gauntlet. But I wasn’t different.

One teacher to whom I bragged about my shaved

head and eager high school beard

countered flatly: Craig, you’re not that weird.

And there was love and joy—

there had always been. My mom

was fun, my dad sort of funny, and

I never doubted, despite my misery,

that I belonged to a normal, happy

family. Later I learned to blame them

for my ghosts and weight problem, but

not then. Every New Year

the three of us would huddle together

around the living room chair, taking turns

wearing a festive hat with a

feather—they must have picked it up

at some party years back—taking

family pictures by the fancy miracle

of a new camera with a timer

on the shutter. My father would hurry

across the room, the camera suddenly

ticking, as if to catch the soon-to-be

immortal moment. He made it every time,

though where are those pictures now?

More paper, the lost manifest of my memory,

boxes and file cabinets stored someplace

four homes hence, which promises,

someday, to verify what I think I felt.

An eighteenth-century stone wall ringed

my yard and those on my block, one

of many relics of the tenant farms—

subjects of the great manor house, now

a tourist attraction, a few miles up

the Hudson. The three oldest

houses in Edgemont—which was once

quaintly Greenville (my elementary school

was given our town’s former

name)—had stood since the 1700s,

with barns or pillared porches or

wooden fences to set them apart

from the stucco or clapboard abodes

that had overrun all the roads, which were

named after our first families—

the Underhills, the Seeleys—

whose generations lay buried in sizable

plots in the old graveyard behind

my high school track, whose church

had been replaced by a Burger King

and a tiny mall with no good stores.

I spent hours by those graves, trying

to fathom time, I looked

into that charged dirt for

the past returning like my reflection

on a pond. I spent my afternoons

smoking by a pond, man-made,

that opened below one of those immemorial

mansions. I ran my hand over stones

some two-hundred-years-dead

man had set into a wall to mark

the edge of his land, and the past

seemed less distant because I did.

I could hold that rock

and rewind time and find myself

standing between verb tenses.

It wasn’t so bad, was it? Nor

so long ago. Twenty years can fit

neatly in the snow globe of one

small thought. And yet, already I talk of

that past as the past, and finally

I think it is. But who really wants

to hear about it? Where’s all

the poetry, one wonders. Not there

in the thin and dwindling mythology

of another middle-class family.

I’ve wished the hell that made me

looked more like Hell, some darkly

broken faraway out of whose muck

I could have arisen. But the days were

gorgeous in spring and summer,

sweetly nostalgic in fall. In winter,

there was always good snow to throw.

Children opened like soft dandelions

in all those landscaped yards.

Our seeds blew wide and most of us have grown

prosperous—we have money now

and safe, smart kids of our own.

I was raising mine in the city, a few

long miles from that lush suburban trap,

thinking, from thirty minutes away,

I was free to never go back. And now,

because my kids deserve some grass

of their own to hunt for bugs in,

my wife and I have put our money down

on a little house in New Jersey

in another happy town

like Edgemont. May our years pass gently.