You can see the highway through the slats in the fence behind our house. A tunnel runs under it, where the workmen used to cross back and forth while the road was being constructed. I was forbidden to go inside, but who could resist? A concrete-lined cylinder, cracked in places, rumored to have rats. By the time I had the courage to run through it, I was too tall to get through without stooping, making it a fast, uncomfortable trip with the sound of traffic close to my head. Every kid from the old regime has been through that tunnel and back once. The new ones probably will never even know it’s there.
This is the oldest part of Route 128, north of Boston from Hawthorne to Gloucester, where the highway has only two lanes in either direction. The houses on my street were built all on one floor, and they’re all identical, although some are turned this way or that on the winding, hilly road. When I was little, you could walk into any house blindfolded and be able to find a box of cornflakes, a piece of chalk, or a Nerf ball.
From the driveway (no garage, no carport, two economy cars), you walk in the front door (no hallway, foyer, or vestibule) directly into the living room. Here is a big plate-glass window ideal for leaning on for hours, when you were small, in case a rabbit or anything went by, and leaving your hand and lip prints on the glass like white stage makeup.
A dining room with crank-out windows is behind the living room, and if it’s summer you have to decide whether to be cool and hear the highway noise or enjoy a sweaty silence. Next to that is a kitchen that looks into the living room over a partial brick wall topped by metal bars, so your mother could see what you were doing if it got too quiet. At one end of the house are a woody den with built-in spaces for books and your family’s one TV, then a small cement-floored room for your tools, sports equipment, winter boots, cleaning supplies, and so on. This room contains your oil tank, your clothes dryer and ironing board, and a pull-down ladder for reaching the attic crawlspace to get toys you’ve outgrown but like to visit, Halloween costumes, and all your grandparents’ things. Also a pink kitchen table with black legs, where your father keeps an ancient suitcase full of small hardware parts that he never bothers to sort. And which you open sometimes, on your own, to crunch the parts with both hands and hear them clank—like a sea that someone drained the water from, leaving only shells.
At the other end of the house are two junior-size bedrooms and a hall bathroom, and one big bedroom with its own sink and toilet. Outside are a bicycle shed, a garden shed, and a patio made of concrete blocks.
All perfectly adequate, you would think. But then in September, our uphill neighbors built an addition, a second-story bedroom the length of the whole house and a mammoth garage with a separate apartment above it for their son who is not much older than me, and just as the builders were finishing the parents’ balcony and the appliance store truck was pulling up with the son’s gas grill, our house was eclipsed. Mom stood in the shadow beside her rosebushes, shaking a fist at the neighbors’ house (although she knew they weren’t home at the time).
“How could they do this to us?” she wailed.
I’m not sure, but I think this shadow could be contributing to our problems.