The shock of moving into a house in bare need of some very basic things had absorbed my available brain matter for a couple of years, but the next spring—as the weather went from icy to steamy in the space of a week, as is the norm in these parts—I remembered with dread and excitement that I was also responsible for resurrecting a scrubby, trash-plastered dirt lot that I hoped someone might someday call a backyard.
I didn’t know what I had or where to begin. The little square of land under my care was scarred and empty, as if torched by a fireball: scraggly, knee-high weeds reaching forth from scratched-up dust; a broken chain-link fence bisecting the small space—perhaps a former dog pen; faded bits of trash snagged in every corner; and dozens of little cellophane crack bags tumbling in the wind.
But the lower the nadir, I told myself, the more dazzling the opportunity for transformation. I was going to reform this delinquent land! I was going to bring it back from ruination!
I went to a used bookstore and bought books on organic gardening. I read blogs. I observed people around me who were building pretty and productive urban gardens—which were still a bit of a novelty in this time just before the locavore/farm-to-table/neo-hippie movement took full hold. Plus, crucially, my ace in the hole: I had friends who were starting up careers in farming and landscaping, who could be persuaded to help save a smidge of urban land from a dire state of affairs.
An old friend and her husband had just started a landscape design business. As a belated house-warming gift, they offered to draft a plan to revive my apocalyptic little yard. I rattled off my priorities: plants native to the area; tall, fancy grasses; space for vegetable beds and leeway around the fire pit James was planning to build; skinny pines that would screen out some of the nastiness of the parking lot behind the chain-link fence. The entire yard is something like twenty feet wide by fifty feet long, so we had to keep it tight and tidy. They prepared a master plan for the “Warner Residence” that detailed what they would do with the space, given my desired features and a total disregard for financial constraints. It was beautiful, visionary, and—even they admitted—maybe a little much. But they were giving me a provisional plan, they said, and I could leave out any parts that didn’t suit me.
James and I decided to follow the basic shape of the plan, and to at least put the plants they recommended in the places they recommended. The rest—fancy stone inlays, timber bed edging, a pea-stone-filled patio surrounded by dense plants and arborvitae trees—we’d see about later on and probably never. I spent a dreamy afternoon at the nursery, getting grandiose in my mind and optimistically picturing myself in a chaise lounge under a thick canopy of glossy leaves, the scent of geraniums infusing the Tom Collins in my hand. There are a few steps between here and there, I thought. First, you have to buy the plants, woman. I selected them haltingly, enjoying their names (heavy metal switch grass, gayfeather, fothergilla, meadow rue) and blankly taking a stab at a substitute species when I couldn’t find the exact one on the list.
James dug the fire pit and lined it with old cobblestones we got from the public works department of a neighboring town for a dollar each. I borrowed a tiller for the topsoil, and we turned the whole yard into a mud pit so that new grass seed could be put down. Contrary to our collaborations on indoor projects, James and I found cooperation easier when we worked outside. There were fewer rules in the garden, and we felt less pressure to be exact. We could be creative without worrying that we were compromising the integrity of some important structure. And we could be under the sun, gloves on, happily ankle-deep in the muck we were learning to tend.
The whole PennHenge crew helped us plunk the plants into the ground. The ten arborvitae trees, with their big burlap-wrapped root balls, were dunked into the dirt as well, watered liberally, and left to take hold. The whole setup looked a bit half-baked that year; amateur landscaping needs substantial settling time.
We battened down for the winter and hoped that everything would survive.
By April, all but one of the arborvitaes had died horrible, crispy deaths.
Point taken. No trees. Got it.
All of the smaller perennials made it, though, and as I went out to the yard to do the landscaper’s walk of shame—digging up the root balls of the very dead trees that had been so alive just a few short months before—I doubled down on my dream of making this bedraggled dirt pit beautiful and productive. To my glee, a couple of bona fide farmers—my affable friend and erstwhile coworker Dean and his bighearted girlfriend Cal—had just moved in with my anarchist crush, Nick. Dean and Nick went way back. Dean had introduced me to Nick that day at the farmer’s market, and now he and Cal were following him to PennHenge. It was perfect. I was so proud of the assemblage of quality people living in my home.
Dean and I had gotten to be buddies while working at the farmer’s market, where we spent happy hours dissing the crabby customers while chomping reject cucumbers. Dean, a wiry, sweet guy with an unhurried air and a fondness for old Appalachian folk music, and Cal, a badass beauty from Baltimore with an effervescent laugh and a goofball sense of humor, arrived in a good-natured cloud of doggy dust (they had three between them), sweet music (they sang and played together), and crates of kale. They were starting up fledgling farming careers, and they’d drive off in a white truck with Dean’s pitbull mix every day to the rented land they farmed. I was surprised that they wanted to live in the city—especially in my crowded and chaotic neighborhood—and commute to this beautiful expanse of land, but they had a lot of friends nearby and the price was right. Although they were moving in the direction of a rural lifestyle in the long run, they were entrenched for now in an urban one, and they liked the half-on-the-farm, half-off life.
Dean did not sweat the demise of the arborvitaes; he was more about efficiency than fashion. In their place, he mapped out a veggie garden. He planned and built two long and narrow raised beds, each twelve feet by three feet or so; we added clean soil from a pristine rural place to get around the problem of our certainly polluted, potentially lead-tainted industrial dirt.
We joked about dead bodies; secretly I was slightly anxious that we might encounter one. In the heart of a former mob-controlled neighborhood, digging down is a dicey prospect.
Dean and Cal started me off with some basic crops—easy stuff like greens, onions, cucumbers, and herbs. They ran through the rhythms of gardening—the cycles of planting, fertilizing, watering, harvesting, composting—and it blew my mind. We started a hack compost pile, and I bought some tools and books to keep around. I bought a couple of strawberry plants and hoped they’d spread into a patch. Dean and Cal set me up and trusted I would learn. It was one of the best gifts anyone ever gave me.
I didn’t know I cared about gardening until I dug my hands in. I’d had no inkling of how hard I would fall for the seemingly repetitive and menial tasks required of the job. I would never have guessed that coaxing a seedling into ornate life could be so tactile, so intimate. Gardening helped me take everything more slowly. It helped me to see deeper down. It squared me with where I come from and with my current place in the world. And it gave me, simultaneously, a chance to be the queen of my own little domain, while also leaving me thrillingly open to the whims of wild chance. Sometimes I’d plant a columbine and the nasturtium would take hold instead. Sometimes a volunteer tomato plant ended up being the best producer of the season. And sometimes I went out to pick kale, only to discover the backside of every leaf encrusted in gray aphids resembling sesame seeds.
I had never before felt a real connection to the land—or specifically, the everyday earth under my shoes. Dirt was a blank substance—it was neutral to me, of no consequence. I had no knowledge of the range of life it contains. I had subconsciously shrugged off the places in which I had lived, believing them to be subpar right down to their dull and depleted soil. It had always taken a trip to a far-flung, beautiful place to elicit wide-eyed terrestrial appreciation in me, but when I began to plant a native garden and grow vegetables, I gave that view up. There would be enough here to entertain me. Rather than always looking toward the big, sweeping things, I began to gaze straight into the ground.
Angelo and Fiorella took avid notice that we’d been steadily improving the lot since moving in; I imagine this was our saving grace in their eyes, because inside the house we were loud, we stayed up late, and we listened to weird music. Angelo and I began to have quick but regular chats through the tall wooden fence that separated our yards, his little dog skittering and barking and licking my hands. One day, when the landscaping was looking particularly orderly, Angelo yelled sweetly over the fence, competing with his Sinatra on the AM radio, “It looks-a like a villa ovah there!”
I could see that their garden would forever kick my garden’s ass in terms of productivity—they had it rigged for maximum efficiency and used whatever they could put their hands on as planters—recycling bins, old bathtubs, trash cans. Their enormous grape arbor sent vines over my side of the fence, the leaves cascading prettily in lush layers. In late summer, the mellow scent of Concord grapes drifted across the grass. Angelo stood on the other side, smoking, coughing. I thought of his white hair, the way it sat vulnerably against the deeply tanned skin of his neck.
Angelo’s tendency to mumble was so ingrained that there were often long strings of words and deep swings in intonation from which I could glean no more than a word or two. He mixed in Italian phrases when the English equivalent didn’t come to him in time. But I learned the patterns of his speech, and how he formed certain words, and soon enough I was able to respond with something more apropos than a nervous laugh or a blank nod. The tone of our conversations was world-weary, put-upon, as if we both had a thankless and impossible job to get done. He’d complain a little about his health, his medications, his tomato yield; I’d complain a little about the rats, litter, and my uncontrollable cucumber vines. Under the grousing, we were communicating our love and admiration for one another. He was an older and traditional man, and I was a younger, unmarried woman with a host of unfamiliar characters visiting my house at all hours. He probably found the whole situation a little strange, but he never let on. He was happy that the house and garden were in somewhat stable hands, because you never know around here.
We began to trade our wares. I gave him jars of the jam that I made every year from his grapes. And he handed me fat glowing tomatoes over the fence and pushed basil seedlings on me whether I had room in the garden or not. I passed them baskets of strawberries, and they tossed me escarole and arugula. “You gotta wash that scarola,” Fiorella would caution me, as if the dirt still clinging to its core necessitated an apology. Fiorella once asked me if I had grandparents; I said they’d all passed away long ago. She gave me a rough squeeze and said, “We’re your grandparents now!” I was shocked, fortified, a little in love. No one passing by would have known we were here, side by side, tucked behind our defeated, old houses, on green and flowering concrete plots.
Before I could relax and enjoy our swish new backyard, there was one more big project that couldn’t wait: our mess of a bathroom. This room epitomized the lazy and cheap renovations Al had put in place, which we’d been deliberately trying to wipe away since we’d moved in. I called a contractor friend, Shawn, and we worked out a time frame. James, Shawn, and I demo’d the old bathroom, throwing dried-out pieces of plaster and wood from the third-floor window and exultantly watching them slam to the ground below. Shawn spent a good month of his life in this unventilated, ultra-dusty, sweltering shell of a room, putting up new drywall, knocking out a wall in order to swap out the summer camp shower stall with a proper bathtub/shower, replacing the vinyl floor with smooth bamboo, switching the sad little sink out with a basic but comparatively luxurious Ikea model that could accommodate facewashing, and—vitally—removing the door from the next room over, while covering over the resulting hole with drywall. He also added built-in bookshelves to that room, which helped me justify my book habit. In one fell swoop, Shawn—a stickler who took his time and did it right—removed many of the irritants that plagued me in this apartment, and applied a salve to the burn in the form of things that worked as they should, didn’t look ridiculous, and fit in the space provided.
This house was starting to come together.
Itching for another summer of restrained flirtation with Nick, but knowing I should be good, I readied myself to weather another Fourth of July. This time, James and I had the wherewithal to know that staying in the neighborhood would only infuriate us. Avoiding the heat and the noise became job number one. Escaping just as the blasts started up, we drove south to the Wood River, near the town he grew up in, and rented a canoe for the day. It felt luxurious to be surrounded by sounds of nature, by rushing water instead of crackling explosives. We tossed a bag of pretzels and a few cans of seltzer and beer into the canoe, and pushed off. We paddled, we stopped for a swim, we paddled, we swam some more. The sun came through the leaves; the bugs zipped in a cloud that clipped the surface of the river.
We got along that day, but there was always a hard edge to our togetherness. Our fun was usually centered on mocking things, judging people, with a negative current to it even in the best of times. It had become clear that we both believed we were ignoring an essential part of ourselves by being together. By now I was neither attracted to James nor willing to accept that he wasn’t attracted to me. I tried to picture him before he let his gray hair grow to the middle of his back, and before his beard concealed his thin face, but the vision was obscured. Then I pictured Nick, new and untarnished in my mind, someone who was fresh and funny, who didn’t obliquely hate me, and whose mind wasn’t 100 percent decided on every topic in existence. But I did nothing. I stayed unhappy; I told no one how unhappy I was. I acted like a happy person. I’d never met anyone else like James, and I mistook that for a reason to stay in a relationship with him, and not simply to be happy to know him.
To break up is to be a mover, and I am a stayer.
As Nick and I became good friends, I watched him date a few ladies and made note of his love interests. They were rowdier than me, unpredictable and flagrantly sexy, less apt to give a fuck. They were cool; they were intimidating—the kind of women of whom I’d already been jealous my whole life. Wildness could get you in trouble, but so could cautiousness.
Nick would give me some little bit of detail on a misstep he’d made with a woman he’d been dating, and—having been let in on his inner workings, the curtain concealing his dating rationale drawn back—my white-hot attraction began to simmer down to an inconspicuous flicker. I wish I could say that we once made out ferociously while James was in the next room, but I never gave Nick any sign of my crush. Because I’m both a champion hider of love interest and in possession of a tone-deaf obliviousness to others’ interest in me, I have absolutely no idea if he returned my admiration. I know he observed my relationship with James and saw that it was rather flimsy in spots.
As his time in the house lengthened, I started to think of Nick as a brother-in-arms, someone who believed as much as I did that we could make this a dream living situation, a punk house with a heart. Although that goal may have been a touch too lofty, he was the person who made it seem noble, a worthwhile place to find ourselves.
During Nick’s stay, we were tormented by the presence of a group of very active drug dealers who operated from the second floor of the house directly across the street, a triple-decker like mine, its vinyl siding once white but now a crusty gray. There was no specific offending event—it just sucks to live near a crack house, and to know that you live near a crack house. The house always looked cold and bereft. The lights were usually kept off. The door stayed unlocked all day and night, banging open in the wind, even in winter. Cars pulled up, cars pulled away. The clientele hassled my tenants and me on the street. There was a mundane gloominess to it all.
Annoyed, my neighbors and I steeled ourselves to outlast the problem. We traded acerbic comments about firebombing the place. One winter morning, after years of indignantly observing the house for sport, I spent a happy hour or so sipping coffee and watching from the third floor of my house as a bunch of FBI agents in bulletproof vests raided the house. People were arrested, the house vacated. It sat hauntingly empty for months, its rammed-in front door like a black eye as it slept off the comedown. When it sold to a new owner, a crew came around and did some mild sprucing, painting and replacing the busted front door.
The house has since been home to a succession of nice people: single moms and their kids, students, twentysomethings with Obama signs in their windows. But it’s hard for me to see this particular house anew. My eyes still slip right back to its broken past. Realizing this has lightened my judgment of the neighborhood’s old guard, the few Italian American families who stuck around Federal Hill until the present, who never left for the suburbs, the stubborn ones who continue to cling to vestiges of sameness and ritual. They’re no longer the majority; they feel threatened; a toxic bitterness leeches from some of them. In situations where I’ve been forced to confront these people, I’m put off by their fear of the future. But being privy to the crack house in full swing, and then watching the ravaged shell sit in its aftermath, I’ve become aware that my inclinations toward this one house may be like the inclinations of the old guard toward the entire neighborhood. Where I saw one house in decline and decay, they see an entire neighborhood comprised of old housing that has fallen into disrepair, and yeah, that is sad. But I don’t blame the current mix of renters and owners within those homes for the waning grandeur of the neighborhood—especially not on the basis of their race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic standing. I suspect that the old guard might.
A friend and coffee shop coworker of mine mentioned that she needed a place to stay for a couple of months while her girlfriend looked for an apartment in Washington, DC, where they planned to move. I was psyched and quickly offered her the “extra” room in our apartment—as extra as a room can be when one’s living space is eight hundred square feet—for a couple hundred bucks a month. Amanda brought a mattress, some clothes, and her bike, and we settled in to shit-talk our way through the rest of the season of Project Runway. She and I sat at the kitchen table making up new words* and a variety of memes involving my oversized cat, Kernel.
Her girlfriend Kelly stayed with us, too, when she was back in town.
It was crowded, but in a madcap way, the women chattering away, unleashing unimaginable amounts of sarcasm and outtalking the normally long-winded James. Then, James’s twenty-year-old goth metal-loving nephew, Adam, decided to come to Providence from a foreclosure-ridden manufactured community in Florida, where he’d been living with his dad. He was experiencing the type of misery you would expect from a darkness-embracing kid living in a sunny Southern suburb, and we worried about his fate should he not get out immediately. So he too showed up at PennHenge with little warning. Adam’s favorite uncle James acted as his oddball mentor and creative coach. We had no more extra rooms, so Adam got the couch. I was game—I wanted to help this sad, broke boy—but I was in denial about the loss of the couch I so enjoyed. With this one last addition, we seemed to cross a line into sitcom territory: a frustrated straight couple, a chatty lesbian couple, two ill-behaved male cats, and a young mall goth who drew on his face every day with black Sharpie, all in one two-bedroom apartment.
Meanwhile, the persistent need for regular money and health insurance swung me back in the direction of the nine-to-five world, and I’d accepted a full-time job as an editor at a small audiobook publisher. I was starting up a new publishing division; not only did I not know how to do that, my bosses didn’t either, so there was a lot of nebulous, on-the-fly decision-making that left me flustered and exhausted. By the time I got home at night, I just wanted mindless quiet. I wanted my apartment back. The overcrowding had been livable at first, but at some point I noticed each of us had locked ourselves into whichever room we could be alone. This made it a challenge to get into the bathroom, the one room I needed unfettered access to at all times. My digestive worries were somehow growing still worse, and more painful, no matter how much doctor-sanctioned fiber I ritualistically put into my face.
Amanda and Kelly left town as planned. And it turned out that James’s persistent life instruction was transformative, because soon Adam found a job, and then an apartment. By then interaction between Adam and me had dwindled to a floor-gazing near-silence.
With everyone safely on their respective ways, PennHenge enjoyed a short few weeks of peace. But soon the tension was running hot once again. Nick had decided to move out. He wasn’t getting along with Dean; their friendship had melted down under the pressure of living together, and with Cal a constant presence. Cal and Dean weren’t getting along, either. I stayed especially far afield of the conflict, being that I loved all three of these people. My knowing the details would only serve to lessen my impartiality. Staying in the dark also helped me hang on to the overly hopeful notion that this would easily blow over in record time. To nurture an atmosphere of reconciliation, I walked on tiptoe, turned down the stereo, burned incense, and napped a lot. I sought to keep the PennHenge environs aggressively happy; I hoped my calm vibes could somehow diminish the conflict, and get everybody to hug and forget about it.
Despite the recent trouble between them, Dean and Cal were an endearing pairing. They worked together, in the warm air, their hands in the lush soil and the breeze ruffling their hair. They made their own schedules, and they grew and sold their own food. They cooked feasts; they played music. A pure air of self-determination seemed to permeate both of them. In my confusion and weakness, my own relationship a sham, having returned to work in a beige office behind a beige desk and feeling the eternal hankering for fresh air and freedom, I gazed at them as if they held ancient knowledge, some secret to a meaningful life that I could look in on.
In a sense, they did help me find my way. But they were as conflicted as anyone else.
Nick left, and all was strangely quiet. I missed his grounding presence.
All of my tiptoeing around and providing a healing atmosphere may as well have been directed right back at me, considering the state of my relationship. I’d been thinking about how I was going to break up with James for months. We’d accomplished a lot together, but any foundation of love and trust we thought we’d built was imaginary. I was overrun with resentment toward him, unable to react to his everyday trials with compassion because he owed me emotional and financial debts we both knew he’d never repay. I felt belittled, lonely, and alienated. Buying and maintaining the house while working a full-time job had required a lot of dull sacrifices, and I felt ashamed because he intimated that I wasn’t doing enough creative shit. I didn’t think he appreciated all I had done to get us this house—at his urging—while he continued in much the same way as before, feeling little of the stress of owning PennHenge. I was irritated with him for expecting me to pay his way, and with myself for paying it.
I was attached to him, but I couldn’t remember why. I was still trying to fulfill the role of long-suffering girlfriend, grasping at anything that might pass for love. We were together because we’d been together. We hadn’t kissed in years.
He felt it too—he was charting the end of the voyage. That was exactly what he was aiming for when he took off from a party with a young art student, coming home supremely haggard in the morning. That evening, I (shamefully) read his Facebook messages. The talk was of how drunk they’d been, but still they’d managed to fuck, haha! I stomped into the bedroom, where James was napping, calling him a selfish asshole, telling him he needed to leave. He had little to say, but at least he didn’t deny it. I was pissed off. I was relieved.
It took a couple of ugly days, but we quickly and cleanly ended our nearly nine-year relationship. He felt terrible, which was the right thing, but in his remorse I sensed a paternalistic quality—like he felt he had done a bad job at protecting me, the precious flower, the weak little woman. This was so far from how I saw myself that I wanted to scream in his face, beat his chest, let him know that there were many definitions of strength and that mine had carried us both for years.
We’d lived at PennHenge together for nearly three years. The relationship was mourned before it was over—I’d already visualized it so thoroughly. I was thirty years old. I was single, lonely, and in no hurry to fulfill any biological destiny. I was going to find out what it meant to live alone.
It could be said that James stuck me with the largest, most glaring piece of relationship baggage imaginable, a monstrous actualization of the hopelessness of our entanglement. He pushed me to buy this demanding house, in effect hastening our demise, and took off to start fresh and free elsewhere. Immediately post-breakup, when I wanted to be angry, maybe I played that card. But in actuality, I was grateful for the house. It offered me continuity and dependability (though it was often dependably insane). I didn’t have to uproot myself entirely to end this relationship. I was suddenly free to make the house fully mine, without towing anybody along. I’m glad I got the chance to say “Get your stuff and get the fuck out of my house” once in my life. Every long-suffering girlfriend deserves to utter those words.
* Our best work was nauticrap (n): A subcategory of pricey antiques salvaged from ships or other seafaring vessels, i.e., buoys, anchors, mastheads, knotwork, scrimshaw, etc.