Homes

            by Anna McDowell

 

Beginnings

“You know that Richmond, California has the highest crime rate of all US cities?” Devon whispers to me during our fourth period US History class. “Really?” I respond and stop chewing my pencil’s eraser. This statistic surprises me. Not because I don’t believe him, but because Richmond is my home.

***

A knock on my door means it’s time to go. I snatch my bag, stuffing into it two granola bars, in case I get hungry, and a bus pass. Ada is waiting on my doorstep.

“Ready?”

“Yeah… one sec.” I fumble around in my bag for a second. Everything there? Yes. I can never check too many times. After all, maybe a granola bar has fallen out of my bag in the time that it took me to answer the front door. We start our long and rather treacherous haul to the bus stop. A journey made much more pleasant by the company of a friend, as passing drivers toot their car-horns at us nearly every other block.

***

From before I can remember, and until very recently, I have lived in a neighborhood steered clear of by tourists and feared by nearly all the people with whom I happen to associate myself: the white middle class. When I told friends’ parents where I lived, their faces would sometimes turn a shade paler, eyes widening with fear and surprise. Richmond, I’d say, indifferent to their anxiety. Friends’ parents have said to me, for fear of being politically incorrect, that they have no problem with teenagers riding public transportation at night or walking around Richmond in broad daylight. I have learned that it is true that these tasks do not bother them, but only if it is not their own children we are discussing.

Richmond, I am told, was once a bustling and happening place. All the way from 40^th to 10^th street prosperous stores were open, and thriving shipyards that were not yet inhabited by the schizophrenic homeless. During the early 1900’s the Ford Motor Company proudly opened a factory line in Richmond and later a vast number of oil refining wells were assembled in the city’s hills. I’m not sure exactly when or how it happened, but at some point in its history, Richmond’s productivity and wealth began to slide down a slippery slope. Shops and restaurants went bankrupt and money-hungry developers erected McDonald’s and Taco Bells in their places. Many people with jobs moved out of town and poorer people moved in. My family was one of them. I was two years old and my parents were young artists from New York City, just beginning to start their lives as working parents.

            Before falling asleep, when I was very young, I sometimes heard the distant sounds of gunshots. My mom would be in the middle of our extensive nightly ritual of bedtime story, cuddle, backrub, song, tuck-in, closing of my closet, check for monster under bed, and kiss goodnight when I would ask her, “Mom…what was that sound?” Not wanting to tell me the alarming truth she responded every time,“ That was the sound of a car backfiring. It’s nothing to worry about.” For a long time I believed that Richmond was filled with malfunctioning cars.

            Richmond Montessori was my very first school experience. Located on Garvin and 35^th, just 3 blocks from my house, I tricycled to school every morning with my mom following closely behind. I met my first friends at Richmond Montessori, Robin Croen and Emily Griffin. Robin came first. He was loud and nearly as rambunctious and bossy as I was.  We shared a belief that we were just as mature as any ten year-old, at least, and that our limited stature of three feet was not at all confining. To our parents delight, we put on magnificent shows nearly every night. Our living rooms transformed into grand dance theaters and our couches into expensive house seats. Adorned in a colorful muddle of face-paint and wearing all the sequined dress-up clothes and feather boas I owned, we both entered the stage, wiggling about to the music that blasted from our 1980’s-style stereo system. Our exhausted parents sat on the couch, laughing and then yawning at our attempts at post-modern dance, although we had no idea of any dance styles other than our own.

            On the other hand, Emily was quiet and alarmingly reserved for a two-year-old. Her mother owned and ran Richmond Montessori Pre-School and so I saw Emily nearly every day. Through choppy straight-across bangs, her big blue eyes lit up when she was alone with just Robin and me. I think it was her shyness that kept her from playing with many other kids. But Robin and I were neither fazed nor bothered by her painful quietness and engaged her in all our imaginary games, no matter how much she resisted.

            Unfortunately, these childhood playdates were cut short when both Robin and Emily moved away around the same time. We were all five years old. Emily’s dad had a job opportunity in Minnesota and Robin’s parents wanted to get out of Richmond and move to Lafayette. My family stayed put, and I had to say good-bye. I didn’t realize, at age five that their moving meant a long time without any friends living close by. I had no idea how isolating it would sometimes feel to be the only one of my new group of friends who did not live in Berkeley.

            From an early age I could sense slight differences between the personalities of my new friends from outside of Richmond and myself. While my new friends made believe that their Barbies were living in big castles, waking up to the mildly bothersome tasks of having to wash their new pink BMW’s, my Barbies were running away from bad guys and hiding in caves in the sofa, orphaned by their poor parents who couldn’t afford to keep them. I never believed in Santa Claus because the idea of a jolly fat man traveling from house to house on a flying sleigh was physically impossible. Maybe it was just my nature to be a little more intense or maybe it was due to a childhood in Richmond.

***

At the age of 7, I remember staring out the front window as our neighbor Charlie’s ‘girlfriend’ was rushed out of his front door on a stretcher. Later I was told she was actually a prostitute who generally used Charlie for his easy drug access and the mattress on his dirty floorboards. It seemed that she had accidentally guzzled down too many of her pain pills, had passed out, and was no longer conscious. I felt bad for her and worried that she might not ever wake up. This was before I learned that the only pain she felt was deep inside her, and that no pain medication could ever cure that sort of pain.

Richmond is plagued with drug addicts, drug dealers, gangs, and unhappy neighbors. Threatening gates enclose many front yards where chained dogs foam at the mouth. Fortunately for me, my street in Richmond was not quite so bad. My house was situated next to the First Presbyterian Church of Richmond, and although I never actually attended a service there, I could be found biking - or later, in my middle school years, whizzing by on a skateboard - nearly every Sunday in the Church’s parking lot; perfect turf for my wheels of speed.

***

Ada moved to Richmond in 6^th grade. I met her at Kensington Elementary School. I found that she had a similarly intense quality about her. Life hadn’t been handed to her like many of the kids we went to school with. At recess we ran through racecourses that we had strategically pieced together, or dealt out cards on the ramp to the portable classrooms that had been assembled for the one and only disabled kid at school. She was my first neighbor friend since 1991 when both Robin and Emily moved away.

I remember the first day I went to visit her. Pink helmet tilted to one side (for style), purple spandex shorts and green high tops on, I jumped on my bike and rode the five blocks it took to get there, my stunning streamers flowing in the wind. The floors of her house were covered in brown boxes and stacks of books. I had to clumsily climb over them to get to her. When I finally made it through my trek, we grabbed each other and screamed with delight.

France

            My aching, bloodshot eyes searched around for a round-faced, grey haired man in a fishing hat. Where was he? If my dad had forgotten my plane’s arrival time, or worse, not yet arrived in France himself, how would I survive on 20 euros and zero hours of sleep for the following one and a half days? Through my hazy, exhausted thoughts emerged feelings of panic. How would I figure out how to be wired enough money to pay for a hotel? But, before I could panic any further, I heard, above the many French voices around me, someone calling my name. The Irish lilt in my dad’s accent was ever more apparent in a Francophone country. “Anna!” he yelled. I wheeled around to see the brim of a khaki colored hat making its way through the crowd in my direction.

***

             I had spent six summers and one spring at my house in France and still it felt like a house we were just renting. Its foot-thick stone walls were cold and imposing, holding a history that was not yet a part of me, but a part of the owners that had lived there for hundreds of years before. Everything felt foreign. The eight foot-wide fireplace was impressive, with a thick black chain hanging in the center, but felt as distant to me as any of the impressive paintings I had seen in museums. At night, instead of blaring car alarms or the booming bass of neighbor’s favorite songs, we were all woken up by the hiss of owls in the attic, and in the morning by the loud cries of baby cows that had lost their mothers in the fields next to the house.

             We opened the heavy front door. It screeched as it slid over our living room’s cement flooring. The house was cold and dark, its walls almost squinting at the few rays of sunlight that permeated through our entryway. No one had stayed here for a whole year and the thick layer of dust that lay on every surface confirmed my family’s absence. My sister, my dad, my mom and I all climbed the rickety staircase, too tired to worry about any overdue spring cleaning. I lay down in my antique wood-framed bed, my nostrils filling with the stuffy scent of mothballs drifting out of my open armoire. Fatigue took me over and I was soon sound asleep.

***

            I started working at a local French bakery within my second week of vacation. Every morning except on Sundays, I woke up at 7:00 to be at work in Treignac at 8:00. After jumping in the shower and throwing on some jeans and a t-shirt I shook my dad awake. We both jumped in our 1990 Renault 21 and puttered down the road on our way to the bakery. I think my early work schedule was responsible for the start of my new and unhealthy addiction to French coffee and croissant. Veronique, my boss and the beautiful wife of the baker, and I chatted every morning while tasting the tarts of the day and sipping our black “café”. She told me about her horrible divorce to a raging alcoholic in Paris, I told her of my only high school relationship, which had ended on much less messy terms than her marriage. My efficiency at the bakery progressed considerably each day. By the end of my summer, I had mastered the task of using “la caisse” (the cash register), learned the name of every bread and pastry we sold, and even started friendly –and not so friendly-relationships with many of our customers.

            One experience I had at the bakery became so popular a local story that even when I was not at work, people approached me to tell a joke or two about my unforgettable mistake. An elderly woman, her frizzy hair unintentionally tinted blue, slowly teetered up to the counter. Her wrinkled and lined lips tightened as she began to speak. “Une baguette, s’il te plait, ma jeune fille,” (a baguette, please, young lady). She seemed friendly enough, for a woman who could barely see me over centimeter thick glasses. I snatched a baguette and put it on the counter beside the cash register and began to ring her up. “Est-ce que vous pouvez plier mon pain?” (could you bend my bread?), she asked, pronouncing “pain” as though there were an “-ing” at the end. Bend her bread? Why would she ask me to bend her bread in half? Couldn’t she do it herself? I decided I must have just not fully understood what she had asked. I responded: “Pardon madame, mais je ne comprends pas ce que vous dites…vous pouvez expliquer?”  (I’m sorry Miss, but I don’t understand what you’re saying….can you explain?). She looked at me as though I were a complete idiot. “Bahhh…pliez-le!” (Bend it!) she exclaimed, getting frustrated with my delayed response. I decided to attempt one last time telling this old woman that I did not understand her. She only responded even more infuriated with the same response: “Bahhhhh! Pliez-le!” That was it. I decided that my translation would have to be trusted, as weird as bending a woman’s bread may be. I picked up her long baguette, and quickly snapped it in two, watching her eyes getting wider and wider with disbelief. “Mais que-est que t’as fais? T’as cassé mon pain!” (What did you do? You broke my bread!). I was at a loss for words. She reminded me of the whiny customers who used to complain about their eggs at the breakfast restaurant I had worked at earlier that year in California. I called out for Veronique. Help me, please! Veronique came running out from the back, trying to assess the situation before I had time to explain it. Rather than scolding me, she began to laugh. Why was she laughing? I had just made a complete fool of myself. She explained: in the Corréze (the region where we were in France), when someone asks you to bend their bread, it is slang for wrapping it up in paper. Sitting at the café later, people in town walked past me, miming the breaking of a baguette, then laughing. While their jokes were sometimes quite embarrassing, being made fun of by a local meant I had become more secure as a villager myself.