One
We are the last house before the woods. That’s why my parents bought it. My mother thought it was too small, even though they were only two at the time, because they planned probably to have a baby someday and maybe even another one after that. Who could see that many years in the future? “We’ll build an extension,” my father promised. “There’s so much room here.” She thought the house was too dark, but my father said he’d cut holes in the walls and fill them with glass. When she told me this story when I was little, I pictured smashed windshields and wineglasses swept up and piled into big gaps punched in the walls. At some point, years later, I realized he’d meant windows, and it blew my mind—that a window was nothing more than a hole cut in a wall and filled with glass, that even something as stable and permanent as a wall was no more solid or nonnegotiable than anything else.
In the cramped kitchen she wasn’t sold, but he turned her around by the shoulders and pointed her toward the woods. Think of wind blowing through summer branches, he said. Think of our kids jumping in piles of school-bus-colored leaves. Think of the forts they’ll build and the exploring they’ll do and the trees they’ll climb and the make-believe they’ll make believe out there. There’s no place better to be a kid than the woods. No place safer.
I have played in his woods, but I have mostly played alone. If Monday did not fear the dirt, the disorder, the potential to get lost. If Mirabel’s chair could more comfortably cover ground stippled with roots, branches, puddles, mud. If Mama hadn’t come to see danger lurking everywhere. If he had himself survived. But that’s a lot of ifs. And besides, there was no place safe here after all.
Pooh used to be our next-door neighbor, back before we lived here, years and years before I was born. It’s maddening that I missed this merely by arriving six decades too late. When she was a little girl, she lived in the house next door to ours, and the people who lived in our house were an older couple called the Perrys who used to invite her over after school for fruitcake.
“What’s fruitcake?” I asked the first time Pooh told me about them, my ghost roommates.
“Old-fashioned holiday loaf that tastes like shit. That’s why they foisted it off on me. But it tastes like shit because it keeps forever so they’d get half a dozen at Christmas and saw off one tiny slice every time I came over. It’d last almost until summer.”
“Why’d you eat it?”
“Even bad cake is still cake when you’re little.” She shrugged. “It’s a shame you didn’t live here then. They’d have liked to know the four of you.”
“The house would have been pretty crowded at that point.”
“They’d have appreciated your mother’s baking skills. But mostly, they liked kids. Never had any of their own. I think they didn’t mind not having kids, but they hated not having grandkids. That’s why they liked me. That’s why they’d have liked you.”
“Is that why you like me?” I ventured. “Because you don’t have any kids of your own?”
Pooh snorted. “I don’t like kids. Having no kids isn’t why I like you. You’re the exception.”
“Everyone likes kids,” I said.
“No.” She looked over her glasses and down her nose at me. “Children are a pain in the ass. Look at your poor mother. No offense.”
“I’m not a pain in her ass,” I protested.
“Oh, sweetie, I love you, but of course you are. That’s the whole point of children—they keep you grounded, but another way to say that is they weigh you down. Grandchildren are probably better, but it’s not like you can start with them so you have to lie.”
“Lie?”
“To your kids. If you let them know how much they wreck your life, your kids won’t make you any grandchildren.” She stopped pulling at her fingers and pointed one at me. “You remember that now, Mab. That’s good advice I’m giving you.”
“I’m not having kids,” I said.
“Of course you are.”
“How?”
“Mab Mitchell, Bourne Memorial High School may not be Eton, but I know you don’t need me to answer that question.”
“I don’t mean how how. I just mean … I’m never going to meet anyone here I want to … you know.”
“What’s wrong with here?” She threaded her fists through the armrests of her wheelchair to plant them on her hips.
“Among other things—” I was, in contrast, lolling on her sofa, one leg long along the cushions, one stretching over my head—“there is no one here I would want to raise a child with, never mind, you know, make a child with.”
“I think there may be some lovely baby-makers in Bourne. Not now, of course. Not soon, even. But there’s no need to rule all of them out forever.”
“I’ve known everyone here too long. They’re practically related to me at this point. It’s gross to have a baby with someone you’re related to.”
“Well, inadvisable anyway,” Pooh conceded, “but don’t knock friends and neighbors who are like family. That’s the best thing about Bourne.”
“It’s a short list.”
“Maybe, but that’s a big thing. It’s why I stayed.”
“No it’s not.”
“The hell it isn’t. Why do you think I’m still here?”
I sat up to look at her. It had honestly never occurred to me that she had a choice. “I thought you…” I trailed off.
“You thought I couldn’t leave. You thought I was stuck here. Well, I’m not. I like it here. It’s small—”
“Too small,” I interrupted.
“Other places have more people,” Pooh said, “but the problem with people is lots of them suck. You limit the population, you limit the assholes too.” Then it seemed like she changed the subject. “You know what growing up Korean in America in the thirties and forties was like? Even with the name Winifred?”
Especially with the name Winifred, I thought.
“Here I got teased and picked on and called names, and Bobby Euford’s mother wouldn’t let us go to prom together, but that was pretty much it. I had cousins in Los Angeles, San Francisco—big, beautiful cities—who got beaten, who got deported, who owned houses and businesses that got destroyed. Anyone tried to deport us? They’d have had to answer to all of Bourne. We were here so we were one of them. We were part of the community. Bourne was small enough that’s what mattered to people here. Matters to people here.”
I saw her point—that life can be terrible anywhere, that there are lots of ways besides ours to get screwed and lots of ways to be evil besides Belsum’s, that sheltered has its perks too—but instead I was thinking about how much wider her life had been than mine. How much fuller and farther flung. “Maybe a small town has fewer assholes,” I said, “but it has fewer cool people too.”
“We have plenty of cool people. Neighbors you know will be there when you need them. Neighbors who get you and what you’ve been through. A sense of place. Shared history. None of that’s easy to find. Or easy to give up.”