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Twelve Houses
by Ashley Sales Meridian
Duchess
On the Fourth of July, when my mother was eight months pregnant with my sister, my parents had a party at the house on Duchess. There’s a picture of me from that afternoon; I’m wearing little red corduroy pants, a homemade top, and carrying a Raggedy Anne doll. My mother is in the background, a white cardigan over her sundress to cover her huge bump. A few minutes after the picture was taken, I ran around the corner and into the wall, cracking my forehead open. My mother calmly picked me up and carried me back into the kitchen. When my dad asked what happened, my mom told him I had just bumped my head. “She’ll be fine,” she said waving him away. When she turned around to go talk to the guests, he noticed a stream of blood flowing from my head down my mother’s white sweater. Now, of course, I know that my scar is not beastly at all. No one has ever commented on or noticed the bump. In fact, I’ve grown to actually appreciate the imperfection. I like having a reminder, a constant memory of time and place in my childhood. I have a history at Duchess, a history that has made its mark right in the middle of my forehead. Locust, Dogwood
Dogwood wasn’t that different from Locust, and I can’t remember much about either of them. Dogwood, house number four, was a two story with vinyl siding painted a obnoxious shade of mint green. There was a big black mailbox in the front yard, a burgundy door, and black shutters. Now that I’m older, I wonder how my mother let us stay there for two years without changing the façade. House number four was in the tree area of Kalamazoo, a city that received copious snow from the low clouds that rolled in off Lake Michigan. In the winter, my sister Alison and I would wear long underwear and huddle around the fireplace in the den. The carpet was a deep burnt orange – a color that mirrored the embers. We still had the worn leather chairs, which would warm to the touch when a fire was burning. The kitchen floor was brown vinyl, grainy to the touch. My mother claims I would crawl across the vinyl to our dog’s bowl and eat his food. When she tried to fish the Kibbles out, I would lock my jaw so tight that she couldn’t pry it open. When she would feed me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I would smush it so hard between my fingers that the mess would ooze out between the cracks. I reportedly licked the goo straight from my knuckles. I suppose that this clenching and smushing was the root of my adult desire to break, throw, and destruct things when life isn’t going my way. But I was four, and don’t remember any of this – just the brown, grainy vinyl. There is a picture of my sister and me in the front yard with a pathetic snowman, no taller than my sister's head. When it snowed, which was often, my mother would turn us loose in the front yard. Supposedly we were content to play outside for house– making snow angels, riding the sled down the driveway, and walking on top of the snow’s crust. One of my mother’s favorite stories to tell goes like this: One day after eight inches of fresh snow, I sent the girls outside to play. It was cold and windy, but I figured the girls would come in if they were chilled. I was washing dishes and happened to look out the kitchen window. Ashley was pulling her sister around in a sled, but Ali was only wearing one boot. I went outside and asked Ashley where Ali’s shoe was. “I dunno.” She shrugged. Well, when did it fall off? “I dunno.” Well, where is it? “I dunno.” My mother took me inside a spanked me with a wooden spoon. Three days later, the woman from six houses down brought the boot back. Apparently, I had given it to her dog as a treat, who in turn brought it in through the doggie door in the garage. My parents were furious, but I just couldn’t understand why that boot mattered – it was just a boot, after all. Boots and toys and cars and houses are replaceable. Just get a new one. Douglas
That spring, we moved to Shaker Heights, a posh suburb of Cleveland. My father had been hired as treasurer of Upjohn, the pharmaceutical company that makes Rogaine. His switch from banker to executive meant a new income, and our fifth house on Douglas was twice the size of any of the previous ones. It was a three-story with four bedrooms, a detached garage, and a sloping front yard. The street was lined with trees – oaks, maples, and buckeyes – that shaded the Tudor and colonial homes. Upjohn paid a relocation fee, and my parents used that to buy new furniture. My mother had long been a fan of French country interiors, ripping out the glossy pages of Home Beautiful and stashing them in a folder. It was Douglas where she realized her dream: hardwood floors, bedrooms with unpeeling wallpaper, and a back yard with yellow rose bushes and bleeding hearts that she spent hours dawdling in. Across the street was a Jewish family with two girls the same age as my sister and me. We weren’t supposed to play with them, though – not because they were Jewish, but because my mother thought they were snobs. The first time they met, Mrs. Stewart told my mom how much her husband made, how much her wedding ring cost, and how much it cost to send her girls to Montessori school The Browns lived behind our house, our yards separated by a line of trees with knotty trunks. Although he was two years older than I was, Justin Brown became the first in a string of best friends. His air rifle and G.I. Joe’s appealed to the tomboy in me, but most our time was spent poking at caterpillars with sticks, trying to fry ants with a magnifying glass, and conning our kid sisters into giving us their snack. Susan Brown was my sister’s age, and she had a speech impediment so thick that her own mother couldn’t understand what she was saying. On more than one occasion, I remember Mrs. Brown dragging Susan over to our house during dinner and asking Ali to translate what, exactly, Susan was trying to say. When I started kindergarten, there was a girl with pretty blonde braids who would kick my shin every afternoon on the bus ride home. I would come home, whining, to show my mother the bruise. After a week, she said, “Our house is just as nice as hers. Kick the little bitch back.” My mother’s suggestion worked: one bloody shin and the girl didn’t kick me again. Instead, we became quiet enemies, glaring at each other from across the pleather bus seats. She once told the entire bus I picked my nose, but I didn’t care. I had Justin, and that was friend enough for me. Because Justin and I were in different grades, we would have to wait until after school to play. We built a fort in his room, and would take turns jumping from the top bunk to the floor. Once, Justin broke his arm on a bad jump. The next day, when I went over to sign his cast, we went in to his closet and showed each other our underwear. Mine had Wonder Woman on the front. It was during our three years on Douglas that I started to realize our family was different from others. My sister and I both had a chore list. We had to make our beds every morning. There was never a dirty dish left in our sink, never a trashcan that overflowed. Our house was immaculate, even in the dust-free corners of the closets and under our beds. Despite the fact that it was “required,” our cleanliness was a source of pride for my mother. A clean house equals a clean life, she must have thought. A clean house when your neighbor’s is messy must equal superiority. I remember a lot about that house: a birthday party with a magician, a cubby hole on the third floor that I hid in, losing my brand new moon boot in the snow pile out back, then peeing my pants when my dad told me to “dig until you find that fucker.” I can’t be sure, but I think I was happy there. And when my parents told me we were moving back to Kalamazoo in the fall of 1985, I’m sure I cried. Justin and I exchanged buckeyes to remember each other and promised to call at least once a week. I remember hugging Justin with sobs ravaging my throat, my stubby fingers clenching the back of his yellow t-shirt. When he pulled away and turned to leave, I could see the crinkles in the cotton where my hands had clung so tight. I wished those wrinkles would stay there forever. I didn’t see Justin Brown again. Scott’s Pine Way
In order to accommodate my mother’s taste, my parents decided to build a house in Colony Woods, a large subdivision on the west side of Kalamazoo. While my mom poured over blue prints and carpet samples, we moved into a two-bedroom apartment on Scott’s Pine Way, a few miles from our new house. Since we moved during the middle of the semester, my parents decided to keep my sister and I home from elementary school. This meant endless dull days either riding our bikes around the neighborhood or going with my mom to visit the lumberyard. When school let out at 3, I’m sure we played with some of the local kids, although I’m not sure when we would have made friends. Every time we moved, my mother would say the same thing – “This is a fabulous opportunity to make new friends. You should be happy!” Little did she know how hard it was to meet other first-graders when you didn’t go to school with them, let alone go to school at all. My parent’s room was on the second floor of Scott’s Pine Way– a master suite the size of our closet in Shaker Heights. Our furniture was in storage, so they had a card table set up instead of a dresser. My dad kept his money clip in a wood box on top, and that summer he noticed some money missing. I overheard my parents discussing whether or not the babysitter stole it. Although I don’t know her name and can’t picture her face, I’m quite certain that the next time I saw her I called her a thief. All together, we lived on Scott's Pine Way for seven months. I only know that because I recently asked my parents. I remember these few things, but nothing else. Not the name of a friend, not the face of a neighbor. I’m not sure if it is because I didn’t have any friends, or because they were just insignificant memories that I’ve chosen to forget. Swallow
That August, when construction was complete on our first custom home, we moved to Swallow. Our new house was a gray two-story with a bright red door and dark green shutters. The front yard was heavily wooded on either side, with gnarled pine trees and sagging oaks. The back yard had an outdoor deck and a tomato garden for my mother. Inside, the first floor was entirely hardwood floors and French country kitsch. This time, my mom decided she was sick of paying workers to paint and wallpaper no better than she could. So she decided to decorate house number seven herself. Every morning, after sending my sister and me off to our new school, she would set about a decorating project as though she were getting paid to do it. Every afternoon, when the school bus dropped us off in front of the house, my sister and I would be greeted with new curtains, a reupholstered chair, or a fleur-de-lis stenciled on the wood floors. She was a madwoman, my mother, decorating as not even Martha Stewart has decorated before. She self-inflicted the frenzy to fill her empty days with something. Anything – her husband was at work, her children at school, and volunteering at the local United Way only took three hours a week. Decorating must have been the color that filled the void. The result was impressive. Our house – royal blue, white, and yellow – had a coziness that rivaled any bed and breakfast. Antiques filled the nooks and light streamed through the custom arch windows. Once she was finished, my parents invited the neighbors over for a Friday night cocktail party. From the newly fluffed beanbag chairs in the basement, my sister and I listened in on the conversation, which primarily centered on the house. When one woman, a lawyer, asked my mother what she did, we heard her answer, “This.” I can only imagine that she was sweeping her tan, toned arm in the air. Her flawless two-carat diamond, newly purchased, would flash in the candlelight as my father proudly put his arm around her, and looked lovingly at the freshly stained armoire. Unlike my months on Scott’s Pine Way, I somehow found friends on Swallow: Becky Buzzard and Alyson Bakitas (also Swallow residents), and Tracy Summerer and Elsa Argyres, who lived three streets over on Whippoorwill. Over time, Tracy became my new best friend – we even sported the matching “Best Friends Forever” lockets we bought at the mall. She seemed to be my other half, and there were times – like when Mrs. Ludwig demanded we stay after school for “giggling detention” – that I felt as close to her as to anyone. My mother didn’t like Tracy. She had six brothers and sisters, her mom drove a beat up Suburban, and their house was messy and smelled like cat pee. Out back, Tracy had three pet rabbits. Her little brother was a notorious cusser, and Tracy always had a red Kool-Aid stain around her mouth. “They’re trash…just look at their house,” my mother would say disregarding the fact that both Tracy’s parents were engineers. My first crush, Mickey Seeley, lived on the street behind us. He had shiny dark hair and freckles on his nose and cheeks. Mickey’s dad owned the largest car dealership in Kalamazoo, and his family was considered the richest in Colony Woods. “Sure, their house is big,” my mother would say when we rode past on a family bike ride. “But have you seen the inside? No taste.” True, maybe: the Seeley’s house was a hodgepodge of leopard print and country cottage, with Barbie dolls strewn about for their two girls. But Mickey had the clearest brown eyes I had ever seen and smelled like rain and hot dogs. He was a local tennis champ, and his parents even built him a backboard to hit against in their back yard. In fact, I believe it was because of Mickey Seeley that I became a tennis player. In fourth grade, Mickey pulled me aside in the library. He told me I needed to wear a bra and that my breath smelled. I loathed him from that point on, and in time found a new crush. The girls and I would spend hours after school gushing about who wrote notes to who, or who held so-and-so’s hand during the school movie. Every weekend for three years, we would have a slumber party. That’s one hundred and fifty sleepovers, and probably three hundred bags of Combos. I remember laughing until I peed my pajama pants. I remember the routine, the comfort of knowing that next week would be the same. I loved looking around the basement and knowing where every black scratch on the drywall came from. Perhaps the most satisfying feeling of all was having proof that I had lived somewhere, for it was proof that I had lived. But most of all, I think I just loved having a home. When I started sixth grade, my mother bought the last piece of furniture she had been searching for: a lamp shaped like a rooster. That same week, unbeknownst to me, my dad started looking for a new job. Not a different job, just a new one. At the beginning of September, my parents threw me a surprise birthday party and invited all the friends I had grown up with over the past five years. At the party, they gathered everyone into the beige basement to open presents. I got personalized stationary and a new bike helmet, both of which were purple, my absolute favorite color. Then my parents gave me the last present – the news that we would be moving to Columbus, a town of 30,000 in rural Indiana. Becky kicked a piñata over, Elsa stormed out of the basement and rode her Schwinn home, and Tracy and I hugged each other. I can remember the way her smooth, pale arms felt around my chest, the faint smell of her rabbits on her hot-pink shirt. At the end of the month, we packed the moving van and stuffed our powder blue Chrysler to the brim. The girls stood on our front lawn while I sat in the back seat of the car – watching as tears thundered down each of their faces. I couldn’t understand why they were so upset. We had only known each other for a few years, and after all we were just friends. As I watched their sobs become more pronounced, I remember feeling hot anger trickle up from the back of my throat. I was angry they were making such a big deal out of this, but more than anything I was mad at myself for not making any deal out of the goodbye. I couldn’t force myself to be sad, no matter how badly I wanted to. The only thing I felt was the hot leather of the car seat singeing the back of my legs. As we drove away I remember holding a picture of Tracy with the words “Best Friends Forever” scrawled across the back in purple ink. I quietly ripped the picture into four pieces and felt a little better. Washington
Because my parents were in a hurry to move, they bought one of the first houses they could find in Columbus…a real dump of a place on Washington, a street with yellow grass and cracked sidewalks. The driveway was gravel, the back patio crowded with weeds, and the corners of the popcorn ceiling crumbled onto the stained carpet. There was a bright orange Formica counter in the kitchen, and the basement flooded every time it rained. Nevertheless, my mother crammed all our custom furniture and antique foot stools into the living room. She peeled the old wallpaper and put up the new in one afternoon. The first week we were there, three of the neighbors stopped by with house warming gifts. My mother would chat with them out on the lawn while secretly glaring at the crabgrass dotting it. When Suki Nie and her daughter, Sarah, stopped by with a pineapple, my mom wouldn’t let them in the house. “They can’t see it looking like this,” she said when they left. “It looks like a trailer,” she added, glancing towards the den. By spring, my parents had rebricked the patio in the back of the house. Although I wasn’t aware of it then, we had the largest swimming pool in Columbus, which meant our house was the hangout for a bunch of twelve-year old girls, now nameless and faceless in my memory. My mother would invite the neighborhood kids over, and we would spend sticky summer days bellyflopping off the diving board and holding underwater handstands as long as possible. We would take breaks only to chase my sister out, or to eat the sandwiches my mom prepared. Outside the house, life was good. Inside, though, my mother was exasperated with the cramped quarters and dripping faucets. By July, my parents were looking for a new house. By August they had found one – a rambling brick ranch just one street over. On an unbearably hot Saturday afternoon, my parents made thirty-two trips to move our furniture less than a quarter of a mile away. My sister and I pushed the lawnmower and snow blower down the street, and carried the dining room drapes over by hand. My mother drove our minivan along behind us to make sure we didn’t drag the fabric over the scorching pavement. I remember feeling a clump of anger heavy in my chest, not because she was embarrassing us, but because I didn’t want to leave. I liked that house…the messy imperfections allowed space for my imperfections. Washington may have been small, but there was room to breathe. Riverside
Our ninth house on Riverside bordered a soybean field, and behind that lay the White River. You couldn’t see the river from the house, but it was close enough to hike to in less than ten minutes. The ranch house was old, like all those in the neighborhood, but came to my mother as a blank slate. Clean white walls, clean beige carpet, and a rose garden to die for. Behind the screened in porch was a swimming pool, this one lined in steel. In the afternoon, the metal heat the water up to bath temperature, and the only way to escape the unyielding Indiana humidity was to run though the sprinklers in the front yard. I had my first kiss with a boy named Brock in the ranch house on Riverside. We would watch TV or play Mario Brothers in the basement, often paying my sister five bucks to leave us alone for an hour. A year later, in eighth grade, I had my first boyfriend: Bobby Witt. We would sneak down to the shed in the back yard to French kiss. Once, we hiked down to the river to make out – the first time I saw a penis. My dog died when I lived in this house. So did my grandmother. I went through puberty on Riverside: wore my first bra, got my first period, popped my first zit. It was a house of firsts, but when I drove by this past summer, I felt unattached. It was a stranger’s house. I had to remind myself that I lived there. We moved a year and a half later. I remember packing up my bedroom and not crying, even though I had loved that house more than any before it. I took a knife and scratching out my name I had carved on an old, dying tree out back. In the end, I thought, you have to take everything with you. Thompson
While construction got under way on our new house, we moved to an apartment on the east side of town. Columbus had a split personality – two fortune 500 companies were headquartered there, which meant both countless executives and countless assembly-line workers lived in one city. According to my mother, East Columbus was “where the workers lived,” a home that we should remind people was just temporary for us. The apartment on Thompson was always hot, even on cool fall nights. It was here my mom first made me wash my own clothes, and here that I became overly obsessed with Dave Matthew Band. The girl responsible was Maggie Weisskirk, a Louisville native who also moved to the apartment complex that summer. Maggie was unlike any girl I have met – a stunning blonde, stronger, smarter, and more athletic than any guy. She could do a standing front flip and kicked the neighborhood boys asses in every race. Maggie had the best taste in music, the newest pair of Birkenstocks, and her dad drove the coolest car: a red Jeep Wrangler. She instantly became the most popular girl in school, and remained so until she moved to Indianapolis in our sophomore year. My mother said she disapproved of Maggie’s hemp necklaces and untied Converse sneakers. Really, though, I knew she disapproved of the fact that the Weisskirk’s called an apartment home. Living in cramped quarters was temporarily acceptable, but living in cramped quarters permanently was for trash. Still, even after we moved to the other side of town, Maggie and I remained the closest of friends, inseparable in school, at cross-country practice, and on weekends. I smoked my first joint with Maggie the night before she moved. Four years later, I saw her at a concert in Indianapolis. Her blonde hair was dreadlocked, her face caked with mud, and she weighed about ninety pounds. “Oh my god, what happened to you?” I remember asking her drunkenly. “I was going to ask you the same thing,” she said, and walked away. Baywood
Our house on Baywood was designed by my mother, blueprints and all. The spacious brick two-story was nestled in a cul-de-sac, and the back yard gave way to a green lake that shone like sequins in the sun. Once again, my mom decorated the interior from ceiling to floor; but this time, everything was “just right.” The cathedral ceilings blended seamlessly to buttery yellow walls, the arch window flowed to the French doors below. My sister and I shared the upstairs, with our own bathroom and plush canary carpet. My sophomore year of high school, I fell in with the popular crowd. We would sneak my parent’s liquor from the cabinet, pour it in a Sprite bottle, and then spend hours on the pontoon boat trying to get drunk. I threw my first party on Baywood, and when my friend Carrie got stoned and kicked my dog into a bush, I punched her – a girl – for the first time. I lost my virginity in the basement, wrote my first research paper at my desk upstairs. On the antique wicker bench at the antique kitchen table, I made my father cry for the first time. No matter how many doors I slammed, no matter how many Saturday nights I spent grounded in my room, our house always appeared perfect. Ali and I used to loathe my mother’s cleaning habits: run the vacuum twice a day, run the dishwasher every night, wipe the counter after pouring yourself a glass of water. Crumbs were bad; Lysol was good. I wanted to leave my socks on the floor or the cap off my toothpaste. I wanted to be able to spill a glass of water and not care. When we moved in, my mother hung up white wallpaper on one of my bedroom walls. She stocked my room with crayola markers and told me to draw what I wanted to. Five years later when we left the house, the wall was completely covered with quotes, stickers, signatures, and stories by all the people who had mattered to me. My parents foolishly asked if I wanted to take a piece of the wallpaper with me. No. Heyward
My sophomore year at DePauw, my father’s company, Arvin Industries, moved its headquarters to Indianapolis. Rather than face the forty-minute commute, my parents decided to build a new house – number twelve – in Sycamore Springs, a ritzy gated community that used to be a golf course. Ali lived with her best friend’s family her senior year of high school, and only saw my parents once a month. I went straight from the sorority house to my mother’s latest creation: a new house just like our old house. Heyward is a one-story, which means my sister and I now have bedrooms in the basement instead of on a second floor. The basement is bigger, with a pool table and bar; other than that, this house looks nearly identical to the one on Baywood. Despite the fact that we used all the same furniture, my mother still found enough decorating dilemmas to fill our first summer there. Between waitressing and interning at a bank downtown, my hours were filled accompanying her to flea markets and Big Lots. If my mom couldn’t find exactly what she was looking for, at a price (usually stingy) she was willing to pay, she would make it herself. Never mind that her arts and crafts sessions usually resulted in a burn from her hot glue gun. Never mind that my dad always got pissed off when he had to help her sew on bric-a-brac. Never mind the fact that, by this point, my parents had enough money to hire someone to decorate the house one hundred times over. The hassle was apparently worth the trouble, though, because as anyone who has visited Heyward will attest, the house is beautiful. The garden seems to be perpetually in bloom, hummingbirds hover outside the window of the breakfast nook, and the babbling pond is home to a waterfall, ten fat goldfish, and one neon green frog named Pete. I can picture it all perfectly, and, as I do, my chest twinges with homesickness. Although I’m not quite certain why. I miss the house, but I never miss anyone. I can’t remember a day when I’ve wished I could see Maggie Weisskirk, or a time when I wondered what Justin Brown was doing. I purposefully lost touch with my high school friends when I went to DePauw, and I’m too lazy to make the effort to contact half my friends from college. Living in Wyoming means I’m a thousand miles away from most everyone I know, and to tell you the truth, I don’t really care. My friends send “you better write back emails,” my sister leaves “you better call back” messages, and I don’t. I just don’t. Last spring, a flood damaged our house on Heyward. Indianapolis received over twenty inches of rain in twelve hours, and all the basements in the neighborhood flooded. My parents were at their second home in Florida at the time, and when the neighbor called, our basement had over two feet of water in it. My mother flew home that same night and spent the next week trying to salvage what she could. Since our bedrooms were in the basement, Ali and I had all our belongings down there. We lost everything: scrapbooks from our travels in Europe, tennis trophies, prom photos, our favorite children’s books, pictures we had drawn in the first grade, old notes from old crushes, broken seashells we gathered from Mexico. I was crushed when saw my bedroom, empty except for my blue antique bed. I cried when I realized my collection of Sweet Valley High books was gone, that Wooly, my very first stuffed animal, was molding. I know you’re supposed to care more about people than about keepsakes, that things are just things. And that “things” are not important. But I’d be lying if I said that throwing Wooly in the trash didn’t hurt more than leaving Tracy Summerer standing on my lawn thirteen years ago. These things – Wooly, my collection of Absolut Vodka ads, my newspaper clippings of old tennis matched – were me. After all, you are what you take with you. |