It Comes and Goes

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The house comes and goes, comes and goes, and no one seems to know or to care. It’s that kind of neighborhood. You keep your head down; you take notice only of the things that are relevant to your own personal welfare; you screen everything else out as irrelevant or meaningless or potentially threatening.

It’s a very ordinary house, thirty or forty years old, a cheap one-story white-stucco job on a corner lot, maybe six rooms: green shutters on the windows, a scruffy lawn, a narrow, badly paved path running from the street to the front steps. There’s a screen door in front of the regular one. To the right and left of the doorway is some unkempt shrubbery with odds and ends of rusting junk scattered among it—a garbage can, an old barbecue outfit, stuff like that.

All the houses around here look much the same way: there isn’t a lot of architectural variety in this neighborhood. Just rows of ordinary little houses adding up to a really ordinary kind of place, neither a slum nor anything desirable, aging houses inhabited by stranded people who can’t move upward and who are settled enough so that they’ve stopped slipping down. Even the street-names are stereotyped small-town standards, instantly forgettable: Maple, Oak, Spruce, Pine. It’s hard to tell one street from another, and usually there’s no reason why you should. You’re able to recognize your own, and the others, except for Walnut Street where the shops are, are just filler. I know how to get to the white house with the screen door from my place—turn right, down to the corner and right again, diagonal left across the street—but even now I couldn’t tell you whether it’s on Spruce corner of Oak or Pine corner of Maple. I just know how to get there.

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