Another essay for nonfiction. I had to describe a place in detail in four to five pages. I picked the worst place I could think of. I had more to say here, I think, but held back on the off chance my professor is from New England.Rodney Munson is real, although I mushed several people into one fat bully and added the name, which I just now realized was a subconscious Buffy reference.
The door slapped open, and my mother’s voice rang in a shrill note I’d never heard before. “Christy, get out of the house, now.” She didn’t wait for me to comply. Before I could process the meaning of her words, her arms were around my shoulders and we were up, up across the white carpet mom despaired of ever getting clean, down the wooden stairs, and funneled through the narrow hall into the blinding daylight.
Someone plopped me on our neighbor’s couch before I realized I still held a plastic dinosaur in each hand. I blinked dust out of my eyes. Adults said things behind their hands. A cup of hot chocolate cooled, untouched, on the coffee table. The smoke alarms had never gone off.
I worried about my toys, mostly, the Christmas presents I hadn’t gotten to play with yet. There was the model train set from Uncle Tony, and the new books from Aunt D. The rest of our things only occurred to me later. My father’s computer would burn, and my mother’s heirloom jewelry would melt. The white carpet was probably black with soot.
Mrs. Fisher smiled at me reassuringly from the other couch. I had only spoken to her once, on Christmas, eight days earlier, when she came to our front door with a plate of cookies and a housewarming gift. This was the first time I’d been inside her house. It was the same floor plan as ours—everyone had the same design, just mirror images—but I had to look for the similarities. Everything here had flowers on it, the couches, the drapes, the coasters, the wall prints, the carpet, and Mrs. Fisher. The air reeked of muffins and sugar. It was nothing like home.
An hour later, a fireman clomped into Mrs. Fisher’s floral living room. Smoke and dust cascaded off his shoulders in waves, and he held out a velvet stegosaurus rescued from certain death. “Your mom said you’d want this.” I snatched it into my arms and nodded wordlessly.
The fire was a four-alarm response, even though the flames never progressed farther than the back wall of our townhouse. Nothing burned, but we lost almost everything to smoke damage. For years later, my surviving toys still smelled like a campsite.
USAA set us up in an apartment nearby while the investigators and the repair crews did their jobs. I’ve since pushed most of that place out of my memory, but looking back I can still see the yellow walls, feel the shag carpet underfoot, and smell the urine musk of the rental couch which looked like a reject from Mrs. Fisher’s living room. We were just guests there, and the apartment never let us forget we were imposing on it. The Nixon-era refrigerator resented all demands to cool below sixty-five degrees and was prone to epileptic fits in the middle of the night that would rattle the building’s struts and make my air mattress jiggle. The TV consistently displayed three colors: black, yellow, and red, whether I was watching The Simpsons or Lost in Space. For the bathrooms, we had a system: Warn people not to use the toilet before you got in the shower, or suffer the consequences.
One appliance that did work was the heat, and we were grateful for it. Nor’easters marched through the region that year in a relentless campaign of wet, white muck, so by the end of January, the snow was stacked up higher than my father’s head. The novelty wore off after I realized that, unlike Georgia, New England didn’t cancel school for snow, unless that snow was accompanied by a suitably sized apocalypse.
The anti-Christ never showed, except in the form of Rodney Munson, self-proclaimed (and undisputed) lord over all the school bus. Rodney had passionate and toxic views on school, people shorter than him, people taller than him, and people that didn’t watch Home Improvement. I didn’t watch Home Improvement. My side also lost The War. My family came from Poland and Germany and wasn’t actually there for The War, but the North had won, the South had lost, and I talked funny. End of argument.
There was no point in telling him, or anyone else, that they talked funny, and pronounced their R’s as A’s. Su-ah. He-ah. Lob-stah. (Dad used to say the R’s migrated south so people could warsh their cars.) I also didn’t point out that their Plymouth Rock was stupid and small and looked like a pebble, and Boston Market’s cornbread was too sweet and tasted like ass. There was no point. Rodney was three inches taller, and that trumped all argument.
If you’ve never been, here’s a quick and dirty guide to the culture of New England, according to my mother, who was raised in Tennessee. In New England, there are two kinds of people, New Englanders, and people who are from Away. That’s what they called it. Away. New Englanders were people born in New England, and whose parents had been born in New England, and preferably, their grandparents had been born there too. New York did not count. Neither did Canada. If your mother was in New York, and in labor, and in a horse drawn carriage racing for the Connecticut border, but you popped out three miles from the state line, you were in trouble. Ninety years later, at your funeral in the small Maine town where you’d grown up, grown old, and died, your eulogy would include a note that, as it turns out, you were from Away. My mother has been known to exaggerate on occasion—or all the time—but the most popular kid in my class could trace his lineage back to the Mayflower Compact, a fact he pointed out on a weekly basis.
Here’s what happened with the fire: The person that poured the foundations for the townhouses had to file for bankruptcy before he could build on them. When the bank turned around and sold the land, it was for only a fraction of what it was worth. Our builder, a guy my parents referred to only as Bob, knew a deal when he saw one, but didn’t have the money to act on it. So he borrowed the cash from a loan shark. He got his brother, Glen, to do all the electrical, plumbing, insulation, and ductwork, all skills Glen picked up from yellow books he bought at Barnes and Nobel. Glen also installed our fireplace. Somehow, he not only insulated our walls, but also our chimney, so when my parents decided to light a festive holiday fire, the festivities spread through the entire back wall and into our neighbor’s walls as well. Lawsuits ensued.
In the meantime, we got the townhouse repaired, and the insurance gave us all new furniture, and I kept waddling to the bus stop in a pink parka, pink gloves, and pinker snow pants, so I could benefit from Rodney’s extensive knowledge of the civil war. The years trudged by. I got older.
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