Not Home

My town was a sleepy southern hamlet before the big entertainment came, and we lived on the edge of it in the new neighborhoods that had been built to accommodate the first wave of workers who had come to labor for the space and defense industries and for the others who came to get work around those industries in the new service businesses that had inevitably opened. But as I say, our house was on the far side of town where new things were already tarnished and worn, old enough for the first coats of paint to begin to fade, for neglected yards to fail, and for the effluvium of collected byproducts to gather, old tires and car parts and piles of plywood. Everything, they said, had value.

But my car allowed me to escape all of that. After school, I would drive away from my house, traveling toward the center of wealth and beauty, to a small village of a town within a town, where brick streets were covered by a canopy of oak trees and a single shopping avenue was lined with stores and cafes. There was an elegant movie theater built in art deco style with a small street front marquee and pillars and balcony seating with a loge inside. Once a week, I would go after school to see whatever film was showing, sometimes, if it was good, staying to sit through it twice. And later, when I emerged from the velvet darkness into the rich light of the late afternoon, I would walk along the avenue to the central park and sit on a bench looking at the yellow lights in the office of the train station where people waited outside under an old canopy until some energy conspired to move me along.

And with that, I would walk back to my car with dread trying to retain some portion of that atmosphere for later as I made the drive home, the landscaped yards and giant oak trees giving way to sugar sand and sand spur yards sparsely filled with pines.

In March, the village had an annual art festival our teacher mentioned, and so, on Sunday afternoon, in the last hour before it closed, I went. There in the central park was a beautiful crowd strolling between booths and sitting on the ground with picnic lunches and bottles of wine before a low stage where a guitarist performed. And there were young women, older than I but young, and as I walked among them, I could feel the difference, feel that everything was wrong with me, the way I moved, the way I held my mouth, the way I dressed. I tried to hide it, of course, but it was like a disease or an injury that would take time and physical therapy to heal. And so I sat down upon the grass where I would be less noticed and watched from the long shadows like a young voyeur as the day drew to its close, watching as the artists broke down their exhibits and the people made their ways home, sitting until it was safe for me to find my car, too.