Sidewalks

When we were young, we never walked in the street. We were awkward girls in that strange liminal space, still lugging baby dolls in dirty dresses behind us with training bras from Kmart hanging silently in our closets. There were three of us regulars, but when all the kids were with a parent for the weekend, it was a gangly mess of six or seven. Two by two, we strutted down the sidewalk: laughing, smacking, pushing, telling fortunes. Two of the girls were cousins, and they fought like cats, pulling hair and running off to tell on each other only to return five minutes later with tear-stained faces and a bag full of used makeup. Here this will keep us busy. Our mothers were hiding from us.

The sidewalks were like portals transporting us from one house to another, one sleepover to another. If we weren’t on the sidewalks, we were on the steps of someone’s porch, pretending and dreaming, our imaginations not yet abandoned. Sometimes we were teachers, our students lined up in rows, hands folded in laps, waiting for instructions. Or we were mothers or big sisters or aunts whose job it was to work, and we clunked down the steps to the sidewalk in our mother’s worn-out dress shoes, a dingy brown oversized purse dangling from a skinny arm, wobbling and yelling at the children to quiet down. I gotta get to work, we’d shout.

We huddled together on the sidewalk as the neighbor’s house burned to the ground, firefighters working in vain to save the old house already in disrepair: broken porch railings, peeling mustard-yellow paint, windows that didn’t close, and the threadbare curtains that hung out of them, trying to escape.

We piled up on the tree-root-buckled concrete, our jaws smacking candy bought with change left on a nightstand or dug from the seats of our parents’ unlocked cars, while the young couple with the curly-haired twins screamed violently at each other, running up and down the street and back into the house, slamming doors. It must have looked comical, a circus, but to us it was everyday life.

We were witnesses for anyone that needed it. No one shouted at us to go away or to mind our own business. No one scowled or flipped us off. We witnessed it all, for them all, and sometimes we were silent afterwards because we wondered when it would be our turn.

When the youngest of us disappeared, we sat in silence under the willow tree, not in the cool grass in the yard but on the small square of concrete under its drooping branches, rough and hard, carving her initials into it with rocks. We stood guard until our parents made us come in, made us lock the doors behind us. Our parents whispered to each other through static-y phone lines or over cheap beer poured in used glasses the rumors found out through cousins of cousins. We snuck to our rotten-orange carpeted landings and held our faces to the banister trying to glean understanding as the faceless shadows of our parents moved around in the fluorescent kitchen lights.

But eventually, when fears slipped away and were replaced with lost jobs and unpaid bills and car trouble and empty cupboards and fighting, we returned to the sidewalks and claimed our right to the neighborhood. Told everyone it was ours.