Recent History. Anthony Giardina

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      By August of that year, the houses on the end of our street, and Uncle John’s, began filling in. Something was evident right away. A new kind of person had come here.

      Uncle John had said the names, “Meola, Semenza,” as though he were describing a delicate, expensive purchase he’d just made. But when they moved in, they ignored us.

      In late summer, they began giving parties for one another. The rows of Cadillacs and Buicks began coming up the Hill. There were four houses on the end of our street, facing one another, and two at the end of Uncle John’s. At first, on the nights of those parties, Uncle John would stand out on his lawn, watering hose in hand. Perhaps they’d made a mistake, forgot he lived there. He stopped short of waving to the well-dressed people going to the party at Meola’s. His big house took on the appearance of a gatehouse at the entrance to an estate.

      The sons of Meola and Semenza were also different from us. They played on the high school football team and wore, in their front yards, letter jackets, purple and yellow. They were compact, black-haired boys, guards, centers. They drove their own cars, too, and some nights brought their girlfriends up to the Hill. From where I watched, from my room or from the front yard (the grass had grown enough to begin mowing), they seemed to drive with an extraordinary calm. Beside them, their girlfriends, girls who wore their hair in “flips,” and who were cheerleaders for the football team, seemed to have all the energy. The girls moved, in the passenger seats of those cars, talking and gesturing with their hands, and when they parked in front of the boys’ houses, they waited for the door to be opened, and then moved inside, sometimes half-running, always followed by the boys, who moved more slowly.

      It had been, in all the ways that counted, an odd summer. No one had bothered to tell me why my father had left. His disappearance, however, had been sudden and absolute. Apparently, he had not needed to take his clothes with him, wherever he had gone, because they still hung in his closet, and because it was summer and I was home all the time, I knew he didn’t come to retrieve anything, unless he came at night when I was asleep.

      I still had my old friends, and sometimes, after supper, I would get on my bike and ride to Candace Road to play in the Wiffle ball games. But the old neighborhood held no great interest. Coming home, I would get off my bike at the bottom of the Hill, walk slowly up, and approach the houses, which had their lights on, like a spy.

      In their backyard, Bobby and George might be sitting at their picnic table, talking, and though they laughed frequently, I began to feel their diminishment, how they were coming to understand that they were not like the sons of Meola and Semenza, and yet not thugs either, in the way they had once been, in the way it had once been all right for them to be. Instead, for a time they were hiding, just as I was.

      Then I would walk down to the other end of the street to look at the newer houses, in which there seemed to be a heightened sense of life: more lights were on, the football team sometimes gathered, or else the sons of Meola and Semenza were there alone, flipping cards to one another under the extravagant chandeliers hanging over their dining room tables.

      There were girls, too: Meola had a daughter my age, in my class at school, though we never spoke. Her friends came over and they sat in the backyard. I stood in the dark with my bike, and listened to the high murmur they made. They spoke in the same language my family spoke, but it was full of hesitations and conjunctions, mysterious nuances that made it seem a language all its own.

      And here is the essential thing, the thing I was most drawn to: when a man, the owner of a house, would come out the front door, and stand in the lighted entrance, it was as though he were surveying something. Nothing need be going on physically for the world to seem alive and full of movement. The men on Candace Road who would come out to watch us play Wiffle ball were not unhappy men, but this sort of proprietary moment was not possible for them. A curtain had been lifted for me, I suppose, certain important divisions in the world were made clear. And though it probably wouldn’t have affected me the same way at any other point in my life, it did then.

      Finally I would go home. My mother would always be watching television in the room we called the family room. She watched with one lamp on, and, frequently, with one arm slung behind her head.

      “Where did you go?” she wanted to know.

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