I am hoping that by posting this, I will feel like writing again. I am hoping that its like once I start talking about something that I know nothing about, I keep talking until not only have I convinced you I'm an expert, but I've also convinced myself.
In the words of Billy Collins: It's not like that. Not exactly.
Anyways, something long(er).
In most towns the roads crossed at right angles creating a grid of ascending numbers and progressing letters. But here in Ashland, the town board had decided that streets would tease one another: some would criss-cross in X's that had spread out their arms and limbs, while others would only tease one another, never crossing. The street names consisted of residents who lived on any given street and changed every few years. Ashland's justification for doing this was to keep people on their toes, to always have people questioning whether or not they were going the proper way. Surprisingly, this wasn't a problem for most of the denizens. Problems only arouse when map makers wanted to chart (and rechart) familiar territory or someone wanted street specific directions rather than being told "Turn left at the Third Citgo after you get off the highway."
Frank lived close to Kate in raw distance, but if one were to take the convoluted mess of Ashland's streets, it could easily take an hour to get to her house. This bothered him very little - he liked walking through the neighbors’ backyards and serendipitously peering into their windows to find Mothers singing into brooms or bands practicing putting words together. Anachronistically, he wore a bowler's cap that he tipped whenever he made eye-contact with anyone. He was only twenty, but the bowler's cap aged him a least a decade, sometimes two.
Frank never minded the distance between him and Kate. He thought of it in several different ways: it was the distance from fingertip to toetip. It was the distance from an eyebrow to the small of one’s back. It was a minor inconvenience easily overcome by phonecalls or five-minute walks. It was remediable.
But Kate thought of it differently. She thought of it as the distance from the tip of her tongue to the ball of her nose. She thought of it as an eyelash to an eyebrow. A near-possibility obfuscated by reality. All that existed was potentiality and nothing more.
Kate’s room had sticker-stars pasted on the ceiling that glowed a sea-urchin green whenever she turned out the lights. She had put these up when she was eight, expecting herself to always be fascinated by the arrangements of stars.
And sometimes after Frank’s walk to Kate’s, he would climb up the stairs to her room and lay by her side on the floor. They would count artificial stars every now and then, as if expecting a new number to appear. Most of the time they agreed on the number 67, but it fluctuated. Perhaps some stars migrated occasionally to different galaxies, but perhaps not. Sometimes while they gazed, Frank’s eyes would get heavy and in only a matter of time he would be snoring on Kate’s floor. Once she heard this, she would get up off the ground and do something productive. Frank was always surprised when he woke up on the floor. He was even more surprised that Kate was never there when he woke up.
Once he thought of it as an analogy of their relationship, but he quickly abandoned the idea, thinking it too morbid, too heavy-handed. He let go of the idea like a balloon to the air, and as he let go of it, he thought he would one day let go of Kate in exactly the same manner.
On this Friday, Frank had brought over a French movie. Neither Kate nor Frank spoke French, but he enjoyed their movies. Kate did too, but hated watching them with Frank. Frank stubbornly refused to turn on the subtitles so they would see Charles Aznavour sleeping with Marie Dubois and feel affected by the grainy black and white scene but would never understand why. Frank claimed they were learning a new language but Kate could not believe this. She understood that they were unabashedly “people watching” the characters. It was like people watching from the fifth floor of an apartment building. You can put whatever words you wish into another’s mouth and they will always be correct.
But today Kate said, “No. I don’t want to watch another French movie. Why don’t we take a walk outside? It is May, after all.”
Frank, doe-eyed, put the DVD case on the bookcase. He put his cap back on his head and made his way to the door. Kate was verifiably correct; it was May, but this May tricked flowers into pricking green up from the soil only to frost over them in the middle of the night. People in Ashland still dressed accordingly for May weather; they wore short sleeve polo shirts and light khakis. They shivered in the day and in the night.
Kate wore her pea coat but Frank hadn’t brought any outerwear – he was simply a polo and khakis. The initial onset of the night was deceptively warm. It felt like the preemptive weather one needs to go to the beach. Kate looked like the one dressed inappropriately.
Kate began, “Sometimes I think about leaving here. Not because of you nor in spite of you, but because my routine is as expected and universal as a measuring cup. I drink 8 ounces of coffee, eat one apple and one banana each day. I walk to my job which is three blocks away, and even though the streets’ names change, nothing else does. My boss is the same person he was four years ago – a pencil-mustachioed man who wears button-ups, which are one size too small on him. And you come over, and its nice, but you always bring over French movies that I don’t understand. I don’t think I will ever understand them. My French has never improved.”
They walked past groves of pine trees and congregations of lawn gnomes. They walked over sidewalks that didn’t meet one another perfectly, but instead formed peaks and canyons, valleys and mountains.
Frank considered what she said. He walked slower, then faster, then slower once again, as if by adjusting his speed, he was adjusting how quickly he processed events. He tried to put variables in her life but they simply caused an annoyance in her gait. She scrunched her brow so she looked three times her current age. He wondered if this was foretelling of how things would be if they stayed together until they were sixtysomethings. The sky was chiaroscuro but wouldn’t be for long, the sun always westering into tomorrows.
“Do we have any course in mind for this walk?” Frank asked.
“No, just lefts and rights whenever one of us desires.”
“We will certainly get lost.”
“It’s a definite.”
They walked past orphaned puppies turning adolescent, who were assembling gangs to roam and rover the streets; a semi-circle of grass-stained-kneed boys gathered around a hole six feet deep as if it were a bonfire. One boy, dirtyfaced, plucked a worm out of the soil as if it were a hair and placed it for examination in front of the others. They stared and inspected it benevolently, but not before one, malevolent and impassioned, procured a ballpoint pen, which he used to saw through the worm’s middle.
“Did you ever do anything like that?” Kate asked.
“Yes, but I never meant any harm. I used to crush lightning bugs beneath my soles and rub their fluorescent insides on the pavement just to see it glow for a brief moment.”
Kate pointed to the street sign, “Lunch Pails,” commenting on how odd it was, how it pleasantly evoked nostalgia but maintained modernity because no street of consequence circa 1950’s would get named “Lunch Pails” when names like “Grover Cleveland” still existed.
“So things are different,” Frank contended.
“Yes, but not enough. Streets still have names, children still torture insects. Nothing has changed, just the way we speak about it.”
The couple approached an anemic stream that hugged a street called “Thin Man,” which ran east-to-west into the Gold Coast, where buildings expertly picked up glints of gold from the sun as it was pressed even further into the horizon.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been here before,” she commented.
“There’s really no way to know.”
“I like how the houses look as if they could belong to any time period – from the Civil War days of whistling war hymns through grass shoots to the era of FDR and master plans. If you took a picture of my mother standing in front of this house when she was my age and compared it to a picture of me taken today, it would look as if the house merely collected residents. Sure, cosmetic changes have occurred – roofs cannot last forever, shingles wilt like leaves in the fall, but the main idea still remains pretty much the same.”
Frank started whistling Sam Cooke’s “Another Saturday Night.” Kate shot a glare, which quickly dissipated when she decided to hang back for a brief second and attempted to pluck Frank’s wallet from his back pockets, half indiscreetly, half hoping she would miss and just bump her hands adolescently against him. Frank noticed but yielded to her attempt. She succeeded, sprinted ten meters ahead, and rummaged through the billfold first, then the credit card slits, until finally throwing it down on the sidewalk.
“You got the whole thing backwards,” she said as Frank swooped down to scoop up his wallet, “It’s ‘I ain’t got nobody,’ not ‘no money.’”
“Soon I might not have either. What’s the difference in the details?”
Further still, they encountered an elevated train line running straight into the horizon. Frank went up towards it for closer inspection, looked down the length of the line first east, then west, and having determined the town’s council elected for it to vivisect the town in hopes of dissuading people even more from using cars, he started walking against the length of the track. Kate followed, somewhat begrudgingly, somewhat eagerly to see where this snubbed structure would lead to. As they walked next to the line segment like a it were a tight-rope, Kate following directly behind Frank, they noted how its construction must have been relatively recent; it ran through their neighbor’s backyards, through the bell tower of the church (the one reliable way to locate yourself in the town was by looking up, first for the sun, second for the bell tower, and third towards the false hope some grandfather figure would appear with simple directions of “straight, left, then right”), it even hovered above the town hall.
“Shit,” Frank said to articulate his incredulity towards the erection of the train track with neither of them noticing. No newspaper gossiped about the project, nor had anyone he talked to in coffee shops and bars even expressed their opinion on the matter. Maybe everyone was asked for their approval/disapproval/indifference, but if they were, then it must have been a poison-pill on a referendum everyone was certain to pass, like Bill 245 or better known as “Ashland’s Attempt to Create Miniature-Universe Health Care.”
The two followed the streamlined track for mile upon mile, and when the sun finally set, Frank robotically flipped his color, tugged at the sleeves, and crossed his arms before uncrossing them and placing one around Kate’s waist.
“Stealing warmth,” he grinned toothily.
“I can tell.” She took his arm and burrowed it beneath her peacoat and then beneath her shirt so he could have some actual warmth. As he started to look comforted, pacified as a toddler, she sped up, thus dragging his arm ahead of him. It waved helplessly as a flag, as emblematic as an anthem.
A white luminescence, glowing as brightly as a dozen halos, sprouted where the sun had set. As they neared it, it looked brighter still, seemingly decorated only with glass panes as big as houses and fluorescent bulbs a mile long. It looked like a secret meant to be kept.
Perhaps when the two approached the building, mouths agape, they had already decided what to do next. Rope lights ran the length of the building, adding ambience to the planes, and would also sequester off queues in place of thick, velvet ropes. A great glass ticket-counter, containing a small spark of a man, who chirped electric sparks when he talked, sat in front of the actual building, where train tracks intersected one another and slim trains sped to stops. Before they breached an ordering barking distance, Frank halted Kate, told her to stay back, and continued making his way to the box. From a distance, Kate could only tell that money was exchanged, that something was handed to Frank, that he came back smiling, accomplished.
“Where we going?”
“No where.”
“Bullshit,” Kate said, having her hand hop towards Frank’s pockets. Frank, taking each of her hands in his own, pinioned them behind her back and placed a kiss on her forehead.
“We won’t be bored tomorrow,” he assured.
They way back to Kate’s was relatively simple: they followed the train tracks in a straight line, through trees which wove their branches with one another’s, and beneath graffitied bridges. They eventually retraced the curvature of their original route – the boys who tortured worms had since moved to the sidewalk and were running to cup lightning bugs between their clasped hands, only to throw them like a pitcher onto the ground and smoosh their heels into the pavement. Kate looked at Frank in a “told you so” sort of scoff, but when she spoke she was still gentle.
“Say it ain’t so?”
Frank sighed. “As dumb as it sounds, I didn’t know I was killing them. I only knew the result – luminescence. I stomped, they glowed, and the process continued until I grew bored of the dots emanating green light from the pavement. Simple.”
The streets were empty, from the scene of the bug smashing to the gentle bend of Kate’s street. When they approached her sidewalk, he followed a few steps behind until they reached the house, where he rested his forearm against her house and tried leaning in to her like a high schooler.
She burst out laughing. “This is absurd Frank.”
Adjusting his hat to emit a glare like a private eye, he asked (perhaps rhetorically), “Why?” But he failed to pull off cool – his teeth clattered against one another a few times too many for him to convince her he wasn’t cold. She opened the door and left Frank on the porch to deliberate his route back home.
II. [History of Ashland – needs major revision]
Ashland hadn’t always been a pretzel of highways and streets, it used to have a calculated “Ground Zero” (as Frank would call it) which was the basilical Town Hall. There, tumescing with its classical protuberances, the building marked where all numbered streets ascended or descended and where the alphabetical streets ran their abecedarian course. The town was set up as a grid that the eldest residents remembered fondly when they were assigned to plot geometric exercises in Real Life. Frank had often heard the story of how his grandfather and grandmother met, his grandfather beginning always with: “I was a point X just looking for a point Y, and Mr. Jenkins placed us at opposite corners of the same street. He had us each hold a piece of red twine so the class of a whole could make some kind of shape – I think it was a hexagon –“
(and here was the point where his grandmother would interrupt saying, “No, octagon, he was trying to stress the importance of octagonal things. Like stop signs.”
Grandpa (or better known as Pa to Frank) would continue, “blushing” for his mistake, saying, “Right, right, octagon, but it might as well have been a heart, because I knew right then that I had met the girl of my dreams. And then I looked at the girl who was holding the other end of the string.”
The story wasn’t so much a story but a comedic bit that had been perfected over a septuagenarian span. It was Laurel and Hardy, but in this case they were happily married and had nursed a generation of boomers to success.
The idea of Ground Zero as a perfect grid system, modernist in its aims, eventually succumbed to the notion that Ashland was destined not to buildings that would extend their fingertips to the sky (it’s largest “tower” circa the present was a five story bank with a glass atrium serving as its top floor), but rather to construct chubby domiciles that would sometimes take up an entire suburban block. The town planners, furious at the realization that they were not creating another Chicago, deliberated to destroy the gridded blocks and replace them with curves and loops, bends and contortions. Streets would deviate and twist themselves in any way possible – some residents hypothesized that the city planners gave maps of Ashland to their newborns and, having armed them with crayons, allowed them to sketch and scribble whatever their tiny hearts desired. These “maps” of careless lines became fully realized streets and Ashland grew its roots as a revolutionary suburban haven. At the time, modern home magazines acclaimed Ashland for its “brave vision” of disregarding conventional city layout. “Who else,” wrote a Walter Philips, “would ignore maximizing the amount of space homes occupy? In an era where we see more houses not only plotted next to each other but resembling one another, Ashland stands as a testament to innovation for innovation’s sake.”
Yet even with rational street layout thrown out the window, Ashland originally didn’t intend to boggle its residents by having its streets change names once a year. Although the streets resembled spaghetti strands sprawled out on the ground, it all somehow made sense. When Frank’s Pa and Ma eventually settled down somewhere in the knot of streets in Ashland, they lived on “Silver Maple.” Here, they would rear three children (boy, girl, boy; more formally known as Matthew, Mariah, and Mark(y) – the ‘y’ becoming optional later in life), who would become infatuated with nature’s helicopters. When the shackles of training wheels finally came off the trio’s bikes, they rode around the neighborhood with ease. Pa, when away on business meetings for a “business” he never elaborated on, always joked with clients that he lived in the U.S. version of Prague. Though he had never been abroad, the clients would never question the veridicality of the joke, so they laughed jovially, or perhaps the proper word is politely.
III.
But, this is after all a love story. If you were not able to gather as much before now, I do apologize for my tendency to linger on the seemingly trivial – why would someone care about a town that sounds so bizarre it could only be fictional (it isn’t, but not even a million words describing the economics of why thirty sweet shops could coexist in a town of only 20,000 could sufficiently persuade you, so I am resigned to let you think of this as fiction). Indeed, I find myself wondering the same very thing the more I write. Something is happening over Ashland this very moment – I see black clouds breaching into the sky, dampening it and damning it in the same motion. The streets are quiet, not because of buffoonish confusion over how to navigate them, but rather because we are well past the Death of Cruising. Teenagers no longer drive eagerly to one another’s lusty arms, but they walk in a solemn lock step past boutiques and parlors, past winding streets that have no name, until they get to wooded hills overlooking the entire town. They spread blankets and they hold hands; they are more mobile than anyone else I have ever known because they are not confined to the backseats of subcompact cars.
If they are in love, then I am not to be one to say otherwise.
Here’s a story I have heard circulating Ashland. I’m unsure whether it’s fact or fiction, most likely it is a brilliant mixture of both. If it were fact, I would be able to recognize the characters even if their names had been changed. If it were fiction, I would have been able to predict the ending.
I will tell it because it reminds me of Frank and Kate.
As I was told, from the minute Eric was swaddled into a fresh diaper, he was in love with a similarly bald infant named Cynthia. This is not hyperbolic – after being cleaned up and cradled in his mother’s cooing arms for the length of an hour, Eric, unhappy, was carried back to the incubating room, where dull fluorescent bulbs glowed hotter than the sun to him. He screamed of course, and continued to scream as the poor nurse Abigail attempted to quiet him. She patted him, she stroked him, she even tried tickling him, but Eric held cold resolve in his persistent crying. Another young nurse brought in Cynthia shortly after Abigail had labeled Eric a lost cause, and, for lack of better word, crybaby. Cynthia, unlike her life-peer Eric, had peacock blue eyes which looked out serenely into the world, contented by the wave of the nurse’s arm and even Eric’s yelps of injustice. Whereas Eric cried at everything, be it the air conditioning clicking on or the sound of stilettos clicking distantly in the hall, Cynthia was awed by it all. The scenery was such a great change that
