The Way It Was

Creative Nonfiction by Kathryn Petruccelli

I remember being curled up in a ball of early pregnancy nausea, my son, Isaac, still just a small cluster of cells wreaking havoc in my body, while people carried out furniture around me until I was a pathetic figure alone in a bare room. We were moving.

When Isaac turned one, his celebration was a combined birthday and housewarming party — we’d just moved again. And again, the weekend he turned two, we passed each other cake over stacked boxes, a select group of friends setting aside their hand trucks to toast our toddler.

My husband, Mike, and I lived in Monterey, California for thirteen years, and over that time, we moved to five different houses. As renters, that’s just the way it was. Though moves of slight proportion in terms of geography — sometimes barely over a mile — each change shifted our center of gravity and redefined our immediate surroundings. Each move created a horror and a freedom, a privilege and a burden, a tearing and a stitching, a stepping stone and a wall.

Perhaps we didn’t understand these notions when we began to consider a move on a grander scale, a cross-country jaunt that would return us to Mike’s home state of Massachusetts, which held as part of its promise, homeownership and a sloughing off of our nomadic existence. Or perhaps we simply didn’t want to understand. Maybe we were blinded by our longing for a permanent base.

When we first began talking to Isaac about wanting someday to buy our own house, he was three. Sitting in the living room of our wee rental, the only place he had any conscious memory of calling home, he became deeply pensive. Earnestly considering the purchase of a house, he asked, “How will we get it home?” Accustomed to us borrowing my friend’s pick up to haul anything large, he wanted to know if maybe we’d be bringing the new house home in the back of Auntie Bridgett’s truck.

Honestly, at that point, the concept of buying our own home didn’t seem that much less bizarre to Mike and I. We commonly talked about our rapid succession of rentals as “the old house,” “the old-old house,” “the old-old-old house”…

When Isaac turned five, our family flew from California to Massachusetts for a week of what were then still novelties: grandparents, snow, house hunting. They were the way it could be — something tantalizingly hypothetical. In that year, while house prices crept up and up in Monterey from their then-average of close to a million dollars, we’d make two more trips east to look for a place to buy, while staying at my in-laws’ — a strange and curious base camp where our preferences were regularly looked on with suspicion and my father-in-law’s hearing aid whistled feedback like a fragile trapped bird.

I became pregnant with my second son while still west coast-based — right about the time the yard around my sage-trimmed two-bedroom, graced by December rains, burst out with yellow oxalis flowers and white calla lilies I hadn’t planted. Unexpected winter treasures. I sat my loosening ligaments down in front of the computer, giving equal time to a search for baby names and houses, though as it turned out the two were not mutually exclusive. I hit on “Xavier.” Maybe a middle name, I thought, and decided to seek out the origin. Google came back with the answer. Basque, it said, meaning — I had to look twice — “new house.”

Friends asked whether I might want to rent first after our cross-country move, see if the whole idea was going to take, feel out which neighborhood fit. I didn’t want any part of this kind of logic. We would buy our own place. Period. Exchanging the west coast for the east would mean freedom from landlords or it would mean nothing at all.

The move that forced us into what would turn out to be our last residence in Monterey County, included a string of encounters with our landlord’s real estate agent, a woman with a canary yellow Porsche and white yippy dog who couldn’t wait to sell our house out from under us. After weeks of unannounced showings, and, finally, a 30-day eviction notice for our supposedly uncooperative behavior, a sale was secured. The buyer’s agent presented us with a small pot of ivy as a gift — the irony of the invasive plant not lost on me. It was the first thing to go in the garage sale.

Over the years, I’d had even less luck with landlords than with real estate agents. They had falsely claimed money owed them to the tune of hundreds of dollars, cut trees down outside my window without my prior knowledge, repeatedly and illegally entered my home, ignored dangerous electrical situations, reclaimed the space I paid them to occupy after a mere few weeks, and generally lied. It was not a big surprise, then, that we didn’t manage to escape east toward a new life without another notch in our belt of unreasonable landlords, this time, one that decided the plants in the yard were overgrown. He said we would have to pay the landscapers’ fee.

“All I ask is that it go back to the way it was,” Mr. Landlord said, generously offering to send me pictures of what the backyard looked like when we had moved in more than four years prior.

Should I take the thriving passionflower vine climbing the trellis outside the living room window and return it to a struggling upstart? Snap every bloom off the rose bushes? Surely, I could siphon all the homemade compost from the gopher-proofed garden beds and stamp out the wildflowers that had moved in along the path.

Of course. The way it was: our lives there making zero impression on the space, the three of us comprising a ghostly presence of no consequence, treading on the hardwood without any detectible footfall, our laughter around five Christmas trees silent wisps of wind.

As a species, we will do anything to deny that in fact, things grow, and do not return to how they were.

There is a moment I remember from years ago. I was standing on Mount Washington in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania looking down at the city lights. I was with my boyfriend at the time; we’d been together a couple of years. It was a beautiful night and we were having a great time. We were also in the process of breaking up, though neither of us was ready to admit it yet. I was about to move out of the city. I would come back to visit more than once, but by then our relationship would have dissolved. Some part of me knew at that moment all the things I couldn’t articulate, things that were moving and changing, things that needed to move and change for growth to happen, things that I myself had a part in setting in motion.

But I was younger then, ignorant. Clearly not like now, with the move from west to east in full swing, our family packed and heading towards Massachusetts in a VW camper van bought for this very purpose, my pregnant self swelling by the day, my wisdom flapping triumphantly in the breeze behind us like a pennant.

One day along our road trip, during an otherwise innocuous discussion about the challenges of using the microwave where we were staying, I proffered, “I guess we’re used to the one we have at home.”

We all stopped short, exchanged shy, sad smiles. “I mean, in the old house,” I corrected.

A by-now-six-year-old Isaac had been somewhat prone to meltdowns on the trip, much more so than his usual easy-going self. Chalk it up to less sleep, or lack of routine, or major life upheavals — a horror and a freedom, a privilege and a burden. One morning, he had come down from his sleeping perch in the second-floor pop-up portion of the camper van to have breakfast, which he wanted while curled up in the covers of the lower bed. Somewhere along the line, blankets became tangled in a way of which he disapproved. Things devolved down a track that was both tragic and ridiculous, a track many situations can follow when one is six, until finally he was shouting about the blankets, tears streaming, “I just want it back how it was! I want it to be the way it was before!!”

One’s heart fills with the flavors of the places it settles. And when we leave a place, the heart carries on with its old charge for a time, jockeying out of the way any new intruders, believing itself full to capacity, as if it cannot hold both realities, as if to swap out bits of what already resides there would be akin to tearing at the flesh. There is no small amount of danger to expanding into new ways of being. It’s like adding a second cat to the house — a risky thing, fronted by a highly sensitive period. One must use caution, baby steps, like still using the present tense in the first months after someone’s died.

The day we arrived in Massachusetts to live, my in-laws swarmed the van, all talking at once. I was dazed, my protruding belly the only seeming buffer between me and this new space for which I wasn’t at all convinced any longer I wanted to swap my old one. The three of them, my mother- and father-in-law and my husband’s aunt, seemed for all intents and purposes like a hundred people. They swept us off to dinner, and from that point on would not once, either that evening over our meal of mediocre pizza, nor since, ask us a single question about the way it was in our five and a half weeks traveling through seventeen states and the District of Columbia, much less the way it was for us in California. “You’re here! You’re here!” they gushed.

Long before the move, we’d met our Massachusetts real estate agent, a man who had renewed my hope in his kind by appearing at our first meeting in a rusty Buick rather than a Porsche, a green knit hat and no sign of a yippee dog. Two days after we arrived for good, we met up with him again, now having shed his knit hat for summer shorts, and began to hunt in earnest for a place to live.

At a showing, Mike and I sat together upstairs in the one bedroom that made any sense — that had both a closet and a wall color it was possible to hold some respect for. The trees were close at the windows, the afternoon light reminiscent of tropical drinks. We talked about whether it felt like ours. He said yes, but I was not convinced. From my bulging abdomen, a meaningful kick. Assertion or dissension, it wasn’t clear.

We were weary from the road, unsure of what we wanted. We had arrived at this point equal parts broken and hopeful. A place to stop. We wanted a place, to make it stop.

The kitchen was huge but obscenely inefficient. One of us lingered at the double sink while the other was cornered by the seller’s agent wielding “darling” pictures of the old laundry chute before the last reno.

How many walks at twilight gazing through lighted windows into other people’s lives had brought us to this point? What do they do in their big houses? I had asked, so hungry then for one of my own. Watch TV, Mike had shrugged, and pointed at the birds nesting on the street sign. Everyone, it seemed, had found a place to land.

On return to the perspective house, the inspector stared into the basement electrical panel. Mike and I looked over his shoulder — the three of us like doctors consulting an x-ray with great concern. Doesn’t look good. Mike dropped into a discussion with him about circuits and insulation and other things I could not follow. I thought about maybe hating him for it.

There is a general societal agreement that any new start requires some amount of courage, but less acknowledgment of the grieving that must take place for what came before. Once, we lived along the California coast. Once, we were a family of three. Once, we dreamed of owning a house.

“Would you buy it?” I asked the inspector, as we climbed the stairs again.

“Wouldn’t be my first choice,” he quipped. “But then again, you and this house could be a perfect fit,” he added mysteriously. “‘What you seek is seeking you.’ That’s Rumi,” he told me, grinning.

An ancient mystic’s words filling my ear, I’m startled by bird song out the open window — the two things briefly occupying the same space.

Kathryn Petruccelli is a bi-coastal performer and writer with an M.A. in teaching English language learners. Her professional life has included translating “Hotel California” for Hungarian high schoolers and anthologizing poetry by rival gang members. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Poet Lore, Tinderbox, december, SWWIM, and others. Nominated for Best of the Net 2020, Kathryn is a past winner of San Francisco’s Litquake essay contest and a finalist for the 2019 Omnidawn Broadside Poetry Prize. She teaches online writing workshops from western Massachusetts. More at poetroar.com.