For the three days our house was on the market, we lived as though our presence here was a deep, dirty secret that would ruin us if it got out. I woke up before my alarm and hustled the kids through their morning routines and out onto the front porch. Then, as they trudged off to school, I stole through the rooms with a polishing cloth and a mop, carefully erasing all evidence that we had recently eaten, slept, and bathed there before tugging the front door closed behind me, a faint whiff of Mr. Clean and flop sweat in my wake. My real estate agent swore it would sell quickly and for a sum that seemed truly absurd, especially in comparison with what we had paid for it a decade ago. And she was right. But I didn’t know that, then. So I spent those three days in abject anxiety, eating copious amounts of cheese in my parents’ living room and obsessively checking my phone for updates.
After the house sold, I started feeling less like its owner and more like a guest. I found myself taking extra care of things that will remain here after we leave, like cupboards and appliances. They’ve never been so clean inside or out. Last weekend my youngest brought home three kinds of glitter slime from a birthday party and I practically passed out. Take it outside, I said, with my head between my knees. This carpet doesn’t really belong to us anymore.
Technically, of course, the house does still belong to us; we don’t move out for another month. We’ve gone back to living as we usually do; there are dishes in the sink and clothes strewn around my kids’ unmade beds as I type. But it no longer feels like it belongs to me, not the way it did before I came up with this crazy scheme. And the new house doesn’t feel like it belongs to us yet either, even though all three of us have logged hours staring at the listing photos and trying to imagine our furniture, and our lives, inside its walls.
These days, the time I have left in this house feels like a tightrope, strung up between the past and the future. The key to maintaining forward momentum, I know, is to just keep putting one foot in front of the other, to focus on a fixed point in the distance. But the point disappears every time I blink, and my peripheral vision has become crowded with memories, all demanding my attention. I keep giving in, to the good ones and hard ones in equal measure, knowing that many will fade once I’ve left the house forever.
I keep looking over at the girls, too. Every time I see them out on the front lawn, chatting and laughing with kids they’ve known since kindergarten, it throws me off balance. I wobble and cling, and cry, and wonder if I’m making a huge mistake. But I’m not, and even if I’m wrong about that, I can’t turn back now, so. I keep going. By day I clean out closets, collect free boxes, and daydream about the little office I’ll have in my new place. At night, of course, I read, and last week I picked up a book about another family on the move.
Last Summer on State Street is narrated by FeFe, a twelve-year-old resident of the Robert Taylor Homes, a massive public housing project on Chicago’s South Side. When the story begins it’s 1999, and her building has been scheduled for demolition. She doesn’t know exactly when she’ll be moving, or where she’ll end up, or how to feel about the end of her childhood as she has known it. All she knows is that her home is being torn down, and what it’s like to watch it happen, from the inside:
Entire floors went quiet, sometimes pitch-black. This is how my block turned into a ghost town. This is how 4950, full of laughing kids and music with too much bass, became a haunted house, the essence of the families who occupied those apartments still floating around the wide-open spaces of the playground and the porches. I could almost hear Stacia screaming “First!” Precious, “Second!” and then Tonya mumbling, “Third,” just happy to be in the game, not caring that she had the last spot. This is how I left Robert Taylor: in the state of a haunted mansion.
It’s hard to overstate the differences between my family’s impending move—from one safe, leafy suburb to another, entirely of my own volition—and FeFe’s. The night-and-day likeness of the two was all I could think about as I read this stunner of a debut novel.
It was easy to read, in that FeFe’s voice is a joy, utterly frank and unsettlingly insightful, in the way so many twelve-year-olds are in conversation. And at the same time some chapters were almost impossible to read because the content was so hard to take in, especially given that I had glanced at Toya Wolfe’s bio on the back flap and knew she was writing from personal experience of the Robert Taylor Homes.
The entire housing project was demolished by the Chicago Housing Authority in the late nineties/early aughts because it had become synonymous with gang violence, dereliction, and drug dealing. Families who were deemed “Lease Compliant” were provided with housing vouchers, so that they could relocate to buildings of their choice elsewhere in the city. Families who were not so lucky, FeFe tells us, would get “shuffled around the projects until they were all gone….some people squatted in the abandoned buildings or became homeless. The luckiest among this group moved in with family members in other troubled neighbourhoods.”
We don’t know until about two thirds of the way into the book which group FeFe and her friends will fall into, and, as with most books written from a child’s perspective, there’s a certain amount of dramatic irony adding to the tension—as adult readers, we understand things that she does not, yet. We can make more educated guesses about the inner lives, capabilities, and motivations of the various authority figures in her life, both the ones she fears and the ones she trusts.
If I had to pick one word to describe my experience of reading this book, it would be ‘devastating.’ And yet, I plan to read it again because it’s just that good. I hope you will pick it up, too.
Did you ever have to move, as a kid? Or as an adult, from one city to another? I want to hear all about it.
Good luck with the move!
I'm not moving yet, but my husband and I have been looking to buy our first home for four years. The pandemic has made it very hard to buy in this market. But it's a bittersweet thing. I lived in my parents house up until I got married. We lived in our first apartment for one year before moving into our second. We've been here for six years. It's the second longest home I've had and I know it will be hard to leave it. I understand your emotional struggle. All will be well, Rosalynn. You'll make beautiful memories in your new house. And, after all, "home" is really the people you're with. Not the walls around you.