This Town Doesn’t Want Me
I’m not sure that I want it, either.
I.
I grew up a few towns away, in a farming community. My friends on the playground had parents who worked in the fields. They would come to school events with hunched backs, fingers stained crimson from berries. Their English wouldn’t be perfect, their children would translate the teacher’s words.
My parents worked mundane jobs, my dad in a jam factory, my mother behind a desk in an office. They hated what they did — I think they blamed the three kids they shared. Maybe that’s why they ran so far, halfway across the country to live in a house with acreage. Is a sprawling grave any better?
I don’t resent them, exactly. It’s more an empty void.
Later, when I entered the workforce after my future of higher education fell through, I saw those same parents of my friends, injured on the job, seeking physical therapy and fighting tooth and nail for the Worker’s Compensation that was supposed to protect them. My self-conscious Spanish pronunciation didn’t matter anymore. I learned the most important words — Are you in pain? Where?
Their children still lived at home, working to support them. In this town, it’s the same — old Italian families living together under one roof, sharing meals. But it’s romantic, celebrated. Back in my hometown, it’s a matter of survival.
Of course here, they’ve never been discriminatory. After all, my skin is white. My husband has a bachelor’s degree, it’s useless but paid off. Our son is personable, a whirlwind of golden curls and a bold smile.
Finding employment here was simple enough. They outsource the labor force from my hometown and I was able to slip through the cracks. It’s easy to give a terse smile, minimum wage, subpar tips when you know you’ll never run into that person at the grocery store on Sunday. But I moved in, staked my little claim on an apartment a quick stroll to the wharf.
What’s funny is I felt like I fit in, before I became a parent. Maybe it was ignorance on my part. The doctors I worked for were kind enough, though I worked long hours, exposing myself to disease, exhaustion, even in the rough early days of pregnancy. I felt like I was a part of something.
My longest stint at any job was five years, because dancing around minimum wage and no benefits would get old, my rent would increase and the strain would physically impact me. We tried all of the hacks — get your groceries down to $50/week for two people! We tried.
My body does this thing where it turns controlled bleeding into trying to bleed to death. It’s embarrassing. Meat is expensive and I tried to explain to the lab technician who needed more blood to test for why I was bleeding that we couldn’t budget for the steak he was suggesting to build up my iron.
If things were always so hard, we would have fled. But the problem was, they got just better enough. Our apartment had an ocean view, the smallest peek through the dusty screen I could never quite get clean. When I was pregnant, we found mold growing from a crack in the wall, the drainage from the gutters hastily assembled ages ago when the complex was built.
My husband never wanted to go back. He had a soft landing place — his parents’ house which his dad had inherited from his adoptive parents. We stayed there but I was miserable, trying to hide. Privacy is the only dignity I had left, but I chose love instead. We left the apartment and moved in.
II.
There’s something I need to tell you.
I don’t leave the house anymore. Walking to the mailbox, I’m often assaulted by the shop owner next door. He doesn’t wear a mask. He likes to gossip, I don’t know what gave him the impression that I am invested in the people of this town or their negligible misfortunes. No one else sees me here. And I want to keep it that way.
III.
I worked in the medical field until my pregnancy became complicated enough to push me out of it. Everything back then was pushing. In labor, when the doctor said my son’s heartbeat was slowing and she put the oxygen mask on me, tears leaking from my swollen eyes.
The important thing is my son was born. The flower bloomed, and the rest of the plant withered.
The boss I worked so hard for never visited, called, wrote. I slipped away from that job like a thief in the night. There was no maternity leave, just six weeks of disability and a growing fear within me.
I lost my home, job, identity.
Eventually, we found this place.
By then the wolves had found me.
“Manifest this,” and “Sell one to five of your friends and you’ll make a profit,”. It was a thin facade of community but it was what I had. I built a legitimate business in the medical field while these “friendships” expired. Alone again.
It’s hard to find a home when you’re self-employed, and newly, at that. My business had been alive for a year and we were doing well for most of the country but struggling here.
This place was a dream, an actual house, with a basement and a garden we could do anything we wanted with, according to the property manager. It was a converted storage unit, behind a full house. We applied, and a couple months later, we were in.
It’s been nearly five years.
All of our neighbors with kids have come and gone. The young families come here while in the military, spending their housing stipend to afford this block. Every time we get close to someone, they leave.
We received a lease violation for the overgrown weeds peeking beneath our front neighbor’s fence. We fought it, but lost, and blistered our hands pulling at weeds whose roots we would never see.
The second violation was over my butterfly garden. Once, when things were better and I didn’t want to be invisible, we took our son to the Natural History Museum. They gave away packets of seeds for pollinators, our town famous for its brief housing of Monarchs, a fitting claim to fame for a town so obsessed with status. We planted them, the flowery weeds giving some life to the cold, mulched yard.
During the pandemic, the butterflies and hummingbirds would visit me, remind me that I was still a part of something greater. Sometimes my fear would grow so big that I would just lay on my son’s rug, the one with the pretend neighborhood where all of his mismatched cars would roll through. Some as big as houses.
The second lease violation came then, an email with pictures of my garden. I fought it — quoting their insistence that we could do what we wanted with the garden. But it wasn’t enough. It never is.
They assured me that the next violation would come with an eviction, oh, but it was said with a smile, as I broke down and hired a gardener, two, to watch them cover everything green with red mulch, seeping red like blood when it rains. $1500, and an extra hundred a month. I don’t mind the money. The gardeners are the closest we’ve come to friends.
I don’t check the mail anymore. And I cringe with each email, not a healthy habit when it’s tied to my income. An eviction is a death sentence, we will not be able to start over. We want to leave but everything, everything takes so much. A momentum I don’t have anymore.
I’m not the praying type, but I write down my hopes — that we will get out, find a better place for my son before its too late. I think about my friends growing up, their parents who made the ultimate choice to give a better life to their kids and I want to be strong enough to do what they did. I don’t know if I am.
Survival in this town depends on whether or not you are beautiful, and I fear that we will always be the weeds in the garden, waiting to be poisoned, struck down.
