I told Theresa and Don on the school bus in May of 1982 that I would be gone for a year, maybe two. I moved to Eagle Heights, in Madison, Wisconsin, when I was nine. My mother had grown tired of the two hour jaunt from rural Wisconsin--Bell Center, pop. 120-- to the UW-Madison campus twice a week in pursuit of her Masters degree in Guidance and Counselling. Three months later I lay on a mattress on the floor of Eagle Heights Graduate Housing Apartment 608f. The rain the day before had slicked the pavement, making it gleam orange under the sodium street lamp. I played with a plastic maze-and-ball in the dark and wondered why, since we were in the city, there wasn't traffic outside my window, any of the honks and crashes from Sesame Street whenever a city scene played.

The next day, I went out to meet people. Ricardo and his friends spoke Spanish, a Thai couple directly over my head at night fought, pounded, and screamed in Thai--little David Leigh, my brother, found a best friend in Wom-pyo, a Korean boy from upstairs. Two days after meeting him, David came inside to announce "Ompear doesn't talk!" My mother explained to him that Wom-pyo spoke Korean, and not English. David was adamant in refusing his friend's speaking ability. I walked with him around the maze of sidewalks and tried to get my bearings, find landmarks. In a new place, more people in a small space than we'd ever seen before, the grass seemed artificial, the brown bus shelter with its graffiti-covered bulletin board frightened me with its casual defacement. Living poor in the country taught me a respect for maintaining things; I wondered what kind of people lived here.

Inside the shelter was a map of all Eagle Heights. Tracing the curved lakeshore drive with my finger, I found our building. We lived in the rear half of the entire complex--a long walk to the garden plots, but on the same turnoff as the Community Center. The buildings alternated rectangular and hexagonal--as if bricklayers and honeybees both lived here. Every building had a number, every number its twelve lettered apartments divided into three entrances. Our apartment sat on ground level, middle entrance.

From the brown bus shelter to 608 lay a long concrete path, slightly sloped downhill. The next day, I skated up to the top, turned around, and looked down the hill. From where I stood I could see Lake Mendota, the field and playground in the hollow formed by four buildings, the Community Center up on the other hill, the path up to "ABC for Kids," the daycare my brother would be going to. All of the maples were turning orange. I pushed off the top of the hill and waited for gravity to bring me back down to the parking lot and home. I could smell my mother's garlic bread all the way down.

My aunt Odessa, thin, blond, and, at 32, several years younger than my mother, owned L'Etoile restaurant. She hired me to come in and run trays of hot croissants down to the restaurant's Farmer's Market booth on Saturday mornings. Six o'clock a.m. I caught the L bus going downtown to the Square. I rode up State street and watched the storefronts--Spaceport Arcade, Rose Records, Steep and Brew--roll by closed. As I got to the head of State street, I could see the Capital Dome, center of the Square and ivory in the early morning clarity. The floury smell, the scrape of stainless steel, yawns as the sun came up, hot pans and flaky croissants all clung to my dough-sticky skin as I rode home at lunch time with my five dollars in my pocket. Work seemed associated with sunlight in an empty restaurant. I sat at the copper bar at noon after my first day of work, sipping Coke from a tall, skinny 'zombie glass'.

I bought my first bike with my own savings, a wad of dollar bills I kept in a Calumet Baking Soda can. While riding it in the parking lot I caught my foot in the spokes. The bike stopped dead and I flipped over the handlebars, seeing in my mind as I hung airborne an image of the Space Shuttle landing. The concrete and blood in my mouth tasted salty, and I lay there for a minute, my bike half on top of me. I didn't think I would move again.

We parked Snow White, our white VW rabbit, in the spot marked 608f in yellow, and later that week caught the Indian kids from the next entrance playing in our car. They were brothers, 5 and 3, too bored to play on the swings or dig in the sandbox; we found Handi-wipes stuck in the tape deck, the blinkers on, windshield wipers suddenly convulsing as we started the car.

In February I dreamed. My brother and I slept in one room, I on the top bunk, he on the bottom. My body was aflame with fever and I woke up when everything in the house seemed deep in sleep. I felt like a cotton-mouthed snake must feel--my throat felt dry as a grain elevator. Falling into a fantasy I slid down to the foot of my bed, clambered down, walked the three steps to the bathroom, without light grabbed the cup, filled it with water and snapped awake in my bed, the house still silent. My mouth was still desert-dry, but my fever sang too loudly for me to get up. Again I dreamt of getting a drink, again I opened my eyes only to see the glow-in-the-dark stars my mother had put on the ceiling above my bed saying "I LOVE YOU." The quiet in the room was too thick to call for help. When I finally managed to move my body, at every step I felt my muscles ache and expected to fall through the floor into my bed again, victim of another dream. The sink felt like ice to my hands.

In the spring of 84, my parents sat David and I down in the living room. As they spoke, one at a time, my Abba's beard moving, then my Mama's curls, I felt frozen inside as hard as the fever-felt sink. The carpet was the color of ripe wheat, and the sun made it shine golden. Mama and Abba told us that things were changing, that no longer would we all live in the same house together, no longer be one family. They told us that the separation they had tried hadn't given them what they looked for. I didn't remember this separation. I remembered standing in my room several weeks before, panicked not to remember dinner the night before, nor anything out of the weeks previous. Panicked, but somehow safe outside the room looking in, safe from actually handling the dangerous isotopes of my life. I was free to live in the world of Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Frank Herbert's Dune. I couldn't concentrate on what my mother was saying as she talked of David and I switching houses. The words dropped away, covered with scribbled black crayon in my mind, edited out.

My mother's thesis was done; we sat in the June heat at Camp Randall stadium and watched the university graduates with binoculars. My mother seemed very far away as I saw her take her empty diploma cover. After graduation we were to move out of Eagle Heights and into two new houses on opposite sides of town. I put down the binoculars. They were heavy, and I couldn't watch any more. February 7, 1995

© 2006 Adam Hirsch. 
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