There’s an abandoned house in our neighborhood. Who knows the reason. The siding has either disintegrated or been smashed off the back of the house, revealing the insulation panels beneath. From the front other angles, the house looks fine, It even looks like someone lives there because the neighbors use the driveway for their extra car. It’s not a scary-looking empty house. It must be a rental with a mowing contract, because someone still comes by and cuts the yard. The apple tree in the back yard still blooms and fruits. If it weren’t for the hole in the back and the long stillness around the place, it would be just another house: a focal point in routine for a small group of people, the place of constant return.
The kids and I peeked into the windows the other day. I think it’s helpful for your children to see your curiosity outweigh propriety once in a while and—despite age and experience— still remain open to adventure. I pulled them off the sidewalk and said “’c’mon; let’s check out that house.” They of course, hadn’t been expecting this and hesitated while they calculated whether dad was asking them to do something too risky for their comfort (wouldn’t be the first time). But when they saw me cupping my hands to look into the back window—into someone’s house!—their own curiosity outweighed the possible risks.
I think it was the garage we were looking into, but it was clear it had been inhabited, or at least been a place of constant attention and traffic when the house had been in use. By the window, just under where we were looking, there was a padded chair next to an end table with an overflowing ashtray. There was a couch opposite it, and beyond the dull ring of light from the murky window, I could make out the edges of many other unrecognizable objects. The stuff that had been introduced into this garage rumpus room and had been left there either purposefully or not when the tenant quitted the place: a meticulously created museum piece of the life of the poor in the early 21-st century.
The kids wanted to see it, too. For some reason, now that I had looked in, I didn’t want them to see inside. There was so much stuff and so many shadows. In my quick scan of the room, I hadn’t entirely ruled out the possibility of something frightful in there, something I wouldn’t want them to see. While they clamored at my waist, I took another look to make sure the room was devoid of corpses or obscene posters. But something about the room in the partial light was so nebulous that I couldn’t focus on anything and only saw the same gray tangle that I hoped they would also see.
I held my son up first, probably because he was making the most noise; he’s also younger and more prone to complaint if he isn’t the first. He attached himself to the glass eagerly, but I had to show him how to hold up his hands to block out the light bouncing off the glass around him.
I don’t know what he saw. He neither seemed interested, nor disinterested. He looked without moving his head and when I brought him down did not protest, nor say anything. It was like he was having to process what he had seen. All that stuff that belonged to no one.
I thought my daughter might even be mature enough, or timid enough, to not want a look in, but as we turned to go, she protested and I held her up to the window realizing, with my usual concern, that I felt more hesitation in exposing her to the unknown that I did with my son. Is it because, as a male, I have a certain understanding of the female experience and an innate desire to, like, uphold that understanding? Do I see my daughter’s innocence as something more valuable than my son’s, or is it just that there is something in her personality, something quiet, empathetic, and kind that I want to protect and nurture?
I held her up and could feel the shift as she positioned herself to take in as much of the view as she could. She brought her hands up and leaned into the view while I pushed down anxieties that there was something in that room that I hadn’t noticed. But it was just an inert room. Interesting only for this selfsame inert quality among so many living, moving, functioning homes.
My thoughts were interrupted by my daughter’s question as we continued across the neighborhood toward the massive fig tree we discovered the other day.
“But why did someone leave all their things?”
I started to tell her how people are evicted. Sometimes they aren’t allowed to recover their things. Sometimes, they just leave in a hurry, or they leave everything behind in a jumble as a protest. But this explanation was eclipsed by the intrusion of a memory and without thinking much, I started to tell her about it.
“When I was about 16, my friend Jim and I found a house like this: empty but full of people’s stuff, strewn around everywhere. But being 16 and without a place to drink the malt liquor we’d purchased (I left this detail out), we went in. At first, we’d waded cautiously through the ectoplasm of someone else’s life. Even at 16, it was hard not to feel respectfully sad when we came upon a room that had obviously belonged to a small child filled with stuffed animals and fluffy pinkness. But deprived of order, deprived of use, the stuff—even the most personal objects—had become junk. And the more we moved through the house, and the more we drank, our sympathy for the former inhabitants melted away. We began to kick things aside, toss them at each other and soon, we were breaking them.”
I paused, not sure how to back out of telling such a revealing story. I keep forgetting that to my children, being a hostile teenager is unfathomable. Why would you break the stuff? Why would you be in an abandoned house drinking malt liquor in the first place when you had a home you could go to, when you had a loving family and even your own room with a TV in it you could turn on whenever you wanted?
Telling my kids stories of my past, I’m continually bumping into the fact that I was a pretty selfish and frequently obnoxious kid who, despite crying when he read Where the Red Fern Grows at 10, probably evinced little else that looked like empathy or kindness until after his 18th birthday.
If I hadn’t had kids, I don’t know how much I ever would’ve come to examine my own childhood in this way. I think we are all inclined, as adults, to give ourselves a break when remembering our childhood. Over the years, I have written many times about the experiences I had being young and dumb, but I never took myself to task for it. If anything, I overfocused on what still seemed like injustices done to me. Uncharitable teachers, a father who yelled, a non-verbal sibling who absorbed a lot of attention: I looked everywhere in my memories to justify my actions, but I have never had to confront my own stupidity, my own utter lack of empathy in that way that I have since I started telling my kids stories of my youth, particularly of my pissed off teenage years.
They understand in the same uncomprehending way I did when my dad would tell me stories of his youthful misbehavior when I was a kid. When I was my daughter’s age, I wasn’t so different from her: a wide-eyed quiet kid who appreciated the difference between positive and negative attention enough to share my cookie with my sister if my mom asked me to. If I had been near an abandoned house, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to go inside and start throwing everything around either.
In a way, I’m telling the stories back to myself. And it proves a maxim I repeat in my classes to my students that audience perception does a lot for the purpose of your stories. With that little hand in mine, walking through a warm spring evening toward a fruiting fig tree, it is difficult to avoid this aspect of myself that somehow atrophied after adolescence, or—more likely— just manifested as a stubborn selfish streak, albeit less destructive.
I don’t know what happened to the kid who trashed that house many years ago. We live so many lives and that one was so far back that I no longer have a frame of reference for and, perhaps consequently, I have run out of empathy for, and I earnestly hope I have converted enough of that kid into someone good to be worthy of raising these trusting, intelligent, and compassionate children who, thank God, have no understanding for the kind of anger and belligerence that hangs on the edges of my resume which can only be somewhat obscured, never completely covered by present-day good works.
We walked on, leaving the dim, empty house and my memories of being an inconsiderate, angry kid to the shades of evening coming on from the east and, by the time we reached the fig tree, my kids had forgotten all about the story, or at least their interest in it, as they reached out to pluck the strange green and unripe fruit from the spindly tree.
Unripe figs, like most unripe fruit, have no taste and no texture, just empty white pith, but as we each chewed it took us different intervals to realize this, spit out the pulp and run off through the still-blooming azaleas to whatever was next.