liked to linger in these moments, steal glimpses of the humans that extended beyond the awkward small talk we shared at dinner. I hoarded these moments like secrets. When that wasn’t enough, I took to the balcony, where our own sink and bathroom were located. As I brushed my teeth, I stared into the apartment windows across the alleyway. Our apartment buildings were so close I estimated that I could easily jump onto their balcony in the event of a fire. The occupant (or occupants, I cannot be sure) had painted the walls, or possibly moved in to a pre-painted apartment, a sickly green. From my own view the apartment could only house one person, but there was no way of knowing where the other doors led. The object of my fixation was not the size of the apartment but rather a man who I guessed to be in his late twenties or early thirties. I never saw him dressed in anything other than a white tank top and denim jeans, and he never hung any other items of clothing on his laundry line. I should have felt weird peering through the window at him sprawled across the bed, sometimes with another man, a brother, maybe, or a friend or lover. It wasn’t that I hoped to catch him doing some-
thing weird or kinky; rather, I derived a voyeuristic pleasure from watching another life pan out before me. Sometimes a woman stood by the window cooking dinner, the fragrant spices seeping through the cracked window as the man watched TV. I wondered who she was and how they knew each other. Did he hire her to cook for him? Were they friends or lovers? One day when I went out to brush my teeth, the lights across the way were off. And they stayed that way for the rest of my time there, and the laundry line remained naked, and it troubled me.
I
f you take a left off of South Main Street before you reach Pop’s Pizza and turn onto Willow Street, you will find the house that I lived in from second to fifth grade. It is a sagging white duplex with a carport attached to the side and two shabby porches, one on top and another on the bottom. The pool in the back probably hadn’t been swum in since the eighties, and instead of clear chlorinated water, murky algae kept a family of ducks afloat. We used to joke that the pool and surrounding soil were radioactive from all the chemicals emitted from the abandoned button factory that sat decaying next door. The lawn was home to grasses and weeds that grew without fear of being sliced by the blades of a lawnmower because Lou, our landlord, never came in time to mow it. So we ran through the almost foot-tall grass barefoot, throwing pregnant water balloons in the summer and setting up lemonade stands where lawn met road. Spot, our adored
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two rock-hard mattresses smushed together. We lay side by side under the thick blankets our homestay mother gave us, often too dazed from exhaustion to talk. I constantly had a sheet of sweat coating my face but stubbornly baked under the blanket to quell the ravenous mosquitos that sucked at my ankles and feet. The apartment was modest, with a cramped kitchen and a living room situated between the two bedrooms. In the mornings we sat on the brown sofas, smearing peanut butter on toast and sipping on hot chai in glass mugs that our mother prepared for us before we woke up. A thick curtain hung in the doorway of the other bedroom, slivers of light peeking out from the gaps between the fabric and doorframe, revealing flashes of movement, the existence of bodies stirring in early morning. They must have shared a room, too — our mother, father, and brother. The few times I caught glimpses of their room was when I had to shuffle through to the washing machine that resided in their bathroom. Their room was identical to ours with a large bed occupying the space, which I imagined them in together at night. Did they talk? Did Kartik, my brother, sleep with them, or on the floor? With the exception of the altar adorned with flowers and candles in the corner, our rooms were essentially arranged in the same fashion. Other more personal belongings marked their presence in the space, too, like Kartik’s black baseball cap strewn across the dresser or the hair clips and makeup scattered about that I assumed belonged to my mother. I