A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing by Mary-Alice Daniel

Author:Mary-Alice Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

Thus began my American childhood.

Flying above, I’d marveled at blue oases in backyards; swimming pools were rare in English homes. American highways seemed impossible—all this fits inside one city? For us, it was unusual to see such motorways and no one walking—and the billboards! Each promising something decadent, like a gallon of free iced tea with the purchase of a bucket of chicken, or buffets offering an all-you-can-eat spread—so my father hadn’t lied. America was a leviathan, a monster that dealt in gratuitousness in everything: highways, malls, the number of channels on television.

We arrived at our new home, Riverbend Apartments, which now has 2.5 stars in a single Yelp review: “Still have the same cabinets and drawers not working, but the place is looking better. The exterior is getting a fresh face which has a pleasant though dark palette. I still hear the squirrels sometimes and am anxious for the roof to be repaired which I am told will put an end to their egress.”

The entrance to Riverbend sat on a straight stretch of road, the length of which still surfaces when I need to mentally calibrate a distance of one mile. The complex seemed colossal, its housing units divided by entryways and arranged along avenues. We lived on the first avenue. The cream-and–brown butter residences were separated by a hill from the cream and powdery blue of another block of apartments similar to Riverbend, only more expensive, better landscaped, and renovated. Winters covered the hill with snow, and my brother and I would sit in plastic buckets to sled down to the parking lot.

Our apartment had two stories—3 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, a living room, a separate dining room, and a kitchen. When we first saw it, we were amazed. It was full of clean furniture not layered in dust; it had a balcony, another rare feature in England; I hadn’t even seen a half bathroom before. I was gratified to find the fridge stocked with a new-to-me form of liquid sugar in juice drinks from Welch’s. That things could be new; that a car or TV could be so large. Perhaps we had shaken off some of the trappings of poverty in only one day.

In my mother’s trunk where she keeps stacks of our immigration documents, I recently found an old thank-you note trimmed in watercolor teddy bears and flowers. One side is titled “Mommy’s Impression.” She’d written: “A little uphill, there is a windy road branching from the main (not very major) road leading to a group of appartments. The appartments are in a semicircular arrangement. Ours is on the lefthand side. N12.” Underneath this text, her drawn diagram of the apartment complex. I note her spelling, “appartment,” halfway between English and French. Otherwise, her musings are accurate.

On the other side, still in her handwriting: “Nashville as I see it (Nana’s).” I had written: “There’s a very long road. Our house is somewhere at the end. It’s quite big. There’s grass and a few flowers here and there. There are lots of trees and plenty of cars.

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