Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories by Sara Majka

Author:Sara Majka [Majka, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781555979249
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2016-02-16T07:00:00+00:00

NASHUA

When I travel, I often visit another town nearby, someplace I wouldn’t otherwise go. Nashua, I think, was like that. It was after Christmas and I was watching, for a time, a teenager and two dogs for a family west of Boston. I rarely saw the teenager, except to drive her from place to place, but I let the dogs out and walked them and picked up the garbage they had strewn about. I cooked meals I found in the freezer—shrimp, individual-sized lasagna. The house was large enough that cleaning people came every few days, and, when I couldn’t find something, I always thought that the cleaning people had moved it when I had probably just forgotten where it was. One night I drove to an old, unheated cinema to watch a musical. It involved driving unknown roads in the snow and then driving back, hoping I would find the teenager at home, chasing the dogs, trying to get them in their cages. There was, as always, the relief of living within a life that wasn’t mine, of raising the heat and walking barefoot across the bathroom’s stone floor.

Around this time, I realized I had fallen in love again, this time with a man who was a drinker. I remembered a story by Alice Munro in which a woman, sensing she is falling in love, and fearing what had happened the other times, gets in a car and starts to drive and keeps on going. It was a snowy day when I thought about this and I sat in my bedroom and imagined waiting it out, how long it might take. Outside there was the scrape of shovels. But for what other reason are we alive? I thought.

I had driven to Nashua from Boston to look for farmhouses. I was researching abandoned farmhouses and wanted to find a part of New Hampshire with both rural and urban poverty. Once there, I bought a bottle of whiskey at the tax-free shop, then found the Salvation Army. I bought fabric to make curtains and asked the woman behind the register about directions, but she knew the roads by different numbers than were listed on my map.

As I drove the hills, the sun hit low across an apple orchard and it was so striking that it didn’t surprise me to see an abandoned farmhouse—just like that, just what I was searching for—at the top of the hill. I pulled over and started to walk. There was a neighborhood watch sign nailed to a tree, and I thought of the neighbors watching me in the snow.

Through the window I saw furniture, not arranged to make the room habitable, but grouped together as if to be taken away. It wasn’t a beautiful farmhouse—it was in the style of a musty-looking ranch—or I would have felt the desire to go inside. I was glad the desire was less than it might have been. Still, it was hard to leave, and below the hills I stopped at a church.

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