Trashy

I press myself against the narrow staircase as a young woman, eighteen at her oldest, tries to negotiate the lumpen bag in her arms. Her burden must weigh as much as she does. I can be generous with my time. I have gravity on my side and an armful of shoes I can put on the floor until she passes.

She wears an elastic robin's egg tube top and a fluffy white skirt; not what one wears moving into an apartment for one's first year at Boston University, but she has time to learn the necessities of jeans and t-shirts one doesn't mind absorbing sweat and dust.

I am madly jealous of her for this innocence, for having never had the experience of conspicuous perspiration to teach her the value of a change of clothes and that one need not be constantly pretty. I cannot doubt, even though my knowledge is limited to passing on the stairs, that she has been as long as she chooses to remember.

My father and I are moving my niece Alieyah out of one apartment and into another. It is fewer than five miles. My father and I will spend over eight hours in his truck getting there and back. This is not a chore for which I volunteered, nor was I eager to spend one of my final free days as a cooped-up pack animal, but no one else could do it. Leelee is family, and one suffers for one's family as a matter of course.

I do bring up that we live so far from Boston, and undoubtedly Alieyah has acquired a friend or two who could help. She said none of them drive, not even enough to bring her somewhere to rent a U-Haul. (When she later suggests that she take an Uber to follow us to her new apartment, I narrow my eyes.)

The street is havoc. When I looked at the street view online, it was a one-way road with cars tightly parked on both sides. This has been coupled with everyone moving out and in at the same time -- sometimes of the same apartment. The sidewalks are thick with student leavings, from discarded food to whole beds. Parking is notional at best. Alieyah tells us this is how it is every year. I cannot help but feel someone ought to have learned a lesson by this point, but all Alieyah can offer is that some students sleep in the grocery store parking lot when they move out before they can move in elsewhere.

The young woman, her white skirt getting grayer, smiles an apology at me when my father and Alieyah leave me on this littered street in Boston while they move their first load. (My father optimistically thought there would be only one load and that we could move her in an hour and a half before buying her lunch. There were two loads because my darling niece is a theater major and a clothes horse -- one who will not get a free lunch today.)

I do not know why the young woman seems sweetly sorry. Is it in recognition of how often we had crossed paths on the four flights to Alieyah's former apartment, that I have been left behind, or because she senses on some unspeakable level how badly I wish I were her? She is so young and shines even beside the heaps of trash her height. She is one of twenty women popping in and out of these brick buildings, so one gets the sense that the proprietors only rent to attractive undergrads. My writer's mind, coupled with my seething envy, conjures a montage of her coming year: dates and classes, friends on campus, nights that rub against the dawn, heartbreak, and weekly broken sobriety.

Did I engender this level of covetousness when I was her age? I squandered the better part of my college opportunity by not living on campus and staying with someone when I needed to figure out better who I wanted to be.

She would not take my advice in the spirit intended. I cannot imagine the phrasing that would come close to conveying it.

I smile back at the young woman, which pleases her in a wiggling way that reveals the teenager she is and not the twenty-five-year-old cosmopolite she wishes to pretend to be.

I spent the next hour walking in a widening gyre Beacon Hills, waiting for their return and the second load. It is as good a neighborhood as one can expect.

I'm not sure where their campus is. Alieyah takes public transit to get there, so likely not walkable year-round. Still, after so long in the truck -- aside from manual labor and wanting to be a pretty college student -- I can do with air and quiet.

Alieyah will graduate in May. I assume my brother and his family will come up for that. When I ask her when next she would otherwise see her family, she says she does not want to go to Texas in general and the part where he settled in particular. She hopes to go from college to working on a Neil Diamond musical on Broadway. She had done it when it was in previews in Boston, but this is the big time. She hopes to poach her older sister Ayannah from Texas, who will do makeup while Lee does costumes. It's a lovely fantasy, better because it is tangible and would give her sister a life closer to what she should be doing without a few setbacks.

I have heard the retort to those who miss college that what they miss is a walkable community with shared meals and activities. I can't deny I would want all that more than Comp 101 at 8 am, particularly since I have taught that through a community college. What I remember of college is a few teachers and a handful of individual classes, but mostly being around friends on lawns and benches. I don't want to be that young woman because she is pretty and on the cusp of this adventure (well, I do), but that her community will come easily, and my nearest neighbor is not some pink-haired anarchist with a punk band named Clinicians of Pain. Instead, I live beside the elderly man who mows our lawn, one whom I expect to die of stage four cancer or from falling down the stairs again.

Whenever I felt fulfilled and content in the past, I was a member of a loving community. You can never fully see these things from the inside. Others -- including my future self -- may look at my life as present (adored wife, published books on shelves, money enough to save and invest) with some fraction of the envy I give to a collegiate stranger. Many worthy people I know struggle with even one of these parenthetical factors, so I shouldn't get too sour in my mid-life crisis. At the bare minimum, I could not pull off a light blue tube top and fluffy white skirt.

last watched: Solar Opposites
reading: What If? 2