My husband and I arrived in the Green Mountains of Vermont with a lease for an apartment we’d never seen, a one-year-old who might never walk, and, though we didn’t know it at the time, a week-old embryo inside me.
We also arrived with a contract for my husband, Justin, to be the priest at an Episcopal church, meaning I arrived as the priest’s wife. (I thought of myself instead as the priest’s spouse, to erase images of aproned shirtdresses and Jell-O salads.) Having just resigned from my gig as a visiting professor in Ohio, I had no job, which left me with dueling desires: to have another baby and to be more than a mother. Could this new life be a container for all my desires, or would some of them never fit? Did I want too much?
The town was beautiful. Low, verdant mountains were covered in massive, broccoli-like trees. Two-lane roads wound past wood-signed country stores and weathered white Victorians. Billboards were against the law. In Vermont you couldn’t obscure the trees. The trees won. Trees did not pay cash, however, so the economy was not booming, and salaries were low.
We’d arranged to rent the first floor of a house on Pleasant Street for $1,000 a month. Most of the locals didn’t have pleasant things to say about Pleasant Street, which was home to a large, dilapidated apartment complex said to be filled with drugs and crime and cockroaches, but my husband had reached out to a future parishioner who lived on Pleasant: What did she think?
“You’ll be on the good end,” she told us. She was not on the good end, and she was just fine.
Pleasant Street was only five blocks long, but no matter how small a place is, we humans are great at dividing it: Good and bad. Friend and foe. My spiritual practices had taught me to be wary of such categories.
I would spend the next two years trying to figure out which end of that good-bad spectrum my life occupied.
We stepped into a living room with scratched hardwood floors beneath our feet and a drop ceiling of off-white particleboard tiles above our heads. The tiles hung a foot lower than you’d want a ceiling to hang, but no problem: Tall windows spilled natural light onto the floor. The dining room had beige carpeting more befitting an IT company than a place to eat spaghetti, but at least there was space for a table. I’d planned on configuring two adjoining bedrooms so that we slept just a door away from the baby, but they were too small for any bed larger than a twin. Luckily the third bedroom was plenty big. The laundry area was right off the galley kitchen. Matte white paint had been slapped over every surface, so the walls and baseboards were indistinct and a little drippy.
Those tall windows offered views of the dumpsters and parking lots behind Main Street, so I drove to Kmart, bit my lip over prices, and settled on a heap of aqua drapes—twenty bucks apiece. They were too shiny and stiff to mask their polyester nature, but they had a pilled texture meant to evoke raw silk.
When our landlords came by to introduce themselves, they stood beside a shelf of our books on how to avoid suffering: “Develop a mind that clings to nothing,” said the Buddhist Diamond Sutra; Be Here Now, read the spine of a Ram Dass book. Dan was a general contractor and wore a flat cap and a half grin. Or a sneer. I wasn’t sure which. His husband, Stew, had a hoop earring, a goatee, a soft round belly, and a voice that exuded Southern ease. They handed us a state-mandated pamphlet, What to Know about Lead Paint. Never strip the paint, the pamphlet said. Never bother the paint. Just paint over the paint. This is how you keep lead paint from causing suffering.
We handed them our rent check and thanked them for the place.
“We hope you never leave,” Dan told us.
I smiled, mistaking our convenience as renters for a sense of community: Maybe they’d become our baby’s adopted uncles, and we’d gather for summer barbecues, blowing bubbles from plastic wands and flipping burgers and talking about how much our mutually beloved girl had grown as she crawled and hopefully then toddled across the grass.
A few days after we moved in, a man fell through the ceiling. When I heard the crash, Justin was at his church a block away. I was unpacking, and the baby, who’d been napping, was no longer napping.
In the laundry area a denim leg dangled from a hole in the ceiling above the washer and dryer, both now doused in white dust and chunks of plaster.
“Are you all right?” I called into the hole.
“I’m OK!” the leg’s owner said, like he was half trying to convince himself. It was George, an employee of the landlords. “Just stepped in the wrong place.”
Later he knocked on the front door with a toolbox and a smile, there to patch the hole.
“All fixed,” he announced a half hour later, slipping out the front door.
The hole was patched and painted, but the washer, dryer, and floor were still covered in debris, as if the ceiling had vomited chalk. I vacuumed the bits and wondered why I was so tired. I wiped the appliances and wondered if I was pregnant. I vacuumed and wiped and wondered if this cleanup job was my role in the community we were building—Dan and Stew and George and my husband and me.
Pleasant comes from an old French verb meaning to please.
Seven days after we moved in, I bought a pregnancy test at the dollar store.
From our tall front windows I watched young mothers amble down our street pushing strollers, trailing toddlers, and looking vaguely numb. Their pajama pants pooled at their ankles: Fleece leopard skin. Poly-cotton poop emojis. Yellow happy faces running down the legs of a frowning person. The mothers were far younger than me—teens or early twenties. Sometimes skinny men walked beside them.
“Shut up,” the parents said to their kids. “Get your ass over here.” Not all their words were angry, but enough were that my hormone-heavy heart broke. Their eyes were sunken, dark-circled, dim. They seemed not fully there. I didn’t understand what was wrong. The New York Times headline wouldn’t come for another two years: “Heroin Scourge Overtakes a ‘Quaint’ Vermont Town.”
In the corner of our bedroom was a sealed door. On the other side was the house’s original entrance hall, which belonged to the second-floor unit. At early hours of the day Dan and his employee George hauled heavy things up that stairwell, dropped those things, barked at one another, laughed, hammered, told stories I couldn’t decipher, and barked and laughed some more.
The only place to put my meditation cushions was in front of that sealed door. I sat there and breathed and let go, breathed and let go, while Dan and George argued and griped inches away.
All those books in our bookcases, whether Buddhist or Taoist or Christian, essentially taught the same thing: You find happiness through acceptance. If you are bothered, work on welcoming the situation. “Every response to God, whatever it is,” wrote the Trappist monk Thomas Keating, “must begin with the full acceptance of reality as it actually is at the moment.”
That’s the good end of Pleasant Street, I thought. That’s the good work.
Though George barked nearly every word he spoke, he usually wore a broad smile, asked how I was, and peeked into the baby carrier to catch a glimpse of my one-year-old.
“How’s Bright Eyes?” he would ask. “I call her Bright Eyes,” he’d explain every time.
One day, when it seemed the second-floor renovation would never be complete and George and Dan would hammer above us in construction purgatory forever, George said, “We’re gonna be neighbors!”
“How’s that?” I asked.
His wife liked the upstairs unit so much that she wanted to move in.
She brought with her a midsize brown mutt who wore a service vest and barked nonstop.
I sat on the floor with the baby, helping her learn to sit. I sat at the dining table with the baby, feeding her spoonful after spoonful of pureed carrots. I sat on the couch with the baby, watching a show about sign language. All the while I eyed the front door, waiting for my husband, who came home each day for lunch and dinner and made both meals. Six feet tall and wearing a black cassock, he looked like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, if Keanu wore prescription glasses and had a buzz cut and a beard. Justin’s arrival meant I could leave the baby in his arms and succumb to a nap or sometimes, once my pregnancy nausea no longer rolled like an ocean in my gut, read or write. He rescued me from the privileged problem of domestic entrapment.
I needed to make friends, so I began taking the baby to story time. The moms there were different than the moms on Pleasant Street. Roughly my age, they all lived in single-family homes farther up the mountain, and they had their sober fingers on the pulse of the story-time circuit. We met in the library or the church nursery or the back room of a store called Earthy Crunchy Mama, which sold trendy cloth diapers. They corralled toddlers around their knees and made exaggerated gestures during the singing of “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” which had way more verses than I ever knew.
None of them pretended her life didn’t revolve around the needs of others:
“What time do you get Elsa down for her nap?”
“What did you make for dinner last night?”
“Have you tried nipple cream?”
“Have you tried the mommy-and-me swim classes at the Y?”
Sometimes I tried to diversify our conversations. “I was reading this article,” I said one morning, “about the importance of play for both children and adults.”
The mothers half listened while they refereed toddlers who wanted to eat stuffed animals or flip a large plastic town upside down.
“One of the things serial killers have in common,” I said, “is that they weren’t allowed to play.”
Some of the mothers’ faces angled toward me, their eyes beaming a telepathic message: We don’t talk about K-I-L-L-E-R-S in front of the kids.
The casual talk continued:
“Have you tried the Ergo carrier?”
“I made mac and cheese last night. Ingrid had three whole helpings!”
One day, as I was pushing my daughter home in her stroller, I saw Dan encasing the house’s concrete porch in wood planks. They were definitely an upgrade, the type of architectural feature found on the New England Victorians up the hill.
“It’s not legal,” he said, arranging a two-by-four across the concrete.
“The porch?” I asked.
“The wood. It’s pressure treated. It holds up better. Doesn’t get moldy or eaten by termites.”
I nodded. Preventing mold and termites seemed good.
“But you know how the EPA is.” He waved his hand, as though the EPA were a bunch of gnats.
I didn’t know how they were, but I’d been raised by libertarian parents who believed seat belts broke collarbones rather than saved lives, so I was familiar with the sentiment.
I also didn’t know Dan was laying planks treated with copper, cadmium, and arsenic. The next day he painted them dove gray.
A woman who managed media and marketing at the elite college in town invited me to her house for a playdate. Other professional women from the college would be there: the registrar, maybe even the president. Maybe people would talk about more than mac and cheese. Maybe I’d make a career connection. I had sent my résumé to the college more than once.
It was a breezy, sunny spring day. The media manager’s ranch was on a hill, hundreds of feet above Pleasant Street, and the landscaped yard was layered like a cake in rich shades of green: emerald, ivy, evergreen. Envy cake.
The other women and I stood or sat at the top of the hill, the wind blowing our hair. The registrar had straight brown hair. The media manager had curly black hair. The college president’s nanny had copper highlights. The president would come later, I found out, to relieve the nanny.
My almost-two-year-old was still struggling to sit up on her own, so I propped her against my pregnant belly while the other kids darted barefoot between a plastic water table and a slide. The media manager lifted the water table and moved it across the grass a few feet. “I love this vintage plastic,” she said.
The table was a faded pink that had probably once been red. By “vintage” she meant 1980s Little Tikes. I admired how a single word could turn something old into something chic.
The media manager asked me what it was like to be a priest’s wife, her eyes squinting a little, her mouth turned up in a curious grin.
I knew what she was probably asking: What’s your relationship to patriarchy? To a tradition that has subjugated women for millennia? I wondered if I needed to tout my voting record, or hail our Democratic Socialist senator, Bernie Sanders, who’d already held a meeting at my husband’s church. The truth was, being a priest’s wife was hard, just not for the reasons she thought—not in the Episcopal Church, where women could be clergy and queer folks were welcome and nobody expected me to make Jell-O salads. It was hard because people made assumptions about what it was like.
“It can be difficult,” I said. “He’s always on call. Someone could get sick. Someone could die. People need him a lot.”
I, in my constant nausea, needed him. I, in my constant urge to vent about the drudgeries of diaper changing, needed him. He drew on his deep well of patience and listened when he could—which was often, but not 24-7.
“Sounds like being married to a doctor,” she said.
“Yes,” I replied, not because she was right but because agreeing was easier.
The wind kept blowing our hair. I had to pee once every hour, so I asked the media manager if I could use her bathroom. She offered to watch my daughter while I stepped into her large, open living room with its mid- century modern furniture and bay windows overlooking the layered green landscape. The walls were covered in modern art, and there were two enormous black-and-white photos of her kids’ faces, cheeky and beautiful. In the hall to the bathroom, a sign implored me to vote for Ralph Nader.
After I returned to the lawn, the college president arrived, her belly as big as mine and covered by a shift dress professional enough to hold board meetings in. I did the math: Both of us were raising a one-year-old and gestating a second human, but she was also running a major institution. While I knelt beside my baby, the president remained standing above me, a statue of a pregnant career woman. Her hair was a neat black bob. The wind hardly seemed to touch it.
She asked the other women about public elementary schools. She asked about private preschools. She asked these questions in an unemotional way, like a person who makes a lot of decisions. It was clear she was here not to connect but to extract.
She already knew the names of all the schools people mentioned. “There aren’t many options,” she said, staring into the mountainous distance.
The subject turned to a local park—a big one with a wood castle and postcard views of Mount Anthony. The college president hadn’t known about the park until recently. “They should advertise it better,” she said.
I realized then the difference between her and me: Where I would’ve seen my ignorance as the problem, she saw it as someone else’s marketing failure, a small town’s inability to sell itself.
The media manager turned to me, again with that curious, squint-eyed grin. “So, where do you live?”
I told her about our apartment on Pleasant Street.
“I know exactly what house you mean,” she said.
She did?
“We looked at it when it was up for sale.”
“To buy?” I asked.
“To rent out.”
“It was so cheap!” I marveled. Dan and Stew had told us they’d paid less than $100,000 for it.
The media manager shrugged. “It’s behind a bar,” she said, “and across from a parking lot.”
I thought of the fry-oil scent that wafted across that lot, exacerbating my nausea.
“Plus,” she added, “it’s on Pleasant Street.”
It was true. The restaurant across the parking lot was also a bar, though I’d never thought of it that way. Technically it was a microbrewery, which had made it sound fancier. And we lived on the same street as a major drug bust. (The cop had knocked on the door of Justin’s church: “Excuse me, Reverend, but could you lock the doors? We’re about to run a chase.”) We also lived one street over from a recent sex trafficking bust at a massage parlor that had been offering more than sciatica relief.
But we were just a block from my husband’s work, I told myself. We were right beside Main Street. We had a three-bedroom that cost just a grand a month. Once the media manager had put her spin on our place, though, I couldn’t unsee it. On weekend nights people stumbled out the back door of the microbrewery, shouting all manner of drunken garble, making our front yard sound very much like the back of a bar.
Had this been New York City, our place would’ve been a steal. New Yorkers would kill for three bedrooms and a porch, even with arsenic-treated wood. If we’d lived in Manhattan, we’d be like royalty. But we didn’t.
Did I want too much? It’s an age-old question. For women, the feminist answer is No. Go, girl. Get yours! But the Buddhist answer, regardless of gender, is a resounding yes. Wanting is what causes suffering. In Pali, the word is tanhā: Craving. Thirst. As Herman Hesse said of the Buddha before he became the Buddha: “A goal stood before Siddhartha, a single goal: to become empty, empty of thirst, empty of wishing, empty of dreams.”
The Christian answer is mixed. You could say Eve wanted too much, but her desire wasn’t hers; it was planted in her by the serpent, that symbol of temptation. According to Saint Ignatius, a person’s truest desires are divinely given. He also said it helps to know what you want and recommended bringing your desires before God.
I didn’t study Ignatius back then. I meditated, and this is what I knew of meditation: You settled your butt against a circular cushion. You crossed your right leg under your left. You let your vertebrae stack like stones, towering toward your head’s crown. You folded your hands in your lap. You closed your eyes. You didn’t move. If you had a thought, you let it go. Have another thought? Let it go. Want to scratch an itch? Let both the itch and the urge to scratch it go.
I had learned the hard way that when you scratch an itch, more pop up. Move the foot that’s going numb, and the other one goes numb, or an ankle starts screeching. Drop your chin to soothe the knot in your back, and you realize your torqued knee has been screaming worse than your back. Once you pay attention to a pain, it spawns more.
Pleasant Street was a pain: hostile pajama-pants parents, stinky fry oil, barking neighbor with his barking dog. My nausea sometimes trapped me in the apartment with a baby who needed nearly all of me. Besides my stretched-thin husband, my family was too far away to help. What hurt should I have focused on? If I had, wouldn’t my attention only have made another ache appear?
In the mornings, before my husband left for work and while George hollered at his barking mutt, I breathed and let go, breathed and let go. I did so beside a door that was sealed shut, that wouldn’t let me leave even if I wanted.
My belly bulged. So did a ceiling tile above our gray IKEA sofa. I sent out more résumés.
“You look like you’re ready to pop,” George said, his ubiquitous smile starting to flatten, his words starting to slur.
Chairs of departments wrote me back: Next year’s classes were all covered, but they’d keep my résumé on file.
A brownish water stain spread across the bulging ceiling tile.
On the last day of May I had the baby. Crates of milk and eggs and beans and rice and a half loaf of locally baked bread arrived biweekly on the arsenic-wood porch—the gift of government assistance.
That summer was hot and humid, which swelled the house’s wood, making the side door stick so badly I could barely open it. I needed to open it. If ever I wanted to get anywhere farther than a walk, I carried two non-ambulatory babies out that side door and to the car, one at a time. When Dan came to repair it, he pulled out a long lemon zester, the fancy kind you buy at a kitchen-gadget party. I stood on the dining room’s carpet, baby in hand, and watched him use it to shred away a layer of lead paint.
He tried to close the door. It still stuck. He zested some more. White flecks of paint gave way to a bluish green. “There,” he said when the door finally closed without sticking. “Don’t tell my husband.” He lifted the zester and eyed it, its tiny silver holes packed with paint dust.
I didn’t think of the state-mandated pamphlet’s warning: Never bother the paint. I didn’t think of my babies. I thought of the zester. I thought of Dan’s husband and his lemon or Parmesan.
Which was the true story? Was I living affordably in beautiful Vermont, bonding with my babies because I had no work to take me away, renting from gay landlords behind a microbrewery, and sleeping in the shadow of the Green Mountains? Or was I trapped, a woman with two master’s degrees and two babies stuck beneath a loud neighbor and collecting food benefits? Which end of Pleasant Street did I live on? The good one? The bad one? What was the right way to frame a life? Should you always paint it in gratitude? Or should you chip away at the paint? Risk the lead exposure?
The American diplomat drove from DC to witness our new baby’s baptism. He hadn’t always been a diplomat. Once, he’d been a college kid living in the same dormitory as my husband and me. He’d hosted parties with red Solo cups and reggae and Bob Dylan on the stereo. He’d taken a writing class in which I’d earned an A- and he’d earned a B+ because the professor had said his thinking wasn’t clear and his arguments for legalizing marijuana were hazy. Now he was a senior official in the Obama administration, wearing a striped poplin button-up, the seams of which clearly indicated the shirt was not sold at Kmart. He was tan and childless and exactly our age, and his sun-bleached brown curls told you he used his vacation time.
When he slipped through our door, he said, “What are you guys doing here?”
He told my husband he’d connect us with people he knew. We’d love Park Slope in Brooklyn, he said.
“Does Park Slope have rent for $1,000 a month?” I asked, the baby attached to my boob.
At the baptism the baby wore a cream knit dress and was drizzled with holy water while she stroked the beard of the priest, who was also her dad. After the ceremony the diplomat came back to our apartment and sat on our couch beside the shelves of books about acceptance and happiness, beneath the bulging, browning ceiling tile that dipped a few inches below the tiles around it. Only then did I see our situation as desperate. I worried about the diplomat’s beauty beneath that ugly stain. In my mind I saw it burst and rain dirty water upon his white poplin shirt, just like the ceiling had done a year before to the washer and dryer.
But it didn’t burst. He just sat there, dry and clean and smiling confidently.
Lately, when George’s dog barked, George barked back, his words growing rougher and slurring into sludge. “Shut up!” he yelled, at the dog and at his wife now too.
“Hey, Bright Eyes,” he still said to my oldest, but with a flatness to his voice.
From the windows I watched George walk back and forth across the shared side yard over and over, from the garage to the front door of his apartment. “What is he doing?” I asked Justin.
“I think he’s drinking in the garage.”
When Justin went to talk with him, George couldn’t stand up straight. “I’m not drunk, Rev,” George said, tipping back on his heels.
“Did you call your sponsor?” my husband asked.
One afternoon a car pulled up onto our grass, and George fell out of the passenger seat. He rounded the car, leaned into the driver’s side window, and made out with the driver, all while his wife was upstairs. When he withdrew his head from the window, he banged his crown on the door frame—hard—then stumbled toward his front door and stomped up the stairs.
“Shut up,” he told the dog.
That night, while George hollered indecipherable rage at his wife, we called the police.
Eventually Dan took down the bulging tile to reveal the house’s original ceiling: regal white filigree befitting a grand 1890 home, but decrepit, with a lightning-bolt crack of brown.
I left Dan to his work, and when I returned, a new particleboard tile, whiter than the others, had replaced the bulging one. It didn’t take long for a brown spot to slowly spread across the new tile like a Rorschach test. What did I see in its shape?
Today, two hundred miles from Pleasant Street, I’m sitting on my meditation cushion in a monastery, reading a book by Trappist monk Thomas Keating. “Every response to God, whatever it is,” he writes, “must begin with the full acceptance of reality as it actually is at the moment. . . . There should be a basic acceptance of whatever is actually happening before we decide what to do with it.”
I look up. Before we decide what to do with it. The Hudson River rolls by outside the window. All those years of practicing acceptance, and I was somehow unable to hear the message of those last eight words: Acceptance doesn’t mean inaction.
“Should we move?” I wondered aloud, though we couldn’t afford to unless I got a job. It was winter again, and I was sending résumés out, casting an ever-wider net, applying at colleges an hour away and more. Even if one said yes, the earliest they could slate me to teach would be the fall, nine months away. A full gestation.
The babies turned one and three in the spring, and we held a tea party in the side yard to celebrate. Justin borrowed tables and chairs from the church while I bought tablecloths and teacups and dishes from Goodwill—enough for a dozen toddlers. The kids ended up sitting on the grass, enraptured with a battery-operated machine that blew iridescent bubbles across the yard. They seemed unfazed that their view was a parking lot behind a bar.
At the end of the summer I got a call from a department chair at an Upstate New York college. Did I want to teach two courses? The college was an hour and fifteen minutes away, and there was no guarantee of future work, the chair said, but they were offering more than I’d ever been paid: $5,000 per class. We were suddenly $10,000 dollars richer.
The cliché was true: If you knock long enough, doors open. And if you wait long enough, time opens other doors. When my oldest had turned three, she’d become eligible for preschool. Come September I would have twelve hours of free childcare a week for one kid. For the other child I found a spacey but well-meaning babysitter who took sharp knives to our Teflon pans and somehow broke the vacuum but adored my one-year-old, a being of earth and ferocity and belly.
Two days a week I drove to work, taught a couple of classes of bright freshmen, and afterward sat happily in my closet-turned-office. On my way home I eyed the single-family houses tucked into the mountains. Small ranches, big white Victorians, it didn’t matter. I loved them all.
If desire causes suffering, shouldn’t I have looked away? I didn’t know. I remembered something a priest friend had once said to me: “If you feel envy, there might be something in the thing you envy that you need.” He’d then told me a story: The day he had signed his divorce papers, he’d found himself in an airport bar, eyeing the doting couples who touched shoulders, leaned into one another’s ears, and tossed back cocktails. Envy burned him. But was that a bad thing? He longed for love. He remarried and had stayed married for twenty years and counting.
Because of my older child’s developmental delays, the babies learned to crawl at the same time that fall: across the scratchy dining room carpet, across the grass as the leaves turned umber and tumbled out of the sky.
One afternoon I noticed sparkles among the blades of grass. Glitter? No. Glass! Shards of it. It was like a bad Dr. Seuss book: Glass, glass, in the grass. Here, there, everywhere. I swept my babies up, one in each arm, and fled inside.
Where had the broken glass come from? Justin checked the garage and found window frames leaned against a wall, their panes shattered.
“Do you know about the glass?” he asked George.
“Oh,” George said. “One of the windows fell and broke, so I just broke them all. That way they wouldn’t break anymore.”
I had to give him credit for his logic. The surest way to rid yourself of a threat is to make it happen.
I stood inside the lemon-zested door while Dan stood on the other side, plaid cap on his head, lip slightly higher on the left. Smiling or sneering? It was hard to say.
“George broke the windowpanes in the garage,” I said, “and then traipsed the broken glass across the yard.”
I waited for Dan to say, Wow, that’s ridiculous. I waited for him—for someone, anyone—to tell me, This is verifiably bad. You shouldn’t live beneath him anymore. Instead he paused as if doing math in his head.
“It’s not safe,” I said. “My babies are crawling.”
“Well,” he said, “George said you left dirty diapers in the trash can and didn’t bag them up. And he had to scrub the whole inside of the trash can. So.”
I stared at the landlord. “That’s hardly the same,” I said.
“I’m just telling you what he told me.”
I took a step back, my eyes glued to Dan. That was the moment I knew which end of Pleasant I lived on.
I found a listing for a 1,200-square-foot Craftsman up the mountain on Prospect Street, just a quarter mile from Pleasant but in a different universe: a neighborhood of single-family homes with mountain views. The word prospect comes from Latin, meaning to look forward. Three bedrooms, one bath, $1,000 a month, utilities not included. There was no dishwasher, but there was a working fireplace and a skylight in the attic bedroom; a view of birches and pines and the rooftops of homes below; a yard that would be entirely ours, with a trio of sister oaks; and an elderly landlady who liked to plant daffodil bulbs for the tenants. No industrial carpet. No bulging ceiling tiles. No broken glass.
But would Prospect be better? I couldn’t decide. I was hung up on the lack of a dishwasher and the cost of utilities—four to five hundred a month—and my shaky employment situation. Good and bad still seemed scrambled, like in Eden before Eve sank her teeth into the wrong fruit.
After work one night I asked the babysitter: “Should we move?”
“Your neighbor’s a creep,” she said. “He ogles my boobs. Besides,” she added while my toddler wrestled in her arms, “at least you’ll get off Pleasant.”
While a fleet of movers swooped into the apartment to transport our lives from Pleasant to Prospect, I drove the babies around for a back seat nap. They drooled, pink-cheeked, in their car seats while our houseplants formed a small jungle around them.
Ten years later I’m on a FaceTime call during the pandemic with a nun who has kind gray eyes and wears a sweater wrapped around her shoulders instead of a habit.
Justin and I live in a new house now, in a new state, and I’m teaching full-time. There are still problems: special ed battles, broken appliances, the chaos of juggling work and writing with children and dishes. I still struggle to know when to accept reality as it is and when to take action, when to ignore an itch and when to scratch. I want Sister to give me the answers through my laptop screen, but she only ever asks questions. At the end of our sessions she always says, “What do you want from God? What do you need?”
I’d once thought desires lived on a spectrum from good to bad, like a street in a beautiful, struggling Vermont town. A good desire: advocating for your child. A bad desire: wanting to run away for a week. Now I know that desires are like nesting dolls—the big, loud, surface-level ones containing the small, vital ones. You can split the big ones open, toss aside your hunger for new pants or better furniture, and find inside them a singular longing that can look many ways but is always the same and never to blame: You want more life.
On the day we moved from Pleasant to Prospect, I pulled into the gravel driveway while my children wiped the sleep from their eyes, and we got out and opened the doors to our new home. The youngest toddled across the hardwood; the oldest pushed a walker she couldn’t yet steer. After she ran into a wall, I helped her reverse.
They brought themselves to the center of the empty dining room, where the oldest said, “Ah!” the only word she could say yet.
“Ah-ah!” the youngest hollered back, thinking they were playing a game of echo.
“Ah-ah-ah!” the oldest called.
They yawped back and forth, enamored of the sound of their voices echoing against the walls, the same voices they would use months, years, decades in the future to say what feels both dangerous and vital to say, even when it’s just a starting point: I want. I need. I desire.
