Attrition

by Susan Cameron

Sharon stared out her front window at the house across the street. Its bushes were pruned, its grass was perfect, its fresh coat of paint gleamed softly in the sun, and it had a dignified For Sale sign posted on the lawn. The short iron fence surrounding the front courtyard entry was decked out in clean white paint, as were the bars across all the windows. Those bars gave its ownership away -- it was a single woman’s house. But the woman who owned it was no longer single, and her new man didn’t want to live there.

Above and behind the new roof rose the huge arc of the old satellite dish, installed in the back yard when TV satellite dishes were the latest technology. She smiled as she remembered how proud Ron had been of that NASA-sized dish, how much he’d loved his TV. Genial Ron, laughing with her ex, Jim, about nothing in particular, raising the Corona beer bottle to his lips, blurry blue Playboy bunny tattoo on his forearm, chunky gold bracelet sliding on his wrist, sipping his beer, always laughing. Years later, she and Jim had boarded the boat that took Ron’s ashes into Newport Bay. His widow Cynthia had hysterics in the arms of her bewildered family. Mascara ran off her false eyelashes as she clung to the container holding Ron’s ashes, screaming “No, I can’t let you go!” as the boat heaved at anchor and the green-faced mourners tried not to do the same. So many years Ron had been gone. Jim, too.

Now Cynthia was going. Ron’s life insurance had been substantial, and Cynthia had her own pension and social security money as well. It had been more than enough to pay for plastic surgery and antidepressants, more than enough to attract inappropriate men who weren’t the least bit fazed by her panic attacks and neediness. Sharon stared at the empty house and silently wished her ex-neighbor well in her new life.

God, what was this mood she was in?

The past kept interjecting itself into her present lately. She’d be walking down the street with her husband Aaron and say things like, “There was a weeping willow tree in the center of that lawn when I moved here, back when it belonged to David and Diana.” Or, “That house was originally Paul and Evelyn’s. I used to play Bunco with Evelyn and her friends.” Or, “My friends used to call this street Van Land. Everybody on the block owned a van when Jim and I moved in – eighteen vans in eighteen driveways.”

Robert and Sarah, Mike and Mary, old Bill on the corner, Patrick and Janey, Chuck and Melanie, the children who’d played Marco Polo in her swimming pool, grown up with kids of their own by now – all gone. Sharon didn’t understand why all the old names and faces were suddenly coming back to her. Some of these people had been her good friends for a while, and some just friendly acquaintances, but they’d all vanished over the years – moved away, divorced and gone, dead and gone. All of this was perfectly normal, of course. She’d felt worse about the removal of the beautiful old overgrown liquidambar trees that had once lined her street than she did about the inevitable attrition of her neighbors. So what was this mood, this ache, this inexplicable nostalgia, if it was even nostalgia at all?

One restless night, while Aaron slept, she quietly stepped into the front yard to look at Venus shining near the crescent moon. Her old Toyota was parked in the driveway, and she sat on the trunk and tilted her head back to drink in the beauty of the sky. When she looked down from the moon and stars at Cynthia’s empty house, it finally struck her.

Cynthia was the last original owner in the neighborhood – except Sharon herself.

She looked back up at Venus and the moon and nodded once, as if they had spoken to her. She stood up, yawned, raised her arms toward the sky and stood on her toes, stretching every muscle in her body. She winced as she took inventory: a twinge in her right hand where she’d long ago cut herself in a kitchen accident, a zing in the left thumb where arthritis had set in; a ligament twanged near her left knee, trashed in a high-impact aerobics class thirty-five years before.

Sharon sighed, looked at Cynthia’s house and turned away. Her knee clicked all the way back to her front door.

copyright 2010, Susan Cameron