Bily
Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI
by Nathaniel Berry
My grandfather took his family wherever the Hartford Insurance Company sent him: Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Wichita. Mom and her siblings were squished into the bench seat of one of those old cars, like a Packard or a Buick, with their luggage tied to the roof; leaving one Midwestern City behind, moving on to another. Company men like their father, her brothers married and found starter-jobs and scattered across the country; her sister married. Mom left home for Kansas State University. At Stonybrook, on Long Island, she met my Dad, and they followed teaching jobs to Boston and, finally, to Adrian. In 1985, they lived in a duplex on Toledo Street; the frat boys on the second-story used to pee out the windows. They moved to a rented farmhouse on Park Highway, until the lot across the road, with its owls and trees, was bulldozed to make room for the State Prison. Mom has lived in the house on College Avenue for half her life now, but the suspicion of some other dislocation coming is impossible to shake completely. The best feeling in the world, she told me once, is when you can fit everything you own into the trunk of your car.
Mom owns one heavy coat and one light coat; she’s been wearing Dad’s least ripped-up sweatshirts around the house all winter. She’s been thinning out Dad’s books and DVDs, overstuffed on shelves in every room of the house, and in boxes in the storage unit, and in the attic, and in squirrel-chewed boxes in the shed — purging sports memorabilia books, glossy biographies of Civil War generals, thin soft-cover compendiums of black-and-white photographs (the kind you impulse-buy near the register), duplicate paperback copies of Dorothy L. Sayers and Archer Mayor. People ask me how she’s doing; I tell people she’s been getting rid of extra books and DVDs. It’s an opportunity to be stoic and practical, and between that and teaching, it keeps Mom occupied to a point that anyone besides her would call busy.
She teaches remotely. She’s adjusted, but everyone hates Zoom, a medium poorly-suited to the students Mom teaches, who don’t always have access to stable internet or a good computer. She worries they’re wasting their money. Her school will be online-only until 2022, and the three-hour commute she got used to has vanished. She loved the commute when it was the only time she had to herself; her new car, purchased for US-23 and I-94, stays in town, makes runs to Meijer’s, or sometimes to County Market if there’s something she can’t get at Meijer’s.
She told me she’d be happy to pick up groceries for the Keenings when she goes to the stores, but she doesn’t want to pry, doesn’t wish to impose. Mrs. Keening, her neighbor, is immunocompromised, and too young for the vaccine. Mr. Keening plows our sidewalk with his John Deer, but beyond that they keep to themselves and this psychic debt makes her uncomfortable. That’s one good thing about churches, Mom says, in no serious way threatening to join one, you’d just get to know more people and know more ways to help. Mom volunteers at the homeless shelter, one or two overnight shifts a week. She volunteered throughout 2020, although I think she took a week off when Dad died. A church would get you out of the house. Keep you busy. You know I hate having down-time.
Robby called me. He wanted to make sure that Mom knew that someone at the shelter tested positive for COVID. Robby canceled his shift. His father is in his seventies and hasn’t been vaccinated, and he told Robby that if he didn’t cancel he had to find somewhere else to sleep. I tell him he could probably stay at Mom’s. Every time we talk on the phone, she tells me that the house is too big for one person.
It’s really not that big a house, Robby says, and he’s right in a strictly architectural sense, but I believe that things like houses expand and contract. The house was small the last time I was home, because when I lived there I was small enough to fall asleep on the couch and have Mom carry me up to my bed when she was finished grading papers. The house is larger now, and has grown hugely quiet for anyone who remembers me and Kurt and Robby playing Rockband in my bedroom, who remembers Dad’s heartbreak when his New York Giants got betrayed by bad officiating. I’ll call Mom and tell her what Robby told me, but I know she’ll go to the shelter anyway. She’s probably already picked up his empty shift, even though she’s too young to be vaccinated. It’s something to do and it gets her out of the house.
Mom’s been moving furniture. She moved the couch that used to be in the living room into Dad’s room where she can watch his TV, which is too new to get rid of, but too big for her to really enjoy. Mom’s going to have the living room repainted and the drop-ceiling replaced, and then all new furniture to match. She sends me pictures of candidate chairs, mostly horrible joke chairs in plaid prints with printed stags and cabins. I realize over and over I’ll never come back to a house that looks the way I remember. When that hurts, I try and remind myself that there’s some living room in Wichita, or Kansas City, that Mom wishes was still painted sixties mint or candy pink, that her real wish is to be transported from time to time back to a couch with her mom, to black and white TV, to the crunch of her dad’s tires coming up the gravel drive. I try and remember no treasury of books or sentimental furniture or shade of paint can unfold time; I make a run to El Paso for groceries or Juul Pods or Michaledas, for something to do.
Nathaniel Berry is a writer and editor from Adrian, Michigan. He has an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, and is the 2020 Swan Quill & Lantern Lit Society Writer in Residence. He has a 2006 Pontiac Vibe with 250,000 miles on it, and there’s a highway curling just like smoke above his shoulder.
