“Growing Like Houses” by Julialicia Case

THE RED AND BLACK BEETLES COME FIRST, settling in swarms on the white plaster of our Arnold Street row house. We come home to find them basking in the sun, a thousand black specks, twitching their legs and adjusting their wings. They find their way in through torn window screens, fall to  the floor in writhing clumps when we open the front door. At night I imagine the whisper of their bodies brushing against the walls of my room in the dark. Mornings I find them suspended in my water glass, some drowned, others paddling mechanically at the smooth transparent sides.

Thin vines creep in through cracks in the foundation and twist down the hallway, their tiny leaves hidden in the shadows. Outside, the plant grows sturdy and green in the flowerbed, while inside, its pale, waxy leaves slither across our painted floorboards. I pull the intruders up quickly, the way one might pluck unwanted hairs.

It doesn’t take long for Katie and me to learn that life twists through our Philadelphia row house, changing it in unexpected ways. This is our first time as roommates in a grown-up house in a grown-up city. We fumble through our first grown-up jobs, and we note, like biologists, nature’s tenacity.

EVENINGS, I TEACH AT THE ADULT LITERACY CENTER.  ”Adult” means the sixty-five-year-old woman who wanders the hallways and tries every door handle as she searches for free  food. It means the sixteen-year-old girl who squats with her boyfriend in an abandoned building, or the woman with a baby Chihuahua hidden in the inside pocket of her coat. The only thing my students have in  common is that they didn’t make it through high school. They had children early, skipped too many days, found drugs and boyfriends and more important occupations. I teach them to write business letters in a windowless classroom.

“How do you spell ‘parents’?” one man asks.

“Don’t worry about spelling for now,” I say. “Just sound it out the best you can.”

This is his first night and the man is jittery. He wants the paper to be in exactly the right place, his elbows to rest on the table just so. He’s tall with a creased leather jacket and too-tight cowboy boots that make his gait jerky and lopsided. He’s hairless, completely bald, and already I’ve had to yell at some teenage boys who have nicknamed him “the dick.”

I go over to the man to see how he’s doing. His paper is filled with letters, lined up, squished together, no punctuation, no spaces, no recognizable words. “bympazinjhg,” he’s written.

I sit beside him. “Will you read me what you’ve got so far?” I say.

“I want to be a better man,” he begins.

“WE NEED TO MEET PEOPLE,” Katie says. “We need to go on dates.”

“Okay,” I say. “How should we meet people?”

We both know where this is going. First, we’ll consider taking classes in things like auto mechanics or web design. Then we’ll wrinkle our noses at the bar scene and internet dating. Eventually, we’ll mock the suggestions of our friends in committed relationships: “Put  yourself out there.” “Don’t be so picky.” ”Are you sure you’re not gay?”

Tonight though, we are organized, goal-oriented women; we pull out colored markers and pieces of blank paper, and we draft a plan. We will become regulars at coffee shops, join extracurricular activities that involve people our own age. By the end of the evening, we’ve constructed a checklist of weekly assignments like a training schedule an athlete might prepare before a race. We stick our charts to the refrigerator using inspirational word magnets. Katie anchors hers with “no” and  “hope.” I use “will” and “not” and “succeed.” We think this is outrageously funny.

IN  FALL, OPOSSUMS MOVE INTO THE BASEMENT. Katie goes down at night to find one staring at her, its furry face and black eyes peeking from behind a cardboard box. The exterminator shows us the hole in the foundation. From the basement, we can see the blue backyard fence, the deep green moss on the brick outside. The landlord tells us not to worry. He’ll come by the house to patch the hole himself.

We avoid the basement for weeks, until the landlord wedges a cinder block and a section of chain link fence into the hole.

“I don’t think they’ll get in now,” he says as he’s leaving. He hands Katie a mousetrap  the size of a shoebox, the metal catch bar as long and thick as a pencil.

“Just put some peanut butter on there,” he says.

We don’t wait to make sure he’s closed the door before we throw the trap away.

IT’S SAINT PATRICK’S DAY, AND I’VE LEFT A MESSAGE on an answering machine in California, saying I am  delighted to accept my placement in the graduate program, and that I look forward to moving there in a few months. To celebrate, Katie and I go to the Trocodero where a band from Newfoundland plays Irish music. The place is packed; people sit on the stairs and block the fire exits. Next to me, a man wearing a red sweatshirt beats the drum rhythms on his thigh. It’s a relief to be leaving the city, to no longer have to initiate witty conversations with strangers. By the fifth song he has asked me three questions. By intermission, he’s written his phone number on a business card.

“What’s it say?” Katie asks as we’re leaving. “Did you even look at it?”

She and I squeeze our way out of the  theater as the music pulses behind us. When I’m sure he can’t see me, I pull the card from my pocket and look at it.

“He’s some kind of computer technician. Lives all the way in New Jersey.”

”All the way,” Katie laughs. “It’s only across the bridge.”

“I’m moving in a few months,” I say. “There’s really no point.”

“That’s not until summer. And what about our goal sheets?”

I want to explain, but can’t figure out the right words. There’s the way I think my life should be, and there’s the way it is.There’s the feeling of dread in my stomach, and then there’s the refrigerator and our chart with all those white spaces.

EVEN WITH THE STORM PANES lodged firmly in the windows, the wind blows through the frames and into the kitchen. The dishtowels sway and the cups hanging on hooks above the sink rattle against one another. We pull the basement door from its hinges and move it to the doorway between the kitchen and living room, and the kitchen becomes part of the outside.

The teapot whistles a permanent song from the stove. We cook in our scarves and hats, our frozen dinners and bowls of canned soup sending trails of steam into the air.

I buy plastic window covers at  the hardware store and climb on the cabinets to hang them with duct tape and a hair dryer. When I’m finished, the windows are covered in clear plastic blisters that mute the snow-colored light.

Outside, ice clogs the gutters and grows in masses around the rusty pipes. Water begins to drain in through the kitchen ceiling, soaking into the drop ceiling and making the panels bulge, yellow and sodden. Katie pulls them down and covers the openings with white plastic garbage bags. From underneath, we can see the water pooled inside the plastic. When the wind outside is particularly strong, the pieces of plastic on the ceiling and windows billow, protesting against the duct tape like trapped spirits.

ON OUR SECOND DATE I END UP at a zombie movie with the man in the red sweatshirt. Doug prefers not to plan ahead. He enjoys going to the theater and watching whatever movie is starting next. We get there late in the evening and there’s only one movie left. I think of the nine nights of nightmares I had after seeing The Ring. If we don’t go to a movie though, we have to think of something else. I decide to just dose my eyes.

Being overly sensitive to horror movies is a weakness, I tell myself as we’re watching the previews. Next to me, Doug pulls out his cell phone to check the time. He enjoys comparing the actual starting time of the movie with its advertised start time.

“Ten forty-seven,” he whispers.

The movie begins.

I pretend I’m a sarcastic film critic who has seen so many zombie movies that she finds them all boring. A zombie bursts from the janitor ‘s closet. A woman turns into a zombie and rips off a man’s face. A soon­ to-be zombie woman gives birth to a zombie baby, and Doug’s hand emerges like a pale fish from the darkness and rests on my knee.

You’ve got to be kidding, I think.

“It’s hard to forget the zombie anxiety after the movie,” I say as we’re walking back to the car. “Do you know what I mean?”

”Are you asking me if I’m worried about getting attacked by zombies right now?” he asks, smiling a little.

I peer into alleyways and behind parked cars. In the glow from the streetlight Doug’s eyes seem glassy and vacant, and his smile moves too slowly, the upturn of his lips and the wrinkles around his eyes eerily mechanical and controlled.

Stop it, I think to myself. I rest my hands in my lap all through the ride home. When we reach the house I make myself wait until the car has stopped completely before getting out.

BOBBY RUTKOWSKI ALWAYS COMES TO CLASS LATE and brings nothing, not even a pencil. While other students pull out their workbooks, or rifle through folders, Bobby sits staring at the smooth, empty brown of the table.

At break he disappears, leaving his chair pulled out.

“When you leave at break, you miss the most important part of class,” I tell him. “I know,” he says, “I mean to stay, I really do. Then at break, I decide to go outside, just for a minute. I take a few steps down the sidewalk, and it’s like I can’t stop, I just keep walking. I watch myself from my head as I walk away.” He begins to sketch a circle on the tabletop with the pencil I’ve given him. “Maybe we shouldn’t have a break,” he says.

A MUSHROOM IS GROWING in the bathroom, Katie’s written in a note on the whiteboard. I left it for you to see. It’s sprouting from a crack in the floor next to the toilet. The stalk is thin and white, three inches high, the cap a dingy, orange-brown color. Underneath, delicate gray folds radiate from the center.

“Mushrooms are only the reproductive part of the fungal life cycle,” Katie’s mother tells us. “You can expect more every twelve to fourteen days.”

The mushrooms are surprising in their variety. Sometimes they are tiny, the size of M&M’s. Other times the stalks are long and thick, the caps the size of nickels or quarters. We take pictures so we will remember.

KATIE TEACHES in one of the most dangerous schools in Philadelphia. In the winter her classroom has no heat, so she teaches in sweaters and long underwear, her bulky bright red coat. She comes home with stories about riots and fights, the student who threw a bottle of chocolate milk and shattered her classroom window, the administration that did nothing, not even replace the glass.

“Today Dante Phillips said he’d pay a woman a million dollars to clean his dick,” Katie says. “I told him that was an awful lot of money for such a small job.”

This year Katie’s students are dying. Two boys in her class, both named Raymond, are shot in separate incidents within months of each other.

“What kind of place do I work where I have to differentiate between the first Raymond who was killed and the second Raymond who was killed?” she says.

Her high school loses four students before the Inquirer runs an article. There have been thirty-five student deaths in the district this year, the most ever. The newspaper  prints pictures, lists ages and causes of death. Katie has her students conduct interviews and prepare presentations about the possible causes of violence: poverty, drugs, media, unemployment. She organizes a group of students to create a mural and takes them to conferences where they present papers.

Afternoons, she curls on the couch in the glow of the television. One night I find her with a pile of graded papers, homework assignments the Raymonds turned in.

“What am I supposed to do with these?” she asks.

We eat real dinner together twice a week: pasta and vegetables, black beans and rice, chicken fajitas. On those nights, we watch sit­ coms, reality shows, lighthearted  movies. Some nights we laugh so hard we can’t speak, and I hope that it’s possible to store moments like this. I hope that  people can carry warmth with them, can dole out little parcels to themselves as they stand  bundled  up at the front of a classroom, as they hold the cold chalk and address the empty chairs. Some nights I think of all the people in this city, moving inside the glowing squares of their houses and apartments, and it seems like protecting a life should be a simple thing. I think this even as the wind sweeps through the kitchen, even as the plastic flaps and twists above my head.

IT RAINS EVERY DAY FOR THIRTEEN DAYS. Driving home, I study the river, try to track with my eyes the progress of its rising. First the water covers the boulders under the freeway overpass. Water rushes white and furious between the pilings, obscuring the dark stones.

In the basement, water pools, murky and eerily serene. I imagine I hear it lapping at the base of the shelves, oozing into the fibrous cardboard of the boxes stacked on the floor. It would be easy to wade in, to rescue the cartons of old things that will surely be ruined. Neither of us can bring ourselves to do it though. A part of me is certain the floor has been sucked away, that I would step into water and find nothing there.

The water rises to the top of the riverbank and waits there for days as the rain continues. It’s night when the flooding begins. The water covers most of the road, sits sullen and obstinate as the traffic lights continue to scroll through their colors for  non- existent traffic. The city sends a truck to pump the water back into the river. It grumbles and shudders from the middle of the intersection, water rippling around its massive tires. People stand across the street and heckle. Great idea, pump all that water back into the river. A man catches a catfish the size of a small dog. Spectators clap as he heaves it shiny and flapping onto the sidewalk. You’re not going to eat that, are you?

Finally it stops raining.

The water has rotted the wood at the bottom of the stairs leading into the basement. When I go down, I hold tight to the banister as the stairs dip and sway beneath me. Thick mud and ratty wisps of vegetation cover the floor, and the dank smell of mildew makes breathing an aching, difficult thing.

DOUG AND I DRIVE ALONG THE RIVER in the rain, headed downtown with our concert tickets and rain jackets. The radio is playing, but I want to say something. The quiet is thick and ridged, and I try not to squirm in my seat.

“Mushrooms grow in our bathroom,” I say finally. “They come up overnight and we find them there in the morning.”

We’ve stopped at a red light, but he doesn’t look at me.

”Are you sure?” he says. “Mushrooms don’t just grow overnight.”

”A mushroom is actually only a small part of a large organism that lives beneath the surface,” I say. ”And they do grow overnight. Sometimes whole circles of them appear overnight, and before people knew anything about why that happened, they called them fairy rings and believed they were magic.”

He looks past me at the rain falling into the river, and I imagine he must be watching the water pour from the drains in the freeway overpass, thick chains of water like miniature waterfalls among the threads of rain. I think he must be thinking about the engineers who designed the freeway and how they had to think about what to do when so much rain fell on nights like this. I wonder if they suspected how beautiful it would be, all that water falling from the sky, how rare a thing it would be to see.

The light changes and we pull ahead, following the curves of the road toward the lit-up city. A train crosses the river on a trestle, the people blurred spots of movement within yellow windows.

This will never work out, I think to myself, noticing the way the water has covered long sections of the sidewalk. Then I stop myself, because I’m not even sure what “working out” would mean.

*

THERE’S  SOMETHING  DIFFERENT about my student, Orlando. He’s got a glimmer around him, a kind of halo of luck and self-knowledge. He’s young, Puerto Rican, with gold chains that drape around his neck and a do-rag. On his first day, I am wary. He looks like the kind of student who will convince the guys in drug rehab to smoke pot  with him in the parking lot, who will take all the condoms from the condom box, who will disappear and then come around at the end of every month asking me to sign the attendance form for his P.O.

Instead, he completes entire chapters in his algebra book overnight and arrives early to ask questions before class. He writes clear, brilliant essays and explains adverbs and reducing fractions to the students having trouble.

“That kid is different,” an older student tells me one afternoon. “There’s something special about that one.”

When he passes the GED, Orlando is the only one of his thirty-one family members to finish high school. He becomes a celebrity around the literacy center, wears his beige velour tracksuit to our annual fundraiser and tells his story while people in ties and cocktail dresses drop bruschetta on the carpet. Of the hundreds of students who attend classes at the literacy center, Orlando is the only one to apply to community college, the only one to be awarded full financial aid.

Just before summer vacation, he’s arrested for dealing drugs outside a middle school: a felony. He should be sent straight to  prison, but the social worker goes with him to court, testifies to his character and he’s let off with a fine and community service. The felony conviction stays on his record, though. He’s ineligible for financial aid and can’t go to college.

Outside, dandelions grow in cracks in the sidewalk. Downtown, in the shiny glass buildings, politicians write laws to each other like love letters. Who could meet Orlando and deny his worth? The legislature is barren and lifeless. At night, I dream of trees sprouting among cubicles and copy machines, lifting their branches and shattering glass.

I HAVE JUST GOTTEN OUT OF THE SHOWER when I hear Katie yelling downstairs.

“Oh my god,” she says. Shouts. “Oh my god.”

“What’s the matter?” I come down the stairs, feeling my hair drip down the back of my T-shirt.

She’s in the kitchen and points to where tiles from the drop ceiling have collapsed and fallen onto the stove. Water drips from the hole, and the PVC pipes and metal tubes glisten with dampness. What’s most puzzling is the soil that covers everything, the stove, the counter, the linoleum floor, thick, rich dirt like what’s sold at garden stores, a cubic foot of it scattered everywhere. A perfectly sharpened No. 2 pencil rests on top of the debris.

“That fell out of the ceiling too,” Katie says.

THERE’S NOTHING WORSE than crossing the Ben Franklin Bridge from New Jersey into Philadelphia at two a.m. on a weeknight. Tonight is the last time, and I try to feel sad about something other than never being able to see the city again from this angle. Across the water, buildings slice into the sky, and on top of City Hall, William Penn extends his hands to the deserted streets. Down the river, I can see the small huddles of buildings in the neighborhood where I teach, and I try to imagine what my students might be doing now, try to picture them working or drinking or talking on telephones. For most of them, I can’t even guess. Trying to imagine their lives beyond the square of our classroom is like trying to picture the constellations that I know are there, somewhere, above us all, in the orange-tinged sky.

The booths gape empty at the toll plaza, red lights blinking over all but two, which sit lone and illuminated at the far end of the bridge. The man reaches for my money with his latex-covered hands, waves me on to negotiate four lanes of emptiness suspended over water.

THE LAST WEEK OF SCHOOL I am a slack teacher. We do some math, some spelling, but then my students and I order pizza, watch movies, play games of Uno.

“Why are you going all the way to California?” they ask me. “Can’t you write here?”

I look down at the fan of numbers and colors in my hand, and I can’t answer the  question. I want to tell them about the vines and the insects, to explain how well everything is living. Even here, a student’s child draws a school of fish on one of the chalkboards, and a cockroach trapped in a fluorescent light struggles with the slippery plastic. I would like to tell them about the man with the straw hat who stands in the middle of traffic on Lehigh and asks for money each day, or about the way the stained glass windows of churches glow at night beneath protective sheets of Plexiglas. I want to tell them about the man smoking cigarettes on a stoop surrounded by caution tape, about condemned houses with the fronts pulled off so that the insides of all the rooms are visible, like giant dollhouses.

They know these things, though, better than I do. I think they know too how much I like sitting here with them, listening to them call each other names, listening to Ben as he changes the rules of the card game with the same quick patter I imagine he uses selling bootleg DVDs on Spring Garden. I can’t explain to them in this moment why I am walking away, even as I’m losing the game and am left with half the deck in my hands.

SEPTEMBER, I CALL KATIE FROM THE BACKYARD.

“How’s California?” she asks.

“This morning,” I say, “there were sheep bleating outside my window.” My friends are burning plant debris in their yard. The bonfire spits smoke into the sky as one friend feeds it armfuls of leaves. The other one keeps the flames in check with the garden hose.

“Is the weather nice?” Katie asks. “Do you like it there?”

“The weather?” I watch one friend wipe at her eyes, smudging ash across her face. “It’s just sunny all the time,” I say.

Wind blows through the branches of the citrus trees, and even with the smoke, I can smell the lemons.

“What if moving here makes me soft?” I say: “What if I get used to how nice it is and don’t ever want to leave?”

“Do you mean happy?” Katie asks after a moment. ”Are you asking me what happens if you’re happy?”

MY LAST NIGHT IN PHILADELPHIA, Katie helps me pack the last of the boxes, closing them carefully with packing tape, writing my name in big, dark letters on the sides. We finish after midnight; a large stack of boxes looms in the empty living room.

After she’s left for her new apartment, I lie in bed and listen to the sounds of the traffic, the dogs barking, the low rumble of the train as it passes. I concentrate on breathing, on the feel of my body against the mattress, and I try to imagine myself growing like a plant, somewhere, perhaps, where the soil is softer and warmer. All I can think of though is the wall at my back, the life teeming beneath the plaster. It is dark and warm and quiet, but I can’t sleep, can’t think about the future. I can’t pretend I’ve learned even one clear thing about what life is, or who I am, or how to grow roots in asphalt and cement. I can only recognize nature’s determination, the life in my own skin, and the futility of trying to build something that will last for always.