Phoebe Martone

The Lot
by
Phoebe Martone

I lived in an old two-story house on a one-block street named Boudinot (pronounced "boo-di-no") Place, and there were many places on the block where the sidewalk was lifting from old tree roots. When I skated around the block with my skates tightened onto my oxfords, and the skate key around my neck, I knew every crack and hopped over them. Across the street was a factory, and we'd play potsy on the sidewalk in front of it, using an old shoe-heel that we got from the shoemaker. We used chalk to draw the potsy game with an arched shape on top. The heel made a nice noise, not like a stone that some kids used--and it sounds awful. The heel is very important. The sound and the weight of it. It falls just right into the numbered shape, and then you couldn't step in that one, but had to bend over to grasp it on one foot.

After potsy, we could play in the vacant synagogue lot, in the tall grasses. If nobody was there, I was Shena, Queen of the jungle, and the leopard was my friend and he was dazzling, long and velvety, moving low to the ground on padded feet. There were big bushes to hide in. In Africa. Sometimes I'd find broken glass and throw it in the garbage can on the side of my house because there's no broken glass in the jungle. In Africa. You drink out of gourds and eat from big leaves that look like elephant ears. The dirt was brown, but you'd pretend it was black and loose. The plains and the grasses would cover the bottle caps that you didn't see when you didn't want to see them. When you wanted to see them, they were jewels. Jewels from the earth, in Africa. There were orange and purple ones because Nedick's Soda made orange and grape-- and the brown ones were birch beer or root beer. The Coke ones, I think, were gray with red lettering.

The boys liked bottle caps more than the girls and played checkers with them. If you liked a boy, you would collect things and save them for him. I hated baseball, but I used to collect baseball cards from bubblegum to flip or trade because there were often no girls on my block.

I wasn't athletic, but I was an outdoor girl and rode my bike and did bike tricks in the paved places. The tricks were so good that the neighbors watched in astonishment. I realized later that my mother's big, heavy bike was the only bike I was able to do tricks on. It was weighted just right, and it was magical. I still picture it in the dusty old garage, waiting for me in the half-light, through the door of the old wooden garage.

I spent my little life in that lot, that lot with trees and bushes and birds and leopards and then, one day, I came home from school and it was all flattened. All the bushes and treees. I stood there in the dirt, in the lot that looked naked, like when someone shaves you for an operation. Shocked and frightened, but ashamed to care so much about it, I acted merely surprised when I spoke of it to my mother--as if it were something that should be so, like a teddy bear you have to give up, like when you outgrow your undershirt because you jiggle in gym.

The last time I visited the house, empty and for sale, my cousin said to walk around the place and say good-bye to it. I knew she was right, but I couldn't feel anything. I stared at the places where furniture used to be, now ghost shapes on the wall, looked around the flat, peering into closets. I remembered my old writings and how they used to be contained in a cabinet made by a young man, and how I'd watched him build them before he was killed in the Korean War.

I looked for something that could stand for the eighteen years in that narrow, pleasant room in the old railroad flat in the two-story house of my childhood.

I looked and looked. Inside I found nothing. But, through the windows of my old bedroom, I could see Africa.

(It got published in a little booklet called: the Leaflet, Teachers Writing '98)