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For awhile she had her own shop; then she worked for others. Sometimes she did hair at home; sometimes she went to the homes of her customers. She was very good at what she did, and she enjoyed it, but still we were nearly always broke. A five-dollar tip meant we were flush: a pizza with all the toppings for dinner. She received a few dollars a month in child support from my father, but it was hardly enough to cover a week’s groceries—not to mention the rent. This meant that there were times when there was no choice but to pick up and leave. Moving was no tragedy for my mother, at worst an inconvenience. I think she enjoyed the change of scenery and the drama that accompanied these moves. I once counted seventeen different places my mother, Paul and I had lived before I went off to college. All of these moves were tightly clustered in two areas: Spotswood, in central New Jersey, where I was born, and Toms River, on the Jersey shore, where I went to middle and high school.

From time to time, the memory of one of those rented houses or apartments comes back to me. It usually begins with an association like the smell of frying pork chops or the sight of a rain-smeared window. I feel a nostalgic hum when one of these sensations is pregnant with the memory of a home that slumbers hidden in my past, and if I sit with one long enough, I can usually stalk it back to its source, very often a house in which I ate, played or did my homework as a boy. I love the smell of frying pork chops, and the sight of a rain-smeared window can make me tear up. Behind the pork chop smell is an indistinct vignette of a woman my mother had hired to watch Paul and me while she was at work. The woman, our babysitter, is fat, wears an apron and stands at the stove. I look at her from behind, and the flesh at her elbows is loose like on a baby’s legs. The cool autumn air comes through the kitchen window, lifts the curtain and brings me the delicious aroma of the searing pork fat as I wait for supper. I cannot account for the emotion behind the wet window—I know only that in the memory I am alone in a big house and the rain is steadily falling. I am warm and out of the weather. I don’t even know if we lived there.

Sometimes I count back over the houses. Of the places we lived, the one I liked the best was a bungalow on Polonia Street in Spotswood. I was about eight. Polonia Street was less than a quarter mile from dead end to dead end and lined on both sides with small wood-framed homes on tiny lots. One end of the street faded into a patch of woods that contained a three-story house with a mansard roof occupied by two ancient women who wore long shapeless dresses and high lace-up shoes. We called it the haunted house. We would sneak up to the door, bang the big knocker and run away in fear and delight. The other end of the street went right up to the wire-and-wood fence that enclosed a horse pasture adjacent to a small ramshackle stable kept by a man who gave pony rides at fairs and amusement parks. There was something creepy yet secretly alluring about the place, mixing, as it did, teenage girls in cowboy boots and scruffy male ponies who seemed frequently tumescent in their presence. So you might say this period of my childhood was bounded on one end by danger (the haunted house) and on the other by the suggestion of depravity (the horse pasture). Home in the middle was security.

Our Polonia Street house had a kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedroom downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs—one for Paul and one for me. The upstairs bedrooms were on either side of the house with a stubby hall between them that led to a front window tucked inside a snug dormer, where there was a window seat. I remember sitting on it watching the limbs of a big tree brush the roof and listening to the sounds of the house—my mother in the kitchen downstairs, Paul in his bedroom playing with his toys, the television on in the living room. I don’t remember