Slide - Kyle Beachy [21]
“The hope,” he said, “is that young people of considerable trend impact will choose to live in an urban environment. This is what we learned from Denver. It comes down to lofts—young adults with disposable income. What a term. Disposable. Right now we're exploring options. Widening sidewalks for outdoor café seating. Planting trees and creating incentives for urban groceries and restaurants. We're considering cobblestoning one or two key streets.”
My mother was watching me listen to my father. I instinctively reached for the asparagus. She passed the salt.
“We have a city stacked with empty buildings. There are dozens. Old paper plants, button factories. What we've begun doing is looking at the city from the outside, as a prospective customer or resident. Is it kind of sad to have to sell the city to its own residents? Yes it is kind of sad. But it's also crucial, because if we continue to let downtown,” he paused, “slide, then the inner rings of suburbia become threatened, and the movement continues forever outward, to the fringes.”
A lot of this sounded familiar.
“These people out there don't understand why their tax dollars should be funneled back downtown. The city is where they go to see baseball, and then they leave. But nobody has to leave. Leaving can be undone.” Here he set down his fork and began gesturing with his hands, flat, gliding motions over his plate. “The goal is a mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood. Down town doesn't have to die. We're going to pump that place so full of life people aren't going to know what to do about it. There will be people and life on every corner, there will be people bumping into one another. There will be life brimming from the streets, everyone watching each other live. People will wave and say hello. It will not die. It will not.”
The table was quiet. I tried to focus on knife in fowl, fowl in sauce, fowl and sauce coming on fork toward mouth.
“What's really neat is the level of control,” Carla explained. “With a loft you can say where you want the walls. Imagine that: wall here, please. Bathroom over here, if you don't mind. One catalog I saw offered six different models of sliding glass doors.”
I was eating and having a conversation with my parents, under whose roof I was once again living. They'd been married for thirty-some-odd years. Their anniversary, like all anniversaries, was in the summer. Look at the posture, the nonverbal cues, notice the tone of words. Consider the ramifications these variables imply. Take extensive notes.
There was an entire family of squirrels living in the attic. I heard them up there, a cluttered, domestic scampering directly above my head. A family of squirrels, each one with its funny little character traits. Mom clad in apron, dad in bowler hat, little vest, daughter squeaking on tiny little squirrel cell phone, son pushing around on miniature skateboard.
Sadly, this was all I had. Because if days were tough, these sleepless nights were a kind of Audrey multimedia carnival. I saw our past charted graphically, four years’ worth of colored bars and slices of pie. I saw emotions as historical artifacts, their genesis and evolution, eventual conflict and abatement. Initially I'd fallen for the farthest reaches of her extremities—tips of fingers, those half spheres of gentle skin behind forever unpainted nails— then worked my way inward. By the time I made it beyond her calves and forearms, thighs and shoulders, and reached her center, it was clear she felt the same. She ran fingers over my childish frame and smiled.
You try to sleep, then try not to try to sleep, then try not to try to remember what you're trying. You sweat and rage and fume over the fact of your sweating, raging, fuming.
The incidentals came at me from all angles and with shocking resolution. A particular trip to the Ralphs on Indian Hill when Audrey stopped among the vegetables and reached down and wrapped her fingers around a rubber-banded bundle of asparagus and brought it up to her ear, listened, laid it right