You grow up in an unusual neighborhood, though you don’t know that at the time. A “resort community” they call it, but it is wooded, sparsely populated. Not all the roads are paved. Some roads only have one house on them, or none. The neighborhood is a labyrinth in the woods, clearly designed for a huge community that never materialized. Some of the houses are mansions owned by rich people from metro Detroit who barely visit them. Some of the houses are small dark A-frames with propane pigs in the back and husbands who smoke in the front yard sitting in plastic chairs. They named it “Michaywe,” supposedly an Indian word for “Land of the Elk”; you are in your twenties when you realize this is probably white corporate B.S. Plus, no elk.
When you are young though, the neighborhood is determined to grow. You remember exploring houses in the process of being built–still just studs, or just an uncovered basement of cinderblocks in the ground. The neighborhood at that time has a golf course, ski slopes, a pool, a lake with paddleboats, tennis courts, a playground, a restaurant with two banquet rooms, and summer programs for the neighborhood kids. Your father works for the golf course. Every Halloween and Christmas your family goes to parties in the upstairs restaurant banquet room, and you are taken around the golf course with the other children on hayrides and sleigh rides. Your family is a company family. Everyone in the neighborhood knows your dad. After a while you realize that many people don’t like your dad though. He’s not always an easy person to get along with. He’s always in a “dispute” with the HOA, for reasons you still don’t understand. Your mother is a preschool teacher, then sells ads for the local newspaper, and she is literally the most beautiful woman in town. Everyone knows your mother too. It takes you longer to realize that many people don’t understand your mother, and she doesn’t understand them. There’s some kind of disconnect. You idolize your parents though. They both act like they are very important people, and you believe them for a long time.
For you and your sister–white blonde girls from the company family–the neighborhood is your own personal forest reserve. Property lines mean very little to you. You know the miles of dirt trails that wind through the woods by heart. You know the best trees to climb in a one-mile radius. You know where the deer sleep, where there is an enormous boulder among the trees, where the blackberries grow, where dead trees have fallen onto each other and created balance beam matrixes. You know where there is a grove in the fall where you can wade waist-deep in yellow leaves, bright sun filtering down through the golden canopy. You snap wintergreen leaves in half and chew on them. You find a forgotten wooden cable spool in the woods. You find a dead deer with an arrow in it, but it’s not hunting season and you tell your dad.
You make forts all over the neighborhood, and visit them all. You bike home with hands sticky from pinesap, legs scraped from tree bark. Grasshoppers fly before you down the gravel road. It can be tricky riding a bike on those sand and gravel roads. One day you take the curve in front of your house too fast, the tires slide sideways over the gravel, and you hit the road chest-first–losing your breath and the belief you’ll never die. Eventually your road is paved with smooth, shockingly black asphalt, and you can make the loop with rollerblades again and again and again until it’s too dark to see.
The house you grow up in is very plain in the front–a completely flat two-story facade with wood siding. Your mother tries to dress it up a bit by painting it sage green and the front door eggplant purple. The back of the house, however, is ski-chalet style with two-story picture windows looking out into the woods. Your parents have the house built when you are five. The contractor builds a number of them throughout the neighborhood with the same floor plan, but the other homeowners have their windows face the street instead of the woods, which always puzzles you. The contractor is not great at his job. Within a few years there are leaking pouches of water in the walls upstairs, and in the basement your mother receives an electric shock every time she touches the dryer. Years later, your parents discover there is an empty space behind the upstairs bathroom that is completely uninsulated, unventilated, and causing roof rot. The woodpeckers love to gouge holes in the front of the house. All around the house there are trees mere feet away from it. You can reach out your bedroom window and touch a tree.
There is only one other house on your street; an old couple lives there. The street is U-shaped, with your house at the first curve. When you’re in bed at night and a car turns down your street, its headlights flood your room then slowly refract and slide away as the car passes the house. You are aware that no one should be driving down your street at night; it is always unsettling. In the summer the windows and back sliding door are left open with only the screens between you and the woods. It’s not so familiar then. Nocturnal animals sound like footsteps rustling through the dead leaves. Something catches a rabbit and it screams for its life. Owls hoot, toads croak, crickets drown everything out in waves. Your mother wonders why you struggle to sleep.
STUDIO 