What I Remember

Two people barely adult holding hands on a small bed with the moon streaming through a window. Enjoying our innocence and the electric joy we discovered. I’d watch your luminous face and see your happiness mirrored in our smiles as moonlight dissolved the spaces between us. In summer when there was no breeze I might rinse my face with a cool washcloth before drifting off to sleep. Mornings were just as special.

You lived on the second floor of a three-story wood frame apartment in the center of town on Main Street—or was it a city, if it could be called that? The building dated from the 1920s and looked like it hadn’t been updated since codes required fire escapes on old wood buildings; when was it you started seeing them, 1960s? A heavy iron structure hung off the back, which tenants hung out on after nightfall to get out of stuffy rooms when not freshened by a breeze. Often in summer, especially after the sun went down. As the tallest structure around it was blasted by the sun all day. No elevator, no AC. Classically old, no amenities, but OK for students on a budget.

Apartments were originally rented to families and service workers employed in local businesses, and to the families of workers who commuted by ferry to the large industrial city directly across the sea in Connecticut—heavy industry, defense, factories and machine shops. Now rented to singles who worked shifts in local restaurants and bars, and students who attended the university next town over. I don’t recall seeing a family.

The port had been in decline until the state built the nearby university on a large tract of bequeathed land, which was a sore point for locals who did not like so-called “transients.” Businesses were favorable, of course.

The one saving grace—the building was designed when prevailing sentiment favored fresh air and natural light as architectural features. Each small bedroom had a wonderfully oversized window, the living room had two, long wide-plank hallways had a window at each end. Even the kitchen had a window that let in sunlight and a refreshing breeze. In winter energy efficiency simply meant the boiler was cranked up, opening windows regulated the temperature. There were no thermostats, radiators constantly streamed hot so windows offered the only relief—open, close, open, was a steady ritual.

At dusk the ferry stopped and the streets quieted. Besides the clanking radiators the only other reminder of passing time, that weekends don’t last forever, was the incessant glow in the common room where a mechanical red—green—yellow switch alternately pressed in expanded the shadows and edges under the raw colors of a traffic light down the street. It somehow reminded me of being back in my dorm.

In the early hours restaurants and bars closed, and the heels of returning tenants clicked on the stairs and down halls that almost never seemed to end but did when a door closed with a bang followed by more clicks. And silence.

I looked forward to getting away from my dorm weekends. Suite mates were streetwise derelicts from the city. My roommate was a harmless enough pot head and a music major who played a Moog synthesizer at odd hours in the style of “Phantom of the Opera.” The others were what I called pushers, who supplied half the college with one pill or other. One of whom was sleeping with the hall monitor, which I learned the hard way after I complained. Their weekends began after class Thursdays and ended Mondays in a stupor. The dorm was appropriately named Hendrix.

I had fled a similar if more studious suite of pre-med students. There my roommate suddenly surprised me with weekend self-loathing manifested by cutting himself and showing the scars, another thing I was not prepared to learn. I took my chances on the room lottery and ended up nowhere better.

Yup, I really looked forward to weekends. All week I thought of the apartment like a luminous prophecy, the silent street running down to the sea before tourists spilled off the ferries, sun rising languidly behind the hill. Before when years later, different city, different state, you turned to say you made the right decision.

After all, what I remember is we realized nothing would ever go wrong between us. Sometimes it’s enough just to remember a time when we began to understand time, the world we were making. This little chunk of our childhood selves, month after month, year after year, in darkness and light, still together in spite of it all.

Stephen Cipot

Garden City Park