Up & Coming

This is the first time I’m going to be sharing anything more narrative on here, so let me know if this is anything you guys are into!

This wasn’t originally written to put anywhere; it started as a scene that I couldn’t get out of my head from a walk a few weeks ago, so I wanted to put it on paper. I kept finding myself going back and working on it for no real reason. Especially given the political landscape of the world we’re in right now, I need to write out things I’m angsty about, or I might simply implode. There’s a lot of lived experience— not always my own— in the things that I find myself writing about. I can’t share the stories that make me feel like i need to stand up and scream, why I’m so pissed off all the time, because my work as a social worker is confidential. So any chance I have to ethically share a phenomenon I see all the time in my own community, I’m going to rant and rave in some way, baby!!!

As for this—

I frequently pass the same house on my hot girl walks around the city, an older house smashed between two, massive new-construction mammoths. I exchange some pleasantries with the owner now and again, who was the image behind Jackie. A few weeks back, I passed the house while she was outside talking to another neighbor: the two were talking in their yards, and I caught the tail-end of their conversation where she said, “I’ve lived here all my life.”

And now we have this! Enjoy it (and if you don’t, don’t tell me!!!!)

The house is made of red brick, only partially crumbling on the peak where both sides of the roof kiss.

The weeds grow tall enough on either side of the front porch steps that you can see the way they knot themselves up as they climb onto the cement. The shingles are rusted, growing their own greenery in the misshapen parts that now fill with water when it rains.

The awning atop the front porch is a striped, emerald green and could be considered vintage with a decent powerwash, which the realtor next door even offered to do for Jackie— free of charge— if she would simply agree to get it done.

The realtor, Rashida, had thought it was a considerate, no-brainer kind of offer that would improve the look of photos online, the cons list for buyers not including a tentative… well, the neighborhood is a little….

Knocking repeatedly at all hours, even calling out ‘anyone home?!’ like they do in cartoons— a better definition of what Rashida was doing was pestering Jackie. She left notes, trying to find ways to first insinuate that her property was of high value in real estate circles if she ever considered selling, and second, if she was going to be so difficult about selling, at least spruce the place up a little.

If Jackie thought about the nerve of that woman for too long, angry splotches would bloom up her neck. So she tried avoiding Rashida’s glittering, champagne Lexus when she saw it parked out front, even went so far as to turn off the lamps near the front window as if to indicate that she wasn’t home when she heard her car door slam shut.

But Rashida was good enough at her job to earn herself that Lexus, after all, and she had managed to corner Jackie on a hot summer evening, right after Jackie had finished a 9-hour shift. Her scrubs adorned dried blood from a patient earlier that day, she noticed just as Rashida approached her car with a bright, unnerving smile. The absurdity of the situation made Jackie want to laugh out loud, imagining herself saying, ‘it’s the other guy’s.’ Then she remembered how much she hated Rashida, and her remaining pleasantness disappeared.

“Just for some decent photos and for viewings, it might look a little more tidy! I’d love to take the task off of your hands! Who can be bothered, right?!” She attempted relatability as she asked about powerwashing the place, but Jackie saw that she was swinging her keys on her manicured thumb with a Louis Vuitton keychain.

How much money do you have to make to spend $200 on a Louis Vuitton keychain?

Without prompting, she told Jackie about all of the recent landscaping and exterior changes that they had made to improve the property value next door. She pointed out the special kind of grass, the black mulch, the perennial trees and small rose bush that she hoped would catch that patch of light. Wouldn’t that be nice? Such an improvement to the neighborhood?

Jackie felt herself roll her eyes involuntarily, but Rashida didn’t appear to notice. “The only thing left is the security system, which gets installed in two weeks. Turns out that the state-of-the-art systems have waitlists to get installed now. Crazy, huh?” She shrugged quickly. When Jackie didn’t immediately respond, Rashida kept talking. “But it’s an expense buyers are really looking for, I’ve learned in my experience! This is a hot neighborhood right now, but it’s still pretty up-and-coming! We just want people to feel safe here, you know?”

Did she know? About feeling safe in her own neighborhood? Yeah, Jackie might know a thing or two, perhaps even more than Rashida Fucking Walters of Jackson and Jackson Realty did.

“Well, sure.” Jackie said, though her whole body was tense and anxious to get inside.

Mind you, Jackie lived in this home with her parents and younger brothers before it became the home of her adulthood. She knew every dip in the wood floor and every tick of the water heater. Her parents had put down every penny for this row home back in the 50s, and since then it had been the only place she ever felt at home.

College dorms had felt like being away at boarding school, and she never could get used to the feel of a bed that wasn’t hers. And then for a brief time before both of her parents got sick, she had lived in a shoebox apartment with her new husband, paying out of their minds in rent for a basement unit that smelled of mildew and had walls tinged yellow with cigarette smoke. She didn’t get a good night’s sleep for a year until they agreed to move into her childhood home so that her parents could comfortably downsize.

They had babies in that house, hosted Christmas and thrown surprise parties. Her mother had gone on hospice care and subsequently died in that house ten years ago. She had lived out the whole of her marriage’s timeline within those walls, had watched it expand and then shrink and then shrivel until there was nothing left of it. She had raised her three kids here, grown a garden, buried a dog.

She had done lemonade stands here on this stoop, used the money she and her brothers earned to gorge themselves on sweets from the block’s candy lady or sugary off-brand sodas at the corner store. They had now paved over the community garden at the end of the block that had been there when her family first moved in, where she was in charge of going on early summer mornings to collect cucumbers and grape tomatoes on the vine before other neighbors got to them first and left only the mushy ones. There had been block parties on her street, go-go music thumping loudly past her bed time, rattling the screen inside of her bedroom window where the adults stayed up into the early morning hours, dancing and laughing and smoking fat cigars. Her second daughter was almost born in this house when she had gone into labor unexpectedly, and the ambulance that they called got stuck behind the presidential motorcade. Jackie could remember seeing her own face in the reflection of the ambulance window on the way to the hospital, veins throbbing in her forehead while she cursed the name of George Bush.

An up-and-coming neighborhood, Jackie rolled the phrase around in her mouth for another moment like a foul-tasting cough drop. She wondered what Rashida would have called the neighborhood before it was up-and-coming. Down and leaving? A place to be avoided?

There was violence in the neighborhood because of course there was. When you make people poor, you make people desperate. It was a city of working folks, after all, and it was how the big guys at the top liked to keep them— vulnerable, down on their luck, suspicious of one another, always just short of a finish line. Close enough to smell the sea and never close enough to see the shore. In the 90s, it was like the police multiplied themselves. They were wielding their batons, taking away fathers and brothers and uncles and sons in droves for every offense under the sun. She learned to get street-wise in the same way all street-wise kids do.

Graffiti bloomed on alleyways and on vacated businesses like a big ‘fuck you’ revealed each morning. Now, each time she walked home from the Metro and saw another familiar corner of graffiti painted over, she felt a pang of nostalgia like they had stamped out a memorial, even if she had never given the swatch of spray paint a second thought. Over the years, Jackie had grown accustomed to seeing it as local charm, the ways that teenagers marked their place on overpasses and cinderblock buildings and alleyways. A way to say I exist, I’m here, this is mine, and I won’t let you forget it.

So yeah, she “knew” about the neighborhood. She knew that the area around it was slowly filling with craft beer joints and boba tea. She closed her eyes when she signed the check to pay for property taxes. She passed sorority girls on Friday nights, out to try the newly opened, highly Instagrammable Korean-fusion bar with cocktails that required blow torches.

She knew that, eventually, it would happen on her street the way that it had happened on the streets before hers.

It would get too expensive, too crowded, too different.

A faceless company would offer some obscene amount of money for your lot.

Renovate, fresh coat of paint, for-sale sign.

If you’re lucky, in its place will go a single-family home. If you’re less lucky, a stretch of luxury apartments which requires never-ending construction and nightmares for street parking.

Jackie knew that it was coming, felt it like a rug creeping out from under her inch by inch. Neighbors around her were selling for numbers she found unimaginable, numbers that her parents would have spit up their drinks laughing over if they were here to listen.

The house on the left sold less than a year ago, and a brand new home was erected next to her as if overnight. New construction, modern with large windows and geographic chandeliers. The lighting was bright, white, and on at all hours of the day and night. They added another floor so that a spiral staircase would lead to a rooftop patio. The entire operation was loud, expensive, and resulted in a constant cascade of shade that fell Jackie’s house. She felt the presence of this looming house that now stood over hers, taunting her long grass, her dried flowerbeds, her children’s old play house that sat in the side yard, pooling with dirt as ivy began to climb the wood.

Three years prior, almost the same thing had happened with her other neighbor when he had decided to sell. A corner lot, Mr. Singh had also lived in his house for over 20 years. He was a great neighbor, owned a cleaning business three blocks down, and had been wrecked with guilt when he sold the house to another real estate developer.

“The money for that house? What they offered me? Ludacris, Jackie!” He had come to her porch to tell her after he made the sale, his face clearly torn. “They say that the corner is most sought after! I mean— holy! I could not believe it!”

He seemed anxious to explain himself to her, but Jackie hadn’t been angry with him. Frankly, she understood. It would be plain stupid to not take the deal, and that’s why it had been offered to him.

His house came down with a loud bang a month to the day after the sale was finalized, and in its place came a steel building that looked like shipping containers with windows— industrial chic, her daughter had called it. It was made up of six separate units, and Jackie was surprised to see that they had, somehow, managed to pave a small patch of grass for parking spots that were shoddily spray painted. She looked it up— additional $350 a month for parking if you rented out one of their units with a year’s lease. Jackie looked up the apartments on Zillow, saw the minimalist cabinets with no handles. Why the fuck would you make cabinets with no handles?

All of the furniture was A.I generated, so it was wonky and hard to see how large the rooms inside were even with all of the different angles. Jackie turned her phone every which way trying to navigate the shape of the place, but found that the fake furniture made it harder to orient. The floors were decent-looking laminate, the walls were bright white, and the appliances sparkled with their newness. Jackie had choked when she saw the price. $2,500 a month, with barely any square footage to show for it.

And much like any other overpriced thing in the city, she could hardly be surprised when they were filled by the end of that month.

Next door, they had kept the frame of the house but not much else. The right side of Jackie’s house was exposed for the better part of a year while they worked tirelessly at reconstructing it.

Jackie felt the wall next to her bed at night and imagined that she could feel the wind whipping past her hand. It wasn’t until college when she lived in off-campus housing that she first slept in a house that wasn’t bordered by other houses. Without homes on either side of her, without apartments or dorm rooms on top and bottom, a house by itself felt awfully vulnerable. She had grown to find it a comforting thought, knowing that at around the same time each evening, a whole collection of people agree to snuggle up and rest their brains at the same time in the same relative place.

She slept much better once her neighboring house had walls again, though she hated the modern, California vibe they were going for. It didn’t look like any other house on the street, sticking out like a sore thumb with it’s massive windows, its bold, black siding, its geometric shape. The house itself felt like it had an err of superiority around it, like it was willing the other homes to conform to it.

She knew that Rashida was trying to embarrass her into cleaning the place up, make her feel shame for the house that she had lived her whole life in. Rashida was the kind of person who thought shame was an effective motivator.

But Jackie was so proud of that home, in fact, it was killing her to say ‘no’ to Rashida’s offer to power-wash that awning . She thought of how filthy it was each time she rustled around in her purse to find the keys to her front door and had an extra moment to look at it, the dirt and fall debris making long trails of sediment that crumbled onto the porch. It was a chore that had gotten away from her, busy as she was. Her daughter had just a baby, her job was requiring new technical skills she didn’t have, and she was spending double the amount of time it was taking everyone else to do the same amount of work. She worked long hours, cared for her new grandson on the weekends, found herself visiting specialist after specialist for a litany of changes to her body— menopause, pre-diabetes, a torn rotator cuff, some arthritis blooming in the joints of her fingers and toes. Plus power wash companies were expensive anymore, and the one that she used herself was too cumbersome to manage once she hit about 45. She didn’t have the forearm strength that she used to, and her split from her husband a few years before meant that no family patriarch would be coming to the rescue.

Excuse her for not wanting to spend her remaining time left on earth fighting with a power washer. Or fighting with the realtor about the power washer. Was it so ridiculous that none of her relaxing hours were reserved for thinking about or planning for power washing?

How she desperately wanted the chore taken care of without having to think about it.

And still, she wasn’t about to let Rashida Walters from Jackson & Jackson realty feel better about herself for having footed the bill. Was improving her home somehow an agreement with Rashida, that the neighborhood was in need of some capitalist restoration? Was it an act of noble rebellion to let the house grow musty and grown over? Was beautifying her house simply giving them what they wanted?

What they wanted, ultimately, was her house. The house that they scoffed at was really what they were after, which was what really drove Jackie wild with rage when she really thought about it. They had no idea what it was like to love a home, to spend so many years building out breakfast nooks and adding swing sets in the backyard and accidentally nicking the plaster while moving furniture around. They would live out the remainder of a lease for a few months until the wind blew them elsewhere.

Jackie was still going to be here.

She had ignored many a business card crammed into the door, letters sent by mail asking to call back about listing the house for ridiculous amounts of money.

She scoffed and threw them all in the trash when she got them. Lifelong locals knew better than to piss away property last purchased when Eisenhower was in office. It was a point of pride, a way that Jackie felt she was honoring her late parents: no, you will not squeeze another ten legislative aides renting shoebox apartments into the space where I was raised, where I raised my children. N-O.

Eventually, most of the repeat offenders fell off of her scent, realized that she wasn’t keen on selling anytime soon. They probably committed to the long game— waiting until she was old and then cornering one of her kids on the walk in, trying to tempt them with a great deal as their mother aged, and weren’t they concerned for her safety living in that decrepit house all alone?

Meanwhile, her house hadn’t looked all that bad at all until they squeezed her between two out-of-place behemoths. Her beloved home now sat squat between two tall buildings on either side, enveloping her in their wake. Industrial chic, modern art deco— both of which clashed directly with her red brick, her vintage awning, her decorative flags stamped into the garden and metal rooster figurine that appeared to be copper, but had luckily just rusted in an aesthetically pleasing way. Jackie’s house had looked outdated, perhaps overdue for some TLC, but now cemented between these bright shiny diamonds, it looked practically haunted.

Rashida was looking down at Jackie from where she stood, her bright smile still plastered on her face as she waited for Jackie’s reply to her no-brainer offer. Jackie wondered if this was some sort of sales tactic she learned when she became a realtor, a way to intimidate with such sweetness that it negates all harm. Jackie twisted her lips up like she was thinking as she stared at Rashida whose offer she digested in front of her as it turned to bile and then to venom. She balled up her fists on the steering wheel, willing them to steady. She swung her legs from her car and stood up until she was eye-to-eye with Rashida, who took a tentative step backwards involuntarily. On her lawn, Rashida’s kitten heels were sinking into the grass. Her face hardly faltered.

“I’ll handle my own damn awning,” Jackie said to her, turning onto her heel quickly and marching back into her house, fuming like she hadn’t in decades.

The door slammed shut behind her, and she imagined Rashida standing there wide-eyed, probably still smiling. Jackie caught a glimpse of her own face in a hallway mirror that she had just hung and had not yet gotten used to the presence of. She was startled by her own reflection— the rage in it. She rarely saw what she looked like when she was this angry, and the sight of her own pained, furious face made her choke out a sob. When were these people going to just leave her home alone?

She stood like that for a while, heard Rashida’s tentative footsteps on the pavement where she retreated to her Lexus, started the engine, and drove off.

As soon as she was sure she was gone, Jackie felt her body underneath her as if she weren’t attached it, towards the front door where she opened it, and marched around to the shed in the back. She felt frenzied, almost a little drunk, which she assumed to be due to exhaustion. But the anger had gifted her a sense of mania, and she planned to use it. She hardly noticed that she was crying until two fat tear droplets fell off of her cheeks and onto her forearms as she tugged the power washer from its place. Dust and debris floated in the air, and Jackie choked as she pulled hard, concerned that she had broken the cord in her fury.

The air was so humid that the heat stalled in the air, weighing her down. Her scrubs felt sticky on her skin, the small of her back a pool of sweat as she attached the hose to the water spigot, fighting with buttons and attachments as she mumbled loudly to herself. Nosy neighbors walking their dogs could probably hear her from the street, ranting and raving, and she didn’t care.

If she wanted her fucking awning clean, she was going to clean her own fucking awning. She was going to be the one to feel the satisfaction of watching the grime rip itself off of her siding, revealing the home that had been her home for the whole of her life. It wasn’t going to be so that Rashida could squeeze another $50K out of a rich couple in a bidding war.

From where Jackie stood, she could no longer see the sunset. It had fallen behind Rashida’s property, darkening her yard so that she couldn’t see where to attach the lip of the power washer. Her eyes kept filling with tears, making it hard to see.

“Mother fucker!” She said aloud, throwing down her hands for a moment to wipe her eyes with her scrubs, careful to avoid the dried blood. Her heart pounded in her ears. Looking up now, she could see that Rashida must have come by to turn on all of the internal lights next door. The inside was bright white, full of IKEA furniture for staging. Jackie wondered for the first time what they would do about curtains. Surely, they’d have to get them custom-made for a window like that— so large that everyone who walked by in the evenings could see exactly what pajamas you wore, exactly how high your dishes were piled. How would you wander your own living room without feeling like you were performing? You couldn’t grow old in front of every passerby on 14th street, could you?

She couldn’t imagine anyone living in that house. At least not the way that she had lived in hers.

She realized then that she was drifting towards the house, the power washer in hand again, her feet taking her closer so that she could now make out more details. The countertops were white marble, and the fixtures were all yellow gold. Massive fake plants framed the windows, making it look almost like a tropical resort from a distance. Jackie bent down to get a better look at the landscaping, and she saw that the flowerbeds Rashida was boasting about were only half-full of soil, covered with black mulch that stank wildly. She could see even in the dusk that there wasn’t enough soil in the planters, that all of these flowers would never take root. They’d die within the month. Surely Rashida knew that. Or maybe, she didn’t. Maybe the real problem was that she didn’t.

Jackie stood up straight, stared into the house as if she expected to see someone moving around inside of it. She stared at it long enough that she thought that she might have. Her vision blurred with tears, the hot shame on her face but only hidden by the dark night that had fallen around her.

She didn’t think about what happened next— not really. In the bright light shining down from the inside of her neighbor’s home, she could see exactly where the attachments to the power-washer needed to go. In one quick motion, she spun the nozzle in place. Jackie adjusted her stance before turning it on, feeling the blast of water charge through the machine with surprising force, directly into her neighbor’s glass window.

A quick drill of pressure, a sharp crack, a glittering explosion. And then silence.

Depending on who you talk to, some would say that no one called the police when they heard the window explode because they were so used to shootings in the neighborhood. Others would say it was because construction was so loud, so constant, that someone assumed it had been a builder’s problem. Apparently no one had even opened their blinds.

“No one was screaming,” a neighbor told Rashida the next day when she came to her door in a frenzy, asking if she had heard anything. “I’m not calling the cops unless I hear screaming.”

When Rashida had arrived the next day for a showing, she found the front window shattered to oblivion. When the police arrived, they noted that it came from outside, but there were no bullet holes or shell casings found at the scene to indicate it had been a drive-by. The floor was strangely wet, but it had rained the night before. Neighbors either didn’t have Ring cameras or claimed that theirs weren’t on at the time of the explosion.

They theorized that perhaps there had been something wrong with the glass when they had it installed. Rashida had insisted that it wasn’t possible, that because their security system hadn’t yet been fully installed it was probably an open target for gun violence.

“What else could it have been?!” Rashida asked, dumbfounded.

Both officers looked at one another, shrugging. “Well we’d have to investigate that further.”

Ultimately, the city had other concerns. No one had been injured, after all, and insurance covered the damages within days so that the house could stay on the market. Rashida, if she had any suspicions about what happened, wasn’t going to spend her limited time playing detective about a pane of glass, albeit a pricey one. She thought Jackie rude, but harmless. Certainly not violent. No, she wasn’t saying that at all.

Before she forgot about it forever, she considered that Jackie had been rather angry when she declined Rashida’s offer. Angry enough to throw a stone through a window? Although a stone had never been found, and certainly would have had to be thrown at a speed much higher than she thought Jackie capable of at her age in order to break through that glass.

Perhaps if Rashida had arrived and saw that Jackie’s house was gleaming and freshly cleaned, she would have considered a power washer theory when it came to the window. But Jackie’s house sat defiantly grimy until the day after the house next door officially sold. When Rashida had pulled up to oversee the removal of the ‘for sale’ sign out front, she saw that the awning had been scrubbed clean, the dilapidated playhouse hosed down until it glimmered. A bundle of balloons was tied to the light post revealing Jackie’s address, indicating that it was some little boy’s first birthday party.

The roof was old, Rashida noted to herself, it would need replacing within the next few years, at best.

She heard loud laughter from inside the house where Jackie’s family was clearly gathered. She hoped her clients wouldn’t immediately regret this purchase once they heard the noise next door. “Thanks to these people”, she muttered to herself, “there’s never any parking on this god damn street.”