A major move

I am in the back seat of a dull red Renault Dauphine. It's a small car. Really, a minuscule thing with a rounded roof and perfect round headlights that stick out like the eyes of a cute bug. My father covered all the seats in clear plastic so the inevitable soda and ice cream spills could be wiped away before staining the faux light brown leather interior and the Dauphine would remain spotless.

Three of us are crammed into the back seat along with various items from our now empty apartment, and Mitzi the orange and white-striped cat. There is a mop, the bushy white head jammed beside my legs, the long blue stick of a body hanging out the window, like a bony finger pointing the way to an uncertain future. The mop was the last thing my mother had packed. She had relentlessly cleaned her way out of 2001 Newbold Avenue, apartment 1A , closing the door that last time on immaculate emptiness.

It was winter, but winter in New York City isn't so much a dramatic change from summer or fall. There's no trees to shimmer in their sad bareness, no green grass to turn a lifeless shade of white. It's just colder and fewer people are on the street.

My brother and I being the two oldest are sitting at the windows on either side of the car. My sister, the baby, is stuck smack in between for the three-hour drive up Interstate 95. My brother and I on opposite ends of our small world have each rolled our window down to catch the last little bit of what we are sensing we are losing. The slight smell of car exhaust and ancient sewers that for years have swallowed our pink Spauldeen balls, the muted light of late afternoon, blocked as always by buildings; the smooth black street, the speckled tan sidewalks. These have been the borders of our reality, the lines drawn around our little lives. Now are leaving them.

This is a big moment, and even at the tender age of 11 I know it. We are jammed into this can of a car pulling out of a parking space heading away to a place I've never seen for reasons I don't quite understand. But we are leaving. That much I know.

My mom and dad had already been to Coventry Rhode Island a few times and they'd come back talking about a safe and comfortable place, New England but not New England, backyards and grass, a house, a real house with a separate bedroom for my sister, and another one for my brother and I to share. I pictured it like Lucy and Ricky on 'I Love Lucy' when they'd moved from New York out to Connecticut to a sprawling but warm house with bushes and closets and neighbors in kerchiefs and sunglasses who dropped in for ice tea.

I was in the sixth grade when my father came home from work and announced to the family at dinner one night that we were moving. Metropolitan Life Insurance was opening a regional office in Providence, Rhode Island and he was going to be the Assistant Manager. Big stuff, big promotion, he was going places. We were to follow.

Until that moment as the car eased out of the parallel spot on Newbold Avenue it had not seemed real to me. Of course I'd told all my friends we were leaving but it didn't seem to have much of an impact on them. They weren't leaving so what did it matter? No one cried or wailed, there were no parties, no secret plans for me to sneak away in the night and hitchhike back to the Bronx. Just "that's cool, sounds like a neat place," and we'd go back to whatever it was we'd been doing - playing hide and seek or Red Rover or walking to the candy store for a moon pie and an RC Cola.

I was just a kid so I hadn't really had to do anything to prepare myself. I didn't pack anything (my mother would never allow it anyway since I could never do it neatly or well enough), I hadn't had to sign papers for the school or break leases or buy new furniture. My dad had just said we were moving and I watched as the activity at our house changed from furtive to excited and mom cleaned and threw out or gave away nearly everything we had including my beloved collection of matchbox cars (with my permission to a little kid in the apartment house more pathetic than me), and one afternoon it just became time, and my dad told us to "wrap it up and get in the car."

I am staring at everything, searching the street for a familiar face, someone chasing down the car with tears streaming down their face. My dad punches the push button drive and we slide out onto the street. I watch his fat, freckled hands grip the mini steering wheel, his gold wedding band a perfect accoutrement for his scrubbed whiteness. There's no traffic. I am aware of the apartment building, our windows facing the street, the red mouth of the tunnel where we park our bikes. We're easing past the houses, Mary Fragaile's brown two-story with the steep stairs and the creepy basement where her grandfather hung himself. The tires, weighted down, roll over the taut sewer covers, past anonymous station wagons and Mike Messina's yellow Road Runner with the horn that sounds just like the cartoon. "Meep meep."

There's Johnny MacALeavey's grey-shingled house. No one there. Silence.

We're at the corner of Newbold and Olmstead Avenues, the corner where the yellow brick Presbyterian church sits. What does Presbyterian mean? Isn't everyone a Catholic? I've never been inside the church but there's a massive stained glass window perfectly round that looks out over Olmstead. I sense it is a holy place, duller and more somber than our St. Helena's, with a small but fiercely loyal following.

This is the corner too, a block away from our apartment house, where we can spot the Mr. Softee truck on summer nights. He parks here to sell parfaits and cups of soft vanilla to the people in these apartment buildings, people we don't know because they live a whole block away. When you see the Mr. Softee truck idling and hear the calliope-like music you know you have just enough time to run inside and ask your parents for a quarter for a cone. Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don't.

My dad turns left to head toward the highway.

"Well, we're off," he says. And that is that.

This is our first big move, the separation from the only things any of us have really ever known. My parents are leaving the neighborhood where they spent their entire lives, a crowded, lower middle-class collection of brownstone apartment buildings and two family homes with men sitting in chairs out front sometimes with beers and women leaning out the windows in black dresses year-round. The places moves to the rhythm of the subway trains thrashing on elevated tracks a block away. In front of the apartment building the Cross Bronx Expressway is the front yard.

For mom and Dad I figure this move is something special - an escape from all things Bronx, from their own pasts of drunken fathers, abusive mothers and teen pregnancies. There is something finally out there for them. My dad has this cool new job and some self-esteem, a reward for all his late nights going to college and working a second job. For mom it is a house, a real house they had had built with carpets and stairs and more than two rooms. She can clean and clean and clean. She's already told us she plans to build a white picket fence in the front to complete the picture in her head.

In the backseat we're coming at this from a different place. We're happy. What the hell do we know? We walk everyday during school to St. Helena's with a group of our closest friends. We play on the street right in front of the building, close enough for our parents to open a window and yell for us to come for supper - "get in here right now." We can see dad walk up the street coming home from work, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows in summer. Sweating from the subway and the walk.

This is something wholly different, a change we hadn't bargained for. Jimmy, Eileen and I hadn't really talked, but I suspect none of us really want to leave despite my parents' promises of new friends and schools, "other kids to play with," they call it, as if the ones we'd been playing with are somehow suddenly damaged or not good enough.

The worst part of it now as we head up Westchester Avenue is that I can see that no one really seems to care. The whole place - people and buildings and streets and sewers - is letting us go without so much as a tug at our sleeve. We are too young to do anything about it, but I am wishing someone could have protested, someone could have cried. No one did.

We're moving up 95 toward New Rochelle, then Connecticut then Rhode Island. Lots of awkward Indian-sounding names - Mamaroneck, Housatonic, Mystic. I don't know anyone in any of these places. They are strange names on a sign.

My parents don't say much to each other or to us. They seem lost in their own thoughts. The three of us kids sit quietly, the mop pressing into my legs. We pass Orchard Beach. Years before my mother had gotten mad at Mitzi the cat for shitting on the floor of our apartment and had ordered my dad to get rid of him. (Mitzi was misnamed - whoever had given him to us had named him before confirming his sex). My dad took us three kids and the banished cat in the car to some woods near Orchard Beach and we reluctantly left him there beside a tree with some food. When we got home my mother had experienced a change of heart and was sobbing. She ordered us back out to find Mitzi, who miraculously was still standing in the exact same spot when we returned. He gratefully accepted the ride back home and was never again banned.

I was hoping I could get a Mitzi too, that my dad was going to stop the car and turn around, telling us he'd changed his mind. Fuck Rhode Island, all five of us really belong in that two-room apartment with the steam heat and the rows of overflowing garbage cans and roaches in the huge dungeon of a basement.

No such luck. Mitzi settles in on the crowded floor at our feet. We are leaving the whole thing back there for good. Goodbye.

We are on the road to Rhode Island and I am thinking already how alone I suddenly am, and that it will stay this way for a long time to come. Probably forever. They are all gone now, Johnny, Emil, Mary, Diane. Nothing will replace them.

It is getting dark but the car window is still mostly unwound. It' cold. The wind blows my hair and it makes my face feels clean, renewed.

No one speaks to me but the red Dauphine. It knows of motion and impermanence and being so small in such a big place.

"Let it go, " it says, the tires whining north toward the darkness.

"Let it go Kevin. Walk away. This is what we do. "

In Rhode Island a year or so later, the Dauphine would die, felled by a blown piston along I-95. My dad would sell it to a junkyard for $25 and catch a train home.

Later that night we arrived in Coventry, Rhode Island. From the backseat the headlights showed us a small red and grey split level house gleaming, new, and as empty as anything I had ever seen in my life.