High Anxiety

Olivia Mason

In her essay, “They All Just Went Away,” Joyce Carol Oates says, “The house contains the home but is not identical with it.” I respectfully disagree. I have lived almost my entire life in one house and I could not consider anywhere else home, not even with my family. My house is a colonial, over a hundred years old, with khaki colored shingles, two magnolia trees out in the front yard, and a large black front door with a gold knocker. Our asphalt driveway that always has too many potholes after winter leads to a garage with a rooster weathervane on top. Off the driveway is a small red brick path that leads to a back door that never closes all the way. Everything creaks and moans in our house. The floorboards squeak, the radiators clang and every storm the whole house shudders with the wind. I don’t mind my rickety old house. I think it has character.

My parents have somewhat over decorated much of the inside. My dad used to bring home a new piece of furniture or art almost every weekend till my mom yelled at him to stop. The walls are so covered with art that we have next to no wall space left; art posters, signed photographs, oil paintings, pastels, and my step grandfather’s sketches line the walls creating one enormous collage. My favorites are the Beatles poster signed by Paul McCartney with a smiley face and the painting of my sister playing in the ocean in South Hampton when she was little. The shelves everywhere are filled with my dad’s mystery and photography books, and every once and a while we wipe the dust off them. My brother, Nick, and I have utilized every single piece of furniture at one time or another for our games, such as throwing our large collection of stuffed animals at each other from either ends of the couch in the TV room. My mom says that I wrote on the wall once behind the TV set but felt so guilty that I went and told her and showed her the tiny dot I had made. Somewhere in the floor are the wings of one of Dad’s Emmys. When trying to reach something on top of the wardrobe that held the TV, I knocked off the statue and it went wings first into the floor. He wasn’t too happy about that. Mom’s favorite chair is in the office and she does all her work in it. I once dared Nick to spend the night sleeping behind it against the wall. He took his pillow and a blanket and did.

My room is usually messy but there is a method to the madness. I don’t like to give things up. My boom box that I got for my ninth birthday and haven’t touched since is by the front window. My collection of dollhouse furniture and accessories is next to it. My An American in Paris poster leans against the wall above my radiator. The last letters my great aunt sent to me before she passed away live in the drawer of my night table along with a birthday card that makes noise when you open it. I’ve slept in the same four-poster canopy bed since I graduated from my crib. And my teddy bear of seventeen and a half years has only recently moved from my bed to the couch.

This summer we are moving back to New York City right as I’m getting ready to go to college. At the moment, most of our stuff is in storage lockers, the house has been stripped to the bare minimum amount of furniture, our family and dining rooms have been switched and my room was painted white. It had been lavender since I was five. I had picked the color myself. My dad had it painted while I was away. I never got to say goodbye to my room. When I came home my room was covered in a thick layer of paint dust and all my stuff and had been moved out. Nothing was where I’d left it. I curled up on the floor and cried, clutching my dusty teddy bear. My brother’s room had been repainted too, but his was still mostly the same color. For a while I considered clawing that layer of toxic white off until I could see the purple, but I gave up the thought. I tried to picture what it looked like before: the footprint where my foot kicked the wall by my bed, the posters taped to my walls, the friendly crack in my ceiling. The fact that we were moving hadn’t really sunk in for me until that day. I could tell it was going to be really painful. Not like quickly yanking off a Band-Aid, but slowly ripping it so that each and every hair gets pulled and snapped leaving your skin sore, red and exposed.

I hate the way the whole house echoes now. All the walls are bare and the shelves are empty. All the magnets are gone from the fridge. I can’t find any of our family photos. It’s lonely and it’s cold. It feels white. I’ve had to hide my things in corners and closets; make my presence scarce. Taking our personality out of the house has made it feel alien. While this is still my home it is no longer our house. They had been one and the same for so long, I couldn’t believe it possible for them to be separate. As my family will unpack our lives into the new home, I will be packing mine to leave. As I navigate college in a foreign country, my family will go through something similar as they settle into Manhattan. They will get months to adjust while I barely get one. When I come back I will never be coming back to my home; I’ll be coming back to theirs.

Sometimes fear is buried so deep we can’t shake it. I am not a fearful person, but I am absolutely terrified of change. My fear bullies me into a corner. It makes me hide. It makes me weak. I’ve skipped classes in school to go to the nurse. I call my mom and barely get out the words “I don’t want to move,” before choking on sobs as my chest heaves and the warm tears roll down my face. My eyes roll around in my head as I stare up at the white ceiling of the sick room. I cry silently till I fall asleep. I leave the nurse’s office empty and meet my friends at lunch. Some of them can tell that the smile on my face is only temporary and that I’m trying too hard to laugh at whatever they are saying. They send me weak smiles of acknowledgment.

My mom is thrilled that we are moving. She’s wanted to move for years. Westchester is too stuffy and boring she says. It took a while to get my dad to come around to the idea. Mom says that’s because he sees the house as his “man cave.” He’s spent the past sixteen and a half years arranging and adding to it and he doesn’t want to see his “work of art” dismantled. However, once we found the new apartment he was sold. Mom keeps trying to make me feel better by saying “I’m so sorry that we are doing this now right before you go to college. I know how hard this must be for you.” I hate hearing those words. No Mom, you aren’t sorry because you are getting what you want. And no you don’t understand because your parents still live in the same house they brought you home to from the hospital. Dragging me through our new neighborhood on the Upper West Side trying to sell me on all the cool stuff that we don’t see in Westchester doesn’t help either. And being cross with me for not keeping a permanent smile on my face and light-hearted attitude isn’t fair. I’m allowed to be grumpy if I’m quiet and don’t bother anybody. I’m a teenager for Christ’s sake, it’s what we do anyway.

I’m heartbroken to leave my brother. He’s grown an inch since Christmas. I’m afraid that when I come home from college he will all of a sudden have grown a foot and actually look more his age (fourteen). I can see Nick walking around the Upper West side with his headphones strapped tightly over his ears. The buildings don’t seem so huge to him anymore and the crowds less intimidating. He dances slightly as he crosses the street near the apartment. His phone rings and he answers. It’s Mom telling him that after dinner they are going to pick me up from the airport. He plans on leading me around our new neighborhood and showing me the best places to eat and hang out because I wouldn’t know. I see his arm stretched high waving to me from the other side of baggage claim. He pulls me into a warm hug as I notice his head doesn’t fit in my shoulder anymore, mine fits in his.

We are selling our house to a builder and not a family. He says he will renovate and expand the house because we have plenty of land. But there is a chance that he could knock the whole house down and start from scratch. In the hopes that he doesn’t, I picture myself older driving by my town and walking up to the front door. I ring the doorbell and explain to whoever answers that this was my childhood home and that this door is where we hung our advent calendar for Christmas and those were the stairs that my brother and I rode a mattress down into a pile of pillows. And the closet under those stairs held my dad’s baseball cap collection and the best hiding spot in the whole house. The young person lets me in and I walk around and feel somewhat melancholy, but also lucky to have so many happy memories. And I finally agree with Joyce Carol Oates. That this was once my house and contained my home, but I couldn’t feel this content had they forever been identical.