I drove up to Silicon Valley to see my old house on a whimsy, several years back. I hadn’t been back since my family moved away when I was in the sixth grade and I was curious to see the place. I didn’t remember how to get to my old house, since I had moved away too young, but my friend had brought a mobile GPS system with him and I still remembered the address.
I was fond of my old house. My parents, or at least my mother, now live in a small two bedroom condo housed in a building that looks like a retirement home. All the tenants’ doors face into a hallway that smells of baby powder and someone’s cooking. In my mother’s condo, some of our old furniture has survived--an old floral still-life that I remembered, a side table in a rich warm wood, a framed Degas print. But many of these relics from the past are crowded out by the newer, cheaper furniture my parents bought as the years passed by.
I remember so many little details about our house, silly things like the hanging plants my parents kept around the house or our carpet. Ours was a dove color, or at least I think it was to begin with, but I only remembered it dirty, so that at some spots it looked more grey-green, with textures shaped like rose cabbages woven into them. When we had professionals come to clean and restore our carpets, to get the house ready to put on the market, I remember running my hands in awe over the newly cleaned carpet. I didn’t know it would feel so thick and woolly. I remember lying on the carpet outside my bedroom door while listening to my parents argue, usually early in the morning. Sometimes I would hear my mom weeping and I would pad softly across the dirty rose cabbage carpet hallway and slip into my parent’s room to comfort her. I said my first bad word, fuck, when I hurt my finger trying to turn on a lamp in their room. A little part of me died when God did not strike me down for saying a bad word.
I can say nothing with certainty about my house because I think I lived there before I learned to make judgments about houses and furniture and amenities. In retrospect, I think it must have been a very nice house. Now that I know the costs of things, the cost of decks and slate paving, of carpets and hardwood floors, of sunken living rooms, recreation rooms, and swimming pools, I realized what a nice house I must have lived in. But I don’t remember that it was nice, I only remember things like the octagonal window seat with ivory striped cushions where I sat and read books upon books, crunching on half a red delicious apple that I would rub with lemons from our backyard, because I hated how the pale flesh of the apple would turn brown.
I remember how the door always seemed to stick and the glittery slate rocks that made up the porch and the paved path that led up to the front door. The overhang provided a perfect garden house. My best friend and I used to play in the bushes that framed the paved path. Her father was an engineer, like mine, and our elementary school sat right behind Apple headquarters. This was before the iPod and the iPhone had revived Apple’s stock and won back Silicon Valley’s approval. This was when Intel and IBM were still gods, when Microsoft was still flapping its fledgling wings.
We played in the garden and played house in the bushes, with the berries and vines that grew all over the place. I live in semi-desert country now and I miss the smell of green, growing things. Next to our driveway, across from our lawn, there was a bare patch of rock and dirt. My best friend and I would ride our bikes to the local nursery, Bonsai Nursery I think it was called, and spend our weekly allowance to buy marigolds, snapdragons, and petunias to terraform that little patch of land. We charged neighbors ten cents to tour the garden. I didn’t like petunias because fat caterpillars would eat them, oozing pink or purple ichor when squished, depending on what color blossom they had been eating.
I remember our living room where we slept after the big earthquake hit. My parents spread out blankets and comforters and we all snuggled down together on the living room floor. We had a beautiful, richly colored Oriental rug in the living room with sofas and loveseats upholstered in cream silk with pale pink and green irises embroidered on them. My piano sat in the corner, by the fireplace, where the oil painting of some famous artist hung. I sometimes see other paintings by this artist floating around but I’ve never found out his/her name. The living room was the nicest room in the house. The sofas and loveseats must have been very expensive; I wonder if my mother misses them. Now that I have a house of my own, I wouldn’t mind furniture like that.
I spent a great deal of time in the living room, practicing piano, reading, playing under the dining room table. I liked to sit near the fireplace. When my father was in one of his moods, I would sit slumped down in one of the blue silk armchairs and hold very still and hope he wouldn’t catch me, because I hated it when he hit me. I sat there when he told me we were moving, that we were selling this house, that he had lost his job and all our money and that we were moving to start a new life somewhere near Los Angeles. I didn’t know anything about Los Angeles except that was where a black man named Rodney King had been beaten and had caused riots all through the city. When the news about the LA riots broke, we were on vacation at Disneyland and I didn’t know that Los Angeles was an hour away from Anaheim.
After my father told me we were moving, I sat in the blue armchair for a long time. I don’t think I’ve ever sat that still for so long. My father had been looking for me but I didn’t say anything when he called my name, I just sat and thought about leaving behind my garden, my sun-bleached window seat, the golden specks embedded in the bathroom counter, the kitchen that overlooked the sunken living room with its fancy karaoke systems and blue furniture, the rec room with its cold tan, yellow, and brown linoleum where I built forts and stared at our jade plants with tiny pink blossoms, the kumquat trees that overlooked our backyard fence into Mike Estrada’s house, a kid who was in my third-grade class. He works for Microsoft now. When my dad finally found me, still sitting in the blue armchair, he was angry but he didn’t hit me like I thought he would.
I miss my old house but I realized what I miss is mostly in my head. When I walked up that path, several years ago, all I saw was a house that looked like it was shrinking in on itself in its old age. The subsequent owners had torn up the glittery rock path and had installed a new garage door. Our old garage door wasn’t even a garage, it was four stable doors lined up together with blurry yellow glass windows that were popular in the 60’s. The plum tree out front was gone. My best friend’s family, who still lived across the street, had remodeled their home so much that I didn’t even recognize it when I was invited in later.
I don’t know what happened to all the nice things my parents must have once owned. I remember a beautiful round side table that I would have loved to own today. The wood was so dense yet smooth, like soap, that it must have cost a fortune. I own nicer furniture than my parents now. I don’t know what happened to that side table. My father lives in Shanghai now. I don’t speak to him unless I have to. When he comes back to visit I’m always too busy working. I wonder if our lives would have been different if we had stayed in that house, if I could have grown up there. I wonder if my parents mourn what they left behind in that house, too.
