Riggs Park by Ellyn Bache

trees and gentle hills, all of which I urgently yearned for this particular fall.
    At the District Line, the sight of the bus stop on Eastern Avenue made me forget my throbbing temples for a moment as I entertained a nostalgic vision of days past: the rich tapestry of city life when Washington, D.C., was not the crime capital of the nation but a small, manageable, southern city that was also, as far as we’d understood, entirely safe.
    “We rode those buses alone from the time we were—what? Ten? Eleven?” I asked.
    “Maybe even younger,” Marilyn said. We’d traveled unchaperoned to ballet and tap lessons, to sessions in the warm indoor pool at the Jewish Community Center on Sixteenth Street, to the Capitol Theatre downtown. We’d swayed on streetcars down Georgia Avenue to see ball games at Griffith Stadium (not that we’d cared about baseball, but the boys had); we’d executed complicated transfers to buses that had taken us to “the other side of town,” a term that had meant, very specifically to Washingtonians of that day, “the other side of Rock Creek Park.” Our horizons had seemed boundless, unlimited, compared to the complicated, menacing world of our children.
    “Oh, look at the trees!” Marilyn exclaimed as I turned onto Oneida Street, our old block, and drove down the steep hill that pitched precipitously from New Hampshire Avenue, past Third Street, into Sixth Street at the bottom. In the early days, the trees had been nothing but tender stalks springing from patches of ground along the sidewalk (required, we’d been told, by the FHA), and later healthy adolescents with lanky trunks. Now they were mature, huge, casting the block into shadow while the street of our childhood had been relentlessly sunny.
    “Yes, but the houses—” They looked amazingly as they had half a century before, yet shrunken, too, as the dwellings of childhood always are: long rows of two-story brick duplexes we’d always referred to as “semidetached,” with ugly, chipping concrete patios we’d proudly referred to as “front porches,” and closet-sized patches of lawn.
    “So tiny,” Marilyn whispered. “I’d forgotten.” Oneida Street had been among the first streets in Riggs Park to be developed, to sprout postwar homes for growing families who (we were too young to know then) would never be rich. But Marilyn and I had been small, too, and the rooms had seemed enormous; and after all this time it was a shock to our older, knowing eyes to see the truth.
    “Functional, unimaginative boxes,” I said. It was the best our hardworking parents, children of the Depression, survivors of the war, could afford.
    “Not exactly North Portal,” Marilyn agreed, naming the stylish neighborhood where, in high school, our richest friends and sorority sisters had lived.
    In our teen years, Oneida Street had always seemed too narrow for two-way traffic and parked cars, too, and spaces had always been at a premium. But there was plenty of parking today. “Sunday morning,” I mused as I pulled into a spot just above the alley. “People must be at church.”
    “Yeah, or in jail.” Marilyn pointed to a sporty black Mustang, its tires held in place by a bright orange boot. “You can’t move your car if you’re incarcerated.”
    Ignoring her, I unlocked the doors. “Does this mean you’re afraid to get out?”
    “Certainly not. I’ve already been slashed and poisoned—” Marilyn’s favorite terms for surgery and chemo. “What’s a little assault and gunfire?”
    “Stop it, Marilyn. It looks perfectly safe.”
    Outside, the sidewalk was dappled with light and shadow under the bright, blowing trees, but except for a woman in an exquisite red suit getting into a car, the street was deserted. I imagined spectators peering at us from behind drawn curtains, wondering why two white women were wandering their block on a Sunday morning.
    Marilyn and I had lived two doors apart, in houses with identical floor plans: