Staying in Your Lane

The town I grew up in was divided roughly into three sections – The Heights, where the money and privilege and bound-to-be-successful lived, The East, mostly single family homes, mostly middle to lower class, and The East End, a down at the heels section on the Cambridge line where the homes were mostly triple deckers and very close to poor. Not everyone spoke English in The East End, the families were almost always renters rather than home owners, and the whole shabby neighborhood was dark and smoky and smelled of cooking grease. Those from The East might hurriedly pass through it on their way to the better sections of Cambridge. Those from The Heights barely acknowledged its existence.

Much to the dismay of my mother, I had a half dozen friends who lived in The East End (we all went to The East Junior High) and only one who lived in the Heights, and went to The West Junior High. We would all be thrown unceremoniously together for high school but 7^th and 8^th grade were (and still are) two very different schools, two different neighborhoods, and two very distinct classes of society. My mother, an only child of relatively well off parents and fond of telling anyone who would listen that she had married beneath her, did her best to keep me from my lesser friends. We clashed often and sometimes violently and my daddy often had to step in to restore some sort of order. He hadn’t much enthusiasm for it.

June was my closet East End friend. She was tall and lean and long legged, the captain of the girls basketball team and the closest thing to a star athlete that we had. She and I had been friends since elementary school when status and zip codes didn’t matter so much. She came from a raucous and sprawling Italian family with four older brothers and a grandmother who spoke only her native language and her third floor home was always crowded and noisy with friends and family and music and an assortment of dogs and cats.

By comparison, my friend Dawn lived in a two story brick house just off Pleasant Street with a circular driveway, manicured lawn, three car garage and a sour-faced housekeeper. Nobody ever played the grand piano in the formal living room and the entire house had a sterile feel to it, even Dawn’s room was pastel’d and antiqued and un-lived in. Her collection of stuffed animals was arranged in a neat row on a shelf above her four poster bed but it was clear they were never loved or played with. Things in Dawn’s house were for show, not for handling and but for the fact that her family and mine went to the same Baptist church, we’d never have been friends to begin with.

High school brought very few changes – the natural order of things continued. Dawn and her crowd were cheerleaders and debate club members, honor students and class presidents, homecoming royalty and prom stars. June and her friends were athletes, got good but unnoticed grades and sang in the chorus. Dawn and her crowd drove shiny new convertible cars and June and her friends took the bus. The haves and the have nots kept to their own lanes and no one questioned the way things worked. And then, one unsuspecting spring, there was a fire at the high school and half the buildings went up in flames. It meant split sessions for the remainder of the school year – half of us left for school in the dark, half of us came home in the dark. None of us were happy and we never saw that it might’ve been an opportunity to build a bridge rather than another wall.

There are times when I think how little has changed.