Somewhere
By Katherine K. Wilson
Every time I see Tony die in Westside Story, I cry. There are other things that always make me cry, closer to home, from my own life, but it’s easier to cry for Tony. I cry even though I’ve seen the film version thirty-six times; even though I’ve seen it on stage at least three. Even though I know how it’s going to end: with Tony shot, bleeding, dying in his beloved Maria’s arms. Even though I know the story was created as an updated version of Romeo and Juliet for the 1950s, twenty years before I was even born: even though I know that it’s fiction. Once, in the ‘90s, when it was broadcast on TV I recorded it. Whenever I needed a good cry during my tumultuous teen years full of broken hearts, spurned friendships, and dashed hopes I would pop the tape into the VCR. The sound wasn’t great on the version I had; it was on a tape that had been used over and over and had worn thin. Commercials punctuated the story in an awkward way, but I was still glad to have it. Usually I watched the whole thing—Rita Moreno was my favorite—but sometimes I just fast forwarded to the last scene. If I need a good cry I know the last scene, the scene when Tony dies, will deliver every single time. I cry because it’s a sad story every single time. Somehow, it still hurts somewhere deep down in an unidentifiable place. I want it to be true as Maria and Tony sing in “Somewhere” from the second act, when they are both alive and well and full of youthful hope and love, that there’s a time and place for them somewhere out there, for them to be together, to be happy, to be safe. Somewhere. Somehow. A place that could transcend the obstacles to their union.
I imagined “Somewhere” would be a place called home.
*
For most of my life, when I thought of home, I would picture my grandparent’s house. My parents relocated us seven times during my childhood, with each move something was lost—vital pieces of my Victorian dollhouse, my dresser’s antique mirror, a guinea pig named Thanksgiving, countless best friends. Through it all, my grandparents’ place remained a steadfast home. It was a shotgun house, small, simple, practical. Its outside was fitted with white siding to shield the exterior walls from the assault of Midwestern winters; inside my grandparents’ constant, uncomplicated love shielded my siblings and me, too. The living room was just wide enough to extend the honey-brown foldout couch we grandkids had slept on when we visited; our breathing, steady, calm, peaceful. The breezeway off the cozy kitchen was overtaken by an eager, well-cared for colony of plants. Its sash windows looked out onto a walkway hugged by daisies that stretched their heads skyward. A sturdy walnut tree cast shade over the front steps.
When I was fifteen I begged my parents to let me move in full time with my grandparents but they wouldn’t hear of it. They couldn’t hear me back then, too much was noisily titling and twirling around them both.
*
I came across a document recently in a box of some dust infused papers. My breath caught, my eyes filled. The top of the document read: Disclaimer Deed. It was the document that had made it official to the county, to the state, to the bank, to all the powers that be that I owned the house I lived in at the time solely and he, my husband at the time, did not. It is now more than two decades after it was signed. My husband had marked it on the day of its signing in navy blue ink with his swooping severe signature in stark contrast to his normally meticulously perfect printing. There was still a slight indent in the paper from the pressure of his writing. I suppose if I had the right kind of light I may have even found his fingerprint or a minuscule amount of his DNA. He’d written out the date in the formal style required by such forms: We’d had exactly one year and three days left. The form was a necessary nuisance in a community property state like ours. It made it official: He didn’t own the house, not legally. My name may have been on the deed, but I didn’t own a home either. I owned a house, a shelter, but that is not the same thing as a home.
The county recorder had returned the original copy of the disclaimer deed to me. I’d tucked it in a box back then full of things I didn’t want to see.
We had moved five times in the handful of years we’d known each other, always into temporary situations——sleeping on my sister’s futon, crowded onto my old childhood daybed, crashing at his parents vacation condo, renting an apartment for a bit. We’d been trying to keep a roof over our heads while slogging through college, enduring dead-end jobs, trying to be in love, while trying to figure out who we were as a couple when neither of us actually knew who we were as individuals yet. All the while our patience and our love were wearing thinner and thinner by the day from the relentless overplaying of survival mode. I thought maybe if we could make an actual home together we’d have a chance.
One day, as we walked back in the door of our apartment after viewing a rental house for yet another impeding move, the phone was ringing. Moments before, the owner of the rental house, a kind middle-aged woman with a sensible copper-brown bob, had agreed to rent to us. “I usually don’t allow pets,” she’d said in reference to our two cats, “but you seem like a nice couple.” He’d written her a check for the deposit, signing it with a slightly dried out cobalt blue Bic pen with his whorl of a signature. She’d only glanced at it briefly before tucking it into her purse. When I picked up the phone in our apartment it was my sister telling us she and her husband had agreed to sell their house to us. They were moving onto to a bigger place. We had no money for a deposit and too poor of credit for a mortgage, but they would allow us to rent-to-own for a year or so until we could get our affairs in order to apply for a formal mortgage with the bank. We smiled. We hugged, the ginger tabby wending his way between our legs. I called the landlady from the rental house. She assured us she would shred our deposit check. “You’re such a nice couple,” she said, “best of luck with your new home.” I could hear the smile in her voice.
I imagined making a home, a true home, that we would own could save us. I imagined filling the home with brand new furniture—a cherry-wood hand carved bed, a firm sofa with a subtle floral print, a pristine white dresser with drawers that slid open with ease—to replace the well-worn and half-broken castoffs that populated our apartment. I imagined decorating each year for Christmas with a real tree that would infuse the house with its piney scent well into the New Year. I imagined clean laundry efficiently folded and placed in potpourri scented drawers instead of lying in heaps on the carpet.
Once we moved in, something came back to us at first in that little house that had been absent. Something we’d had our first year together that had been dormant for years, not during the day, when silence reigned broken only by words that did not sound like love, but at night. In the wee hours, our breathing steady, calm, peaceful, something otherworldly resurfaced. A sort of celestial connection enveloped us when the only sound was the thrum of two synchronized hearts. With it came a sense of home almost within reach.
Like always, though, we ended up filling the new house with garage sale finds, thrift store deals and odds and ends that others no longer wanted. We failed to ever erect a Christmas tree. I only managed to fold the laundry for the first month or two before the heaps staged a comeback. And any connection between us, celestial or otherwise, shortly began fraying again.
It took a year and a half to get our affairs in order, to finish college, to get a “real” job, to prove creditworthiness to the powers that be. The necessary players of a less chaotic life were finally starting to assemble. We were almost somewhere. By that time, though, the day he had signed the disclaimer deed, the possibility of having a real sense of home—together, finally— was buckling under the weight of our slow, yet undeniable, unstoppable uncoupling. There were many reasons to buy the property myself, financial, legal, his blurry immigration status. But deep down I knew if we split, it would be easier on me if the house were solely in my name.
The form asked him to “disclaim, remise, release and quit-claim unto the spouse”. He signed it quickly without even reading it through; shaking his head, causing his red-blonde waves to tremble, proclaiming, “I don’t need anything to do with it.”
He knew, too, that it would be easier this way, but he didn’t say that. He knew our connection was becoming threadbare; divergence was becoming well seated. He signed it for me as one of his last acts of a love on life support.
*
A few years ago, I went to see my grandparents’ house. It was long after they had both left the earth. The house lay vacant waiting for a new family to remedy its emptiness. I peered in the windows; saw the daisies still dotting the walkway. The walnut tree was gone, though, not even a wisp of trunk remained. I tested the screen door to the breezeway—open. I slipped in, inhaled deeply. No plants were in sight but the air was still heavy with the scent of greenness and life. I never lived there, but my happiest memories were there—grandpa patiently playing pick-up-sticks a hundred times with me, grandma plucky daisies and delicately weaving them into my chestnut braids. I didn’t own it but it was my home.
After I visited my grandparents’ old house, I finally started to unpack the boxes of things I didn’t want to see. The little place deeded in just my name hadn’t saved us, but long before that, my grandparents’ house had saved me. It was ok. I was ok. It was time to start opening the boxes.
In the first box I came across another paper from the same county office that had issued the disclaimer deed it read: Dissolution of Marriage. The paper listed the date of separation as exactly on our fifth anniversary. The story that had started in a historic church—white bows gracing the end of each pinewood pew, a Juliet cap veil embellished with tiny seed pearls, carefully tied bouquets of daisies, a string ensemble playing the song “Somewhere” from Westside Story, hope buoyant in the air —had ended in a non-descript courtroom. The wooden benches in the courtroom were glossy from years of wear, they were long, like the church pews had been, but hewn from much darker wood—walnut perhaps—no adornment graced them, and only disillusionment and sorrow pressed down on us heavily in the air. His familiar signature is on that paper. My familiar tears came when I saw it.
When things had ended between us, dissolved, I’d wanted to go; he’d wanted to stay. So I went and he stayed in the little place deeded in just my name. But in less than a year, my phone rang one day as I was just sitting down to lunch, sporting a new haircut, trying on a new life, in a chic café half a world away.
“I’m going home,” he’d said. I knew enough to know that “home” wasn’t that little place deeded in my name. Home for him was in a far off town, in a different land in an impeccably clean house with a bedroom holding a wood-frame twin bed neatly made, a window that overlooked a crabapple tree that burst with red and green in summer, and a small bulletin board above a desk that once displayed a photo of us, our faces flush with youth and hope. The pin hole where our photo had once hung was still visible if you looked closely enough.
After his call, an airplane whisked me back to the town with the little place deeded solely in my name. All of his things were already gone. He seemed to own fewer possessions on the last day I saw him then on the first day I had met him. They consisted of just a few clothes, his books—white cotton T-shirts, Levi 501s, Stephen King novels, some poetry—and the plaid navy and white comforter set that had been on his futon in the apartment he’d lived in near the college when we’d first met: The day his sky-blue eyes lit up upon meeting mine for the very first time. I hadn’t noticed that slowly over the years he’d owned less and less. Slowly, he had been shedding rather than accumulating. The dissolution of marriage decree had awarded him all of his personal possessions and had awarded me all of the household furnishings. He was gone and so was everything he owned, but somehow the house wasn’t empty. Somehow that made it seem even emptier.
The house went up for sale. I had a yard sale and watched neighbors and strangers haul away our furniture and wedding gifts. The St. Vincent de Paul truck came to take whatever was still left in the house. Then, nothing remained but our two cats. The ginger tabby went with him. The grey tabby went with me, and then shortly, she went on to live out her days in someone else’s home. I had no home for her after all.
I got on another plane and then another, onward and so forth—movement was my default setting after all—as I lived out of suitcases in shelter owned by others for a decade: apartments, faculty housing, graduate student housing. It took seven months for the little place deeded in just my name to sell. The day of the closing I was living in teachers’ quarters in Japan; a small earthquake shook me as I sat clinging fearfully onto a nubby, peeling, pink leather sofa owned by someone else in a dwelling I did not own. Over the years, the boxes of things I didn’t want to see lay dormant collecting dust in my mother’s hall closet and my sister’s garage until I was ready for them.
I’m proud to say I no longer have any boxes of things I don’t want to see. I’ve finally unpacked them all. Not much written evidence of that marriage remains, most of it fell victim over the years to neglect or an overly ambitious shredder, but when I do come across his handwriting on a document, an old letter, a scrap of paper, without fail I still feel my eyes moisten.
Our marriage had been like the delicate plants my grandma had sheltered in her breezeway. They required precise attention to watering, fertilization and sun exposure to stay alive. She was an expert gardener; it was rare for her to lose a plant but sometimes the most fragile ones didn’t survive despite her best efforts. Our marriage had perished while we were both still in the bloom and health of youth. We would surely have never been able to endure what the unknowable future held for me—multisyllabic, multi-systemic illnesses, disabilities, struggle and change. Stronger unions than ours have quickly withered under such stress.
Thankfully, I don’t watch Westside Story as much as I used to. But when I do, I tell myself I am crying for Tony and Maria, but somewhere deep down I know I’m crying for me, too. Our end wasn’t because of cultural or family constrains or gun violence. It was because of an impassable topography of other reasons, some big, some small, many long forgotten with the march of time. A familiar story. A common story. I thought owning a house could save us, but I was wrong. We had been shedding joy and hope for years. I just hadn’t noticed until it was too late. I owned that house, but we never owned a home. It’s a sad story every single time. Somehow, it still hurts somewhere deep down in an unidentifiable place.
It’s easy to say it was all for the best. Today when someone asks me to picture home I have a new vision. For the past decade, I have had a new home with a new spouse, deeded in two names, not one. The furniture, sleek and minimal, wood, glass, steel and leather, was all purchased from Ikea. The laundry smells like lavender and is folded and neatly tucked away. It is my home, our home, together. It is happy. It is safe. We have a cat.
Sometimes, though, I let myself imagine a parallel universe out there some place where a different version of me exists with a different version of the signer of the disclaimer deed. It’s a place where I spend lazy Sunday mornings on a firm sofa with a subtle floral print slowly raking my fingers through red-blonde waves; a place where, somehow, I am still healthy and, somehow, his sky-blue eyes still light up upon meeting mine. Somewhere where, somehow, the house became a home and saved us.
Katherine K. Wilson (she/her) is an Arizona writer living with multiple hidden disabilities. She holds a Masters in TESOL and has taught English in multiple countries. In addition to her creative non-fiction, Katherine has authored/edited numerous educational texts and materials. Her recent piece, “Between Us,” is forthcoming in Iris Literary Journal.