Construction Season

In the summer I take detours and find my way through the city by chance. I don’t enjoy construction, but I do like the way one turn becomes two, a left becomes a right, and suddenly I’m back again on one-way side streets, weaving my car between parades of parked cars. Detours make me feel like a stranger, when the highway on-ramp is closed and I’m directed into shadow-brimmed neighborhoods, turning corners that face me back toward the city in the distance. I find the past in those moments, an old friend spotted just out of reach. My mom and I shared a bus pass before she saved up enough for a Plymouth Breeze. Her stop for work was six past my school. I memorized the route, every bungalow turned picket-fenced Victorian as we left Chicago for the near north suburbs. Sometimes in the summer, which my mom called “construction season,” the bus would detour onto Northwest Highway, and I could see through the driver’s window the skyline rise from horizon, scraping clouds or fields of blue, the neon signs of passing storefronts illuminating a landing path home. There she is, my mom would say, as if each encounter were a surprise.

And I remember later, the last year before I left, the city blockaded itself one street at a time. Construction signs emerged everywhere I went, squeezing Harlem into a single-lane trail of orange cones and detouring me off Addison onto the grid of side streets on my way to Dani’s house. Her street always seemed to be closed, first for repaving, then a broken water main, then a natural gas leak. I’d park three blocks away and meet her in the alley, kiss under the jaundiced glow of a street lamp. This was near Kedzie and Roscoe in Avondale, a neighborhood that felt to me like a different city entirely. I’d finished high school and was waiting to leave for college in New York. Dani was two years younger and had no intentions of leaving. She wanted to be a Chicagoan and a doctor, in that order.  

Dani would lead me through her backyard, and we’d crouch between dog droppings and folding chairs so as not to be spotted from her kitchen window. As we walked up the back stairs of her family’s two-flat, I could hear plates clink and her parents speak in muffled Korean as the steps groaned beneath my feet. I held my breath until we reached the top floor, hoping that this would let me pass unnoticed. This is how we spent most of our time together, whispering into one another’s ear on her pullout couch and muting the television whenever we heard her parents below us.

When the sun set, we watched the construction workers return their backhoes and loaders to the corner and pack up their belongings. A thin man with smudged goggles pulled himself from the dark hole in the street as another set the two-sided Slow sign against a tree. Dani and I liked to imagine where they were headed and who they were going home to. Dani’s guesses were lists of details. Mine became stories. 

Other times Dani studied for the ACT as I read. The overhead fluorescent lights had long since burnt out, so we jostled for the dim glow of her tableside lamp and worked in silence. We treated our futures like embarrassing secrets, choosing instead to distract ourselves. I’d run my lips up and down her, lingering on the base of her neck until she pulled my shirt off and then hers. We’d lie there for hours, kissing until my jaw throbbed and her face became red from the scruff of my peach-fuzz beard. It was only toward the end, when I finally told her I was leaving, that things changed. I’d try to break her focus with a kiss on the cheek, and Dani would push me away with a sharp elbow, saying This score’s going to stay with me long after you’re gone.

We took rides in my car through the city once her parents went to bed, taking turns giving one another directions. Dani would flip through radio stations with one hand and signal which way to turn with the other as I followed the line of street lamps and dark-windowed buildings with tired, blurry eyes. She moved quickly through the low-numbered talk news and radio evangelist stations but lingered in the high 100’s, where deep voices serenaded us in Polish. I could make out some words and phrases from listening to my father talk on the phone as a kid, but I never told Dani, who’d smirk at the foreignness of the polka band’s zither. 

No matter which route we took, we always ended up in Lincoln Square, which had become our favorite spot and even now conjures memories of Dani. We’d hold hands through the commercial district, peeking in the windows at bookshelves and well-dressed mannequins. The only shop with lights on was the German deli, where the store owner removed the collection of sausage chains strung from hooks behind the counter. He’d wipe his hands on his apron and wave, and Dani and I would smile back before continuing on, feeling then as if we were long-time neighbors with a man we’d never shared a word with. Walking down Claremont, we pointed out the houses we dreamed of living in one day—the uniform red brick apartment buildings, the cramped bungalows fit between one another like Legos, maybe one day even a mansion overlooking the lake. These moments rest warmly inside me, making plans we knew we’d break.

_____

Dani’s brother Eugene worked at the bookstore in Lincoln Square. He’d completed two years of college down in Champaign, but hadn’t returned after the summer. Dani said that her brother never explained why he quit school, but that he’d come back quieter, reserved. On weekends, she and I spent hours roving the shelves, tracing our fingers along the books’ spines. Eugene would watch me from the brim of his book behind the cash register as I stacked copies of Hemingway and Kerouac under my arm. Then one day he finally set his book down, stepped softly into the classics section, and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Let’s expand your range a bit,” he said.

Eugene led me through the stacks, his body snug against mine, smelling of coffee and shaving cream. He pulled Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros, and Margaret Walker. His shirt rose with him as he reached for the top shelf, and I caught a glimpse of a tattoo. A vine of shaded leaves, twining and twisting up his ribs like a trellis.

“First one’s on me,” Eugene said, but as we went to leave he added, “But can I get a ride home?”

Eugene led us down Western and southeast onto Elston, far past their house and along the bend of the river. Dani put her hand on my leg and Eugene leaned forward to tap my headrest to the steady gusts of wind rushing in through the open windows. We drove until the warehouses and auto repair shops and storage centers became plump, sharp-angled homes built in scarlet brick and glass. Then Eugene directed me back north on Milwaukee Avenue. No matter how many years pass, this street always remains under construction, and before long we were rolling slowly along a runaway of cones and taillights. By the time we got back to Dani’s house, the setting sun was painting the clouds purple like a bruise. Eugene lit a cigarette in the shadows of the gangway, and Dani and I headed upstairs. I could see him through the window as we climbed the back stairs, puckering his lips as he released a strand of smoke into the air.

_____

Dani and I drove to Lincoln Square a week before I was set to leave for school. We saw a movie at an old, single-screen theater. I can’t remember what we saw now, but whenever the music swelled, Dani rested her head on the crook of my shoulder. I expected her to say something, but it never came.

The street shimmered in setting sunlight. We held hands as we stumbled to the car, our eyes still adjusting to the outside world. I knew I’d want to find this feeling again even if it was soon to fade, my legs asleep and my stomach soaring and my palm sweaty in another’s grip.

“I’m going to miss this,” Dani finally said.

“We can call every day,” I said.

“And you’ll come back for breaks, right?” she asked. “Winter, spring, and summer.”

We drove to Dani’s house with silence and the static of a high 100’s station between us. At a stoplight I said let’s not go back yet, and she agreed, but neither of us knew where to go instead. My smile was making my face sore, and I figured Dani’s was too. I pulled into the alley behind her house as street lamps sparked to life.

We kissed for a long time to the engine’s steady hum. Each time I pulled away, Dani reached for my head, and I pecked her cheek whenever she reached for the door handle. We could have done this forever, trying to turn a moment into a lifetime.

Finally, Dani leaned away.

“My parents are going to see us,” she said. “Good luck in New York.”

I sat there for a while after she disappeared inside. I was hoping that she would come back to me if I waited long enough. The stench of trash soured the air as overflowing bins cooked in the summer night heat. I laid my head on the steering wheel. 

There was a tap at the window.

“Could you use a drive?” Eugene asked, the diminishing remains of a cigarette bobbing between his lips.

Eugene stamped out his bud and got into the passenger seat. He directed me down Kedzie, then onto the Kennedy Expressway headed downtown. We had long missed the end of rush hour. The lanes were nearly empty beside a few cars escaping into the night. Shadows ebbed and flowed as we sped between streetlamps. Eugene put an elbow on the ledge of the open window and I snuck a glance as wind tousled his hair. At the curve, we hit a stretch of highway that the city recently tore up, and our bodies shook slightly as my car’s wheels grumbled against the uneven road. They were directing us off this closed stretch of I-90.

We were driving past dark storefronts and the towering frame of the elevated tracks. I tried to follow the detour signs, which led us down streets that sounded vaguely familiar, as if they’d been whispered to me in a dream. The sound of Eugene’s breath grew louder as we slowed and the wind died down. Then perhaps looking for the center console, he set his hand on mine; left it there. Laced his fingers with mine like the perfect stitch. 

We continued on, no longer caring to follow signs, my foot easing from the pedal until we were crawling down side streets, staring through the glowing windows of homes, and imagining all the lives they may hold inside them. The glimpses of possible futures both recognizable and distant unfolded with every turn. This moment stays with me more than anything, our bodies close and still as I watched an L shoot sparks into the night on its way to the airport at the end of the line, only for it to follow the tracks back home again. I thought about how at one point in my life I’d have wanted a path like that, with all its clicks and rumbles and familiar notes. And I thought how I could drive every construction season day trying to find all the streets and turns we took that night and still never recreate that feeling of being utterly uncharted.

Photo by Kind and Curious on Unsplash.