Tremont & Tremont by Sarah Pascarella
During my Lonely Summer, 1999, my cousin Jonathan arrived in Boston from Chicago, and called to tell me his friends’ address where we planned to meet. The South End location brought me to the window; in the adjacent building, I recognized his familiar silhouette, stout and stocky.
“Does Brent and Sharon’s apartment face the street?” I asked.
“Yeah, why?”
“Look outside—straight across,” I said, and waved like a maniac.
“No way!” he yelled. If our windows had been open, we wouldn’t have needed the phone.
I crossed Bradford Street and Brent buzzed me in. Inside, their stairwell was tidy and swept, not a speck of dust or grime. Under the beam of a skylight, a delicate orchid posed atop a marble table. Upstairs, Brent and Sharon’s apartment smelled like fresh cotton and crisp apples. They had new furniture and framed art, a coffeemaker that gleamed. A spotless fluffy white rug centered the living room.
In Brent and Sharon’s kitchen, Jonathan swept me up in a bear hug, softer than in previous visits, his former muscles now doughy. His once-high-and-tight buzz cut was replaced with unruly curls, like a neglected lawn. He turned to his friends. “This is my little cousin, Susanna,” he said.
Jonathan, a few years older, was always an unattainable cool, the type you’d leave your comfort zone to impress (but never could). Going toe-to-toe with him, I saw Nightmare on Elm Street at nine, had a wine cooler at fourteen, and pot shortly after, but with every first, the confidence I’d hoped for never came. It had been a few years since we’d seen each other, not since his college football injury that cost him a scholarship. He’d been between jobs, last I heard. I wondered if this would be the first visit where we might be on the same level.
He noogied the top of my head. “Beer?” he asked.
“Yes, please.” I smoothed my hair back into place.
Brent fetched a frosted mug from the freezer while Sharon fixed snacks.
“Can you believe we’re neighbors? What are the chances?” I asked.
“Pretty crazy,” Sharon said. Like her home, she was sleek and elegant: high cheekbones, swan neck elongated above a lint-free black T-shirt, long fingers, like a pianist.
Over microbrews and nachos, held carefully over my plate, I discovered that I was an unaware inheritor, my choices echoing theirs. Not only had we chosen adjacent apartments here, but Brent and Sharon had also gone to Syracuse, and lived in my old building on Jerome, a few years before I arrived. We had gravitated to the same places, defined home the same way.
Sharon replenished the food and—of course—they had my favorite pretzels, honey mustard and onion. On the coffee table, a stack of New Yorker issues as far behind as me. In the bathroom, identical shampoo bottles to my own caddy.
You’ll become like this, I thought. You, but better.
From their living room, I could see my own dark, empty apartment, the outlines of my hand-me-down furniture and posters affixed with Stic-tac.
“These coincidences… Maybe we’re supposed to know each other,” I said.
“Maybe,” Sharon said, her tone polite.
“It is pretty weird,” Brent said. He put on a jazz CD, plunky piano keys and low saxophones, a crooner vocalist. Grownup music.
“I don’t believe in that stuff,” Jonathan said. He never was sentimental.
I hadn’t intended to start from scratch, that Lonely Summer. I’d chosen Boston partially for a built-in community and opportunity: Gina, my childhood friend, planned to start her master’s at MIT. Christopher, my on-again off-again boyfriend, suggested we’d be on again if I moved. Rolytzan Labs, my dream employer, was right across the river in Cambridge.
A few months before graduation, I had visited Christopher, burrowed into his Beacon Hill studio, romantic with exposed brick walls and a functioning fireplace, wandered the cobblestone streets aglow against gas lamp streetlights. In Boston, the snow was pretty and twinkly, not the Moria-esque slush of upstate New York. Near stately Harvard Square, we met Gina for dinner at a basement-level restaurant, shabby and snug. Everything felt cozy. The weekend scenery morphed from backdrop periphery to future focus: Wednesdays at Grendel’s, weekend sailing lessons on the Charles, breakthrough experiments at work, lazy Sundays with the Globe, coffee, and doughnuts. I prepped my resume and found my apartment, anticipating a life like my favorite sitcoms: my friends and I tackling manageable struggles together, hours lost in cafes and pubs, jobs with ever-increasing responsibilities, all the formational experiences that would bring us closer to our adult selves.
But by the time I’d settled in, I badly needed a laugh track: Just after I’d signed my lease, Rolytzan announced massive layoffs and a hiring freeze. Gina got a free ride from Johns Hopkins and left for Maryland. Christopher met someone else, “and it’s serious.” I realized, a few signatures too late, that I had centered major decisions around others who didn’t reciprocate. While I had thought we were all dandelions in the same field, we were in fact the spores, scattered on our own trajectories. My plans were mine alone: Those I wanted near didn’t feel the same.
So, those coincidences – I wanted them to mean something, a signal that my solitude was a temporary setback. Perhaps Christopher and Gina had fallen away because my path, after so many missed encounters, had finally intersected with Brent and Sharon.
My old friends hadn’t considered me. Maybe Brent and Sharon would.
For the few days Jonathan was in town, the four of us migrated between our apartments to nearby pubs and back again, as though there were shared history and an established dynamic. We went dancing, made meals together, fell asleep on each other’s sofas and guest beds. If Brent and Sharon were put off by how austere my place was, they were too courteous to say. It’s us, I thought, and hoped they thought of me the same way. That was the tell of inclusion, scripted in my favorite shows, usually early in the first season, in response to the initial big misunderstanding with the newbie of the group. It’s us, a shorthand for so much I craved: don’t worry about it, don’t explain, all good, help yourself.
On the last night of Jonathan’s visit, I bought a round of drinks, with money I didn’t really have.
“Keep it open?” the bartender asked, after running my card.
Brent saw my hesitation and handed over his. “Nope, next are on me,” he said.
We carried the pints back to the table, one in each hand. “Thanks,” I said.
A few drinks later, I might have said the collective “us” out loud, maybe with an arm draped over a shoulder, I can’t recall whose. The next morning, we took Jonathan out for brunch, then Brent drove him to the airport.
“Want to get a pedicure later?” I asked Sharon.
“You know, I just got one,” she said. Slivers of mauve peeked out from her open-toe sandals, although one looked chipped. “But have fun!”
After Jonathan’s departure, I tried to keep us going—impromptu invites for Brent and Sharon for happy hour, dinner, to watch the game. (Which game? It didn’t matter, there was always a rabid fan base at Clery’s, the nearby pub.) Most times, I got noncommittal replies, and on the few occasions we did make plans, they ghosted.
They’re busy, I thought. Sharon worked in public relations for an agency in the Back Bay, the type of place that rewarded long hours with fancy catered lunches and splashy holiday parties. Brent was in law school, his days spent in the university’s modest building on the outskirts of Chinatown.
I was not busy. Solo, I continued to explore, feeling very much the tourist, not a local. I took the rickety Green Line, with its brakes and gears that squealed and shrieked, out to Boston College, where I discovered its accurate name should be Chestnut Hill University. The campus felt hushed and orderly, with tidy lawns and stern stone halls, and was much more compact than Syracuse. Another afternoon, I took a bus to Castle Island, which was not an island at all, and had a fort instead of its namesake. I ordered two hot dogs from Sullivan’s and sat on a bench at the edge of the channel, across from the airport. As the jets roared overhead, their bellies visible and gears still exposed, I wondered if I had made a mistake, and should book a one-way ticket someplace else.
One morning, in my aimless wanderings around the South End, I spent ten minutes at the intersection of Tremont and Tremont, my chin craned up toward the street signs.
A guy in a suit stood next to me and waited for the light to change. He wore a long coat, even though it was warm.
“That’s weird, right?” I pointed to the street sign.
He looked up, but didn’t say anything.
“I mean, isn’t Boston supposed to be this super-smart place? That’s really confusing – and probably has been for a really long time.”
The light turned green. Long-coat crossed, without a reply.
My jaw ached, and I had a feeling it was self-imposed, that I’d been clenching it for weeks. I wagged it side to side, felt a click in my ears.
I rummaged in my handbag and found my digital camera. I took a picture of the street signs and when I got home, emailed it to Jonathan. I can’t figure this place out.
Random! he wrote back.
Hey, have you heard from… I started to type, then thought better of it.
Instead, I sent the same photo to Gina. When you first lived here, how long did it take you to find your way around?
LOL! she sent back.
That evening, I passed Clery’s en route home, the pub windows open wide. Sharon and a friend sat just inside; chilled wine glasses perspired on their table, the evening’s breeze ruffled their hair and lifted their napkins. I went in and got a beer, then walked over to their table.
“I mean, there’s only so many ways you can sugarcoat downsizing. If they want positive sentiment coverage in Fast Company, their timing is way off,” Sharon was saying as I approached.
“May I join you?”
“Oh, hi.” Sharon shrugged. “Sure, if you don’t mind work talk.”
“Client issues,” Sharon’s friend explained, extending her hand. “I’m Cate with a C.”
“Hello, Cate with a C. I’m Susanna with an s.”
Cate lit a clove cigarette, perfume-sweet. “As opposed to?”
“A z,” I said. “In the middle.”
Sharon sniffed, not quite a laugh.
“So, like you were saying.” Cate turned toward Sharon. “Instead of layoffs, we could pivot to ‘operating efficiencies’ as the preferred message…”
I sipped my beer as they talked, then excused myself after a while to use the restroom. As I came back, a small crowd stood between me and the table. I waited to get through, obscured from sight, but close enough to pick up snippets of conversation.
“Brent’s friend’s cousin,” Sharon said. “A bit of a lost puppy.”
“And I take it you don’t want to adopt?” Cate said.
“All set, thanks.” Sharon’s smile was broad, then she saw me. A flicker of displeasure passed across her eyes, so fast I nearly missed it.
It’s me, I thought.
Sharon and Cate – they were an us. Brent and Sharon – another. Jonathan and Brent – yet another. If this were an ensemble sitcom, I would have been in by now.
At the table, I downed what remained of my beer. “Hope that company gets it together,” I said. “Nice to meet you, Cate. See you around.”
The thing about sitcoms, I thought as I walked home, is they were predetermined, managed via scripts and scouts. On shows, writers controlled destinies; casting agents tested for compatibility and chemistry. In reality, first impressions were auditions. A coincidence could be meaningful or an accident. People thrown together could click or move along.
Midway through the Lonely Summer, after a few unsuccessful job interviews, I met with a recruiter in a charmless office in Downtown Crossing. The company was a single room on a floor with multiple small businesses, next to a psychic hotline and a dentist. A faint whirr of drills buzzed through the thin walls. The recruiter wore khakis and a synthetic polo, shiny under the fluorescent lights, and looked the same age as me. On his recommendation, I took a behavioral assessment test with multiple-choice questions that I was to answer quickly. “Don’t overthink them,” he said. “The point is to go with your gut.” Even so, I lingered over several, and one in particular.
Which situation is worse?
To have your head in the clouds
To be stuck in a rut
“The thing is, a rut is temporary, right? That’s better than having your head in the clouds, which seems permanent to me—a lifelong delusion,” I said over the phone to Gina, at home later that night. “On the other hand, what if the rut is really bad, like an unexpected bill that you have to pay, or getting sick or injured? That’s awful, too.”
“And what if you’re a person who has their head in the clouds—and then gets stuck in a rut?” Gina said. “It’s not like both aren’t possible.”
“Excellent point.” As I considered this, my gaze traveled out the window to Brent and Sharon’s apartment. From their living room, flashes of blue-hued light flickered against their semi-drawn blinds. I could just make out the TV screen, tuned to a courtroom drama, and their profiles in front. Domestic, content, settled. Level heads, rut-free.
“So, how did you answer?” Gina asked.
Across the street, the TV darkened. A Sharon-shaped shadow stood and turned off the light.
“Head in the clouds,” I said. “Even though that might be me.”
***
More than twenty years later, when the virus’s first vicious spores flew and took root across the globe, I felt a pervasive loneliness. By then, Boston really had become home, complete with a partner, a pet, and a permanent address in a suburb just south of the city. But during the quarantine, those were all I had. The relationships I’d worked to cultivate over the years, the shorthands and familiarity, were as inaccessible as if they had never been formed at all. At first, the emptiness of my hours seemed novel, but then, they grew evocative. The abundance of solitude, the inability to connect, made the city feel as distant as my first days in town.
With no one to see, I streamed old sitcoms, singing along with outdated theme songs claiming friends were safety nets, not risks. With nowhere to go, I put on a mask and pretended I was a traveler in my own neighborhood, seeking newness in the long-overlooked. I waved to neighbors, on porches or on foot, and realized that, even without face coverings, I didn’t know them.
On one walk, I made a wide arc to avoid a dogwalker, and my phone buzzed.
Jonathan, now a venture capitalist in San Diego, texted: I hear it’s surging pretty bad there. You OK?
All status quo, I replied.
Good
The dots wavered and brightened across my screen.
You remember Brent and Sharon?
Y
Sharon thinks she has it she’s trying to get a test
Oh no
It was odd—after that Lonely Summer, when I was in a rut, I rarely saw Brent and Sharon again, even though I assume we had been neighbors for a while longer. Our meeting had not been a fated connection, but an aberration, not to be repeated – and once our paths had intersected, I no longer followed their definitions of home. With the exception of Jonathan’s occasional visits, we didn’t bump into each other, nor did I give Brent and Sharon much thought.
But I felt a swell of affection seeing their names—and realized it was not quite for them, but for that younger, unformed me, who had hoped for so much, even if at the time the enthusiasm had been misdirected toward those more settled and solid, who couldn’t match my need. Although brief, my time with Brent and Sharon had been intense with loneliness, equal only to my eagerness. That lonely girl, that lost puppy, was always close. During quarantine, that former self felt like a nesting doll, exposed after a long stow.
Back home, I added my keys and mask to the clutter of shoes, coats, and mail in the entryway, then went to the kitchen to wash my hands.
My phone buzzed again.
Your lab is working on rapid testing, right?
Y
Back in those early days, when the recruiter gave me the results of my assessment, it said, “Susanna values close-knit and supportive relationships, a community spirit of everyone helping each other to get the job done.”
Tests were in short supply, but my employer did have some.
Maybe we’re supposed to know each other, I remembered.
Not then. Now.
Maybe they were supposed to know me.
On my phone, the dots blinked and faded.
At the sink, I waited for the water to get hot. I rubbed my palms until there was a good lather, silently counted to twenty, then rinsed.
Sarah Pascarella is a writer and editor based in Boston. Her stories have recently been featured in The Petrigru Review (Pushcart Prize nominee, 2022), MudRoom Magazine (Best of the Net nominee, 2021), and Little Patuxent Review, among other publications. She has a master's in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College.