Yesterday, I did it again. Driving from my house in Providence to my mother’s house in West Warwick, 12 miles down Route 95 South, I took Exit 12, the same exit I’ve taken to go home since I got my driver’s license in 1972. Off the exit, I come up by the Toys R Us on my right and the junior college on my left. At the light sits Rhode Island’s first mall, built in October of 1967, when I was 10 years old. I got my first pair of bell-bottoms there, and a Nehru jacket, and more 45s than I can remember. At some point, while I lived out of state, they changed its name from Midland Mall to the Rhode Island Mall. But I still call it Midland Mall. At the next light, I find myself looking at the Dunkin’ Donuts where my mother would take me at three in the morning for coffee and a plain cruller when I was in high school and suffered insomnia.
That’s when I realized I’d done it again. I’d followed the route that is as familiar to me as my mother’s Chloe perfume–cigarette smoke smell, as familiar as the pattern of freckles on my chest. Ahead of me sits River Street, the street that should lead me on a meandering series of curves and turns until I reach the hill on top of which my mother’s house sits. But during the flooding here in Rhode Island last spring, the Pawtuxet River rose higher than it had in a hundred years. The shopping mall, Route 95, and River Street were under water. River Street is closed indefinitely. What I see from the driver’s seat of my VW are orange cones keeping me out.
For most of my childhood, River Street connected me to the rest of the world. It was not a broad or beautiful street. It had potholes. Lots of them. Tired mill houses painted off-shades of green and yellow lined half of it. The other half had some commercial buildings: a barber shop, an Italian deli, a gun store. The roller rink sat in a lot farther back, long-abandoned railroad tracks cut the street in half, and a small bridge on one end stretched over the Pawtuxet River, which was brown and frothy back in the ’60s. But at the other end there was a Dunkin’ Donuts, and beyond that pink square building was the world: two shopping malls, two fancy restaurants (The Golden Lantern and The Duncan Fyffe), and the on-ramp to Route 95. Route 95 could take me to Maine or all the way to Florida. When it first opened, I imagined that all I had to do was get on that highway and magically I would be under palm trees eating oranges.
Those railroad tracks led to a big empty lot that remained deserted except for litter most of the year. But every August a carnival came to town and set up its flashy rides and impossible-to-win games there. I lost my first tooth at that carnival, biting into a candy apple. The highlight of the carnival was the Little Miss Natick Beauty Pageant, and the summer I was six, my mother entered me in it. My Auntie Julia, a seamstress, sewed me a leopard bikini. My Great Aunt Nuneen set my hair in rags to make perfect banana curls. Because I had no talent to speak of, my mother taught me a poem to recite for the talent competition:
I have 10 little fingers and 10 little toes,
Long blonde hair and a turned up nose,
A great big smile and a cute little figure,
Stay away boys! Till I get bigger!
She choreographed it, too, showing me when to hold up my fingers and how to sashay my hips. For the last two lines, I marched right up to the judges’ table and wagged my fingers at them. With that, I won Little Miss Natick 1963. I got a giant trophy, my picture in the paper, and a ride in a parade perched on top of my Uncle Eddie’s white Cadillac convertible. The mother of one of the other contestants stole my leopard bikini, cut it into shreds, and threw it in a swimming pool because her daughter lost. It was that kind of town. And River Street, with its shabby beauty, epitomized it.
I pull into the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot. I have a choice. I can backtrack, head north again on Route 5 and take the shortcut, past the sewage treatment plant. Or I can continue south, down Route 2, which is now clogged with strip malls and big-box stores. Neither option feels right. For 38 years, River Street has taken me where I want to go. It took me to get those bell-bottoms. It took me to college, to the airport and train station. It took me to meet lovers and friends in far-flung places. It is the street I traveled on a hot summer day in 1982 when I learned that my brother Skip had died and I needed to get home. It is the street that led to the hospital where I was born and where my father died. For 38 years, River Street has taken me back home.
I get out of my car and the smell of doughnuts surrounds me like a hug. Growing up, I wanted nothing more than to go as far away as I could, way beyond that shiny Dunkin’ Donuts. Now, a middle-aged woman, I want to drive down this street and feel the bumps of its untended road, let my body lean into the wide curve near where my cousin Anthony had a deli, see the little girl I once was, alone and friendless in my elementary school playground playing jacks, and the sassy teenager I became, storming out of Sacred Heart Church because I disagreed with the priest. Is it possible to love a street lined with years of disappointment and the echoes of carnival laughter? With a gun shop and a roller rink and mill houses? Standing there, yearning to travel it again, I realize I do love that street. River Street, which used to point to my future, now holds the connection to my past, to my long-ago childhood dreams and hopes, in its waterlogged arms. From that Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot, I stand at its edge, to catch a glimpse of them.
