Church Hill

Elizabeth's truck groaned as she urged it through the intersection and on up the hill. Behind her somebody honked, then pulled across the double lines to pass her and rush up to the next stop sign. With an absent cluck of disapproval, she peered through the thrashing windshield wipers to read a street sign and checked her sister's directions before turning south.

Narrower, this street was edged with Victorian houses in varying states of repair. The trees were older than the slender maples on Broad and their long, arching branches met high above in delicate Gothic curves. Whenever a blast of wind shook the trees, orange and yellow leaves occluded her windshield until they were trapped under the windshield wipers and dragged howling across the glass as they were ground into mushy confetti.

After being blinded for the third time in as many minutes, she pounded the steering wheel with frustration and to the empty interior of the cab, she cried, "At least in New Jersey the leaves were already down!" She was perversely pleased to find yet another reason to be cranky about moving back to Richmond. When she had set her feet on the train north and away to university, she had sworn on her (then) holy of holies, a first edition of The Mists of Avalon, that she would never live here again. Now she was returning, under a cloud of defeat, and her couple years at a technical publishing firm had her wondering about the utility of her degree in English and computer science.

Besides, the publishing job had actually been pretty good and she thought of it even more fondly now that the company had folded. She had seen the end coming when the company had decided to triple its line of publications and expand into internet publishing, back in the heady days of the tech bubble. The CEO had also changed the company's name to start with an E.

A sudden influx of goateed young men with undefined job specifications had wandered the halls, high-fiving each other and talking about the "new" economy. They had laughed at Elizabeth when she pointed out the parallels to the stock-market crash of 1929 and the seventeenth century tulip bubble. As it turned out, she had been right all along, but she had to admit that she would much rather have been employed. Now, instead of exercising stock options, she was using her sister's connections to get a job in mail order at an independent bookstore. Knowing Alice, the job would doubtless come with a side order of crow pie and she winced as she recalled some of the more insensitive remarks she'd made about those too lazy to seek their fortunes beyond the Richmond city limits.

She slowed her truck to a crawl and, creeping down the street, despaired of finding a parking place. The cars were packed in bumper-to-bumper all down the three blocks to the corner where she would be living: old Volvos, a Mercedes Benz, and no fewer than three BMWs and six sport-utility vehicles. The neighbors are going to love my truck. She had bought it for three hundred dollars from the art student who lived downstairs from her in New Jersey. It was airbrushed with sunflowers and some green things that were probably supposed to be frogs, but she wasn't quite sure.

Pulling through the next intersection and far enough down the block that her trailer did not block cross traffic, she double-parked and flipped on the hazard lights. Through the windshield she saw a copper statue crowning a stone column which sprang from the center of the street at the end of the block. With nothing but sky beyond the statue, the street appeared to end in midair. To her right was a park with gentle winding lanes and a Victorian cast-iron fountain which looked like a stack of birdbaths arranged in order of decreasing size. On the left her new home anchored a row of squat brick mansions.

"It's the house on the corner," Alice had told her. "We don't have a view of the river, but out back we do have a pretty good view of Bloody Run in the ravine behind the house. And an old train tunnel runs under the property, so we have sinkholes too, but nothing worth mentioning. The worst one is right in the basement and the city came and filled it up with sand, so it's kind of like having a great big indoor sand box. We have to be really careful to not let the cat get in there. The main thing is that it only costs three hundred dollars a month to live here, no matter how few people are living in the house at once."

Elizabeth looked through her smeary driver's side window and studied the house while she waited for the rain to let up. A mass of ivy and a rose bush graced with orange hips filled the tiny front garden. The house was three stories high, plus the English basement with barred windows she could see peeking from beneath the porch. A mansard roof rose into the sky like the top layer of a wedding cake. The pastry effect was enhanced by the wooden gingerbread and the frills of woodwork around the dormer windows.

The drumming of the rain on the roof of the truck became marginally less deafening. She flung open the door and dashed up the steps with her coat over her head. When she reached the porch, both halves of the split front door swung open to reveal her twin sister standing framed by warm golden light. Alice's slender body was encased in ripped jeans and a pornographically translucent floral blouse which left Elizabeth feeling dowdy in her unfashionably whole jeans and baggy sweatshirt.

"You're finally here!" Alice exclaimed, throwing out her arms dramatically. "I expected you hours ago."

"Don't be silly," Elizabeth said as she hugged her sister. "I called you when I left, and I told you that it's at least an eight hour drive."

"You called so early, I was still asleep. How could I remember what you said?" Alice looked over her shoulder and said, "You brought a trailer? I told you that you didn't need to bring any furniture. The house is chock full of these gnarly Victorian monstrosities. I can't believe that truck actually made it all the way down here, and up the hill for that matter, pulling a trailer."

"My furniture is all from the hardware store, it's not very heavy."

Alice took her arm. "Let me give you the tour and you can meet our housemates."

Elizabeth rapidly calculated the time required for a house tour with commentary and introductions and protested. "No, I'm double-parked. I can't afford a ticket or to get my truck back if it's impounded."

"Oh, come on, it's Sunday. The police aren't going to be out on the day like this. And Tech is playing. Anyway, the police don't come around here very much. Heck, even when there are gunshots, they only show up if somebody gets hit."

A thundering sound interrupted Alice. Two young men pounded down the elegantly curving stairs. Alice had already told her about their housemates. Elizabeth pegged the brown-haired, heavily muscled man with the large, melty brown eyes as Dirk, who worked as a personal trainer at the gym down the hill and was gay. Tragically so, Alice claimed, making the standard, single straight girl's complaint ("All the fun, beautiful men I like to hang out with are only interested in each other!"), adding that he would make up for it by getting her a free membership at the health club and mixing her the most divine Cosmopolitans.

The other housemate was Dr. Bob Southell, an intern at the Medical College of Virginia on the next hill west from their neighborhood. Since she had already figured out which was Dirk, the process of elimination made it easy to determine that the sleepy redhead was the doctor. The wrinkled scrubs were a clue too. He smiled shyly when Alice introduced them and a spark of static electricity zapped Elizabeth when they shook hands. Before she had a chance to wonder at how there could be any static electricity at all on such a wet day, Dirk enveloped her in a brisk hello hug and relieved her of her coat.

"So let me show you the house," Alice said again.

Bob looked out front at her verdant truck with its orange and white appendage. "You're double-parked," he said. "We'd better get your stuff in so you can go find a parking spot."

Between the four of them, the truck and trailer were unloaded in a matter of minutes. The lull in the rain which had allowed Elizabeth to get into the house had lasted and now no more than a heavy drizzle fell. The wind still blasted clouds of mist through the park and they were pelted with wet leaves every time they stepped into the street, but as Bob noted cheerfully, they were all waterproof. She thanked Dirk and Bob profusely for their help, and they ducked their heads and mumbled replies before Bob left for his shift at the hospital and Dirk headed back upstairs.

The girls were standing out on the porch, Alice looking with displeasure at the truck. Elizabeth plopped down in a steel-tubed glider that was bolted to the porch floor and looked around her instead. The porch extended all the way across the front of the house. The columns supporting the roof ended in sleek ionic capitals, and the railings had shapely wooden balusters that were downright plain compared to the gaudy French ironwork on the porch of the house next door.

"Now I suppose you're going to want to take that trailer back," Alice said, her hands planted on her hips.

"I might as well. You have no idea what a pain it is to drive with that thing. I really don't want to try parallel parking."

Alice went back into the house and pulled a coat at random from the coat tree in the hall, then rejoined her sister on the porch. She had picked a nineteenth century man's frock coat, but the moth-eaten skirts somehow went perfectly with the ripped jeans. As usual. Elizabeth never understood how she did it. The two girls looked exactly alike, but Elizabeth couldn't ever wear Alice's clothes. "It's all attitude. Just get some," Alice would explain unhelpfully.