Little Known Secrets About Parking Lot Living, by Joan Schweighardt

I grew up in a parking lot, more or less. In an arial view, the balance would fall toward more. You’d see the Acme Supermarket, big and bold and prominently placed on the highway, with Plaza Road, which cut straight through our town north to south, alongside. Below the Acme was its parking lot, which stretched almost all the way to the end of the block, at Ellington. Almost is the operative word. Just before the Ellington/Plaza corner, you’d see a scant horizontal rectangle of unpaved land, and on it, a house, our house, which barely fit. We were a thumbprint on a postage stamp. We had the narrowest of backyards, and only a scraggly line of dwarf boxwoods to separate us from the lot. 

The supermarket parking lot actually bled into the lots for the bakery, the Chinese restaurant, the auto parts store, the cleaners, and all the other businesses running west along the highway for the next half mile. But whereas the supermarket lot reached nearly to Ellington, the other lots were shallow, maybe half the depth of the Acme lot, and the houses below them had larger yards, more foliage, better separation. Moreover, our house was cut off from the other houses on Ellington by a second lot, also owned by the supermarket, just to the west of us. This one was not used for parking, however. At the time we moved in, it had been leveled and covered over with crushed gravel. Asphalt was the next step.

I was only five when we moved into the parking lot house, so the threat of being completely surrounded by asphalt at some mystery date in the future was of little concern to me. E, who was a year younger and lived across the street—not on the corner but one house in from it, facing the gravel lot—had been waiting for someone like me to come along all her life. E was a rock collector, and as any serious prospector will tell you, the process can become tedious when you work on your own. But prospecting with a partner—especially a newcomer to whom you can show the ropes—can be exhilarating. When I looked out at the gravel lot in the early days after our arrival, I thought gray, and, because some of the rocks that made up the gravel were sizeable and had sharp edges, bad for running, and therefore wasted space. But E showed me that the space wasn’t wasted at all, because amid the sharp gray rocks were tiny colorful gems: quartz, amethyst, feldspar, pyrite, olivine, lapis lazuli.

We had no such names for them at the time, of course. We called them pretty stones, and we distinguished one from the other by their colors: green, purple, pink, red, white, black, gold, or even clear, like a diamond. Wanna look for pretty stones? one of us asked the other virtually daily when the weather was right for the next several years, and off we did march, deliberate, low to the ground already but bent in half anyway, moving at a snail’s pace, training our perfect eyes to discern the gems amid the rubble, even though they were few and far between. Look! Look! we called out when we found one. We ran to the other’s side, to marvel at each stone’s beauty. They were magic to us. We put them in our pockets to save later at the back of a drawer. They were small treasures that we could pull out and delight in whenever the occasion called for it. The gravel lot was paradise to us.

As for the grownups I lived with, they fell into two camps, one that believed living more or less in a parking lot was a good thing and the other that believed it was not. My father represented the former. The Acme was the busiest supermarket in town, he reasoned. The lot could not contain all the cars of all its shoppers as it was. But rather than park behind the bakery, the Chinese restaurant, the auto parts store or the cleaners, most Acme shoppers preferred to park beside our house, on Plaza, or in front of our house, on Ellington. It was only a matter of time until the Acme offered to buy us out so as to expand its lot, and as my father had purchased our house for next to nothing because of its ticklish location, he was sure he would make profit enough to move us into a better situated house in the same town.

The question my grandmother, the representative for the opposing camp, posed, was, What if the Acme owners pave over the gravel lot in the meantime? We were almost completely surrounded by cars as it was. She’d hated our house from day one, from minute one in fact. She spent her all free time walking from window to window, one hand holding her cigarette, the other cupped beneath to catch errant ashes, muttering, “Goddamn fishbowl, this place is.” But my father, being of the mind that people are basically good, didn’t believe the Acme owners would do such a thing. Trucks pulling up beside our house to dump hot, stinky asphalt, steamrollers arriving to compact it, machines trucked in to spray toxic sealants—the Acme owners would realize, surely—would be very inconvenient for us. Besides, since our house and the gravel lot were side by side, it would make better sense from a construction point of view to rework both properties at the same time.   

My grandmother and my father did not sit down and hash this out the way I’ve made it sound; they seldom even spoke to each other. My grandmother insisted she despised men (though I’d seen sepia photos of a younger her, adorable in baggy trousers and deliriously happy at my grandfather’s side out in the yard of the house in which we had lived with them before my grandfather passed and we moved to the house in which she lived with us). Rather, both my grandmother and my father shared their thoughts with my mother, who was neutral (in all matters except my ridiculously early curfews), and she in turn shared with each camp what the other was thinking.

In point of fact, my father was right. The Acme did buy us out, albeit twelve years later, and they never did asphalt over the gravel lot in the interim either. What he got wrong was thinking they would offer enough money for us to find a more hospitable house, and my grandmother, still sending her communiqués through my mother, never let him forget it. 

But all that is beside the point. These were adult issues and I was a kid, and while I was curious enough to listen in on the various conversations concerning them, I trusted that everything would unfold as it should. My core purpose here is to say that a parking lot is not a bad place for a kid to grow up.

For one thing, when it snowed, which it did all the time in northern New Jersey in those days, the Acme closed long enough for monster plows to come and clear the lot. And what did they do with all that snow? They pushed it up to my house, right up to the hedges that marked the line dividing the lot from my backyard, and up to the edge of the gravel lot as well. Where once we looked out the windows at the back of our house and saw cars, now we saw snow-covered hills, and with the next storm, mountains, and with the one after that, the rugged white peaks of Mont Blanc, of Kilimanjaro… We’d moved into the house in Spring. By the time Aconcagua appeared in mid-winter, I knew every girl my age in the neighborhood, and they were thrilled to be invited to my wintry wonderland. They came carrying serving spoons and garden trowels, whatever they could find to work the snow. We were engineers then, construction crews carving out secret caves and fashioning foot paths through the Himalayas. We marched across them, single file, singing songs we learned in school, or, as we got older, pop hits from the radio. 

Gradually the snows melted, revealing the lot again, but the older I got the more I came to appreciate the sights Everest had been hiding from me all the long winter through. Nothing less than the full spectrum of human behavior was on display in our lot! All I had to do was lift one metal slat on the blinds that covered the solitary window in my bedroom, and there they were: Couples arguing as they emerged from their cars, moms scowling while their children screamed and punched one another in the back seat, teenage boys slipping out from four-door sedans, pulling up their jacket collars and straightening their lean backs before marching into the supermarket to buy smokes… If the shoppers were parked close enough and their windows were opened and mine was too, I could actually hear bits and pieces of conversations. But mostly I studied body language, the stiff shoulders and hurried pace that meant someone was angry, the contorted mouths of the women whose husbands or older children insisted on waiting in the car while they shopped. 

Sometimes I knew the kids who shopped with their parents. Here I thought Peggy, who kowtowed to the nuns in the schoolyard, a model of obedience in every way, must be an angel at home too. But when her mom went to place an arm around her shoulders after they’d exited their blue Chevy, Peggy shook her off with a sneer the likes of which I’d never seen before. Once I saw Francis, the boy I was in love with back then. Francis wanted to be a priest, even as early as first grade, but I never tired of praying he would change his mind or of staring at him in class, and it was a dream come true to see him crossing the lot with his dad. Once there were three uniformed workmen in the parking lot, not far at all from our house. They were using pick axes to break up a section of pavement for reasons I could not discern. It was hot that day, very hot, and they had to stop every few minutes to wipe the sweat gushing from their foreheads with their sleeves. I was just thinking about how thirsty they must be when I saw a small figure moving towards them, carrying three tall glasses of ice water—my grandmother, the man hater! Apparently the woman who worried about people looking in must have spent a lot of time looking out too. Ha!

My grandmother didn’t drive; she took the bus to work every day, cooked and cleaned side by side with my mother when she returned, and watched TV until it was time for bed. On weekends, when my father, who worked the nightshift, was home, she hid in her room and worked at her sewing machine. That was her life. She never would never have admitted she actually liked the lot, but I believe she secretly enjoyed the drama it offered as much as I did. Once a mom pulled away in her Ford without first checking to make sure her daughter had shut the passenger door. The kid fell out of the car! She was bleeding from her head. Mother and daughter—both in a panic, the mother dragging the screaming kid—were headed to our house anyway, but my grandmother, who must have been watching from an upstairs window, ran outside and intercepted them before they even reached the break in the hedges that led to our door. She brought them inside and ordered my mother to call the ambulance while she busied herself wrapping the kid’s head in gauze and telling her that everything was going to be alright.

But the real action in the lot began at night, late, though I didn’t know about it for some years because I never thought to look out the window once it was dark. But then one night I did. The Acme hired lots of young people, young women to work the registers and young men to stock the shelves. They all parked their cars as far away from the supermarket as possible, which meant either right up against our hedges or at the edge of the gravel lot. When the store closed, they came out all at once, laughing and lighting up cigarettes, and then most of them got into their respective cars and drove away. The first time I witnessed this mass exodus, I noticed that one young woman sat in her car over by the gravel lot until there was only one other car left, up against our hedges. When the coast was clear she got out of her car and walked over to the one by our hedges. It was only then that I noticed the young man sitting inside, slouched down until the woman pulled the passenger door open and he straightened and took her in his arms.

In the house we moved into after the Acme bought us out, my bed was not in its own room but on the second-floor landing, which led to my grandmother’s room. I had no window, nothing to look out from. I slept under the slope of the attic ceiling and had to remember to keep myself tucked when I awoke so as not to hit my head. I would only be there a few years, so it was more an inconvenience than a hardship.

By the time we’d left the parking lot house, I professed to hate the place as much as my grandmother did. After years of looking out, relishing the glimpses of humanity that it afforded me, I’d become self-conscious and begun looking in, which is to say, at myself, and worrying that other people were doing the same. I was ashamed to live in a parking lot in our last years there. When my mother sent me to the Acme for a loaf of bread or a carton of milk, I looked left and right upon my return, to ensure no one was watching, before bolting through the opening in the hedges and running for the door. I was glad when we finally moved to a normal (albeit too small) house on a normal street. I was glad when the bulldozers razed our old house and dump trucks filled in the basement with dirt and compacters smoothed it over and the asphalt trucks paved it—and the gravel lot beside it—into an extension of the parking area. I wasn’t there to see it happen, of course, but the first time I returned to pick up E, the deed was already done. I remember being rattled at first to see cars parked on top of the space that had once been my bedroom, where I had lain on my stomach—feet up in the air, crossed and swaying left-right behind me—while I cut out paper dolls I drew myself, and later, listened to the same sad songs over and over on my phonograph, and later yet, wrote my first poems about—what else?—unrequited love. But in the years that followed, I discovered that whereas I had once lived in a house that was more or less in a parking lot, now that house lived, more or less, in me. I wrote about it all the time, revealing a secret here, a secret there, as I pleased. Now that I’m old, I cherish it more than ever. I write about it all the time. It is a pretty stone sitting in my child’s palm. Look, look, magic.

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Joan Schweighardt is the author of several fiction and nonfiction titles. Besides her own projects, she has worked as an editor and ghostwriter for private and corporate clients for more than 30 years. She also had her own independent publishing company from 1999 to 2005. In addition to Under the Blue Moon, hermost recent work is the Rivers Trilogy—Before We Died, Gifts for the Dead and River Aria. The Art of Touch: A Collection of Prose and Poetry from the Pandemic and Beyond—an anthology she conceived and co-edited and which contains the work of 39 writers—will be published by the University of Georgia Press November 1, 2023.

© 2023, Joan Schweighardt