Once when I was younger I sat in the kitchen with my mother and my aunt, and I felt good, the way you feel when you’re a child and you’re sitting with grown-ups. They talked about politics and money and all the things I didn’t really understand. But they talked about it even though I was there and I felt grown-up too, just sitting quietly and listening. The kitchen was small.

“Just enough room to turn around in,” my mother used to say, banging the dishes around in the kitchen, making little tsk-tsk noises with her tongue.

A Queens tiny two-bedroom apartment, the window in the kitchen with a view of nothing but the brick wall of the building next door. Except it was nice, it was July and the sun shone in the space between these buildings, illuminating the brown hues of the brick and shining down on the ledge where my mother had put some lilies. They raised their long white faces towards the sky, thin green necks reaching.

That was when my parents were still saving up to buy a house. Later we would move out to the suburbs, and my mother would have a big yard, with gardens filled with her herbs and flowers. I complained about the move until I went away to college. The houses were all so far away from one another, and the streets were so quiet at night. No one looked at each other in the supermarket. The spaces between the houses became the spaces between people, and everyone stood the correct distance away from each other in lines, and spoke in soft voices.

But my mother acted as if this was just another step she had to take, in a long staircase that she was ascending.

“I know you don’t like it here, baby. But we own land. That’s all that matters.”

My aunt sliced a tomato into wedges, handed one to her. A tomato was strange, I thought. How the seeds could stay inside if you held it just the right way, or they could all drip out and slide slowly down your palm. Like passengers in a rowboat, swaying with the whims of the ocean. I knew how to keep the aboard, though. Knew how to balance the slice between my thumb and forefinger, knew to slurp a little when I took a bite so the seeds didn’t fall.

“Put some salt on that,” my mother said, placing the shaker in front of me.

“I don’t believe all this hype about salt being bad for you,” my aunt said, smiling. “High blood pressure, my ass. My parents put salt on everything, sometimes it was the only spice we had in the house. My mother could boil potatoes and carrots, and set in front of us with a couple of shakers of salt, and that was dinner.”

“That’s true,” my mother said, nodding. “Baloney sandwiches for lunch, salt on the table. If the meat was old, the salt disguised the taste. Our parents worked in factories, long shifts spent turning industrial emperors into billionaires, and they still couldn’t always feed their families. It’s in our history, everyone’s history. Did you know that in Africa, people traded gold for salt? Hell, they knew what they were doing! Ever tried shaking gold dust on your steak? Let me tell you, I’ll take salt any day. Reminds me where I come from.”

When my cousins came home from school my mother washed the dishes while my aunt helped them with their homework. I remember watching her, the way she hummed and rinsed off the plates, and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. And the lilies behind her, searching for sunlight.

***

My kitchen window looks out onto a busy street and a small lawn that should be filled with grass. But we never take care of it, never raked it in the fall or watered it in the summer, not once. I don’t mind it, really. I think the neighbors talk about us. But I don’t mind that either.

One night I was fighting with my boyfriend and I stopped talking. He kept stomping around the bedroom, asking me what was wrong. Picking up things and then putting them down, and doing nothing at all, really. I closed my eyes until he left the house and then I went into the kitchen and picked up a tomato from the window ledge. They ripen faster, if you let them sit in the sun. There weren’t any clean dishes so I washed a knife that was sitting in the sink. Its blade gleamed as I cut into the tomato.

Tomorrow I’ll leave, I think to myself. I’ll really leave this time. The phone rang but I didn’t move. I stood still at the kitchen sink, looking out the window, the cars passing by, their headlights shining under the streetlamps. Man made light illuminating their way through a dark empty night.