Where Do You Go? Samar Farah Fitzgerald (bio) One spring, when they had been married two years, when they both had good jobs they could do from home, they left the big city as they had always planned to and bought a house. The house had a two-car garage so they bought two cars. In the attic—they'd never had one before—they stored everything they thought they'd outgrown. Kierkegaard, for one. Plus, her thrift-shop leather jacket, his music posters, their longhorn cattle skull. They had found the skull—desert angel, dank bone picked clean in certain morning light—on a trip out West, shortly after they moved in together. It was expensive and awkward to carry on a plane but perfect for the front wall of their studio apartment. One year, before a party, someone painted the horns blue. Another year, someone stuck a dried corsage in a hollow eye socket. Their new home was an hour from the old studio, in a town that was nothing like the boastful but forgettable suburbs nearby. More of a village than a town, set snugly on a pretty, wooded hill. A person might live five miles away and never know the place was there. But it was. If you took the right road and stayed with it around a narrow bend, then up the hill, eventually you'd come to a clearing with modest homes encircling a small lake. All of the houses were cottage-sized—no three-story colonial fortresses here—and yet remarkably distinct and intricate. Pointed turrets and steep gables, stick work in the Victorian gingerbread style and eaves extending over small rounded doorways like visors. Their three-bedroom stucco sat at the bottom of the hill. It had a prim stone walkway, two short chimneys, and a slim cast-iron balcony with enough standing room for one, facing the water. Because they were so charmed by the setting and the architecture they were willing to overlook the fact that most of the residents were older, much older—retired couples, widows, and divorcees well into the winter of their lives. The evidence was everywhere. The nearest supermarket stocked blood pressure monitors at the checkout counter, and signs within a half-mile radius proclaimed street names in a colossal font. Wednesday nights, half the village gathered for card games in a community center at the top of the hill. They could see these tepid parties from their side of the lake, the large atrium windows giving up a dozen or so round, indistinct silhouettes. On weekends, a purple bus rumbled up the hill and idled in front of the center, waiting to carry the cotton-headed gamblers south, to the casinos and beaches. [End Page 77] It was sort of funny that they'd joined an outpost for the near-to-dying—that's what they were able to tell each other at first. They enjoyed themselves: "Next stop on the casino bus: diaper change in Freehold." At the beginning, anyway, they were too busy relocating to give much more thought to their new neighbors. When they'd moved into the studio years before, it had been a simple merger: his things and her things coming together. Now, although their total living space had more than tripled, nothing from the past seemed right—the painted longhorn skull looked kitschy in the foyer, adolescent in the master bedroom—and they were struck deeply with the desire to purge and start all over. Some of their belongings they posted for sale online, some they hauled to the dumpster, and what they found themselves unable to remove entirely from their lives they relegated to the attic. They wrapped the skull in a large white sheet and set it on an old piano bench abandoned by previous owners. It wasn't long before the sheet loosened and pooled around the animal's brow, so one exposed eye socket loomed threateningly each time they climbed the attic stairs. They took breaks from the purging to order a new couch, a dining room table, a kitchen table, and matching nightstands for their bedroom. Late at night, worn out from the effort...