1925

The street was in South London and it was not famous for anything except the fact that it had existed for two hundred years and would continue to exist for two more, and the houses on it were made of brick and the bricks were the color of old tea and the windows were the kind of windows that reflect the street back to itself so that when you stood on the sidewalk and looked at a window, you could see the street and the people on the street and yourself standing on the street, and the reflection was not perfect because the glass was old and slightly wavy, and the imperfection was the point, because the imperfection was what made the reflection honest.

Eleanor Whitfield was twenty-eight when she stood on this street in 1925 and looked at her own reflection in the window of number 47, which was the house she had lived in for twelve years and which she was about to leave, and in the wavy glass she saw herself and the street behind her and the woman standing behind her who was her mother, who was sixty-two and who had never left this street in her entire life and who was about to watch her daughter leave it for the first time, and Eleanor said nothing and her mother said nothing, and the nothing between them was the most honest thing either of them had ever spoken.

The house at number 47 had been Eleanor's grandmother's house, and her grandmother's grandmother's house before that, and the street had been the center of their world because the world, for women of their class, was the street. The street was everything: the place where you were born, the place where you worked as a domestic for the families on the better streets, the place where you married the man who lived on the next street or the street after that, the place where you raised your children, and the place where you died, and your children would inherit the house, and the house would pass from mother to daughter the way it had passed from grandmother to mother to Eleanor, and Eleanor was the first in the line of women who would not inherit it, because she was leaving, and the leaving was not dramatic, it was not a rupture, it was the quiet, inevitable movement of a person who had grown into a shape that the house could no longer contain.

Her mother stood behind her in the reflection and said, "You'll come back."

Eleanor looked at her mother's face in the wavy glass and saw, distorted by the imperfection of the glass, the truth that the perfect glass would have hidden: her mother was not asking her to stay. She was asking her to return. There was a difference. Staying was a choice. Returning was a need.

"I will," Eleanor said. And she meant it, and she did not mean it, and the two meanings coexisted in the space between her words and the truth, the way the street's reflection coexisted with the street itself, the reflection being true in its own way and the street being true in its own way, and both being true.

1975

The street was the same and it was different. The houses were still made of brick, but the bricks were darker now, stained by fifty years of smoke and rain and exhaust. The windows were no longer the kind that reflected the street back to itself because they had been replaced with double-glazed units that reflected only the sky and the tops of trees, and the sky and the trees were not the street, and the street had become, in its reflections, something other than itself.

Clara Whitfield was twenty-six when she stood on this street in 1975 and looked at the window of number 47, which was the house she had grown up in and which she had left at eighteen and which she had not returned to in eight years, and in the new windows, which reflected only the sky, she could not see herself or the street or the woman standing behind her. She could see only the sky, and the sky was gray and the same gray that it had been in 1925, and she thought about this, that the sky had not changed while the street had changed everything.

Her mother, Eleanor, stood behind her in exactly the same position in which she had stood in 1925, and Clara, who was her mother's daughter and who carried her mother's eyes and her mother's mouth and her mother's habit of standing on the street and looking at windows and seeing things that were not there, turned around and looked at her mother and saw, in the face that she had inherited, the face that she recognized from mirrors and photographs and the wavy glass of 1925, the same silence that Eleanor had carried in 1925, the silence that had been the most honest thing either of them had ever spoken.

"You came back," Eleanor said.

Clara had. She had returned at eighteen, left at eighteen, returned at twenty-two, left at twenty-two, and now she was twenty-six and she was standing on the street and she did not know if she was returning or leaving or doing something that had no name because it was happening for the first time and had no vocabulary in the language that had been spoken on this street for two hundred years.

"I'm not sure what I'm doing," Clara said.

Eleanor smiled, and the smile was the same smile that she had worn in 1925 when Clara's grandmother had asked her if she would come back, and the smile was: I know. I have been here. The sky is the same. The street is different. And you are the same. You are also different. And both are true.

1925 and 1975 occupied the same street simultaneously, not as a trick of literature or a device of narrative but as a fact of geography and biology and the way that a street holds the people who have stood on it and looked at its windows and seen their reflections and the people behind them and the sky above them, and the street held both 1925 and 1975 in its bricks and its windows and its sky, and the two moments were parallel lines that never intersected but that ran alongside each other, always alongside, always in the same direction, always true in their own time, and the truth of 1925 was that Eleanor was leaving the house but not the street, and the truth of 1975 was that Clara was leaving the street but not the house, and both truths were true in their own reference frame, and neither truth invalidated the other, and the street, which had no opinion and no preference and no desire except to continue existing in its bricks and its windows and its sky, held both truths in the same way it held the rain and the smoke and the exhaust and the children's chalk drawings on the sidewalk and the footprints of two hundred years of women who had walked this street and not known that their footprints were part of something larger than themselves.

Clara stayed in the house for three weeks. She slept in the room that had been hers at twelve and fourteen and sixteen, and the room had not changed because her mother had not changed it, as though she had been preserving it for the day when Clara would return and need it to be the room she had left, and Clara slept in the room and dreamed of 1925 and of her grandmother looking at the wavy glass and seeing herself and her mother and the street and the sky, and she understood, in the dream, that she was standing on a street that was two hundred years old and that she was part of a line of women who had stood on this street and looked at windows and seen their reflections and known, in the same way that she knew, that the reflection and the street and the sky were all true and none of them were the whole truth and the whole truth was the street itself, which held them all.

She left again on a Tuesday in June. She did not say goodbye. She drove to London, found a flat in a building that had no windows that reflected anything except the sky, and she lived there for the rest of her life, and every Tuesday in June, she stood on the street outside her building and looked at the windows and saw only the sky, and she thought of 1925, and she thought of Eleanor, and she knew that both were true, and that was enough.