Florida Lives

Photographers: house by Jodi Marr, bats by Éamonn O'Brien-Strain, cockroach by Zeeshan Qureshi

Roaches don't die easy deaths; they can survive nearly anything. Everywhere else I've ever lived—New York, San Francisco, a rented cottage in Alaska—they call them roaches. But in Florida, a blend of kudzu and heat, a mixture of North and South, a dangling participle on the United States, they are palmetto bugs. My husband and I, we'd left behind our San Francisco lives, pulled a reverse pioneer and come back East. In San Francisco we had affairs. We racked up credit-card debt. We bought things we didn't need (garlic presses and lamps made out of beach glass) and then returned them. We took jobs we hated. We went to graduate school. We took different jobs we hated. We drank booze at breakfast and then told ourselves we didn't have a problem and drank some more. We had the seams of our clothes let out and then got sickly thin and bought new things. We played the lottery and then blew the last of our savings on a Danish Modern couch. We laughed, we cried. In our thirties, childless, broke, becoming a cliché. We had a marriage. For those seven years that were our San Francisco lives.

In hindsight, I can see now that we never should have left San Francisco. My husband was unemployed, and I was working only part time, teaching at a private elementary school: making papier-mâché, making eyes at the principal, making life hell for my husband.

But there was a call from a fledgling fern nursery for someone, anyone, willing to market the little company, willing to start over in Florida, relocation expenses included. Did you know that Apopka, Florida, is the international foliage capital of the world? This was how we started our Florida lives.

Before we left there was a party in our honor. Friends, old and new, lovers, enemies, coworkers, our parents. It was at a Thai restaurant in the Tenderloin, part charming teak tables, part roaches in the bathroom. At a table set for twenty, we were toasted. In the dim lighting of the restaurant everyone looked a little nostalgic, and a little relieved. So we drank a bit. And then we drank a bit more. And with the alcohol and good vibes coursing though us, we messed around in the back of the taxi on the way home, like we used to when we first met.

Our rented house in Apopka was walking distance from a swamp, freeway adjacent, smelled like mold, was perfect. In Florida everything was ceremony. Our dinners were feasts: expensive cheeses, forty-five-dollar bottles of wine, meat without the bright orange Reduced for Quick Sale sticker. Oh, the luxury! I stayed home and played around with exotic recipes. Let's try cow-tongue soup, escovitch fish, meatloaf! We stuck my husband's first paycheck on the refrigerator with a flourish, and new drapes—hot pink and cream—were hung with aplomb.

In the evenings we dragged plastic beach chairs out onto the front lawn and watched a colony of bats circle our house at sunset. We watched them arc upward and wend their way in slow, concentric circles into the neighborhood. We toasted them with plastic cups and thought how very lucky we were.

We loved: our new bicycles, that we could buy wine in the grocery store, the plush seats of our new SUV, the good life, the easy life, the suburban life.

We hated: the weather, the tendency of people we met to use the word irregardless and our neighbors; he hated our neighbors most of all. Even before we met them we knew they weren't the kind of people we wanted to get to know. Yellow grass, cartoon-print bedsheets in the front window instead of curtains and cigarette butts like breadcrumbs from their carport to their front door.

We'd only lived in the house about three weeks when they rang our doorbell in three...