A Stranger's House (15 page)

I smiled, trying to give back to her that feeling of help she had had only a moment before, and she, too, smiled at me, though behind it I could see nothing, in her eyes only the remote fear of me that had been growing and growing since my father's death.

I said, “I'm sorry, Mother. It's just that—” and I stopped, because I did not know what I could say to her. In that moment the air suddenly changed: I realized what I was doing, my underwear down and stained, my mother there in the doorway, and I felt embarrassed, as if she had known me too well before all this. As if she had known me too well. But before I could do anything—pull up my underwear, pull my dress down over my knees, either of these movements a signal to her that I wanted to be alone here—she said, “Excuse me,” as though she had come upon a boarder in her house, and not
her daughter. She turned from me and went into the hall, pulling the door closed behind her.

I stood at the foot of the driveway, and I knew I had to do something, had to move from here, from our driveway, our apartment, still honoring my father and his voice in me, still listening for him and my name, and though it took more effort, more strength than it had in years to do it, more courage than I could have imagined, I took a step. Then I took another, saw that I was heading toward Market and those train tracks, beyond them King Street and lights and people and downtown.

I took more steps, wondering why it had taken so much for that first one, and I wondered if, as I grew older, I weren't becoming my mother, more like her each day, more turned into myself. My dreams of the ghosts of imagined children, for one thing, came back to me most every night since I'd been bitten, those children continuing to surround me, to gawk at me and swirl and disappear.

I stopped a moment, only a couple of doors down from the house. I turned around, looked up to the second floor of our house, to our apartment, and as I did a light went on, and a hand was inside the curtains. Tom's hand, pulling down the shade, and suddenly I felt as though I might be a boarder in this house, too, a stranger; Tom up there alone, self-sufficient, not caring what I was doing out here in the cold, not climbing out of the car and walking down the driveway to me to talk things over, to urge me upstairs.

Slowly I took a few steps backward, suddenly not caring what lay behind me, if anything, on the sidewalk.

Moving was what counted. I would walk. I would move my legs, have them carry me where I wanted, and I turned, headed off down the street. I would walk for a while, come home later. We could talk then. I would tell him what I thought of Grady, and what I thought of Martin. I would plan with him to go out to Maplewood to try and talk to the grandfather, that man we hadn't yet met, without going through the lawyer, and for a moment I wondered whether or not this grandfather, this Mr. Clark, even existed, or if he were merely someone's sad joke, the lawyer's, perhaps. Or Grady's.

I got to the end of the street and passed between two houses, one, on my left, dark and empty, the other dark, too, except for a single light in an upstairs window on the back of the house, and for a moment I felt the adrenalin a burglar might feel, a stranger intruding upon someone else's home, someone's familiar objects alien to me: in the moonlight I could see a hibachi atop a picnic table with X-legs in the yard of the dark house, in the other yard a lawn chair and a busted, abandoned washing machine, its door torn off to reveal the large, black hole like an unblinking eye, watching me.

I shuddered, then moved as quietly as I could to the rear of the yard, afraid I would make a sound, break a twig beneath my feet or suddenly cough, my presence known, and a face would be at that window, I knew, and I would be found out down here.

I made it to the row of trees at the rear of the yard, behind them the dirt and rock embankment up to the train tracks, and I stopped. I turned, put my hand on the trunk of the tree next to me, a small maple, and looked up through the leaves gently moving with the cold breeze at that lit window, someone inside waiting for me to make a sound, I knew, waiting.

I had no gloves on, and the trunk of the tree was cold, rough. It felt good. It felt real, and with my eyes on that window, the light—there was no curtain inside the window, only a shade pulled down—I reached up and touched a branch, felt the leaves trace themselves around my hand. I took hold of one of the leaves, gently pulled it, tough and green, a leaf that had made it through spring and summer and now to fall, when soon it would drain itself of its green, leaving only its bones, red and orange and brown.

I took that leaf, my eye still on the window, and pulled on it, pulled harder than I could have believed I needed, as though there were no strength in my arm, no pull of muscle against muscle, and the branch came toward me, the leaves coming down to hide the window. Then the leaf snapped off, the branch popping up into the tree with the certain strength of life, and I heard the quick, loud whisper of those leaves banging against other leaves as the branch swayed slower and slower until once again it barely moved with the cold breeze.

I could see the window again, waited, held my breath for a shadow to appear, for the shade to fly up, for someone's face to find me out.

And nothing happened. I only stood with the leaf in my hand, its cold green waxy and tough, and for a moment, an instant, something new came into me: I
wanted
someone there at the window, someone to look out and see that it was me here in his backyard, that it had been me to have pulled that branch, let it pop back up. Me.

The breeze picked up, shook the highest branches, the sound coming down to me, a sound in the dark so much louder than my small branch jumping back up into place had been. I looked at the window a moment more, knowing then that nothing, nothing would happen, as if I had never been here, and, the dark green and resilient leaf clenched in my left hand, I turned, started up the embankment, my right hand out, touching the ground before me a couple of times to keep my balance.

Once at the top and on the train tracks, the cold wind moving down from Canada and through me and on south to the rest of the world, twisting the branches of countless trees, the air around me filled with the static hum of leaves against leaves, I held the leaf out to that wind, held it by the stem so that it whipped and whipped, a frantic dance in the air. I wanted to let go of it, to invest in this act some sort of significance, as if the leaf had only existed until this moment for me to come and tear it off its branch, let it fly away. I held it in the wind, held it, my fingers ready to let go, but then I stopped. I brought my hands together, felt the leaf between my palms, a thing so useless now but so real. Gently, slowly, I rolled it up, held the small piece of green with my left hand, and I put it into my coat pocket.

I started moving.

 

I walked from one end of town to the other, from the train tracks, where I'd walked the rail as if it were a balance beam, then down the other side of the embankment behind the Calvin and out onto King, past the shops and boutiques and restaurants on Main Street.

I walked and walked, sometimes thinking, sometimes not. When I thought, it was about Tom, and it was about different feelings I had for him; at any given moment I was loving him or hating him or not caring one way or the other.

I finally got to the end of downtown after crossing and recrossing Main, staring in windows at books or jewelry or clothing. Inside a bookstore was a display of children's books, one book opened to beautiful pictures of unicorns and faeries and trolls, another one a pop-up
Goodnight Moon,
the white moon through the window, and the old lady whispering
“Hush”
there in three dimensions.

I stood looking at the books, and heard from behind me loud laughter, the deep, rolling laughter of a man I imagined was drunk. Then came a woman's high-pitched laughter, laughter somehow broken, disjointed, as if she thought she shouldn't have been laughing, but couldn't help it. The laughter of lost control.

I turned around. Across the street was Pulaski Park, a small lot where benches had been set up and sidewalks poured and a plaque erected to the Polish hero of the Revolutionary War. Though it was dark I'd expected to see someone, the sound seeming so close, but there was no one. Only the darkness, and the bushes and trees.

I looked down and turned, headed up Main to State Street and
the base of the hill, that beginning into Smith territory, and I thought for a moment of going on up there and looking in dorm windows once again, but decided not to. That part of me was over, I thought. I'd gone to college, gotten a good enough job, and was now about to buy a house, and I'd done all that without this venerable institution. That was what I told myself, though a part of me still wanted up there, and, I knew, always would.

I paused a moment, and went north on State.

A few yards down I came to a hobby shop, huge windows across the front of the building, shelves inside the window filled with everything from toy train sets to rows of basketballs and soccer balls and footballs to bicycles hung from the ceiling.

But on the far-left side of the window were dollhouses, and I crossed the small parking lot and went to them, put my hands up to the glass. Ten or twelve dollhouses were in the window: three Victorians, a saltbox, a Queen Anne with its turrets and gingerbread, a split-level, two log cabins. And there was a Cape, this one a full. Some were painted, others left unfinished, the wood soft and pink. One of the Victorians, too, had been furnished, each room in the house filled with miniatures: in the kitchen sat an iron stove and a rocking chair, on the floor a round braided rug; in the living room was a fireplace with wood in it, an overstuffed chair and divan, even a minuscule newspaper lying flat on a dark-wood end table, its legs carved into claws. Upstairs was a girl's bedroom, the wallpaper pink with rows of bouquets of roses separated by thick stripes of white from floor to ceiling. There was a white-lace canopy over the bed, and a small, white rocking horse. In the other room, the boy's, was a bunkbed and football, postage-stamp-sized circus posters on the walls. On one wall hung a dart board with six darts pushed into it.

I stood there for what seemed an hour, taking it all in, forgetting about moving. I just looked, examining the details, trying to imagine how I would have decorated a girl's or boy's room. I tried to imagine this, but nothing came to me, and I wondered whether that was a good sign or bad, whether my inability to imagine what might never be was a sign I had accepted our not having children, or if it meant my imagination had died, if that part of my brain used to muster images of what I wanted had been obliterated somehow. I could see nothing but what lay before me, all miniature, all toy. Not real.

I took my hands from the glass because the cold had started working on me again. I put my hands in my pockets, felt the leaf in the left side. It was still warm from my having held it all the while I had been walking.

I saw where my hands had been on the glass, the faint dusting of heat and moisture on the window, my ten fingers and two palms, and I watched as they disappeared, as if I'd never been here, had never gazed in on a dollhouse filled with evidence of imagined life.

I turned and headed back to the street, continuing on up State. I had to get my feet moving again, but now things were different, and that small fear I'd had before was coming up again, and I became conscious again of putting one step down and then the next, of one breath in and one breath out, of muscles and ligaments and bones all working to move me, and as I passed the State Street Fruit Store with its outside bins empty, waiting for the next day and the fresh fruit and vegetables that would fill them, I thought of Tom, and his face, and the fight.

His face had been in the dark during the fight, but as I thought of him and his words, his face wasn't hidden. It was full and lit for me, because I knew that face. I had seen it every day for years, and there was nothing to conjuring it up, even in the dark. It was his face,
his,
and in the set of the jaw, the straight eyebrows unmoving even in the midst of the fight, his eyes clear and glistening, I saw that I loved him.

I saw again the one I'd accidentally sat next to at a basketball game when I was only a senior, back before I'd gotten the job in the laboratory. Our knees had touched again and again and again during the first two quarters, but at the half he left with the boy he had come in with, and I was disappointed, hurt in some way, though we hadn't said a word to each other. Then he reappeared, carrying with him two hot dogs and two Cokes, and sat down. He turned to me and smiled. I could see him from the corner of my eye, looking at me.

He said, “Would you turn me down if I asked you to dinner?” and held out to me one of the hot dogs and a Coke.

I turned to him, acted surprised but cool. I looked into his eyes
for a moment, and I could not help but smile, say, “Such a sumptuous meal, too,” and we laughed.