A Stranger's House (35 page)

While I'd scraped the walls of the front room, alone there in the house, the only sound the scratch of the putty knife in my hand and the pop and crack of wood burning in the stove, I'd had nothing to do but think. Think, and imagine, and try to place myself somewhere else, someplace other than this house we had bought in the hopes of making it our home. I scraped, and I thought, imagined, tried to feel what effacing might be like, tried to feel dilation, tried Kegels, tried all I knew to make me become Elaine, or Paige, or anyone I knew who'd borne a child. That was what I wanted to do that afternoon. Just to imagine.

But I could imagine nothing, could feel nothing, only the scrape of the knife against the wall, only the grate against plaster, a sensation much like that of a pencil marking Xs on the raw skull of a rabbit.

I thought of my dream, too, the one I'd had before I abandoned hope, but what I remembered—the center of gravity shifting, the breasts full—were only shadows of the feeling I'd had when in the
dream; those sensations were gone. Even the children I'd dreamed were gone now, and any comfort I might have taken in them, in just my
imagined
children, had disappeared. I hadn't dreamt of them since that night. The night my period had come.

And then, the knife in my hand and pushing up hard, a thin sheet of ancient wallpaper, cold and wet, dropping over my hand so that the knife disappeared, I thought of my mother. I did not understand why she would have come to me except, perhaps, to haunt me with more of my inheritance, more fear of the world outside the door, of empty rooms upstairs, of a barn outside that would have devoured me had I stayed in it a moment longer. But she came to me, and the smell of solvent in my head, the heavy work of holding my arm and pushing it against and up a wall again and again, brought me to my mother's home—my home, the Single Family Unit—and into her kitchen, the room now with those old photos moved in from the front room, her cot, too, moved into the kitchen, the TV in there as well, perched on the counter and turned so that she could watch it and lie in the cot at night, this room the only one she inhabited anymore. The room I found her dead in one Thursday evening in January, me ready to take her on our weekly grocery-shopping trip. My mother lay on her back, her arms at her sides beneath a blanket pulled up to her chin, tucked snugly around her.

This was how she had died, alone, comfortable, ready. But alone.

As I pictured her there on the cot, her face the gray of the dead, I realized that she, too, had been one of these women, the fertile in our world, the ones who could bear children, and that I had been the one she had borne. It had been me who had passed from inside her; she had felt the push and pain, felt the dilation and effacement, felt the tear, the fire, the sweat. The putty knife in my hand, my muscles aching once again from too much work, I thought that I hated her even more, hated her for having had me when, I knew, she would have preferred not to, would have preferred to move through her world without the additional burden I was to her, the added fear each time I left the house, whether with my father or alone, whether for grade school or college, whether for a loaf of bread at the store or to marry my husband. I was only that for her: more fear, when all I had wanted in my life was to bear a child with
Tom, and to face that kind of fear, the fear of life. Face it, and live through it.

Finally, the sun near down and Tom, I imagined, probably home, my hand dropped the knife in mid-push; the knife clattered to the floor, the last piece of wallpaper I would work on that day hanging from the wall, the edges frayed, the pattern lost, the thick paper crumpled and limp and dead. I reached up to tear the loose piece from the wall, but I stopped. I left the piece there. It would be as good a place as any to start up the next day.

Tom was asleep next to me, and I wanted to wake him then. I wanted him up with me. I wanted to find a reason to wake him, convinced I needed an excuse to wake my husband, when all I wanted was for him to hold me through this night

I sat up in bed, moved my hand over to his shoulder, held it above him a moment, but I stopped. I needed a reason to wake him, I thought, but I knew that if I woke him and told him of my dead mother and of what she'd given me, my fear, a fear that kept me from entering a barn, he would think me mad. He would think me insane if I were to wake him and tell him I'd known I would die if I'd stayed inside the barn a moment longer that day, and might still die if I were ever to enter there again. That would cinch things for him, and he would know I was mad. And I wondered if I hadn't already gone, if this weren't how it happened: the sudden paralysis, the inability to make a decision, the right choice; the hand poised, unable to move for fear it might betray me, but wanting to move because I wanted him awake with me, a wind strong and loud outside, the rattle of branches like bricks dropped from some great height one on another, one on another, outside our window.

I wondered if this weren't insanity, the awareness of all things passing in and out of you until you could do nothing, or if this awareness were simply the terrain of the hopeless, the territory I had claimed for my own, the world I had taken on with giving up. I could not decide, could not see clearly whether this were insanity or hopelessness, and so I drew my hand away, lay back down in the bed of our dark room, beneath the gray clouds and night, certain of only one thing: I did not want to decide.

 

When the alarm clock went off the next morning, the room was darker, immensely darker; when I shot open my eyes at the piercing buzz of the clock, I thought that somehow it had been reset, or that it was broken. Something was wrong. I knew something was wrong, and as Tom fumbled with the clock, I sat up in bed.

By this time Tom was sitting up in bed, too, and then he stood, slowly made his way to the window. He let up the shade.

“Look at this,” he said, stooping, peering outside.

I pulled back the sheet and blanket, but I had already seen: snow was falling outside.

I went to the window and looked out, our shoulders touching, and he put his arm, still warm with sleep, around me, the two of us leaning over and looking out the window. It seemed awkward somehow, his arm around me as we leaned, peered out at the white: his arm around me felt forced, as though he were obliged to try to touch me.

The gray clouds that had been threatening for the last month had finally broken, letting snow sift down to dust lightly the street, cars, lawns, rooftops. A small snow, the wind gone now so that nothing drifted. Just first snow.

He said, “We got the roof done. And the clapboards. This is fine.”

I thought of Grady and Martin again, of their riding bikes in the snow all the way to Friendly's. For a moment I considered driving over to the subsidized housing, stopping to offer them rides, but I
dismissed the idea. They could ride bikes in snow, in dark. A morning darker than any I could remember.

At breakfast Tom said, “You know, you need to slow down.” He said it just like that, out of thin air.

I said, “I know. I'm aware of that,” and then I put my coffee cup down, looked out the window. Snow still fell, and I could see outside bare branches of trees filling with snow, white-edged black limbs, and I knew that when we left this morning, went out the door off the kitchen and descended stairs clouded over with white, I would see the dead Christmas tree still leaning up against the foundation next door. There almost a year now.

I said, “Tonight, when we get home, I want to start packing. I want to start putting things in boxes and lining them up in here so that when we go, when we move, we can go as easily as possible.”

He had his cup to his lips, and looked at me over the brim, the reflection of the lights above us caught in his glasses, and I pictured him at work before his computer terminal, clicking up stories all day long, the green monitor with its green letters reflecting up into his eyes headlines like
VALLEY COUPLE'S TRIUMPH COMPLETE
.

He put the cup down, looked at the magazine open on the table before him, and closed it. He said, “You're not even listening. You're not even hearing me.” He paused. He hadn't looked at me.

He said, “Let's get going. I'll be late, with this snow. We need to go.”

When he climbed out of the car in the parking lot of the newspaper, he gave a small wave, turned and headed for the door, where inside he would work away at that computer, do his own job, his own work, reading more press releases, I assumed, of more women impregnated by turkey basters or anything else, sperm handed over in plastic Baggies from some willing masturbator. He would read of more triumphs today, more glorious victories.

When he had waved at me, there had not been even that small automatic smile, the thoughtless one. Even that was gone, his face straight, still.

Martin and Grady stood stamping their feet in the snow, both of them blowing into hands in fists at their faces, Martin's stamping exaggerated, his feet lifted a little too high, the time between dropping one foot and lifting the other a little too long.

Grady opened the passenger door, Martin his backseat door, and they climbed in.

Still there were no words between us. Still Martin shoved himself into the far corner. Still there was something dead hanging in the air.

Once we were through Williamsburg and on 43, back almost in the Berkshires, the snow was thicker, heavier, the road before me covered with snow except for two thin black lines stretching out in front of us.

I said, “So how was that ‘odd-ball' shift you guys worked yesterday afternoon?”

“Work,” Grady gave out quickly. “Just work.”

Past Chesterfield, the black strips on the highway grew narrower, traffic through here lighter, and the valley and road falling down toward the gorge were new again, different once more: snow was everywhere, still not too heavy, but enough to have veiled the meadow to the left. To the right the leafless black trees were stark and quiet, the dark-green pines cloaked in white, uppermost stones on the fences bordering the road impossibly white, a soft, continuous cushion of white.

I'd seen this drive in late summer, and in autumn, and now I'd seen it in winter. The only season left was spring, and already I longed for that, for the burst of new buds, bright green from iron gray branches.

I longed for that, and it seemed, as we glided down the road toward the stream at the bottom and the narrow bridge over snow-hidden stones, that even the gray sky and snowflakes were pressing in on me along with all else, those things I'd cried over last night. Suddenly the inside of the car seemed smaller, the three of us crammed inside a machine that crept through the world outside our windows toward a house that would shelter us, and I was afraid. I wanted to be in that house. I wanted the stove on. I wanted the scraper in my hand.

When I parked the car, I looked out the windshield only a moment at the house, different yet again, new: snow had collected on the roof, the windows black below white, the chimney poking up into the gray sky, the yard hidden by white. The junk heap, I could see from here, was sprinkled with color: broken yellow Formica from the counters, fake, plastic brown from the paneling, sky blue from the clapboards, all shrouded in white, the colors that much brighter for it.

I was first out of the car, Grady and Martin slower than usual, as though there were something they wanted to discuss between themselves before heading in. They stood at the car a moment, looking at each other, and then went up the stone steps, stomped their feet once inside. Grady closed the door behind Martin, Martin shrugging off his jacket, though the room was no warmer than the air outside. He lay the coat across one of the sawhorses he had built, a piece of awkward, temporary furniture inside a house torn apart

It was dark inside, and the first thing I did was head for the stove. I bent over it, moved my hand for the latch on the stove door, but here was Martin's hand right next to mine, reaching the latch first, his hand big and calloused and red from the cold, the nails bitten down to the quick, and I turned, looked up.

Martin's face was right there next to mine, closer than it had been the first time I'd seen him through the glass of the window that first morning. The day I'd screamed out of fear at his face, and I saw that no matter how sorry I had felt for him when he had been moving dishes around in Friendly's, or how much in awe of him I had been when he was piecing together a foundation or shimming in a floor joist, there had always been a piece of me that had held onto that fear of him, a piece of me that had clutched my first impression of him: head at the window, dull eyes, teeth together. That fear was always buried down deep in me.

Until now. Now here he was, his face near mine, his hand at the stove, ready to do for me what I had intended: to start up the heat in the house, to warm it up, to make it more and more my home. He wanted to do this for me, and his face no longer gave me that fear. Fear melted in me, all in an instant, in just that flash of time, long enough for me to see in the creased lines beside his eyes the sorrow that had been a part of who he was, and in the lines of his
forehead the years of work at just living, and in his eyes the practice of just being, the forced preoccupation with getting along that involved the awkward stomping of feet against the cold, the staring at the wheel of the bicycle in front of him, the echo of words Grady gave so that it would seem to everyone, anyone—me—that Martin was only a human. Not any different from me. Not at all.