Authors: Anna Quindlen
I’m sitting on the screened porch perspiring as a hummingbird makes noisy feints at a fuchsia hanging from a bracket just outside. The back of the house is shaded by a curtain of forest, the light falling harshly out of the shadows onto the path to the barn. It’s early August, steamy, with a loamy smell, and the front of my T-shirt is gray with perspiration. Sanding hardwood floors is a dirty job, and I have been doing it since just after dawn.
Olivia used an expression one day that I’d never heard before. “Safe as houses,” she’d said about something and, when she saw the look on my face, added, “Don’t Americans use that one? It means certain, sure.” She said she thought it had something to do with real estate as an investment, and I assume she was right. Ruby’s English teacher had told me that Olivia’s father was once the editor of the
Oxford English Dictionary
.
I liked the way the expression sounded, but I thought it meant something else, the way that a house made you feel. In the way that sinners stubbornly continue to believe in good, or agnostics
glimpse God when their plane starts to bounce on a zephyr, I still somewhere inside believed a home could keep us safe.
It wasn’t exactly for sale by owner. The number on the sign was that of an art historian at the university whose mother was fading into nothing in a nursing home. “It’s just too large for one person,” the woman had said, as though she had to justify selling the place where she’d grown up. “You’ve seen it. You know.”
The professor, a tiny woman in a black shift, met me at the house two days after the storm. At dusk the huge concolor had been silvery, a tree that carried its own shadows in its branches. But in full sunlight its green needles had a faint bluish sheen.
“That’s some tree,” I said.
“My father said it was Christmas all year round,” she replied.
A living room with a fireplace, a dining room with wainscoting, a kitchen along the rear of the house that hadn’t been changed for fifty years, a screened porch straight across the back to balance the open porch in front. A steep and narrow staircase led to four smallish bedrooms, two on either side of a hall with a bath between them. The gravel drive continued down to the small barn, red faded to russet. A foursquare, old-fashioned, unimaginative house, the sort whose layout you know before you ever set foot inside.
“There’s no garage,” the professor said.
“That’s fine,” I replied.
I’d rented it for six months with an option to buy. It was the middle ground between past and future, an acknowledgment that I had to do something without doing too much, without facing a deed and a mortgage document with only my name on it. And it provided me with tasks to occupy my days. “Can I do some fixing up?” I’d asked, and the professor had looked around at the dingy walls and the chipped woodwork. “If you’d like,” she said. I’d given her a check at the beginning of July, and then gone to work there every day, stripping wallpaper, applying paint, ripping up the faded
greenish carpeting that ran through the house like creeping mold. Beneath the pressed vinyl in the kitchen, designed to look like no one’s idea of bricks, was red linoleum with black flecks, vintage schoolroom stuff. I scrubbed it and put on a sealer.
The only sounds were nature sounds, birds and wind and the occasional shower, dropping onto the leaves with a muted
rat-tat-tat
. I talked to myself sometimes, with no one to hear, no one to care, no one to whisper that Mary Beth Latham hadn’t really gotten over what happened, as though someday I would and would be cheery and bright. Twice a raccoon in the garbage can gave me a fright, and one afternoon a dark car pulled into the driveway, the first car I’d seen since the professor and I made a rental deal. I’d held my hammer so tight there was a purple dent in my hand afterward. A man was at the wheel, a man in a white sport shirt.
“Um, hello?” he’d called, looking at the hammer as he walked toward me, his face shadowed by a baseball cap. “It’s me? Ed Jackson?” When he got a little closer, my heart began to slow slightly.
“Officer Jackson,” I said. “I didn’t recognize you right away.” But I recognized his voice. I’d heard it when I was lying on the floor of my bedroom on the morning of January 1.
“You’re really in the middle of nowhere out here,” he said.
“It’s fine,” I replied.
“You putting in a security system?” I just smiled. “Everyone asks me that,” I said. He’d brought me a rubber plant, one of those big smooth-leafed plants that look as though they are artificial. There was a red bow around the pot. I’d put it on the back porch, out of the way.
Sometimes Olivia would stop by after she had dropped the younger boys at day camp and clean up after me, ripping away the bright blue painter’s tape, emptying the sander bag. One day she appeared suddenly from out of the woods, a fairy princess with a halo of dust motes.
“Where did you come from?” I’d called from a bedroom window.
“Just below,” she called back. “I reckon it’s a mile and a half through the woods. There’s a clear deer trail for most of it. It took me thirty minutes, but these boys will make it twenty on the run. If the trees weren’t so thick, we could put in a zip line.”
“I’m there as soon as you say the word,” Alice had said on the phone. “It sounds perfect.”
“It’s pretty ordinary, but the setting is nice,” I replied.
She was at the lake in Michigan with Liam, and with Nate, too. Her brothers liked Nate and so did her mother. “My father’s skeptical,” she said. “He told my brother Tommy that Nate probably had the wrong idea about me because I was a single mother.”
“He means Nate will think you’re fast.”
“Oh my God, that’s exactly the word my dad used. Who says that anymore? And, by the way, did my father miss the part about the donor sperm?”
“Don’t use the word ‘sperm’ around your father.”
“Anyhow, he says Nate may be trying to take advantage of me. I told Tommy that he’s taking advantage of me every chance he gets.”
“And Tommy said, ‘Oh jeez, Al, shut it.’”
“Exactly.”
The work is close to done now. That’s what I wanted, to have the house ready when Alex returned from camp. That’s why I didn’t buy it, so Alex can decide. “You’re going to let a fifteen-year-old decide whether to buy a house?” Alice asked to the rhythmic sound of Liam beating something metal against the phone.
“It’s his house, too,” I said.
“I understand that, but—Honey! Honey! Don’t hit me with that again, or no beach! Do you hear me? No beach, no swimmies!”
Liam wailed. “Okay, who was just giving parenting advice here?”
“I just want him to be comfortable,” I said, sighing.
All morning a truck has been bringing furniture and boxes. My mother has been here for four days, glad, she says, to leave the harsh Florida sun, and she’s been packing up our old house. I will never go there again. I’ve told her what to bring: Alex’s nearly new double bed, his scarred old desk, his posters, his books. The chair that ended up in Max’s room, the old oak rocker with the upholstered seat in which I nursed the two of them and Ruby, too. The upholstery is now a bright red-and-yellow plaid, but if you peeled it off you would find yellow polka dots, and beneath that rocking horses, and beneath that the ugly cracked imitation green leather that was there when I bought it at a junk shop in Chicago. Glen and I had carried it home, each of us holding one thick arm. A nameless neighbor helped Glen carry it upstairs. I had plans to strip it down to its mellow golden patina, but first there was one child, then three, and now I would never change it.
I’ve decided to keep the good antiques—the desk from the living room, the armoire in the kitchen, the mahogany pieces from our bedroom. The paintings will all be transplanted, although there is one beautiful landscape in watercolors that Olivia has admired and that I plan to give her. I don’t believe the den is tainted, so I’ve told my mother to have the movers bring over all the furniture from that room. The two couches and the wing chairs, the coffee table and the big bookshelves—together they will fill the living room. Everything else in the house will go. “What about the mirrors?” my mother asked.
“Give the mirrors away,” I said. I’m not sure why.
The night before, my mother and I had shared a pitcher of cold mint tea at the little table in the guesthouse, and she looked around and said, “You were lucky to have this place.”
“I know.”
“I wish I had.” I didn’t know exactly what she meant, but I let it lie. I was no longer inclined to pick at the scabs of our shared past. The boxes had come up the drive, gone down to the barn, labeled in black marker in her block print. I watched from a window as the men carried them, my whole life in cardboard, everything I’d loved and lost: G suits, M books, R sweaters. And I remembered that the same sort of boxes had been stored in the basement of the house where I grew up. The ironing board had been set up down there, and as I pressed a skirt or a shirt I would look at them, stacked to one side of the cast-iron boiler: J books, J shirts, J misc. I never thought of opening them, and I hadn’t thought until now of what happened to them after my mother sold the house and moved South with Stan. Were they in some storage unit alongside boxes filled with Stan’s first wife’s dresses and costume jewelry? Or had my mother finally carried them to the Goodwill, or consigned some to the curb for the morning trash collection? I could ask her, I suppose, but what difference would it make? Whatever she did was fine. That’s what I’ve learned. It’s fine. Whatever you manage to do.
I look down at the cement floor of the screened porch. I’ve decided to paint it with three coats of red deck paint, but first I have to finish the last of the bedrooms. The downstairs is done. The walls are painted pale yellow to try to capture the sun. My body is sore every night, and I welcome the soreness. The third evening I worked here, I lay down on an old chaise in the yard to rest for a few minutes before I closed up. The gnats had worried my damp face, and I closed my eyes against them and fell asleep without medication for the first time in seven months.
I had a dream then, the first dream I’d had in all that time. That was why I wanted the pills, not so that I could sleep but so that I wouldn’t dream. I was so afraid that the vague imaginings that circled
me during the daytime would become sharp and vivid in the dark, in my unprotected unconscious mind. I was so afraid that I would see, moment by moment, step by step, what happened first to Ruby, then to Max, and finally to Glen.
But the dream I had was nothing like that—no loud noises, no muffled screams, no blood. It was scarcely a real dream at all. There were no improbable or unrecognizable places or people, none of the strange and nonsensical occurrences we have learned to recognize as the weird back roads of our minds. How often did we come down to the table in the morning, squinting against the light, groping for coffee, saying to one another, “I had the weirdest dream last night.” Animals. Movie actors. Winged flight. Free falls. We were always sure we knew what the others’ dreams meant, but we could never parse our own.
The dream I had in the yard, as the gnats gave way to mosquitoes that bit at my arms (I would discover later) and a bat flew through the open porch and the kitchen doors and into the dining room (I would discover the next day), was simple and straightforward. We were all at the kitchen table. Glen was in his seat at the head, I in mine opposite him. Ruby was at his right hand, Alex at his left, Max between Alex and me. For years we’d threatened to change this, when their arguments would escalate into pushing or slaps, but we couldn’t bear to. This was where we had all always been.
The sixth chair, the chair where Kiernan always sat, was gone.
The table was set for dinner, but there was no food. We were all talking to one another and smiling, even Max. Ruby lifted her napkin and put it on her lap. Ginger was underneath the table. Glen said something to Max, and he passed the salt. When they moved their lips, I couldn’t hear them.
“Where’s the food?” I said, and everyone laughed, and suddenly
I was wide awake, as though I had shattered the vision by asking the question.
The dream hadn’t had time to fade, and I was confused by my position, and the dark yard, and the woods, and the porch and the house. Ginger was asleep at the end of the chaise, snuffling softly. I lay there and looked up at the stars, which seemed exceptionally bright. Then I closed my eyes and tried to see them all again, gathered around the dinner table. Why had I cared about the food? Why had I spoken aloud? I closed my eyes, but the dream, bidden, refused to return. When I looked at my watch I saw that it was nearly five, and I got up and made coffee and began to sand again.
I have halved the dose of the sleeping pills now. I have the sedatives of hard work and long days, wet heat and dark nights. And Alex isn’t here, so I don’t have to worry about being conscious if he cries out, or of holding myself together when he walks in. Most of the time I sleep on the new mattress I had delivered, which is in the dining room until the lacquer on the bedroom floor is dry and set. “Aren’t you scared out there?” Nancy had said when we saw each other at the farmers’ market. I can no longer manage the empty social answer everyone wants. “What’s left for me to be scared of?” I had replied softly, and walked off to weigh some peaches.
When I got into my car, she appeared at the window. “Mary Beth, I feel like we need to clear the air,” she said. “Anytime,” I replied.
My mother is afraid that many people will do what I first did—that they will miss the sharp curve and careen into my front yard. But in all the time I’ve been working here there have been only a handful of cars that have come down the road, most of them lost and therefore driving slowly, looking for direction. Even my mother has had a hard time finding me. When she arrives with the
last load of furniture, she brings sandwiches and a cherry pie. Her face is filthy She has hired a service to clean the old house thoroughly. “Inside and out,” she keeps saying, and I wonder if the latter means that she has asked them to clean the garage as well. A couple with two young daughters have signed a contract to buy the house at only slightly less than the others in the neighborhood. I ordered the real-estate agent to tell anyone who wanted to look the truth about what had happened, and she complained that it drove most of the buyers away. But these two apparently were unconcerned. They told her they believed making happy memories could expunge the events of that night. I know what they mean, because I am trying hard to feel the same.