Lost Art of Mixing (9781101609187) (19 page)

It wasn't about the act of entry itself, he knew that much; what he wanted was to be inside, which was altogether different. He also knew, of course, that he shouldn't—and thus the slow courting, the daily request. If the house wanted him, it would accept him, grant him access. By the end of the third week, when he tried the last basement window and it opened, it didn't feel like breaking and entering at all.

He went in feet first, carefully lowering himself to the uncertain ground below him, then made his way through the darkened room, eventually finding the stairs and then the kitchen above, which was surprisingly neat and clean, as if the owner had been preparing for company instead of paramedics. He wandered into the living room. He didn't know what he expected to find—the closed curtains and reclusive nature of the inhabitant should have led him toward theories of hoarding, and yet, he had never thought that about the house. It had always felt full, but not physically.

He pushed open a curtain a bit for light and made his way around the room, stopping at the fireplace mantel before a line of six framed photographs. A sepia print of a man in theatrical makeup and garb; a mother and three young children, the picture equally old. And then the rest, moving through time: two girls, then women, then crones.

He reached out, without thinking, and took the picture of the two old women, slipping it inside his jacket. Outside, he heard the honk of a car and remembered suddenly that he was late for school. He started for the front door, the quickest way out. As he opened it, he heard, too late, the sound of footsteps on the front porch, and then saw the startled face of the local real estate agent.

•   •   •

“WELL,
that was just stupid,” Aunt Ailis said, shaking her head.

Finnegan nodded, the flush of mortification rolling down the long length of his body.

“They aren't going to charge you with anything, but that doesn't mean we're done. If you're going to take things, you have to learn to take something that people need to give.”

She pulled out a box from her overstuffed hall closet. Inside were stacks of blue exam books.

“I taught a class at the community college,” Aunt Ailis said, by way of explanation. Finnegan could tell by the way her hands lingered as she picked up one of the blue books that her tenure at the college had not been as long as she would have liked.

“Here,” she said. “You might as well use one of these. They're just going to waste.”

“What am I going to use it for?” he asked.

“You'll see,” she answered.

Which is how Finnegan ended up, the next Saturday afternoon, in Maridel House's tiny room in the assisted-living center, a blue notebook in his lap and a pen in his hand.

•   •   •

“SO, YOU LIKE MY HOUSE?”
Maridel looked at him, her eyes green as river water.

“You could have knocked, before,” she commented. “When I lived there. I would have answered the door.”

Finnegan nodded. He wanted to disagree, tell her that everything about the house, from its overrun garden to the buckling front walk and the mailbox that tilted across it, seemed to be there for the sole purpose of keeping people away. Even the wooden siding appeared to recoil from the paint that had been applied to its surface. But he realized that might not sound very polite, and would certainly throw more suspicion on why he had wanted so badly to be inside in the first place. And, as he didn't really know why he had, it seemed easier to avoid the topic.

“I've lived there my whole life,” Maridel said. “This is my first time away. The nurse says to think of it as a vacation.”

Maridel looked around her, at the flat white walls of her room. “I wonder where she goes for fun,” she remarked. “I always kind of thought that if I went anywhere, it would be to Greece. Or Rome. Or maybe go to see kangaroos in Africa.”

She gazed blandly at Finnegan, then more sharply.

“You can correct me,” she said. “I don't break.”

He looked up and saw her eyes on him, watching.

“Or you can get me a glass of water,” she added.

•   •   •

“I AM THE HOLDER
of my family's stories,” Maridel said. Her hands, crabbed by arthritis, rested in two half-circles around the water glass on the small table in front of her. “There is nobody left but me.”

Finnegan observed the old woman in front of him. Her frailness stunned him, her hair almost shimmering in its lack of color, her skin so thin he wondered how it could hold the blood and bones inside. He wondered, too, what would happen to her stories when their container failed, as hers surely would. He thought of her stories slipping out of the rubble left behind, traveling on currents of wind, separating into particles. Would they float out there, or would they simply drop silently onto the earth, into the ocean?

The thought filled him with a strange sense of despair. Finnegan opened his blue notebook and raised his pen. “Tell me,” he said simply, and then, remembering his aunt's admonitions, he added, “please.”

•   •   •

FOR SUCH A SMALL CONTAINER
, Maridel seemed to hold a tremendous number of stories.

“I was the oldest,” Maridel told Finnegan. “Fourteen when our mother died of the influenza in 1926. My father was an actor, all mustache and capes, always entering the front door as if he was arriving onstage. I still remember him coming out of my mother's room that night she died. He said she was made to be a parent, but he wasn't. He handed me twenty dollars and left. For a while we hoped he was coming back, but then we realized he wasn't. My twelve-year-old brother said he wasn't going to stick around if I was in charge, so that left my sister and my little brother, who was two years old then. He was killed by a car a few years later, and so then it was just my sister and me.”

Finnegan watched Maridel counting, polishing the losses of her life as if they were beads on a rosary.

“We wouldn't have made it without the neighbors,” she continued. “They dropped off food and hired me to do sewing and mending. They always paid me too much, even though nobody had anything extra to spare back then. And they always seemed to know when the social workers were going to come checking on us. A neighbor who was the local butcher would drop off a piece of meat, and I'd get cooking. All it ever took was a pot roast. If the social worker walked in to that smell coming from the oven, they never asked us about our parents. So we got to stay together.”

The outline of Maridel's life was quickly sketched that first evening, but even then, Finnegan could see that what she had told him was like a blueprint of a house waiting to be built, the most important details merely suggested by its basic lines. It took a single sentence for Maridel to explain that she and her sister had lived together in the house until Hattie had died a few years ago. A short string of words holding almost eight decades of moments—a hand passing a freshly washed plate to a sister standing with a drying towel, the swirl of a skirt, the celebration of a new job, men who entered their lives but never the front door. A cat that Hattie had wanted. An argument over the paint color for the house. Finnegan could hear Maridel's voice change as she talked about her sister's death, the way the sounds echoed and became an empty room. He understood what that felt like. He sat, populating the page with her words.

•   •   •

AUNT AILIS HAD COMMENTED
after a few weeks that he could stop going to the nursing home whenever he wished, but he found he didn't wish. Every Tuesday and Thursday he would jog to the nursing home, keeping his stride easy so he wouldn't arrive in a sweat. It was a two-mile run, not hard. The first mile he spent letting go of the day, the jokes the other kids made about human skyscrapers, the curious glances as he tried to fit his body under the showerhead in the locker room. By the time he was into mile two, the evening was opening up before him and the lights of the nursing home were soon reaching out to greet him.

He found he enjoyed his time with Maridel. After her house sold, she had asked Finnegan to bring her the blue and orange and yellow scarves from her bureau drawer and then directed him in hanging them from the ceiling of her room in great swaths.

“We can pretend we are nomads,” she said. “And this is our tent. It'll be our vacation.”

He had spent the winter in the gold-and-orange glow of her room, listening. His run home was always faster, his feet flying on the wet pavement, the streetlights illuminating the world in shimmering circles.

By the end of March, Finnegan had filled three blue notebooks, but he didn't stop. After Maridel came Luanne, down the hall, and then Simon and Jasper. Simon and Jasper lived in another nursing home, but Maridel had met them at a senior-citizen dance years before and she said Finnegan should talk to them.

“They have no families,” Maridel explained. “And Simon was a railroad man; he has lots of tales to tell. They shouldn't be lost.”

Simon and Jasper led to Viola and Ida. Henriette. Hannah. Voices strong or wavering, shaking out their stories like bedsheets fresh from the dryer. Regrets and anger and small moments of pure joy. A starched yellow dress from childhood. A lost engagement ring, found years later in a picnic basket. The first, or last, sight of a child. A rosebush, dug up and moved from one house to another. A kiss that shouldn't have happened. The pages filled and Finnegan paid less and less attention to high school, until suddenly it was over and he was out on the other side, barely, his head full of other people's lives.

•   •   •

OVER THE YEARS,
Aunt Ailis had tried to lure Finnegan into the world of computers, the lines of software code that she studied as if they would give her a key to the inner workings of the human brain, if not heart. Finnegan understood the satisfaction she derived from the act of coding, her ability to aim for and achieve something she already knew she wanted—but for Finnegan, his interest in people's stories was always the unexpected memories that lingered beneath the words, waiting to come out. As far as Finnegan could understand, the purpose of coding was to create a form of stable perfection, a series of commands that could reproduce every time exactly what was intended. The opposite of humans, who were interesting to Finnegan precisely because of the way their narratives changed, hid other meanings, shifted with time and perspective.

So he reached out and took the stories in, knowing they had nowhere else to go, unable to refuse safe haven to memories that otherwise would disappear unnoticed. And yet, at times he was overwhelmed by the weight of other people's lives, the stacks of notebooks that surrounded his bed.

“You could publish them,” Aunt Ailis suggested. But Finnegan knew, somehow, that wasn't the answer. What he had experienced in the transfer of these stories was as intimate as touch, a table for two in a crowded restaurant. It didn't seem right for them to be made public. Still, he didn't know what to do with them, didn't know who he was without them.

And so he sat in his room, surrounded. Over the months he stopped opening his window shades; he gave up running. He avoided the nursing home, with its rooms full of tales wanting to be told. He sat on his bed and picked up one notebook after another, reading.

•   •   •

“YOU NEED TO
figure this out,” Aunt Ailis said, some five months after Finnegan's high school graduation. “And it's becoming apparent that's not going to happen here.”

She hugged him, once, fast, and then handed him the keys to her old Honda Civic. “A present,” she said. “Now, go.”

•   •   •

THE INTERSTATE THAT CURVED
its way through downtown Portland was otherwise long and mostly straight, running the entire length of the western coast of the United States. From Portland, Finnegan could head south and drive for days and days without ever leaving the highway, all the way to Mexico, into sunshine and bright colors and languages he didn't speak. Even if people wanted to tell him stories, he wouldn't be able to understand.

If he turned north, it was only a matter of six hours or so to Canada, through landscape that he believed would feel familiar, green and blue, mountains and water. In Canada, most people would speak his language, but he had heard Canadians didn't think all that highly of Americans, so it was unlikely they would see him as a worthy recipient of their narratives.

He sat, his car idling, at the overpass above I-5. In the trunk of the Civic was a big box of blue notebooks; the backseat held three paper bags of clothes and a pair of running shoes that Aunt Ailis had thrown in at the last minute. He looked south and saw traffic heading out of Portland, cars jammed against each other like spawning salmon. He clicked on the left-turn indicator and aimed for Canada.

•   •   •

STOMACH AND GAS TANK
both hit empty four hours north. Finnegan took an exit, hoping for a gas station and food that had never been inside a hermetically sealed package. After months of living in his head, he had started seeing colors again as he drove along the highway—the yellow of an outsized Hummer muscling its way up the fast lane, the inky green of the pine trees lining the road. He could feel the slip of the steering wheel under his fingertips, smell how the air changed as he passed a river, a diesel car, a burger joint. While usually a road trip lulled him to sleep, this one seemed to be having exactly the opposite effect. He found himself wanting food, real food, the kind that would require him to use two hands and taste buds.

As he filled the gas tank, he spotted a fruit-and-vegetable stand across the street, and, more important, the young woman who was holding up a shining red apple and laughing with the vendor. She was about his age, her hair dark and curling, her height just tall enough to reach the vendor's shoulder. Finnegan couldn't have told you what it was about her; all he knew was that he felt as if he might have room for one more story if it was hers. When he saw her leave on foot, he quickly topped off his tank and parked his car on the street, then followed her at a discreet distance past a small hardware store, a bagel shop, a bookstore, a dust-covered window cluttered with old couches and swatches of faded fabric. He wondered where she could be going with her bag of apples, or what she would think if he stretched out his stride and caught up with her.