The Good House: A Novel (25 page)

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Years ago, when I was a girl, we had a blizzard that lasted for five days. It snowed day and night. The town didn’t have all the road-plowing equipment that it has now, and when the snow stopped, Hat Shop Hill Road was nowhere to be seen.

We had an old toboggan. Somebody—one of my dad’s customers—had given it to him the year before, because they were moving down south and wouldn’t need it. All the kids on our road and all the surrounding roads, all the kids who lived up on Wendover Rise made their way over to Hat Shop Hill Road that day and we turned the road into a half-mile-long toboggan run. It’s the steepest road in town, and the straightest. Kids brought their Flexible Flyers and their flying saucers and their inflatable tire inner tubes, but our toboggan was the best ride down, and suddenly we Goods were the most popular kids in Wendover. Everybody begged to be next on the toboggan ride. We could pile five kids on at a time, six including Judd, who was the smallest but insisted on taking each ride down and then being pulled the long way back up the road.

School was closed for an entire week. On the second day after the snow stopped, a truck made it down Hat Shop Hill Road with a plow, flattening the snow, tamping it a bit, but not clearing it down to the pavement. This made for even faster going, and that’s when my cousin Eddie and Frank Getchell had their brilliant idea. They would run a hose from our house, which stood almost at the top of the hill, and pour water down the road to make an ice run, just like the bobsled run in the Olympics.

My dad was at work, my mother—who knows, maybe she was in the hospital then, but she wasn’t around. So Eddie and Frankie attached a hose to the outside spigot, but when they tried to turn it on, no water came out. Frankie’s dad was in construction and Frankie, though he was only thirteen or fourteen at the time, knew how to go into the cellar and turn on the outside water line. Soon there was a steady stream of water pouring down Hat Shop Hill Road. We waited in our cellar while the water was running. There was a bulkhead hatch to our cellar that we could climb in and out of and it was nice and warm down there. It smelled of laundry and damp cellar and sometimes of our cat Calico’s kittens, which she produced there once or twice a year. We weren’t allowed to take our friends in the house when nobody was home, but the cellar was allowed, and that day there were at least a dozen of us down there.

Whenever we went inside, Judd would start crying because his little toes and fingers had become so cold in his wet mittens and socks that they were numb, and as they thawed, they hurt him. Lisa or my cousin Jane or I would hold them under warm water in the cellar sink and we’d tell Eddie to stop calling him a baby and a faggot, since he was only five. Eventually the boys turned off the hose and we had to wait again for the water to freeze, but it didn’t take long.

It was late afternoon and the sun had moved down below the trees, and the road, in the dimming light of day, was a steep white slope with a silver racing stripe that gleamed down its center. It looked like a ribbon of glass. There was a lot of shouting about who should be the first to ride down. Frankie and Eddie had engineered the thing, so it was a given that they would be first. Judd would cry unless he was allowed, so it was decided that those three would go first—Judd sandwiched between the two older boys. In order not to demolish the little walls of the run, the boys had to lay their legs alongside the legs of the person in front of them. They needed a push, and Frankie, who sat in the back, asked me to do it. “Good n’ hard, Hildy,” he said, so I gave it my all. I got a running start. I grabbed Frankie by the shoulders and ran along behind, pushing, pushing with all my might, and as they hit the iced slope, I couldn’t resist—I hopped on behind Frankie. There was plenty of room. My legs were sticking out to the sides and he grabbed them and wrapped them around his waist, shouting at me about not wrecking the run. And then we were off.

The toboggan had been fast before, but nothing like this. We flew down Hat Shop Hill Road, the ice singing beneath us. Little swales in the road shot the toboggan into the air again and again, and each time we hit the ground, we seemed to gain momentum. We all screamed, Eddie, Judd, Frankie, and me. We screamed in unison—a thrilled, terrified, joyous, electrified cry to the heavens, to anyone who might hear us. The wind whipped my eyes full of tears and I buried my face in Frankie’s back. Faster we went, faster and faster. The road levels off near the bottom, and before the run was iced, the toboggan always came to a gradual stop well before the stop sign, well before the intersection with Atlantic Avenue, Wendover Crossing’s main street. But the water from our hose had run down to the end of the road, and now so did we.

“Eddie,” I screamed, “stop us.” We all put our legs out, but they just slid along the frozen surface. The road leveled off, but we flew along as if propelled by jet engines. Ahead of us, cars and trucks moved along Atlantic Avenue.

We all had the idea at the exact same time. Eddie went one way, Frankie and I the other, with little Judd tucked safely inside Frankie’s arms and legs. We all bailed, rolling off the sides of the toboggan as it sailed at lightning speed across Atlantic Avenue, where it ran afoul of Bucky Garritty’s dad’s station wagon. The toboggan slid under the front tire and the car skidded across the street and across the sidewalk and through the picture window that graced the front of Allen’s Pharmacy.

Today, I suppose there would have been a lawsuit of some kind. Nobody was hurt in the collision, thank God, but Dad found out about it in no time (the market was two doors down from where Allen’s used to be—it’s a CVS now), and he let us have it. Eddie caught the worst of it, being the oldest. My dad let him have it in the face and whacked him around his head, and the rest of us got whacked on our backsides, but we were so padded with snowsuits, we just howled to let him think he was finished with us. I think Dad threw Frankie in the snow a few times and told him he was going to call his dad.

“You coulda all been killed, do you understand that?” Dad kept hollering. We thought he might just kill us for coming so close to getting killed.

Our bobsled run became legendary. When school started up again, the story had been stretched to involve us sliding under a truck before the collision, and Eddie invented all sorts of heroics for himself—one version involved him plucking Judd from the toboggan just a nanosecond before it was run over. He left out the part about how he and Frankie forgot to shut off the water valve, causing our pipes to freeze and burst and causing Dad to make more outraged phone calls to the Getchell household. Many years later, Dad laughed until he wept, recalling the story, but he didn’t see much humor in it at the time.

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When the dogs and I returned to the house, Emily was in the kitchen, in bare feet, sweatpants, and a tank top.

“Good morning, Emily,” I said cheerfully. I gave her a little hug.

“Mom, it’s FREEZING in here. Can you turn up the heat?”

I walked over to the thermostat, but it was set at sixty-eight, where I like it.

“It’s winter,” I said. “Put on a sweater and some socks like a normal person.”

“‘A normal person.’ Do you know how damaging it is to hear from you how abnormal you think I am?”

“Oh, Em,” I said, laughing a little, trying to lighten the mood, “it’s just an expression. I know you’re normal.”

Emily sighed, and then she smiled and said, “I know.”

“Did you find the coffee and everything okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Emily said, holding aloft the mug from which she had been sipping.

“Great, great,” I said. “I thought you said you were coming home today. I didn’t expect you last night.”

“No, I guess you didn’t,” Emily said.

I poured myself a cup of coffee. My head was throbbing. No more red wine.

“Mom, was that Frank Getchell’s truck outside last night?”

“Yes,” I said, opening the fridge, looking for the milk.

“And were you … in bed … with Frank Getchell?”

“Well, that’s really none of your business.”

“Mom, I just can’t believe, of all the guys your age…”

“What?” I demanded, spinning around and glaring at her. “What guys my age? Where are all these guys my age? And what’s wrong with Frank? You don’t even know him.”

“He’s the … garbageman.”

“He owns a maintenance company that handles garbage removal, among many, many other things.”

“Were you drinking? I saw a bottle of wine on the table … and it smelled like somebody had been smoking weed when I came in.”

“Frank drinks. And he smokes. All my friends drink.”

“But you weren’t…”

“No. Of course not.”

The relief on Emily’s face. You’d think she and Tess had spent their childhoods carrying me out of bars. I know how awful it seems to just so blatantly lie to one’s own daughter, but it was for Emily’s good. For her peace of mind. She was upset about Adam. She had enough to worry about.

“So what’s going on, Em?” I asked, and Emily filled me in. She wanted to move out of the loft and into an apartment with Adam. It infuriated Emily that Adam wasn’t ready to move to that next step. “We’ve been together for two years,” she said.

“I don’t know, Emily, maybe it’s for the best. Maybe you should be seeing somebody with better … prospects … for the future.”

“What do you mean, ‘prospects’?” demanded Emily.

“I mean a job,” I said. “It would be nice, I think, for you to be with somebody who earns a steady income.” I couldn’t believe these words were coming out of my mouth. I was a child of the sixties—a feminist who had forged her own way, never relying on my husband for support. But now I thought how nice it would be for Emily to wind up with somebody who would take care of her. I didn’t need that, no, I had always taken care of myself. But it would be nice not to have to. It would be nice for Emily not to have to, I mean.

“I knew you were going to say something like that. You’ve never had any faith in Adam as a musician. His band is about to get signed. The other night he did a gig at Irving Plaza and there was a rep from Sony.… Oh, forget it. I knew you wouldn’t understand this. I’m calling Hailey. I’m going to see if she’ll go have lunch with me. Maybe we’ll go down to Marblehead and see Tess.”

“Emily, I’m not trying to be unsupportive. I just want you to be realistic, that’s all.”

“Whatever,” she replied, stomping upstairs to her room.

It stopped snowing and Emily did go down to Marblehead with her friend Hailey. I spent the afternoon reading the Sunday paper, and when it started to get dark, I thought I’d have just a hair of the dog—just a little glass of wine—while Emily was out. She made me so nervous with all her prying, and truthfully, I had a little hangover. Hangovers always fray my nerves. So I went downstairs and uncorked a bottle and poured myself a little mug of wine. I used a mug, just in case Emily arrived home early, and I left the bottle downstairs behind an antique framed botanical print that Scott had left there.

I used to hate my cellar. It’s an old house, near the water, and the cellar has such a low ceiling that I must crouch when walking through it. Still, I get cobwebs across my face. The cellar has a hard dirt floor that is often damp and somewhat slimy, even though I run a dehumidifier all year around. There are mice down there and spiders, and once, not long after I bought the house, I ran down there for something and almost stepped on a long, dark, slithering snake. The thing was at least three feet long. It sidled across the earthen floor and then disappeared into a crack in the stone foundation, sending me shrieking back up the stairs. But now I had become accustomed to the cellar. I quite loved the feeling of being underground. It was toasty in the winter and cool in the summer. The furnace hummed, the water heater hissed. All the vital organs of the house were healthy and hard at work.

And, of course, my wine was there now. I went downstairs each evening with my flashlight and ducked around cobwebs, and when I saw the occasional mouse, I knew that its days were numbered, due to the resident snake. I no longer set traps, preferring, instead, to let nature take its course. Mice must have a warm place to spend the cold months, snakes must eat, spiders must weave intricate webs to capture their tender prey. I must have a drop of wine at the end of the day. This is how I experienced the cellar of my house now. It harbored a wonderfully symbiotic ecosystem, of which I was an integral part. Often, when I drifted downstairs for a second bottle of wine, I imagined, with some degree of delight, that when I died, I would haunt the place still, and that the spiders and mice and the snake would know me, even then.

fifteen

Molly woke me, licking my face and whining. It was pitch-black, I couldn’t see a thing, and I only knew it was Molly because of the feel of her rough coat beneath my fingers. I wanted to go back to sleep, but when I reached around for my pillow, I found nothing but a hard-packed dirt surface. I lay there for a moment. Something crawled across my hand and I sat bolt upright and realized, by the feel of the ground beneath me, and the damp smell, and the sound of the furnace, that I was lying on the floor of the cellar.

A thin stream of light came from the slightly open cellar door at the top of the stairs. I stood and staggered toward it. Clever Molly must have opened the cellar door with her paws. Now the dogs were licking my hands as I walked, wobbly-legged and dizzy, to the bottom of the illuminated stairs.

If I wake up early, after some heavy drinking, as I did that morning, I often enjoy a wonderful, tipsy hilarity, which I have learned to relish while it lasts, because it’s always followed by the sharp dagger plunge of a hangover, which will rip away at my gut and saw at my brain and fray my nerves to within a hairsbreadth of the snapping point. I was still in that loose-limbed half-life—not quite drunk, not quite sober—while climbing the stairs, and I recalled, with some astonished amusement, the events of the night before.

I had poured myself a mug of wine and turned on the TV, to discover that one of my all-time-favorite movies was on. It was Alfred Hitchcock’s
Notorious,
with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. I really couldn’t have been terribly drunk, because I remembered the movie ending. I think I had gone down only once, or maybe twice, to refill my mug, but that was all. The movie ended and I realized that Emily would be home soon and that I might appear a little tipsy, so I decided to go to bed. But that was a particularly delicious wine that I had opened and it seemed a shame not to finish the bottle. It’s never as good when it’s been uncorked overnight. So I made my way downstairs and was about to refill my mug with the remains of the bottle, when I heard footsteps above me.