It all began when I met Maggie a year ago.
“I’m an artist,” she said, again and again. “Let me show you what I mean.” Even when she’s down the street, I hear her words from shady quiet corners of my house, where I’ve put some of the things she’s made for me. Her artifacts cling to my tables and bureaus like old locust shells in the last summer sun—mute, brittle memories of something once alive but just now gone.
There is the clay pot she threw too fast and then watched as the pulling circular motion stretched it into a wavy, wobbly, misshapen egg.
“The center didn’t hold,” she said, with obvious joy, when she gave it to me.
The pot is colored a deep reddish tint, and if you hold it directly in the sunlight, the way Maggie showed me, and then spin it, the glaze will send little red fireflies shining off the walls, dancing a drunken voodoo spin of fire licks across the furniture and past my face in the mirror. For a minute, it looks as if Maggie herself is here in the room, dancing with the magic lantern show, harmlessly decorating the room for me, until I pull the pot from the sunlight and she disappears with the red lights.
“She’s very flighty,” the neighbors say.
“But I’m an artist,” she would answer, as she did when she sketched each of our neighbors in quick satiric strokes one afternoon on her thick watercolor pad. She ripped off the drawing as soon as she finished each one and threw it in the fireplace. Then the neighbor who had been momentarily misjudged by her pencil would flutter softly above the choppy fire for a long minute before she would brown on the edges and burst into flame. I saved myself by reaching into the flame just as the edges of the page were curling around and back on my long apron strings. I saw something in the picture come alive for a second, and I forgot the fire and reached in to pull it out. It was a sketch of how she had pictured me before we became friends.
“Get rid of it—you’re not like that any more,” she said, grabbing it back. “I’ll show you what you’re like now.”
She threw it back into the fire, stared at me for a minute, and then turned to a clean page. Her pencil began to whisper to the pad, and I fanned my scorched knees and blew on my burned finger to cool it while I waited for my newer self to emerge. My old caricatured face, now back in the fire, shuddered and drifted and began to tip into the smoldering flames, and I remembered the first time I ever wore the plaid babushka that she had sketched me wearing.
It was the day I first saw the neighborhood unrolling like a green game board in front of the tinted car windshield. The real-estate agent was narrating, and her words were as colorful and teasing as her long scarf, which was waving out the open window. “Now, here is one of our prettiest neighborhoods … it has the best schools … the country club … within jogging distance to the trains … nothing at the moment in your price range, but I knew you’d like to see it, anyway … you look like such a perfect person for a house here: Why don’t you tell your husband to come have a look? It’s a real storybook town, don’t you think?”
And then abruptly we turned a corner and were back on the main road again, back to the apartments, but the agent knew—she could smell the blood lust, the animal heat, that the idea of living in that other, older, better neighborhood had stirred in me. I wanted to live there in the same desperate way I had wanted to live in the Christmas village in Aunt Ruth’s train set, where tiny gray geese swam on a pocket mirror in a sea of salt. Where people never wanted to be anywhere else.
Jack was flattered because the agent said I was attractive, but realistic when I told him about the prices in the neighborhood after dinner that evening. He took out his ledger book and opened it up on the kitchen table, calculated the hours of overtime he’d need for a bigger down payment, and then turned back the lead in his gold mechanical pencil before speaking.
“I don’t think we can afford it, any way you slice it.”
“But if you saw it … “
“Listen, the people there will be older—they’d all be on their second houses, and we’re just starting out. There wouldn’t be anybody our age there—you’d be all alone.”
“But if you worked a little overtime and if I saved every penny, every single penny … think of the investment we’d have! And I don’t care about friends … “
“You know, if your aunt would leave us something, we could make it without my taking so much overtime I get sick,” he began, when the phone rang. We were waiting for the final call from the hospital where Aunt Ruth had been taken to die. The doctor said that with a constitution like hers, she could hang on forever, and we knew that it was only a matter of time before the scales were going to tip and Aunt Ruth’s savings would be gone. Then our money would have to be dropped piece by piece down the deep black well, while we wished for her death. Whenever the phone rang at night, we were always tense, waiting for her. “Maybe this is good news,” Jack said, as he reached for it. It was the agent, calling to say that the smallest house in the neighborhood was up for sale, a bargain if we hurried.
We moved in the spring, and I put Toby in his bassinet down on my new doorstep. While I waited for Jack to bring the truck with our furniture, I tried to imagine really being there. There was a serenity in the empty room that was waiting for me—it was the full calm before the game begins, when your money is in neat piles of colors; when the players are all down on one clean nylon knee for the kickoff prayer. It was, for the moment, a fragile bridge between two worlds, that of their Mayflower van filled with cut velvet, which had just left, and that of the U-Haul filled with our Herculon, which was on its way. Suddenly, and finally, Aunt Ruth was gone, with all her aches and pains and complaints, like the dim night before; she was swept away by the insistent sunshine of my new life in this neighborhood. She left us no money—in fact, the only thing I had from her was the dark quilt she had sewn in the last months she was alive, the only really creative thing I had ever seen her do. When she had gotten too sick to talk any more, she tore the dresses in her closet into pieces and then sewed and embroidered the shapes into a heavy, dreary quilt that didn’t go with anything I owned. It was in the first box that would be carried into our new house because it was the last thing I had packed in the apartment, along with the other stuff I didn’t know what to do about.
Perfection seemed quite tangible to me then as I looked in my empty new room. The sunlight was laid out in neat squares on the polished oak floors, sliced by the window frame into small lemon area rugs. I liked the room and the house better at that moment than I ever could again. It was the only time the room would have its own personality, a membrane thinly stretched across the pale floor, from white wall to fieldstone fireplace, and back to where I stood at the door. I knew I would destroy that delicate tissue once I stepped into it, like a bull charging through a paper hoop, and I knew the room would forever separate and spin backward, hanging in tatters on the horns of my own subjectivity once I entered it for the first time.
I wanted to empty my mind of everything but the sunlight, and for once to start new, to make the first page in this notebook look nice; to get rid of all the debris and memorabilia that cluttered everything. I wanted to lie down on the floor in the light and pretend I was swimming in water, on my flat stomach, the way I did when I was a kid and we could never go to a pool or to the beach because Aunt Ruth had to work all day. The only cool place in her apartment was the brown speckled linoleum on the living-room floor, so I used to lie on it, face down on the slick waxed surface, and pretend I was clinging to the sides of a giant trout in deep water. I was suspended, floating through the summers in lazy solitude above the hot sandwich shop where she stood at the counter, making hoagies and cheese steaks. Now, in the same way, I wanted to fall down into the inhuman emptiness of this new room as if it were a snowfall, to keep the furniture and Jack and Debbie and Toby from ever coming in to spoil the cleanness of it.
“You call this clean?”
I heard that voice cracking through my thoughts and backing into the room, and there she was again, sweating and scraping her bucket of brooms and rags in with her. “Okay. We can start over by the fireplace,” she said, dropping to her knees.
And that was how I created the first of the many ghosts that were to haunt this house—the ghost that there can ever really be a beginning. I remember Aunt Ruth always used to say that all she ever wanted was peace and quiet. Then the rented truck that Jack didn’t know how to drive screeched into the driveway, jerked forward, and stalled on the slope. I heard what was in there rock backward and settle against the barred tailgate as he jumped out and helped Debbie down. I could actually see the clean white silence in the living room splinter like a glass spider web and begin to fall all around me with the first clink of a Corning Ware casserole at the front door. When that first neighbor reached for my bell, I knew the Anvil Chorus had begun. Then I think I finally knew what Aunt Ruth meant, because I swear a splinter from that shattered glass web flew up and got stuck in my eye, and after that, everything began to look refracted and ugly. 🏠