my dad’s wife looked like one of those instructional drawings of the human physiognomy you find in old textbooks. She was waiting beside him in the arrivals hall, tall and thin, in a sleeveless dress that left her white arms bare, and like in any anatomical diagram you could see how every single muscle was attached to her long bones. She could have been drawn by one of those Austrians, Gustav Klimt or Egon Schiele. She made me want to draw too, her jaw sharp and angular as the rest of her, her buttery yellow hair so meticulously piled up on her head that not a single strand strayed from its place.
It was two o’clock in the morning, and she walked ahead of us through the airport building, talking in an accent that matched her outline, and which to begin with was hard for me to understand. Alongside me, my dad lugged the leatherette suitcase (a baggage trolley cost a quarter) and pointed up at the roof, where I now saw a single- engine plane of the kind with only enough room for one person.
That’s the Spirit of St. Louis, he said, the plane in which Charles Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic nonstop, and for a moment I felt a bit like Charles Lindbergh myself, quite as exhausted and as wide awake as he must have been when he landed in Paris.
My dad’s wife drove the car, a great barge of a vehicle that sailed us out into the night, past giant billboards on spindly legs welcoming us to Marlboro Country. Street lights with a sleepy yellow tinge, as if from some feverish dream. On one sign, a woman with a long, thin cigarette between her lips said: You’ve come a long way, baby. They spoke to me from the front seat too. I had to concentrate, it was difficult to catch what they were saying, difficult to understand. What? They said it again. I leaned forward between the seats. What?
The heat in St. Louis, even in the night, was thick and moist with a musty smell. It struck me as I got out of the car, the dense, almost organic air, like an enormous body pressing against me. The sound of crickets, and insects winking in the night like microscopic lanterns. In front of me in the darkness was their huge house. My dad was already lugging the leatherette suitcase toward it, it was a house the size of a Danish museum building.
Is it all yours?
He laughed, the kind of chuckle that always comes out of him when someone says something surprising or funny.
Even the garage was enormous. Besides the beige Oldsmobile we had arrived in, there were two more cars, a blue Ford and a smaller vehicle under a dusty blanket. As we made our way to the back door, crossing a small cement-covered yard with a basketball hoop and stand, I thought about how many moving boxes such a house could hold. Hundreds and thousands, I imagined. Or letters. Millions upon millions. It would take ten thousand lives to write them all.
Speaking to my father in English for the first time was not the kind of radical turnaround or breakthrough that one might imagine. As in, Oh, now I understand the language of the birds, or seeing colors for the first time, or hurling away one’s crutches outside the medicine man’s tent to dance euphorically in the mud. It was more like the opposite, a disconcerting demonstration of the delicate conditions of language. We stood in the kitchen, leaned against the tall counter, each with a chinking glass of something cold. My dad had spoken English all his life, it sounded a lot different from the way my English teacher, Kirsten, spoke, and his wife’s Dutch accent required me to listen even more keenly.
She chewed gum and smoked cigarettes and drank Scotch with water and ice. Her voice was deep and her face shone with thick, beige-colored cosmetic cream under the fluorescent ceiling lights. She spoke to me like I was an adult. It was an intoxicating feeling, the very scene in itself was dizzying, to stand in your father’s kitchen at three in the morning and converse with him and his tall wife after a long journey. Everything I wanted to say, but couldn’t, tormented me. It felt like I’d been given a teaspoon to extract a ton of diamonds from deep inside a mountain. Every time I managed to bring something out into the light, it turned out to be coal.
My dad carried the suitcase up to the third floor, where my siblings had their rooms. My room was a mirror image of the eldest’s, a door in each led out into a bathroom in the middle. The doors of all the rooms were open, we went from one to another, looking in on my sleeping siblings, my dad’s wife still holding her whiskey glass, switching on the lights so I could see them. There was the eldest, Carissa, the one who looked like me, jöst incredible, my dad’s wife said, jöst like tvins, and in another room was the second eldest, Jessica, and in another the two youngest, Sabrina and Eugene, who’d crawled into the same bed and lay clinging to each other, my baby brother with his sheet cast off in the humid night, curled up in a little yellow T-shirt and beige shorts. Like the others, he seemed to be sleeping in the clothes he’d been wearing during the day, something I’d never realized was possible until then. I looked at him and felt immensely rich. So small he was, three or four years old, hair sticky with sleep lay curled on his forehead, and his sleeping face seemed so completely open and pervaded by innocence.
Like in the other rooms, the floor of my own room was covered by a thick wall-to-wall carpet, and on top of the carpet were rugs of the kind that are meant to look like genuine Oriental rugs. The color scheme was kept in shades of beige, and apart from my bed there were some chairs and, set back against one of the walls, a small decorative table with a vase of artificial flowers. For the likely reason that children and servants hadn’t been considered as important as architecture at the time the house was built, it was impossible to look out of any window on the third floor without first climbing onto a chair. It felt like the light that filtered through the many tall trees in the street outside and fell in through the small panes beneath the ceiling when the day began only had the vaguest connection with the world outside.
My first thought when I woke up the next morning was to see my sister, the one whose face had been with me ever since my dad had shown me the photos. I’d been imagining this moment ever since. I jumped out of bed, and there, in the door opening that led from the bathroom into her room, my own sleepy face appeared in front of me, oddly different, but with the same familiar, inquisitive expression, like when you look in a mirror. A few seconds passed before I realized that I wasn’t looking at myself but at my almost-twin sister, Carissa. For a moment we stood there like that, in the bathroom, staring at each other, the same and yet not the same, each transfixed by the other’s blinking almost-mirror image. I’ve forgotten what we said. But I only slept in my own room that first night. After that, we stuck together. After that, my room was just the place where I kept the brown suitcase. I didn’t turn around, but went with her into her room and became a part of the mirror world that opened up behind her: life in the house, life with my siblings and their mother, where boundaries and dimensions and contours were constantly in flux, as if in a feverish dream.
i can’t say how many times I’ve tried to write about my dad’s house. Nor can I say how many times I’ve entered it in my dreams, gripped by a nameless terror, in search of my dad and my siblings. Sometimes I feel that it wasn’t simply a house, a thing, a reference point or geographical location that framed my family’s life, but an independent character which influenced us, and that even now, at a vast distance of time and space and dreams, exercises its demonic power over me so that that I am doomed to try and describe it again and again—and fail again and again.
I was checking something in a book, and onto the floor fell one of the old postcards that my dad occasionally sent from St. Louis. It depicted a red gatehouse with three pointy towers, the historical entrance to their street. The wrought-iron arch we drove through each time we went in or out. I was impressed that my dad lived on such an important street that the entrance was recognized as a fitting motif for a postcard, on par with attractions like the Gateway Arch or the city skyline including the Mississippi River, and maybe my dad was a little bit impressed too, because he always had a small stack of them to send. The two tiny square windows, together with the arched wooden door in the center, resemble a face and reminds me of a sad o
r frightened wizard. He seems to be gasping for breath, as a drowning man would. In the middle tower, the center of what would be the wizard’s middle hat, rests a massive clockface made of wrought iron, with roman numerals and a pair of tapered arms busily showing the time, the time that unmercifully continues to tick …
•
On good evenings, after my dad had come home and we’d had dinner, we’d go for a stroll on the street. We looked at the houses, most of which had been built for the World’s Fair in 1904 and which, as the caption on the postcard states, were spectacular examples of classic American and European architecture. My dad’s wife had a special expertise in real estate, she made a living buying properties to refurbish and sell for a profit, or else she kept them as rental properties. She had three or four such properties, and at her peak, she had seven. Every now and then we went with her to spend a few hours in an empty apartment, skipping rope down on the sidewalk with Black girls our age while she scrubbed the floors in one of her sleeveless dresses and her admirably piled-up hair and bucket and broom and arms, white and bony and with veins that ran blue and bulging up and down like rivers on a map. She pumped the mop full of water, typically angry at someone, a faceless crowd pressing against the building, people who in her opinion ought to be scrubbing the floors instead of her, or people who didn’t appreciate scrubbed floors, the world was a sentient organism in which all living and dead conspired for her to stand here scrubbing. Lazy and unthankful, hurrible people, jöst hurrible. Mean. Cheap. Ugly.
But that was earlier in the day. Now she was strolling with my dad on the sidewalk, while we biked or ran around them in small clusters, everything was nice, the little ones were out on the street, and my sister and I hovered as close to the grownups as possible, my sister to listen to her mother’s chatter, me to be as close as possible to our dad. The evening light shimmered beneath the old oak trees, and the grasshoppers’ music rose like a thick carpet of sound from the lawns that sloped up toward the houses. Gray squirrels darted around us, and for some drawn-out moments we were watched by one of them, frozen in place on its way up or down a tree trunk.
They walked arm in arm, and she talked about the houses we passed. She was simply dressed in a plain sleeveless blouse and a straight knee-length skirt, and feet stuck in a pair of slippers with leather straps and wooden soles. Always subdued colors that were tastefully chosen, and no matter how hot the weather became (sometimes so hot that babies and the elderly died), she never exposed her bare legs. If her legs were as white as her arms, then they were very white, I’d say as white as the belly of a fish. It was as if you could observe the secret passageways of blood through her skin, the fine blue tributaries just below the milky surface, but her nylon stockings were always beige, and at least three shades darker than her skin.
Without ever discussing it, we were all acutely aware of her mood, but as long as we walked on the street, everything was fine, the houses were in their places and she could comment on them, whether they were ugly or attractive, and she could air her opinions about how people kept their homes.
When we reached the wrought-iron fence that sealed off the street, and which was covered with bushes and trees that, no doubt with the help of a gardener, remained green despite the heat, the sidewalk ended, and we crossed the street and headed back. It was like flipping through a catalog of architectural styles, some of the houses resembled old European palaces and mansions, while others seemed very American or like something from an English fairy tale.
On the opposite side of the street, we passed the only house in the neighborhood with just two floors. It was a redbrick house completely devoid of decorative embellishments or architectural ornamentation. It stood out, and I felt bad for it, the way it seemed pressed flat on the lawn, as if a cosmic hammer had pounded its noggin. The street’s only Black family lived there. It seemed as if the man in the house was always mowing the lawn. As soon as he saw us, he paused his machine and raised his hand to greet us.
Little by little I have now, with small steps, approached their house, which I’ve tried in vain to describe so many times. From the outside, it resembled the mini palaces that line Venice’s grand canals, a sand-colored mansion with lancet windows and a loggia on the right side. At the top, an imposing balustrade lined the third story, and above the entrance, in a glass mosaic, a peacock unfurled its tail in a half circle above the front door.
I have no idea when they bought the house, or when they moved in, or whether they were already living there when their eldest daughter was born. I knew only that my siblings consistently referred to their home as my Momma’s house or just the house, and not as their home.
I was never given the tour and as a result never really got an exact sense of the house’s actual size. It was as if it expanded in every direction, dark rooms leading into even darker rooms and fading into infinity.
In his short novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke describes a house that, with its never completely illuminated corners, “drained one of images without giving any particular recompense in return.” That is exactly like what this house did, it sucked the images from you without replacing them with anything else. Just like with the windows on the second floor, the connection to the outer world was never quite clear, but inside, the house spiraled around on itself in endless darkness. The two staircases especially aided to this boundless sensation, they ran in their separate enclosures, one originally designed for the masters of the house and lavishly decorated with tall wooden panels and a thick carpet, while right next to it ran a more spartan one meant for servants, with low panels and steps covered with a threadbare gray runner.
Along with my siblings, I spent a lot of time playing on these stairwells. If you were seen, you were dead. In my case, the game was intensified by the fact that my sibling’s mother could, at any moment, appear in front of me on the stairs. They were like those impossible drawings by Escher. You could walk down one stairwell while others walked up the second, and on each floor you could glide like a shadow across to the other stairwell, continually shifting direction, up or down, and in theory you could flit around forever without ever meeting anyone. And yet, you never really knew if you were alone or not.
Except for the master bedroom where the day ended, I hadn’t seen any of the second-floor rooms. Though it was left unspoken, this part of the house was reserved for my dad’s wife, especially during the daytime hours when he wasn’t home, but even when he was home he seemed like a guest in these chambers. Once, after I’d been visiting for several years, my sister said: Let me show you where my Momma keeps all her dresses. She tiptoed down the hallway past the master bedroom toward the rear of the house, and I followed her, passing through several bathrooms before she opened a door to an unfurnished room with a stone fireplace.
In the center of the room were clothes racks heavy with dresses and more dresses, some of which were in transparent garment bags from the dry cleaners, and many still had price tags hanging from them like dogs’ tongues on a warm day. The shock of seeing so many unworn dresses, the discomfort of constantly discovering new rooms, a creeping unease. There was something demonic about the house that made it spin on its own axis, mirror a panel, spew a stairwell, sprout a room.
“(I)t is all dispersed within me,” writes Rilke, “and will never cease to be in me. It is as though the image of this house had fallen into me from a measureless height and shattered on the bottommost part of myself.” And that’s how it is, the house is shattered on the bottom-most part of myself, and at night it rises in my dreams, and I tiptoe around inside it, it’s very different than I recall, its anatomy keeps changing, I search for my dad and my siblings, and the same thing happens every time. She appears on the stairwell out of thin air, wearing one of her sleeveless dresses, tall, with her thin, white, butcher-strong arms and her tower of hair poised like a crown on her head. Maybe she’s busy with something, a project, maybe she backs out onto the stairwell from one of the many rooms carrying a vacu
um or a plastic laundry basket filled with clothes, but when I see her, it’s just like in the game: I am dead. I shrink back, and she looks at me, equally startled. You scared me, she says. For a möment, I thought you were a ghöst. Then I wake up.
The sensation that she was intimately connected to the house, even the spirit of the house, has still not left me. An invisible membrane existed between the sections of the house we used and the sections that were off limits, and it seemed so closely bound with her that she could feel it if we, and especially I, pierced it.
Of the rooms on the first floor, we spent most of our time in the solarium, which had probably been designed for plants and trees but which my siblings used as a kind of common room, even though nothing had been done to invite it. Except for some random and not especially comfortable chairs, there was a television and a bamboo papasan that we took turns sitting in. Things lay scattered across the enormous marble floor, like stuff washed up on a beach after a shipwreck, a hula-hoop, a glass table in a shape that discouraged any use, and on the floor stood a table lamp, its shade still wrapped in plastic and with a cord crawling like an eel in the direction of the outlet.
One summer we were playing a few feet from the solarium, in the large hall behind the peacock mosaic above the main door, possibly having worked our way out there from this room, in any case, my brother’s toy cars were spread across the carpet, the patterns of which had become roads. I had to pee and wanted to run up to the third floor, but my brother said: Why don’t you use the bathroom right here? And sure enough, in a wood-paneled cubby beneath the broad staircase there turned out to be a toilet. I went in. The sweet, stuffy odor was more concentrated here than in the rest of the house. When I was done, I tugged on the chain to flush the toilet, and then I washed my hands. There was a hand towel as smooth as paraffin hanging on the rack. Though there wasn’t anyone else in the hall and I had locked the door, I didn’t feel alone, and when I exited with dripping hands, she was waiting just outside with a question: Why did you use this bathroom? Like a genie from a bottle, she was angry, and I sensed that I’d broken through one of the house’s membranes, maybe she’d felt it when the toilet flushed? It was as if the house’s internal organs were her internal organs.
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