Halfway House

by Katharine Noel

  Vlad held up the enameled box. “Before dinner, one more?” The accent was back. He didn’t wait for Pieter to respond before tapping out lines.

  Dinner was in the basement of the public library, a large room set with folding tables. As one after another official and townsperson rose to make hyperbolic too-long speeches about the necessity of bringing the arts to Clementine, Pieter realized again how much it had cost this town to have the orchestra there. He tried to keep their effort at the front of his mind, and not his irritation, as the librarian struggled to her feet (she had on a full-length taffeta dress, as though she were attending a prom) and began a rambling account of the decision to have a concert here. Under the table, Pieter jiggled his crossed legs, fast.

  “They said we couldn’t do it!” the librarian said. They? “To them I say: We. Have. Done. It.” She raised her arms; the hall applauded. “We have done it!” she cried again.

  He hated them, these people with their preference for Mozart and Vivaldi, hated the smallness of their ambitions. And then, just as suddenly, his hatred turned in against himself. Who was he to feel contempt for these earnest people, who had saved and schemed to bring him here?

  And, as always happened when he let his guard down, his wife’s affair rose in him. He had to get out of this room.

  “Bathroom?” he gasped, sotto voce.

  Mr. Stevenson pointed, frowning. He looked concerned, though Pieter wasn’t sure where his concern was directed. Pieter’s health? The rudeness of leaving mid-speeches? Standing, he stumbled a little, just as the librarian had, and began to make for the side door. People were looking at him. More and more people looked over. He was making a spectacle of himself. No: they thought he was about to speak. Some clicked their water glasses with their forks. Someone clapped, uncertainly.

  He called their house from the pay phone in the library’s dark hallway. The phone rang ten times before he hung up.

  Sometimes Pieter didn’t even know if he still loved Jordana. He looked so assiduously for hints of her infidelity that when he found one, no matter how weak—she was out! at seven at night!—his first reaction was triumph. And then the sensation of unhingement. He felt literally as though he were being unhinged, the parts of him gently, stealthily moved apart. His elbows and hands felt cold and buzzy, and he thought he might throw up. He shoved through the library’s heavy side door.

  Outdoors, he leaned over, hands on knees. He was panting, as though he’d run.

  He felt he should have gotten over the affair, at least enough to think of it with philosophical rue. Instead, it had lodged itself jaggedly in his chest. If Pieter talked to a young man, any glimmer of humor or kindness radiated threat. And at the same time, he sought them out, the ones he thought Jordana could possibly fall in love with. Young, not necessarily handsome, but probably artistic in some way. If he saw Jordana talk to someone at a party, he had to talk to them also. Partly he was trying to minimize danger—he acted friendly and interested, on the theory that suspicion would only make the other man competitive. There was also an element of fascination, though, like seeing cars about to collide. He actually thought Jordana probably wasn’t cheating. But part of him wanted the crash.

  After a few minutes, he became aware of the cold. He took a step away from the building, then turned and looked back at it. Even these small, depressing towns often had stately public buildings. The library was Federalist in design: square, three-story, with greenish-black shutters and doors.

  “Pieter?” Vlad said, poking his head out the door.

  Pieter had to clear his throat twice before he trusted his voice. “I’m fine. I just don’t feel very good.”

  “That’s natural when you’re coming down.” Vlad hesitated a moment. “You should come in soon.”

  Pieter waved and tried to smile.

  After Vlad had gone back indoors, Pieter imagined a different exchange. He could have said, Not physically unwell. I mean inside. And Vlad might have said That’s what I meant, too.

  His loneliness seemed without bottom.

  After a time the worst passed. He straightened, dragging his hands down his face. He took a few deep breaths, then made for the door from which he’d exited.

  Light came murkily from a crude wooden chandelier, high above. He could hear the noise of the “banquet” downstairs—voices so clear they must be traveling through heating vents, the words oddly indistinguishable. He found the narrow basement stairs behind one of the hall’s wooden doors. The walls were brown in the process of being painted white, or else white in the process of being painted brown.

  Descending the stairs, it seemed what mattered wasn’t the dramatic stuff: Jordana kissing him in her parent’s apartment, or Luke being born in the cab on the way to the hospital, even Angie throwing herself into the pool. What truly made up his life were the moments like this one, when something—maybe only the cocaine’s polluted wake—took him out of himself. All he wanted was a life that had coherence and a little grace. It didn’t seem like such a big thing to ask, yet here he was, leaning against a half-painted wall, as somewhere below floated a crowd, their faint cheers rising around him.

  Sixteen

  At the halfway house, Lily was making her slow progress down the driveway, clutching Teresa’s hand. Angie, on the way home from her day program, stopped to watch. Staff tried to have the house Keep a Low Profile because there had been protests about their moving into the neighborhood. Some of the houses still had signs up: not here. Residents weren’t allowed to smoke on the front porch, only the back, and they couldn’t wear nightgowns or pajamas outdoors. Once a day, though, Lily had to walk, which was in no way low profile.

  Angie thought, We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it—a gay rights slogan, but she liked the feel of it against the inside of her head. Lily weighed probably close to three hundred pounds and had only two expressions: catatonia and terror. She was twenty-eight but looked forty, with her lank hair and thick glasses. Trembling all over, almost to the mailbox, she said, “That’s close enough, that’s close enough.”

  “Keep going. Just a few more feet.”

  Lily was afraid of stairs, water, night, cars, people speaking foreign languages, dark liquids, children, and the outdoors. She touched the mailbox, stretching as far as she could to avoid taking another step. Then she held her hand out toward Teresa, who dug Lily’s daily pack of cigarettes out from her pocket. Cigarettes were the only way to make Lily do anything. Lily grabbed the pack and barreled back to the house, moving so fast now that Teresa could barely keep up.

  Angie followed them into the dirty light of the front hall. A sign leaned against the hallway wall: bright futures. It was the name of the halfway house, but the less-than-brilliant late realization that they needed to Keep a Low Profile meant the sign had never been put on the lawn—as though without the reminder, the neighbors would forget that the six patients and three staff at Bright Futures weren’t really just a big, jolly family. The bathroom door was closed; Bill was probably jerking off. He spent about three hours a day in there.

  The kitchen linoleum, walls, and cabinets were all a pale yellow someone must have hoped would brighten the small room, but which succeeded only in looking grimy. Angie would bake a cake. The refrigerator’s sole magnet held the chore wheel. Lily wasn’t on the wheel: because of the water phobia, her chore was always to vacuum the living room. (She also didn’t have a turn making five o’clock coffee. Dark liquids, she insisted, might be made of ground-up bugs.) Russell hadn’t done the breakfast dishes again, and Angie couldn’t cook if the sink was full of dirty dishes, so she washed them. Not wanting to put them away on dusty shelves, she took everything out of the cabinet. The supposedly clean dishes were sticky to the touch. In her head, accelerating and stuck, like an advertising jingle: we’reherewe’requeergetusedtoitwe’re herewe’requeergetusedtoitwe’reherewe’requeergetusedtoit.

  She washed the counters, the gunk that built up on electric cords and stove buttons, the dirty moldi
ngs. She’d meant to make a cake! No chocolate in the house, but oranges. Orange cake. She turned on the oven, found her—clean clean clean, thank you very much—sifter, sifted flour. Some flour got on the floor, and she found the broom, which wouldn’t budge a large black spot; she got the steel wool and knelt to scrub it. Down close like this, she realized that about half of what she’d taken to be the linoleum’s pattern was actually gunk. Filling a pot (there was no bucket, natch) with soapy water, she worked on her knees, scrubbing in small concentric semicircles. The linoleum turned out to be beautiful, with a pattern of pale green leaves vining against the lemon yellow. She was forgetting the cake. She sprang up, sloshing and almost upsetting the water; she’d deal with it in a minute. The fridge drawer was labeled produce! She’d said once, “It’s like a communist exhortation,” and the staff person, Mark, articulating slowly as an ESL teacher, said, “Produce. Pro duce is things like lettuce and apples.” “Oh,” Angie had said with false brightness, “fruits and vegetables!” and Mark had beamed at her as though she were a particularly bright student.

  In the produce drawer, she found the oranges, along with carrots that had sprouted roots. And potatoes! You weren’t even supposed to keep potatoes in the fridge; they went starchy and inedible. Maybe even poisonous, she didn’t remember, but they were related to deadly night-shade. She’d get rid of them in case. She pulled out the potatoes, the gone-soft celery, the carrots with their soft white fringe of new roots, piling everything on the floor—she’d bring the trash can over in a minute. The whole drawer smelled faintly rotten. She pulled it out, dumping it into the sink. She should defrost the fucking freezer, now that she’d started. She bet none of this had been done in months. It was outrageous, that she paid to be here and Staff was paid to be here. She should become Staff somewhere. God knew she had enough experience. She’d been places where Staff were crazier than the clients. It took a certain kind of craziness to want to live in a halfway house. Teresa was idealistic and would burn out, and Mark—Angie would swear to it—had all the negative symptoms of a schizophrenic: the inability to read social cues, the over-loud voice, the sudden, awkward exiting of conversations. The center drawer, marked frigid meats, was sticking.

  “You’re home,” Trevor said, from the doorway. “Are you trashing the kitchen?”

  “I’m cleaning it. Help me with this drawer.”

  A silence: his meds meant it took Trevor longer to process things. He had a narrow, handsome face, and his dark hair, long in front, fell into his eyes. “It looks trashed.”

  “Make omelets, break eggs. Are you going to help me with this drawer?”

  She worked her hand into the narrow opening she’d been able to make already. Pulling out the plastic packages of bologna and ham, she tossed them onto the floor. Together they wrestled the drawer out.

  “The trash can,” said Angie, but as she rushed across the room to get it, she slid on the water she’d meant to mop. “Hey, look,” she said, sliding again. “This is my dad skating.” Angie clasped her hands behind her back, looked down, frowned, and swept rapidly across the kitchen floor. “Now this is my mom.” She fell showily on her butt and said, “Fuck shit damn.”

  “… Your mom says fuck shit damn?”

  Trevor was two years younger than Angie, twenty. Although romantic relationships weren’t supposed to be allowed at Bright Futures, she and Trevor had been together six of the six and a half months she’d lived here. She lay back on the floor. The lamp was of dusty red glass like in a pizza parlor. “I’m looking up its skirt,” she said.

  “… What?”

  “Come here, come lie here.”

  Trevor didn’t say, On the floor? He lay down, a potato rolling away from his foot and under the stove. Angie looked for faces in the water stains that moved like clouds across the ceiling.

  Trevor rolled close and took her hand. “Who was the first person you ever knew who was crazy?”

  “Not till the hospital, I don’t think. Before that, I had a babysitter who tried to kill herself. Not while she was babysitting us. I think her boyfriend broke up with her.”

  The pause. Talking to Trevor was like talking on a bad overseas phone connection. Then he laughed. “How did she do it?”

  “Cold pills. Contac.” Residents weren’t supposed to talk about the subject but they did, all the time. They were a house of failed suicides, five of the six of them having made attempts. Usually multiple attempts.

  Keeping her eyes on the kitchen light, she put her hand under his shirt. Even in heat like today’s, Trevor wore long sleeves. He didn’t let Angie see the burns on his body, but she could touch him. His stomach reminded her of one of those topographical maps in elementary school, at once bumpy and plastically smooth. Trevor had almost died when he’d set fire to himself in front of his parents, three years ago. He was the one resident, though, who didn’t count as actually having made an attempt: he’d been messianic, psychotic, not suicidal.

  “If I was crazy, this place would make me crazier,” Trevor said softly.

  “Tell me about it.” Beneath his armpit, her fingers found the rough place where the blanket his parents had used to smother the fire had fused to his skin. A few fibers had been left—cutting them out would have meant doing one more graft—and his skin had grown around them. He drew her hand away, up to his lips.

  The water on the floor had begun to soak through her clothes. Plus she was getting bored. She started to get up. “I want to make my cake.”

  He didn’t let go of her hand. “Stay here with me.”

  “I’m making a cake.” She jerked from his grasp. “I’m fucking making a fucking cake.”

  Nighttime. Lily already snoring heavily, stoned on Ativan. Rachel perched on the edge of her bed, biting the hair off her wrist. Rachel was twenty-five, African-American, very pretty: men always tried to talk to her when she and Angie went downtown. She had survived two attempts, the second a jump from a high bridge. Jumps were higher status than overdoses like Angie’s. If you jumped, you were seen as having really meant it. Her red welted arm glistened with spit. Lifting her head, she turned her arm over, searching, and then with a small grunt began gnawing at a spot where she must have seen a minuscule hair regrowing up through the weals.

  And Angie, wide awake, wide wide wide awake, lay under the covers, legs thumping the mattress, running in place.

  Seventeen

  Wendy woke at six. Quietly, she found her work clothes and dressed without waking Luke. Before this summer, she hadn’t realized how much he slept. She liked how guiltlessly pleasurable it seemed for him. Sprawled on the futon, he looked smaller and younger, vulnerable in a way he never seemed awake. The blockiness of his forehead was offset by the fullness of his lips—open now, with a damp spot on the pillow beneath. His rusty hair, usually pulled back into a ponytail, fell into his face.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, she touched her toes, pressing her forehead to her knees. She liked these early mornings, when Madison was cool and still. The whole town emptied between May and the end of August, which meant that she and Luke seemed to live in a pocket of time—eating bread and cheese for dinner, going to movies at the Orpheus, calling each other during work—that scarcely touched their real lives. Lately, she’d been sleeping at Luke’s every night. Semi-living together broke several of her rules for herself, but instead of making her feel panicky and out of control, she felt a strange, lazy complacency.

  Pulling her hair back, she turned on the kitchen tap and bent to drink the running water. Outside, a rattling green Galaxie bumped to the curb. Wendy wiped her mouth, swung her ankle up onto the sink edge to stretch her hamstrings. A big blonde girl emerged from the car. She turned in circles, then bounded up the walk, knocked on the frame of the screen door, and—without waiting—walked into the kitchen. She seemed jittery but happy, wearing cut-off jean shorts and a man’s tattersall shirt, sleeves rolled up to her biceps.

  “I bet Luke’s still asleep. That car,” the girl announced, poin
ting, “has a mind. The heater doesn’t turn off. All the way across Pennsylvania, which is a huge state; you don’t think of its being huge, it’s so innocuous and rectangular, I mean, I think of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and the Amish, and then I run out of associations—oh, Hershey’s—but you’re on the highway and both sides are crusted with houses of windows and there are these hundreds of lives going by every second—you know those blink and you’ll miss it signs? You look away and you’ve missed seeing about a hundred houses, all of them full of people’s lives and their ideas, their radios, talking to them. All those garages full of Black and Decker stuff. Hershey’s isn’t even automatic, I don’t see it in the store and remember Pennsylvania. You must be Wendy. You don’t look like a cheerleader. And Quaker Oats, and Quaker Oil. Can you imagine, like, Hindu Oats? Baptist Oats? They’d be horrified. Hor-rified. No one’d buy it.”

  “That was high school,” Wendy said, of the cheerleading. Her brain was several steps behind. This must be Angie. She looked different from her pictures, heavier but more cheerful. Luke had just talked to her two nights ago on the phone, and Wendy was pretty sure he and Angie hadn’t discussed her visiting.

  “You’re not blond, though. I actually went through Hershey, not that it’s exactly on the way. There’s the factory on one side of town, and a few miles away is a paper mill.” She spoke so fast the sounds pushed together, hard to separate into words, the way people talked when they were very tipsy but not yet drunk. “So you smell chocolate—it’s so strong!—and then the wind changes and you smell wood pulp, it sounds like a good smell, wholesome, right? but it’s more, God, closer to burning shoes, I would have bought some chocolate, but this was like two in the morning; the factories must go all night, chocolate and paper. Do you have any coffee?”

  “Luke’s housemates might have left some. You drove here from New Hampshire?”