The Upstairs House

by Julia Fine

  “Fucking Arthur and his motherfucking banging.”

  “What are you talking about? Don’t swear at your baby.”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t hear it either.”

  “You should be happy that she doesn’t have colic,” said my mother.

  AS A BABY, I had colic. I’m told I wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t be held, wouldn’t nurse. My parents ran the fan in the bathroom to mimic the sound of the womb and drove me in circles around the block, hoping for peace. I don’t think that my mother intended to use this against me, but each time she mentioned my difficult infancy, I felt she was referring to a debt that was accruing. She’d follow with “Now Ann was such an easy baby,” an epithet with its own expectations, its own weight. Already, to be sisters close in age is to invite comparison, to be cast as the pretty or the plain one, the brains or the brawn. You’d think each gene, once expressed, could never be replicated, the way we talk about sisters, the way we set sisters against each other. Because I was good at school, Annie was necessarily average. Because I practiced piano more often, I was the musician, no matter that both of us played. Do brothers feel this way, as if a basket of traits must be doled out between them, each attribute in limited supply? My father was a swimmer in college—not so fast that he broke records, but talented enough to make the team. My uncle Brian swam too, and in one fifty-meter freestyle they finished at exactly the same moment. Could such synchronicity even be possible of sisters? All my life I had felt Annie struggling to push past me, and each boost I offered her meant I myself slipped further back.

  My mother knew them both in high school—my father and his younger brother, Brian. She found something in my father that she didn’t see in Brian, some quality that attracted her. The way he could look at you as if he truly saw you, the way he was willing to reposition himself to best help you shine. When you were in his sights, you were incandescent. The trouble was that when he looked away, you turned off.

  “Has Dad come by to see the baby?” my mother asked, subconsciously tapping her long fingernails to the beat of the upstairs sounds. He’d had his other family for more than twenty years, and yet my mother still thought of herself in relation to my father, was still caught in his orbit. I didn’t want to be fifty-five and still in thrall to the man who’d destroyed the future self I had imagined at fifteen. I didn’t want to want any life but the one I was living.

  “No,” I said to my mother. “He hasn’t.”

  Once, in my father’s eyes, I’d been special. Once, I’d been paraded around his office and brought to his company softball games. Our mutual adoration had expounded, a reflection bounced off another reflection, an infinite vacillation of light. But then he left my mother crying in the driveway, left me and Annie watching at the top of the stairs.

  So no, Dad had not called or come by to see the baby. My stepmother sent an email from their joint account—no text, just a little animation of a stork turning his head first left, then right. The subject line: CONGRATULATONS!!

  “Well, you let him know it’s unconscionable.” My mother sniffed. “Not visiting his grandbaby. Not visiting his daughters.”

  “I will,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t.

  “Fuck him,” said Annie when she came to bring back Solly. Clara was now five days old—or maybe six. Time was syrupy and difficult to measure. “Seriously, fuck him.”

  “Fuck him,” Ben agreed.

  “Can you just stop?” I said. “It’s fine. It doesn’t matter.” I knew that they were looking at each other over my head, performing concern. “Of all the things for us to worry about, this doesn’t even make the list.”

  “It must stir up some sort of feelings,” said Ben, scratching Solly, who kept rubbing up against him. She hadn’t come to say hello to me yet. She was wary of Clara.

  “Don’t you think we should at least talk about it?” Annie touched the tender spot at the top of Clara’s skull where the bones hadn’t yet fused. Clara burped, and Solly startled.

  I knew my father well enough to have no expectations. I couldn’t understand why everyone thought that a baby would change him, when it wasn’t his baby, when he lived thirty minutes away from us in traffic, when he had my half siblings.

  Now the upstairs sound was someone scattering nails on tin, tipping a big bucket of nails and sending them clattering against the steps and against the floor and against the puckered metal landing. I winced, and Annie leaned forward with her fist under her chin. Solly ventured closer to sniff Clara’s feet.

  “Well?” said Annie.

  “So?” said Ben.

  “Can you all just stop whining about Dad and do something about that banging?”

  BEN CAME FROM a nuclear family, the younger child of Linda and Seth. Seth was a stamp collector, a gardener, a man who watched birds. He’d retired at sixty and now sat on the board of his synagogue and read thousand-page histories of World War II. Linda volunteered. I did not know what this meant about the way she spent her days. She had a perfectly shaped blond bob and, although she knew that my mother was Jewish, liked to ask me when I planned to convert. She doted on both her sons, but Ben was her favorite. I had to work very hard to convince her I was not by any means trying to take him away.

  Linda and Seth had been in Palm Springs with Ben’s brother when I went into labor. We told them not to rush back on our account, yet here they were, the trip cut short, Clara one week old and Ben’s paternity leave mostly spent and my hair still unwashed. I felt Linda eyeing my roots. She put a finger to the dust on the bookshelf, bent down to the bassinet. I could tell that Clara was too bald for her taste. She smiled without teeth and then said, “There’s a good baby.”

  Ben told me the judgment was all in my head—I just didn’t understand his mother. In truth, I understood her too well—we were too alike, which in retrospect must be why Ben had married me. Two simmerers, as my mother, a boiler, liked to call me. What I wanted: to be vibrant and mercurial, to have the highest of highs and the lowest of lows and enough faith in myself to ride them through; to be a happier, stronger version of my mother. What I was: a Linda—ruminating, nitpicking. Waiting for compliments to deflect, waiting for offers to turn down. Cleaning the salt-water splatter off the stovetop because otherwise who else would.

  “What books have you been reading her?” asked Linda.

  “She’s eight days old, Mom,” Ben said. “She isn’t reading any books.”

  “And I hope you aren’t letting her watch television.” Linda drew the word out, adding additional syllables. I stood up.

  “I need some air. I’m going to the roof.”

  “Bring a jacket,” said Seth. “It’s gotten chilly.”

  THE LAST TIME I’d climbed up to the roof, I was eight months pregnant. From the living room couch I’d watched clouds roll in and rain fall in sheets, knocking a potted plant from the balcony across the way. The darkness passed quickly but the rain continued, and I’d been struck with the urge to get out into it. The streets were empty and the alley was empty and my hair frizzed and my ankles swelled while Clara swam relays inside me. I only went back inside when my tank top soaked through. Since then I’d been too sore or too frightened or too tired to go upstairs again. I’d not yet been so badly in need of escape.

  Now I was still sore and tired, but I made it to the top and I drew my coat around my new body. I sat down on a patio chair and listened to the faraway hum of the el on its track. Arthur had left a crumpled beer can on a ledge—or maybe it was Ben, who was now worried about breastfeeding and alcohol and trying to be thoughtful with his own consumption. But Ben wasn’t forgetful. Ben hated the sound of scrunched aluminum.

  A seagull flew high overhead, incongruous but common, its shadow a gliding blur. And then the banging.

  This time it was coming from below me, which didn’t make any sense, because below me was the furnace, and my bedroom, and the nursery. The sound was different when I heard it from up here, more like hammering, more like the crash of toppling p
lywood. A dog barked, lower-pitched than Solly, who didn’t respond. She’d spent the morning conversing with the dog across the alley, so it was unsettling to now hear nothing from her, like shouting into a cave and receiving no echo. Perhaps she was frightened of Ben’s parents.

  Logically, the banging was coming from the insulation in between the roof deck and our upstairs ceiling—somewhere within the beams, hidden in the poisonous pink cotton candy. This seemed appropriate: a bit of commissioned construction between old life and new.

  I was immensely, unspeakably tired.

  What were they building? Where was the foreman? Who had Arthur hired? A mouse, I thought. A termite? A frantic rabbit burrowing—did rabbits burrow? Did they live in burrows? A yawn cracked my jaw. I would go down from the roof and catch the rabbit, remove its safety vest and helmet, release it into the park. I could take Solly with me. Though if I took Solly with me, she would likely try to play with the rabbit, and when that didn’t work she might eat it. I didn’t mind when in the past she’d brought us dead things—a bird crushed by a car tire, a rat. Ben didn’t like it, but I didn’t mind. I’d rather know what was out there. Still, now with Clara . . .

  I heaved myself out of the chair, launching back toward my life. Shuffling across the deck. Grimacing.

  And there it was, halfway down the stairs. An unusual door.

  The rest of the building’s entrances were uniform: heavy whitewashed wood, brass hinges, triple locks. Modern for the mid-2000s, when they were built, if simplistic. This door was intricately carved, its paint a peeling turquoise. I’d never seen it before.

  What was behind it? I couldn’t help myself. I knocked.

  I heard, “Come in.”

  Come derives from the Old English cuman—to move with the purpose of reaching. I reached for the doorknob. I twisted. The door swung open.

  Inside was a woman, and her medium-sized dog, which was dark and curly with a long face and a little sort of beard, and triangular ears that folded over. It was growling, but due to the heat of the room its tongue was lolling, dispelling the menace. The woman behind the dog had a long face and a straight nose, cheeks like apples. Her straw-colored hair was pinned back in 1940s victory rolls, her lipstick bright red and recently applied. She wore a brown tweed jacket with elbow patches atop a pair of wide-legged pants, and a brooch in the shape of a sharp-pointed star with an intricate swirl at the center. She seemed familiar, although I couldn’t place her. Someone I’d seen, perhaps at Arthur’s door, or the neighborhood bar. She stood on the third step of a ladder, looking down at me, a cigarette tucked into her mouth. Her feet were bare.

  Fur rugs stretched across the floor, under the ladder: a bearskin with the bear’s face still attached, but oddly flattened; some tawny thing that looked like different pelts all sewn together. No chic faux here—I could feel the animal heat still steaming off them. An array of paint-splattered tools and drop cloths sat in a corner—this woman was clearly responsible for the noise, though given the elegant finish of this particular room, her main construction site must have been elsewhere. On one wall hung a picture frame outlining a gaping hole through which I could see our back alley: an overflowing dumpster, weeds needling through concrete. Next to it was a second turquoise door, which, given the view through its adjacent window, had to open on a sheer drop down to concrete. The room should have been cold—it was early November and, as Seth had warned me, chilly. But the air coming in through the picture frame was mild, and smelled marshy, like the sea.

  I said, “What are you doing?”

  The woman laughed a low, raspy laugh, and took out her cigarette. Her eyes first welcomed me in on the joke, then softened and fell back to something painful before glazing over with a levity into which I was no longer invited.

  “Why,” she said, smiling, “I’m building a house for Michael.”

  “ARTHUR!” I WAS banging on his door, but I didn’t feel guilty, not with his friend upstairs hammering away. Ben had handled the paperwork when we signed for the condo, but I was sure there was a clause about notifying neighbors before beginning any major construction. Behind my own door, Clara waited. I found myself equally frustrated and thrilled to have a project that was not just her survival.

  “Arthur!” His car was in the garage, and his muddy shoes were sitting in the hall. Was he ignoring me? No, he’d just been in the shower. He answered the door while pulling on a T-shirt, and I resisted the urge to peer around him for a good look at his home. I’d always felt I could only know a person once I understood the places that had made them, the objects that they kept or threw away. The art on their walls. How recently they’d steam-cleaned their floors.

  “Is something the matter?” Water dripped from Arthur’s hair, down an earlobe, darkening his shirt. “Can I get you something? Maybe some coffee?”

  This seemed like a strange offer. The circles under my eyes must have been particularly brutal in the glare of the bare hallway bulbs. He must have heard Clara in the early morning, crying.

  “Sorry that the baby’s been so loud,” I found myself saying. “I try to get to her in time, but I’m still figuring out what I’m doing.” Why confess this? I was losing focus. What had happened to the rage that had propelled me here, caused me to slam the door on Arthur’s upstairs friend?

  “Oh, gosh,” said Arthur, “don’t even think about it.”

  “I do wonder,” I said, chewing on a chapped lip, mumbling, “if you can ask your friend upstairs to be quieter.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, I don’t claim to know the building codes, and I don’t even really care what she’s doing. If you want to add a room or whatever. It’s just the noise. It’s pretty constant.”

  “On the roof? I didn’t let anyone up.”

  “No,” I said, “in the stairwell.”

  “A woman in the stairwell? You think somebody broke in?”

  “No,” I said. “The woman hammering.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Weiler,” said Arthur, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I started to cry. Not because of his denial, not because of the way the woman upstairs had sized me up and found me wanting with my dirty pajamas and my flabby arms, the fact that her dog didn’t like me. Not even because I felt myself leaking, again, although I’d already dispelled what felt like twelve gallons of watery pee that morning. It was the Mrs. Weiler—the formality—when I knew him as Arthur.

  “Oh gosh, Mrs. Weiler,” he said. His earnestness made me cry harder. “It’ll be okay. Here, let me get some shoes on and we’ll take a look together.” He was talking to me as if I were old. He was talking to me the way I talked to my mother.

  I let him guide me by the elbow past our landing—where Seth’s and Linda’s shoes sat primly on the welcome mat—and up to the door to the roof.

  “You said this lady’s out there?” Arthur asked me.

  “No, she’s through the door on the stairs.” I pointed at the turquoise door, exasperated. I only had another twenty minutes until Clara had to eat, and I didn’t want to spend them illustrating the obvious. Arthur scratched the back of his neck.

  “Okay, I’ll head up and look for her.” He wasn’t listening. Jesus Christ, why wouldn’t anyone listen?

  Arthur went through to the roof, and I put my hand on the turquoise door, feeling for a sign of life behind it. I didn’t want to turn the knob without Arthur, to show up again without some plan of action. The door itself smelled like the ocean, brackish and burnt. Behind it I felt a vibration that was most easily reconciled as an electric drill. A hot-blooded chain saw. And suddenly the door was hot, the paint sticky and melting. Something behind it or within it was now angry, boiling. I yanked my hand away, afraid I might stick. Afraid this sudden anger, which was not my own, would seep in and consume me.

  Why not let it consume me? Maybe surrender would be beautiful: a free fall, in which I’d bear no more weight, in which I’d find the distance to laugh at my futility—a little speck o
f nothing, making nothing, meaning nothing. Responsible for nothing.

  “There was a time,” whispered the woman behind the door, “I felt well loved by you, and it was the warmest, happiest time in my life.” She wasn’t talking to me but to the anger, the heat that even now was blistering the wood. I reached toward the door, but before I could touch it, Arthur slammed in from the roof, yelling down that he hadn’t seen anyone.

  “Everything seems totally normal.” He took the stairs two at a time. Normal—from the Latin normalis: made according to the carpenter’s square.

  “Not up there,” I said. “Right here.” The door seemed cooler in his presence, the anger hiding itself.

  “Like, in the wall?” Arthur frowned.

  “Okay,” I said, “so she isn’t someone you invited.” I was well past the point of regretting my decision to involve him, not least because I sensed another gush of fluid coming. No, not coming, already here, with nothing I could do to prevent it. There was a prickling at the back of my neck that felt like the anger, laughing at me. “Excuse me,” I said, trying to push past him. But Arthur was adamant.

  “If you saw a strange lady in the stairwell, we should call the police. And let the condo association know.”

  “Yes, we can definitely do that. Let’s make sure to do that later. Can I please just get . . .” But it was too late. I had no pelvic floor, so it was silly to think that I’d have been able to make it down the stairs, through our front door, into the bathroom. My pants were soaked, rivers of clear fluid running down my legs into lakes on the pocked iron stair. Arthur looked as if he’d walked in on me naked. I could see his throat visibly tighten, his Adam’s apple lifting.

  “It isn’t urine,” I said, as if that made things any better. “It’s just . . . stuff from my uterus.” He was trying to smile, but it was a transparent mask that couldn’t hide what his eyes were practically screaming: Why would you do this? Why would you think this is okay?