The Upstairs House

by Julia Fine

  Solly was thrilled to have my full attention, to be stroller and bunting and carrier-free. She peed freely and often, rediscovering each fence post and tree. On our way back up, she bounded past our landing, heading up the stairs to the roof. Heading toward the turquoise door. Sitting patiently outside it.

  I hadn’t been to see the door since Ben left. I was afraid to show it to Clara—afraid she’d respond to the fur room with its adult child-sized chairs and its proliferation of flowers. Afraid she’d be her same impassive self. Afraid I was wrong about who it was inside; afraid I was right. I did wonder if Margaret had finished building Michael’s house, how her terrier was doing. I knocked.

  “Yes?” Her voice was raspy, with a mid-century pretension. “The door is open, just come in.”

  Inside, I saw no sign of the heat or the anger. Nothing was melting. Nothing was forcing its way in. The dog was asleep, and he stirred a bit upon hearing us enter, but did not acknowledge Solly. Margaret was seated at a desk, wearing an elegant green blazer, writing with an ink-dipped quill.

  “Oh, you good girl,” she said, and Solly went right to her, stubbed tail wagging. “What a sweet, good little girl.” She leaned down to cup Solly’s chin, and her wide-linked gold bracelet slipped down over the back of her hand. I stood in the doorway. In the corner of the room a small round table had been set for two: long candlesticks, champagne flutes, folded napkins. A chaise longue with a cigarette burn was piled with cashmere blankets. A calendar with paintings of dogs hung by the picture window: two red setters in profile, February 1944. Without looking up from Solly, Margaret chastised me: “You’re letting in the cold.”

  I closed the door, and Solly settled at her feet.

  “I only have a minute,” I said. “We’re going to the zoo.”

  “With the dog?” she said. “How silly.”

  “No, with the baby.” Also silly.

  “Oh, the baby,” she said in her low, gravelly voice. “Why didn’t you say?” And all at once I was nervous to be in this room that was not a room, in this house that was not a house. There was a smell to it that I couldn’t quite place, a combination of the sea smell from before and something gamier. Margaret seemed amused. She cocked her head at me, her hair falling jaunty at her shoulders. She smiled, and then turned back to her work. Her dog was still sleeping.

  “You’ve tired Crispian out,” she said without looking up. “All of that screaming.”

  “What?”

  “He’s very excitable.”

  Are you actually her? I wanted to ask. Are you Margaret? What are you doing here, why have you chosen me? Instead I picked at a scab on my elbow. How do you ask a breathing body if she’s actually a ghost? How do you say, You are a secondary figure in my graduate school dissertation, I’m sorry that I’ve abandoned you, I did just have a baby, to be fair. Is life easier, here in the 1940s? Where did you find dahlias out of season? What are you doing in my home?

  “How’s the house?” I asked. “Is it coming along?”

  “The house?”

  “The one for . . . Michael?”

  “Ah,” she said. “We’ll have to see. I’m hoping to persuade her it’s worthwhile. She’d rather summer in Bar Harbor. She has very good taste, very expensive, and won’t suffer inconvenience. It’s always a challenge to win her completely, which is why it’s so satisfying when one does.”

  “It seems like a lot of work for someone who might not even be grateful,” I said.

  “Well, she won’t show the gratitude,” said Margaret. “That doesn’t mean it won’t be there.”

  “Of course,” I said. Margaret frowned and brushed the feather end of the quill against her cheek. I put my hand to my own cheek in sympathy. There was a fire in the hearth. Polished brass bars supporting the whispering logs, a brass basket holding the logs not yet burned. A collection of fire tools, leaned against a curved brass sculpture. A blue clock on the mantel. Goodnight, goodnight. I wasn’t reading to Clara yet, although we had books. At my baby shower we’d been gifted some obscure Curious George books, Count to Sleep Chicago, Sandra Boynton. Everyone assumed I’d already bought the classics. I hadn’t.

  This room was small. It was not green. It seemed as if the fire was flickering in stop-motion, not fluid in the usual way of fire but moving in segments, like tissue-paper flames blown by fans on a stage. My life was moving in segments, shifting in front of me. My eyes were forever peeled open, and still I was missing the meat of things. When I moved closer, the fire was hot, the blaze translucent. I thought about Clara grown up, and I started to cry.

  “You wouldn’t want to be late for the zoo,” said Margaret, and I knew that she was sending me away. I took a breath and wiped my nose on my sleeve, and by the time Solly and I were back downstairs, my eyes were dry.

  MY MOTHER HAD said she’d pay for the lot, but when I turned in to the entrance, she balked.

  “It’s so expensive,” she said. “I’m sure there’s something free and closer.”

  “There won’t be,” I said.

  “Let’s just check.”

  So we circled the free spots along the park three times, checking, me clenching my jaw, my mother ooh-ing and oh look–ing and pretending to be useful.

  “There’s a family up ahead just leaving.” With a sharp manicured fingernail she pointed at a couple pulling a stroller from the trunk of their car. “Or maybe this group here?”

  I was frustrated, but mostly just tired. My mother showed me who she was twenty years ago, had shown me every day since. I knew better than to think I could depend on her. I used my credit card to pay for the lot and then my mother stood tapping her foot as I hefted the stroller from the trunk of the car, detached Clara’s car seat from its base and snapped it onto the stroller. “What a process,” she said as I unfolded the handles and unlocked the brake. “When you were little I did things the normal way.”

  Mom wanted to push our stroller, and kept telling me that people passing by probably thought she was the mother, not the grandma. I let her have this illusion.

  “Look at the seals,” she said to Clara. “Look at the leopard.”

  “It’s a cheetah,” I said.

  “No need for sass.”

  Mostly Clara slept, or stared up at the sky with those blue eyes that kept darkening. I hunched over on a plastic bench to feed her, cold despite the nursing cover, cold from the way my mother kept waving her scarf in an attempt to provide “modesty” that actually attracted more attention. The hot chocolate that we bought from a cart was cool.

  When Clara cried, my mother picked her up and rocked her, wrapped in the scarf, holding her up to the fabricated savannah to look at the lions’ half-eaten lunch. The zookeepers served the bloody carcass in a large cardboard box, folded up like a container of Chinese takeout.

  I had the feeling someone was watching us, that something dangerous was coming. I pushed the empty stroller along the enclosure, and kept whipping around to catch the owner of the eyes that I felt on my back. Was it because my pants were too loose in the waist? I was fifteen pounds of child and water weight down, but still carrying twenty. I wasn’t going to spend money on clothes until I knew where my body would land.

  Mom was holding Clara up to the lions, out over the rail. The zookeeper was standing nearby, watching them. Wet leaves decoupaged the stroller wheels, which felt like the zoo laying its claim on us. I couldn’t decide if this meant we’d been fated to come here. Across the concrete expanse, by the seal pool, a toddler in an unzipped coat hung from her nanny’s leg, hysterical because the seals were underwater.

  “No!” she kept wailing, “I need them on top.”

  “It hurts,” Clara had written on the message board. Or had she? Had I dreamed Clara’s first real communication? If it wasn’t a dream, how wonderful that her thoughts could be so clearly transmitted, how awful that they’d be so much like mine.

  About a hundred feet down the walkway toward the birds of prey, an old lady bought popcorn from a vendor. S
he had on an odd blue straw hat and a long trench coat. My mother still showing Clara, what? Her future? Her domain? Anything the light touches. Or was it everything the light touches? Popcorn grease was dirtying the lady’s white gloves, and when she turned, I could see that she was watching us through a veil draped across her wide hat brim. My mother held Clara farther out, palm supporting her neck. She was saying, “Can you see, little bird? Can you see?”

  The lion tearing into the carcass, his mate sunning herself on the far hill.

  “Little bird, can you see?”

  WE GOT HOT dogs from another cart, and I ate mine one-handed, splattering mustard on my coat. Clouds amassed, the afternoon fading. I knew we should leave—Clara would have to eat again, Solly was waiting. But I felt that I was waiting for some cue. Nothing had happened, there’d been no splash to break the surface of our day.

  Clara was back in her bunting. My mother’s eyes wandered, flitting from visitor to visitor. The veiled lady had followed us to the café, and sat with a hot cup of something, looking down at her feet. A popcorn kernel had stuck in the veil’s netting, hanging like a spider on a web. It must mean something. I half expected her to stand up with a big reveal and announce that she was what I had been waiting for: the warning sign, the storm. To stand up and announce that she was angry, and must be let in.

  But she just sat there with her tea, and we threw away our silver wrappers and folded up the stroller and clicked the car seat back into its base. On the way home we got every green light. Maybe that was my sign.

  8

  The diaper bag was filled with pockets—for bottles and wet wipes and pacifiers, for cell phones and snack cups and extra pairs of socks, for credit cards and ChapSticks and rash creams—but even with a place for everything, I couldn’t find my key ring.

  “You drove the car home,” said my mother, grimacing under the weight of Clara’s car seat.

  “Obviously. They’re here somewhere. You can put Clara down.”

  “I’m getting a mark on my hand from holding her up here,” said my mother, always a martyr.

  I reached my hand into each crevice, each pouch. At least this time Clara and I were on the same side of the door.

  “Just wait with her a minute while I run back down,” I said. “They’re probably in the car.”

  “You didn’t leave them stuck in the ignition?” My mother winced, stretching her hand.

  “That’s not a thing anymore,” I said. “You don’t stick anything in, it’s just a button.”

  Ours was the only car in the garage. I could have sworn I’d turned it off, but it was idling. The headlights were bright. The car was locked, which was a paradox: the car couldn’t be on unless the keys were within range, and if the keys were within range, the car should unlock when I pressed the SmartKey button on the door handle. It didn’t. They weren’t.

  I put my nose to the tinted rear window and quickly jumped back. The car felt as if it had been baking in an August sun, not sitting here in the garage on a cool November evening.

  We’d bought this car just months ago—a totem of our new life in Chicago, our new life as a family of three. It was sleek, and I liked driving it, but it was a gas-guzzler. Every time I filled the tank, I thought about how I was burning up our planet, how we’d decided that cloth diapering was too difficult, how once Clara was on solids I’d probably forget to fill the reusable baby food pouches, the stroller was too heavy to carry up the steps to the train. Don’t think about it, said Ben. Nobody else does.

  If there was a disembodied anger—and I knew there was, I’d felt it at the turquoise door, I’d felt it on the stairs and read the warning on the message board—it stood to reason it would punish me for buying this car, for choosing comfort over the future of the planet. It also stood to reason that the car would be upset—it hadn’t asked to be a massive metal guilt trip, it hadn’t asked to meet the anger. People had made it, and sold it, and bought it, and now people hated it. I almost felt sorry.

  I couldn’t tell if the anger had locked itself inside the car, or if it was trying to get in. Either way, this seemed to me a battle of anger versus vehicle, and it was better for the anger to be focused on the car than on our condo. I didn’t want to get stuck in the middle of things, so I went back upstairs.

  “I STILL CAN’T find the keys.”

  “Well, I can’t wait with you,” said my mother. “I’m meeting Shelly.”

  Annie was on her way, again.

  “When you have kids and you lock yourself out, I promise I’ll come save you,” I said to my sister over the phone, as if getting locked out was an inevitable consequence of childbirth. As if I didn’t need her so desperately I almost couldn’t breathe. Annie had just finished work, she had to come all the way from downtown. She said “I’m coming” in a tone that let me know this conversation wasn’t over.

  “That’s fine,” I told my mother. I was sitting with my back to the door, cradling Clara, who had started to sweat in her bunting.

  “If I’d known you’d lose your key, I would’ve brought my copy. Really, Megan, now that you have a child, you’ve got to be more careful. Keep track of your things. Prioritize.”

  I hadn’t told her I’d gotten the locks changed after the fire department broke down the door, that the key Annie was bringing was a new one. There wasn’t anything good that would come of her knowing. If I’d known you would lose your key. If you’d known your marriage would fail. If you’d known that once your daughter was born, you would have to be a mother. I supposed I would have to, again, call the locksmith. It could wait until tomorrow.

  “Go have fun,” I told my mother, and she kissed Clara on the forehead and swung off with her cross-body purse.

  Annie texted that the trains were running late. A mysterious object had been thrown on the track. I took off my boots to make sitting cross-legged on the floor a bit more comfortable. Ben had talked about getting a bench or a table with some flowers to liven the place up—so far we just had a taupe doormat. A scuff on the wall from when we’d moved in. A little 3B, hanging crooked. The zipper on my left boot was broken, the pull-tab snapped, jagged and sharp, and I nestled Clara in the crook of one arm while my other hand cosseted the metal.

  It was boring, sitting on the floor, waiting for Annie to come let us in. It was dirty. If I kept messing around on my phone, it would die. And so I told myself I’d walk up to the roof, just check in on the door. Clara didn’t belong behind it—I knew that in the same way I knew rain was coming when the sky was steeped gray, when the waves on the lake battered and spat against the boats tied up onshore. But I was already the type of mother who’d sit with a cup of tea and listen to her child cry, who’d justify with Well, this once.

  I stood, still cradling Clara. I climbed up the stairs.

  I’D BEEN LIVING in New York, where for a while it was easy to take the subway to a different self, easy to put on a new dress and try out a new restaurant and feel for just a moment you’d become a new person. But the illusion faded. I’d been in New York for three years, and I was tired. I was dating a guy who drove stick shift. We talked every day, and when we didn’t, I got antsy.

  A neighboring building was getting reroofed, and the insistent crash of hammers was abrasive until I recast it as a drum circle, a ritual. One afternoon, aching for distance, I took a pill that stick-shift guy had left in my bathroom—he was always taking pills, always ribbing me to take them. I told myself it was part of the ritual, the way up out of the rabbit hole, into a different sort of life. But all that happened was the sunlight glinting off the parked cars got even brighter. My mouth got very dry. My disposable razor blade shone deliciously sharp when I pressed it into the meat of my thigh.

  The hammering stopped, and my blood pulse took up the beat. I walked myself to the ER—tied an old T-shirt around my thigh and went to get stitched up at New York Presbyterian. At the hospital they gave me to an old guy and his intern, who was disappointed to find that I hadn’t sliced an artery. Wa
s it on purpose? they asked, and I said no. Do you think about self-harm? they asked, and I said doesn’t everyone? And then I laughed and said no and they sent me home with some pamphlets and a bandage that I could have bought at Rite Aid and a thousand-dollar hospital bill to fight about with my insurance company and eventually pay most of myself.

  It was time for a new way of living, I decided then. Time to be more in control, to take a step back from the edge. I’d go back to school, like I’d been telling my sister I wanted to. I broke up with stick-shift guy the next day, and my coworkers took me out for martinis, where I let them set me up a profile to meet someone online. I hadn’t really changed, outwardly. But in piercing the skin, I’d sliced something inside. I was too chicken to cut in and find it again, to push past the indentation, to tickle a paper clip under my thumbnail until it was suddenly real, a flyspeck of blood bruising beneath pearlescent polish.

  “What’s this from?” Ben asked once after sex, early on enough that it was still exciting, late enough that we’d spun ourselves intimacy. He touched the gummy layers of scar, and I didn’t mind because it felt like the scars weren’t really my skin, like he wasn’t actually touching me.

  “My inability to commit,” I said. Ben didn’t push me, just smiled and licked my thigh and pulled me closer. He was good with his tongue.

  I WAS TELLING this to the woman upstairs, who was now nodding and not at all shocked by my descriptions, though she’d come straight from the 1940s, all pin-curled bob and brooches and that mink coat draped over her chair. Nobody wore mink anymore, not real mink. PETA wouldn’t have it.

  “But the point is, it’s embarrassing,” I said, “Being a half-assed cutter. Not having the drive.”