The Upstairs House

by Julia Fine

  As soon as he saw me struggling with the stroller, he ran over to hold the door, letting in a gust of peppery air. The woman rolled her eyes, and when she saw that I’d brought Clara, she almost physically shuddered. It’s not like we were on an airplane. Clara wasn’t crying. The woman could easily get up and move. In a remote corner of my mind I knew we were treating this coffee shop like our living room. But what was I supposed to do? Just go to Gymboree and preschools?

  Ben didn’t notice. Ben beamed. He took Clara out of her bunting and held her up for all the denizens of Espresso House to see. He was such a delivery-room dad that I thought he would start passing out cigars. A few people smiled, but most turned away. They didn’t need a baby in a coffee shop on a Thursday afternoon, this same baby that many of them had seen in this same coffee shop on Tuesday afternoon. Why did I feel such a sadness for Clara?

  She barely seemed to recognize that we were no longer at home; the bagel slicer behind the counter was just as intriguing as the ceiling fan as the bathroom tile as the hand Ben was now waving in her face. She yawned, and sort of hiccupped.

  I ordered a tea, but didn’t have time to drink it. Clara started turning her face back and forth, the way she did when she’d be hungry soon, the way she did when she was seeking out a breast. I got Clara bundled up to leave again, and put the tea in the stroller caddy. I forgot it in the garage, left it atop the car, still steeping.

  The next afternoon I walked by the coffee shop to visit Ben and saw Mr. Garbage paying for something at the counter. Too risky. I turned around. It was too cold for a walk, so I went back home through the alley, saying, “Crunch, crunch, crunch,” as the stroller wheels ran over fallen leaves, as if Clara understood me.

  I could hear Solly barking from inside our unit as I hefted the car seat up the stairs, the clip of her paws on the hardwood as she skittered back and forth in front of the door. Something was wrong.

  “Careful,” I said, as I walked in, lifting Clara at an awkward angle—all angles were awkward—so that Solly wouldn’t slather her with kisses. She must have been excited we’d come back so soon, I thought, although that didn’t quite make sense.

  Solly’s feet were wet. She ushered us toward the master bathroom, yipping.

  Music was playing, but I couldn’t trace its origin. A tinny sound; a woman’s voice spun out like treacle. Birdsong? There couldn’t have been birdsong.

  I’d set up candles in the master bathroom while I was pregnant, but never lit them. I didn’t like baths—couldn’t get past the thought of marinating in my own dirt—but they were supposed to help with the contractions once labor began. These candles were lit now: one on top of the toilet, two on the ledge by the bath. The tap was on, the water overflowing. A tenderness to the grout—the water would seep down through the ceiling to the kitchen.

  If Ben had walked in on such a scene he would have panicked, called the police and maybe the plumber. I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything more than a resigned recognition. This made sense. This was just Michael, asserting herself.

  “What do you want?” I asked out loud, over the splurge of the tap. I put Clara on the middle of the bed and went back to turn off the water. Michael had it on the highest setting, scalding. Too hot for me to reach in and lift the drain. The kind of hot that forced you into your body, overwhelmed all other feeling. Was she looking for a body? Trying to come back to herself—the physical self that portrait artists had lauded “the most beautiful woman in America,” that performed Shaw’s Saint Joan, crossed the country giving lectures, had her own radio program. A dilettante. Always needing a platform. Always needing a stage. I thought about how it must feel to be seen, to be so beautiful, and then to be nothing. But first, to be old.

  There are two kinds of legacies to leave—the things that you build and the things that you conjure. Michael had left both: she’d written poems, she’d birthed children.

  “She didn’t like her children much,” Margaret had said, “but she did love them.”

  “And did she love her poems?”

  Margaret hadn’t answered. She’d been watching me put on my lipstick, that night that I left her with Clara. Why had we been talking about Michael? Because Margaret always wanted to talk about Michael—what she wore, the way she spoke. There was something oedipal in her obsession, her need for Michael’s affirmation. But Michael didn’t want to be needed—she wanted to exist in a place where she was idolized but not asked to do anything, where when she offered her opinion everyone would stop and listen, but no one would ever ask her for it, and it would mean more for the lack of asking, and she would mean more for the mystery. Or maybe that was me.

  Did Michael love Margaret? I wondered this as I finally stuck my hand into the tub, the tile firm against my knees, my arm immersed to the shoulder, my entire body prickling with the heat. If there was no love, then why was Michael here? The baby bunny tries to run away, and the mother will always run after it. Margaret had based The Runaway Bunny on an old French love song about a man chasing a woman. It wasn’t romantic, it was threatening: I don’t want to be yours, yet you refuse to let me go. Margaret had co-opted it, shifting the narrative in the process: the mother and her child, the cord stretched tight but never broken. The lover and beloved. Poor Margaret, I thought to myself. Poor Michael.

  I was facing the tub from above. There was no reflection. Why was it that in films there was always a reflection? There should be my face in the bath, and then another face behind me, or my face rippling to morph into another face, the reflection of it laughing at me. Visions in the fire were always signs of things to come, but visions in the water showed what already had happened.

  I felt around for the drain, but couldn’t find it. Instead, something slippery and grasping was blocking its spot. Up on my haunches to remove it, I was elbow-deep, digging blindly. In candlelight, the water seemed opaque. Was this a fingernail? A knuckle. Then a hand rising to meet me, an impossible arm stretched thin through the pipes, slithering out through the drain.

  How ridiculous, I thought, but then the hand grasped my wrist, pulling itself up by pulling me down, and now my arm was completely in the water, now my chest. My nose skimming the surface of the floral-scented bath, those fingers clawing at my shoulder.

  Then I was under.

  There were two hands now, ten fingers, and they were holding my face, stroking my cheeks. My back, already sore from the constant curl of breastfeeding, was shot through with fire, and my lungs shot through with fire, and I tried to pull up, but Michael was strong. My every instinct screamed freedom, my body bucking for breath—still she held on. What was I to do? Even as it was happening, I knew that it couldn’t be happening. I was deeper than the depths of the tub, I was burning. An airless giddiness overtook me. I thought I tasted salt. I opened my eyes and saw a lobster sputter by.

  And suddenly the hands were not only letting me go but forcibly pushing me out of the bath. As soon as I realized what they were doing, I yanked myself up and the drain cleared and the water began swirling down. Water rained from my hair as I watched it chug shallower, and then I was coughing, and then I was crying—the two compounded until I couldn’t untangle them, one egging on the other until I was snotty and hoarse. From the bedroom, I heard Clara’s faint babbling, and this normalcy was calming. My breathing slowed, my sobs less frequent. I wiped my nose. The candles flickered against the dark walls. The foreign music was still playing, and I heard the dripping of the tap, the thrum of the heat heaving down through the air vents. Then the candles snuffed out, each releasing a sooty wisp of loss, and I waited for these wisps to come together, for Michael to materialize.

  She didn’t. What did she want with me? I had laughed at her narcissism. I’d thought her poetry pretentious. I’d belittled her, disliked her, because Margaret’s biographers disliked her, because they claimed she’d encouraged Margaret to dislike herself. Maybe now she disliked me. Had I already made her angry? The message-board mothers had warned me not to make her
angry. Clara had warned me. Clara was out there, alone.

  Clara lay on the bed, on her back, and from the angle of the floor it looked like she was laid out on an altar, wrapped up in her bunting as a sacrificial lamb. The ceiling fan click-clicked above her, hypnotic. The shadow of each blade cutting through and across, waves of light and dark exploring her face. I’d hit a wall of exhaustion, and was unable to climb it. I sat against the bedframe, trying to steel myself, trying to force myself closer, trying to breathe. Clara up on the bed, enraptured. Me on the carpet, shivering in my nursing bra and yoga pants, grasping at the bedspread, trying to protect her from someone I couldn’t see. Someone who wanted to be seen.

  My phone was flashing—a series of notifications, one after the other, sliding down the screen like beads threaded on a string. The phone was at the edge of the bed, and I yanked the sheet to slide it down so I could reach it.

  Someone had responded to my message-board question, reviving my thread from so many days back. Does anyone else feel like someone they can’t see is watching them? The answers flooded in now:

  Anon654: Yes. Pay attention.

  Anon655: Get back to work, Megan. Start writing. She’s waiting.

  StrwbryLvrTx97: My motherinlaw is around all the time and shes really nice but sometimes I can’t stand it. Also she gibes my baby water even though I’ve asked so many times for her not to. I don’t know what t do.

  I shuddered. Michael was watching me. Michael was waiting. But Michael was telling me exactly what she wanted. Michael needed me alive, because then I could write about her. This knowledge was a comfort.

  I hiccupped. Swallowed. Whispered, “Clara?”

  Although she didn’t yet know her own name, Clara turned her head toward me. She was fine. She was just a normal baby, safely positioned at the center of the bed, discovering small and lovely truths about the world. The magic of the ceiling fan. The safety of a mother. She cooed; the sound was steadying. I took a breath, and clicked out of the What-to-Expect app to find a text from Ben waiting: Hi babe, I miss my girls. The little emoji with x’s for eyes. (What did that mean? I’d always thought that one meant dead.) I’ll head back early and we can take C out for dinner tonight?

  I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my palms. I wrung out my wet hair.

  This could all make sense, if I tackled it with logic. Ben wanted to get dinner. Michael wanted me to write. These were basic desires, and I could fulfill them both. Ben could text me to let me know what he wanted, but Michael didn’t have a smartphone; she had to resort to other methods. But now I knew. She’d made herself clear, and now I understood, and since I understood, I could take action, and since I could take action, it wouldn’t happen again.

  I just had to reply to Ben. I just had to write about Michael.

  I straightened my shoulders, rubbed my eyes with my wrists.

  I texted back: Sure.

  13

  Ben had to go back to Houston—this time just for a few days. He was going to miss Clara’s one-month birthday, but would be home for Thanksgiving.

  “I’d rather you be here for her birthday,” I said. “I don’t even care about Thanksgiving.” For the past two years we’d flown out to Ben’s brother’s place in Utah for a week—Linda and Seth, too—a whole Weiler reunion with awkward small talk and too much wine and attempts at flag football that went nowhere. We’d suggested that this year we have Thanksgiving in Chicago, given that we’d have a newborn baby and were in no shape to fly, but Linda had balked. That was not how things were done. We could stay at home, but she and Seth absolutely must fly to Utah. She hosted Hanukkah. She hosted the High Holidays. She did not host Passover, and she did not host Thanksgiving. Ben was clearly disappointed about how it all played out—he wasn’t used to hearing no from his mother—but he agreed it made no sense to fly with Clara.

  “It’s not a birthday every time she turns a month,” he said now.

  “You know what I mean.”

  He nodded and acted contrite. Clara was lying on the bed next to his suitcase while he packed, her special tummy-time mat with its raised pillow puffing up atop the comforter. Her forehead still loose and wrinkly, like elephant skin. When would she grow into her body? Ben tickled her stomach after folding his socks.

  I was in the master bathroom, cleaning the infant tub insert that fit into the sink. My hands kept slipping: white vinegar pooling on the counters, weeping down onto the floor. I spilled or tripped or crashed a lot lately—from the elbow down, my arms would start to tingle the way they once had if I drank too much caffeine. The message-board mothers blamed hormones for the clumsiness, and for the night sweats, and for the difficult digestion. It gave me a sense I was no longer in control of my own body. I supposed this was appropriate, as my breasts were Clara’s alarm clock, the crook of my neck was her pillow, and my hair was only there for her to gnaw on, as a place for her to spit. I’d wake up some mornings—a relative term—and my full left side would be numb, and I’d wonder if she’d finally sucked me dry, if this was it for me.

  “You should exercise,” said Annie when I told her about the feeling. She was calling to check in, since Ben was gone. After seven voice mails, I’d finally decided it was easiest to just pick up the phone.

  “It doesn’t happen when I’m holding the baby,” I clarified. “Just when my arms are free. Maybe I pinched a nerve carrying the car seat.”

  In the kitchen, Michael jostled the icemaker. For the past week she’d only been around the house when Ben wasn’t, and now that he’d left for Houston, she was making herself comfortable. She liked to remind me she was there by turning on the electric teakettle or rolling pens across the counter—things that either hinted at the heat of which she knew I knew she was capable, or things that prompted me to get back to my writing. She wasn’t used to modern appliances. They frustrated her.

  “Your fridge is loud,” said Annie. “I can hear it through the phone.”

  Over on her play mat, Clara moved her foot so that her jingle-bell anklet sounded a tiny, tinny peal. Theoretically, Clara would associate the sound with the movement, and therefore recognize she had a body. I wasn’t sure if this theory was a good one. After all, you didn’t have to have a body to make noise. You merely had to move molecules. Make waves.

  Another crash from the kitchen, the ice falling from the top of the freezer to the well in the door. I knew better than to say anything to Annie about Michael. She was mine—mine and Margaret’s. And Clara’s.

  “Jeanie asked us to Thanksgiving,” Annie said suddenly.

  “Wait, what?” I coughed.

  “Yeah, she emailed me the other day, said it was Dad’s idea, he wants to see the baby. I guess Kelsey mentioned she’d come by.”

  “Why wouldn’t she reach out to me herself?” I asked. I gave Clara her pacifier and stood up, cracker crumbs cascading off me.

  “I don’t know, Meg. Should we go, do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I think we should. Rip off the Band-Aid. Introduce Clara to the rest of her family.”

  “Introduce Clara to her family,” I repeated.

  “Are you okay?”

  I was thinking about rabbits. I was thinking about beagling. One of the many things to love about beagling was the clear delineation of predator and prey. Not once in its terrified existence did the rabbit think it was in charge—its little heart fluttering, its ears alert, its back legs propulsive, never fast enough, no such thing as fast enough. Speed was its only asset, which in a way made everything easier, closing off other possibilities, letting it focus on one thing. Sometimes the rabbit got away. Sometimes the dog would crack its neck but other times would mouth it, wet and matted, bloody, still alive.

  With my father, I had never been in charge. But I was a parent myself now, and he and Jeanie wanted something from me. I had power.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll go.”

  I FELL ASLEEP in Clara’s glider, my neck slumped down, my arm perfe
ctly still. I woke up to the panting of the garbage truck out in the alley, the scrape of the dumpster, the exhaust’s distant trills. Clara dozed on my chest, a little baby bird asleep. Someone had covered her with a quilt. It hadn’t been me.

  MICHAEL WANTED ME to write. Research I did gladly, but for me writing had always been a painful bloodletting that had to be scheduled. I found it unfair that in order to be a doctor of history, you had to produce, you had to publish. Really what I wanted was to be a receptacle for knowledge, to hold the knowledge in my body and just pass it on to Clara through the enzymes and the vitamins and the minerals, let her suckle at the font of my knowledge, and do with it what she would.

  I sat down at the kitchen table and pulled up my Word document, jumping through the tracked changes, which were mostly dated more than four months back. I pulled up a new, blank document and wrote “Michael.” I could tell that she liked this, because the room got comfortably warm. My phone rang. Annie again. I ignored her.

  “When Michael finally died,” I wrote, “Margaret’s old friends said, What a relief.”

  This Michael did not like. A lightbulb in the kitchen burst, spun sugar shattering everywhere. I had to lug the vacuum down from upstairs, had to wipe down the floorboards with a damp cloth to make sure Solly didn’t step on any shards.

  “Okay,” I said when I was done, “I get the message.”

  I sat back down and I wrote:

  It was summer, pavement steaming, and Margaret was working as an editor for W. R. Scott. She wrote three copies of a letter to send to Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Gertrude Stein. How would you like to write a children’s book, but cleverer, more persuasive. Only the publisher, John McCullough, put his name on the letters. Only Gertrude Stein responded.

  (I knew Michael would like this, because it demonstrated Margaret’s desperation. It justified what Michael always said about Margaret: that she was needy, that she cared too much about the opinions of others. Music began to play, soft trilling flutes. Clara was gurgling on her play mat. I continued.)