The Upstairs House

by Julia Fine

  “I’m worried, and I’m also mad.”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said. “You don’t need to be worried about me. You can just be mad.”

  “Megan, Ben mentioned that your bathroom flooded. You keep locking yourself out. The other day your gas burners were all turned on.”

  Well, that had not been me. That had been Michael. If anything, Annie should be worried about her, how she was coping in her current state of incorporeality. How she felt about being dead.

  “If you don’t get help soon, you’re going to hurt yourself,” said Annie. “You’re going to hurt somebody else. You could hurt Clara.”

  At this, Clara, who’d seemed sleep-adjacent for the past several minutes, let out a hell-raising shriek. Normally her frustrations began at a whimper, rising only as we idiot adults failed to determine her needs. This panic was immediate. She was squalling and stormy, red with rage. Annie put a tender finger to her cheek, but it did nothing. I tried to rock her, to coo to her, to bounce her up and down, but she continued to cry.

  “It isn’t fair, to put this all on me,” said Annie, voiced raised to be heard over Clara. “Do you understand that it isn’t just about you? You’re putting me in a really tough position, and I want to be on your side, I am on your side, but I can’t lie for you. If you don’t tell Ben by the end of the weekend, I’ll tell him myself.”

  Tell him what? What would I say? Our home has been infested. No, infested meant hostility, and I didn’t think Michael was hostile, at least not as her resting state. We’ve opened up our home to a visitor. Yes, that was better. Like we were hosts of an adorable bed-and-breakfast, and provided little bottles of shampoo to our guests. I could make fancy brunch casseroles and large batches of fruit compote pancakes, if only Clara would stop crying long enough for me to get the house in order, long enough for me to gather the ingredients, long enough for me to think.

  “Is she hungry?” asked Annie, and I opened my shirt, but Clara wasn’t hungry. Her diaper was clean, I’d tried to burp her, I was shoo-shoo-shoo-ing rhythmically to mimic the beat of my own heart. “Maybe she’s constipated,” said Annie.

  I didn’t think Clara was constipated; it was just that she was living. She was staring the act of living in its impossible, cruel face, and all we could do until she’d conquered or forgotten it was try to give some comfort. I didn’t know how to say this to Annie without worrying her further. I didn’t know if this was something only children and their mothers knew, something I’d known once as a child and then forgotten, recollecting only with Clara’s birth. Michael was a mother. She would understand. Margaret wasn’t, and by this logic she wouldn’t. But Margaret knew children, Margaret understood children, Margaret talked to children in their own language. Annie didn’t. She wouldn’t understand.

  Clara was hiccupping, which I hoped meant she’d found some sort of temporary resolution. And then Ben was at the door, reliable Ben, helpful Ben, coming to check on us.

  “You doing okay with her?” he asked me.

  “She’s just having a rough time,” I said. “We’ll be okay.” Ben came to put his hand on my shoulder. He took Clara and started whispering to her, holding her with his big hands against his solid chest. Making her safe, or at least giving the illusion. I rubbed her back while he held her, and by some magic the sobs trailed into little whimpering ellipses.

  “Ahhh,” said Ben, “that’s better. You’re okay.”

  We were constantly telling Clara that she was okay, and most often it felt like a command. Like a careful. But now she truly was okay, nuzzling up against Ben, blinking, letting out a milky yawn. Instead of the jealousy I expected, I felt relief that he could calm her, that she knew him and settled into him in a way that I never would know him or be able to settle. At inception she’d been equal parts of both of us—sperm stitching into egg—but since it was my body that blanketed her, I’d thought it would be only my body that could soothe her. Sometimes it was. Sometimes it wasn’t.

  Ben took Clara out of the office and down the hall to where my father’s second family was gathered. Annie followed. Before she turned at the end of the hall, she looked back at me and said, “Tell him.”

  DINNER WAS OVER quickly. I had to stand up and bounce Clara halfway through, and then I had to go into Kelsey’s bedroom to nurse her. Dad talked about work and about Sam’s fraternity. He gave a perfunctory glance at Clara, nodded to tell me she was acceptable, then shoveled in more mashed potatoes, flecking gravy onto the collar of his shirt. When we left at eight thirty, he was no more known to me than he had been when we arrived, no more known to me than he had been when I was a child after he’d moved to the suburbs, no more known to me than he had been when we lived eight hundred miles apart. He would always be either unknown or so categorically, conventionally knowable that I refused to accept that was all he had in him, that was all that there was.

  ONCE WE WERE home and Clara was settled, Ben went out to get more beer. As a general rule he was either basically sober or twenty beers deep, and tonight he was drinking, which I didn’t begrudge him. It was not, however, a good time to let him know about Michael. Instead, while he walked down the street to what in New York we had called a bodega but here we just called the corner store, I tried to summon Michael, to warn her.

  She didn’t come when called. She wasn’t a pet. I wondered how I would know she was listening. Light as a feather, stiff as a board? The disembodied lighting of a candle? A tap on the wall? Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me?

  Most appropriate, I finally decided, was to open all the living room windows, as Margaret had done the night Michael first came in. After all, I was trying to tell her goodbye. I was trying to tell her that it had been lovely having her, that she’d been decent company, but now it was time for her to go wherever Margaret had gone so they could work out their issues and I could get my sister off my back. The woman who lived across the alley watched television late into the night, which seemed like a nice and timely activity for Michael to interrupt. If her window happened to be open, Michael could just hop over. A smooth transition. Very easy.

  “Thank you,” I started, because Michael was the sort to respond best to praise. I had to make it seem like I needed her, but it would be better for her if she left me. Like she was vital somewhere else, but I was désolée to see her go. It would help if I said some of it in French; she was the sort to respond well to French or German. “It’s been so wonderful having you here,” I began. “I feel so lucky that you chose me to help you . . . return.”

  A gust of air across my neck made me feel like she was there, and she was pleased with me. This was good, because I only had minutes before Ben would be back.

  “Still, it’s unfair to keep you all to myself,” I said.

  The air took on a chill. I wasn’t sure how to continue. Michael wasn’t naturally patient, but she knew how to wait out a verbal gaffe, and I imagined her with brows raised, looking at me down her aquiline nose, anticipating her own displeasure.

  “The lady who lives over there, I think, would love to have you . . . I mean, I think she needs help with her . . . it might be a good time to . . .” I paused, recalculating. “Look,” I said finally. “Michael. I’m going to tell it to you straight, which is how I would want you to tell it to me. My sister’s worried. I don’t want my husband to be worried. I think it’s a good time for the two of us to go our separate ways.”

  She prickled at that, which is to say I prickled, the hair rising on the back of my neck.

  “I mean it in the best possible way,” I tried. “I’m really not mad at you. It really isn’t even my decision.”

  The windows slammed shut, and suddenly the kitchen countertops were steaming—across the divide of the kitchen island, I could see the stove knobs spinning, the gas a struggling blue light. I was a few feet from the kitchen, but I felt the heat rise up in a great squall, damp and thick against my throat and my chest. The anger was directed at me, and I was afraid of what would hap
pen if the flame caught, what height it might reach, how it might spread. I was afraid it would inhabit me, that I would feed it to Clara.

  Then the electric lights in the room all flickered at once, and this felt like such an obvious choice for Michael to make that I was no longer afraid, because she was predictable. She wanted me to rewrite her story, and if I didn’t, she would bully me into submission, the way she’d always bullied Margaret. But I had researched her. I could prepare for her. I might be irritated, or inconvenienced, but I could steel myself against her coming anger, reflect it back to her or bury it deep. I didn’t have to worry that she would catch us unawares, that she would hurt us. I could protect my daughter against anything I knew and understood. I simply had to name it.

  “Michael,” I said to the darkness.

  And then she was gone, and Ben was walking in with a six-pack, asking me why I had turned off all the lights.

  October 1947

  If you don’t learn to say what you mean, I’ll go mad.” Michael draws herself up as she speaks, a bullfrog full of its own voice. Margaret sits with her legs crossed underneath her on the bed, looking out on a bleak city morning—a flag hanging limpid on its pole in the park, a motorcade on its way back from Gracie Mansion. “Your language matters. You expect me to keep propping you up . . .” But Margaret isn’t listening. Margaret is watching a balloon wisp out over the river. She was trying to find the right words to tell its story when Michael burst in from across the hall, irate.

  These are Margaret’s working hours, but with Margaret’s career continually on the rise, any work done for the publisher is a perceived affront to Michael, whose own career is fading. She must have seen the messenger from Golden Books leaving with Margaret’s paperwork, must have heard Margaret on the phone with Garth. She says that Margaret came home from dinner too late last night, disturbing her rest, and had visitors come much too early this morning. She says that Margaret is sucking the life out of her, making it impossible for her to do her own work. She says that Margaret doesn’t speak clearly. Look, here, she’s spelled balloon wrong, how can she call herself a writer, how can she call herself an artist, how can she—

  Margaret climbs down from the bed and goes to Michael, holding her, finding her hips through the silk housecoat, nuzzling her neck. Michael’s body sighs and submits. The two of them stand clutching each other. Then Michael pulls away and coughs and says she has to go rewrite a lecture, pack for London, choose a dress.

  “I love you,” Margaret says.

  “I know you do,” says Michael.

  BY NOON TRAFFIC is heinous around Union Square, and while Margaret doesn’t mind being late, she hates to be bored. This orchestra of horns and drums and protestors might once have excited her, but these days the spark of what might once have been excitement turns quickly to frustration.

  “I know you do,” Margaret mutters, jittering her leg so hard her Town & Country coupe shakes. “I know you do. I know you do.” She has always had a knack for riffing on a theme. Does she want to laugh or cry or join this swarm of dirty people? She squints but cannot read their picket signs—poor penmanship conspiring with bad eyesight. Doubtless they are out of work, or pushing for a union, or hungry, or down on their luck. None of these excuses for blocking the intersection. Margaret leans hard on her horn. One man in a ratty sweater shrugs an apology. Another, in a jacket with no tie, makes a rude gesture. Margaret honks again.

  “You are impulsive,” Michael said at the beginning, her fingers finding Margaret’s bra clasp, her fingers circling Margaret’s breast, “and that will get you into trouble.” But Margaret hasn’t been impulsive with Michael. She’s been patient. She has tried to understand. Yet—always—trouble.

  Now Margaret searches for the man without the tie. She yanks off a bracelet, a hand-me-down from Michael, and throws it, thwacking him squarely in the back. When he turns and sees her watching him, he moves to thump the bonnet of her car, but she steps on the gas.

  “Make way for the rich,” Margaret says, and drives through.

  LUNCH IS AT a quaint Italian restaurant, checkered tablecloths and cotton napkins thick as towels, waiters leaning down with black pepper and Parmesan, refilling red wine. Margaret picks apart a stale piece of focaccia, half listening as her editor, Ursula, and illustrator, Garth, discuss book royalties. Her wrist is still thicker than she’d like to see it, naked now without the bangle. Michael likely won’t notice it’s gone. She’ll be touring for the next few months, and when she returns she’ll hardly remember that she passed it on to Margaret. It seems she has forgotten—or wants to forget—about many of the things she’s given Margaret. I won’t be your crutch, Michael will say, but then she’ll ask Margaret to lean on her. You need to be able to form your own opinions, Michael will say, and then rage when Margaret doesn’t parrot back.

  “And of course Children’s Book Week will be just as overblown as it was last year,” says Garth, “and Miss Moore just as determined to exclude us.”

  Normally this would prompt Margaret to make some clever barb about the children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore, her stodgy sometimes-nemesis. When she squints and says nothing, Ursula and Garth exchange a look.

  “They’ll be hard-pressed to outdo themselves on theme,” says Ursula. “Last year’s was so . . . cerebral. ‘Books are bridges.’ As if the New York Public Library had ended the war themselves with the bravery of its new children’s programming.”

  “This year: ‘Books are battlefields.’” Garth laughs.

  “Books are battalions.”

  “Books are bullets.”

  “Books,” says Margaret, “are books.”

  15

  Hosts and ghosts are inextricable. The linguistic root ghos-ti is Proto-Indo-European—present in languages across Europe and Western Asia: in Spanish and in Hindi, in Bengali and in Russian, in Marathi and in Portuguese. In English it contributes to hospital, guest, and hotel. It is also found in hostile. In hostage. Words rooted in ghos-ti reference the reciprocal obligations of ancient hospitality. Off you would go to sail the sea, and when your ship sprung a leak, you could stop by and your host would say something like “Oh yes, I knew your father,” and invite you in or else be cursed for generations for denying you. I didn’t want to be cursed for generations. I didn’t want Clara to be cursed. So after asking Michael nicely to get going, I decided the next best thing to do was make my offerings meager, get her to move on to her next host of her own accord. Michael liked beautiful things, so I tried to make us ugly. Michael liked intrinsic mystery, so I tried to make our lives obvious and plain.

  “Where did Madame X go?” Ben asked of the framed Sargent print that had hung by the bed.

  “I’m redecorating,” I said. Ben nodded. He didn’t care what we put on the walls. The truth was that it smelled of too much luxury, too much sex, too much temptation for Michael. Not that she cared, not that any of it mattered. When Ben left the house for groceries, she snuck into the closet to retrieve Madame and broke its glass in a series of quick cracks that spread like the aftershocks of an orgasm. She was telling me she knew what I was doing, that she wouldn’t be fooled into submission.

  The next morning, we woke up to find volume 1 of my Oxford English Dictionary shredded, its vellum-thin pages ripped deliberately from their binding, bunched up and strewn.

  “Solly must be acting out,” said Ben. “I don’t know how she got it down.”

  I nodded, though of course it was Michael. She was trying to hurt me; she was saying that she knew what I loved and could destroy it. She would go through my beloved objects one by one, the commodities that made up my economy of selfhood slowly ravaged. The dictionary first, because it housed the names, and thus breathed life into the physical objects. A word, broken down into its component parts, was the most powerful magic I had. Michael was a poet. Michael understood. It wasn’t garlic, not holy water, but language that would drive Michael out, and we both knew it. Margaret knew, too.

  Margaret’s
poetry was good, which was why she’d lasted. Michael’s lacked the lyricism, the urgency, the ineffable spark of longevity. “What will survive of us is love,” said the poet Philip Larkin. A pleasant thought, but truly what survives is art—Larkin’s Arundel tomb is a statue, a statue is a thing made out of marble and feelings. A painting, oil and feelings; a poem, words and feelings. I’d never been called to make my own art—though of course I wanted to survive—because although I had all the physical materials, I didn’t have the right feelings. This was why I struggled to write down my dissertation, though the ideas were all there. Did that make sense? It seemed to make sense, and it seemed to make me an ideal vessel for the next generation: I could give Clara the tools and the parts, and when she was old enough, she’d imbue them with the feelings.

  I had the parts.

  Michael had the feelings.

  Here she was.

  This all made an illogical sense to me, but of course I couldn’t share it with anyone. Annie was mad, and she’d issued her ultimatum. Ben just thought I was renesting. Kelsey was seventeen. My mother was difficult. I really didn’t have any friends.

  IF ONLY MARGARET would come back and help me. Every time I went upstairs the door was locked.

  ABOUT A YEAR ago, I’d stepped on a tiny shard of broken glass and couldn’t pick it out. My skin callused over until it disappeared inside me, and all that remained was a twinge of memory of the pain. Sometimes I thought it had moved through my blood, hardening me. Sometimes I thought Clara was born of the shard of glass meeting an egg, and this explained her transparency, and also her bite. This explained why we were special, why Michael wanted us.

  WHILE I NURSED Clara, I thought about what I was going to tell Ben, now that Annie had drawn her line, since it seemed likely Michael wouldn’t make things easy and just leave us. I could say that I had postpartum depression, which was probably true. Perhaps that would be enough to placate Annie. Better to say that I had had postpartum depression, but I hadn’t wanted to worry him and now I was through it. At Clara’s checkups I filled out questionnaires about how I was doing: had I blamed myself unnecessarily, been anxious or worried, had I looked forward with enjoyment? Did I have trouble sleeping? Yes, I did, because I was still nursing every four to six hours. Did I feel like things were “getting on top of me”? Yes, an eight-pound baby. It was ludicrously easy to know the right answers, the answers that would have the pediatric nurse nodding and smiling and praising me.