The Upstairs House

by Julia Fine

  “What?” I dabbed Clara’s cheek, fumbling.

  “My poetry,” said Michael, very weary, very tired, luxuriously basking in how much she had been put upon. In this she reminded me of a wealthier, mid-century version of my mother. “My poetry,” she said again, “the best and most true thing that has come out of me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t think I understand. You want us to read it out loud?” Clara in my arms now. If I scooted us both to the side of the sofa, maybe we had a chance. I inched along, my leggings snagging on a nail that jutted out in the wood floor. I heard the rent, felt the pressure of the nail head against my thigh. From this angle I could see that the dead bolt was unlocked, that all it would take was a turn of the knob, and then freedom.

  “Of course that isn’t what I mean. How silly,” said Michael. “How very childish.”

  One.

  “Oh.”

  Two.

  “Excuse me.”

  Three.

  “I’m sorry.” And then I was off, grabbing my coat, tucking Clara under my arm, her neck supported by the crook of my elbow. I pushed through the door, dodged a puddle—gravel piercing sharp and cold through my wool socks. A huff of breath delivered to the top of Clara’s head to try to warm her, an awful rawness in my throat, my fingers sticking to the door handle, the two of us inside. I cradled Clara in my oversize sweater. I turned on the car, willing the air to heat quickly. I looked at the cabin.

  In my rush, I hadn’t bothered to close the door behind me. I could see Michael sitting on the couch, facing the fire. A gust of wind scattered a mound of dead leaves. A static-ridden radio program whinnied through the car speakers, although I hadn’t pressed any buttons. Clara wasn’t thrilled to be up next to the air vents, but I held her close enough that her lips lost their tinge of blue, the tops of her ears reddened. Lifting the bar to push the front seat as far back as it could go, I sat on the floor in front of it, picking caked dirt out of the plastic mats, my heart pounding.

  “You might as well go back inside,” said Margaret, and I jumped, banging Clara’s head against the dashboard, making her cry. The car had been empty when we climbed in; now Margaret was peering down from the passenger seat. “You’ll be more comfortable there.”

  I didn’t say anything. There was a chance that my silence would vanquish both women, that I could exorcise them both with compression, like when I had to pee, but held it in so tightly that all of a sudden I didn’t. Margaret blinked and reached for the volume dial, the voice on the radio crackling to life.

  And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

  On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door.

  “She did a whole series of great poetry set to music,” said Margaret. “She even did the Bible. But it wasn’t commercial enough. Michael didn’t want to sell soap after losing herself in Poe, so they canceled her program.”

  Clara was still crying, a whimper not appeased by me rubbing her back.

  “Me, I’d sell whatever they asked me to,” said Margaret. “After all, it is business.”

  “You broke your contracts,” I whispered. “You constantly forgot to pay your electric bill.”

  “Well,” said Margaret. “Michael says I never really outgrew my childhood.”

  Clara was moaning now, a sound that cut through the radio static, through the toasty itch of my sweater, through Margaret’s musings.

  “You should take the baby back inside now,” said Margaret. “Before Michael gets frustrated.”

  Clara’s lips were turning blue again. The sound she was making was not fear but pain—the sound of sinews overstretched, a rope pulled to fraying. A keening. Cover the mirrors, rend your clothing, mourn. I no longer wanted to squeeze her until she burst, or shake her until she went quiet, and I understood that this was love, this hurt my heart was holding on to for my daughter, this hurt I wanted not to stifle but absorb. And now I had absolute proof: Clara would hold Michael within her, no matter where we’d gone. I was a crocus in a hidden garden, and here was Michael: I will find you.

  I took Clara back inside, and Margaret stood next to the car, huddled in her furs, waiting. Margaret was used to traveling great distances to reach Michael, only to be turned away. Margaret was used to waiting.

  HAUNT: FROM THE Old French hanter, which means to practice. To indulge in. To cultivate. Possibly taken from the Old Norse heimta, to bring home.

  BACK IN THE cabin, Michael was unfazed, still watching the fire. “It seems to me,” she said when she heard me shut the door, “that my remembrance is corrupted. I’ve had the unfortunate luck of being incorrectly recorded.”

  Clara was settling now, nuzzling into my shoulder. No longer blue, no longer hurting. I brought her closer to the fire.

  “These biographers, you know.” Michael’s face puckered.

  Michael had no biography of her own; she’d only played the villain in Margaret’s. Her out-of-print autobiography was a rambling, self-important opus disguised as a letter to her mother. Parts were lovely. I enjoyed elaborate language, and reading Michael felt at first like eating French pastry after academia’s brown bread. But like French pastry, she was easily overwrought, there was too much puff and not enough substance. Overly rich, and difficult to digest. Michael’s book was buoyant, always another aspiration, always a new career or husband around the bend. Unfortunate things happened—a failed marriage, a scathing review—and she still called her life delicious. But autobiography as genre is a trick of smoke and mirrors. Selfhood is reflexive, autobiography performs. After reading Michael’s book, I didn’t know her.

  What other people had written of her—what she claimed they’d gotten wrong—seemed closer to the truth. The person that she was, as opposed to the person she wanted to be. We say the ego swells because it bloats the idea of the self to something unrecognizable. Michael was resting on her ego, had survived on her ego. It had buoyed her across the river Styx and into my Chicago condo, and I’d driven it up I-90 to this cabin, where it was sitting on my stepmother’s brother’s couch.

  When you fashion yourself a new name, when you marry an actor. When you have your suits tailor-made in a style no one else in New York is wearing. When for several shining years you feel the heat of the world’s spotlight, and then spend the rest of your life trying to get that glow back.

  Of course she wanted a new legacy. Of course she wanted me to write it.

  “You’re not really my focus,” I said. “I’ve tried to incorporate you as much as I can, but I’m writing more about children’s books. More about Margaret.”

  “Margaret, Margaret.” Michael sighed dramatically, leaning farther back into the couch. “Always Margaret, my god. She’s going to give me a heart attack. You know that she gave me leukemia?”

  “What?”

  “Leukemia. A cancer of the blood.”

  “No, I know what leukemia is, it’s just, you can’t catch it. You can’t give it to someone. It’s mutations of the—” Michael gave me a withering look that stopped me further plumbing the shallows of my medical knowledge. I changed tactics. “You had children. Didn’t your son have children?”

  Michael sniffed. I tried to imagine my parents discussing the “best and most true thing that had come out of them” and wondered if that thing would be me. Wondered if, for me, the best true thing would be Clara. I was banking on it being Clara, resting on the laurels of her birth. Before, I had been resting on my dissertation, investing in the work with the thought that someone would one day read it and attribute it to me and say “Well done.” God, I was typical. Mommy and Daddy didn’t love you the way you wanted to be loved, so you go begging for love elsewhere.

  Margaret’s parents had an awful marriage. They would argue, and her father would go live on his boat for weeks at a time. Divorce wasn’t done, then. Too embarrassing. Margaret’s mother became involved in spiritualism, desperately trying to shore up the cracks. Her father would bring his children into his st
udy and start off reading out loud to them, but get so immersed in the story he’d forget them and forge silently ahead. Neither parent spent much time on Margaret. They weren’t especially proud of her success.

  Michael, on the other hand, had two doting parents.

  What sort of parents would Clara have? In one sense, I supposed it would be up to me, but in another sense it wouldn’t. I couldn’t choose how I felt—I could choose only how I acted—and at some point she’d be old enough to see behind the mask I wore and know. How old would she be before she sniffed out my resentment? Or at some point would I no longer resent her? Would the love—which now felt about equal to the resentment, about the same weight on the scale—fatten up and decisively surmount it? Maybe I would gladly give up hopes of a stratospheric career, and go teach high school. Maybe motherhood would soothe my frustrations, and I would be so grateful that Ben was a good father that I’d start to really love him. Maybe I’d become the person he thought I was already, gradually softening, accepting the mold.

  If I had to teach, god forbid it be high school.

  All the while I was thinking this over, Michael was waiting for me to speak. She sat with her back very straight, tapping a finger against her knee to the beat of phantom music. Clara passed gas in her sleep.

  “No,” I said, finally. “No. I think you’ll have to rely on your children. Or great-great whatever children. I really only have revisions left. I’ve added as much of you in as I can, and it’s crazy to think I’d rewrite everything. My advisor would never agree to it.”

  Michael hissed in a breath. I thought she might swell up like a Halloween ghost set up in someone’s front yard, all shimmery at the bottom, full of hot air. Instead she flared her nose and stood, patting the creases out of her pants. She went to the window and nodded. Margaret was out there, her ankles bare, thumbing the cuffs of her coat. Michael opened the door and stuck her head out into the cold.

  “Bunny,” she called sharply, “come here.”

  19

  Margaret came when called. I knew women like this, spaniels heeling their lovers. Women who would cancel plans, travel halfway across the city to deliver a forgotten brown-bag lunch, dye their hair and get waxes and try to lose those last ten pounds. It was an epidemic, and it spread because you’d think to yourself, If she does all that and still nobody wants her, what will love look like for me?

  Michael watched Margaret through the window, her eyes dark and narrow. Calculating.

  “Maybe,” I said before I could stop myself, “if you wanted a better legacy, you could have been nicer to people when you were alive.” This was the bitterness that had rooted in me upon Clara’s birth, the trauma that was only soothed by the expression of the anger. A bruise I had to keep pressing on, no matter the pain, because otherwise it would be gone, it would be swallowed, and without it, who would I be?

  Michael ignored me, watching Margaret come inside with that kicked-dog slump of her shoulders, that loyal-dog shine to her eyes. Michael rose and laced their hands together, and I could see how the squeeze lit up something inside Margaret. I could see where the love had been, where Margaret thought it still could be.

  “Come,” said Michael, and of course Margaret came. Michael took Margaret upstairs, her stocking feet silent next to Margaret’s clacking pumps, her dark head bobbing next to Margaret’s gold one. The cabin had a winding metal staircase, which was terrible for children and made you feel that you were climbing up to something far more interesting than what you actually found at the top: a widow’s walk that circled the top of the great room, leading to bedrooms tucked away over the kitchen. I watched Michael and Margaret, who didn’t seem to know I was watching them, step into the larger bedroom.

  I COULD HAVE left then, but I didn’t. Instead I opened up a can of baked beans, and heated them on the stove. Nursing made me hungry.

  Falling in Love

  Margaret Wise Brown and Michael Strange first met in Maine. Michael was fifty, Margaret twenty-nine. They were both romantically involved with “Big” Bill Gaston, a well-to-do lawyer and philanderer, through whom they were introduced.

  Over the years Michael saw Bill sporadically; she had many lovers. Margaret’s only consistent lover was Bill, who was older than she was and owned a house across the water from her cottage in Maine.1 He kept telling her one day he’d settle down, or else she kept telling herself that he meant to tell her, that that was what he meant when he told her what he actually did tell her. He would visit her in New York, and she would write to him, imagining the family they’d have. But then Bill got another woman2 pregnant, and he married her instead. Margaret stayed away until she didn’t, because Bill was a flirt, and she loved him. His wife Lucille found the two in bed together and mentioned divorce, and so Margaret—clever, Margaret, not always kind—talked to the tabloid reporters about his failing marriage. She thought she could change Bill, she thought she could play God. And in a way she did play God, because that summer Michael read the article about Bill’s imminent separation and came to Maine to comfort him.

  Michael and Margaret struck up a vibrant friendship. Back in New York, they went to lunch at one of Margaret’s favorite haunts in Greenwich Village. Are you dating anybody? asked Michael. How’s the sex?

  Margaret drank a vermouth cassis.3 At this point she had published with Doubleday, Harper, Golden Books, and W. R. Scott.

  “You should stop writing those silly furry stories,” said Michael.

  20

  They came back downstairs as I was opening my laptop, debating whether or not to turn on the Wi-Fi. The cabin hosted the only available network, which was locked, but I was pretty sure I could guess the password: something stupid like GOPACK or 12345. The trouble was, once I got into the Wi-Fi, Ben could find me. Everything was interconnected: the tablets and the cell phones and the computers and the cars. I didn’t know if I was ready for Ben to find me. I didn’t know what it would mean to be found.

  “Margaret,” said Michael, “it’s time.”

  They stood blocking the staircase, arm in arm, neither of them smiling, although Margaret had a slight twist to her upper lip that signified pleasure. She loved a good game, a good surprise. I picked up Clara, who usually melted into being held, but now was wiggling with a strength I didn’t know she had. She’d only discovered her hands a week ago, and she was already reaching with them, using them to grab at something past me.

  Crispian whined and circled the dining table, a conduit for the awful energy coursing through the cabin. Michael clucked her tongue at him, and he appeared somewhat chastened—instead of trotting, he slowed to an amble. When he reached her, she put a hand on his back. Clara wanted the dog. She wrenched out of my arms, trying to reach him. I couldn’t contain her, couldn’t save her, and I panicked as she dove away from me. Now I had only her legs, which were kicking to be free. Soon I would drop her altogether. But before Clara could plummet to the floor, Margaret walked over with a tap tap tap, crouching to meet her wherever she was going. I tried to grab on to Clara’s ankles, I tried to reposition myself to protect her. I was left holding a tiny purple sock.

  Sleet fell in sheets outside, pattering against the roof, splurging against the window.

  Margaret disappeared. Margaret was gone. And with Margaret, Clara.

  21

  They were only invisible, only away, for a minute. Clara and I were inextricable. My breasts were heavy and my bra wet where my nipple chafed the cup, and so I knew Clara was hungry. Michael sighed when Margaret reappeared. She rolled her eyes when Margaret handed Clara back to me.

  “She eats every three hours,” I said. “During the day.”

  “Go,” said Michael, and I didn’t know what she meant, but then I did, because Margaret was going. She was going into Clara the way Michael had come out of Clara: Aladdin’s genie into the lamp, Red Riding Hood into the mouth of the wolf, a little fur child into a warm wooden tree. Clara’s pupils dilating very quickly, until I could barely see the darkening bl
ue of her irises. Clara’s body very hot, very frightening. She opened her mouth, and I could see the nubs of teeth sprouting from gums where there had not been teeth before. Her nostrils flared, and her mouth turned up at the sides. Amused.

  Amused and hungry. She was wrinkling her chin, butting her head against my breasts. I dropped her on the play mat because I didn’t know what she was anymore, who I was to her. Clara couldn’t speak, couldn’t say Mama, and I wasn’t sure any longer if I was her mama. The word mama, the sound of it, is universal in almost every Indo-European language. Mamma, mama, muhme, maman, mam. Linguists think it’s an echo of the sound made while sucking. The lips together, the wetness. The feeling of being so disgustingly fecund, then empty.

  On the mat Clara bellowed, demanding to suckle. Michael looked at me impatiently, doing everything but tapping her imaginary watch to tell me to get a move on, to feed Clara so that they could do with her whatever they would. It hurt me to withhold from Clara—the pressure of my full breasts, the anguish of watching her cry. The knowledge I could sate her appetite so easily.

  But I was afraid of her. I’d been afraid of her since she first slid out of me, since the nurse dried her off and put her on my belly and told me she was mine. Now that Clara had teeth, now that Clara had Margaret inside her, it was easy to look back and see how much of my resentment had always been fear.

  Her crying stirred something native, summoned all my deep maternal instinct. She was so much louder to my ears than to anyone else’s. She would have to eat, regardless. If I wanted my daughter back in her body, that body would have to be fed. It would have been much easier if I’d brought the pump, much easier if I had used formula.

  Clara’s new teeth were tiny and sharp. I brought her to my breast, and they drew blood. She ate, and when she pulled off the breast she had a ring of red around her mouth, a popsicle mustache of milk-watered cruor. She repeated her work on the other side, deliberate and symmetrical, and then Michael came and took her from my arms and then she was gone.