Still, with each one I passed, I stole a little something. The petunias along the walk. The trellis, and the pink roses climbing it. An overgrown shrub. A welcome mat with an embroidered rooster on it near a front door. A lazy calico cat stretched out on a stoop. A few clunky notes from a piano drifting through a window. The swish of a broom sweeping dust out a side door and into a driveway.
These little treasures became mine, slipping into my imagination’s pocket along with the things I couldn’t see: The clawfoot tub. The porcelain knobs on the cupboard doors. The striped wallpaper in the bedroom at the end of the hall, and the way the sun spilled onto the wooden floorboards, a white-washed wall, a lacy coverlet.
I became the woman setting the kettle on the stove, waiting for the whistle, pouring herself a cup of green tea, carrying it with her out to the little fenced-in backyard, sighing with the sun on my bare arms. My laundry was softly drying itself on a line. It smelled powdery and humidly lush. Later I would run myself a salted bath in that clawfoot tub.
March turned into April, April to May, to June. In those weeks, I’d walked past hundreds of houses, and each one lodged itself inside me. Even the ugly ones. Even the ones with broken shutters or peeling paint. I could fix those up, I knew. I imagined myself on Saturday mornings hauling an aluminum ladder through the crabgrass. My husband slamming the pickets back to their runners with a hammer. Fixin’ this dump up. I always tried, on each walk, to see a new neighborhood, but sometimes I forgot which little winding side streets I’d already been down, and I’d find myself in front of a familiar house, and have a sense of déjà vu, thinking I once lived here, before I realized that I’d only imagined a life there, maybe only the weekend before, so vividly that I might as well have lived it.
So, when I found myself in front the most beautiful of all the houses one Saturday in June, unable to continue walking because the feeling of recognition, and need, and familiarity, and certainty, was so great that I found I had rested my hand on the latch of the little gate of the decorative fence at the end of the walk, and that I was opening it, and stepping through it, and that my sneakers were padding along the flat stones leading up to the front porch, and then up the two cement steps, and then that I was on the front porch, I was less surprised by my own behavior than I might have been, than I should have been.
This was a tiny pale-green bungalow, one story, on a street called Vervain Lane. There were white shutters on the windows, lace curtains behind them. There were windowboxes spilling purple flowers. There were more purple flowers in the gardens on either side of the house. A swinging chair hung from chains to the roof of the porch, which was bordered with bric-a-brac. The front door was solid and wooden, but it had a little diamond-shaped pane in the center, and a bright brass doorknob. Before I could knock, a woman peered at me through the diamond, opened the door, and said, “Come in.”
I was not overly surprised at first to be invited in so casually. I assumed she’d been expecting someone else, and had mistaken me for her. I opened my mouth to try to explain myself, to begin my apology, but the woman turned her back and said, “Sit down on the couch. I’ll get you a glass of water,” and then she disappeared.
I did not, of course, sit down. It would have been so rude to accept her hospitality only then to tell her that she was confused, that I was not the guest she’d been expecting. But when the woman came back out of the kitchen with the glass of water, she looked, I thought, annoyed that I was still standing, and glanced from me to the couch, as if judging the distance between us. Why had I not sat down?
She was a nice-looking woman. Maybe ten years older than I was, ten pounds heavier. Her hair was ash-blond, and although it was long and wavy, it did not look like the kind of hair a woman took pride in. It was just naturally luxurious. Accidentally lovely. Full. Healthy. Alive.
But her face was pale, tired-looking. There were girlish freckles across the bridge of her nose, but also dark circles under her gray eyes. She wasn’t wearing makeup. The white dress she wore was gauzy, and on another woman—or on this one at another time—it would have looked California-hippy. Something you’d buy in an import store, smelling of patchouli. Something you’d wear to an outdoor concert on a warm summer night. But on this woman, on this weekend morning, it looked like widow’s weeds.
“Please,” she said. “I invited you to sit down.”
I hesitated before I took the glass of water and went to her couch.
The room we were in was so beautiful, I could hardly bare it. It put a lump in my throat to look around. It made my chest ache: There was a fireplace. The brick mantel had been painted white. The couch was overstuffed. A sateen shimmer to the white cushions, the floral pillows leaning against the armrests. There was a wooden rocker on a nubby round rose-colored rug, and a gleaming oak trunk, used as a coffee table, on another circular rug—this one a little shabby, but with a forest scene, complete with lumberjack and doe and buck, woven into it.
There were no books or magazines on the trunk, or decorations on the mantlepiece, or pictures on the walls, so I projected my own things there: My husband’s big glossy Brueghel book, which was presently propping open a window in our apartment, on the trunk, and a few literary journals in which, perhaps, I’d one day publish a poem or two. A gardening book. I imagined paintings my husband had done years earlier, in storage now in his brother’s basement, hanging on the walls. I would arrange my dead mother’s collection of antique sugar bowls on the mantel. Myself, instead of this woman in the rocker, would be saying to an unexpected guest sitting on her couch with a glass of water, “I’ve seen you outside the house several times—”
I was shocked, as if I’d been caught in a lie I’d yet to tell. I started to interrupt, to tell her that she was mistaken, that I’d never even been in this part of town before, and that in truth I had no idea why I’d come to her door, but she raised a hand as if to hush me before I was able to speak. “Please,” she said. “It’s understandable. You’ve heard about our trouble, and you’re curious. I’ve watched you standing outside, staring at the windows.”
“No,” I said. “I’ve never even been in this neighborhood. Today is the first—”
She waved the hand now, and then held a finger to her lips to stop me from saying any more, shaking her head. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to keep me from making more excuses for myself or if she was trying to keep someone else from hearing me, and then I heard footsteps in a room behind her. She cocked her head. She was listening, too. She took the finger from her lips, and the footsteps stopped, and then she said, “You don’t need to explain.”
“It’s just such a lovely house,” I said, explaining anyway. “It’s so charming. So perfect. It takes my breath away. I live in an apartment and—”
“You’d like to live in my house.”
I felt mortified when tears sprang into my eyes. To hide them from her, I looked down, into my glass of water. I brought it to my lips, took a sip from it. The taste of the water was so bright and clean, so much the taste I imagined water would have after pouring down the side of a mountain, melting straight off the icy mountaintop, that I had to will myself to swallow it, to look up again, still with that brilliance in my mouth. The sun poured through all the windows at once, as if it were at the very zenith of the sky. It shimmered in the woman’s ash-blond hair, revealing a few little rivulets of paler hair, golder gold. She ran a hand through it, and the gesture seemed to tuck the sunlight behind a cloud for just a second before it sprang back out. But the look on her face was terrible—almost as if all of her had been painted with great care, by a master, in loving detail, but the face had been smudged away with a gray eraser. She said, “I would show you the house, but the bedroom, my daughter’s room, they’re—”
“Oh, God,” I said. “No. Of course not. I didn’t expect a tour. You’ve been more than generous, inviting me in, giving me the water. Please.” I stood up, and this time when I did I heard stomping again in the room behind her, and then
what sounded like a woman trying to explain something important to someone through a closed door, in a whisper, loud enough to make out a few words. We ignored … and were always. … We actually … was saying. …
I heard a door opening, and then a little girl in a diaper and a pink shirt came dashing into the living room, threw herself into the woman’s arms, panting. The child seemed terrified, but she wasn’t crying. She was completely expressionless, all blond curls and pale skin, gray eyes like her mother’s, bare white arms and legs, like a package of sunlight, herself, tossed into the living room, into her mother’s arms.
But, unlike her mother, the child’s cheeks were radiant with life. She looked almost feverish with it, in that way of children when they’ve just woken from a sweaty nap. Her lips, too—rosebud red. I could smell her. The little-girlness of her. She was freshness, lake water, bread dough, moss. “Mama,” the girl said, and the woman stood up quickly with the child in her arms and said to me, “I’m sorry. You need to go now,” nodding to the door. “Hurry. Please.”
There was no alarm in her voice, and it wasn’t a rude request. It was more like the kind of command a crossing guard would make. Something suggested for your own safety. An important announcement. Nothing personal. I put the glass of water down, said a rushed thank you, opened the door, stepped out, and closed it behind me. I made my way back through the manicured garden, down the flat stones, out the gate, and latched it behind me, and walked quickly all the way back to the apartment, where my husband was still asleep, despite the incredible shrieking of a caged bird in the apartment next to ours.
The next week, there was car trouble. There was an error that had been made on a project at work that required all of us to put in extra time and to accept equal blame. My husband and I bickered about who’d forgotten to put the credit card bill in the mail the month before. After the new bill came with the extraordinary late charge attached, we found the old bill, complete with a stamp, slipped down behind the dresser and the wall.
Throughout it all, I carried the pale green bungalow inside me. Its garden gate. The purple flowers in the slightly overgrown windowboxes. The sunlight in the living room. The little flushed girl in her mother’s arms. The taste of the water in the glass. The sweet, empty tang of that.
When Saturday finally came, I headed back.
I would not, of course, bother the woman again. I would simply walk past. I would explore the neighborhood around and beyond the house. I would try not even to pause outside it—although I knew it would be next to impossible not to pause. But I didn’t want to alarm the woman, or make her suspicious. If she saw me again, she would doubt the truth of what I’d told her the first time, that I had simply been a passerby, admiring.
This was another glorious summer day in the neighborhood. The few clouds in the sky looked like paintings of clouds. The grass was even greener. There were small, jewellike birds sitting on the telephone wires. Through open windows as I walked, I could smell coffee, bacon. I could hear children singing childish songs, and now and then a hammer pounding away at something in a backyard. The few people I passed on the sidewalks or saw sitting on their porches looked content. They nodded. They waved. If people were losing their houses, selling them in desperation for songs, they were hiding their troubles well. Everyone, it seemed, had a rocking chair, a calico cat, a flowering shrub under a picture window.
I turned right at Vervain Lane. My heart was fluttering—impractically—in my chest as I saw the little green bungalow up ahead.
Its gate. Its windowboxes.
But this time the gate wasn’t latched. It was wide open. As I approached, I was half hoping and half dreading that the woman would be in the front yard, that she might be gardening or playing with her little girl, that she would recognize me and invite me in again. Another glass of that pure water. This time, she might be able to offer me a tour of the other rooms, which might have been tidied since I was last there.
But it wasn’t her. There was a different woman in the front yard this morning. This woman’s hair was short and gray. She wore a dark suit, carried a clipboard. She was walking unsteadily on what appeared to be high heels around on the grass, which had grown a great deal since the week before. Nearly a foot. It was halfway up the woman’s shins. She seemed to be inspecting the windows from where she stood in the grass, or maybe she was looking up at the roof or the eaves, hand held to her forehead as a visor. She dropped the hand and turned around quickly when she heard my footsteps on the sidewalk behind her.
“Jesus,” she said. “You scared me.” And then, apologetically, taking a step toward me. “Sorry. Jumpy.”
I stopped, and rubbed my eyes. The house looked different. The flowers in the windowboxes were dead. The flowers in the garden looked dried-out, too, and nearly dead. There was a yellow sticker affixed to the front door. The gray-haired woman looked from me to the sticker, and back. “Foreclosure,” she said in what sounded like a falsely sentimental voice. “A terrible tragedy.”
“They’ve moved?” I asked. “The people who lived here?”
The woman looked at me as if waiting to see if I would go on. When I didn’t, she said, “They lost the house. In over their heads.”
“Oh, dear,” I said. “Oh my God. I was just here last week.”
The woman shrugged. “Well, it’s empty now.” She pointed at the windowboxes and then waved her hands at the overgrown lawn, as if to prove her point. “Are you house-hunting? I’m not the realtor. I’m with the bank. But I’m fairly certain you could buy this place now for a song if you wanted. Have you spoken with the realtor?”
“No,” I said. “I just admired it. The house. I met the woman who lived here, and her child. We can’t afford a house at the moment anyway. Not yet. I just thought it was so—”
“When?” The woman eyed me suspiciously. Her lips were pursed. “When did you meet the Bells?”
“I didn’t know their name was Bell,” I said. “I never even asked her name. It was only one time. Last weekend. Last Saturday.”
The gray-haired woman waded toward me, her heels catching in the soft ground and the long grass. She tucked the clipboard under her arm. She licked her lower lip, seemed to think for a moment before she said, “Then it wasn’t the Bells. Do you know what happened to the Bells?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, you didn’t meet the Bells last weekend. After the foreclosure, they sold all their furniture and things. The house was completely empty, and they only had twenty-four hours to get out, but they never got themselves another place to live. They were sleeping on the floor, it seems, since they sold their things. When the bank came to change the locks, they wouldn’t leave.”
I held up a hand. This was none of my business. And it was also a lie. Or I was in the middle of some mistake. No point in hearing the erroneous details. I had the wrong house. The wrong time of day. It was no longer summer. A year had passed. Or two. I was simply confused. I’d read this in the news. Some sort of horror that occurred to desperate people. I’d had a bad dream. I would wake up from this dream. We were all having the same dream. Those of us without houses, and those of us with houses. Things were changing. It would take a while to get used to this new order of things. We saw their yellow stickers, of course, all over town, and their For Sale signs, but surely those people bought other houses after they left those houses, after we bought their houses for a song.
In other neighborhoods. Or other towns.
And so on, and so on.
Surely, their lives went on.
“It’s quite a tragedy,” the woman from the bank said. “I’m surprised you hadn’t heard.”
Had I heard?
I took the hand that had been resting on the gate, then, and covered my mouth. I had to keep my hand over my mouth for several minutes while the gray-haired woman watched me anxiously before I trusted myself to take the hand away, and to speak again without singing a song.
Search Continues for Elderly Man
“Mr. Rentz?”
“Yes?” I said.
“Don’t you remember us?” the boy asked.
Behind him, a tractor rumbled by on the gravel road. A cloud of dust rose behind the tractor. A young farmer in a white T-shirt took one hand off the wheel and waved. I lifted my hand to wave back, but the farmer had only glanced in my direction for a second, less than a second, before rumbling away.
“What?” I said, leaning down to the boy.
Of course, I’d heard what he’d said, my hearing was perfect, but I’d already forgotten what it was I’d heard. The dog—some kind of terrier—had begun to wag its tail, whining excitedly on its leash, as if it were anticipating something from me, as if it expected me to open the door.
“I just asked,” the boy said, looking a bit amused, “if you remembered us.”
“Oh,” I said.
Behind the boy, on the other side of the gravel road, there was a young girl running bare-legged, leaping through the field. She had a handful of clover, or something blurred and purple, and she was shrieking. I watched her for a few moments, and then, as if she’d slipped into a hole in the earth, both she and her shrieks were gone.
I looked back down at the boy and his dog. Yes, I thought, there was certainly something familiar here. The boy’s chipped front tooth. But also that dog.
“We were in the neighborhood,” the boy said, “and we remembered your house, and wondered if you wanted to come out, if you could come out and play.”
I snorted a little, of course. Come out and play. I supposed this was supposed to bring it all back—those childhood years, those carefree summer days! I supposed this boy was supposed to be some hallucinated version of me. I supposed that dog was supposed to be my dog, way back when, and here was Death at my door, beckoning me outside “to play,” and I was supposed to step out there and follow the boy into the field, and maybe later he’d get me to take his hand, and we’d find ourselves back at my mother’s table with a big ham at the center and all my dead relatives would be shiny-eyed and happy to see me, and in a startling epiphanic moment of ambivalence and ecstasy I’d suddenly understand that the boy, who was me, was dead. But I’d never had a dog.
If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories Page 9