A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  I laughed; Tom only smiled. I watched to see if Martin would try riding with no hands, but he was still looking at Grady’s tire, still leaning forward. He closed his mouth, though, and took in a deep breath. He was only doing what Grady had told him: taking in this night air. He was still smiling.

  They moved past us to the entrance, Grady now with his hands on the handlebars. He slowed, looked both ways, and then, so quiet I wouldn’t have heard it had there been another sound in the air, he said, “Okay, Martin, let’s head on home. It’s a good night,” and they turned left onto the street, Route 9, leaving behind them only the soft tick of gears in the cold air.

  “I’m going to find out about this guy,” Tom said as we drove home. I looked at him. Headlights from oncoming cars played across his face, turned his features into strange, contorted shadows, changed his skin, clothes, hair from the gray of night into white, ignoring any real colors there. His eyes were on the road.

  I said, “What? What about him?”

  He turned to me, his face gray again. “What do you mean? Weren’t you listening to him back there?”

  ’To what?” I looked back at the road, then at Cooley-Dickinson to my right, that hospital where Paige had had her baby. As I did every time we passed here, I thought for a moment of when I’d visited her there, of the row of babies in the nursery, all of them crying except for Phillip, little Phillip lying there in his crib, his body wrapped tightly in pure white, the lights bright, keeping the room warm.

  I turned my head as we passed the hospital, trying to see back behind the addition to the old wing and the window on Paige’s room, just an old window with a frame and twelve panes; an ordinary window, but one from which I wanted to gaze and see cars passing on Route 9, and I wondered who was in that room now, and what the child’s birth had been like, whether vaginal or C-section, if there’d been any fetal distress, if the father had been there to coach the mother on, to hold her hand, to feed her ice chips and to yell Push.

  “Claire?” Tom said.

  I turned back to the windshield. “What?” I took a deep breath, smoothed out my skirt.

  “Didn’t you hear what he said back there?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I touched my hair, put my hand to my forehead. “But what?”

  “He said his dad died nine years ago. But that day when we were out at the house the first time he said both his parents were in California”

  We’d already passed the Smith dorms, those rooms still full of light, as if nothing in this world had changed since I was a girl standing before them, except that now the windows were closed against the October air. We slowed to a stop at the light just before the drop into downtown.

  I said nothing.

  “I take it you also didn’t hear what he said a month ago about living with his parents out in California for a year or so, then moving back here a year and a half ago. Of course, that doesn’t jibe with his world-record four years at the Friendly’s in Florence.” He was quiet a while, the light still red. “He’s lying,” he went on, “about something or another. About his parents. Who knows what else.”

  I said, “What are you so worried about? Maybe the kid’s parents are out in California, maybe they’re both dead. What difference does it make?” but as the words came out of me I knew what was the difference. We really didn’t know who this kid was. All we knew was what we saw: he was with Martin, cleaning the place up; he worked at the same Friendly’s he told us he did; and, it was plain, he cared for Martin.

  The light changed, and he pulled ahead. “Just that, maybe,” he said, and stopped. “Just that maybe this Grady isn’t any relation at all.” He was quiet, his jaw tight. He stopped at the crosswalk outside Thorne’s to let an old couple pass in front of us. The woman, in a down stadium jacket and crocheted beret, leaned forward with each step, and held onto her husband’s arm. He stood erect, tall, and had on a tweed hat and blue parka He looked at us, gave a quick wave and nod.

  I put up my hand and gave a little wave, though I was certain he couldn’t see me for our headlights shining in his face. They made it to the curb, and we moved on, under the railroad overpass, and turned left onto Market Street. I didn’t say anything.

  I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what to think. I hadn’t caught it, hadn’t heard the fault in his story, and for a moment listened again to Grady telling us his father didn’t think anything of the grandfather selling the house because he was long dead. I saw Grady again, his head back, him looking at stars. I looked and listened and tried to remember, but heard, finally, nowhere in the words he’d given us a lie. He hadn’t been lying. I felt I knew that.

  We turned right onto our street, the same street we drove everyday: I knew the potholes, anticipated them by putting my hand to the dashboard to steady myself through ones that had existed for years; the only repairs made were when the road crews came out every spring and shoveled cold, loose asphalt into the holes, and backed the truck over the spot, as if that might cure this terminally pitted road.

  Then we were at the house, and Tom turned onto the driveway alongside our place, followed it to behind the house where it widened into a patch big enough for two cars. The people who lived below us, a man and two women whom we’d met only once, all three of them grad students in the hotel-and-restaurant-administration program at the university, weren’t home, and we sat in the driveway, the engine running. Still there were no words.

  Tom cut the motor, and the car was silent only a moment before the ticking of the engine took over, filled in the empty air between us. The cold started seeping in, too: first through the windows, my shoulders and face going cold, next into my toes again.

  Tom said, “I just think it’s strange. That someone would lie right off the bat. He’s just a kid.”

  “So why did you agree to meeting him out there in the first place? If you don’t trust him, you don’t want him, right? So why ask him out there in the first place?”

  My words had come out in a rush, in one breath, and I took in a new one, the air cold in my lungs. A moment ago the car was warm. That warmth was gone now.

  We both stared out the windshield, the glass quickly fogging over.

  “Because,” Tom said, his voice breaking the silence. “I think he’s okay. I think he’s basically a good kid. I like him. And Martin, too. I kind of want to see what he means with Martin and the wood.”

  “Then why?” I said, and I put my left hand up to the back of his neck, gently rubbed it, though I could feel the adhesions in my hand drawing up in the cold, the tight pull of skin and muscle. He let his head drop.

  “Why,” I said, “are you so worried? It’s obvious they’re the ones who clean the place up. How else would they know someone was supposed to take care of the place three times a year?”

  “But the lie,” Tom said, and suddenly his head was up, his hands on the steering wheel as if he were going to drive across the small patch of grass before us and right through the gray picket fence that separated our backyard from next door, where, I knew, that Christmas tree still leaned. “The lie,” he said again. “Why lie? Why?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said, and took my hand down. “You’re being stupid now. Everyone lies. I lie, you lie. Just because you work for a newspaper doesn’t mean you don’t lie. It doesn’t mean you’ve got some sort of monopoly on the truth.” I put my hands in my pockets again, turned toward the windshield. “It’s his life, not yours. It’s a lie. So what?”

  “You can’t even put two and two together, can you?” he said, and things had changed, our conversation taking the step into argument. Into fight. His voice had made the subtle twist from quiet and resolved to edged and clenched. He said, “It’s like I said already, if you were listening. If he’s lying about this, he may be lying about the house. There may be something wrong. And we’re buying the thing, remember? We’re buying the goddamned thing.” He was in full swing now, his hands gripping the wheel, letting go, gripping again.

  �
��But he wasn’t lying,” I said, quiet.

  He turned to me. “How do you know?”

  I shrugged, knowing full well that my answer would not suit him, would never be enough of an answer for him. I said, “I just know,” and decided I would say nothing more. It was a move I knew would work. We had fought often enough for me to know which tactics served me best, and silence was among them. When he went off onto his own course of reasoning in a fight, I would go quiet, letting him ask question after question, letting him dig his own grave. He couldn’t stand it, I knew, but with that cut in his voice he had already decided: Grady was a liar.

  “That’s a good answer,” he said. “That’s one of your beautiful stock answers. ‘I just know it’ That’s a good one.”

  I was through then. I opened my door, climbed out, slammed it shut He didn’t say a word, I could see through the glass, and I turned, headed back alongside the house and down the driveway. When I got to the foot of the driveway I heard his car door open, close.

  I was at the street now. I looked both ways. To my right the street ended about a quarter-mile away at the town cemetery, circled by a chain-link fence. The moon was out, and I could see down there the black masses that would be trees. In daylight I could make out tombstones, but now I could only see black shapes.

  I looked to the left. The street ended fifty yards away, forming a T with Market, and I could see behind the houses the raised platform of dirt where the train tracks ran through town.

  I stood at the foot of the driveway a moment, listening. I waited to hear Tom’s footsteps behind me, wanted him to come up and put his hands around my waist and hold me to him. I didn’t want an apology; I didn’t want any explanation or reasoning. I only wanted him with me, to feel him, just to feel him behind me, the two of us out in the cold.

  But I heard the faint scratch of his steps up the outside stairs, the opening and closing of the kitchen door, then silence again.

  I shuddered, not from the cold, but from, down deep, some fear, the kind, I knew, I had unwillingly inherited from my mother. I tried to shake it off, tried to understand what it was that I was afraid of, but could come up with nothing. Only the dark, an empty street, and the kernel of fear I knew had been there since birth.

  When I was thirteen I brought home to my mother a new word, one I wasn’t exactly sure how to pronounce, but one that worked well. It was a good, sound word, one that was real, that had meaning, and when I stumbled through it the first time in my Health Science textbook, a word that would have slipped through unnoticed among so much assigned reading, I had to stop, reread its definition, then the word again. I read it out loud, the sound clumsy in my throat, and I read it again and again. I had found a word, a name for something that had been in my home, my world, for as long as I could remember.

  I ran home that day, repeating the word to myself, the textbook held tight against my chest, against my new breasts just beginning to show, and the world, everything, seemed ready to start, ready to begin to grow.

  When I got home, I held the book out to my mother, showed her the paragraph, and said the word: agoraphobia.

  She was at the stove, stirring something in a pot, the other hand at her side. I held the book while she read the paragraph about how some people were afraid of open places, afraid of crossing fields or streets. Some people were afraid of their own backyards, some even of their front porches, while others couldn’t even bring themselves to look out windows.

  She finished reading the paragraph, and looked back at the stove.

  “Agoraphobia,” I said again, knowing of course I would end up a doctor someday, get my degree at Smith, move on to Harvard Medical School. “That’s you,” I said, and reread the passage again to myself, though I must have known it by heart.

  “I know that,” she said.

  I looked up from the page. She turned to me and gave a feeble smile.

  “You know that word?”

  “No,” she said, now looking at the pot again. “Not the word. But the feeling. Always I’ve known it.” She pulled the spoon from the pot and set it in the ceramic spoonrest between the burners, the same spoonrest my father had brought home one evening as a freebie from the company, his distributorship’s name printed in the hollow of the rest.

  She put her hands on my shoulders, me only an inch or so shorter than her. She looked in my eyes, and I could see just how much work it was for her to do that, even to me, her only child: her eyes blinked again and again, darted down and down and down before settling into mine. She said, “I’ve lived this long this way. I’ve lived this long. Now your daddy is gone, and there’s no one, just you. So let me go on. Let me.”

  She held onto my shoulders, her grip tightening a moment, and slowly she let her hands slip down my arms. Her eyes started going again, tearing away from mine in quick glances down, until the moment was over, and she turned to the stove, the book still open in my arms to that page, and to that word.

  An insignificant one, useless. Just a name given to something unknown, I knew, to make someone more comfortable with that unknown. Mine was the same old world. There was nothing new here; only the knowledge that, though I had heard my father speak to me, kept his words in me, her own fear still existed, always ready to edge into me, willing to take me over. I saw that day, my mother’s back to me, the spoonrest empty as she stirred the spoon in the pot, that I would have to work to avoid her fear, fight to keep myself from being like her. I closed the book, and backed away from her without another word. She was comfortable in her fear, I saw. She wanted it no other way.

  And nothing was ever new while I grew up. Nothing was new, even when, some three months later in a bathroom stall after school, the sheet metal walls around me a cold army-green, nicked and scarred with graffiti about girls and boys I never knew, I found the small spot of blood in my underpants, that spot the shape and size of an oblong quarter. Though the blood itself was new—I had been waiting for this moment for so long, all of my other friends having had their first periods months and even years before, that the thought of my first period actually happening had receded from my mind, buried itself somewhere in my brain—the idea behind it, what having a period really meant, was ancient in me. I knew from the films we’d been shown and all the lectures we’d had, some of the boys looking bewildered when we filed out of the class for the nurse’s office, other boys snickering and jabbing each other with elbows, that this meant my body was now ready to reproduce.

  I had gone home that day nearly running, afraid of soaking through and ruining my underwear, not knowing how very small that period would be, and that the next would not show up for another eighty-one days; I ran home to my mother to give her this news, to let her know of my growing up, of my becoming a woman, even though I knew there would be little reaction from her, if any.

  She did not let me down: when I told her, blurting out on my way through the living room for the bathroom, “It’s finally here. My period,” she slowly looked up from a magazine she had across her lap, and stared at me. By the time I was in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet with my underpants down to examine that stain—it had grown no larger, though I was certain it should have at least doubled or tripled in size—I heard her slowly stand from her chair, place the magazine on the coffee table, and start down the hall toward the bathroom.

  She stood in the doorway, her eyes not on me, but on the cupboard below the sink. Slowly she knelt, as if the knowledge I had given her were already weighing her down, already burdening her. She opened the cupboard, reached in, and pulled at her own box of fat pads. She opened the top of the box, reached in.

  Finally she looked at me, and she did her best, I knew, to smile at me, in her smile and eyes some sort of tentative investment, some sort of quiet care.

  But this time it was me who had scared her away: as she stood, pulling from the box one of her awkward, ugly pads, I said, “Mother, I’m okay. Look in there again,” and she lost the look, on her face now a puzzled expression, with
that puzzlement always the accompanying fear in her eyes. She knelt again, leaving the pad in the box, and looked, reached in, and brought out the box of tampons I had bought for myself over a year before, convinced way back then that this day was only a week or, at worst, a month away.

  She brought out the tampons, looked at the box a long moment, and then held it out to me.

  I smiled, trying to give back to her that feeling of help she had had only a moment before, and she, too, smiled at me, though behind it I could see nothing, in her eyes only the remote fear of me that had been growing and growing since my father’s death.

  I said, “I’m sorry, Mother. It’s just that—” and I stopped, because I did not know what I could say to her. In that moment the air suddenly changed: I realized what I was doing, my underwear down and stained, my mother there in the doorway, and I felt embarrassed, as if she had known me too well before all this. As if she had known me too well. But before I could do anything—pull up my underwear, pull my dress down over my knees, either of these movements a signal to her that I wanted to be alone here—she said, “Excuse me,” as though she had come upon a boarder in her house, and not her daughter. She turned from me and went into the hall, pulling the door closed behind her.

  I stood at the foot of the driveway, and I knew I had to do something, had to move from here, from our driveway, our apartment, still honoring my father and his voice in me, still listening for him and my name, and though it took more effort, more strength than it had in years to do it, more courage than I could have imagined, I took a step. Then I took another, saw that I was heading toward Market and those train tracks, beyond them King Street and lights and people and downtown.

  I took more steps, wondering why it had taken so much for that first one, and I wondered if, as I grew older, I weren’t becoming my mother, more like her each day, more turned into myself. My dreams of the ghosts of imagined children, for one thing, came back to me most every night since I’d been bitten, those children continuing to surround me, to gawk at me and swirl and disappear.