A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  “No,” Grady said, still looking at the stove. “No more.” He looked down at me, his eyes wide open, his hair down in his face. “There’s more, by the way. Tons more. But at least I hope you’re happy with what you’ve got. I hope you’re happy with the story thus far.”

  He looked at Martin. “Now. We have to go back now. I forgot to tell you. We’re working an oddball shift tonight. This afternoon. So—”

  “Wait,” Martin said, and he was moving, uncrossing his legs, standing. He looked at Grady, then at me. “She can—”

  “No!” Grady shouted, and startled even himself. He seemed to shake with that one word, almost tremble. He blinked twice, and brought his arm out to point at Martin. The soda can was still in his hand. “Now. We—have—to—go—home,” he said, the finger jabbing the air with each word, and things shifted right back then, any authority, any influence Martin may have had just falling away, Martin almost cowering as his eyes looked down and away from Grady to his own plate and soda can on the floor. He picked them up, and stepped right behind Grady now on his way into the kitchen.

  Heat waves still shimmered up from the stove, the world and its physics moving right along as though nothing had happened here. And yet I didn’t even know what had happened. I only knew now why Martin was as he was, that trauma at birth. I knew, too, that there was something else, some story I would not hear this day, a story I knew I did not want to know.

  I looked at the waves of heat, followed them with my eyes, trying to see how far into the air they went, where their influence faltered and disappeared, and I saw the wallpaper above the mantelpiece, that ugly wallpaper, beat and tired and ugly, ready to be torn off. Ready for solvent, for dousing with the sponge, for my scraper. I stood, knowing what I had to do: work. I picked up my plate, and went into the kitchen.

  Martin and Grady stood next to each other in there, Grady’s arms crossed, Martin’s hands at his sides. They were waiting for me.

  I dropped my plate into the garbage can, and picked up my purse from next to the cooler. I opened it, peering into it for my car keys.

  Grady said, “We can hitch a ride if it’s a problem for you.”

  “None at all,” I said, and I pulled out my keys and held them up as if they were some sort of trophy. I tried to smile.

  I knew that things would be changed from now on, that Grady and Martin would be different around me. I had known it from the ride home, Grady in the seat next to me, Martin in the back, huddled in the far right corner so that I could not see him in the rearview mirror. The air had been different, dead and flat somehow, as all three of us thought over the story, me thinking of the small fragment I had, the other two of the rest of it, the huge one, I imagined, of Martin and his life. But the air was dead; for the first time Grady said nothing, made no comments on anything. He was silent, and because of that silence Martin, too, was quiet. I did not know if he were looking out his window or straight ahead or at the backs of our heads or at his hands. I knew nothing. He was just somewhere behind me.

  Then I had dropped them off. Grady was leaning out of his open door when I said, “Tomorrow morning?” just to make certain they would return.

  “If that’s okay with you,” he said. He stood with his hand on the door, ready to close it, waiting for me.

  I said, “Fine,” and he pushed it closed. Martin had closed his door, too, and they had both gone in the back door of the Friendly’s.

  Now here I was, parked on a side street off Route 9, a street a hundred yards down from the Friendly’s. I was parked across from a small commons, an area of grass and trees, all dead now, a small monument of some sort erected in the middle of the lot, the lot fronting on Route 9. I was parked, waiting to see what would happen. From where I sat I could see the front porch of the Friendly’s; Miss Flo’s was up the street from me, next to it the rest of the small shops—the post office, the drug store, the pizza place—leading up to the corner. From here I had a clear view.

  I was waiting for them to leave Friendly’s, because I knew Grady had lied. They had no odd-ball shift. It was only his way of getting out, away from the story. I was only waiting, waiting to see what would happen. And I could not say why.

  Not ten minutes later, here came Grady, bundled up on his bike, looking up Route 9, pausing, pulling out onto the road off and away from me. Then came Martin, his wool cap on over his ears. He quickly looked at the road and pulled out, now only a few feet behind Grady.

  I started the engine, and felt at once idiotic, silly. I felt embarrassed following these two for a reason I did not know, when what I did know was that there was work I could do back at the house: wallpaper to be scraped away, more paneling to tear out, more linoleum to break up and remove. But here I was, and I realized I wanted to know more of them, of that story, and thought that if I followed them home this once, saw where Martin lived, and then where Grady lived, I would know something of them, as if views of their apartments would give to me some hint of what they hid.

  I waited for one car to go by on Route 9, and another, and then I pulled out and turned left. They turned right at the intersection, there at the pizza place, the red-brick building that seemed the color of blood in the gray December morning. I paused at the light, letting them get as far ahead of me as possible.

  Then I turned, and I slowly drove up the street, the two of them clipping along, Martin’s legs pumping hard, his head down, Grady’s head up, hair flying.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror, saw a car behind me. I pulled to the curb, and let it pass.

  I followed them, pausing, letting more cars pass, picking up again, all the way to Bridge Street, where they turned right again across from the elementary school. The homes back here were nice, more expensive than anything Tom and I could afford, and I wondered where Martin lived, wondered if, perhaps, he lived in a single room of one of these homes.

  But once they’d ridden a mile or so back toward King Street, the road itself turning slightly, lifting here, falling there, beside us all the way these houses and beautiful yards and trees and patios and garages, we came to another stop light, and I knew then where Martin lived.

  In the midst of comfortable, middle-class homes was a large complex of squat, ugly apartments, square, two-story buildings with square windows, siding on the top story, brown brick on the bottom. Lawns were nonexistent, rubbed bare to dirt much like the lawn before Sandra’s married-student housing complex over in Amherst. But these apartments had nothing to do with a college.

  These apartments were government-subsidized housing, and I watched as Grady and Martin sailed through the intersection, and pulled into the small, paved parking lot before one of the rows of apartments.

  I turned right at the light, drove a few yards down, pulled onto the shoulder, and stopped. I left the engine running. They were a hundred yards or so away; I was partially hidden from them by the trunk of a dead tree across the street from me, a tree whose roots cracked the pavement of that parking lot, the broken asphalt heaved up, dead weeds protruding, shoved this way and that by the cold wind and passing cars.

  Grady hopped off his bike, popped the front wheel over the curb of the lot, and wheeled it up to one of the black doors of the apartments, Martin behind him. Grady pushed the bike right up to the door; with one hand on the handlebar, he put the other into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He found the right one, put it into the knob, and opened the door. He pushed his bike inside, and Martin followed, his front tire bumping into Grady’s back tire as they disappeared inside.

  Then a light came on inside, and the front door closed. The curtains were open, and I could see inside two silhouettes from where I sat across the street. I saw the two of them in there, watched as two shadows took off coats, settled themselves into where they lived. Then the curtains closed.

  They lived there together.

  This was what I knew, what I had known longer than I could have said. They were living together, the two of them, here in subsidized housing, wh
ere in summer children played in the dirt, where men and women sat outside on hot evenings, tipped back in lawn chairs, beers in hand. This small enclave of poverty in the midst of prosperous Northampton, home of Smith College and two art theaters and Thorne’s Marketplace and any number of other cultural centers. Right here was a place I’d forgotten about, a place I never thought of, only drove past sometimes as a quick way through town, a way to avoid the boutiques and restaurants and slow, rich pedestrians on the streets downtown. Here was where they lived.

  Yet what I had just seen was no reason to believe that the two were living together. Perhaps Grady had only stopped in to help Martin get a meal together, or to help him pay his bills or turn the heat up just the notch it needed to make the apartment a home. Maybe that was the only reason Grady had stopped in.

  But there was the ease with which he had pulled out the keys, one fluid motion into the pocket, locating the key, inserting it and pushing in the bike, Martin clunky behind him. And there was how I had seen him slip off the coat, simply and easily. Only small things, but they told me more than I could have imagined. They told me that they lived here together, and that I didn’t need to stay any longer with the car running, their curtains closed, weeds between cracks in the pavement whipped now by a growing wind. I didn’t need to see if, in a few minutes, Grady would be pushing his bike back out, peddling off to wherever he lived. Because he lived here.

  I could go back to Chesterfield now, back to the house we were trying to make a home by tearing it apart. I could go back to the wallpaper.

  I put the car in gear, and I drove. I made it in less than twenty minutes, had the stove stoked and solvent in my sponge and walls wet five minutes later. I was working.

  That night, back at the apartment, the same ugly apartment that was not home, that would never be home, I cried myself to sleep, Tom next to me, his steady heartbeat there, his presence. I cried myself to sleep because so much was pounding up against me and on top of me. Too many things: Sandra still pounding away at me, at my heart, digging into me and how I had failed her, and how I had heard nothing from her since the day I left her in the perfusion room, left her with the shattered head of a rabbit I’d killed; Grady and Martin, the story of a woman mad with hate, and the grief I felt at a granite hate that killed Martin at birth, forced him into a world where he would, fifty years later, wash dishes and ride a bike home, following a boy who took care of him, who loved him for no other apparent reason than that the boy’s father had befriended the man, and the boy’s grandfather hated him; and the grief in me that cried at denying birth, when all I wanted to do—all I had wanted to do, before hope had died in me—was to give birth, feel in me the same pushing Elaine had felt, welcome the same force inside me, let it go. And, as usual now that I had quit my job, had filled my days with work on the house with Grady and Martin, I had told Tom none of this, kept the story to myself like some piece of bad news all through dinner, through an evening before the television, through listening to him fall asleep, through his moving toward that soft hush of breath.

  While I’d scraped the walls of the front room, alone there in the house, the only sound the scratch of the putty knife in my hand and the pop and crack of wood burning in the stove, I’d had nothing to do but think. Think, and imagine, and try to place myself somewhere else, someplace other than this house we had bought in the hopes of making it our home. I scraped, and I thought, imagined, tried to feel what effacing might be like, tried to feel dilation, tried Kegels, tried all I knew to make me become Elaine, or Paige, or anyone I knew who’d borne a child. That was what I wanted to do that afternoon. Just to imagine.

  But I could imagine nothing, could feel nothing, only the scrape of the knife against the wall, only the grate against plaster, a sensation much like that of a pencil marking Xs on the raw skull of a rabbit.

  I thought of my dream, too, the one I’d had before I abandoned hope, but what I remembered—the center of gravity shifting, the breasts full—were only shadows of the feeling I’d had when in the dream; those sensations were gone. Even the children I’d dreamed were gone now, and any comfort I might have taken in them, in just my imagined children, had disappeared. I hadn’t dreamt of them since that night. The night my period had come.

  And then, the knife in my hand and pushing up hard, a thin sheet of ancient wallpaper, cold and wet, dropping over my hand so that the knife disappeared, I thought of my mother. I did not understand why she would have come to me except, perhaps, to haunt me with more of my inheritance, more fear of the world outside the door, of empty rooms upstairs, of a barn outside that would have devoured me had I stayed in it a moment longer. But she came to me, and the smell of solvent in my head, the heavy work of holding my arm and pushing it against and up a wall again and again, brought me to my mother’s home—my home, the Single Family Unit—and into her kitchen, the room now with those old photos moved in from the front room, her cot, too, moved into the kitchen, the TV in there as well, perched on the counter and turned so that she could watch it and lie in the cot at night, this room the only one she inhabited anymore. The room I found her dead in one Thursday evening in January, me ready to take her on our weekly grocery-shopping trip. My mother lay on her back, her arms at her sides beneath a blanket pulled up to her chin, tucked snugly around her.

  This was how she had died, alone, comfortable, ready. But alone.

  As I pictured her there on the cot, her face the gray of the dead, I realized that she, too, had been one of these women, the fertile in our world, the ones who could bear children, and that I had been the one she had borne. It had been me who had passed from inside her; she had felt the push and pain, felt the dilation and effacement, felt the tear, the fire, the sweat. The putty knife in my hand, my muscles aching once again from too much work, I thought that I hated her even more, hated her for having had me when, I knew, she would have preferred not to, would have preferred to move through her world without the additional burden I was to her, the added fear each time I left the house, whether with my father or alone, whether for grade school or college, whether for a loaf of bread at the store or to marry my husband. I was only that for her: more fear, when all I had wanted in my life was to bear a child with Tom, and to face that kind of fear, the fear of life. Face it, and live through it.

  Finally, the sun near down and Tom, I imagined, probably home, my hand dropped the knife in mid-push; the knife clattered to the floor, the last piece of wallpaper I would work on that day hanging from the wall, the edges frayed, the pattern lost, the thick paper crumpled and limp and dead. I reached up to tear the loose piece from the wall, but I stopped. I left the piece there. It would be as good a place as any to start up the next day.

  Tom was asleep next to me, and I wanted to wake him then. I wanted him up with me. I wanted to find a reason to wake him, convinced I needed an excuse to wake my husband, when all I wanted was for him to hold me through this night

  I sat up in bed, moved my hand over to his shoulder, held it above him a moment, but I stopped. I needed a reason to wake him, I thought, but I knew that if I woke him and told him of my dead mother and of what she’d given me, my fear, a fear that kept me from entering a barn, he would think me mad. He would think me insane if I were to wake him and tell him I’d known I would die if I’d stayed inside the barn a moment longer that day, and might still die if I were ever to enter there again. That would cinch things for him, and he would know I was mad. And I wondered if I hadn’t already gone, if this weren’t how it happened: the sudden paralysis, the inability to make a decision, the right choice; the hand poised, unable to move for fear it might betray me, but wanting to move because I wanted him awake with me, a wind strong and loud outside, the rattle of branches like bricks dropped from some great height one on another, one on another, outside our window.

  I wondered if this weren’t insanity, the awareness of all things passing in and out of you until you could do nothing, or if this awareness were simply the terrain of the hopel
ess, the territory I had claimed for my own, the world I had taken on with giving up. I could not decide, could not see clearly whether this were insanity or hopelessness, and so I drew my hand away, lay back down in the bed of our dark room, beneath the gray clouds and night, certain of only one thing: I did not want to decide.

  When the alarm clock went off the next morning, the room was darker, immensely darker; when I shot open my eyes at the piercing buzz of the clock, I thought that somehow it had been reset, or that it was broken. Something was wrong. I knew something was wrong, and as Tom fumbled with the clock, I sat up in bed.

  By this time Tom was sitting up in bed, too, and then he stood, slowly made his way to the window. He let up the shade.

  “Look at this,” he said, stooping, peering outside.

  I pulled back the sheet and blanket, but I had already seen: snow was falling outside.

  I went to the window and looked out, our shoulders touching, and he put his arm, still warm with sleep, around me, the two of us leaning over and looking out the window. It seemed awkward somehow, his arm around me as we leaned, peered out at the white: his arm around me felt forced, as though he were obliged to try to touch me.

  The gray clouds that had been threatening for the last month had finally broken, letting snow sift down to dust lightly the street, cars, lawns, rooftops. A small snow, the wind gone now so that nothing drifted. Just first snow.

  He said, “We got the roof done. And the clapboards. This is fine.”

  I thought of Grady and Martin again, of their riding bikes in the snow all the way to Friendly’s. For a moment I considered driving over to the subsidized housing, stopping to offer them rides, but I dismissed the idea. They could ride bikes in snow, in dark. A morning darker than any I could remember.

  At breakfast Tom said, “You know, you need to slow down.” He said it just like that, out of thin air.