by Lydia Netzer
“She’s not your mother-in-law,” said Irene quietly. She climbed up on the stool and heaved herself out, sat on the ledge, and then swung her legs out, dropped away.
Now George was alone with the thing and its black breath. The thing is this: there had never been anything all that bad in his life. No one had died. No one had even been very sick. His mother had laid waste to every problem in his path. She spread out the world, easy for his taking, tuned to his key, ripe for his harvest. No grandmother to wither, no teacher at school, no college chum, no one would have come to end up here or anywhere else where death could find them. His mother had kept that all from happening, from the sheer force of her human will. And now George stood, one foot on the stool, one hand on the window ledge, the black box of ashes tucked under his arm, and the bad ugly god said one more thing to him.
“I’m coming for you,” it said. “Believe it.”
18
Irene had no memory of the time before the fire. No memory of the fire itself. Irene’s first memory of her mother was an incorrect outline of the mother’s face against the white ceiling in the dark. It was bedtime and Irene was getting rocked to sleep. As she lay in her mother’s arms, she would look up at her mother’s face now and again and then close her eyes. She could remember looking up once, and instead of seeing the flatness of a face with a small nose poking out and glasses shining in the light from the hallway, she saw a sharp point jutting out of the forehead and a smooth recess where the face should be. She lay there for a minute, staring. In her memory, she couldn’t place what she thought about it. But she remembered relief at realizing the sharp point was a chin, the smooth recess a neck. Her mother’s head had fallen back against the chair because she was asleep, and Irene was seeing the bottom side of it. Then she felt like laughing. On subsequent nights, when she observed this shape against the ceiling, she was not disturbed. Because she knew it was just a chin. Mommy, she would say, Wake up, please. And feel a quiet smugness that her mother was looking undignified in the rocker.
She was always two years younger than her classmates. And always seemed to be a foot smaller. For this she was tortured on the elementary school playground, and later came the impossibility of dating in high school. None of the showio-boobio that was going on in other girls’ lives. Irene could remember a little boy in her third grade class who chased her around the sandbox in the playground, trying to sit next to her and touch her legs. That was the last time she was pursued sexually until she was in graduate school.
To make matters worse, her mother read aloud every night from poems and novels that glorified love. Love of the ages, a penetrating, everlasting love of eternal proportions. Love you find once and cling to forever, even if the person you love is decapitated in the process. Love fraught with difficulty. Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester love. Heathcliff and Catherine love. Love on the moors, love with a capital L. Cleopatra love, and Romeo and Juliet love. Love in uncomfortable costumes, with death at the end of it. It was like her mother’s Bible. It seemed to be her mother’s creed.
Irene didn’t drink or have any sex in college, and when she graduated she was still twenty and went on to Bowling Green for a master’s degree in math. In Bowling Green she loved a music graduate student who composed for a tuba ensemble. Or, more specifically, a euphonium ensemble. He lived in an apartment in a tower, and she took an elevator up. She sat in his bedroom on a chair and worked on her work, and he sat at his desk and worked on his, and they listened to Sting. From time to time he would come over to her and put his head in her lap or on her shoulder. He kneeled in front of her chair and she put her arms around him and patted his back. Periodically, he pressed his lips into her neck. He was cute, and had long hair. In her mind, Irene had been calling him Percy Bysshe Shelley, before they met. It was shocking to her that he wanted to date her. Once, she’d had a nonlucid dream where a kiss on the neck became pretty sexual, awakening feelings in her that led her to want to replay the dream again and again. But in real life it didn’t happen that way. It just led to a wet spot on her neck.
When he first kissed her on the mouth, it was her first kiss. She was sitting on a radiator in his apartment with her back against the window and he came at her, with the obvious intent to kiss. He said, “Irene, I know you have been kissed before.” She hadn’t said no. She noticed he licked his mouth right before he came close. Eventually, they had a careful, feeble attempt at sex. Looking back later, she thought it might have been his fault, because he was terrible at it. He didn’t even take his pants off or her clothes off, just pushed and pushed at her, and then eventually said, with a gasp, “I did it.”
At the time, she just felt tired, like she wanted to go to her own bed. Nothing came of it thereafter. There was no further attempt. She started getting bored and dumped him. He was a good guy and very smart about music, but after he had been pressing himself on her leg through his pants, she never felt good about him anymore.
After that, she was getting her Ph.D. in Columbus, and she dated lots of men but didn’t have sex with them. She learned instead how to do very good blow jobs, to the point that she felt quite masterful about it. She stopped dating academics and fell in with a man in a nightclub who didn’t tell her his last name until she finally ripped his driver’s license out of his hand and found out it was Wiener. He was handsome and funny, and he was also dealing drugs, which Irene didn’t realize until later. They would walk up and down Park Street while he said scornful things about the liberal arts majors she pointed out. But sometimes, he would be in her apartment and he wouldn’t talk and he’d appear to be watching television but would lose the ability to respond to questions. So Irene rolled him off the couch and into bed and then the words would come out, encouraging words. She realized later that he must have been tripping during these catatonic times. She thought back to cuddling next to him on the couch, while he stared blankly before him, and felt that it hadn’t been so bad. In times of lucidity, he argued about his need to give Irene an orgasm with his tongue. But he failed to convince her it would work.
The relationship ended one night at a club. They ran into another guy she had dated a few times, a smart guy, a physics fellow. She was surprised to find that when she turned to introduce her boyfriend to this smart guy, she had forgotten the boyfriend’s name. “This is uhhh,” she said. The smart guy laughed. The boyfriend didn’t. The next week he moved out to her neighborhood and bought a kitten, and said, Look what I did for you. But she couldn’t face him ever again after that night. She wanted to go to his new apartment and see his kitten, but she broke up with him instead. It just hadn’t felt good to stand there and forget his name. There had been no way to cover that up.
So in her mind the main history looked like this:
1. Mother’s face as a chin.
2. The boy on the playground touching her legs.
3. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s wet lips on her neck.
4. Drug dealer staring at the television.
The only thing next was Belion. And then George.
*
“Here we are!” said George.
Irene turned the corner into a rutted dirt road flanked by encroaching trees, each with leaves turning a different shade of brown. They had been on the main drag of Sylvania, a western suburb. Monroe Street was Vegas-wide and lined with neon, oversize restaurants, and gift shops. Then they had turned onto a blacktop highway, rolling over hills and through some woods. Now the road had narrowed and decayed.
“Just keep one wheel up on the middle thing, and one wheel over on the side. If you let yourself down into the ruts, you won’t get through.”
“You live here?” asked Irene.
“Well, my mother has a city apartment. My dad lives here. We used to live here. This is where I grew up. Yes, I live here. Sometimes.”
Irene took her eyes off the ruts to give him a powerful stare. “If you’re sure.” He smiled back and she laughed.
The house was ramshackle-quaint. A tumbledown well in t
he center of the yard gave it a haunted feel. There was a two-story garage with wide, carriage-house doors, and cragged oak trees spread their gnarled limbs over everything.
“Wow,” said Irene. “Picturesque.”
“Yeah,” said George. “My mother used to have her psychic shop set up out here. It used to be even worse than this—prayer flags and a llama. Over there in the side yard they had a crystal maze, where they’d buried crystals in the ground in a labyrinth shape—you were supposed to be able to get to the center by feeling your way along the crystal energy.”
George pointed to a little meadow adjacent to the house, where rosebushes were sending out their fall offerings around the edge.
“Or you could just walk there, to the center,” said Irene. “Not much of a maze.”
“Yeah, you should try it,” said George. Irene started laughing with sound coming out. Actual sound.
“Are you OK?” George asked. He smiled at her.
“I think you fucked me silly,” she said. “This is me silly.”
“OK, silly, you can just park here next to the garage.”
When they got out, she picked her way across the lawn and sat down in the porch swing. She let out a long sigh and looked around.
“So this is why your hands feel like longshoreman hands,” she said.
“Gardening,” said George. “I do it a lot. And how do you know what a longshoreman’s hands feel like?”
“Conjecture,” said Irene. She pulled her feet up on the swing and hugged her knees, making the swing move but not rock.
“You do not look right at home,” said George, pointing to a hand-lettered sign on the wall that said MAKE YOURSELF RIGHT AT HOME.
“How do I do that?” Irene asked.
“Probably with some of Dad’s weed,” George told her.
“Is your dad here now?”
“No one’s seen Dad since the banquet,” George responded. “But if he does show up, we’re not supposed to…” George appeared to be trying to remember what he was not supposed to do.
“Let him in?” Irene guessed.
“Yes, or give him any money. Mom likes to keep the reins tight.”
“Shit, I forgot the ashes!” Irene jumped up off the porch swing and the chains jangled.
“Where are you going to put them?” George asked.
“I don’t know,” said Irene. “I want to get them, though.” She walked toward the car.
“We could scatter them here,” George offered. “Around in the woods, on the crystal labyrinth, down the well.”
“Down the well? How could you even suggest that?” Irene said.
“There’s no water down there!” George insisted.
“So much the worse,” said Irene. She pulled the black box out of the backseat of the car and slammed the car door.
“Sorry,” said George. He grinned at her, and she felt, looking at him, a flush of something blooming out of her face and out of her skin all over. A good feeling bubbling up through her skin, making her feel like giggling was a real thing that happens to people, instead of just something people do who don’t read books.
“How about the crystal labyrinth then?” George was saying. “That might be a nice place to get sprinkled. All those vibrations.”
“We can’t leave her here at all,” said Irene. “Why would she want that? She had no connection to this place.”
“People have no connection to the cemetery either, and that doesn’t stop them from being buried there in droves.”
They went inside, and for now Irene put her mother’s ashes on the kitchen table.
“Something about this place seems familiar,” said Irene. “Like I saw it in a movie or something.”
George frowned. “Let’s go to bed,” he said.
*
Irene lay next to George on a big bed. George was asleep. The bed had a curling iron frame and there was enough room on it for two Georges and several Irenes, but she was tucked up close to him, so that their bodies were touching all the way down. In his sleep, his face was turned toward her, as if they had just now stopped talking. His eyes were closed, the lashes lay long on his cheeks. His arms were thrown out wide. Her head rested on one bicep, and his other arm was up on the pillow on the other side. She leaned into him and smelled the scent of his body, feeling she had smelled it before, had been this close before to his skin, to the hair under his arms, to the three small freckles on this side of his neck. It was just hard for her to remind herself that he was new. There was no sense to the idea that he was somehow old. Irene breathed deeply and sighed. Was he dreaming? Was he aware?
She saw his rib cage stretch and deflate, a low, slow rhythm of his life, and in the soft skin of his stomach she could see his heartbeat tapping at the surface.
“This is love,” she said in her mind. “Love, love, love. This is love.”
She laid her hand on top of his stomach, as if she was planting a flag. I love you, she thought. But the thing was, unfortunately, if she were to love him, she could never sleep again. As long as she stayed away from the inside of her mind, from her mother, from her Dark House, from the spiraling center at the black heart of her, she could try this love. She could lie down with this man in the middle of the day with no clothes on and put her mouth around him sweetly, and when she was done she could let him put his arms around her and fall asleep clutching her like a life preserver, his lips pressed against her hair. As long as she didn’t sleep, this could happen again and again, every day here in the house in the woods, and she would lose her last name, and take his, and forget where she came from, and how it was clouded with piss, and gin, and unfortunate accidents.
Irene turned over and put her other cheek against George’s arm and pressed her back against him, the backs of her legs, the soles of her feet. Her eye came to rest on the box of her mother’s ashes, and she felt her heart lurch. Physically she could feel it beating, racing, under her arm.
She closed her eyes and began to put herself to sleep. She was dreaming, and aware, in her mind, of her mother’s house, of the shelf of bells, of the sound each one made, and the final ring of the bell that told her she was in.
*
Asleep, I see that the Hinterland is changed, has become trees and bushes, and wild grass and a blue sky of fall. Directly across from my mother’s porch is George’s country place, where I am really sleeping now, with its own porch and its rambling pieces tucked under the spreading trees and behind the bushes turning red. I run across and go inside. There in the bedroom I see him stretched out still, the quilt tangled around his knees. He is so dear, and so sweet to me. I could devour him all over again, but I don’t want him to wake up either, and anyway, my dreamspell is so embarrassing. I don’t know if he would even want to see it. I am embarrassed of how dear I find him. I am embarrassed that I find him when I’m asleep and picture the angles of his elbows, his long feet, his absolutely beautiful face.
What is love? A contract for keeping us together, making things legal, perpetuating the species, a droopy butterfly wing of invented sap for the masses, a drug for idiots. That’s what love is. I want to say that what I feel is desire, just sex, an animal firing itself up over another animal, but I know I have felt that before. Love makes me want to spread my legs. Love makes me want to put his hand down my pants. That’s my version of romance.
The box of my mother’s ashes is heavy in my dream, superheavy, like it’s going to kill me to carry this box through the house and out the door. How much did my mother weigh? How much did she weigh after her bones had been put through the pulverizer? This box is not my mother. It has her ashes in it, but it’s heavier than that, it’s heavy like heavy, dude. Meaning weighty.
I lug my mother’s box of ashes into Dark House: the parlor, the library, the theater, the back room, the props room, and I know I’m coming to the center.
There’s nothing inherently scary about a ruined room, a broken floor, and a hole that leads down. Or maybe there is. I don’t know, beca
use what this particular broken floor has always done is push my face away, so that it is perpetually in the periphery of my vision, and just looking at it sideways fills me up with paralyzing fear. I am the girl that has a solid plan for suicide in every city I am likely to visit, involving bridges of a particular height, water of a particular depth, and gravity. I face the side of a bridge with my toes curled, my breath let all the way out, my hands open like catch me. But that broken floor, that whistling dark, those beams sticking up through the floor, down through the ceiling, that causes me a fear that goes deep, all the way back to the little child’s brain I had when I was six, and this whole thing started.
I’m afraid of the hole in the center of Dark House, but I walk straight over to it now, and I open up the box. Inside the box is a plastic bag. I open up the bag. Inside the bag is a thick powder, interspersed with bits of her. In the dream, it is the purest white. There is a wind coming at me from the back, a firm strong breeze behind me sucking straight down into the hole in the floor. The hole is big and draws everything to itself: the air, the people ground up into powder, the ideas in my head. I know that when I turn the box upside down the dregs of my mother will spiral into the hole and make a beautiful shape, like the curve of a snail shell, like the inside of a nautilus. It will spread out from my hand in a sparkling arc and make something so perfect as she floats away from me.
So I don’t do that. I throw the whole damn box down the hole in one whoosh. And it is gone.
I feel dizzy, like I do when I stand too close. Then I’m running like a child up the basement stairs having banged the lid of the clothes dryer closed, and I burst through the door and out onto the porch, and George’s country house is straight ahead of me and I run, run, run across to it and up onto the porch of it, and there’s George again, and he’s sleeping still. I lie down next to him in the bed, put my cheek on his arm, and curve my spine into him, and it’s warm.
I’m looking at the place where my mother’s box of ashes used to be before I threw it into the center of Dark House, and I know that now I can’t wake up, because if I do, I will open my eyes, and it will be back there, that black terrible box. So I’ll lie here, and sleep forever.