Playing House

by Lauren Slater

  As an artistic strategy, my pushing the limits of raw, unfiltered honesty failed. It never got me where I needed to go. It earned me a reputation, I suppose, as a controversial writer. It earned me faithful fans in equal proportion to determined detractors. But it did not, this pushing, describe or delineate the edges of my professional bounty so that I might better come to control it. Thus I wrote still harder, faster, riskier, only to find my confusion increasing in proportion to the amount of attention I received, and the more attention I received and the more money I made, the more sure I was that Good Luck would be leaving me soon, and how much the better if I left her before she left me.

  No, I don’t know his horse’s name. Or what sort of underwear he wears. All I can say for sure is that he claimed me like a cowboy, with a whoop and a holler as he lashed out his lasso and snagged my ankle, bringing me down into the dust, me yowling like a calf, and then a cow, and then a woman who has dropped her dignity down the disposal and cannot get it in her grip.

  Let’s just say, for the sake of story, that the first appearance came three years ago, when Bad Luck was delivered through the mail slot carved in the wooden hunk of our heavy antique door. I distinctly remember this event, how the man-myth and his horse came flying through the letter slot, miniaturized and disguised as lawsuit numero uno.

  As with much—but not all—of what followed, I did not do anything, or much (and “Ay, there’s the rub,” as Hamlet said, feeling for his responsibility), to justify this first lawsuit. And yet, I would also say I did not do much—if anything—to justify the second lawsuit. And then again, I would also say I did not do much—if anything—to justify the third lawsuit. You see how this sounds? Suspicious, eh? When enough Lemony Snicket sorts of events start to pile up at one’s purportedly innocent feet, one would be a fool not to wonder if, or rather where (and then again if), personal agency enters the picture. Thus we come to the core of my question: Precisely how am I haunted? Back and forth I go, ping-pong turned existential and absurd. I did it. It did it. I did it. It did it. To rephrase the question: To what degree, if at all, am I the reason for both my comedy and my tragedy, my riches and my rags?

  First, the first lawsuit, which caused the deeply dented coffers. Then, my best friend one day and entirely out of the blue stopped speaking to me, writing in an e-mail, “Stay away from me and I will stay away from you.” As if I were diseased, and, who knew, perhaps I was. I began to feel tilted, unwell. I had a huge fight with my literary agent of twenty productive years and left her, or she left me; it matters not. The point: a great gulf came. My favorite aunt, my mother’s middle sister, as sweet as my mother was not, died in an automobile accident, driving down the highway without her seatbelt, hitting the car in front, my aunt flying through the windshield, an angel going through glass. My luck turned, and I began my mourning. After my aunt died, our hot-water heater burst and flooded out the basement, destroying all my notebooks, all my earliest attempts at writing, the tiny diary I kept at the age of six, with its little gold lock and minuscule key, warped beyond recognition, this one of my last links to my old home, the one I’d left for a foster family, never to return, left just like Good Luck left me and Bad Luck appeared, pronto, in her place.

  And then I was sued a second time, for something equally as ridiculous as the first lawsuit, but the thing about lawsuits is this: you can’t just walk away. You have to play the game, get a lawyer; the whole shebang cost me over one hundred thousand dollars, so we went from being well-off to being unwell and also off, but off of what? Off a ledge, an edge, a place of quiet comfort.

  And then one day, soon after the second lawsuit had begun, our lawn got a weird disease and then died, and from the dead thatches of sod grew odd purplish plants I’d never seen before. They all had stout scaly stems and broad waxy leaves, and they stormed the yard, multiplying like the rabbits they most certainly were not, daily gaining ground and girth.

  Soon after the odd botanical appearance, we began to find small mammals in the once-was grass, their corpses already stiffened, their bodies curled in the corners or simply splayed straight out, flies feasting. At first, we had no idea what might cause such a spree of death nor did I fully comprehend that Good Luck had left for good, so I was slow to take things seriously. My husband and I tried not to giggle through the hedgehog funeral, presided over by the high priest of my daughter and her servant, my four-year-old son, who solemnly covered the cardboard box and placed it in the grave my husband had dug, clearing a patch of the odd plant with a sharp spade.

  The morning after the funeral I went outside and tugged on one plant, surprised at how freely its forked roots gave up the ground, dangling their long slippery strings. “Deadly nightshade,” the man at the garden center claimed, looking at the limp victim I held out between thumb and forefinger. He snapped on a latex glove and gingerly took the weed from me. A latex glove? “It’s everywhere in our yard,” I said, and I felt something soft in my throat, something, well, gushy.

  “I’ve heard of occasional infestations before,” he said. “It’s a bitch to get rid of, and you gotta be careful.” He placed the plant’s corpse on the counter. “This plant,” he said, “this plant is one of the most deadly weeds on the East Coast. One bite of its berries and a child’s heart stops in a second. I’d keep my kids out of the yard.”

  Berries?

  In August, he told me. The plant becomes a twining vine that unpacks its petals, a fragile purple flower, the seed head stocked with millions of its descendants all dueling to duplicate. At some point mid-month the seed head bursts into birth, the flower furls and falls, and in its place, at summer’s end, grow clusters of berries. The horticulturist showed me a botanical drawing of our opponent. In the drawing the flower was long gone, the berries painted a rich red, dangling on the slender stem like a lumpy scarlet scrotum. According to the horticulturist, the berries are surprisingly sweet to the taste, attractive to all manner of life forms who know no better: raccoons, skunks, hedgehogs, minors.

  It was well into summer, then, and my corner of the globe was wilted in warmth. The sidewalks sizzled. The flowers along the fences had long since fainted, their faces hanging sideways. Only the nightshade thronged. We had resigned ourselves to the necessity of chemical intervention lest the hedgehog lead to a swan lead to a prince or princess.

  I spent a few hundred bucks on contractor-grade herbicide, thigh-high rubber boots, huge plastic goggles, pale-blue gloves. Sweating from every gland, I tromped around our yard, pumping the valve, poison arcing from the plastic spout and splashing with a small sound onto the thriving green leaves. The next morning, the nightshade looked, well, unsettled, as though, perhaps, every stalk was being sued. By evening, the purple flowers had rolled up and dropped off. Within a week, the stalks were dead and brown, their previously plump vines stringy, the plants arced and twisted in what seemed expressions of agony. Our yard still looked infested, but not with nightshade anymore. It looked infested with death. And not a single scream.

  I can’t possibly tell all the terrible things that happened to me. By now I’d been through two of the three lawsuits that came my way, an infestation, the toaster caught on fire. We went in search of sunshine, to Florida, and all our luggage got lost and was never found, so to this day our brown bags are somewhere circling and circling the globe. I started fighting with my spouse; this was—what—2006? And then 2007 came in a gust of mild garbagey-smelling January wind, the winter melt laced with brown, sloppy dog turds on every city sidewalk. The paths around our more rural home smelled as though they’d been made from septic sludge. I felt my words wobble when I wrote. Periods turned into question marks, which marched off the page and stood sentry in my head. Was this word right was that word right was this word right? It finally became clear to me that, at some point I could not quite determine, Good Luck had definitely—and with finality—departed, on to bigger and better pastures. Previously a veritable font of authorial productivity, I felt my spouts close. The blank pag
e is, in fact, far from blank. Stare long enough into its creamy smother and you feel yourself start to gasp.

  Less, I’m sure, is more in situations of negative abundance. Thus I’ll try to do this quickly. Our house began to rot. Or maybe it was always rotting, and I began to realize it. During an unseasonal rainstorm, a chunk of our foundation came loose, and when the wet weather passed we found the chunk on our neighbor’s lawn. Slates slid from our previously sturdy roof. Water dribbled down our walls, the color of rust sometimes, and then sometimes the color of soot. I’d always loved our house; we’d been living in it, a small saltbox with a single stained-glass window in its narrow hall, for over three years now, a house set on acres and acres of pasture and forest, the trees so tall and old a man’s huge arms could not circle their massive majestic trunks.

  Good Luck and Bad Luck have similar plot lines. They start slowly, gather motion, roll, then rise to a crescendo, and, following the basic laws of physics (Remember this from seventh grade? An object in motion remains in motion unless . . .), stop only when acted upon by an outside force.

  Thus my panic, for what would the outside force be if not Bad Luck’s sole equal and opposite—Good Luck—with her honey hair and high heels, long gone from me now, involved with her new clients.

  Humanoids emerged on this earth two million years ago, and since that time there have been on the order of a quarter-million regal philosophers who thought through issues as diverse as time and grief, evil and isolation, the blessed and the cursed, the whys and wherefores. The great playwright Sophocles dandled luck in his lap and wove it into every act, and still, in the end, he could not name its ingredients or its origins. If the most noble philosophers pondering the issue for, say, the last twelve thousand years have not been able to unpack luck, why on earth, so long as I’m on Earth, would I? Sometimes giving up is a form of grace.

  My cognitive revolution occurred in—so appropriate—the sweet rainy spring of 2009, when the clouds emptied themselves of their water weight and emerged, come June, as lean, clean lines of white and the palest of pinks. The rain-drenched earth yielded up its goods in excess, so ripe strawberries, as nubby as tongues between large green leaves, emerged everywhere in our garden, the weeds washed away, the loam beneath as black as melted chocolate, the fiery-yellow flowers standing in stark and gorgeous contrast to the ground. In June, the flowers bobbed and nodded when the breeze blew, as if agreeing with me. Yes. Call it quits. Enough wondering why. Or when. Or if. Enough examination.

  And yet, what does one do after quitting? I’d been struggling for so long, puzzle piecing for so long, meditating for so long on my fortune and its reversal, trying for so long to woo my ex–best friend back to me and to repair what was beyond repair with my literary agent, working and working, chewing and chewing: how to give all that up and simply sit? I have never liked meditation. The mandate to breathe always makes me feel like I am choking. The practices of Buddhism are not my strong suit.

  “Let’s build a pond,” I said to my husband that summer, and he, perhaps sensing that I needed a project other than myself, agreed, and so we took up our shovels, together for the first time in a long time. In the abandoned, weed-eaten field behind our rural home, a field the prior owner scraped of its top soil to sell for a fat fee, we excavated the hard earth, hurling sharp spades into its stone-studded skin, splitting it sideways, subsoil yielding up the glossiest, wriggliest worms, and those stones, everywhere, flat and round, veined and mottled, but all, every one, mysteriously smooth, as if they’d been pounded for millennia by the sea. “Perhaps they have,” my husband said, holding in his palm a gorgeous purple globe, a red arterial scrawl just visible beneath its opaque, violet skin. “After all, this was once the ocean,” he said, gesturing with his hand to the land all around us, the tall grass in the healthy far fields rippling like the hide of some huge beast; picture that. We were once covered. It comforted me, for a reason I can’t say. You find your blankets; ultimately, you do. I pulled the sea around me, a salty shawl.

  And, comforted but still uncomfortable, I, and we, continued to dig. The sun swelled hotter, higher, as the days went by, and on the solstice our sun was pierced on its pointed peak, spinning and spinning madly, this fire-star, our raison d’etre. They say to never stare into the sun, but I did. I stared straight into its blackened stove-belly and saw for minutes afterwards dark shapes dance before my eyes. I posed no questions. I got no answers.

  Meanwhile, we dug ourselves in and, paradoxically, out to a depth of five feet, ice-cold lemonade cracking the thick glassine thirst that coated our throats, proving relief was possible.

  “I want ten feet,” my husband said, eyeing the modest hole. “If we’re going to make a pond, I want it deep enough so I can do cannonballs without worrying about my ass.”

  This seemed reasonable to me, so we hired a yellow machine with a steel claw, and the machine gnawed out another five feet, so at the end we had a crater that descended deep into the earth, the tapered sides taupe colored, at night the hole so impenetrably dark, so utterly mysterious one could almost imagine the tiny flickering lights of China deep in the deepest distance, a world beyond our world.

  Ponds, like breasts, are not meant to be made. They are meant to simply occur. When one makes a thing like a pond or for that matter a breast, one must resort, unless incredibly lucky, to unnatural interventions; in the case of breast-making, saline implants or chunks of fine flesh culled from a chunky bottom; in the case of ponds, plastic liners or concrete, some way to hold the water. We’d resigned ourselves to a liner, all twenty-five hundred pounds of Firestone nontoxic rubber.

  It was July then, and the rains resumed, and our pond-making stalled while we were pelted. The rain came down like a temper, a tantrum, beating its billions of fists against the hoods of cars, the roofs of houses. Tears of rain snaked their way beneath the loosened slates, slid down the walls, so the walls wept while I watched; I practiced watching. How do walls weep? Why do walls weep? Can walls weep? Do weeping walls stop weeping? I might have had such crazy questions if I had succumbed to my mind’s inclinations; but I did not succumb. I watched the rain. I waited it out, and, in the waiting, my body began to rain right along with the world. I rained droplets, sweated drops, the humidity coating me, its hand across my mouth.

  I detest clichés, but then again, there’s a reason why certain phrases have attained immortality as clichés. I cannot think of a better way of saying that when you let something go, it frequently comes back to you. I let go of the search for understanding my bad luck, and in doing that, I also let go of the hope embedded in that search: that, by understanding, I might come to control my fortune, which I would swiftly reverse once I figured out the stick shift. I let the wheel go, watched Good Luck and Bad Luck disappear into their separate mists, lost sight of them completely in the rain, and then the rain stopped. The clouds cleared. They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking, their heads lolling with dizzy delight, rivulets etched into our earth, showing us which way the rain ran, downhill, of course, heading, all water, straight for our yet-to-be-pond. We had ordered the liner, and right this minute it was en route, rolled like a massive scroll, a Torah made of rubber, on some truck, halfway between Minnesota and Massachusetts. Understand, the liner was key and, therefore, even though it ensured a synthetic wetland, we couldn’t wait to receive it. Our pond depended upon it. The liner would at once contain and seal the pond, allowing it to exist while ensuring its fraudulent nature. Unnaturally sealed up, our pond would require expensive aeration systems and flashy pumps that would circulate the water 24/7, sending a no-no message to mosquitoes seeking stagnant fluids in which to hatch their larvae.

  And now, after rain, with only a few days left before the shipment was to arrive, we followed the water’s path to our half-made pond. We weren’t going to see if it held water; we assumed i
t would not. We were going to see if the pounding rainfall had destroyed the plant shelves we had so carefully sculpted.

  I think we heard it before we saw it, the sound of plop plop plop. Ben says he heard gurgling, not plopping, but I don’t see how that’s possible. I heard plopping, and then, peering over the sculpted lip of our hole, I saw emerald frogs arcing from bank to bank, missing by long shots, falling into what could be called a massive puddle or could be called a . . . a . . . pond, for the hole was holding water, against all odds, against all rules, because dirt in New England does not hold water, but, well, this dirt did. “Clay,” an aquascape contractor, told us a few days later, when he came out to see our little miracle, our piece of great good luck, the liner shipment cancelled, $12K returned to our account. “You’ve got clay here it seems,” the pond professional said, grabbing a chunk of the saturated stuff and letting it ooze through his fist. “You know,” he said, “you’re really, really lucky. You won’t need a liner. Pond people would kill to have your soil.”

  I started to laugh then, because I knew no one would kill to have my soil. Of this I was positive.

  Still, there are times when clocks stop and awareness of the terrible temporary nature of your world gets suspended in some liminal, summer-like state, so your life hangs like a long afternoon in a perfect mid-July, the roses rose-red, their mouths yawning wide as if in perpetual surprise, or sleepiness. And that was what our sudden luck was like. We didn’t ponder its temporary nature; we just enjoyed it. The kids whooped with delight, stripped off their clothes, and went racing down the embankment, skidding, stumbling, finally belly flopping into the half-filled crater, muddy and foggy but delightfully cool and totally ours. All day the kids played in the pond we’d made, caught frogs, pried stones from the field and let them cannonball down deep into the deepest part. The children emerged from the murky water at sunset, sun-baked and flaking mud; we hosed them down outside, brown giving way to a deeper brown, the bodies of my estivating progeny.