The Carriage House: A Novel

by Louisa Hall

  She remembered Philadelphia from a course she took in American history, which goes to show that it’s not always wise to take your cues from history. Now she was stuck day in and day out in a suburb so boring she sometimes thought the sheer tedium would cause her to vomit. At first Louise was dutiful in every aspect of her job. She went around labeling kitchen drawers with her professional label maker, at which point Margaux stopped coming down to the kitchen. She accompanied Margaux on her walks, at which point Margaux abruptly stopped walking, choosing to go out to the garden. After several months of scurrying around, trying to find tasks that she could perform, attempting to remind Margaux of things she should not fail to remember, and sensing Margaux’s distinct and rational-seeming frustration with her every effort, Louise finally became exasperated enough to confront the situation head-on. “Listen, Mrs. Adair, let’s be straight,” she said. “I get the feeling that you’d rather I wasn’t around.”

  “I’m sorry?” Margaux asked, looking off into the distance. She had what people call the lion’s face, the expression that Alzheimer’s patients develop sometimes, when they seem to be forever gazing out over the Serengeti, blinking at the prospect of blankness. Louise repeated herself, and Margaux finally focused on the person in front of her.

  “I’m sorry, but do I know you?” she asked. Louise waited, unwilling to back down. Margaux heaved a sigh. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’d like to be alone right now.”

  “I’m only here to help,” Louise said, parroting the dialogue she had been given in training. “I’m here to help because your husband was worried. You were getting lost on your walks. He hired me to help you remember things, so that you can continue living your life as normally as possible.”

  “That was kind of him,” Margaux said. “But I’d like to be alone now. If I forget, I forget. All this insistence on constant remembering,” she added, then stopped. Margaux rarely seemed to feel the requirement to finish her sentences. “And the inability to be alone . . .” She trailed off, her eyes going distant again.

  “Point taken,” Louise told her, and relocated to the kitchen for the rest of the day. As Margaux declined, Louise told herself, she’d take a more active caretaking role. For now Margaux seemed capable enough to float around on her own, unburdened by constant remembering. Never acknowledging Louise’s presence, she moved between her third-floor studio-bedroom and the garden. She ate alone in her room. She slept often. Louise sat in the kitchen sometimes, the second-floor guest room other times, and if it was warm enough, she occasionally would lie out on a chaise longue on the patio. From time to time she was asked to run to the grocery store, or to find a lost shoe, or to drive to doctors’ appointments, since Margaux’s license had lapsed and no one in the family felt it was safe for her to renew it. Margaux tolerated these services, and Louise provided them without expecting gratitude; she was used to moving around in other people’s houses as inconspicuously as possible.

  Other than these small chores, the day was a vast unoccupied expanse. Unfortunately, this allowed her to engage in marathon text conversations with Brad, which wreaked havoc on her commitment to forget he’d ever existed. She was able to take holidays off, during which spans of time she visited New York and inevitably ended up sleeping over in his sloppy apartment, then talking casually about his new girlfriend over postcoital coffee in the morning. Back in Breacon, she began to nurse a tabloid addiction. In the absence of other forms of mental stimulation, she looked forward to trips to CVS as though it were a veritable Mecca of eternal life and beauty. She considered moving back to Melbourne to finish her communications degree, but she loathed the idea of admitting defeat to her mother, who would blow on her tea and stir the soup and only partially disguise her triumph at having been vindicated in the lifelong quest to lower Louise’s expectations. And then one day Brad texted Louise to let her know that he and his blond girlfriend were getting married, and that he was coming to Philadelphia on business in two weeks and could he stay with her, wink-wink, and Louise found herself in the Adair kitchen, fluctuating between the desire to cry over the loss of a person she didn’t even like and the competing urge to plot a complicated revenge.

  Revenge won out—Louise Wilson had never been one to succumb to sentiment—and the plan she settled on was as close to perfect as revenge plots ever get. She would a) never talk to Brad again, and b) write a novel that would be published to much acclaim, thereby causing Brad to seethe with regret that he had not plucked her up while he had the chance. Because the thing that most devastated Louise about the Bradley debacle was the fact that he had decided the blond girl was a surer key to success. Louise knew this because she understood the sad creature that was Bradley Barlow. It was clear that he had chosen the blond girl—with her fashionable shoes, her conspiratorial niceness, and her palatable job—because she exuded whatever it is that successful people exude.

  Therein lay the problem. Louise had always imagined, with utter confidence, that she would be a success. She never knew exactly how, but from the time she was a child in Catholic school, she was aware that she was charming and clever. This awareness gave her confidence. She never worried about speaking up, in class or otherwise. There was no reason she should not succeed. That Brad chose someone else to help him achieve the success he so desperately desired was a blow that Louise was finding it difficult to recover from. And so she would write a novel that would allow her to attend glamorous book parties in New York, to which she would wear ridiculously attractive outfits, and maybe she would run into Brad on his way to some Irish pub and she would brush him off by saying, “Oh, I’m just in town for my book signing, yes, it’s getting made into a movie, sorry I can’t stay and talk, I’m just devastatingly busy this trip, maybe next time, you moronic wanker.”

  Louise was excited about this idea until she realized she would have to come up with a topic for her novel. It was skull-splitting work. She allowed herself a new Us Weekly magazine as a reward if she put in a solid hour of thought. As a result, her novel ideas tended toward the fantastic: Actor falls for his costar and splits from his wife of nine years! Child star divorces her mother, then falls for her manager! Each of these ideas sparkled for several hours, then fell depressingly flat. And then, like a vision, Adelia Lively marched into the kitchen while William was in the hospital and announced that she would be moving in to help with his recovery. Louise could do nothing more noteworthy than sit back down in her chair. She took a deep breath. Her subject had been sitting under her nose the entire time, only she’d been too bored to notice. The tagline appeared to her whole: Husband of Alzheimer’s-afflicted wife reunites with his high school lover, and right beneath the wife’s afflicted nose, the two fall madly in love while all around them snooty neighbors and spoiled children ball up their fists and howl. The novel lifted its head and roared.

  She began to take notes in a spiral notebook she purchased at CVS, along with a new pack of Crest Whitestrips. The next week, from Margaux’s upstairs window, Louise observed Adelia as she helped William—back from the hospital—out of her Acura. Later, coming down the stairs with a hastily assembled load of Margaux’s laundry, Louise took note of William’s humbled state. She stayed an unprecedented hour late to fold the laundry so she could eavesdrop on the family meeting that Adelia convened. The daughters’ reactions were muted. They rolled over when Adelia announced she was moving in, which was odd. Louise was expecting some fireworks from Elizabeth, some levelheaded reasoning from bland Diana. She had hoped for more vitriol from Isabelle. But there was no grand display. As one demented family unit, they moved right on to the issue of the carriage house.

  Tying Margaux’s socks into loose knots, Louise wondered at people’s appetite for defeat. They pretend they’re avoiding it their whole lives, but when it finally arrives at their front door, they fall into its arms with gratitude, allow it to shag them for a year, then watch in horror when it leaves them for a blond girl with a marketing degree. Wh
en the kitchen-table meeting was adjourned, Louise carried her laundry basket up to Margaux’s room. Her charge was preoccupied with painting a pale pink streak in a landscape of gray wisps and white space. Louise set the basket down noisily, hoping to attract some attention. Margaux ignored her. Louise rattled the glass of ice water on the bedside table. Still nothing. Finally, she sat down on the bed and jumped right in. “Are you angry that Adelia’s moving in?” she asked.

  Margaux heaved a sigh and turned to address her interlocutor. She looked tired but present. In fact, the sharpness of her presence seemed almost uncomfortable to her. She winced slightly, peering out at Louise. “I’m sorry?” she asked. There were shadows under her eyes.

  “Adelia,” Louise repeated. “Are you angry she’s moving in?”

  “Adelia?” Margaux asked. As soon as she said the name, her expression began to recede. Louise watched each step of its steady retreat. Her face relaxed, and the Serengeti started to shimmer around her. “She’s a friend of his,” she finally said from somewhere off in the distance, then turned back to her canvas and resumed painting.

  “But they’re not little kids,” Louise insisted. “It’s not a sleepover.” Louise knew she was breaking cardinal rules for interacting with delusional patients but now she was no longer Louise the Caretaker but Louise the Artist, Louise the Seeker After Novelistic Truth.

  Margaux sighed. “No,” she said, agreeing mildly. “No, it’s not.”

  “The point is, you still think of William as your husband, don’t you? You remember that, don’t you? That he is your husband?”

  Margaux stopped painting. Her brush hovered an inch away from the canvas. Louise wondered if she was angry for once. Some Alzheimer’s patients are aggressive, disturbed by all the unrecognizable people who keep intruding in their lives, but Margaux was never violent. She floated around serenely. Still, could she really remain calm while Adelia moved into her house, down the hall from her husband, one floor beneath the bedroom of her youngest girl? Louise watched Margaux’s frozen hand, holding her breath, waiting for a response.

  “For God’s sake,” Margaux finally said. “Let it be. You’re a stranger in this house.” And then she returned to her canvas, looping the pink streak around a new blank space.

  From that day on, Louise kept herself busy with taking note of everything. In the grocery store later that week, she ran into Beebee Cheshire from the house next door. Casually, while pretending to test the ripeness of peaches, Beebee asked whether Adelia’s car in the driveway suggested perhaps that she was living with the Adairs.

  “She is,” Louise said, watching Mrs. Cheshire for material.

  A peach was bruised in the spirit of victory, then replaced and passed over. “That’s shocking,” Mrs. Cheshire said. “Don’t you think?”

  “Well, it’s not really any of my business, is it?”

  “To just swoop in,” Mrs. Cheshire continued. “I never put this past her, of course. I’m only disappointed in William.” The neighbors had always hated Adelia. Ostensibly, the reason was some altercation that took place between Adelia and Mrs. Cheshire’s overweight son, but Louise suspected it had more to do with Adelia’s successful career, which functionally undermined the importance of their housewifely routines. Louise had always felt for Adelia, if only because she fit so poorly into the schedule of grocery shopping and lasagna trading that held the women of Little Lane in its death grip. The petty triumph that a woman such as Mrs. Cheshire felt upon discovering that Adelia had disgraced herself irritated Louise, and she renewed her commitment to depicting Adelia as a complicated and at least partly sympathetic villain. Mrs. Cheshire should be the worse of the two. Louise reminded herself to describe the precise stiffness of Mrs. Cheshire’s anachronistic beehive hairdo, and the waxy permanence of her magenta lipstick, both of which caused her to resemble a well-off zombie sent from the American suburbs of 1959.

  “Listen, Louise,” the beehive continued, “do you mind if I ask a personal question? Is Adelia staying with him, in the bedroom?”

  Louise feigned a shock of morality. “No, Mrs. Cheshire, of course not. She’s moved her things into the guest room.”

  “I see.” Mrs. Cheshire’s eyes gleamed. This was the neighborhood gossip event of the century. She was damaging swathes of peaches in her excitement. “Well, give my best to Margaux,” she said, and Louise agreed to do so, although she would not, because the last time she carted Mrs. Cheshire’s greetings to Margaux, Margaux murmured, “She always frightened me,” and Louise could see her point.

  Back at the house, Louise started surreptitiously snooping. While Margaux was out in the garden, she rummaged through various desk drawers and made the following list in her CVS notebook: Margaux’s Desk Drawer Contents: a) tiny red paper clips; b) oil paintbrushes, uncleaned, well ruined now; c) unpaid bills (tell William to call credit card company; you should have caught this earlier, you fuckwit, Louise); d) photos of Margaux with her girls when they were little babies, dressed in costumes and other such heartbreaking stuff; e) silver box with mother-of-pearl-clasp, full of broken glass.

  And then, in the bottom left-hand drawer, Louise found a pile of notebooks. They were unmarked, but it was clear they had been well used. Louise reached down for the top notebook and changed her mind, going for the bottom of the stack. As soon as she opened it, she knew from the elegance of the cursive with which Margaux had filled its pale blue lines that she had found something important. In the back of her brain, she began to hear the buzz of a book party, and she imagined that Bradley would understand, forever and for always, that his bland blond wife was no match for the fascinating woman he’d left behind. Attempting to temper the increasingly noisy chatter of her daydreams, Louise took a deep breath, smoothed down a crease in the binding, and plunged.

  March 14, 1988

  I remembered yesterday that my mother kept a memory book. The idea of it intrigued me and I told myself to get one next time I went to the store. When I went, I remembered this notebook but forgot to buy apples and tonic water. William will be frustrated and Izzy will have to go without fruit in her lunch bag. Still, I’m happy to have remembered this, at least. There’s so much I’d like to write down.

  For starters, there is this: I have suspected for six years that I would develop my mother’s illness. The feeling came first when I was pregnant with Isabelle. I was trying to remember how my mother looked when I was a child, and suddenly I thought, “I can’t be a mother for another little girl.” The idea of it sickened me. I tried to tell William, but he was too happy to listen. He is deafened by excitement sometimes. Later, when Izzy was born, I wished I had never seen her face so that I could never forget it.

  The first real symptoms started this year. I sometimes go out on my walks and forget what I’ve gone out for. When I find my way back, I open the door to this house and think, “This place is meant to feel like home,” but I can’t remember why, or if it ever did. I see my children, even, and I know I’m meant to feel like their mother, but there are days when I can’t feel it. Days when I feel like a person who has somehow wandered into another family’s house. Mostly I feel stuck in a younger version of myself. I remember baking bread with my mother on the farm, and I feel so strongly that I am that child. And then a daughter of mine walks in and I can only think, “Who does that girl belong to?”

  Other days I wander around the house and think, “This place reminds me so clearly of him,” but it’s not William I’m thinking of. It’s someone I knew in a past life whose name I’ve long since forgotten, and yet I miss him in a way that makes me want to lie down on the floor and cry until the world is swept away by my tears.

  But it was William that I married. I first saw him in art history class. I remember watching him from the back. The way he laughed with his friends, the way he whispered during the slide shows. He was so handsome that I blushed when he answered questions in class. After two weeks he left his f
riends and sat next to me. It was only us in the row. I felt so shy I couldn’t even look at him. He asked for a pencil and I gave it to him. I’d unwrapped my lunch at my desk and felt embarrassed to be eating with him sitting so close. I was ashamed of my hard-boiled egg and the napkin I’d unfolded in my lap. The egg smelled awfully sharp. I started to wrap it up so that I could eat it later, when I was alone, but he said, “Don’t stop eating for my sake,” so I had to eat, miserable and ashamed. That I remember. He continued to sit with me all through the rest of the year. I was still shy, and I couldn’t pay attention when he was sitting so close, but I felt privileged that he chose me. I wasn’t a popular girl. My mother was getting sick, and I was too often alone. There was something strange about me. I knew I was different from the other college girls. And he was so confident. I remember how lucky I felt to be seen at his side. But I can’t remember why he married me. I didn’t even hesitate when I told him yes, I’d be his wife, of course. I couldn’t imagine it, but I didn’t hesitate. I can’t remember why. I know I felt lucky that he came to sit at my side.

  Later the wrongness seeped in. I recognized it first as the desire to be alone. Every conversation felt uncomfortable. An unnecessary engagement. A scrimmage from which I emerged a little more shaken. I couldn’t get alone enough, and the houses we lived in never felt like my own. He laughed when I tried to tell him. His careless laugh: “Margaux, you strange creature.” I’d hate him for laughing, but later I’d feel lucky again that someone like him would choose me. It’s a gift to have a place made for you by someone like him. Someone so buoyant. In exchange, I tried to fill our houses with beautiful things—the little nouns, my discoveries, that I’d kept with me since I was a girl—but he called them trinkets and laughed as though they were habits I ought to shake off. As the children grew up, they broke so many that I finally packed them up and stored them away in the attic.