The Carriage House: A Novel

by Louisa Hall

  “We’re going to get that house back,” Di said, as though to offer strength.

  Adelia straightened some, and her eyes came into focus. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, we will.” She reached out and took Diana’s hand. “We’ll get it back, sweet Di.”

  Chapter 6

  Monday morning was chaos. From the time they woke up to the time they tumbled into the car, the girls were a nightmare to corral, Caroline having left her tennis racket at science camp and Lucy insisting that she had flown on her way down the stairs to breakfast and would they please just come and watch, and Caroline reminding her that flying was impossible for Homo sapiens because of gravity and winglessness and the lack of evolutionary need, and both of them evading their toast with a slipperiness that was incomprehensible to Elizabeth so early in the day. She thought again, with a welling sensation to which she had grown accustomed in the last year and a half, that she was doing all of this all alone, while Mark was probably having morning sex. To settle her nerves, she breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, then wrapped the toast in foil and gave it to the girls for the road. She was in the process of reminding herself to feel grateful for her blessings, for these little girls who were her own, when she walked out the front door and caught Lucy throwing the remains of her toast into the pachysandra bed, and Elizabeth flew to pieces again.

  By the time they got into the car, there was a pit in Elizabeth’s stomach, the feeling that she had forgotten something important. This pit welled with anxiety when she found herself stuck driving behind a bulldozer, moving at a speed that could only be described as prehistoric. As a result, the girls would probably be late for the tennis court she had reserved in their name, which had been difficult to procure at that hour in the morning, popular with all the undivorced housewives who were not raising children on their own. She attempted to remain calm as she followed the bulldozer for the entire length of Clubhouse Road, but she found herself beating the steering wheel with her palm when it took a left onto Little Lane. At this point she started to wonder what the bulldozer could be doing on their street, which was a cul-de-sac and could not be used as a throughway. And then her anxiety sharpened into something resembling fear because the bulldozer was turning onto Anita Schmidt’s driveway, joining a crane-thing with an actual wrecking ball. She braked in front of the house.

  It was Monday. Today was not the day for the demolition. The demolition day was Thursday, was it not? They were meant to have some time to start fighting for neighborhood hearts and minds. Daddy had just had a stroke, and that asshole across the street was speeding up the demolition plan? Elizabeth glared at Anita Schmidt’s house, which was ugly in an old-person-house way: ranch-style, with pale bricks and orange-brown shutters. It was the ugliest house on the block: the neighbors never should have allowed her to build it. Specifications should have been made about shutter color when Granddaddy subdivided the land.

  Two construction workers in hard hats climbed out of their machines. They consulted a clipboard; one of them made a joke and the other one laughed, and in her frustration Elizabeth beat the steering wheel again. Now they were waving their hands, and the machines rumbled and moved out onto the lawn, approaching the carriage house. Elizabeth tried to summon inner calm. She needed to think clearly. She attempted to practice her ujjayi breathing, but as she pulled into the driveway of her childhood home, Lucy let out an earth-shattering screech, followed by “I CAN NOSE-FUCKING FLY IF I WANT TO!” The ujjayi breath went out the window, and all Elizabeth could think was, did Lucy have a cursing problem before the divorce, and why had literal-minded Caroline told her she couldn’t fly when it would obviously upset her, and how had Mark left her to do this on her own? But she didn’t have time to think about any of these questions with a peaceful mind or an open heart because there was a fucking bulldozer ready to tear down Daddy’s carriage house and she had to hustle the girls inside so she and Adelia could strategize.

  Inside things weren’t less of a wreck. Daddy was sitting at the kitchen table, looking disturbingly discombobulated in an old pair of corduroys and slippers and a patterned sweater. A patterned sweater, of all uncharacteristic things. Elizabeth had never seen him wearing it: he looked like Linus from Charlie Brown, defeated and small. And he was just sitting there, looking down at his coffee mug, muttering, “I can’t smell it,” over and over again. Adelia was there, ignoring Daddy, staring out the window with an intensity that made it seem as though she were preparing to dive through the glass. She was wearing some kind of Gothic floor-length nightgown. Even the girls could sense that something was terribly wrong. They clung to Elizabeth’s skirt as though their grandfather were naked and his best friend had transformed overnight into a little vampire girl.

  “Shit,” Adelia said. “Shit, shit, shit.” She abruptly fled the kitchen. Elizabeth wondered if that was where Lucy was getting her cursing, and she reminded herself to talk to Adelia about it, but then she heard Daddy saying, “I cannot smell a thing,” so she attempted to focus on her father.

  “Daddy,” she said, squatting by his side. “Daddy, what do you mean?”

  “I cannot smell this coffee,” he said. “It tastes like nothing. Do you understand?” Elizabeth was trying to listen to him, but a second later, through the kitchen window, she saw a rock the size of a fist fly through the air and strike the ground a foot away from one of the construction workers. The worker spun around, covering his head with his arms. Elizabeth stood up, speechless. “This coffee tastes like dishwater,” Daddy said, and then another rock—this one the size of a sneaker—flew through the air and struck the crane-thing so hard that Elizabeth could hear the clatter from inside. The rock had definitely come from above her.

  “Mommy, what’s going on?” asked Caroline. Lucy was gone somewhere, striking a tragic pose, most likely, and then another rock flew through the air and landed with a thud between two other hard-hatted workers, who by this time were cowering in the shadow of their machines.

  “Stay here, sweetie,” Elizabeth said, although she was not entirely confident about leaving Caroline with Daddy in his strange condition. She ran up the stairs and saw Adelia standing at the guest room window, in that Gothic-virginal nightgown, launching rocks at the demolition team. She was pulling the rocks from a threatening stockpile that had somehow accumulated on the guest room carpeting, and while she launched, Diana was sitting there on the guest room bed, watching Adelia without making a single move. Then Izzy was running down the stairs from her little lair up in the attic, and there was a crazed flush on her face. “Is she bombing them?” she asked. “Are those coming from Adelia?” When she saw that indeed it was Adelia, she started laughing like a keyed-up lunatic before turning and retreating up to her lair.

  Elizabeth rushed into the room. “What are you doing, Adelia?” she asked, then noticed that this was where Lucy had run off to. She had wedged herself between the open door and the corner and was watching Adelia with her mouth slightly ajar. “And Di,” Elizabeth said, “what are you doing? Why are you letting Lucy watch this?” Di, startled, looked back at her with a brand of vague guiltiness that evaporated the last vestiges of Elizabeth’s inner calm. It was unfair for Elizabeth to have to be the voice of reason in this mess. She was only thirty-two, and yet she was as old as if she had lived for a thousand years. That was the saddest thing about being a mother: you gave up your right to youngness forever. She would have liked to run laughing up to her room. Or to sit on the bed and watch the show unfold. But she was a mother. She had to act adult, and here was Adelia, almost fifty-five, pelting rocks out of the window in a nightgown. And where was Margaux? After years of therapy, Elizabeth had learned to stop asking that question, and yet now she wanted to go knock on her mother’s door, to plead with her, “Please just take care of this chaos in your house, I’m so tired of dealing with it all.” But first she had to get Lucy out of there. She took her by the wrist and literally dragged her up to Izzy’s room, whe
re Izzy was sitting at the desk, peering out the window like a cat watching a bunch of crippled canaries. Of all the crazy people in the house, she seemed the least harmful influence at this point, so Elizabeth deposited Lucy there, after which she marched across the hall and took hold of Margaux’s doorknob. Then she stopped. It wouldn’t help. Instead, Elizabeth ran back down the stairs to deal with Adelia, realizing as she did that she would miss her nine o’clock class and she had not called in for a substitute, and in order to get to the ten-thirty class she would have to leave the girls with one of several lunatics.

  By the time she got back to the guest room, Diana was gone. Adelia was still launching projectiles, which, Elizabeth recognized, were the rocks Margaux used to line her iris beds.

  “Adelia, stop,” she said. But even as she said this, she glanced out the window and saw that the construction workers had taken refuge within their machinery and were backing off the Schmidt lawn, beating a lumbering retreat down the driveway.

  Together Elizabeth and Adelia watched the bulldozer and the crane-thing, with its swinging wrecking ball, totter off down Little Lane, away from the carriage house. It was like watching the last two dinosaurs on earth seeking safety in solitude. There was something momentous about the accomplishment. They had vanquished the powerful machines. Elizabeth felt framed by the window, illuminated, caught in a moment that ought to be watched. Adelia was flushed and triumphant in her nightgown. Adelia, Elizabeth realized, had pioneer grit. She was no flabby suburban mother, bent on smoothing rough edges. She thrived at the point of a blade. This incident with the rocks required more courage than any of the women on Little Lane ever could have summoned. Elizabeth enjoyed the understanding for a few minutes, feeling a kinship with Adelia that she had never felt with her mother. They were both women who didn’t belong in a town such as this one. She could see herself and Adelia, standing by the window, as the workers must have seen them: two women, one old and one young, both regal in their way, defending their family.

  The sweetness of the moment, however, was short-lived, because suddenly, three police cars rounded the corner from Clubhouse Road onto Little Lane, silent but alarming with their rolling red-blue lights. Panicky sensations were unfurling in various parts of Elizabeth’s body so intensely that she worried she was having an anxiety attack. She closed her eyes and practiced trataka visualization, but all she could see were the flashing lights of the cop cars, and when she opened her eyes, they were still there, pulling into the driveway.

  “Shit,” she said. “Shit, Adelia. You should change into some clothes.”

  Chapter 7

  When Isabelle opened the door for the police, she found herself explaining that her mother—who had been suffering from advanced dementia for many years—had thrown the rocks, and that it wouldn’t happen again, and that she was very sorry for the disturbance.

  This came as a surprise. When she called to report the Little Lane Offensive, she had happily imagined the Horrifying Woman getting carted off in her nightgown, blinking in her lidless way while the cops pushed her head down to avoid the frame of the car. But as Isabelle was making her triumphant way to the door, she passed William, muttering at the open refrigerator. He seemed so small, washed by the false light of the fridge, that Isabelle stopped in her tracks. She wanted to stand beside him and snake her arm around his waist. When he felt her presence, he shut the refrigerator door. “I can’t smell anything,” he said. It had been a long time since she had felt for him so strongly. The cops were at the front door, Adelia was upstairs with her pile of rocks, and William was looking at Isabelle as if only she could restore his sense of the world.

  When she opened the front door, she found that she had turned on her charm. This charm was separate from her; she, Isabelle Adair, was not a charming person. But she did have access to a switch that she had been able to turn on or off ever since she started competing on court. When her charm was on, she entered rooms and people adjusted themselves to orient around the pole of her presence. It was a quality her sisters lacked. Elizabeth had no ability to differentiate between her outer and inner selves, a significant failing for an actress. She was one entity, frantic and agitated, incapable of controlling multiple layers of selfhood despite years of study. Diana was athletic, and that was sometimes attractive to people, but she wasn’t charming. Her looks were frank; they seemed to conceal little mystery. No, Isabelle was the most charming Adair. It made her into a powerful secret agent, capable of dangerous missions and covert activities.

  As soon as she opened the door, the officer started to stutter. Isabelle acted awed by his presence; she widened her eyes beneath his gaze and awaited his judgment. The officer consoled her; he took full responsibility; he offered to write a letter of apology to the family as a whole. Isabelle accepted this gracefully—no, charmingly—and sent him on his way, waving him off in the driveway.

  When the cop cars had receded, she turned the switch off and felt the familiar crumpling that always occurred post-charm, as her veneer faded and she was left alone with whatever existed beneath. By the time she was back in the kitchen, surrounded by her family, she could summon nothing but a dirty bathwater feeling. William had returned to his seat at the table. Adelia was behind him, dressed in a lilac sweater set and capri pants, her hair clipped back like a little girl’s. Beside her, William peered at his coffee as though a dead mouse were floating in it. By the refrigerator, Diana gripped a carton of orange juice, and in front of the potted fern in the corner, Elizabeth clutched Lucy and Caroline, two large chickens that she was getting ready to carry down to the market.

  “What happened?” Adelia asked, her voice taut as a coiled spring.

  “It’s fine,” Isabelle said. “They think it was Mom. They apologized.”

  “Oh, Izzy,” Adelia said. “Thank you. You’re wonderful.”

  It should be illegal, Isabelle thought, for a grown woman like Adelia to wear two little clips on the sides of her head. It should also be illegal for her to feign innocence or any kind of fragility. Because when all the Adairs had crumbled to dust—when Margaux evaporated into the hazy atmosphere, when Elizabeth combusted and Diana slipped sadly away, when William finally aged in the way he had committed himself not to do, and when Isabelle had found it in herself to cut the remaining threads—Adelia Lively would rise out of the ashes, craggy-browed, the sole survivor of the whole pathetic group. The chance had been there for Isabelle to vanquish her, but she’d chosen not to. Adelia wouldn’t have chosen the same.

  From the crook of Elizabeth’s elbow, Lucy spoke. “We were supposed to play tennis this morning,” she said.

  Elizabeth freed her chickens in order to raise a dramatic hand to her brow. “Oh my God, they had a tennis court! At ten o’clock. And I have to get to work. And Adelia, Daddy says he can’t smell his coffee.”

  None of the assembled characters responded to this list of grievances. They examined one another in silence, as though everyone had forgotten their lines.

  “Izzy, I could use some help,” Elizabeth said when no one else offered. “Could you take the girls to tennis? Please.”

  “It’s my first day of summer break,” Izzy said. “Doesn’t Dad want to take them?”

  “I don’t want to take them to tennis,” William said.

  No one spoke. Elizabeth leaned heavily against the wall, and for the first time Isabelle noticed that she was wearing two different scarves, one lavender and one green with a paisley pattern that looked like an infestation of orange bugs. Something was very wrong with every single person in the kitchen.

  “Fine,” Izzy said. “I’ll take them.”

  And so she found herself in possession of her two nieces, walking across the golf course to the club. Both of the girls were quiet at first. The scene at the house had obviously shaken them. But as they walked, Lucy’s quietness became noisy. She was summoning resentment; Isabelle could hear it in the angry swinging of her ar
ms. She started clapping her hands in the direction of invisible insects. Caroline was more tentative. She had her father’s nearsightedness and had been wearing thick glasses since she was a toddler. Isabelle felt for her, stuck in a family of people priming themselves for a fight. The rocks, the police, and all of Isabelle’s charming lies must have been difficult for her to understand.

  When they arrived at the courts, Lucy tore her racket out of its case and ran to her side of the court. Caroline was slower. She didn’t have a racket; she had to borrow one from the pro shop. She kept dragging her feet. She tied her shoelaces with excruciating attention to detail. By the time she was out on court, a little crowd had assembled to witness the commercial adorableness of Lucy Adair, approximately the same size as her tennis racket, her blond hair in two stiff braids, bouncing a ball on her strings and humming to herself. Izzy sat down on a bench to watch. Lucy was launching forehands that a person her size had no right to launch. In another life, Izzy might have smiled at the sheer guts of that tiny girl to hit such shots, but in this life, at this country club, she felt nothing but the greedy eyes of the gathered crowd fastened to her niece.

  “Check out that little firebrand out there,” she heard Jack say from behind her. She didn’t turn around to acknowledge him.

  “Hi, Izzy,” Abby Weld said to Izzy’s back. She turned and attempted to smile. Abby was wearing a tennis dress. Her ponytail was tied with a white ribbon, all wrapped up and ready to be given away. Jack stood beside her, proud dad. The kind of dad who puts an Amherst bumper sticker on his Volvo the very second his daughter gets in.

  “It’s a treat to see you here, Isabelle,” he was saying. “We haven’t seen you at the courts in years!”

  There was nothing to say in response. Seeing him and Abby together had always struck Isabelle as a sad joke. Sometimes the joke was on them, sometimes on Isabelle. She wished she could get away from Breacon and never see them again.