All the Houses

by Karen Olsson

  I made the mistake, once we’d ordered, of asking Dad whether he was still thinking about voting for Kerry. He had been a Republican all his life, but he couldn’t stand George W. Bush, in part because he thought the war in Iraq had been a terrible mistake, yet his aversion ran deeper than that. Something more fundamental offended him, the president’s whole persona rubbed my father the wrong way, and after a few glasses of wine he would make overblown declarations like, “We’ve lost our moral standing in the world!” As if the United States’ moral standing—whatever that even meant—had been untainted until Bush took office. He meanwhile joked that I had become a “Hollywood liberal.” I think he really did believe that I’d come by my political leanings in California, that I’d more or less tossed them into a cart along with a bag of avocados and some flip-flops. The truth was that I’d been much more idealistic as a teenager, if fuzzily and quietly: it was when I’d last lived in the same house with Dad that I’d actually been the ardent lefty he thought I was now. Since then, we’d both inched toward the center. Earlier that year Dad had said he wouldn’t vote for Bush again, and I let myself hope that he represented an entire tribe of disaffected Republicans, one that might tilt the election toward Kerry. But now he drew back and pinched his lower lip before he spoke.

  “I don’t trust John Kerry,” he said, as though he knew the man personally. “He strikes me as a panderer.”

  “Oh please,” Courtney said. “They’re all panderers.”

  “Some more than others.”

  “So you’re going to vote for Bush?” she asked.

  “I may leave it blank.”

  “Blank?” She scoffed. She looked down at her lap and read a message on her BlackBerry that made her smile.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  “Oh,” she said, “work.” Then she started complaining about their realtor. She and Hugo had sold their Adams Morgan condo and bought a house in Spring Valley (which was incredible to me, Spring Valley!) and it had all been very hectic and fast and stressful and thank god it was over, but now she was having déjà vu because she’d been trying to contact the realtor—she needed a forwarding address for the previous owner’s mail—and she hadn’t been able to get through to Bonita Pope. That was the realtor’s name. It had been like that ever since the house went under contract, she said. All the subsequent back-and-forth had taken place over voice mail, a series of demands left after the beep.

  “Once they’ve got you on the hook, that’s it,” she said.

  “So you’re moved in, that’s amazing,” I said.

  “The whole time we were closing, we would call and call and nothing.”

  “But she left you messages.”

  “She knows our schedules. She knows when to call so that she doesn’t have to talk to us.”

  “I can’t wait to see it,” I lied.

  “She did leave us a nice gift,” Hugo said. “It was a pie.”

  In the middle of the meal, Courtney excused herself, and I said I’d go with her. Although we’re not those women that need or even like companionship in the bathroom, I wanted to see her away from Dad and Hugo. I was hoping for something, I’m not sure what. She walked ahead of me into the ladies’ room, and we each entered a stall and then were silent.

  “Dad seems like he’s doing okay,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, but her tone condemned me. My sister could tell me she liked my shirt and I could hear in her compliment that she thought the whole way I lived my life was incorrect.

  “What do you mean?”

  She sighed, which I took to mean the usual thing, i.e., that she, the only sister living in D.C., understood something that I didn’t. She bore the burden of our dad, or so she’d convinced herself, no matter that she was married and worked long hours and so it wasn’t as though she saw him all that often. She knew, and Maggie and I didn’t know. I waited for more of an answer, but none came. I heard a series of tiny clicks, the sound of her fiddling with her mobile device.

  * * *

  Back home, in my childhood bedroom, I unpacked my clothes, clothes that looked all wrong now that I was in D.C. Too much yellow and turquoise, too much cotton jersey. Polka dots. Summery, girly things I couldn’t wear there. I unpacked and then puttered, the way I always did in that room, which wasn’t exactly my old room any longer—my mother had made it her office after I left for college, and so gone were the beanbag chair and the striped wallpaper, gone the glow-in-the-dark ceiling constellations, gone the taped-up photos of the cast of The Outsiders. But still it was my old room, sticky with old-roomness, with the residue of having lived in it from ages five to eighteen. It hypnotized me, and I did what I always did when I came back to it, which was to start opening drawers and pulling books off the shelf and rummaging in the closet, looking for scraps of my younger selves.

  In other words I put off going to sleep. I never knew what my childhood bed had in store for me, because sometimes it was the most comfortable and comforting of beds, the standard by which all other beds invariably fell short, and at other times it was like there was a wormhole in the mattress—I never knew when some flood of teenage sorrow would shoot through it and overwhelm me, and I would wind up sobbing.

  I picked up a picture from the bookshelf, a framed photograph with a label below it, in metallic script: Girls Varsity Basketball 1986–87. It was from my sophomore year, the one season that Courtney and I played on the same team together. Twelve girls wearing game uniforms, in the gym, lined up at midcourt. Six of us kneeled in front and the other six stood behind, flanked by our coach on the left and the assistant coach on the right. I stared at my grainy, remote face and then at Courtney’s, remembering her then, how good a player she’d been and how confident, right up until near the end of the season. Then she’d changed, in part because she hit the adolescent skids: she was even arrested, a couple of months after that picture was taken. It was as though some switch had flipped. A light went out inside her head, or a darkness was activated.

  In the photo her smile was clean and wide. We were so young! That was my gee-whiz reaction, looking at that picture. Teenagers! The eighties! Holy shit!

  My first days at home with Dad, it became clear that if he needed any genuine help, he wasn’t about to tell me what kind of help that might be. He was moving around more cautiously than usual, but he could manage just about everything himself, or so he insisted, and I even caught sight of him one afternoon, in his bedroom, doing exercises with some small purple hand weights that must’ve belonged to, then been abandoned by, one of my sisters or maybe our mom. He did let me take him to a doctor’s appointment. Other than that the most useful thing I could figure out to do for him was to make lunch or dinner. A low-fat, low-salt cookbook had come into his possession, and I followed one lackluster recipe after another, most of which involved blended-up vegetables, so that the food might as well have been baby food, and though Dad and I would try to improve the situation with eleventh-hour transfusions of butter or soy sauce, usually it was too late to salvage the baked chicken, the pureed squash, the pasta with peas.

  What he wanted me to help with were his projects around the house, and here I dragged my feet, because these had always struck me as make-work. He had this Protestant itch he had to scratch. Not only that, he’d been a part of that tier in Washington that defined people by their occupations; he’d been, for many years, as dedicated to his work as anyone; and once out of that world, missing its pace, he jerry-rigged his own treadmill. He liked to be constantly running errands and doing chores and making needless improvements. One afternoon he asked me to go out to the shed with him, a long narrow shed he’d put up himself years ago, where as it turned out he was having a hard time unscrewing a plastic hose hanger from the wall. His reason for removing the hanger was that he’d bought a little wheeled cart for the hose instead, a summer remainder, half off. The final screw was jammed in tight, the head rusted, and he wanted me to brace the hanger as he worked the drill. I didn’t think it
needed to be braced, but he’d grown frustrated and in his frustration needed me to be working too.

  After a series of long exhales and G-rated oaths, he told me, “I had a talk with Judge O’Neill the other night.” Kit O’Neill was a retired appellate court judge who lived down the block. Some nights he would walk over with a bottle of Evan Williams and wobble home after they’d drunk the better part of it—when Dad said they’d had a talk, that’s what he meant. “His son-in-law just started law school, and he’s thirty-six. Come to find out, there are a lot of second-career attorneys these days.”

  I pretended that I hadn’t understood him. “This is Ruthie’s husband?”

  “I bet that someone with your experience in the entertainment world—”

  “I don’t think I want to be a lawyer.”

  Actually I had considered it, like I’d considered so many things, pouring myself a glass of wine and then sitting down with my laptop and clicking away at one web link after another, studying the sites of various law schools, picturing my life as an entertainment lawyer, that is to say the suits I would wear and the house I would own. When I was younger it had seemed more important to be interesting than rich, and law school hadn’t had the slightest allure, but the older I got, the more the idea of financial security overshadowed whatever notions of self-actualizing I’d once had—I could no longer even recall why I’d thought that becoming a screenwriter would help me be myself. What would help me be myself, I now thought, was money, and there was something pleasing about the notion that Dad had tipsily imagined me as a lawyer, just as I’d done.

  And yet, even if it wasn’t too late in principle, it was too late for me. I would not go to law school. Surely he knew that.

  I used to get these e-mails from him, often time-stamped midnight or 1:00 a.m.

  Helen:

  The other day I ran into Roger and Ann Sullivan at Safeway. They are well. Geordie (their son) is living in New Jersey and has a job working for Bell Labs. They said he is always happy to connect with old D.C. pals and tell them about potential opportunities with the company.

  You should consider opening an IRA (Individual Retirement Account) since you aren’t invested in a 401k. I’ve attached some information.

  Love, Dad

  “I just thought it could be an option worth exploring,” he said. He’d taken his eyes off the drill, and it was starting to carve out the center of the screw head. I pointed at it and said, “Stop, stop.”

  “All right,” he said. “I think I know what I’m doing.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Have you talked to your mother lately?”

  “Not since I left L.A. Why?”

  “No reason.” He patted the hanger. “You try holding it over on this side and I’ll try from that side.”

  At last the screw came loose. I took a step back and the hanger came with me. “There we go,” he said.

  “So who’ve you been spending time with these days? Anybody besides the judge?” I asked.

  “Spending time?”

  “Do you still get together with the Osborns?”

  “They have a place in Florida now, so they’re gone all winter.”

  “You see Courtney, I guess.”

  He’d taken the hanger out of my hands, and carefully, as though it were something he intended to save, he set it down just outside the shed door. “She’s very busy, as you know. And I’ve been busy myself. I mean I was, before the surgery.”

  “With teaching?”

  My dad’s postscandal career had been uneventful. Right afterward there’d been a scary stretch when he’d been out of work, but then he’d joined a big telecommunications company, as public affairs director. He’d been paid very well, though he never liked the job. On the side he’d taught night classes in government and policy at American University. This he loved. Many of his students were immigrants, for whom he undertook to explain the ways of our nation. A few years earlier he’d retired from the day job, and now the classes were it.

  “I’ve also been preparing for—I’ve been invited to speak on a panel in several weeks. I’m preparing for that.”

  “What about?”

  I assumed it would be related to the telecommunications industry, his area of reluctant expertise, and so I was surprised when he told me the name, a long-winded name, something about Bush’s national security policy in historical context. It was at the S____Club, he said.

  “Who’s sponsoring it?”

  “It’s a group affiliated with Hopkins. I hope you’ll be able to come.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” I said, though something in his voice made me nervous. And was he blushing? It might’ve been that the cold air had reddened his cheeks. A lean gray cat had snuck into the yard, and now it padded into the shed with its tail high and hooked. “Oh hello,” Dad said. We watched it for a moment, and then he added, “Too bad Maggie isn’t here.” There was this idea in the family that my younger sister was a cat lover, because as a kid she had followed the neighbors’ cats around, though as an adult she had never owned a cat. “If Maggie were here she would bring you some milk,” he told the cat. “Wouldn’t you like that?” The animal completed its tour of the shed and slipped back out again. We followed in time to see it climb the back fence. It walked along the top and then disappeared.

  Ours wasn’t a huge yard, but it did have a pool, a rectangular one with flagstone around it. The pool had been drained for winter and covered with a sheet of green vinyl pulled taut with springs. A grid of nylon straps ran across the cover, like coordinates for locating points in the hole underneath.

  * * *

  Mostly how I remember that first week or two in Washington is as a series of nights, long nights in a quiet house, during which it gradually became apparent that while I had come home, supposedly, to help my father, he believed that I was the one who needed assistance. We quickly arrived at a mutual-aid stalemate. Neither of us had a clue as to how to help the other. Neither of us knew how to talk to the other: that much had been true my whole life, but only recently had I detected in myself an old, flattened-out hope, a dulled dream that we would somehow, someday be more fluent. I’d carried that hope for such a long time but hadn’t named it, and even now that I recognized its existence, it was only a vector, pointing to an outcome I couldn’t see or even envision.

  I did little during those two weeks but was often exhausted by the evening. I’d been taking an antidepressant that had put an air pocket between me and the sadness that had paralyzed me over the summer, so that instead of feeling bad I felt neutral, even while having some of the same thoughts that had gone along with the erstwhile bad feelings. Over the summer I’d often woken up at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. and thought, What the hell am I doing with my life? What am I supposed to be doing? Is it too late for me? Now I slept through the night, and when those questions came to me, intermittently during the day, I just let them go by. Sometimes it was like I was watching the movie of my life and wondering why they hadn’t cut out some of the slow parts. I don’t mean that I was entirely passive, only that there were days when I wished I could speed things up, and I couldn’t.

  I did still intend to rewrite my old screenplay, or reinvent it, and so I tried to read (secretly, in my room) a long account of the Iran-Contra Affair that I’d bought in Los Angeles. The book was a thick, oversize paperback, exhaustive, exhausting, which I would leave splayed facedown on the floor as I dozed off, so that its binding became a register of my naps, each one logged by a new crack in the spine. What I did stay awake for, I couldn’t wrap my head around. To me, it was a suggestive but ultimately indigestible scandal. I’d read other Iran-Contra books, or sections of them at least, but for all the facts I’d taken in, if someone had asked me to explain the whole thing I could barely have managed a summary.

  Here’s what I could say. The main players were a few bureaucrats and a gang of freelance old hands, drawn to the rush of counterrevolution and back-channel deals. Their foes were communists and hostage
takers, not to mention certain State Department guys with their thumbs up their asses, not to mention the U.S. Congress. They had encryption devices for sending secret messages back and forth. They had secure telephones. They met with middlemen and mercenaries in foreign cities. They kept cash in a safe. They gave themselves false names. They got carried away with it all, and they almost got away with it all.

  Some aliases: Mr. Goode. Mr. East. Steelhammer. Max Gomez. The Courier. Blood and Guts.

  Compartmentation, that was one rule. The big box, the one that investigators would later pry open, contained smaller boxes, which in turn contained smaller ones. You knew only what you needed to know, the contents of your compartment.

  The men in their tiny boxes wrote memos in coded language. They caught flights down to Miami or Tegucigalpa and glad-handed commanders who asked for more bullets, por favor! During the three or four hours of sleep they allowed themselves each night, they dreamed of sorties over the jungle, of walking across hot tightropes, of cats circling. They awoke in a room in the Old Executive Office Building with three video terminals and three phones and a window overlooking a neglected courtyard. A warning bell, connected to one of the terminals, rang all day long.

  Who were they? These men, or most of them, had served in Vietnam. They were in government now but not of it, no sir, they still set store by clearly defined missions and chains of command, not by the vagaries of politics. Or that was one way of putting it. Another thing you could say was that they would do almost anything to keep from abandoning other men, other fighters, the way they themselves had been all but ditched over there and then had been forced to ditch the Vietnamese in turn. Another was that they were desperate to please a genial but distant father figure, their commander in chief.

  As their children must have wished to please them. To the extent the men led private lives, they led them largely in absentia. They whispered drowsy goodbyes in the early morning, called home from the office to wish the kids good night, drove the station wagon to church on Sunday. Now and again the histories of the affair will allude to families in Chevy Chase or Falls Church—for instance, there’s a moment when Oliver North (a.k.a. Steelhammer, a.k.a. Blood and Guts) and a Justice Department lawyer chat about their daughters’ love of horseback riding. A different set of books, the biographies and memoirs, lay out the domestic basics: where these men grew up, how they met their wives, when their children were born. More than once the reader encounters a flashback scene, circa 1970, in which the father-to-be, at his desk, learns that his wife is in labor and must speed to reach the hospital in time. The sections of black-and-white photographs, while dominated by pictures of men in the company of other men, serve up a few family snapshots too: baby pictures, Mr. and Mrs. X walking down the aisle on their wedding day, Mrs. X with their young children, and then, much later, Mr. and Mrs. X leaving the congressional hearings together, marching hand in hand past the reporters.