All the Houses

by Karen Olsson

  To one side of my bed was a window, an old ivory-colored shade covering the upper half while in the lower half I could see my reflection in the glass, my knees drawn up and the paper resting against them. When I saw that, I felt as if I were acting, putting on a show of studiousness for an audience of one, i.e., myself. And yet, haphazard as this whole course of research was, I did learn from it. Some remnant of that midcentury military-industrial mind had stayed with us, hadn’t it? A machine inside a ghost. This was how some people who were still in power had been taught to understand the world, long ago, in different times. This was the rug that had been yanked out from under them. Secrecy, quantitative analysis, the best plans made by the best men.

  I was drawn to the jargon my father would have learned then and also later, after he went to Washington, terms that cropped up in selected circles in the seventies and eighties, like procurement and operationalize and off-the-shelf covert capability. All those words that meant nothing but pointed to something, the confidence disguised as procuring and operating, the belief in our ability to analyze and control. To manipulate other nations like numbers.

  And in his stiff old textbooks, I found Dad’s underlining, the odd phrase penciled in the margin. Alongside the densely printed text of a book called East-West Relations in the Atomic Weapons Era, for instance, he’d written short notes, indicators of what was discussed on that page, like nuclear aggression—consequences and reflexive choices. Or was it reflective choices? These notes also got to me, though here it wasn’t the words but the handwriting, recognizably my dad’s, if neater and firmer. That script belonged to a twenty-year-old student with his mechanical pencil, the eager debater in his bilateral world of pro and con, west and east, good and evil, all or nothing.

  With the help of the Internet I found a place of my own, and I told Dad I’d signed a lease on an apartment, a semifurnished studio I could rent month to month. It was in one of the few remaining areas of D.C. that had not yet been thoroughly gentrified—that process was still in the early stages. When I explained where the apartment was, he scowled. No, he said, you shouldn’t live over there by yourself. And then he said I needed to be mindful of “the security situation.” Explaining that it was now home to a few artists’ studios and a coffee shop had no effect. He insisted he would help me pay for a place in a better neighborhood, I said I didn’t want him to do that, and in this way we circumscribed the subject of my departure without ever addressing it.

  I wanted to live where I chose to live. During my childhood it was an area we’d driven through and never stopped in, which lent it a mystery that, for me, had always had as its wellspring the House of Wigs, a store on a corner that displayed tiers of faceless plastic heads wearing every sort of hair and, in some cases, fanciful hats. When I moved I was pleased to discover that the House of Wigs was still in business, though now the store, much dustier than in my memory, seemed to cater to cancer and head-surgery patients. I took up residence a few blocks from there, on Vane Street Northeast. Faded town houses that had been divided into apartments lined most of the block, but mine was a corner building of brown brick, with bars over the first-floor windows.

  Dad helped me move in, and while he was there he checked out the apartment, the suspect locks, the windows that according to him should have been constructed differently. He was very much dissatisfied. He left me with a list of demands he thought I should make to the landlady, demands I did not make, and from time to time after that he would leave long messages in the middle of the day about exploding water heaters and other hazards. Naively, I saw this as a good thing, his preoccupation with the apartment, because it focused all his worries about my life on what was, to me, the least worrisome component, and so I was content to hear him out.

  On the phone he was a different father. He would call to check on me, and although we’d chatted plenty when I lived in other cities, these calls from across town had a new quality to them. I could practically hear our nearness, the way you hear static or breath. He might’ve been gabbing about any old thing, the Redskins’ running game or airline fares, and still there was this underlying sense of I’m right here, I’m right here.

  Loosely defined as the whole book project was, I began working in earnest, staying up late to crawl through the underbrush of an imaginary bureaucracy, as memories of the eighties brewed, and I brooded, at odds with myself. For no reason at all I pictured the small white stickers that had appeared on bus stops and trash cans when I was in high school, which had on them an ugly caricature of the U.S. attorney general and below that the slogan: “Meese Is a Pig.” These came later, after Iran-Contra, in response to a lesser scandal, but still. Rained-on, halfway scraped-off, melting Meeses were with me as I wrote.

  The afterimage of those stickers suited my twilight leanings, the sense I had that the scandal marked the end of something. At least, that was a sense I wanted to have. I wanted the scandal to possess historical weight, to mark the End of an Era, even if I couldn’t name the era. I wanted to tie it to the decline of the so-called Washington Consensus, to see the NSC mandarins’ secret activities as the reduction to absurdity of an older way of doing things, back when policies had been fashioned by a small chummy group who dined at the homes of Georgetown hostesses. I wanted to understand Iran-Contra as a parody-triumph of all that, militarism as the new paternalism, the inner circle outdone by a junta. But even if there was a case to be made (and I would be out of my depth trying to make it), what did it matter? As best I could tell, one sort of ruling caste had just been replaced by another, more corporate one. And much as I wanted meaning on a grander scale, my terminal feeling had not arisen sheerly or even primarily from my spotty understanding of history. It came from sources and experiences closer to home.

  The downside to my microapartment, for me, was not its location or its window glass but the fact that I slept poorly there those first nights. I don’t know what the cause was—not street noise, not the bed—but after I moved in, sleep was coy, a tease, and I would spend half the night chasing it around those three hundred square feet, only to sink deep into dreaming just before dawn, then wake up again as soon as the sun infiltrated the room. I rose in fits and starts; I dressed petulantly. To actually wake myself up, I relied on a morning walk and a double espresso: before that beverage I was a muddled brain weakly bleating out instructions to a distant and uncooperative body.

  I will go ahead and admit that I was reassured by the sight of other white people in the neighborhood. I wasn’t sure who lived around there now, and I’d had a fear that I would feel extremely conspicuous every time I went out. Instead I only felt somewhat conspicuous. At a nearby playground, I saw a white girl shooting baskets at a hoop without a net, in a taut ponytail and a headband and shiny red shorts that fell almost to her knees. And there was a man, I’d guess in his midforties, who lived in the town house next to my building and who on some mornings would come out the door just as I was coming out my door. I would follow in the same direction until he turned left toward the Metro station and I kept on walking straight ahead, toward the nearest coffee shop, a coffee shop that aspired to the status of cultural center, with shelves of left-wing reading material and movies for rent, and was populated by hipsters, kids in their early twenties wearing mismatched clothes from Value Village. It seemed these people were biding their time until they could move to some even more blighted neighborhood in Brooklyn or Queens. Hence Voltaic (this was the name of the place) had the feel of a train station or a dock, one where the awaiting passengers read Chomsky and discussed recent sexual endeavors and community organizing. On two or three hours of sleep I was never in the mood for any of that, and so I would down my espresso and be on my way.

  * * *

  Soon after I moved in I met the neighbor I’d noticed walking down my street, in fact more or less collided with him. I hadn’t seen him when I left my building, and I was proceeding along my morning route when at an intersection I nearly stumbled into traffic. My eyes had been loc
ked on the walk signal ahead of me, not the orange-smocked police with their whistles and their outstretched arms, not the approaching motorcade. Just as I was about to launch off the curb, someone took hold of my arm. And then a police motorcycle zipped by, right in front of me, and for a moment I had one of the stranger sensations I’ve ever had: it was as though the sudden backward thrust had ejected some part of me right out the rear, so that I was watching myself from behind, for a second or two. If even that long. No sooner had the feeling arrived than it was gone.

  I sucked in air. And I turned, with a keener interest than I might have had otherwise, to face that gangly guy I’d tailed on previous mornings. His eyes were hard to see behind his glasses. I had the impression of someone who, like me, didn’t exercise much. His pants were baggy and woolen, and his chest bowed beneath a brown worm of a necktie—in fact everything he wore was brown, aside from his shirt, a faded blue, although none of it exactly matched. (But consider what he would have seen in me, a dazed girl—woman, I should say, but I have always had trouble saying it—hugging a tote bag.) He rubbed his forehead and apologized.

  I asked him what he was sorry for, and he began, “For grabbing you in such a…” and then paused. As he searched for a word his hand moved in a circle. “Such an adverse way,” he said.

  Better than death by cop, which, I told him, would have been very adverse. It might have seemed to him that I was poking fun at his way of talking. But that was just my way of talking. We watched the vehicles go by, a series of motorcycles followed by three of those long black cars that reminded me of crocodiles. Attached to one of the limousines was a fluttering green and yellow flag.

  “There go the generals!” he said. He put his thumb to his lips and mimicked a bugle fanfare, doo do-do doooo. There was something embarrassing about the way he sang out like that. I don’t know why he thought there were generals in those cars.

  Between the flaps of his brown blazer I could see a lanyard around his neck, a bureaucrat’s work badge at navel-level. Silence swelled up between us. I considered then rejected the idea that we would fall improbably in love. No we wouldn’t. He told me his name, Daniel, and I told him mine. I thanked him again, and we hastened away from each other.

  * * *

  That evening I called my mother, which I didn’t do often. When I was in a good mood I didn’t want to be brought down, and when I was in a sour mood I didn’t have it in me. I called only when I was in a middling mood, and after a drink. Typically the conversation went better if I had news she would approve of, such as my having found a job and an apartment. Now, though, it only seemed to confuse her.

  “So are you going to stay in Washington?” she asked me.

  “Not forever, but—”

  “I never really pictured you living there as an adult. It doesn’t seem like the right place for you.”

  “I think I can adapt, at least for now.”

  “God knows it wasn’t the right place for me.”

  But hadn’t it been? My mom had molded herself into that exemplary Washington wife, blond and underweight, who favored crisp shirts and cardigans paired with the pearls she’d worn since college, who swam laps at the Chevy Chase Club and knew the number for Ridgewells, the catering company, by heart. Who met every unfortunate turn, whether it was a blighted azalea bush or a sick child, with the same semidetached poise.

  She was a self-made WASP, not a born one. Her stock was Swedish, by way of Texas: an ancestor had hopped on the wrong boat, or so I pictured it, and instead of making his way to Minneapolis or Chicago or another of the communities where his countrymen were clustered, he’d landed in Galveston, met and married another Swede, and settled with her in Houston, where they begat a clan of functional alcoholics. Like a lot of her family, my mom had a hybrid manner, mixing Texan forthrightness and surface warmth with a more intrinsic Nordic cool. She got by on industriousness and denial, and having hoisted herself out of the Lone Star state with good grades and good manners and a law degree from Southern Methodist, she’d become a different kind of woman from the women she’d known as a child, namely a white-collar professional. And then she lived all those years in a city that was so starkly two cities, Washington and D.C., especially during the mid- and late 1980s, when D.C. won the grand title of murder capital while Washington remained the stodgy, blossom-ridden seat of government. In our dual metropolis it made perfect sense for a lady to be lost in Mario Puzo while waiting for her hair to set at Elizabeth Arden, the same way it made sense for white boys to blast rap from out of their parents’ European station wagons. She gobbled up crime novels and sent us to dance classes, followed the news of every shooting and bought dresses at Garfinckel’s.

  “How’s your new apartment?” she asked.

  “Cozy,” I said.

  “Your dad said it was small.”

  “You talked to Dad?”

  “Sure. We do talk.”

  “What about?”

  “You girls, mostly.”

  As a kid I used to walk a few feet behind my mother, watching the backs of her narrow legs, tracking her down sidewalks and across parking lots. When she would stop so that I could catch up to her, I wouldn’t understand why she was stopping. I would halt too, a few feet behind her, and we’d stand like that, separated, until she stuck her hand back for mine and pulled me forward.

  “Hey, do you remember Rob Golden?” I asked.

  “Courtney’s friend?”

  “I ran into him.”

  “You did? What’s he doing now?”

  “He was in Iraq.”

  “He’s in the army?”

  “No, he did something with the reconstruction authority.”

  She laughed outright: this was incredible to her. “That obnoxious kid!” To her he was still a teenager, and often it seemed as if she also thought of me that way, as a kid with my little friendships and crushes and hobbies.

  “I was going to ask Dad about Dick Mitchell.”

  “Dick? Why?”

  “He was Rob Golden’s stepdad.”

  “Oh, that’s right. God. I can’t believe I forgot that,” she said. “Dick Mitchell. Do you know I met him on the second date I went on with your dad? Your father took me to—I mean this was not a date by any normal standards. It was a meeting of the committee for—what was it? American, no, new American peace. The Committee for a New American Peace. All those guys, they were so full of themselves!” She brought her voice back down. “Dick Mitchell especially. He’s the one that started it. How old could they have been, twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? They all went straight from taking the bar exam to deciding how to run the world.”

  “I think either you or Dad mentioned it before.”

  “They would get together and shoot the breeze, and they thought they were reinventing our foreign policy.”

  “You still went on a third date,” I said.

  “Yes, I liked him. He took me on better dates too. But we kept going to those meetings, we went to those damn meetings for how long, three, four years? Of course all the wives would be in the kitchen, wives and girlfriends. We used to roll our eyes at it all. Almost all the men had gotten deferments and were self-conscious about it. They needed to feel like they were part of a cause, fighting for something.”

  “Soldier envy.”

  “If you think about it, your dad’s had a chip on his shoulder about guys like Jim Singletary for years and years. I don’t know if he’s mentioned Singletary to you.”

  “What chip on his shoulder?” I asked.

  “If you didn’t fight, you were always a guy who hadn’t fought, and you had to prove yourself in a different way. Singletary was one of the army guys. There were a lot of men at that time, and now I’m talking about the late seventies and eighties, a lot of men around the White House who’d come from a military background.”

  “I bought his book. Singletary’s. I started reading it.”

  “You did? Why?”

  “I was just wondering what it said. Dad seem
ed kind of ticked off about it.”

  “That’s an understatement. It’s been driving him crazy. How is it?”

  “Like all those books are.”

  I don’t know what I’d been expecting when I read it—a sudden, direct attack on Dad? Of course there was nothing like that. In the few paragraphs devoted to Iran-Contra, my father’s name came up once, in a matter-of-fact list of some of Singletary’s NSC colleagues who’d been caught in the independent counsel’s high beams. What I did detect in his short recap of the crisis was an acceptance of it, a note of satisfaction, even. He never said it outright, but you could tell that Singletary thought some of his colleagues had had it coming.

  “It’s not as if I don’t understand why this is driving him crazy,” she said. “I get it. Why should Singletary have done so well for himself? The man is an idiot. Not I.Q.-wise, but he invents his own reality. Back then he was kind of paranoid: they used to call him Red Menace. And now instead of the Russians it’s somebody else, the terrorists, whoever. It’s all a big video game. Shoot the bad guy. Now let’s invade Iran too. And then he gets to dine out on his extremism, they’ll put him on TV precisely because he’s inflammatory. If you’re a total wack job, they won’t put you on those shows, but if you’re seventy-five percent there, and you’re good on camera, well then.

  “Here’s a man who was in the same pickle your dad was in, back then, but instead of being dragged down by the scandal, it all just rolled right off him,” she went on. “I still don’t know how he managed that.”