All the Houses

by Karen Olsson

  Then a woman with a corona of thick white hair and a granite face and a tight grip on her shopping cart hit our cart with hers, or else we hit her. There was a collision. Wine bottles rolling against each other, ringing out. She must’ve assumed that Maggie, who was pushing our cart, would stop sooner, and Maggie must’ve assumed the same of her. These had been faulty assumptions. Maggie, rather than apologize or move out of the way, just kept going (or tried to) and nudged the other cart again, not so much aggressively as out of distraction, as though she were simply trying to continue moving forward and hadn’t noticed that the obstacle was attached to a person. The woman gasped at Maggie’s boldness and took a couple of unsteady steps backward and collided with a tower of Parmigiano Reggiano. She landed on the ground, theatrically, I thought, more or less choosing to sit down on the floor—what would be called, in certain sports, a flop. This lady was trying to get the foul call from an invisible referee. She sat with her legs sprawled and a half-dozen plastic-wrapped Parmesans spread over her skirt. It was a long, black skirt she was wearing, which gave her the look of a violin teacher who’d been caught trying to boost all that cheese.

  “I’m getting the manager,” she kept saying. I went over to her and tried to help her up, but she refused my hand. An employee had come out from behind the cheese counter—a cheese partner, I guess he was—and was heading toward us. “Could you get your manager, please?” she called to him. He said something into a walkie-talkie.

  “I’m really so sorry,” I said in a low voice. “My sister’s a little out of it right now. Her dog just died.”

  “That’s bullshit,” she said, insightfully. She pushed herself up, gave us each a cutting look, and huffed away, no longer interested in the manager.

  I looked at Maggie, thinking we would share a moment, but she was staring upward, toward the trelliswork of crossbeams and lights and occulted security cameras, and I couldn’t tell what her face contained, whether she was shaking her head slightly or trying to discern something up there. Even my younger sister had faint lines on her neck now, that much I could see. Other shoppers pushed past us, saying “excuse me” in harried voices.

  As we left the store and eked our way out of the parking garage, she remained absently somber, staring out the window at all the SUVs or else staring past them. “Next time we’ll go to Safeway,” I said.

  “Mmm.”

  “You okay?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Good,” I said. We didn’t talk for a bit, not until we were halfway home, when Maggie noticed she’d missed a call from our dad. “Should I call him back?” she asked.

  “We’ll see him in a couple minutes. It’s probably okay to wait.”

  “Poor Dad.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like—that plastic Santa!”

  “I know.”

  “It just makes me think of the way he wants to be appreciated, how he’s always wanted that more than anything,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “of course.” I don’t know how to explain why I was so struck by those words—the way he wants to be appreciated. Naturally he wanted that, who doesn’t? But from time to time one of my sisters could say something about our parents and it would seem revelatory to me, even if the statement would’ve sounded mundane to anyone else. There was something deep and true under the words, something I’d seen before but only partially, and now here was another facet all lit up. I wanted to talk about it more, to analyze our dad’s need for appreciation, but Maggie had moved on, now she was trashing Whole Foods. Whole Foods and its fucked-up people buying their fucking ciabatta and their fucking fair trade coffee, people who thought they were so superior when all they had was money, not culture, they’d confused ciabatta with culture. With art! Ciabatta is not art, she was saying. I didn’t argue, though obviously we were those people she was denouncing, insofar as we’d been buying the same food at the same store. And she’d probably paid at least a hundred dollars for that new haircut she had. But she hadn’t published all that she needed to publish to advance in her career, and she was worried about money, and angry that she had to worry about it, and though she kept her anger under wraps, every so often it lurched out of her.

  Was everyone angry in every family? I didn’t used to think so. However: it did sometimes seem that way, in this country at least. People might’ve still been happy in Corfu or Uruguay, but here we all felt we should’ve gotten something we didn’t get, and though I hadn’t voted for him I sometimes thought our current president was just the leader we deserved: the feisty son, the shorter one who’d struggled in school and drunk too much and once challenged his dad to a fistfight. Our peevish commander! There was a little W. in all of us, during the holidays especially.

  * * *

  On Christmas Eve we met Mom at an Italian restaurant, one that had opened when we were in high school and that we’d been going to ever since. In the mideighties it had quickly earned a spot on the best-of-city lists, though it had since drifted into the honorable-mention category and was entering its senescence. Loyalists continued to eat there, generally older people who I suppose were as comforted as I was by the familiar, by the rosemary breadsticks at the center of the table, the fried calamari on the menu, the frescoes that decorated the walls, and the somber, long-suffering maÎtre d’, who in his pigeon-toed stance behind the podium had the air of an inbred aristocrat reduced to servitude at a restaurant in Washington. Between the frescoes were nooks with lit candelabra in them, a touch of Tuscan gothic, their long shadows fingering the walls behind.

  When Maggie and I arrived, our mother was already seated with a glass of white wine before her. She looked up, then stood. I had her modest height and her habit of holding her hands up by her chest, and I too had a way of resisting when I was tempted to smile. I could sense her bracing herself. Not that she was unhappy to see us, but greetings and farewells made her tense up, even with her own daughters. It was as though she were following dance steps that had been inscribed on the floor, positioning her feet over the foot-silhouettes and then looking past us. Her skin had a sheen to it, produced by her regular, rigorous facials, and her hair was smartly cropped and colored a blond that approximated what she’d once been naturally. She still looked the part of the Washington wife: the soft red sweater and black pants with velvet seams, the fancy flats, the fresh manicure. I guessed that she probably had male admirers in Philadelphia, and that she wouldn’t have made half the effort for them that she’d made for us.

  “Are we expecting your sister?” she asked, even though she knew that we were.

  “She might be running late,” Maggie said.

  “Just this once,” I added.

  I was only partway through my first breadstick when Courtney and Hugo arrived, which is to say they weren’t so late, by Courtney standards. She came in coldly. Her lips were pursed, her eyes hard, at least they were when she glanced my way. But Hugo, bless him, had brought a bottle of tequila, and though at first the waiter seemed uneasy about letting us drink it there, the holiday mood got the better of him. He brought us little glasses. I took a few sips, and it was like the smoke of some magic spell wafting down my throat. Hugo kept saying funny things and pouring more for everybody. This was before we’d eaten anything, and after a few sips, Mom’s Texas accent came back to her.

  We talked, though Courtney and I never addressed each other. We talked about people we used to know, and about a movie that Mom and Courtney had loved and I had not loved, and then during a lull in the conversation Mom said, “So how is your father?”

  This only prolonged the lull. We all gazed at nothing. Then she followed up with, “Has he been exercising?”

  Everyone looked at me. I was now the expert on Dad and his fitness habits. “I think he’s been exercising, yes,” I said. Before I’d moved to my own place, I’d sometimes heard the braying of his old rowing machine down in the basement.

  “Good, that’s really good for him. And seeing people. Has he been
socializing?”

  “Mom, stop,” Maggie said.

  “Stop what?”

  “You’re talking about him like he’s debilitated.”

  “I am not.”

  “Like you’re his social worker.”

  “I’m concerned, that’s all.”

  “Did he call you the other night?” I asked. “From the Morgans’ party?”

  She plucked a bit of fuzz from her sweater before she answered. “I did get a message from him, a little strange. Why?”

  “I just thought I heard him call you.”

  “He was talking about that book.”

  “What book?” Courtney asked.

  “He said he’s been trying to write something, a memoir I guess it is. He’s been at it for a while.” She didn’t say bless his heart, but it was there in her voice.

  “I thought he gave that up,” I said.

  Mom said she really didn’t know much about it.

  “I wonder if he’s dating anybody,” Maggie said.

  “He did make some mysterious late-night calls when I was there,” I said.

  “He has a lady friend?” asked Maggie, not hiding her delight.

  “Maybe.”

  Then Hugo piped up. “What about you, Eileen?” he asked. “I bet that you have been beating off men with sticks.”

  In spite of the accidental image—one that he and Mom were oblivious to and Courtney ignored, while Maggie and I stared at the table and bit our lips—there was a charm in the way he talked to our mother. I wondered whether he weren’t in fact some secret genius, saying these things to amuse us and placate her at the same time. At any rate he was the hero of the evening, the source of the smooth liquor and smoothing-over remarks that kept our wheels turning.

  “Oh no,” Mom said. “I’m enjoying the life I have now. Why would I let some man mess it up? You should see these women I know, they go onto websites, date-oldsters-dot-com or something. Not me!” She laughed unpersuasively. “Who wants dessert?”

  After dinner we opened the gifts we’d brought with us. As usual Mom had given my sisters and me the same thing in different colors. This year it was pashminas. Beige for Courtney, black for Maggie, green for me. I gave my mother a teapot. We all put the scarves around our shoulders. Then Mom said she had to leave, to catch her train back to Philly, and Courtney and I spoke the first word we’d said to each other all night—goodbye. Maggie and I returned to the house to find that Dad had left for the midnight church service already, and though it was not so late, we retired to our rooms.

  * * *

  There’s not too much to say about Christmas itself. We traded presents quickly and apologetically. Dad gave me a handmade vase, which, he explained, he’d bought at a church holiday bazaar. It was cylindrical and had swirls of blue in the glaze, and odd though it seemed that this was the “special gift” he’d told me about on the phone, I could never tell what would strike his fancy—in this case he knew the woman who’d made the vase, and that made it special to him, I guess. Courtney was still cool, quietly bustling around and picking up other people’s discarded wrapping paper until we forced her to open her own gifts. In the afternoon we made enough food for twenty people. My father was dissatisfied with the roast; he said that it was unevenly cooked and that the oven needed to be serviced or replaced. Although there was more than enough decent meat to feed us, he wouldn’t let it go and at one point dug up a toll-free number for Whirlpool, which we had to convince him not to call. Then he went on a long thing about an army general who’d been in the news, how he thought the general was an honest guy who had gotten a raw deal. From there he skipped to another news item and then back to Whirlpool. Even so, I don’t think he was disappointed with Christmas. He seemed grumpy and sanguine at the same time. In the middle of dinner he got the idea he should call Judge O’Neill and invite him for dessert, but the judge was busy with his own family.

  We stuffed ourselves, then opened a bottle of port, which we drained while watching Die Hard on television. Whatever happened to Bonnie Bedelia? we asked ourselves; nobody knew, and that would’ve been that—except that this black wave crashed over me as the movie was ending, one minute I was merely drowsy and the next thing I knew I felt close to tears, though not close enough to get any relief from crying. It was that Courtney had disappeared too, just like Bonnie Bedelia, and had been replaced by this self-righteous, overdressed person who made me feel crazy every time I was in the same room with her. I glanced at her—she was half-asleep.

  “So what are you guys doing tomorrow?” I asked her.

  She blinked and yawned. “We need new tile in our downstairs bathroom, so we thought we might go look for that.”

  “Tomorrow? The stores will be a nightmare.”

  “Probably. We have jobs, though. We have to go to stores when everyone else goes,” she said.

  “I mean, I guess it just seems like the day after Christmas—”

  “We’re not going to a mall. We’re going to tile stores.”

  “Okay then,” I said, meanwhile pressing my fingernails into my palms. “Good luck finding some tile.”

  We just fell into these exchanges, it seemed. I wouldn’t see them coming. The blandest of topics would still lead us back to You’re wrong. No, you’re wrong.

  * * *

  The next day, I was reading the paper on the living room couch when Dad came in to tinker with the thermostat, a new digital model he distrusted. Offhandedly I told him about a bit from the gossip column. “That’s Washington for you,” he said, and then he stared at the tree and said that he wondered from time to time how his life might have played out in a different city than this one. It was the kind of thing I wondered about all the time, with respect to my own life, but it startled me when my father said it, because I considered the course of his life, of both my parents’ lives, to have been fixed. All but fated. I didn’t like to think of their choices as choices. I sat there, staring at him, Dad in his sweater and jeans and slippers, hair uncombed, thumbs hooked in his pockets, and thought, Even for you it wasn’t all mapped out. I’d been raised in a world of tests and competitive admissions and college career offices, maybe that’s why I had to remind myself of the obvious—that our lives are shaped as much by other people and external forces and luck as they are by aptitudes and plans.

  “I was offered a pretty good position down in Florida in, what was it, spring of eighty-five? An old friend of mine had a company that was doing very well, it was a distributor for medical supplies, and he invited me to interview for vice president of something or other. Operations? I had the sense that the interview was a formality, though. It paid very well.”

  “Did you think about taking it?”

  “Oh sure. We had college tuitions to think about, and it was just so different, the private sector, Fort Lauderdale, all of it. I went down there and did the interview, talked to a bunch of guys. But your mother was happy in her job here, and you girls were in high school, and you know—selling things to hospitals. I just hadn’t seen myself in that sort of business. But then again…”

  He drifted off, and I thought I understood: had he taken the Florida job, he would have avoided the scandal, which itself had steered him into the corporate life, but only after many months of investigations and unemployment—and painful memories that lasted much longer. But he went on.

  “Then again I was certainly tempted to get out. The White House was exciting, but it wasn’t the best atmosphere. There were big egos, a lot of infighting. It could be hard to get anything done, or even keep in mind what we were trying to accomplish.”

  “Did you write about that, in your book?”

  He stayed quiet for a bit, and then he said, “I didn’t get that far.”

  “Maybe you should keep going.”

  “It’s not about Iran-Contra, hardly any of it is. I wanted to write about the rest of what I did, the parts that got lost after the whole, whatever you want to call it. The whole shebang. I was going to give you some
of it to read. That was going to be my Christmas present, but then I thought the better of it.”

  “Why?”

  “These old-man memoirs. They’re so funereal.”

  “It’s not funereal.”

  “‘Let’s go ahead and get it on the record while he’s still got his wits about him. Then we’ll self-publish the thing and never look at it again,’” he said. He’d started pacing a little. “Believe me, I’ve seen these things at other people’s houses, and they’re like long, first-person obituaries.”

  “Come on, Dad.” He didn’t say anything. “I’d just like to know more about it. When it happened, Iran-Contra was like this big thing that nobody had straight and people made fun of, at least the kids I knew would make fun of it.”

  He stood still and tall. “I’ll say one thing about all that. My colleagues at the time, they skirted the law. They broke it, I suppose, and they covered it up, and they—we, I should say, since I did help them, we were caught. But those men did what they did for reasons they believed to be the right reasons. Moral reasons. I won’t say I myself had all the conviction of an Oliver North, but I did believe in their good faith, if that makes any sense. I still believed I was working for and with people who had our country’s best interests at heart. This may seem simplistic to you. We live in, I guess you could say, a more complicated world now, and we’re more sensitive to how dangerous our convictions can turn out to be. At least some of us are. But then I look at your generation and I wonder what it’s like—what do you even put faith in?”

  I couldn’t tell whether he expected a reply. I didn’t have one. Faith? A pretty country singer. The shape of a fish on the back of a car. A musty old rocking chair that had not been handed down to me. I wanted to defend my generation, but all I could think to say was that there were other members of my generation who were better and more faithful people than I was.

  Dad went upstairs, and I heard the printer going. He came back down with a small stack of paper and handed it over.

  “It’s not much,” he said. “Fits and starts.”