All the Houses

by Karen Olsson

  * * *

  Dad still came to watch us, but he was not so fanatical anymore—and at home he was likewise subdued. He slipped in and out of the house. He slept in his clothes sometimes. There were pouches under his eyes, and his hair turned from mostly brown to slush-colored.

  He and I were the early risers of our family. Dad typically left for work before 6:00, and one morning I crept downstairs at around quarter past and went out to our porch to pick up the newspaper. It was a half hour or so before sunrise. I read by the porch light while my mother slept. But what was I reading? Five or six paragraphs about a downed plane, the role of the Israelis, the assertions of this or that official.

  My father must have been sitting in his car. All of a sudden he came surging up the steps with rigid arms and a rebuke at the ready, but then I think he recognized he couldn’t actually scold me for reading the paper.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said.

  He turned on the kettle, and we sat at the kitchen table, silently. He must have been trying to formulate an explanation. “I’ve been advised,” he began, then stopped. “Okay. What questions do you have?”

  It was early. It was dark. Things I’d read bobbed around my head, just out of reach. I wanted him to read me a story, or teach me to ride a bike again.

  “What’s going to happen?” I asked.

  “We’re going to be fine,” he said. “Just fine.”

  That’s a bunch of bull, I wanted to say.

  Maybe he saw it in my face. He lowered his eyes. The kettle shrieked, and he stood to take it off the burner. He turned back toward me and asked, “How is school going?” His voice was as gentle as I’d ever heard it, but he didn’t have any words to go with the gentleness. It was all he knew how to ask. The time we’d once spent together, such as it was, had always been centered on activities, on biking or skiing, or trips to Roy Rogers for burgers, but then he took a job that consumed all his hours, and then I was too old to want to ride bikes with him.

  “It’s fine.” I wanted to say so much more than that. “It’s okay.”

  “Good.”

  He started to spoon instant coffee into a cup, and then he asked me whether I wanted some. I said I did, so that I could drink it with him, and in the silence that followed, we discovered a new activity: that wordless coffee-drinking itself. I started waking up even earlier, listening for Dad’s footsteps. I would pull on a long-sleeved shirt over my pajamas and go downstairs and into the kitchen, where I would mix a little of his instant coffee into hot milk. While Dad heated water in the kettle, I would put milk in the microwave and watch to make sure it didn’t boil over, though often my attention would wander, last night’s dream would for a moment or two retake my porous 6:00 a.m. brain, and the milk would spume over the sides of the cup. I would sponge the milk scum off the microwave carousel, and then we would drink our coffees, in loud, slurpy sips.

  Because of the scandal my father would have to resign, but his new boss allowed him to give three months’ notice, so that he was able to remain until early March, and his lawyer persuaded the joint committees to postpone the date of his testimony. We were living inside the temporary shelter of those deferrals, a lean-to of scavenged time. It was a chilly, exposed place. In spite of the restricted access to information on Albemarle Street, we all knew that it wouldn’t be easy for our father to find another job. The thing that scared me was to see him pick up the comics and read them straight through, Prince Valiant and Momma and Family Circus, all of them. Or: once I passed by the study and saw him playing one of our computer games. He’d never had any interest in those things before.

  * * *

  In the short time that Courtney went out with Rob, she never seemed in love with him so much as preoccupied by him, waiting for his calls and then answering them briskly, as though he were a nuisance. My suspicion was that she undertook Rob in order to undertake sex, sex as another entry in her list of achievements. Deflowering: check. But after the deed was done, and done a few times, she found herself attached to him and irritated by him and confused about what to do with him. Which was not all that different from how she felt about me.

  She stared into space. She fouled out of two games.

  One night Tanya, who was our team’s equipment manager, drove us home from an away game. I sat in a cramped backseat seemingly designed for the legless, making origami of my limbs and looking at Tanya’s long neck in the space between her seat and the headrest.

  “Your dad couldn’t make it,” Tanya said to Courtney, who was in the passenger seat.

  “He had to meet with his lawyer. I’m sure he’s hating it,” Courtney said.

  “He told you that?” I asked, but the two of them went on talking to each other.

  “Why does he have a lawyer again?” Tanya asked.

  “Somebody decided that he and some other people he used to work with aren’t eligible to have White House counsel,” Courtney said. “They hung them out to dry.”

  “I meant, what’s he accused of?”

  Courtney exhaled deliberately. “They are accused,” she said, “of violating a law that said you can’t give military aid to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. But you know what? It’s not even the law anymore! Congress overturned it.”

  It was as if she had learned Mandarin Chinese on the sly.

  “How do you know all that?” I asked, louder this time. “Mom and Dad told you?”

  “Yeah, right,” she said. “I read the newspaper at school, in the library.”

  “You found out Dad was meeting with his lawyer from the newspaper?”

  “No, Dad told me that.”

  “Okay,” Tanya said. “There was a law, and now it’s not a law anymore.”

  “But they broke it when it was a law, right? Doesn’t that still count as breaking it?” I asked.

  Courtney sighed again.

  Only much later did I think anything of the fact that Courtney would’ve seen Dick Mitchell during that period, a period when my father wasn’t supposed to contact him. She and Rob spent time at his house on the weekends. I thought about the plush suburban manor I’d seen when we’d gone to the party there. I pictured the two of them sunk into an overstuffed sofa, watching cable, this vision not sharp and realistic but fogged with envy: romantic, transcendent Saturday-afternoon cable.

  My sister did mention Mitchell at least once. This was one evening when she’d come home late from dinner at their house. He’d let Rob and her each have a glass of wine, she told me, and had said the funniest things. He’s so cool, she said.

  Our own house had become gloomy. It sounded so much better over there, for even though Rob’s stepdad was in the same bag as our dad, he was cool and our dad was not.

  * * *

  The goals were worthy…, said the president in his State of the Union address, but we did not achieve what we wished, and serious mistakes were made in trying to do so.

  The first snow of the year came in late January. On the radio they warned of baffled traffic, dangerous conditions, abandoned cars. White out: the city was redacted. Tufts of snow topped the bus signs, and lost scarves lay wet and mangled in the road. People covered their little red ears.

  School closed, and Anthony and I found each other outside, in a muddle of kids still deciding what to do with themselves. He said I had to come to Georgetown with him. Why would I do that? I asked. He thought the movie theater where he worked would still be open. His boss there would never close, not for a tornado, not for a tidal wave. He was going. There was no reason to go with him but for a snow-giddiness that drew me slipping and sliding, and we skidded all the way down Wisconsin, pushing each other, running in circles, burying snow in each other’s necks.

  Then kissing. In the projection booth, it was. He had his hand up my shirt, he murmured “Oh god” as he sank his face into my hair, and that seemed like something he’d seen in a movie, but he was trembling too, while in the theater below a lone man watched the film. I did let Anthony unbutton my shirt, I’d
sipped the vodka he’d taken from a cabinet, and I snuck my hand under his shirt too, reaching for his thin waist, soft in spite of how skinny. Patchwork of temperature, warm, cold, warm, cold, his lips, my hands, his breath, the air that came from someplace. The room didn’t seem clean enough for taking off clothes, everything black and metal, stacks of reels gathering dust, and there was dust on top of a file cabinet, thick and dense as a rug. Way too suddenly, his hand was inside my underwear and then his finger was in me. It hurt. Anthony! He pulled his hand out of my pants and leaped back. Shaken. We both were. I buttoned myself up. Here was this person who’d been sort of my best friend. And now what.

  We stayed there, holding hands, for a few minutes after the movie ended, and when at last we zombie-walked down to the lobby, that man, the audience, was still shuffling around in his coat and hat, reading the blown-up reviews on the walls. He had on tinted glasses and hid his baldness under a maroon snow hat with a gold pompom.

  “Did you like it?” Anthony asked him in that way of teenagers talking to adults, half ironic, half surprised that it is even possible to talk like this. It was his fourth time seeing it, the man said. There was something he wanted, he looked at us too eagerly, making me nervous, though all he did was pour some M&Ms out of a pack he was holding and push them into his mouth.

  Although we tried to make fun of the man after he left, the joking fell flat. By then it was six or seven. We walked along the lit-up sidewalk, the darkness yellowed by the streetlamps and the headlights of the occasional taxi or SUV, the tires slurping through a stillness that made it seem much later than it was. The snow had stopped, it had been trampled, driven over, and we couldn’t tell whether the buses were running.

  “That was sad,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That man all by himself.”

  “Lots of people go to the movies by themselves. I go to the movies by myself.”

  “Yeah but still. There was something about him.”

  “Maybe that’s just your imagination.”

  “Really, everything is my imagination, though. I’m imagining you,” I told him.

  “And how do I look to your imagination?”

  “Cold.”

  “I’m serious.”

  I didn’t know the answer. I liked him more than just about anybody, but I wanted to get away. I wished that I could think of a joke to tell or that a bus would come.

  “You’re a fortress,” he said.

  “That’s what we call our car.”

  “I’m not talking about your car.”

  His lips twitched. I nodded. Then we trudged very slowly up the hill. It was dark, and I assumed that by the time I got home my parents would be angry at me for coming in so late, and I also wondered whether they would see that there was something different about me, that I’d been drinking and messing around, but it wasn’t actually that late, and they didn’t notice anything.

  2005

  The trouble with sisters is this: any time you have more than one of them, the configuration is highly unstable. Were I a scientist of family dynamics, I might dedicate myself to studying systems of n sisters for n > 2, which are continually perturbed by half-licked wounds and false fronts, secret competitions, unstated agendas. I felt this whenever I was in the presence of both Courtney and Maggie. Though I often looked forward to seeing either of them one-on-one, I shied away from the three of us. Still, there was this idea that it was good for us all to get together—not my idea, probably not anybody’s, but it remained part of our collective thinking. And so when Maggie came down for a literature conference at Georgetown in mid-January, Courtney invited us both to dinner at her new house, on a night when Hugo had other plans. Maggie agreed to skip the gender studies cash bar, and I said of course I’d come along.

  I met Maggie, who had borrowed Dad’s car, at the conference, in a building lobby full of academics wearing paper name badges. There was a peculiar vibe in that lobby, which I chalked up to equal parts enthusiasm, ego, and insecurity, this inference drawn from my eavesdropping, while waiting for Maggie, on a few young men in V-neck sweaters who were absorbed in a conversation about sublimated lexicons, etc., making noisy assertions and subtly craning their necks. On the way to Courtney’s, I detected some of the same frenetic spirit in Maggie: she was flushed and spoke quickly. She told me Dad had come to her session, where she’d been one of three people presenting papers, and that he’d seemed to appreciate it, that is to say he had not fallen asleep, even during the other papers, like the one that had addressed the performance of ecstasis in colonial Latin American verse.

  “Who among us does not enjoy a good performance of ecstasis?” I asked.

  “I don’t think he was all that into the presentation per se.”

  “Of course he was proud of you. I’m sure he was thrilled.” Weeks earlier she’d told me the subject of her own paper, I’d forgotten what it was exactly. She specialized in early Tudor drama.

  She was at the wheel, sitting straight up like yoga had taught her to do and driving as though she’d gone to Courtney’s new place a dozen times already. The farther we went, the taller the trees looked, scattered around ever-larger houses. “He said he hadn’t seen much of you lately,” she said.

  “I saw him, like, a week ago. A week and a half,” I said, feeling accused, no matter that Maggie was only reporting what he’d said. And then I remembered that I hadn’t heard from Nina for roughly the same amount of time. I’d assumed she would call to ask about another driving lesson, or to tell me when her next basketball game would be, and after she didn’t, I’d left a message for her. She hadn’t returned the call. It made no sense to interpret her silence as anything but a reminder that she was young and busy, a sixteen-year-old not hugely invested in a friendship with me (which, to be sure, was an unusual friendship, with uncertain protocols). Even so I felt the lack of her.

  “I’m going with him to the doctor on Tuesday,” I said.

  “The cardiologist?”

  “Yeah. Just a checkup I think.”

  “So what’s going on with all that?”

  “I’m not sure. I’d like to ask him more about it. I don’t know what to ask.”

  “Me either. I got a book about heart disease,” she said.

  “I should get a book.”

  “But really we need to get him to tell us more about what’s happening with him.”

  She was right. Instead of asking about his heart I’d spent all that time trying to learn what had transpired during the Reagan administration, and now I began to confess as much to Maggie, in the hopes that she would absolve me.

  “You want to write about Iran-Contra?” she asked.

  “I was trying to write about Dad, you know. About what he did, and how it affected us.”

  “So did you interview him?”

  “I tried to get in a question here and there.”

  She said the same thing our mother had said—“Huh”—but without Mom’s note of disapproval. For Maggie it was straight-up confusion, which made me want to explain myself. I tried to.

  “The past isn’t even past?” she asked.

  “Actually I think the past is past, but we don’t have a handle on it. They never told us about it. I wanted to know—”

  Just then we pulled up to the house, a doozy of a residence, three stories, red brick, two huge oaks presiding over a tidy yard. We parked but sat there in our seats for a moment, looking up at the place. And before we could reach the door and take hold of its brass knocker, it opened, and Courtney stood there gloating, or I took it for gloating. Inside she showed us around, while we were still in our coats. We praised the arched doorways and picture molding, the large windows, the kitchen the size of my apartment. She made sure to point out all the things that were not quite right and/or needed fixing—because of the trees the house didn’t get good light in the mornings, there were issues with the bathroom tile, and so on. Maggie managed to sympathize, to be engaged by questions of paint color and furn
ishings, but I didn’t have much to say about Courtney’s decor. I couldn’t tell whether she was still mad at me. No doubt she was, but she didn’t shoot me any loaded looks or hollow smiles, and I took this to mean we were going to aim higher than that, for the evening at least.

  In the kitchen, I picked up a book from the counter, a thirty-day program for optimal wellness. My sister was into that kind of thing: on the advice of a book, she would throw away the cheese and crackers and fill the cabinets with brewer’s yeast and kelp and herbal supplements. She would elaborate on the consequences of various vitamin deficiencies and exhort me to stop using a microwave. She would put arugula in the blender and drink the result. And then she would have a cigarette.

  “Do you want to borrow that book?” she asked.

  “I think I’m probably well enough.”

  “It’s really good. I learned so much about how our hormones are affected by corn.”

  “Maybe not optimally well.”

  “Corn is in practically everything,” Courtney said. “And it gets cross-contaminated by other toxins, from other crops.”

  “So corn is bad?”

  “It’s not quite that simple. You should just read it.”

  When we were kids, our parents had worked long hours, and Courtney had looked after us, in her way. She’d been the choreographer of our three-person dance routines. She’d chosen our games, booby-trapped our rooms. One time she’d found a plastic slide someone had left out on the street and dragged it home for Maggie to use. She’d picked a summer camp for us all to go to, after seeing an ad for it in The Post’s Sunday magazine. She put Band-Aids on us, liked to feed us snacks of marshmallows or salami rolled into flutes.