All the Houses

by Karen Olsson

“You really want to know?”

  “Lay it on me.”

  “She was obsessed with my stepfather. She thought she was in love with him. It took me a while to catch on, but eventually I figured it out. She went after me to get to him.”

  “Please.”

  “She did.”

  “Your stepfather. You expect me to believe that.”

  “I don’t care if you do or not. She was obsessed.”

  “I think you went out with her, you sold her pain pills, you dumped her, and then you were cruel to her after that. That’s what I know.”

  “Man,” he said, smiling acidly. “Ask her then. You really should.”

  * * *

  Although it had seemed that I might have to drag Nina away by the hair, she came willingly enough—that is to say, grudgingly, but of her own accord. By the time we stepped outside, all the establishments were locking up. Bilgy odors wafted out of the alleys. A man dashed across the street holding a piece of cardboard over his head and knocked at a black door. I’d found the girl but lost her. I got us a cab.

  The driver had the radio on, and we’d gone through a light or two when some pop ballad began to play, one of those songs so simple I wanted to curl up and live inside of it, to float within the girl singer’s breathy voice.

  “Was he hitting on you?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I was at a loss for something to say that might reach her. The barricades were so high, and I was so tired. I was also wound tight as could be. I wished that we could smile at each other again, that I could ease our way into talking, and then I could tell her to stay away from Rob, even though I knew that the same warning hadn’t worked on me.

  Nina called her father and told him we were nearby. Helen’s bringing me, she said, and I could hear his voice getting louder and faster before she told him be there soon and hung up.

  He was waiting out front with crossed arms and wet glasses, in a big nylon jacket bloated by the wind. When we drove up, he came stumbling down to the street and wrenched her out of the car and held her until she pushed and he let go. Then he leaned over to speak to me through the open car door. I still didn’t know whether she’d been gone the whole time, missing since the day before, or whether she’d come back last night and then vanished again. I had no idea whether he was going to yell at me again or thank me. Maybe he himself could not decide, his face was stung with exhaustion, and without saying anything he stood and shut the door. Because he was blocking my view of Nina, I couldn’t so much as wave goodbye to her.

  What Rob had said kept coming back to me. I couldn’t buy the idea that my sister, when she was in high school, had fallen for someone our dad’s age. She wasn’t that unconventional. Yet I had never understood why Dick Mitchell had appeared that night outside the Giant, after Anthony and I had gone there to pick her up. I remembered the look on his face, a look that had gone missing from my parents’ faces, tender and fraught, and I could imagine that a girl like my sister, who was starved for that look, might wolf it down.

  However: Rob was a liar! I wouldn’t believe him.

  I was all wet around the edges: my hair, my shoes, the cuffs of my jacket. I heard distant sirens. I wanted to talk to Courtney, but it was too late to call. I was stuck on the image of her and Dick Mitchell, and by image I mean a composite of what I remembered from that night outside the Giant and a kind of blurry film still. I tried to shut it down: Rob was a liar. And Courtney was a drama queen. A drama queen, a perfectionist, a bizarre individual—she was all of those, and then again those were labels I’d pasted on her to cut her down to size. Whatever she was, or wasn’t, Rob’s accusation had reinforced my latent sense that while I wasn’t looking she’d gone down to the underworld and back. She’d made a few trips, perhaps. I wanted to ask, why did you go without me? And maybe she would’ve said that there was no way to bring me, or maybe she would’ve said, why didn’t you come along?

  I sent Courtney a short e-mail, having first written a long e-mail and then deleted most of it.

  When we were kids, my sisters and I would swim in a lake near our grandmother’s house. Setting forth from a tiny smear of beach, we would enter the water, slowly, holding our arms out like featherless wings. We had to divine with each step whether our feet would land on smooth sand or muck or rocks or weeds. I searched for the good sand, wished it could all be good sand. I remember Courtney choosing to walk on the rocks, making a game of it. Come over here! It’s better over here! I would call to her (over here, here, here) and she would reply, No, you come over here!

  The thing about my sister was, I held on to that ideal bathing-beauty version of our relationship no matter what, no matter how stupidly we behaved, no matter how much we needled each other. I still believed in some sort of transcendent sisterly intimacy. I suspect she did too. I think maybe this ideal caused us to go at each other all the more, because we both had this underlying disappointment in our ongoing failure to realize it. Every once in a while we came close, though. That’s how it survived.

  * * *

  In the morning she called me, about the e-mail. “What did he tell you?” she asked.

  “It was very weird.”

  “Like what?”

  “I feel weird even saying it,” I said. “You were right about him having some issues.”

  “Do you want to get something to eat?” she asked.

  “Right now?”

  “I’m hungry. Is there anything good near you?”

  Twenty minutes later, she walked into the Hunan Palace and sat down across from me. She looked old, thirty-five going on forty-five. Here she was. We’d played a thousand rounds of card and board games, ridden thousands of miles in cars together, eaten thousands of meals, but my accumulated understanding of her was corroded by moldy judgments. I was only just starting to grasp how people in families, or at least the people in my family, refused to know one another. And it was hard to say which counted for more, all those games and cars and dinners, or the fact that when she’d had a crisis of her own, we’d been distracted—or had we turned away?—and let her down.

  Courtney pressed me to tell her what Rob had said, so I did. “He said that you were, like, into his stepfather.”

  “I never slept with him.”

  “Rob didn’t say that. Only that you had a crush on him.”

  “Oh.”

  “Did you?”

  Her eyes glazed over. For a second or two the hurt was right there for anybody to see, until she bit her lip and sent it back to its hole. I wanted to hop over the table and sit next to her and tell her I’d seen that, I’d seen her!

  “Wow.”

  “I thought it was love. I was sure we were in love, Richard and I,” Courtney said.

  It took me a moment before I realized who “Richard” was. By then she’d already plunged in and was saying things I couldn’t quite believe about herself, about Rob, about “Richard.” How she used to write his name in her notebooks and then scratch over it so no one would see. How she would want to go over to Rob’s house in the afternoons just to sit where he sat, to look at this one photo of him. I had some trouble hearing all this. Maybe everything had happened just as she said, and still it seemed so crazy that I wanted to criticize the story on those grounds. And literally too, I could barely hear her. She seemed to be murmuring this tale to herself.

  We were the only customers, and instead of the usual waiters a middle-aged man was working, who had told me, when I’d come in, to go ahead and sit anywhere. In the middle of Courtney’s story, he brought our food, glancing at me and at her and then back at me. “Sisters?” he asked. Not for the first time, it was as though having a sister had made me more of a person. I said “yes” with inexplicable pride.

  “You’re the older one,” he said to Courtney. Nobody ever got it wrong—they always guessed that she was older. “You look out for her?”

  “She looks out for me, actually,” Courtney said.

  “Is that right?”

&n
bsp; “That’s right,” I said. None of it made sense. We were just talking.

  And then he kept going, he told us about himself in far too much detail, as we spooned food onto our plates and—there was no use waiting for him to leave—started eating. Behind the cash register, a small television was tuned to CNN, reporting that there was unrest in Belize, of all places.

  It wasn’t until after we left, and she drove me the two blocks back to my building, that she went on with the story. She’d had a crush on Dick Mitchell, a.k.a. Richard, ever since she was about twelve, but then came a time when he started looking at her differently, talking to her differently, and that was when she’d really fallen for him. She used the same word that Rob had: obsessed. She’d become obsessed, and because that was the first time she’d felt so strongly about someone, she decided it had to be love. True love. My sister the seventeen-year-old athlete had been a covert romantic—then again who isn’t a romantic, at that age?

  She’d started seeing Rob, but it was the stepfather she thought about constantly, and when she went to their house she would stare at his picture, or, if he was home, she’d linger too long while talking to him. Rob picked up on it soon enough. Worse, he became convinced that the two of them were having a full-on affair, which, Courtney said, they weren’t.

  Rob broke up with her, which meant that she never saw Richard anymore. It made her miserable. She hardly ate, she dreamed about him. Sometimes she felt she was losing her grip.

  “So what happened that night?” I asked.

  “What night?”

  “The night I came and picked you up,” I said. “That night you got stranded at the Giant.”

  She said she’d been really fucked up that night and didn’t remember it clearly. She remembered going to a party where she drank a lot. She remembered that Rob had been there, and she remembered him taunting her, screaming things at her. “He locked me in a room,” she said.

  “By yourself?”

  “No, he was in there too.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was really loud. The party was. I don’t think anybody could hear us.”

  “And he—”

  “I don’t … You know, it’s kind of a blur,” she said. “At some point I blacked out. The next thing I remember is when I called you from that pay phone.”

  I thought of how messy and sad she’d looked when we’d found her, and now I saw that same person making a phone call, her clueless younger sister answering, two frightened girls. “How come you never told me about any of this?” I asked.

  She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “It’s not who I am.”

  At first I took this to mean that it wouldn’t be like her to tell me, or maybe that she wasn’t capable of telling anybody. Later that night, though, after she dropped me off and I went to bed, I would wonder whether she’d actually meant that the story itself wasn’t her—that what had happened that night hadn’t defined her. She wasn’t a partier, wasn’t a victim, wasn’t the person she’d been that night, was no longer the girl she’d been when she was seventeen. She’d disowned that girl.

  I guessed that Courtney remembered more than she was saying, and meanwhile that were I to ask Rob about all this, he would tell a different story, but I was tired of trying to be objective. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  She stared steadily at the road.

  “I wish I’d known. I wish we’d all known.”

  “Yeah, well,” she said. “Our parents knew. I mean, they didn’t know about that night, but they should’ve known a few things. I was taking all those pills, I was fucking up, and as long as I still got to go to Brown they just bailed. Turned a blind eye to it.”

  “I know. They couldn’t deal.”

  “I mean, thank god I got arrested. After that I had to go to those meetings, which were kind of stupid but they probably saved me. Mom and Dad never even talked to me about it. God.”

  “I know.”

  “And it’s like, will I ever stop waiting for them to say they’re sorry? I feel like I still can’t let them off the hook.”

  “But Dad is sorry. Can’t you tell?”

  “Yeah. It’s just that having him act guilty and not say anything—”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “And Mom—”

  “Mom’s a freak,” I said.

  “Mom is a freak.”

  “Did you ever see him again?”

  “Richard? I did, actually. One day I left school and drove to his house. I think about it now, and I can’t believe I did that, like what if his wife had been there? I guess she had some kind of job. Anyway it was—we mostly just talked, and then he kissed me, and that was—it was weird, I mean for both of us. It didn’t go past that. That was the last time I saw him. I think I had this idea that, you know, we would be together later, like after I finished college. But then—”

  “It sounds like things had always been rough for him. I can’t imagine…”

  Courtney nodded, and then dismissed it all at once, banishing the ghost of Dick Mitchell from the car with an odd jerk of her chin. I wanted to say more but had no more to say. “So. Anyway…” she said. “There’s something else.”

  “Yeah?”

  She told me, and I made a sound, a squawk.

  “It’s still early. And I lost the last one, so I’m really nervous.”

  I pretended I hadn’t known about the miscarriage, tried to reassure her. But oh my gosh this is so great, I said.

  I admit that I was not as happy for her as I might’ve been in that moment, not purely and selflessly happy. I concentrated on breathing. I counted my breaths.

  “I’m not telling our parents yet. Just you and Maggie.”

  “Guess you’ll have to quit smoking,” I said.

  “I don’t smoke,” she said. “I mean, not really.”

  That denial was so 100 percent my sister that I smiled, and then I noticed that I did feel something other than fear and envy, something warmer: a little yellow feather of feeling that I stuck in my cap.

  And then I was disturbed by a different piece of news, for the next day my mom called to tell me that Jodi Dentoff had died. She’d gone to the hospital to have something removed and while there had come down with an infection and then, my mother said, she’d succumbed to it. That was the word Mom used, succumbed, and I had to repeat it to myself before I understood what she meant. I said how shocked I was and so on, stringing those phrases around the concave place that the news had made. Tinny as it might’ve sounded when I said it, I really was shocked. Jodi had always seemed more alive than just about anybody else.

  Somewhere in my head there was a picture of everyone I’d ever known, and now another person in it was blacked out. More and more of the people who’d been present for some stage of my life were now gone, and though this would’ve been true of any adult following time’s arrow in the usual direction, it still gave me pause, and made me think about how I’d grown up in a disjointed world of people from other places and how after college I had mostly lived in other places myself and had never come across most of those people again, never heard a thing about their lives and deaths. I’d turned away from that picture of everyone I’d ever known, I’d rarely looked at it, but still it was a part of me, and the darker it became, the more it demanded to be seen.

  I asked Mom if she knew how Dad was doing, and she said only that I should talk to him myself. I called, but he didn’t pick up. When I finally got him on the phone he wouldn’t talk much about it. He agreed that it was a real shame and then changed the subject.

  The service was hardly what Jodi deserved. A woman like her should’ve been remembered at a palace or at least the Kennedy Center; there should’ve been a choir or a second-line band or tropical birds; but the Jewish and Catholic sides of her family had disagreed on what sort of funeral to hold, and the compromise service took place at an event space on Florida Avenue, low-ceilinged and musty. It was packed. There were reporters and politicos, but also frie
nds from other places and a handful of young women whom Jodi had helped pay for college.

  My mother and Maggie had both come to town for the funeral, and we all went together, except for Hugo, who was visiting his family in Mexico. I sat between Mom and Courtney, and then to Courtney’s right came Maggie, and then Dad next to her, on the aisle. We’d reassembled the old family unit, which was strange and comforting at the same time. I couldn’t have said how many years had gone by since I’d been someplace in public with both my parents, and strange as it was, still it felt like the most regular thing in the world, even the way they were bookending us—they used to do that in church or at the movies, to contain my sisters and me.

  Jodi’s mother was still alive, a ninety-year-old woman as tiny as Jodi, or maybe tinier, stooped over, shutting her watery eyes as she accepted one hand after another and held it loosely between both of hers. She didn’t get up to speak, but a brother and a cousin and a couple of Jodi’s colleagues did. They told charming stories into a microphone that had been placed just slightly in front of the first row of chairs, as it might be at a question-and-answer session following a lecture. And then Dad stood up, unexpectedly, hiked his pants, and walked slowly toward the front. He had a handkerchief in one hand and a set of index cards in the other.

  Jodi had been wrong about him, I thought. He hadn’t been wrecked, not really. His government career had ended early, sure, but that didn’t mean wrecked. For here he was, very much intact, as were we. Pressing on was one of my family’s strengths. Let it be said about the Athertons: we had okay manners most of the time, and we ate well, and we went on with it. Dad lifted the microphone from its stand and stepped forward, in front of the crowd, and turned to face everybody. I was nervous for him and I guess instead of him. He was calm, gazing above us at some spot toward the back, where maybe he could see Jodi hovering in midair, hands planted on her hips, chin tucked, eyes full of private glee.

  “I should’ve straightened that bow tie for him,” my mother whispered to Courtney.

  It was a peacock-blue bow tie—askew, yes, but only slightly—that he’d worn with his black suit. He’d combed his hair so that it hugged his head more closely than usual and traded his everyday glasses for tortoiseshell reading glasses. His look was classically Washingtonian, not exactly well-heeled, not exactly professorial, but a cross between the two. He was entirely of the city that had ground him down and then kept him on.