by Isla Morley
The UPS man leaves without saying a word, and without looking back.
And there it has alighted, a box the size of an oven, in the middle of the living room floor. Kneeling down and turning my head sideways, I read the label: COTTAGES 4u. The smoldering coals in my belly begin burning again. Cleo’s dollhouse.
A plastic dollhouse. Now, that’s something that doesn’t leap into flames. It has small parts that can choke a child under two, warns the label, but it is not combustible. I had packed away every button, every washing machine quarter, the month Cleo was born. I all but nailed shut the kitchen cabinets under the sink long before she could crawl. Every time I found a pushpin Greg left lying in the study, I picked it up, centered it on my palm, and ceremoniously walked it over to him. His carelessness could do her in, I implied, but only ever said, “We need to be more careful.” After reading a magazine article about how a child had strangled herself on the blind cords while her mother was putting on the kettle, I became a cord vigilante too. My house became a yacht with all its sheets knotted down in place. There was no way she could hurt herself. It was impossible.
GREG AND I have called on parishioners whose houses take on appearances. Appearances that say, All is right with the world. Clutter-free countertops, carpets vacuumed till every fiber snaps to attention, gleaming toilet bowls, for-show-only couches, lampshades still wrapped in plastic, and fireplaces stocked with unused candles—dead giveaways of things running amok, if you ask me. The smell alone can make me panic: the smell of trapped air, windows kept closed for the fear of neighbors’ wandering ears. Air breathed in and out, over and over again, siphoned through pinched lungs, lungs used for shouting or crying or, worse, squeezing it all in.
Houses like that make some women envious, and had I not lived in one when I was sixteen years old I might be one of them. Because when you have lived in one you know that it is all an act, a façade behind which a demon runs loose.
My mother never picked up those important papers from City Hall. Instead, she stayed at home, day in and day out. It was as though she were punishing the house, disciplining it in the hopes that what took place in it still had a chance of being “normal.” She beat the cushions till they swelled; she struck the rugs with the broom till they coughed up big clouds of dust. With the duster she lashed out at the corners of each room whether a web had been brave enough to occupy it or not. Every inch of the house took a beating, and even though it did exactly as she wished, things only got worse.
For one, we ate less, at least she and I did. With my mother’s household allowance cut, there were no longer bowls of fresh fruit on the table. Sandwiches of ham and cheese were replaced with ones of jam. The fridge, once stocked with cheese and sausages, housed mostly my father’s beers and eggs from my grandmother’s farm. We took to eating food out of boxes and cans, sometimes for weeks in a row till my father would complain.
“Christ, Louise, if I come home to one more macaroni and cheese dinner or one more goddamn Vienna sausage, I’m going to spit!”
“We can’t afford anything else with twenty rand a week, Harry,” my mother protested one night.
“Well, maybe if I had taken that promotion instead of having to take charge of you, we might have more money, now wouldn’t we?”
And just like that she left the table to go slap the sheets on the clothesline while my father yelled, “Tomorrow, by God, I want a roast on my table!”
The following day, before she sent me off to school with her sad eyes, my mother asked me a favor: “Could I borrow some money?” Other kids got pocket money, but I only ever got money for birthdays and Christmases. Still, I had saved enough for a new tennis racket. She saw the look on my face. “Ten rand,” she pleaded. “Just enough for a small leg of lamb. I’ll pay you back, I promise.”
That night, while my mother, the lamb, and I waited at the dining room table for my father to come home, the house took on a smell that to this day can make me break a sweat: burnt meat. It was close to midnight when he came home. My mother was still seated at her chair at the table in front of her ruined dinner. He was loud enough that I woke up and opened my bedroom door in time to see him pick up the lid off the roasting pan and peer at the meat shrunk to the size of a tennis ball. Then he looked at my mom and said in a billowy cloud of alcohol, “What would your fancy boyfriend think of you now?”
I closed the door on his laugh and wished with all my might that it would be his last.
MY HOUSE, you could say, suffers from neglect, but it is a premeditated neglect. Stuff piles up in the corners where the geckos hide their eggs, the windowpanes are streaked with dirt. Rather than burnt dinners, the air is full of the smell of dead flowers, of the stagnant water in which they wallow. It is to this home, where there are no appearances, where things seem exactly as they are, that Greg returns at seven o’clock, the time I get up from my afternoon nap.
Heating something in the microwave, he comes to hug me as I walk in, a gesture that now strikes me as peculiarly out of place. “Dinner is nearly ready,” he says.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Eat something, Ab.”
“I did already,” I lie, and he knows it because there are no dishes in the sink.
I can tell he has been crying, and for a moment I can’t think why. But then I look over at the dollhouse sitting in the middle of our living room, the dollhouse with its decorated bedroom and en suite bathroom.
“What should we do with it?” he asks.
“Leave it there,” I say, and it comes out contrary.
“Why don’t we give it to . . .” and I know he’s trying to think of a child he knows, but the names do not come. “Charity?”
“Why don’t we keep it?”
“It just doesn’t seem right,” he says after a deep silence.
It is the longest conversation we have had in days, since Sunday, and I am already tired out.
“Leave it where it is,” I insist, and walk out of the kitchen.
My grief is a bully, I notice—people cave in so easily at its obstinacy. I don’t need to say much, but its weight and size make them back off. It is not a good idea to keep Cleo’s new dollhouse in the living room, God knows we have enough reminders that she is not coming back. It isn’t good for me, it isn’t good for Greg, but good is not the point; good is taken away and all the best intentions amount to nothing.
I cannot stop and think about how I make other people feel, because there is too much feeling in the world. I am afraid of them, with their suffocating blankets of feeling. I only want them to stay away. Greg, I imagine, knows this too, but when the two of us come head to head, it is usually my bully who prevails. So the dollhouse stays up, and tomorrow, I think, I will set up the miniature kitchen.
GREG BOUGHT ME a dollhouse once. I told him long ago how I had wanted a dollhouse as a child but never got one; instead, my father handed me a tub of bulky LEGOs more suitable for a toddler, and left me to build my own box of a house into which my dolls could never fit. We had been married five or six years when I found a receipt from a place called Gardens and Paradise on Greg’s desk for $ 180. He hadn’t brought anything new home, so that night, when we were getting into bed, I asked him about it.
“You snoop!” he accused, smiling. “It was supposed to be a surprise for your birthday,” he sighed.
“Right.”
“No, really.”
“What is it?”
“Can’t you just wait for your birthday?”
“No.”
“Okay, it’s a garden gnome,” he said. And I laughed so hard, but then I saw the crushed expression on his face. I had hurt his feelings.
“Honey, a garden gnome?” I frowned.
“Well, it’s not just your common garden-variety gnome,” he explained. “Its hat is also a birdbath.”
I snorted.
“I thought you would like it,” he said miserably.
“I will,” I lied, and snuggled into his chest. “I’m sure it’s ve
ry nice.”
But the next day, after I swore Betty to secrecy in the print room while she ran off copies of Sunday’s bulletin, I told her her boss had bought me a garden gnome that doubled as a birdbath. “No!” she said. And we laughed till the tears ran.
The big box arrived a week before my birthday and Greg let me open it that afternoon because it was no use waiting. And there it was, a beautiful Victorian dollhouse in the sweetest shade of lavender, complete with a shingle roof and wraparound porch. I immediately burst into tears.
And then he bought us a life-sized dollhouse when he knew Cleo was on the way. Borrowing from his mother and using the proceeds of the sale of a small plot of land in Ohio that his grandfather had left him, Greg exchanged the rent-free parsonage for an indigestible mortgage on the little two-story chalet perched on a hill overlooking Honolulu. It was met with a mountain of disapproval by the church’s finance committee. “Why pay him a housing allowance when the church owns a perfectly good parsonage?” Kelsey Oliver grumbled. A retired financier, Kelsey Oliver was a short, stocky man with glasses that made him look like an owl. He had a slight limp, from an injury during his service in the Korean War, but walked with a briskness that was hard to keep up with. Always arriving late on Sundays, as though the invocation and hymn-singing at the beginning of the service were mere preamble, Kelsey would slip into the second-to-last pew next to his old friend Warren May and talk throughout Greg’s sermon. Then he and Fay, his wife who seldom spoke at all, would leave before communion to take their places in the parking lot, the site of many unofficial meetings to which Greg was never invited.
It was Kelsey and Warren who ran the church, who made the big decisions. It had always been that way. And then Greg had to show up and insist he have a say. He wanted to do things differently. Now, it’s one thing when a minister makes a few changes to the Sunday bulletin—heck, he might even get away with introducing a few new hymns occasionally—but anything that involved spending money was downright meddling as far as they were concerned.
“There are two types of people,” Greg told me after spending the better part of the evening at a finance meeting trying to convince the members that the parsonage, rented out, could fetch a price more than enough to cover his housing allowance. “Those with a mentality of scarcity and those with a mentality of abundance. As Christians, we ought to be operating with the latter.”
“Oh, like the ‘The Lord will provide’ and all that?”
“Hasn’t he?”
“I’m beginning to think the Lord is a miser, Greg,” I told him. “His staff get paid like clerks and treated like errand boys.”
“No, I think you’re confusing the Lord with Kelsey,” he replied.
“Well, who has more clout around here?”
Church members remembered how Kelsey had spared the church from bankruptcy in the seventies, raised the money to repair the sanctuary’s collapsing balcony in the eighties, and led the crusade to build a monstrous new organ in the nineties whose bellows the termites had already made good work of. He had outserved three pastors, two district superintendents, and a couple of bishops, and there wasn’t a doubt in anyone’s mind that he would outserve Greg too.
It seemed to me, then, that the dithering group of old-timers had a collective will mightier than the Lord’s. Greg didn’t find this nearly as troubling as he should have, not until that group turned its squinting attention from bean-counting to Greg’s bullet-point plan for church growth.
It is fair to say it wasn’t entirely Greg’s plan but one that resembled similar plans all over the country that were credited with the transformation of dwindling congregations to multimedia centers attracting the masses. Just before Cleo was born, very much in the mood for new birth, Greg preached a sermon and distributed a one-page document outlining his plan for the church’s revitalization. If some of the church members had been cold and unintentionally unwelcoming before, now, with Kelsey’s vocal opposition to it, determined rigor mortis set in. “We don’t have but a handful of youth in this church anyway,” Kelsey declared, objecting in the all-church meeting to what he called an unnecessary expense of a youth pastor.
“That’s the problem,” Greg retorted, straining at the effort of collegiality.
“Can’t see why you don’t have Deighton do the youth program,” Kelsey barked at the chairman of the staff-parish relations committee.
“It’s Reverend Deighton,” said Gregory, pried away from his usual ledge of self-restraint, crumpling in one hand his one-page plan.
Some said it was tampering with the way things had always been done, but it was that single aggressive gesture that made people swing their heads—and their votes—from Greg to Kelsey Oliver for the last time.
IT MUST BE SATURDAY, because when I get up and pass the bay window I can see Greg in the garden, trimming back the halekonia, careful to leave their red-clawed blossoms. I put the kettle on and walk out the front door, down to the mailbox to get the midweek paper. Just as I head back to the house, I hear Mrs. Chung’s screen door open and her shrill voice call my name: “Mrs. Deighton! Mrs. Deighton!”
The ill feeling stiffens my neck and I know that what is to follow will surely be a complaint.
“What is it this time?” I snap. “The wind chimes, the cat, the bird feeder? Did someone park the wrong way in the parking stall or is our mango tree dropping leaves in your yard again?”
Her rickety-stick frame slows from a trot to a hobble and she holds out a white plastic bag as though it were a white flag. “Please,” she says, “I would like you and the Reverend to have these.” She approaches me cautiously and hands me a bag of oranges. “They’re from our tree.” And before I can thank her, she is headed back to her screen door.
Once inside, I stack the oranges in the fruit bowl with the two overripe bananas and open the card that is taped to the outside of the bag. A short, impersonal note of condolence is typed below the card’s preprinted message. What kind of person types a condolence message? I wonder aloud. The kind of person who accounts for each orange on her tree and shares them with no one. “She’s too stingy to eat them,” I used to tell Greg each time I saw her standing with her notebook making an inventory of the oranges in her tree. Today she has given us eight of her finest.
I am unpacking the dollhouse’s living room set, marveling at the miniature rug and matching pillows, when Greg sits down on the floor.
“I met with the district superintendent yesterday, Abbe,” he says.
“What about?”
“Seems that Kelsey and his recruits don’t think I’m up to par. They have asked that I be transferred to another church.” Funny how rumor travels faster than news. I have been waiting for the official word on the subject for months, ever since Jenny heard from someone that Kelsey was recruiting church members for a coup. Nobody was questioning Greg’s commitment to his calling or had any quarrel with his doctrine; it was that silly plan that was going to sink his ship. They said they were not opposed to change, it was the price tag attached to it.
“When?”
“Apparently they wrote a letter to the bishop before Cleo died, but Alex didn’t have the heart to tell me till now.”
“No, I mean when do they want you to go?” Somewhere a voice is telling me I should be more shocked, to muster, at least, a little outrage.
“First of July,” he says.
“But Greg, that’s a month from now.”
“I know. It’s not going to happen. Alex says the bishop and the cabinet have made all the appointments for the year already, but it will probably mean a mid-appointment move, if they can find us a church.”
“And where might that be?”
“Well, that’s the thing, Abbe. It’s not likely to be in Hawaii.”
I arrange the TV set, the bookshelf, and the floor lamp.
“Maybe they can find us something closer to Rhiaan and Cicely,” he continues. “Maybe it’s not the end of the world.”
“But what about my
work?”
“Are you going back to the magazine? I just assumed you were going to resign.”
“I can’t move, Greg.” And that’s that.
Move. God knows I cannot muster the strength to drive to the grocery store; California is hardly an option. And the house, with its imprint of Cleo all over it. There cannot be a new house. There has to be her room and her closet with her little clothes hanging in it.
“It’s not going to happen for a while . . . Maybe we’ll get lucky; maybe something will open up here. But wherever it is, we are going to get through this together.” The microwave pings. “Now come and eat lunch with me. Oh, where’d the oranges come from?”
“Mrs. Chung’s tree,” I answer.
“You are always on at me for stealing them,” he says.
“She gave them to me.”
“Miracles never cease,” he says, shaking his head.
Yes they do.
EIGHT
I have taken to watching clocks. There’s the digital one on the nightstand of what used to be Greg’s side of the bed, the one whose alarm used to wake him at five-thirty on Sunday mornings—but no more, not since his insomnia dispensed with all that. And not since he stopped sleeping in our bed. Sometimes, when I have spent an afternoon castigating my former self for dressing up a crush in True Love’s clothes, I think it is because of that filigreed locket. Other times, when the jagged edges of self-recrimination cannot be dulled even a little by the yellow pills, I believe Greg’s absence from our bed is because Cleo’s death has decanted the curdled illusion that Greg and I were a couple. When I hear Greg weeping outside my window where he tends the orchids that stubbornly refuse to bloom, I feel sure it is Cleo’s absence that has wedged between us, every bit as palpable as a lover. And while the red digital numbers flip over themselves, I wonder why I did not spend more time thinking about Cleo and less about the jilted leftovers of another woman’s marriage, which is what Sal has now become. Guilt stains my thoughts, like the nicotine-tainted tips of my father’s fingers.