Open House

by Jane Christmas

  Perhaps the reason behind this moody agitation lay in what happened several weeks later.

  One cold January evening just before supper, the phone rang. I answered it. It was my father. In a dead voice he said, “Tell your mother that I am at the subway and I am going to throw myself in front of the next train.”

  I had been given no instructions on how to respond to such a declaration so I called to my mother, “It’s Dad.”

  She seized the phone from me, and I slipped out of sight to give her privacy while I listened around the corner.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she hissed into the phone. “You get on the next train now and get right home. I have had just about enough of your theatrics.” She slammed down the receiver.

  Her callousness alarmed me.

  “Is he going to kill himself? Should we go get him?”

  “Nonsense,” she snapped. “He’ll be home.” Then, as if noticing me for the first time: “Have you done your homework?”

  An hour later my father walked through the door. My mother did not run to him with relief and a kiss, or welcome him home, or say anything to him other than a terse “Your supper’s getting cold.” He sat at the dinner table like a beaten prisoner, eyes too heavy with unspoken grief to lift from his plate. I sat next to him, sensing his anguish and feeling angry that I lacked the words and the deft emotional skills to offer comfort. I had absolutely no language for this. In moulding me into a paragon of Victorian manners—the anachronistic adage “Children should be seen and not heard” was the war cry in our household—my parents had trained me to be dumb and numb: I was as mute as a piece of furniture.

  That evening, as I lay in bed, I could hear my parents’ hushed voices as they argued behind their bedroom door, though I could not make out the content of their conversation. Even the house ghosts seemed to be hovering and listening.

  Two nights later, the morning of my fifteenth birthday, my father threw himself down the stairs. He survived the attempt to end his life. Once again, I did not know how to respond. We never spoke about emotional things in our family; in our home we let the walls absorb the silent pain, and the foundation support and steady us. I never found this approach satisfactory, but it was the way my parents wanted things, and there was no option but to fall in line.

  Was this some sort of mid-life crisis? My parents were by then in their forties, after all. Was it an early warning of the depression that would one day grip me? We comprehend, too late, the shadows that reside in our parents: they die before we can revisit the past with them and allow our bitterness at their perceived failings to be transformed into empathy.

  After my dad’s suicide attempt, my parents went away to Bermuda for a change of scenery. I was sent to live for a few weeks at the home of friends of my parents. They happened to have a handsome son who was a year older than I was, so the arrangement suited me perfectly fine.

  My parents had two weeks in sunny Bermuda, but I had it better: I got two weeks in a home without drama. These particular friends of my parents were academics, and their son was similarly clever. What their home lacked in fascinating decor it more than made up in stimulating conversation. It was a bookish home, calm and convent-like in atmosphere, but at supper, the dinner table became a forum of roving ideas, news of the day, and opinions expressed without censorship. I was asked my thoughts on current events, but being unused to this freedom, I worried that any contribution would be shot down as “nonsense.” Far from it. My hosts were lovely, and they coaxed this restraint out of me, so that I warmed to it, unshyly voicing my views or asking questions of things I did not understand. When my parents returned from Bermuda, tanned and relaxed, I tried to replicate this dynamic discussion at our own dinner table. I cannot say they were thrilled.

  AFTER FOUR YEARS in the Henry Farm house we moved in 1969 to Mason Boulevard, at the edge of what was then known as the Toronto city limits. The house was much smaller than Oriole Lodge, but crucially, it meant that my father’s commute to work would be shorter, and that it would ease his mind. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect. He felt acutely the loss of prestige that came with owning a distinctive home, and felt this new one, though perfectly nice and with a beautiful ravine backyard, was inferior. He grew more tightly wound and looked as if he might spring apart again at any moment.

  He did so on the morning of my sixteenth birthday, once again throwing himself down the stairs. As with his previous attempt, he was unharmed physically, but from the whispered arguments between my parents and calls to a doctor there was no doubt that he was unravelling. I did not know whether I could survive another birthday with a suicidal parent. To this day, long after my parents have died, I continue to approach the morning of my birthdays with immense trepidation.

  My desire for more loving, mentally stable, less house-obsessed parents grew, and as it did, I became despondent. In hindsight it might have been simply a case of being sixteen, but at the time I felt as confined as a prisoner under a life sentence with my mother as warden. Now that I was in my mid-teens, she had embarked on a plan to mould me into a woman with a country-club lifestyle. She wanted an attractive, aspirational, well-dressed, polite young daughter who would date attractive, aspirational, well-dressed, polite young men. After years of telling me how unattractive I was, I do not know how she figured this would succeed.

  One day, I had a big argument with her. It was a school holiday, and I had gone with a friend to see a movie. My mother was incensed that I had not thought of devoting my day off to household chores but had, instead, indulged in selfishness.

  “If you have time to go to a movie, then you have time to do the laundry,” she roared. That night, she flounced out of the house to the movies with my father.

  I was tired of not being able to do the right thing, or at least of living with people who felt I was doing the wrong thing. I believed myself to be a good daughter, who was helpful, dutiful, respectful. I had nothing that could be remotely called a social life, but when I did go out at night, I was always home before curfew. It felt like I was breaking apart: I did not fit in outside the home, and I did not fit in inside it. I longed to run away but had no idea how to make that happen. The only option was to end my life.

  While my parents were at the movies, I raided their medicine cabinet, then sat at the breakfast table and downed the lot—Aspirin and sleeping pills, I imagine, though it never occurred to me to consult the labels on the bottles—until I began gagging. Our dog, a gentle border collie named MacGregor, watched me with big, sad eyes. I was unexpectedly overcome with guilt about leaving our beloved dog behind—though to be fair, he received far more love and attention from my mother.

  I decided at that moment to telephone the hospital and tell them what I had done. Within minutes an ambulance was screaming up our street. “What would the neighbours say,” I imagined my mother’s reaction to be. I was mortified. As soon as I opened the front door, one of the paramedics grabbed me and shoved me into the downstairs loo, where he stuck something down my throat to make me vomit. They were not the least bit sympathetic to my situation.

  “Where are your parents?” one of them yelled.

  At the movies, I said meekly. I told them which cinema.

  They flung me onto a stretcher, strapped me to it, and rolled me into the ambulance. Lights, siren, and we were off. It was terrifying.

  At the hospital, I was put into a cubicle and forced to drink something that induced more vomiting. No one spoke to me or consoled me.

  Not long after, the curtain around the cubicle was flung open. My parents walked in.

  “Have you any idea how embarrassing it was to be paged over the address system in that cinema?” my mother said theatrically. “What must the neighbours be thinking?”

  “The movie was just getting good,” teased my father. “I’ll never find out how it ended.”

  We drove home in silence, and I was sent straight to bed. The incident was never spoken of again. The next day, our family doctor
made a home visit. He checked my pulse and my heartbeat, and prescribed Valium. I sincerely wished he had prescribed it to my parents. My remaining high school years were spent in a quasi-doped state, my teachers wrongly assuming that my sudden lethargy was due either to boredom or to a scandalously wild social life that included illegal drugs. But then, no one asked what was going on at home.

  A YEAR BEFORE I WAS to graduate from high school my mother decided that we were all going to move to the country. “Fresh air! Exercise! A simpler life!” she enthused.

  I could not believe she was deciding to do this at such a critical point in my education, and that she expected me to finish my final year at a completely different school.

  My mother cared not a whit. Life was all about changing and adapting, and she wanted another house to fix up. It would do us all a world of good, she said. To her, houses were the most important thing in life. I can tell you, it did nothing for my confidence to be playing second fiddle to a pile of stone and brick.

  As my mother flounced around, looking at possible homes to buy and strategizing our next move, my brother and I held our breath. This would mean not only a change of schools but a change in the way we were taught. By moving to a rural school in my last year of high school, well, I might as well have thrown my entire education out the window. The school would be no more than a schoolhouse, and I might be one of two, possibly three, other grade thirteens.

  “Fiddle-dee-dee,” said my mother. “Think how unusual you will be! Think of the adventure!”

  She did not seem concerned at all that my father would now be commuting to work much farther than he had ever commuted. A commuter bus and train service had been proposed for the area, she insisted, failing to add that it was at least ten years away from becoming reality.

  None of us had the courage to talk her out of this. Instead, we dealt with it by ignoring her.

  Off she went to find her dream stone farmhouse, and soon enough she found it: an Ontario Gothic wreck set against a ripple of scrubby hills. It was in Campbellville, about forty miles west of Toronto, which in the early 1970s was akin to Deliverance territory. In a move of singular audacity, my mother bought the house without my father’s knowledge. When he found out, he was incandescent; not outwardly so, more in the way many British people are incandescent: with a composed, even cheery exterior while mentally calculating murder. From the set of his jaw and the change of blue in his eyes—from sky blue to the colour of a blade—I knew he had been pushed far enough.

  Before major renovations began in earnest on this new acquisition, my mother threw a large and drunken surprise party at the farmhouse for my father’s fiftieth birthday. Everyone was instructed to wear casual clothes and to bring a garden chair. This was quite a departure for my mother: she never allowed us to wear jeans; hated the thought of anyone dressing down. We actually had to go out and buy jeans for the first time.

  It turned out to be a splendid party, the only time my parents really let their hair down in front of me and allowed me to do the same. Maybe my mom was right: maybe this house would be a good thing for us after all. At the party, one of the gifts my father received—intended as a joke—proved prophetic: a For Sale sign. It was as if he had been handed the greatest power in the universe. He was about to be given the opportunity to exercise it.

  A week after the party, my mother drove out to the farmhouse to meet a builder. While there, she slipped on the icy driveway and broke her leg. She was taken to hospital, where her leg was mended and put in a cast, and then she was decanted to a convalescent home for a couple of months. She was rendered completely immobilized. Seizing his chance and showing rare defiance, my father drove out to the farmhouse with his new For Sale sign and posted it on the fence. It was a speedy sale. My mother was beyond furious.

  It was a win-win for the rest of us: my father did not have to worry about a lengthy commute to work, and my brother and I had a few months of stability without the threat of being moved to another school. By then, I would be out of high school and off to university, with any luck far from Toronto and from my mother’s constant preoccupation with houses, moving, and renovating me.

  When my mother finally did return home and was firmly back on her pins, she redoubled her efforts to find a home in the country. Just before I left for university, she purchased another stone farmhouse, this one outside the town of Milton, a step up from Deliverance territory. We drove out as a family to see it. When we arrived, we stood at the top of the driveway, dumbstruck.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” my mother sighed dreamily.

  We stared ahead at what could only charitably be called a “disaster.” The house was basically a burned-out shell; a dilapidated barn nearby looked as though it would not survive someone exhaling within ten feet of it.

  My brother and I, who were barely on speaking terms with one another at the best of times, looked at each other with an expression that we both read as Okay, this does it. She is definitely crazy.

  Once again, we were conscripted into renovation work, but not for long: My brother, always a wild child, had had enough and took off on a road trip that lasted more than a decade. I left a month later for university.

  By the time I returned home at Christmas the burned-out wreck was unrecognizable. Once again, my mother had sprinkled her interior design fairy dust over another ruin and had transformed it into something stunning. One fire-scarred room was turned into a wood-panelled family room with a huge open fireplace flanked by built-in bookcases. The large country kitchen was bright and welcoming, with modern appliances and conveniences blending in with her beloved pine Canadiana furniture, among them a large harvest table. Every room had been artfully decorated with the antiques my mother had collected since the 1950s. Outside, there was an in-ground pool and a large latticed gazebo. To one side of the property was a pond, stocked with fish and encircled by more than one hundred poplar saplings that my brother and I had been tasked to plant one weekend. On the other side of the property, the old barn had succumbed to fire. My mother had ordered construction of a new, albeit smaller, barn, which was now home to a dozen sheep and two cows that she named Juicy and Delicious.

  I escaped all the house shifting and shaping when I went away to school, but I did not exactly avoid the moves: In the three years I spent at university, I lived in four different off-campus student homes. But then, was that not par for the course for everyone? What I knew for certain was that I was done with old houses, with renovations, with constant moving and upheaval. It was ridiculous and unnecessary; it wreaked havoc and instability. Done with that. I was not going to be the home I was raised in. Once I finished university, I was determined that life on my terms would be settled and stable.

  4

  The Hunt

  The Husband has come around to understanding the need for us to move house, though it has been a tough sell. He is comfortable in Brixham but agrees that the seagulls and the location of our home are drawbacks. For nearly two years, he has been driving back and forth every other weekend to Essex—a six-hour drive each way—to look after his elderly parents, and a move that would shrink that distance is looking pretty enticing.

  Convincing him to move was the relatively easy part; convincing the British house-buying public to buy our home was another story.

  At first, the signs for a quick sale were promising: The town was on the upswing, we were told. The newspapers’ Homes sections reported that floods of people were itching to move to the seaside, and that one of the sought-after destinations was our town! But none of this bore fruit, and in fact maybe none of it was true; perhaps it was all part of the shills and tricks the news media use these days to sell newspapers and aspiration. For nearly a year our home languished on the market.

  One reason was Brexit. The referendum had been held in June 2016, and the shocking result sent the country into a collective paralysis, if not financially, then psychologically. No one knew what to do next or what to expect. There was no plan. Those who put
their trust in the politicians’ bombast and lies, and those who voted to leave purely out of spite, slunk back to their respective corners to see what would shake out.

  The political stasis sent the housing market, especially in the rural areas and particularly in the apparently much-vaunted seaside, into a seizure. For sellers like us it was depressing and nerve-racking. After five months, I could no longer suppress my feelings behind a brave face. When The Husband went out for a run or for a coffee, I would sit at home on the sofa and weep, asking God, asking St. Joseph (patron saint of house hunters), asking anyone, why we had not sold. I felt utterly trapped in this home. It reached the point where I begged The House itself to intervene and be kind to prospective buyers: “Remember, it’s not you—it’s us. You are a beautiful home, but we need something not quite as special as you.”

  And then someone came along, nonplussed by the busy road, the steep steps to the garden, and the seagulls. Someone bought The House. Halle-effing-lujah.

  Still, just because we have sold does not mean we have sold. This is England, after all. When someone offers on your home and you accept their offer, this does not indicate a done deal. It is a complicated, frustrating system. Here is how it works: