Empty Houses
/ Fiction /
“If we lived here, we could play tag whenever we wanted!” Her seven-year-old, his cotton socks skate-slick on the hardwood, rolled around the corner, the furnitureless space still wide and willing to take their bodies. She throbbed, became weather, the pressure of heat and cold coalescing, fog rising, snow falling, whiteness. She stood in the blue nacre of her breast milk and her mother’s before that and her grandmother’s before that, an infinity of water. She wanted to protect this space, her space, and her son's joy. She wanted to have them both, the egg and the nest. She petted his tufted head with her bird-bone hands and caught a smile with her lips, turning herself into a vision for him to hold fast to. She worried that the moments when she felt frightened meant he would too, worried that he never knew when his mother's face would turn into the woods, when he would feel lost and afraid. How do I hold them in my palm and not crush them with the fists of my anger, my helplessness? she wondered.
On the day she became a mother her eldest pressed his head against her and she slowly opened, not pain but rejoicing, widening, falling in love. I would die without you, she thought, but how to live with him, with his wants and needs and tiny machinations that clicked and ground against her own, the clockwork of his hunger. Her body, a woman’s body, a mother’s body, was a place. To have and to hold. Behold, she was caught by the throat, by the skin of her teeth, a snare at her feet, snarling, daring her to step away. You'll catch your death, they said as she walked the wrong way to the campanile on winter nights listening for the tolls, even though what she was looking for was a way to live.
It was her husband's idea, the easing in. The move was hers, something she could barely articulate without crying but felt deep in her body they needed, she needed. They’d run against each other in that too small, too big house they'd become a family in, the five of them, until their edges were gone, until the mechanisms that made them people, a family, were exposed and vulnerable to dust and water and rust. Three stars fused into one destruction: sometimes their fists, the six of them, would pummel her to nothingness. She’d press her hands on their bone crucibles under their hair, soft and hard and something she made but something she had nothing to do with except to die to protect it, or to save herself from it.
They toured the house with the rental agent as the former tenants were still moving out. The light telescoped long wrists towards her face and the mote spangled air landed softly on her hair and skin. Even in the presence of another’s life she could feel something stirring, not a mother creature but a different beast, one who felt soothed and welcome here.
“Let’s not tell them we're moving right away,” her husband insisted with the privilege of owning their too small, too big house, “Let’s show them the house and tell them we can borrow it and play in it whenever we want.”
“Like a treehouse?” their five-year-old asked, his voice a quaver, his body a slender Phoenician “N,” ready to turn and swallow itself.
He was so attached to material objects, that beautiful child of hers who resembled her the most physically, though they all largely looked like their Scandinavian father. When her mother-in-law visited and the three generations stood next to each other she saw the length and breadth of her children stretching away from her in both directions, obscuring her presence until she was more necessary than a footnote and as unnoticed.
Objects and places were not people, she told herself, nor are memories, though if biology was willing we kept those with us wherever we went. And yet her husband had only shared a handful of memories of his own father with her, one of which was salvaging electrical components from junkyards as a child and storing them in a garage, much the way he kept caches of parts, a living memory and a habit of just in case which meant stuff had a central point in their lives and space. The space which equally held his tire collection and her shelves of books and their children's firsts: steps, words, foods. Do walls have memories too, she wondered, or is it only water, except water is in everything, even walls?
You didn't know what you didn't remember until you were reminded. Smells. Tastes. Places. Objects. Keys to the unknown, the unremembered, the forgotten. She had her own objects. Their dining table was her grandmother’s game table, sturdy polished maple but too small for a family of five. The four chairs didn’t fit underneath, the arms were too high, and so the too small table was also too big in their square kitchen.
At night they’d discuss how to allow their son’s sadness and not be run by it, not tell him not to have it. How could they raise soft, strong men, find strength in softness? Her middle child saved dandelion wishes for her, wilted and missing tufts, offered with sincerity and love.
“Keep my wishes safe,” he called over his shoulder, the frost-stiff November dandelion puffs a bouquet garni in her gloved hands, and she was reminded of a poem by Keats, or the song by The Pogues, tread lightly on my dreams…I kept your dreams with mine. He was all potential as he ran towards school, like the spores of the dandelions unclocked in the wind. Her eldest stopped in the middle of soccer practice and yelled across the field because he wanted her to see the rainbow. Her youngest played a game where they said “No, I love you,” to each other until he said, “Okay, we love each other.”
So they held their plans close, an affair. She visited the empty house during the day while the boys were in school, cleaning or writing or just thinking. They could make noise from anything, even her silence, those boys of hers. They accidentally quoted her favorite songs, a kind of incidental knowing, or her songs quoted them, a prescience. Maybe that's part of art and children, to feel known if only for a moment, while also cherishing the secret knowledge that no one could ever really know you. Sometimes simply to exist in the clean bare emptiness, the tastefully painted walls and winged ceilings and windows bright as eyes unblinking against the russet fall leaves with the white built-ins and smooth electric fireplace behind her, felt like a sacred solitude, a gift. She brought a bag of books and assembled them on the bare shelves, decorating an altar. A room, Virgie? What about a house?
The first time she held her sons, each of them slick from her body and entire worlds unto themselves, she knew she was meant to be their mother, just as the first time she finished writing a story in the first grade she knew she was meant to be a writer. Sometimes the multiplicity of herself felt like duplicity, like keeping disparate selves apart, other times she knew she couldn't be, wouldn't be, one without the other.
The air was wrong on these morning walks from old house to the new, a wool sweater in August, out of season, out of time. Except perhaps her body was out of time, perhaps those long, hot November days were the new season, the unseen but still tacitly agreed upon consequences of what had been asked for, what had been taken. She needed both the rain and the sun, her children and the stillness. In that way she was no better than anyone else, in her need. Her husband’s need, or dream, which weren’t the same but often felt as though they were, was for them to share an office, a separate togetherness, and she felt her insides coil, clock hands scrabbling backwards across the black edged face of things, uselessly spinning. The stories she wrote in this space felt spacious and specific, electric, alive.
Sometimes writing felt like having sex, climbing the tips of words like an orgasm. Standing on a threshold while the door swung wider and she tipped until she fell through. After her bursts of brilliance she felt quiet and empty and ordinary, her words and thoughts the same as her neighbors or the barista or the mothers waiting to pick their children up from school–a voice leached of everything but ego. In the empty house, in that sugar light, granular and slow, making time rush like blood, she was like a henwife, the sister of a spaewife and the cousin of a witch, living at the bottom of the garden offering the pretense of eggs. The trauma of others became her drama, a scattering of clothespins to fasten her dirty clothing with.
She remembered the splintered, water-logged wood of the clothespins dropped on the grass, the diapers flapping, her mother’s hand held high and loud. She understood the desperation now, in a way, the bloodied cuticles and rimmed eyes. There was a name for it now, postpartum depression, and sometimes even belief in it, but still so little relief. And her mother would deny it now, calm and cool as a bone, still so afraid of shattering, of the fact that she had, once, and the loneliness nearly killed her. She sometimes wondered if this need of hers was an inheritance, carried by blood, or if it was built into houses where mothers bring their children.
How do the shapes of houses and the shapes of families resemble each other, she wondered. They’d slept in one room, the five of them, the entirety of the children’s lives, their small bodies tumbling across the brown night to land against the bodies of their parents, still asleep. They’d cuddle at midnight, sharing breath the way her body once shared milk, an easy, thoughtless telepathy, and wake up more tightly bound, despite the mistakes and missteps of the day before, the tears and raised voices, the blind and too clear sighted both. Will the sleep restored by having separate rooms mean she won’t make the mistakes in the first place, or will she continue to make them and no longer have a way to repair the cells of their bonds? Will she lose her children more quickly now?
“A seven-year-old cannot sleep in the same bed as his parents,” her husband assured her, and her ambivalence beat at his words with the same hands that would stroke them.
In the afternoons and evenings they took the boys to the empty house where they played cards on the sunlit floor, go-fish and crazy-eights and Uno. They’d grill outside, haloumi and eggplant, sausages and steaks, or bake frozen pizzas and mix premade salads with their dressings inside their paper-thin plastic bags, and eat off paper plates cross-legged in a circle on the floor. Then they’d drive down the street to their too big, too little house, bathe the boys and put them to bed. They gradually shifted their lives from one space to the next: a television, a basket of books, a shelf of toys. A new sofa was delivered, then a dining set they had to assemble.
Their garden prepared itself for winter. The vines turned brown and sagged against their supports, limp and poached, out of season and ready to rest. Inside their too big, too little house the carpet was rimmed in the dirt outlines of missing furniture, the walls pocked where pictures once hung. The air smelled like water caught on reeds, still and murky. This silence was lost, not found.
The day they brought their cat to the new house they knew there was no going back. They could move their things back, yes, but once a place had been abandoned she wondered if it would feel the same. Her heart was the loafed breast of a robin, red and rising in her throat. She thought about her children, her husband, in what was her space, her writing space. That a man and children, with their snares for mouths cocked with the expected, could love it too, so easily, made her doubt her own love, such a large and nurtured thing.
Their middle boy cried. She remembered the feeling after each of her sons were placed in her arms, red and terrestrial, like the sun at dawn at the brim of the world. She longed to give him that peace. The traditions of her childhood, of anyone’s, whether marked by a paucity of or a generosity of kindness, which felt like forever weren’t really traditions at all, because to reach that distinction they needed to reach across generations. They weren't house-bound. Overhead the clouds were tense and open, still and moving. She blinked and they were different, she held herself still and they swirled around her, but while she was living, in this moment with her small, sad child, they were just there, white, immutable. “This may be a new house, but we are home when we are all together,” she said.
When she told her eldest son to go back to bed that night it felt sacrilegious, illicit as a cigarette in the face of science, because she believed in science but not God, though she bought into the sainthood for mothers. The front window of their too little, too big house was once a creche with its view of unvarnished pine highchairs and pillared learning towers, its brightly colored Grimm's blocks and rainbows inviting tiny fingers to unfold and build and open the world. She knew there would be more change, always.
She had always been slender, not in the dogeared-shouldered, paperchained-legged way of so many girls trying to shrink themselves, but with grace. Her areolas, wrinkled as a brain remembering and thinking too much, babies’ mouths and milk and the heat of infection, had to work harder for pleasure now. Her stomach, starched and translucent under her leggings, was pleated and pale as a tennis skirt. Her husband had seen so often the blue veined plate of her eyelid when he longed to see her irises with their unfixable green. She was internal when he longed for her to open. In this house, on this first quiet night with children tucked in their own beds, she could be loud and wide-eyed. The pathology of quiet sex could fall away. He slicked her rosary bead in the sacristy of his lips until water filled them both, holy as the cruciform his tongue made.
“Mamma, when will it be the last number day?” her three-year-old asked in the morning, his spoon a spade in his oatmeal. Boxes were stacked around them, a crooked cardboard castle. Outside the Byzantium clouds split the sky like a fig, a new horizon above the mountains. She could translate for her child. How long would we be here? Where was home?
“Our days are unnumbered.” As she spoke she wondered how many numbered days they had in this house, she had with them, until her nest was empty again, and if, when that last day came, she'd need the emptiness anymore. Would the silence become a hurt? A bell rang in the distance.
“Mamma, I love you. I'll never let you die.” Sounds careened around her, but her mind was smooth as an empty house.
