A Face in Every Window

by Han Nolan

  The house fund was my idea. We had money now. Mam had her job; we had Grandma Mary's insurance money and money from the sale of the house. But with Mam getting to work late half the time, I worried she'd get fired and we'd lose her good income. Mam had set aside the rest of Grandma Mary's insurance for Pap's future, in case anything should happen to her, she said, and the money from the house wouldn't last forever. Besides, I resented Bobbi and Larry's freeloading and taking everything for granted. Larry had even taken to bossing me out of the cabin anytime he found me in there, as if it were his property.

  I held a meeting in the upstairs hall bathroom. It was a narrow room with a bathtub on legs, a large washbasin that took up most of the space, and your basic toilet in the corner. Larry and Bobbi grumbled and shuffled into the room, where Mam had already found her spot on the floor, sitting cross-legged with a slice of zucchini bread on a napkin in her lap. Larry and Bobbi sat down on the edge of the bathtub, stretched their legs out in front of them, and passed a cigarette back and forth.

  I stood leaning against the wall, wedged between the sink and the entrance, and Pap sat on the closed toilet bowl. He thought sitting on the toilet in front of everyone was funny enough to mention every few minutes, and he giggled over it until Mam set her hand on his lap and he stopped.

  "I called you into the bathroom," I said, once we were all settled, "because it's in need of the most work." I pointed at the ceiling.

  "Plaster is falling everywhere, and this floor"—I pushed my weight forward into the floor and the wood gave under me, groaning and threatening to give way completely—"this floor's pretty much rotted out, and the toilet overflows."

  "Like this!" Pap imitated flushing noises and tossed his arms up as if demonstrating an eruption.

  I cleared my throat and continued, speaking over Pap's giggles. "We also have a couple of bedroom ceilings that look as if they're about to come crashing to the floor, a leaky roof around my chimney, some floors that need refinishing, and others, especially the parlor, that need shoring up from the basement before that piano we've got in there falls through. Also, several of the rooms could stand fresh paint. All of this costs money and, folks, the money's getting tight."

  "But not too tight," Mam interjected.

  "True," I said. "And if you're willing to shop at the grocery store instead of the health food store, we could really save a bundle."

  "No way." Mam shook her head and Larry stubbed out his cigarette on the edge of the tub and stood up with his arms crossed in front of him.

  "Well, then," I said, "we all need to pitch in. Get jobs, those of you who don't have one, and put a portion of your earnings into a house fund for repairs and groceries and stuff like that."

  I waited for everyone to groan and grumble. Instead Larry suggested that we do the work ourselves.

  "I know we don't have any experience, but there's this Reader's Digest do-it-yourself manual I saw at the bookstore we could use. I'll pay for the book. I get a discount," Larry said, glaring at me as if to say, I already have a job, you stiff.

  He had gotten a job at Farley's Bookstore in town, but so far the store had profited more than he had, because he came home just about every day with a small stack of books, and always with one for Mam.

  Mam and Bobbi thought Larry's idea was a good one and that maybe we could do half the work ourselves but leave some of the more difficult tasks to a professional.

  "Either way," I said, interrupting their enthusiasm for the do-it-yourself idea, "it's going to cost us, and I think that each of us needs to contribute monthly to the house fund."

  Everyone agreed and Pap said, "You know what this toilet does is just like the creek overflowing. Remember the creek all over our house, and Mrs. Jerico, she got snakes in her house and she rode away on her bike in the water with her cat on her shoulders? Remember funny Mrs. Jerico?"

  Even I had to laugh at that memory, and instead of laughing to ourselves with our heads turned down the way we all usually did, we laughed looking at one another, nodding at the shared memory of the time the creek overflowed and we moved from house to house helping one another salvage furniture and bail out basements, making runs to the McDonald's and eating together at picnic tables set out in the street, then talking late into the night. Then this feeling ran through each of us. I felt it, and I could see it on the others' faces, in a look of recognition: We all came from the same place. It was almost as if another person had entered the room and passed his hand over each of us, baptizing us, five people, one memory, one household, one family.

  Chapter Twelve

  I SAW OUR new family as a ship. At first it had been a sinking ship, with a hole in its side so large that the best thing any of us could do was abandon it and swim to safety. Then as we tried to adjust to one another, it became a ship that needed constant bailing, first from one side, then from the other. It stayed afloat, but only as long as we kept bailing. Then after the meeting in the bathroom, the ship ran aground, and the five of us, stuck on our small island, could put down our bailing buckets and take a long deep breath. We could walk the length of the ship, and the ship, though tilted, wouldn't move. We could step outside the ship, explore the island, and know that when we turned back, there it would still be—until the tide came in, or a wave, or a storm, or some other turbulence came along to dislodge us and send our ship back into the cold dark waters.

  Everyone acted as if running aground was the way it should be, as if this were the most stable condition, but I knew nothing had been fixed. We still had the hole in the side, we'd still have to bail like crazy when the tide came in, and I knew it would. I knew the only really safe place for us to be was anchored back in homeport, no holes and no added weight. I just didn't know how to steer us there, not when everyone was happy where they were and Mam was captain of the ship.

  Larry had discovered that we had run aground in a town filled with artists—actors, potters, painters, musicians, and writers. This discovery changed Larry. He started seeing himself as a poet, and he invited other wannabe poets to the house at night to read and critique one another's work. When Larry read his poems to the group, his voice took on a haunted, moaning tone, and since he loved the English poets, he read with an English accent. After a while he started using the accent in his everyday speech, until, at last, it became his usual way of speaking. He began to use the word bloody a lot. He'd say, "It's bloody hot in here," or "I bloody well have a right to be in here, you swag." He started calling our meals repasts, and flashlights torches, the hood of the van a bonnet, and gas petrol all words he'd picked up from the poetry and the Agatha Christie mystery novels Bobbi had been taking out of the library and Larry had been snitching from her.

  Then I noticed Larry was wearing black turtlenecks all the time. He took out all his earrings except one, grew a goatee, and wore Mam's red plaid scarf around his neck, even indoors. He said the scarf was his signature. Every poet in the group had his or her own signature and own pose. Harold, the angry poet, wore his hair in a tangle of dreads and dressed in colorful African robes that came down to his ankles; Jerusha, a cellist and the most talented of the group, wore ties and men's suit pants; Leon, more interested in Jerusha than in poetry, wore tall L. L. Bean hunting boots with the laces wrapped around the boots like a ballerina's toe shoe; and Melanie, the nature poet, wore thin cashmere sweaters over long and lacy dresses she bought at the vintage clothing store in town.

  The poetry sessions at our house became so successful that Larry and his friends gathered there every night. They'd talk all night long, drinking cheap gallons of wine or sipping herbal teas, and Mam didn't mind a bit. She loved all the comings and goings of Larry's friends. She loved the crowd they made in the kitchen, squeezing in with the rest of us for dinner at a table built for four.

  "Now, isn't this cozy," she'd say, looking around the table at us and reaching out to squeeze someone's hand.

  She loved their poetry. She loved their moody, over-emotional existence, and the group soug
ht her advice on everything from poetry to love, and a lot of that love went on right under our own roof. Larry and his friends passed themselves around, hooking up with one person one week, then moving on to another the next. I never saw the same coupling two weeks in a row, which meant there were a lot of lovers' quarrels and hurt feelings and making up going on all over the house.

  They argued about everything and Mam loved it. "I just love a fun fight," she'd say, after what she thought was an exhilarating argument over the looting of Egyptian pyramids, or euthanasia and living wills. Of course, most of the time they argued over poetry and poets, discussing the false lives and improper desires in'T. S. Eliot's Waste Land for hours on end, the air thick with cigarette smoke.

  Sometimes the discussions lasted so long the group would all stay the night, and I'd come down in the morning and find bodies scattered about the house, asleep in chairs, on the couch, on the floor, anywhere they happened to be when sleep overtook them. Sometimes I'd even find Mam asleep right alongside the others, covered in someone's old ratty coat I'd stand and watch her and wonder who she had become. I didn't know her anymore, and I didn't know the others, either, Larry or Bobbi or even Pap. All of them had become different people from who they were back home.

  Bobbi got a job at the veterinary clinic after school and became a foster parent to the stray cats, dogs, and ferrets she picked up at the SPCA once in a while. She and Pap loved the animals. They'd feed them, cuddle them, talk baby talk to them, and laugh together over the silly things the creatures did. Bobbi and Pap became close through the animals, and it changed both of them. Bobbi stopped yelling at everyone and even left me alone, for the most part. She made friends in school who didn't know about her past reputation, and she sang in the school chorus.

  Pap didn't wander around the house looking for something or someone to entertain him. He didn't wander outside anymore, either. He had Bobbi now, and they did everything together. They would climb through the second-floor hall window out onto the porch roof and sit with the Nativity set. I could see their still, dark forms among all the lit bodies. They sat together, arms around each other, rarely speaking, as if they were waiting for something.

  Mam looked at them through the window one evening and said, nodding to herself, "Bobbi needs Pap. He's a good father to her."

  I didn't say anything, but I looked out at the two of them and wondered. Could Pap ever be a father to someone?

  Every morning, the two of them got up at five-thirty and slipped out to go to six o'clock mass. As far as I could tell, most of their conversations were about Jesus, and sometimes I'd see Bobbi reading to Pap from the Bible the same way Larry would read Tennyson's poetry to Mam, as if they were sharing something deep about themselves.

  Pap still went to the Center every day with Mam, and he loved this. He took a gym class, an art class, a reading class, and then Mam's horticulture class, where he learned how to propagate, grow, and maintain flowers and vegetables and other plants. He worked in the greenhouse with his classmates, and Mam said he was a natural at digging dirt. He loved his new job, as he called it. He'd come home with egg cartons filled with dirt and seeds, and he'd set them near the windows in the kitchen and talk to them. Sometimes he'd take the poor things into the parlor with him and play the piano and sing to them. We were amazed when the seeds started growing and he had to transfer the plants into pots, but no one was more amazed than Pap.

  "I just love to grow seeds, now," he'd say, holding up his pots. "Look what I got, everybody, and we can eat these in our food when they're all grown up."

  Mam gave Pap a patch of lawn to turn into a garden, but since it was autumn, and then winter, all he could do was rake leaves and scoop out the snow so he could talk to the frozen grass, promising it that he and Bobbi would someday turn it into a beautiful wildflower garden.

  This was our new life. Everyone wandered off during the day to school, to jobs, but in the early evenings we'd gather again, five, seven, nine of us (not including Bobbi's critters), and the noise—piano music, readings, arguments, cooking—the chaos would begin.

  I never knew what to expect. I never knew who I'd find in my bathroom when I came home in the afternoon, or who I'd find napping on my bed. I didn't know which of Larry's friends would help him with dinner, creating even more bizarre concoctions than before, or how many there'd be squeezed in at the table. I didn't know what kind of animal would sit on my feet while I ate or escape at night and crush my chest while I slept. If I wanted Mam, I never knew where I'd find her—listening to poetry, working out in the yard at midnight, on a date with Dr. Mike, asleep in a bathroom or on the living room floor or, sometimes, in her own bed with Pap.

  While everyone around me seemed to have found themselves, I grew more and more lost. While everyone else could hear their own voice in the midst of the cacophony, I grew more and more silent. I spent my evenings up in my room, eating and studying with the radio on so I wouldn't hear the others below and have to think about how I didn't, couldn't, fit in. I wanted to tell Mam. I wanted her to know how I felt about our new life, and I wanted her to care. I wanted to say to her, "Okay, Mam, either I go or they do, you choose," but I was afraid she wouldn't choose me, and I had nowhere else to go.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ONE SATURDAY MORNING after the first snowfall of the year, I found Mam outside sweeping snow off the porch, and I asked her if she would go for a walk with me in the woods. We had lived in the house three months and yet we had never taken the time to explore the land beyond our front door. At our old house, when Grandma Mary was alive, we lived outdoors; we explored the creek and its wildlife on a daily basis, and I realized, looking back on those days, that there was a certain sanity in our lives there. Paying attention to the minute details of the life at the creek, the changing seasons, kept us sane, focused, centered even. Now we were all crazy, wild, out of control. We had no Grandma Mary, no creek, to keep us grounded. That was what I wanted to discuss with Mam.

  Mam loaded up a pack with binoculars, camera, pita sandwiches, herb tea in a Thermos, cups, and a notebook for drawing. I carried it on my back, pleased to think that we'd be gone a long time. I needed that time to figure out how I would say what I wanted to say.

  We found a path in the woods marked with deer prints in the snow. We followed them beneath a steeple of trees that Mrs. Levi had claimed were planted back in the days of William Penn. Most were tall, slender trees that bent easily with the wind, and the few birds left to sing in them sounded so far away in those high, high branches that only their echoes reached us.

  Mam stopped and closed her eyes to listen to a cardinal. She had her hands stuffed in the pockets of a coat I'd never seen before. She held her face up to the sky, her back slightly arched, her eyes closed.

  "Listen," she said, smiling to herself.

  I didn't listen. I watched her instead. I wondered if by staring at her long enough I could figure her out, because I had a feeling words wouldn't work. She had on jeans and Larry's boots, which were at least three sizes too big for her. She wore her hair knotted up in some kind of mess held together with a plastic grabby thing that looked like a butterfly. I had seen the same hair holder in Melanie's hair the night before. She had on Bobbi's long Egyptian-style earrings, which were too large for her narrow face and looked out of place dangling next to all her freckles. They were meant for Bobbi, not her. I looked at Mam and thought that she had become, like the clothes she wore, a hodgepodge of different people. I missed the old Mam, the Mam who wore her own jeans and plaid shirts and her own boots and who spent hours exploring the creek with me. I missed being with her alone. I missed talking to her about nothing. We used to have so much time to talk that it never mattered that it was about nothing, because that nothing was everything. Now I had to think about what to say, plan it, make every word count, because I didn't know when I'd get another chance.

  I tried to ease into the conversation by just getting her to talk.

  "I'm glad you like living
here, Mam," I said, looking up at the treetops so far away.

  Mam opened her eyes and smiled at me. "I do," she said. "I love it. And I love the house and everyone in it." Mam ran her hand down the trunk of a tree and leaned forward to smell it "Mmm, you can smell the sap already. Come on, smell."

  I leaned forward. I couldn't smell anything.

  "You know, I'm really good with people," Mam said, starting to walk again, leading me along the deer path. "I never knew that about myself, how good I am with people—outside my teaching, I mean—how much I love it." She turned back and grabbed my hand and pulled me forward.

  "This trail's kind of narrow," I said, hanging back, not wanting to talk face-to-face or even side by side.

  Mam pulled me along, talking all the while. "I thought I was an introvert," she said. "Imagine going all your life thinking of yourself as a loner, an introvert, telling yourself you don't need people and then discovering—well, life! I think I've been dead all these years. I've been hiding out in the woods, in the creek, in Grandma Mary's house. It never occurred to me to go out and get my own life. What a scary thought. That's what I used to think. I was so afraid of people."

  "Some people, though, are natural introverts," I said, pulling my hand from her grasp. "Some people don't like crowds and groups all the time. Some people like it quiet, less chaotic."

  Mam stopped walking and turned around. She blinked at me, her eyes a deep dark blue in the filtered light of the woods. "Might you be talking about yourself, JP?"

  I leaned against a pine tree and kicked my heel into the snow. "I hate chaos," I said.