The opposite of hospital order and clarity and decisiveness is the velvet passivity of sinking into the high-backed seats of a darkening theater, but whose whim was this? Down at the thrilling level where children piece together rumors of what adults find dirty, this movie was a source of joking and awe and backyard reenactment: This bad guy kills women by sneaking in while they’re sleeping and painting them gold all over so their skin can’t breathe. They die? If a person’s skin can’t breathe they die. Wouldn’t it wake you up to be painted? They’re just in real deep sleep. The painting happens fast. They used real gold. This one woman, while they were painting? They forgot to leave her a patch of bare skin to breathe through and she died. In real life, died, and you get to see her. For my aunt and uncle as evangelicals, the corruption that could attend moviegoing wasn’t taken lightly; how did they ever agree to 007? I can’t explain it, unless the movie was meant as compensation for the ordeal of the hospital, which had left the grown-ups in a dangerous state of disillusion with each other. Maybe some unprecedented enchantment was needed, which could embrace them in its scandalous arms—maybe it had to be scandalous or it wouldn’t constitute enough of a break, it wouldn’t do the trick. Neither can the adults’ decision to sit apart from us children be accounted for, unless their apartness seemed the route to undistracted calm and unity. So: to the gilding and velvet and shushing of Southern audience voices, to five cousins in thrall to each other’s nearness, alert to every flicker of an eyelid in a cousin’s profile. The troubling parts are going to go right over their heads, the grown-ups had murmured, a satisfying conclusion all round, for them because it guaranteed them a respite from the strained aura of mutual apology that had overtaken them at the hospital, for us because we fully intended to absorb every bit of sex and violence. In the downfalling twilight I rested my brand-new cast on the armrest and admired its pristine whiteness, the separate aluminum splint that shielded my thumb, the cute paw-like entrapment of my fingertips showing at the cast’s end. Then it was dark. For music there was a moaningly erotic blare of trumpets whose notes were prolonged with a nyaaaah nyaaaaaah obnoxiousness well-known to children. Bond, too, was gloriously obvious: he did whatever he wanted. We understood! How beguiled we were to find ourselves surfing the shock waves of a movie for grown-ups. We grew bolder, also for some reason indifferent to each other, staring without whispering. Deep in the movie, in the silk sheets where Bond had left her the night before, a woman lay on her side, her hair swerving across a pillow, her back to us, what my dad called the cheeks of her ass exposed, just a little string running down between them. Bond came in. Bond sat on the edge of the bed. She was bare bright overpowering gold, the tilt of shoulder declining to the tuck of waist, the hip the high point of a luminous dune tapering to rigid feet. Had she slept through her own death? Or wakened to feel consciousness beat its wings against suffocating skin? How long did it take? What came next? In his white pajamas, his back upright, Bond extended his fingertips to the glazed throat. No thudding, no pulse, only calm metal thingness like a tin can’s, a car fender’s. We sat there hushed and oppressed and sorry. My cousins hadn’t moved a fraction of an inch, but they had gotten farther away. Maybe to my cousins, maybe to something else, I directed an inarticulate wish along the lines of Come back, come back. The wish could do nothing. It was a trammeled, locked-in wish beating against other people’s unknownness. It wasn’t going to work. Aloneness wasn’t going anywhere. While my soul hung waiting for the next part of my life I looked down at my arm, emerging into visibility as the lights came up. Under plaster and gauze was the ghost of the x where I had once bled into somebody and she had bled into me, and it worked, that x, and if it worked once it could work again, or something like it could, the x of one body held to the x of another, and this notion stirred me, though I didn’t know enough about bodies to make the desire any more detailed than that, I didn’t know this was sex. But I knew it was a way out. Find Jenny and ask her if she loves you and when she says yes say good because I do too. And then I did. Love her.
They were reality. Like everybody’s parents, they were the most real thing there was. It was not possible to blame them, it would not have occurred to me at ten. The truth is I was sickened by myself for being a child they wanted not to know about. I repudiated myself because I could find no way to matter, it was my failure and I understood that another, more beautiful child could have had a hold on them. Yet it seemed possible that by force of will I could become this other, more beautiful child. Was it a thing a non-beloved child could figure out—could replicate? How long would it take? This was an emergency. I was wrong, in my wrongness I was alienating them, and either I was doing things wrong, or I was imbued with wrongness, irretrievably wrong, a wrong self, and that could not be changed, and it could not be borne. Therefore it must be the case that I was doing things wrong, and if I was doing things wrong, then it was only a matter of beginning to do things right, and I could do that, I would, I had to, it was life or death to me to be loved by them, so I would do things beautifully, beginning now.
If they have both been lost to me by death, gone for years, that hasn’t changed things: death, it turns out, can’t touch the aura of waiting, the lifelong spell that is the need for them to see.
How much honesty is possible about a child if one is no longer that child? Does having once been her make me an authority? Can I understand her better than I can my cat? How radically would what that child would say about her existence differ from what I have said? As I write this I feel the kind of sadness known as piercing because it feels like admitting uncertainty in regard to her experience is to lose her. In contrast, to claim absolute certainty in regard to the child’s experience feels like having her. (Not being her. Having.) But I know very well that no person whose experience can be narrated with absolute certainty exists, or ever did. The paradox is that to write about her with the utmost honesty I’m capable of feels continually like loss; it’s only the loss of her that convinces me I ever was her.
There’s nothing here is what we think—the three of us who are children. See that, kids? my father says. That’s our address. In front of the bare dirt lot, on the new cement curb, inside a yellow rectangle, are numbers stenciled in black bars and arcs. Down the exposed length of the curb other addresses promise other houses, invisible as our own; except for our station wagon, the street is lonesome as the last black trace of a settlement lost to fire. From this series of bare-dirt lots everything that was once interesting has been scoured away, uprooted or plowed under by the yellow machines parked randomly in the distance. Our mother and father believe they are owners, but to the three of us who are children the development’s grid of blocks and corners and cul-de-sacs and real estate agents’ signs is owned by wind, by prairie dirt erupting over the curb, clogging storm grates, unrolling gritty streamers down virgin asphalt, by a sky whose clarity is streaked across with matching streamers of cloud. My father wants to get across to us the momentousness of seeing this place for the first time: encouragement emanates from the back of his head as plainly as if he were whispering Come on, come on. He’s worried our lack of reaction will bother our mother. If she is dismayed, we can’t tell: the back of her scarf is mysterious. Otherwise there is only the trampled dirt of the lot to puzzle over, and we turn toward that. Look at the bareness they bought for us, these two who can change our lives on a whim, who are only so predictable, whose moods are our weather. We wait in the back seat for some sign of what our lives will be like here. My father says we ought to get out and stretch our legs, breathe some fresh air.
We get out shyly, unequal to owning a piece of in-progress earth.
My dad says Search the whole state, you won’t find a prettier lot.
His voice is reproachful, also adamant, as if we’re about to run off to search the state of Illinois.
The house I grew up in could fit inside the living room your mother has in mind.
Has in mind? I study her with greater than usual focus, as if
the blueprint might appear in the silk of her scarf. Nothing appears: there is only her profile or, more exactly, the wedge of fine jaw seen from below, the outline of earring under rippling silk, the corner of her eye, the rest hidden by sunglasses, so there’s no guessing what she feels. My best chance of finding out lies in staring where she’s staring: from the curb the lot ascends to a rise too mild to qualify, despite the prevailing flatness of the development, as a hill. But there it is, this slight steepness necessitating, in the house to come, the two flights of stairs that will be my obsession. Stairs and all, the house in her head is already, that day, complete.
My dad says No exaggeration: fit inside the living room she’s dreamed up.
On the far side of the rise (and thus unseeable from the curb) the muddy expanse that will be our backyard takes its time descending to a stand of young maples with skittish new leaves, an outpost of the real woods massed farther back, old woods whose owner leaves them alone. Those maples stepping forward at its far end are something my mother will love about the backyard. The three of us have foraged the green world—as much of it as lies within our ken—for what she might find beautiful. Children did that then, scavenged and trespassed with a mother’s delight in mind. No wilting handful of Queen Anne’s lace, no mason jar wheeling with lightning bug gleams has ever charmed her, but she will praise the doings of the maples as if each is an unsure ballet student. They will be our rivals, these ink-stroke maples issuing leaves greener than her eyes: she will love them without trying. No one knows that yet, not us, not the trees.
My mother points out for my little brother a place in midair. Right there is your room.
There’s nothing there. Affronted tone of a misled favorite.
No? You don’t see that window? Your nice big window.
Gonna get his brain overheating, my father says, laying a hand on my little brother’s crew cut.
And the picture window in the living room, see that? And the pair of front doors with brass hardware. That room downstairs, that’s yours, you girls.
There’s nothing there! My little sister’s astonishment is faked, I can tell, but my mother can’t, and smiles, first at my sister, then at the house only she sees. Her rakish discolored eyetooth shows, the one she almost never forgets to hide. The tooth of rare, un-self-surveilling happiness.
Mystified, exasperated, my brother says I saaaaiiiid. There’s nothing there.
To highlight his cuteness my sister says Nothing! and he says grimly Nothing.
My turn. Nothing?
He shouts Nothing!
You kids, my mother says. A rebuke whose usual scornful weariness means we are tormenting her to death turned, now, confident endearment. We want to hear it again. We want more of this voice and of customary rebukes turned inside out. If this place can do that, we will live here instantly. Tomorrow. We will pitch tents and sleep on the ground and excavate the basement with our bare hands. She knots her rippling scarf more tightly at her throat. In the lenses of her sunglasses hang two reflected suns and I want her to hold still, to be this and only this, a woman who can see what we can’t, who has a whole house in her head, her conviction that it will be ideal sufficiently secure that no failure of ours casts the least shadow on her pleasure.
Under the brim of his hat, behind his sunglasses, my young father studies this elation of my mother’s. As far as I know, and I am his obsessed observer and interpreter, he has never minded her involvement in decision-making. The opposite: in the little fables he tells of when they were first married and very poor, her subtlety and canniness repeatedly save them from disaster. Given the times, when men dislike any appearance of relying on their wives’ opinions, this makes him an unusual husband. But few experiences can touch the designing of a house for richness of choosing. I recognize at once that choosing suits her down to the marrow of her bones. That hers is the deep, set-apart absorption of making something.
Making something perfect.
My father was indulgent toward the drab Victorian we lived in while the new house was being built, and touched by his own indulgence. I especially liked to hear him say, about this old house, I’ve got kind of a soft spot for it. Rueful, gratified: I hadn’t known you could be both, or that laying claim to an unjustifiable emotion could be charming. But the dolefulness of the house wearied my mother, whose taste ran to Scandinavian furniture and Russel Wright china, to cleanliness and sparseness, order and ease of upkeep. It got her down, the abiding dusk of the Victorian’s high-ceilinged rooms, the taint of mildew in drawers, the fussy ornateness of chandeliers with multiple flaring arms, trickily turning stairwells meant for servants, knobbed and faceted and spindled woodwork, flocked and floral wallpaper, tattered glamour cheek by jowl, in my dad’s phrase, with recent half-assed renovation by the landlord, shag carpeting throughout the upstairs rooms, fireplaces boarded up against drafts, pea-green paint slapped onto the kitchen cupboards. My mother’s irritation with the house meant I hid my fondness for it. Secret: I loved our block of stately old sycamores shading other foundering Victorians, brick sidewalks, and, in the backyards, cisterns sealed by monumental disks of cement. Secret: I loved that if I drew something—I was going to be a painter—on the wall inside a closet the drawing would never be discovered because there were so many closets none of them got inspected, and anyway it wouldn’t matter because the house would be torn down sooner or later due to being too far gone. Secret: for its hiding places, its museum-smelling attic and the single-bulb cavern of its basement, ominous with echoes, I loved the house. I pitied it for all it had lost and what it was about to lose. It was going to lose us. All the bedrooms were on the second floor, opening off a single long hallway carpeted in crimson shag. Being all on the same floor meant I learned things about our lives. Did my mother and father come up the stairs together, or was there a lag after my mother’s ascent, meaning my father was alone downstairs, and if he was what was he thinking and would I ever find out? Who got up first, my mother or my father, and what mood emanated from the awake person? Across the hall from the doorway of the room I shared with my sister, our little brother narrated the movements of the armies of two-inch-high plastic soldiers arrayed on every inch of surface area in his room. Across floor and bed and desk the armies crept with guile and deliberation; their generals were cautious, and confrontations were kept to a minimum. My brother suffered from nightmares and my sister and I could sometimes hear him. Over Cheerios we would tease You had a bad dream last night and he would shout I did not! because he didn’t like his sisters telling him anything about his life.
Every family has its crucial sentences: things it loves saying about itself. For a long while our sentence was We are building a house. It gave you a sweet feeling to say it. Whoever you said it to was going to get it and that was rarely true of sentences. The endeavor of building a house meant something to both children and adults. Because it was what all married couples wanted then, adults’ response to that sentence was polite awe: Oh, you are! Children, even more than adults, recognize the eros of house building; it’s hard to get through childhood without having devised hundreds of shelters. My mother and father never seemed more in love than when they bent over the architect’s blueprint unrolled on the kitchen table, their exchange low and ardent and important. There was now a third person in their marriage, the architect. The translation of whims into convention was the architect’s role, since the house would belong to a street of virtually identical houses, because that was the point of the development, and the architect was left to mediate between suburban inevitability and my mother’s What ifs, notions proffered in a trance of daring, her pencil tap on the blueprint hesitant and her glance sidelong, as if he might find these modest stabs at originality shocking. What if instead of drapes there are shutters. If the brick of the chimney isn’t all that same red but variegated. Decision by delicately negotiated decision, the difference between our house and the others that were being built narrowed even as she would have told you the opposite was tru
e and the house was becoming more exceptional, more boldly original. Her own father had been a blue-eyed Irish alcoholic who somehow—financial shenanigans were implied—got them evicted from the house they had owned for fifteen years, causing his wife to leave a note under the kitchen-table sugar bowl saying Gone to stay where you will be ashamed to show your face, meaning my great-grandmother’s house two blocks over, and in fact my mother did not see her father again for a year. Part of her was always going to be that girl tugged down the street by her humiliated, vengeful mother. Think how far she’d come from that. This far: a house was being built because she wanted it. And: the way she wanted it. Where her forefinger touched the blueprint a picture window would materialize in the facade. Desire had seldom had a more consequential object. Because it was my mother’s desire, my father adored it and oversaw its limits. What did she have to have, at what points would he veto longing with No, sorry, honey, but we can’t afford that? How many stories, what sort of roof shingles, two fireplaces or one? We are building a house was a sentence whose pleasure never wore out, but which had to be relinquished because, at long last, the house was ready.
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