Housebreaking

by Dan Pope

  Midmorning, Andrew took his place at the kitchen table with the newspaper. “Are there any eggs?” he said.

  This meant he wanted a cheddar omelet with green peppers (small squares, thinly sliced). Her husband had rules for everything—how to make the bed, how to clean the lettuce, how much sleep he needed—and any slight deviation could unsettle him. For a strong, athletic man, he could be extremely prissy. Years ago she’d found these foibles cute, like his habit of lifting one eyebrow.

  Andrew was a fast talker, a fast thinker, a man who spent half his day barking into the phone. He thrived on argument, on being right; it was what made him good at his job. Law was a profession that rewarded an aggressive temperament, if you didn’t burn out. Most of her friends who’d gone to law school had quit their jobs by now, had moved on to less stressful endeavors. Only the true devotees like Andrew kept at it. He liked the stress.

  When he took the milk out of the refrigerator to add to his coffee, he brought the carton to his nose for a quick sniff, another of his habits. She knew why. She’d seen the old Tudor mansion in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, where he’d grown up. For a lovely woman, Andrew’s mother had been a sloppy homemaker; she’d let food sit in the fridge and cupboards until rotten, until weevils burrowed in the rice and flour and moths flew out of the cupboards. Andrew would tell these tales at dinner parties to great effect, but Audrey knew the squalid kitchen was anything but funny to him—the filthy pantry, the unwashed dishes and soiled pans in the sink. So Andrew had gone the opposite way; he’d become a tidy, well-organized man. It made sense. So many things finally made sense when you visited someone’s childhood home, when you met his parents and saw the rooms where he’d been raised.

  “Will she be joining us?” he asked.

  “I doubt it,” said Audrey. She left the whisked eggs on the counter to settle for a minute and went down the hallway to Emily’s room.

  “Breakfast?” she said, poking her head inside.

  “No, thanks.” Emily was lying in bed with her enormous stuffed white bear. The room had been painted a fresh white, like the rest of the interior, the floors refinished. Her clothes were strewn everywhere. Her daughter didn’t live in a room; she destroyed it; she turned the area into chaos. Hurricane Emily, her brother used to call her.

  “Are you sure?”

  “The smell of burning meat makes me sick.”

  “That’s soy bacon, not meat.”

  “It’s gross.”

  “Come and sit with us at least. You’ve been sleeping all day.”

  “I’m not sleeping.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Thinking.”

  The mattress rested directly on the floor, in the middle of the room. When she was five or six, Emily had pitched headlong out of her four-poster bed during a bad dream, knocking out a tooth, and ever since then she wouldn’t use a bed frame or box spring. The walls were bare; she hadn’t bothered to hang her framed art prints or photographs of her Denton pals.

  “Are you ever going to clean this room?”

  “I like it this way.”

  “I’ll help you. We can do it together.”

  Emily rolled her eyes. “Would you please close the door?”

  After breakfast Andrew got a phone call to play tennis with some new associate from the office. He raced around the house, gathering his gear. “Where’s my racket?” he yelled from the bedroom, then appeared a moment later in the kitchen. “Where’s my—?”

  “What’s the rush? You’re making me nervous.”

  “Just tell me where—”

  “In the garage. In the box marked—”

  “Right. I remember.”

  A minute later he stuck his head in the doorway, manic-eyed, waving his Wilson. “I’ll kick his ass and be back in time for dinner,” he said, by way of good-bye.

  “Go already.”

  After he raced out of the driveway, she destressed by cleaning the kitchen. She didn’t mind the empty motions, the running of the water, the cleaning and scrubbing, the stacking of dishes, the separation of utensils. It wasn’t much different from the mind-numbing process of grading undergraduate papers, once upon a time.

  A leaf blower roared to life next door. This was just the start of the neighborhood racket, a cacophony of barking dogs and squawking crows, lawn mowers and chain saws that seemed to continue all afternoon. Once some irritant stopped, another would begin. Was there any place as noisy as the suburbs? The leaf blower operated at a deliriously high pitch, cutting through the other sounds. When the clamor died down somewhat, Audrey could actually hear a cardinal chirping methodically in the crab apple tree out front. But then another machine started a few streets over—a wood splitter, perhaps—making a crunching sound, like some giant monster chewing up rocks and gobbling them down, the whole earth vibrating under its feet.

  * * *

  SHE WAS from Vestal, a town in western New York that had the distinction of being one of the darkest places in the eastern United States, literally. Only a few other towns in the country, it was said, got less sunlight, and they were nearby—Syracuse, Utica. Her dad drove a truck for the phone company; her mom was a full-time housewife. Mom and Dad, Michael and Audrey. She was the youngest, the wild one, a star soccer player. In ninth grade, she left for Goodwin Academy on a scholarship, the first time she’d ventured away from home. When she was twenty-two, her parents retired to a condominium near Tampa, and her brother fled to the west, settling in San Francisco. After they sold the house in Vestal, Audrey had never had any reason to go back.

  When her parents met Andrew, they called him a catch. “Finally,” her mother said, “you bring home someone respectable. A Yale lawyer. Usually it’s strays and misfits.” In his crewneck sweater and wool pants, with his fine manners and lawyerly speech, he was all the things her mother wanted for her daughter—stature, security, class. Audrey liked him for a simpler reason: He listened to her. Unlike the poets and pseudo­intellectuals she’d dated, Andrew respected her for her mind, and sought her advice about matters of importance to his career. Later, after her parents had succumbed to long illnesses, their beach condo sold, their possessions scattered, Audrey wondered if she herself hadn’t seen Andrew through their eyes too. Had the small-town girl she’d thought she’d left behind appraised him with a banker’s eye, weighing costs and benefits? What else could explain her marrying Andrew, so unlike any other man she’d dated? Yes, they might have been misfits—artists, musicians, academics—but they were interesting misfits. Andrew was consistent, above all else. Consistent, thorough, predictable.

  After she married, her sphere of acquaintances slowly diminished. All of Andrew’s friends were lawyers, whether young and handsome or old and garrulous, and they all uttered variations on the same themes: money, expensive toys, envy, contempt. Andrew’s clients were middle-aged white men, bald and potbellied, the management sector of corporate America. That was his job, protecting the bosses against their sexist and racist practices, shortcutting on taxes, cheating workers out of pay. Most of the time Andrew got them off the hook, at three hundred bucks an hour, the money their family had lived on for the past twenty years.

  She had chosen this life freely, so why did she feel tricked? As an undergraduate at Wesleyan, when she was feeling mischievous or wanted to make her mark, she had a statement she used to write on bathroom walls and sidewalks: To exist is to be spellbound. She couldn’t remember who’d said that, but she had always made an effort to live true to the dictum. During her junior year, she spent Christmas vacation in Middletown. She’d told her parents she had rehearsals for an Ibsen play. She didn’t tell them that she was sleeping with her drama professor, a Harvard PhD who wore his hair in a ponytail halfway down his back. Every New Year’s Eve he hosted a bacchanalia called the cannabis cup, where prizes were awarded to guests who brought the most uncommon contraptions to smoke marijuana—bon
gs and pipes, hookahs and other machines without names. Audrey had been one of the few undergraduates at the party, the recipient of inordinate faculty attention, and it had seemed correct to her then that she held that special honor. These days Audrey often castigated her daughter for her risk taking, yet how much like Emily she had been then, how willing to embrace everything that offered itself for her amusement or pleasure.

  When she married Andrew, she hadn’t intended to give up her career. But teaching composition on a 4/4 schedule for two years at Woodbridge Junior College cured her of any enthusiasm for academia. When Andrew got his job at the firm in Stamford, making three times her salary, he said, “You should quit. Stay home. Have kids.”

  “Why don’t you quit your job?” she shot back, bristling, her feminist streak fully engaged.

  “You come home every night exhausted and irritated,” he responded calmly. “I’m suggesting this for you. For your well-being.”

  She took a few days to think it over. He was right about her mood. She was smarter than anyone in her department, and they’d put her on the parking committee. She’d reached the point of disillusionment. She had intended to wait until she was thirty, but entrenched in Cos Cob, there seemed no reason to delay. Why not try something new, to deflect herself from the sameness of her surroundings? What were the suburbs for, if not raising children? She wasn’t working on her doctorate; she wasn’t doing much of anything but cooking and going to the gym and waiting for Andrew to come home and eat his dinner.

  The children were born almost exactly a year apart. And suddenly the smallness of her life didn’t concern her; she was too busy and too tired to notice. Daniel was a chess champion in the sixth grade, a tennis prodigy at fourteen, a rock climber during the fall season in high school. One afternoon she’d stood at the bottom of a sheer cliff, holding her breath, watching him climb with a sure-footed grace. The same night she and Andrew watched an evening performance of a play Emily had written and directed for her eighth-grade drama class, a comic retelling of the life of Sappho. These two lives she had created: Audrey couldn’t help feeling proud of them, discussing their accomplishments with her husband. She volunteered at the library and women’s shelter, and wrote a weekly column on culture for the local newspaper, but her children were her real work, her foremost achievement. She didn’t like to admit this, but it was the truth, and she qualified it only by reminding herself that there would be time for herself after, when they didn’t need her as desperately, when her motherly debt was mostly paid. It was a sacrifice, sure, but not that dire, as sacrifices go. She loved them helplessly and was happiest having them at the center of her world, but this did not keep her from wondering whose world she was the center of. Not Andrew’s, certainly. He had always been the star of his own movie, and he considered her his supporting actress, at best.

  As kids, Daniel and Emily were inseparable. They shared a bedroom until they were ten and eleven, because they wanted to. She would hear them late into the night, talking, scheming. They would sit side by side on the couch, reading the same Harry Potter book. They’d often seemed inscrutable and wondrous to her: They had the same dark eyes, the same smile. Black Irish, the both of them, Andrew had once said, like your grandmother Edna. Audrey supposed she could see the resemblance in ancient photos, a girl posing in a large wicker chair, peering down through the generations, but Edna didn’t have the same powerful beauty as Audrey’s kids. Sometimes, at a glance, she’d mistake one for the other. Even as they entered high school they stayed as close as always. Coming home after school, the two would gather in the den or up in the attic, where they’d made a sort of parlor in one corner, and discuss their experiences of the day and do their homework together.

  It had all gone along—the days and nights of her children, their triumphs and failures, the relentless wonder of watching them become who they were becoming—until that terrible day in May. The phone call from the Greenwich Police Department. The emergency room. A year and a half had passed, but she’d never really left that emergency room. The scene replayed itself, as vivid as morning: the endless waiting, Daniel’s pallid face, those hectic last moments. This is the knowledge that consumed her: She had waited by his side those two hours, making small talk, laughing, while the whole time, he was bleeding inside his head, his life draining out of him; and she had done nothing. She should have forced them to look at the scans, to stop the blood before it crushed his brain, before he died gasping for breath. She shouldn’t have just sat there, assuming they knew their jobs, assuming they would protect her son.

  But she didn’t know the danger. How could she have? But how could she not have insisted, anyway, that they move more quickly? What could she have done differently? Her mind returned, again and again, to that question. For a year after the accident she’d done nothing but cry. She’d wanted to be strong for Emily, but she was helpless against the grief, an illness without cure, a monster beyond reason, beyond mercy. The grief came in waves, sometimes so strong that she could not breathe, a thousand-pound weight atop her chest.

  Of all days, that day Andrew had turned off his cell phone. She’d called him—his office line, his secretary—ten times at least from the emergency room, leaving messages, telling him what happened, telling him to come quickly. He rarely played golf, he disliked the game, but that day he’d gone off with some clients. Had he answered, it might have gone differently. Andrew was an impatient man. He would not have waited for two hours, chatting with nurses, as she had. He would have complained. Where’s the doctor? Has he read the scan? He would have asked those questions, as he did later, in depositions and interrogatories, the same questions she’d failed to ask. He would have done what she had not: made them do their job and save her son.

  She could never forgive Andrew for that day. For being absent the one time she’d needed him, the one time Daniel had needed him. Afterward he’d busied himself with arrangements for the funeral, the memorial, using a manic energy that bordered on psychotic. Later, with the same zeal, he’d filed a lawsuit, even though she’d argued against it. That was the last thing she’d wanted—to give affidavits and depositions, to corroborate and testify, to be cross-examined. The events of that day were secured in her mind in real time, every moment. But he’d done it anyway. The money would go toward Emily’s college education, he said, and it’ll make the hospitals do better. That’s what lawsuits are for: to make institutions change their practices. This was how her husband functioned, according to his own rules of logic. He’d enjoyed making money on their son’s death, punishing someone. He had no real sense of regret or loss in him. She had grieved, for the most part, alone.

  And the awful thing was, now, being around Emily made it worse. She had his Moorish eyes and thick dark eyebrows. Ever since the accident, Audrey couldn’t bear to look her daughter in the face. It pained her too much. Emily reminded her so strongly of Daniel: his expressions on her face, a ghostly reflection. She knew how much Emily was hurting, to have lost Daniel too, but she couldn’t help it. Sometimes Audrey couldn’t tolerate being in the same room with her, the resemblance was so strong. For months after his death, she would glance up and see him—sitting at the kitchen table, coming down the hallway, or lying on the couch—and then would follow the immediate, crushing rejoinder. The sight of Emily confounded her, tricked her, permitting a harrowingly quick moment of innocence. But: It’s not Daniel. Daniel is dead. She knew he was dead. Of course she knew. That was how every day started, with Daniel being dead. And deep down she felt something dark and disjointed: Maybe she wanted it to be him who had survived; maybe she wanted it to be Daniel now sitting, whole and happy, in front of the TV, not Emily. And this thought, unbidden, made her despise herself.

  She had to dull the pain, somehow. Wine in the afternoon, Valium at night. She couldn’t escape its grasp, but sometimes she could distract the beast, she could make it look away. Now, eighteen months after the accident, that was the best she could do. Ea
rn a small reprieve now and then.

  * * *

  AROUND NOON she heard the whine of the electrician’s drill from the dining room. Then the crack of his hammer. His whistling. And finally, a short while later, the sound of his voice. Was he talking to himself? She peered down the hallway and saw her daughter leaning into the doorway, wearing only a long white T-shirt, barely covering her thighs.

  “Best place I ever been is New Orleans,” the man said. “You’re talking a twenty-four-hour party, every day of the week. You can walk down the street with a bottle of beer in both hands. Perfectly legal.”

  Emily responded in a stagy voice: “Sounds like my kind of place.”

  “You should check it out. But who knows after the hurricane. Might be dangerous for a girl your age. How old are you anyway?”

  “Old enough.”

  “Ha. Good answer.”

  “Emily,” Audrey called, and her daughter pushed herself off the wall and came into the kitchen. “Put some clothes on,” she said in a hushed voice.

  “I am wearing clothes.”

  “Now.”

  Emily went lazily down the hall. After she passed the dining room, the electrician’s head appeared in the hallway, following her movements. Didn’t he know that it was inappropriate to stare at a girl half his age? As angry as she was, though, Audrey knew she couldn’t really blame him, the way Emily had baited him. Old enough. Had she been trying to taunt the electrician or Audrey herself? That insolent slouch of hers. Men had started staring when she was only twelve or thirteen. Audrey knew how well Emily understood her own behavior, the effects it had on those around her. Even as a child, Emily had seemed to sense her reckless allure, the havoc she played with a toss of her hair, the narrowing of her big dark eyes. If someone looked back or said something, she would retreat into the embrace of Daniel, a child again. Without him to fall back on, she didn’t seem to want protection anymore.