A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  I stopped a moment, only a couple of doors down from the house. I turned around, looked up to the second floor of our house, to our apartment, and as I did a light went on, and a hand was inside the curtains. Tom’s hand, pulling down the shade, and suddenly I felt as though I might be a boarder in this house, too, a stranger; Tom up there alone, self-sufficient, not caring what I was doing out here in the cold, not climbing out of the car and walking down the driveway to me to talk things over, to urge me upstairs.

  Slowly I took a few steps backward, suddenly not caring what lay behind me, if anything, on the sidewalk.

  Moving was what counted. I would walk. I would move my legs, have them carry me where I wanted, and I turned, headed off down the street. I would walk for a while, come home later. We could talk then. I would tell him what I thought of Grady, and what I thought of Martin. I would plan with him to go out to Maplewood to try and talk to the grandfather, that man we hadn’t yet met, without going through the lawyer, and for a moment I wondered whether or not this grandfather, this Mr. Clark, even existed, or if he were merely someone’s sad joke, the lawyer’s, perhaps. Or Grady’s.

  I got to the end of the street and passed between two houses, one, on my left, dark and empty, the other dark, too, except for a single light in an upstairs window on the back of the house, and for a moment I felt the adrenalin a burglar might feel, a stranger intruding upon someone else’s home, someone’s familiar objects alien to me: in the moonlight I could see a hibachi atop a picnic table with X-legs in the yard of the dark house, in the other yard a lawn chair and a busted, abandoned washing machine, its door torn off to reveal the large, black hole like an unblinking eye, watching me.

  I shuddered, then moved as quietly as I could to the rear of the yard, afraid I would make a sound, break a twig beneath my feet or suddenly cough, my presence known, and a face would be at that window, I knew, and I would be found out down here.

  I made it to the row of trees at the rear of the yard, behind them the dirt and rock embankment up to the train tracks, and I stopped. I turned, put my hand on the trunk of the tree next to me, a small maple, and looked up through the leaves gently moving with the cold breeze at that lit window, someone inside waiting for me to make a sound, I knew, waiting.

  I had no gloves on, and the trunk of the tree was cold, rough. It felt good. It felt real, and with my eyes on that window, the light—there was no curtain inside the window, only a shade pulled down—I reached up and touched a branch, felt the leaves trace themselves around my hand. I took hold of one of the leaves, gently pulled it, tough and green, a leaf that had made it through spring and summer and now to fall, when soon it would drain itself of its green, leaving only its bones, red and orange and brown.

  I took that leaf, my eye still on the window, and pulled on it, pulled harder than I could have believed I needed, as though there were no strength in my arm, no pull of muscle against muscle, and the branch came toward me, the leaves coming down to hide the window. Then the leaf snapped off, the branch popping up into the tree with the certain strength of life, and I heard the quick, loud whisper of those leaves banging against other leaves as the branch swayed slower and slower until once again it barely moved with the cold breeze.

  I could see the window again, waited, held my breath for a shadow to appear, for the shade to fly up, for someone’s face to find me out.

  And nothing happened. I only stood with the leaf in my hand, its cold green waxy and tough, and for a moment, an instant, something new came into me: I wanted someone there at the window, someone to look out and see that it was me here in his backyard, that it had been me to have pulled that branch, let it pop back up. Me.

  The breeze picked up, shook the highest branches, the sound coming down to me, a sound in the dark so much louder than my small branch jumping back up into place had been. I looked at the window a moment more, knowing then that nothing, nothing would happen, as if I had never been here, and, the dark green and resilient leaf clenched in my left hand, I turned, started up the embankment, my right hand out, touching the ground before me a couple of times to keep my balance.

  Once at the top and on the train tracks, the cold wind moving down from Canada and through me and on south to the rest of the world, twisting the branches of countless trees, the air around me filled with the static hum of leaves against leaves, I held the leaf out to that wind, held it by the stem so that it whipped and whipped, a frantic dance in the air. I wanted to let go of it, to invest in this act some sort of significance, as if the leaf had only existed until this moment for me to come and tear it off its branch, let it fly away. I held it in the wind, held it, my fingers ready to let go, but then I stopped. I brought my hands together, felt the leaf between my palms, a thing so useless now but so real. Gently, slowly, I rolled it up, held the small piece of green with my left hand, and I put it into my coat pocket.

  I started moving.

  I walked from one end of town to the other, from the train tracks, where I’d walked the rail as if it were a balance beam, then down the other side of the embankment behind the Calvin and out onto King, past the shops and boutiques and restaurants on Main Street.

  I walked and walked, sometimes thinking, sometimes not. When I thought, it was about Tom, and it was about different feelings I had for him; at any given moment I was loving him or hating him or not caring one way or the other.

  I finally got to the end of downtown after crossing and recrossing Main, staring in windows at books or jewelry or clothing. Inside a bookstore was a display of children’s books, one book opened to beautiful pictures of unicorns and faeries and trolls, another one a pop-up Goodnight Moon, the white moon through the window, and the old lady whispering “Hush” there in three dimensions.

  I stood looking at the books, and heard from behind me loud laughter, the deep, rolling laughter of a man I imagined was drunk. Then came a woman’s high-pitched laughter, laughter somehow broken, disjointed, as if she thought she shouldn’t have been laughing, but couldn’t help it. The laughter of lost control.

  I turned around. Across the street was Pulaski Park, a small lot where benches had been set up and sidewalks poured and a plaque erected to the Polish hero of the Revolutionary War. Though it was dark I’d expected to see someone, the sound seeming so close, but there was no one. Only the darkness, and the bushes and trees.

  I looked down and turned, headed up Main to State Street and the base of the hill, that beginning into Smith territory, and I thought for a moment of going on up there and looking in dorm windows once again, but decided not to. That part of me was over, I thought. I’d gone to college, gotten a good enough job, and was now about to buy a house, and I’d done all that without this venerable institution. That was what I told myself, though a part of me still wanted up there, and, I knew, always would.

  I paused a moment, and went north on State.

  A few yards down I came to a hobby shop, huge windows across the front of the building, shelves inside the window filled with everything from toy train sets to rows of basketballs and soccer balls and footballs to bicycles hung from the ceiling.

  But on the far-left side of the window were dollhouses, and I crossed the small parking lot and went to them, put my hands up to the glass. Ten or twelve dollhouses were in the window: three Victorians, a saltbox, a Queen Anne with its turrets and gingerbread, a split-level, two log cabins. And there was a Cape, this one a full. Some were painted, others left unfinished, the wood soft and pink. One of the Victorians, too, had been furnished, each room in the house filled with miniatures: in the kitchen sat an iron stove and a rocking chair, on the floor a round braided rug; in the living room was a fireplace with wood in it, an overstuffed chair and divan, even a minuscule newspaper lying flat on a dark-wood end table, its legs carved into claws. Upstairs was a girl’s bedroom, the wallpaper pink with rows of bouquets of roses separated by thick stripes of white from floor to ceiling. There was a white-lace canopy over the bed, and a small, white rocki
ng horse. In the other room, the boy’s, was a bunkbed and football, postage-stamp-sized circus posters on the walls. On one wall hung a dart board with six darts pushed into it.

  I stood there for what seemed an hour, taking it all in, forgetting about moving. I just looked, examining the details, trying to imagine how I would have decorated a girl’s or boy’s room. I tried to imagine this, but nothing came to me, and I wondered whether that was a good sign or bad, whether my inability to imagine what might never be was a sign I had accepted our not having children, or if it meant my imagination had died, if that part of my brain used to muster images of what I wanted had been obliterated somehow. I could see nothing but what lay before me, all miniature, all toy. Not real.

  I took my hands from the glass because the cold had started working on me again. I put my hands in my pockets, felt the leaf in the left side. It was still warm from my having held it all the while I had been walking.

  I saw where my hands had been on the glass, the faint dusting of heat and moisture on the window, my ten fingers and two palms, and I watched as they disappeared, as if I’d never been here, had never gazed in on a dollhouse filled with evidence of imagined life.

  I turned and headed back to the street, continuing on up State. I had to get my feet moving again, but now things were different, and that small fear I’d had before was coming up again, and I became conscious again of putting one step down and then the next, of one breath in and one breath out, of muscles and ligaments and bones all working to move me, and as I passed the State Street Fruit Store with its outside bins empty, waiting for the next day and the fresh fruit and vegetables that would fill them, I thought of Tom, and his face, and the fight.

  His face had been in the dark during the fight, but as I thought of him and his words, his face wasn’t hidden. It was full and lit for me, because I knew that face. I had seen it every day for years, and there was nothing to conjuring it up, even in the dark. It was his face, his, and in the set of the jaw, the straight eyebrows unmoving even in the midst of the fight, his eyes clear and glistening, I saw that I loved him.

  I saw again the one I’d accidentally sat next to at a basketball game when I was only a senior, back before I’d gotten the job in the laboratory. Our knees had touched again and again and again during the first two quarters, but at the half he left with the boy he had come in with, and I was disappointed, hurt in some way, though we hadn’t said a word to each other. Then he reappeared, carrying with him two hot dogs and two Cokes, and sat down. He turned to me and smiled. I could see him from the corner of my eye, looking at me.

  He said, “Would you turn me down if I asked you to dinner?” and held out to me one of the hot dogs and a Coke.

  I turned to him, acted surprised but cool. I looked into his eyes for a moment, and I could not help but smile, say, “Such a sumptuous meal, too,” and we laughed.

  When the game resumed, our knees touched even more, and we filled in the slow places in the game with the obligatory small talk, talk of roommates and classes, futures. He told me he was a year out of college and a stringer for the Hampshire Gazette; within a year he planned to be a full-time reporter. I told him about the possibility of a position as a research assistant in Neuroscience and Behavior.

  The game over—we had thrashed Holy Cross, I remember—we had filed out of the bleachers and into the night air, air at once cutting and welcome after the hot, smelly air of the old gym.

  We stood outside, light from inside the gym falling down on us, and his face was half in light, half in darkness. I hadn’t known his face then, I thought as I kept walking on State, the leaf still tight in my hand, my steps still heavy. I remembered I had been afraid of him that night. Not afraid in the sense I wanted to flee or to hide—not the fear that gnawed at me now, a car passing as I walked, its brights on and blinding me until the driver flicked them off only a few yards before passing me—but fear of departure, of taking off. The fear, expectant fear, welcome fear, of the prospect of love.

  We’d gone from the gym to a loud bar in town, the place packed but all the more joyous to me for that. I wanted to be around people, wanted to hear laughter, wanted to feel my throat and lungs fill with warm air again after the cold walk, the two of us with our hands in our pockets, watching the sidewalk and our steps instead of looking at each other.

  We stood just inside the front door, and Tom, taller than me, surveyed the room. He looked back at me, said something that was lost in the noise of the place, but I nodded, smiled. Then he took my hand, just reached for it and held it, his hand big but tender, and led me through the crowd, past the waitress station and bathrooms to a smaller room in the back where he was able to round up two chairs for us, but no table. We held beers in our laps, and talked.

  I pictured him as he had been that night, his hair longer, parted in the middle and with no gray hairs, no small creases beside his eyes. He was younger, of course, but much younger than I could ever know because I, too, was young, and had thought we were both such adults. Now I knew enough to be confused about that word, still not knowing exactly what the term meant, what being an adult entailed.

  And then I pictured him at different times in our lives, different places, different events: I saw his face our wedding night, a night at an inn in Yarmouth Port, the room filled with dark wood furniture and the sound of wind in trees outside, saw in his face his delight in me when I let the straps of the white chemise I wore slip from my shoulders, let the silk fall about me; I saw his face looking off at a sunset as we sat on the terrace of the Plantation House up in Charlemont, where we were celebrating our second anniversary, saw that he was looking forward to something, his eyes to the west, looking beyond the long, green lawn before us, beyond the stone fence that bordered it, beyond the forest and the Berkshires and the horizon to something else.

  Looking toward children, I knew, because we had started planning then, started scheduling amounts of money we would have to save, promotions and raises we would need to have secured, all for the sake of our children.

  I saw his face on any one of the thousand days we had talked of those kids, saw the shine of dreams in his eyes as he talked of trips to sugarhouses to show our children exactly how maple syrup was made, the roaring fire, the long, shallow pans filled with boiling, steaming sap; talked of picnics to the Quabbin and Mount Tom, and tours of the museums in Boston, and playing catch and making up nonsense words.

  I saw his face the moment we finally decided we would begin to try, saw his face after an evening’s calculations, sheets of yellow legal paper spread out on the kitchen table, pages littered with numbers, account balances, goals, years, our lives mapped out before us: if the baby were born within the next year, we figured, he or she would graduate high school in 2002, college in 2006.

  We looked at each other then, both of us smiling. He reached his hand across the table, and I took it.

  He said, “Now the real work begins,” and I felt as though I were blushing as my eyes fell from his to the tabletop, and I nodded.

  We had stood, still holding hands, and went through the living room, the apartment dark, and through the bathroom into the bedroom, where Tom let go my hand, went to the nightstand and turned on the light.

  I was already at my dresser, pulling open the top drawer. I brought out a small tissue-wrapped bundle, tied off with a white ribbon.

  He’d stood there, his hands on his hips. He tilted his head, and said, “What’s that?”

  I said, “A surprise,” and I turned, went back to the bathroom.

  Inside the tissue paper was a sleeveless white cotton nightgown, the low neck and shoulders done about with lace and pink ribbons. It was something I’d bought a few weeks before at the lingerie shop downtown, when I’d sensed that this night would be coming soon, our savings recently having reached the level we’d decided four years ago would be adequate.

  I put on the cool, white gown, felt it soft against my skin, saw in the mirror the lace and ribbons and the pale sk
in of my shoulders and my chest and neck, and I brushed out my hair, touched up my makeup rather than take it off as I did every other night. I smiled at how I felt: perhaps even more nervous than the first night in Yarmouth Port, though this evening, this making love, would be no more than a symbolic gesture of our beginning; tomorrow would be my first morning off the pill, next week I would get my diaphragm, and we would wait three more months, we had agreed, before I stopped using it, three months to wash from my system all the drug that had for years given me periods like clockwork, the blood coming just after noon of the second day the last pill of the month had been taken. Now would come the waiting for that period, the surprise of it, my periods before the pill never having been regular occurrences, some coming three weeks apart, some five. A constant surprise. But if all went well, I thought as I brushed my hair again, we would see only a couple of more periods, and they would be gone, and I would be pregnant.

  All that waiting would begin the next day, I knew, but there before the mirror, my hand bringing the brush through my hair one last time, I felt in me some quiet adrenalin, the brink of beginning, of bringing into the world what we had waited so very long to bring, and then I placed the brush on the counter, and I turned out the light

  Tom lay in bed on his side, propped up on his elbow, his shirt off, the sheets at his waist. The light was off, too, but he had lit the candle in the small hurricane lamp I kept on the dresser. He still had his glasses on, his face lit with pale orange light, the reflection dancing in his glasses. I stopped at the footboard, put my hands to my sides, and took hold of the gown, brought my arms up so that the gown was out to either side, and I turned in a circle.

  “For you,” I said when I had made it around to face him again.