A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  She said, “Just close the door.”

  I looked for a chair, the light from the hall giving me only a view of half the room, and when I thought I saw the outline of an old straight-back I closed the door behind me, sealed us off. I headed to where I’d seen the chair, a hand low in front of me, the other still holding my lunch bag. My hand wasn’t low enough, though, and my knees hit the chair, sending out into the dark the cold scrape of old wood on linoleum.

  I turned, sat down. I put my lunch on the floor beside me.

  I said, “Talk.” I paused, the silence inside all the more loud for the dark. My eyes were on the thin line of white beneath the door. I said, “I’m sorry that I didn’t listen before. I’m sorry. That’s all I can say. But talk now.”

  “Please,” Sandra said, too loud and too quick. “Please, just shut up. Will you please just shut up?”

  She went quiet. A moment later I heard her take in quick breaths and then breathe out in a silent cry, one long hiss of air.

  We sat for a long time. There was only the dark, and the crack of light on the floor, light that crept only a foot or so out onto the linoleum, no farther. I stared at it, and as I did, the light seemed to make the rest of the room disappear, the blackness around me nothing, just space, the slice of light some strange sun, me hovering just far enough away to keep from being pulled into the center of it, just close enough to keep from hurtling away and into whatever black was behind me.

  “Okay,” Sandra finally said. She hadn’t moved; there was no creak of chair, no sound of material against material as she moved an arm or crossed her legs. Just that single word.

  I said nothing.

  “Then,” she said, and nothing more. I could feel in the air her waiting for me, but still I said nothing. She took in another breath, and said, “So what do you want to know?”

  I said nothing.

  “Claire?” she said. She paused, then said, “Oh, you’re going to play quiet.” She paused. “Fine.”

  I said, “I’m here.” I was quiet a moment, and I said, “The last I heard you were with the PMS study. Is that your problem? You kill your husband because of cramps?”

  At last she laughed, and I could hear in her the pain involved: it was more a cry than anything else, her throat tight, her laughter escaping in quick, desperate bursts. She laughed and laughed, but suddenly stopped.

  “If only,” she started. “If only that were it. Cramps. If it were only that easy.” I heard her weight shift in the chair, the twist and grate of a spring.

  “Ohh,” she breathed. “To laugh. Jesus. What a thing.”

  “Just talk,” I said.

  “PMS,” she said. “PMS. I wish it were that. But to start it. Okay.” She took in one more deep breath, and on the sound of air going in I could hear the faint hiccups from her crying, the little spasms of breathing. “It starts,” she said, “with me being pregnant.”

  “What?” I almost shouted. I sat up in the chair and turned to her voice. I could see nothing, only the luminous purple shadows inside my eyes from staring too long at the light beneath the door. “Sandra,” I said, my eyes trying to locate her, if only some vague outline. “Sandra,” I said again, moving to stand up. I wanted to go to her, to hug her. “That’s fantas—”

  “No it’s not,” she said, her voice loud, cutting me off, and I froze, half-standing, half-sitting. I held that stance for what seemed a full minute, then slowly I sat back down. I was leaning forward now, my elbows on my knees. I made out her silhouette: her head in profile, her legs, it appeared, pulled up in front of her, her feet on the edge of the seat.

  “It’s not fantastic,” she said, her voice now solemn. “It’s not fantastic at all. It’s not anything. And so you see, I hope, why I haven’t said anything to you at all. Because I knew what you would say. I knew how you’d react. Just like this.” She paused. “Like the whole world wants precisely what you want.”

  I looked away from her, looked at the floor. I clasped my hands between my knees.

  “I found out about seven weeks ago. Eight weeks on Tuesday. So that morning, that morning you got bit, I think things were just starting to sink in. It hadn’t really started to hit me until that morning. That was the first morning I threw up.”

  I said, “So throwing up’s going to make you not want to have a baby. Is that it?” and I heard my words in the dark, too harsh, too cutting.

  “Just shut up,” she said. “Just shut up and listen,” and I saw then that the darkness of the computer room could work both ways: it could free us up to wonder at the universe, but it could also force us to see how ugly and small we really were, how little we knew of each other, of ourselves.

  “A diaphragm baby,” she said. “Hah. A diaphragm baby. So much for diaphragms. So much for taking and plugging something up into yourself in the hopes that some little sperm won’t get past a vulcanized rubber wall. So much for that. I didn’t take the pill—I know that’s what you’re thinking right now, thinking, Why didn’t she use the pill? I didn’t take it because I didn’t, don’t like the idea of all that progesterone and estrogen and the warnings and symptoms and everything else you read on those slick little pamphlets they try and give you. All that shit. I didn’t want any of that in my system. I’ll tell you. So this is what I do: I put in the diaphragm, I use the spermicide, and there I was a month ago. And I’d wanted to talk to you.”

  I let the silence after her go for a while, and said, “It wasn’t my fault I got bit. That much should be obvious.” My eyes were still on the floor, and I thought I could see the outlines of each individual square of tile, though I knew, really, I could not.

  “Obviously,” she said. “But you. You’re so filled with yourself, that’s it. You and your hubby looking for your Dream House. And you moping around after that bite, just moping and moping, dragging ass around here. But here’s the sad thing: you’ve been doing that for years, and you don’t even know it. You don’t even know how much you drag ass around here, mourning yourself. And now it’s only gotten worse. You haven’t given me the time of day since that day, and now the only reason you’re over here right now is because I practically had to drag you over here. Had to stand up in that crappy cafeteria and drag you over here.”

  My face and hands and neck had gone hot, and I wondered what color my face was, how hot a red I’d become. Still, I did nothing.

  She said, “And you and Mr. Gadsen. You don’t give a good god-damn for him. That old guy. You won’t even talk to him. You’ve seen his truck here before and sneaked back into Paige and Wendy’s, or back to the locker room. I’ve seen you. I’ve seen that, seen you move somewhere just to stay away from him, just to avoid having him apologize to you.”

  I looked from the floor to the line of light. A shadow passed outside, making the light waver, thin out, return: Will or Paige or Wendy moving down the hall. Or Mr. Gadsen, a ghost moving around in this building.

  “So what?” I said. “What does he have to do with your being pregnant? Is this why you got me in here? Just so you could bitch at me? Just so you could sit there and bitch and moan because you’re pregnant and don’t want to be? Just because you got pregnant and things weren’t quite right enough for you right now? Just—”

  “Just shut up!” She cried, sobbing fully now, echoing in the room so that it sounded as if there were three women in here, crying, crying. “Just shut up,” she said again, this time quieter. “Shut up, because I want it. I want the baby.”

  “Oh God,” I whispered, and I stood, making my way through the dark to her, both hands in front of me. Finally I touched her, gently placing my hands on her to find she was sitting as I’d thought, her hands clasped and holding her legs to her chest, her feet up on the seat. Her head was down, and she was crying into her knees.

  I knelt next to her, gently patted her shoulder.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said. “Just don’t even touch me.”

  “Sorry,” I said, “but I am,” and I kept patting her, kept
touching her. I said, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong with keeping it?”

  She tried to stop crying, going silent for a moment and holding her breath, but then she seemed to burst, and her sobs came out even louder. She took one hand and rubbed her eyes—I could only feel the movement in the dark, the shift of an arm from in front of her legs to her head and back—and she tried to whisper. “Because of Jim. Because he doesn’t want it.” The words came out broken, some whispered, some on the loud voice of her crying.

  Suddenly her head was up, and she leaned it back until it rested against the chair. My hand was on her neck now, but I didn’t move it; instead I gently rubbed the muscles there.

  She sniffed, swallowed. She said, “Because Jim doesn’t want it right now. He thinks we’ve got a lot more to do first He thinks we have to climb the Himalayas first, and then sail the Atlantic, then walk across America.” Her voice had toughened up now, some of the sounds of tears disappearing.

  Though she spoke of her husband often enough—of their bike rides to Boston and to Hartford and, once, all the way to Buffalo, I had met the man only twice. The first time was during the worst snowstorm I could remember. It was only a couple of weeks after Sandra had started, a day when I was training her on staining and mounting. We were in the staining room, both of us leaning over the microtome, the fixed and frozen rabbit brain ready to be sliced into thin sheets and placed on slides, when I heard a sound from behind us. I turned, a slide in my hand, and dropped it, startled at what was there.

  It was a man, no one I recognized. He was short, but I couldn’t tell how he might have been built for all the clothing he wore: he had on a huge, green parka, the hood tied tight around his face. All I could see of him were his sunglasses and nose and mustache, all ringed by the brown fur of the parka hood. He had on thick nylon-shell mittens, blue ski pants and knee-high snowboots. He was dusted with snow.

  Sandra turned only after the slide had hit the ground, and shattered. “Jim,” she said. “What are you doing here?” She came around me and moved toward him.

  “Help,” he said. “I don’t think I can move in all this.” Sandra was at him then, loosening the parka hood. He pulled off a mitten, and Sandra pulled back the hood.

  He had blond hair and a full, red beard that had been hidden inside the parka, and he was smiling. They kissed quickly, and Sandra turned to me.

  “This is my husband, Jim,” she said. With one hand she started brushing snow off his shoulders.

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said, and took off the sunglasses. He had brown eyes, bright, and with that smile he looked like a kid, all set to play in the snow.

  “I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” he said, “but the campus is closing down. That’s why I walked over here, to get Sandra.” He turned to her. “The place is going to shut down, and so I thought we could walk home through this. I thought it would be fun. But we have to go now. It’s going to get too deep to make it through.”

  Once Sandra had gotten her coat and hat and mittens and boots on, they left, and I went to the staining room window to look outside, see just how heavy things were out there.

  Snow was already halfway up the tires of cars in the parking lot, the sidewalks nonexistent, only drifts of snow, and here came Jim and Sandra, Jim ahead of her, running, Sandra behind him, stooped in the snow. She pulled up a handful, made a snowball, and threw it at him. She nailed him square in the back, and I could hear above the bubbling of the radiators their laughter.

  The second time I met him—the only other time—had been in midsummer. Jack had given me a draft of a paper he and Sandra had written for Brain Research, asked me to take it up to Sandra’s apartment in North Village, where she was home sick.

  I walked, the trees bright green and new, the students all gone, the campus like some small city evacuated for whatever reason. It was beautiful, quiet.

  North Village, one of the married-student housing centers for the university, was about a half-mile north of campus, and by the time I got to the place, I had worked up a good sweat, the air heavy with humidity.

  The complex was made up of one-story duplexes. Big Wheels littered the place, in yards, on porches, on the street. Each unit had a small patch of ground before it, mostly bald dirt where kids had played. The duplexes themselves were covered with gray, wooden siding, the trim all gray, the roofs gray and flat. Huge blue dumpsters sat here and there around the complex, some overflowing with trash, others empty.

  I found their apartment halfway back into the complex, in the G section. Their lawn seemed to have a little more grass than most of the others, and I figured it must have been because they had no children.

  I knocked on the door, a cheap, hollow gray door, and heard Jim shout from inside, “It’s not locked.”

  I pushed too hard to get the door open, slamming it into the wall inside. I nearly fell into the room, but then I got my balance. I looked up.

  Jim stood in the front room in red nylon running shorts and black running shoes. He was pulling on a T-shirt, his chest bare and hairless, his stomach flat. The shirt was covering his head, and when he pulled it down, he was looking at me from the corner of his eyes, his head turned a little away. His mouth was shut tight.

  I didn’t recognize him. He was hurrying to dress, I could see, as he straightened out the shirt, knelt to tie first one shoe and then the other. He didn’t have the beard or mustache now, and his hair was short. He was thin, terribly thin, and he was shorter than me, too, something I hadn’t noticed during the winter, and for a moment I thought that I had busted in on something illicit: a stranger hurrying to dress, Sandra somewhere, perhaps dressing in the bedroom, me arriving here unannounced.

  He started in on a couple of stretches, spread his legs and leaned first toward one foot, then the other.

  I said, “I’m Claire Templeton. From the lab? Jack sent me over to give something to Sandra.” I was still leaning against the open door.

  He didn’t look up at me, but merely stopped one stretch and went into another, twisting from side to side, his hands on his hips. “She’s in the bedroom,” he seemed to grunt out. “Says she’s sick.”

  He stopped and, still without looking at me, came toward the door and jogged out. When he got onto the grass he called, “Close the door. Air conditioner’s on.”

  “Claire?” I heard from farther back in the apartment. It was Sandra, her voice faint, weak.

  I closed the door, saw in the wall the hole where the doorknob had hit probably a thousand times before. I went for the doorway at the far end of the room, looking at everything. An old brown couch sat against one wall, the cushions nearly flat and sunken into the frame. Above it hung a poster of El Capitan, thumbtacked into the wall. Beneath the front window, the window that looked out onto the lawn and parking lot, were brick and plywood bookshelves crammed with textbooks and Stephen King novels; atop that sat a small portable television. Various sports equipment had been tossed or stacked around in the room: two sleeping bags, two backpacks, a Coleman stove, a canoe paddle, baseball bats and gloves. For a coffee table they had a telephone wire spool, one of those huge, round wooden things. On it lay issues of Consumer Reports, Mother Earth News, Outside, a dog-eared copy of the Whole Earth Catalog.

  I made it to the doorway, to my right the kitchenette, only a recess far enough into the wall to allow a sink, stove, and small refrigerator, above them miniscule cabinets maybe eight inches deep.

  “Claire?” Sandra called out again, and I went through the doorway.

  The room was nearly dark, the curtains drawn, the shades down. The room, too, was ice-cold, the air conditioner in the window on full blast.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, Sandra lying in the middle, just a sheet over her. More posters hung on the walls; in the dark I thought I could see an Ansel Adams and a Harvey Edwards. Still more sports stuff was in here, against the wall and below the air conditioner their two bicycles, in another corner a soccer ball and some tennis racquets.

 
; “Sandra,” I said, “what’s wrong?”

  “A cold. That’s all,” she whispered, her nose stuffed up, I could hear. “A goddamned cold is all. I thought I could whip it myself, but I couldn’t. Here I am.”

  I said, “What’s with Jim?”

  She let out a deep sigh. “Oh, Jesus. He thinks it’s my fault. He’s up there with Linus Pauling, holding that the cold can be prevented with Vitamin C. So now it’s all my fault.”

  I handed the manuscript to her. “Will’s get-well gift. The Brain Research paper. Final revisions.”

  “What a guy,” she whispered, and reached for the manuscript Our hands touched, and her fingers were hot.

  I stood, leaned over her, and put my wrist on her forehead. She was burning up.

  That was when I took her to the Health Center, where they’d had to put her on antibiotics to get rid of the sinusitis she’d contracted.

  So that now, in the dark of the computer room, these were the images of Jim I had in me: a kid ready to play in the snow, and some bastard who held her personally responsible for getting a cold.

  “So,” she said. “You tell me. You tell me what to do. My husband gets me pregnant. I want it. He doesn’t. So you tell me.”

  My hand was still on her neck. I said, “I know what I would do.” I paused. “But I’m not you.”

  “Easy answer,” she said.

  I waited a moment, and said, “Will he leave you if you have it?”

  “That’s the thing,” she said, and leaned her head forward again, let it rest on her knees. “He’s just pissing around with his course work. He is. He’s not interested in the Ag stuff anymore. He doesn’t study. He’s not attending classes. He’s got his job with the Ag department, handling animals and cleaning sheep shit, and that’s it. Otherwise he’s out playing fast-pitch softball, or over at Boyden playing basketball, or ice-climbing or running cross-country or God knows what else.” She sniffed, then whispered, “Stuff I used to do.” She was quiet. “But he hasn’t said one way or the other. No ultimatum. Not yet.”