You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know

by Heather Sellers

  I wanted to tell Bank Dave that Dave was a good man who’d stood behind a sick and troubled woman and then cared for their children, all on his own. This was why his credit score history wasn’t perfect. He had good reasons.

  I also wanted to call everything off, right then and there. I wanted to stop, and regroup, and think this all through. But paperwork has a momentum of its own, and I signed and signed and opened my folder and signed.

  “Stop,” I said as we left the office. “We can take the stairs.”

  “You okay?” Dave said.

  Was he okay?

  “It’s big,” he said. “It’s just big. And all the old stuff. I’m of course going to be thinking about all that. I’m sorry about all that, Heather. I wish so badly I had more to offer you.”

  “They’re here,” I said. “The stairs.” I worried that when I pressed the door open, alarms would ring throughout the bank, throughout the whole downtown.

  I told myself once we had this house it was going to be easier. We would be together and we would get better at things: money, dinner, trust. But I was anxious, I worried, I consistently felt something bad was going to happen. Soon after we signed the loan application, a woman came to Dave’s house. Dave was at work. The boys were in their bedroom playing Legend of Zelda on the GameCube. I was cooking dinner, which I would likely eat by myself, though I’d set the little round office table for four. My first thought when the doorbell rang was: This is Sarah. When I opened the door, the woman took three steps back. She had a serious briefcase and no coat. She looked alongside the house, like she was expecting someone to be escaping.

  She asked for David. She used his full name. I wondered if I was supposed to know her.

  “Which one?” I said.

  She gave me a look that said, Don’t get smart with me. I told her there were two, a senior and a junior. “I am the wife,” I said. I felt I was incriminating myself.

  She said she was the process server. Again she looked down the driveway. I was trying to remember if I knew what a process server was. What was the process? What was “being served”?

  She let me sign for Dave. The envelope was from a law office. It was, she said, an outstanding balance. It could be for anything, I thought, and I went inside, weirdly calm. I’d been waiting for something bad to happen. Had I been hoping for a reason, any reason, to leave? I knew Dave had spent a few nights in jail. I knew he’d had to be very careful or he’d lose his driver’s license permanently. It was so hard to square these facts about Dave with the kind, gentle man I slept with at night. Why hadn’t he told me about lawyer debt? What was it for? I was terrified to buy a house with this man. I sensed I would be the one paying this lawyer bill. I was disappointed at how ungenerous I felt. I felt I was in over my head. I felt like I didn’t love Dave enough, and that feeling was sickening. I felt like a deserter.

  I set the envelope on the sock pile on his dresser. I turned off the noodles and told the boys they could eat whenever they wanted to, everything was ready. I slipped out and drove home, and then I tossed and turned all night.

  I thought about leaving all the time. But I pressed forward. I asked Dave to drink less. He said he was fine, it was fine, I was worrying way too much. I arranged for the house inspection.

  And at the same time I arranged to meet my old boyfriend, Dick, for lunch. Dick was not a Dave fan. Since meeting Dave, I’d hung an American flag on my porch, taken archery lessons, and discontinued exclusive NPR listening. I had questioned mindless Bush-bashing. I had questioned the two-party system. Dick felt Dave was not the right man for me; he had told me this on more than one occasion. Dick believed I was turning into a conservative. Dick felt Dave had led me to isolate myself from my friends and from my real self. But Dick was also bright and sensible and he knew me and he cared. And I needed somebody to be honest, brutally honest, about my marriage.

  He sailed up to the table at the New Holland Brewery. “Hello, there, Heather, you look beautiful. As always.” He slid into the booth and put his folded hands on the table like we were at a summit.

  Dick was tall, distinguished, white-haired, in a crisp black leather jacket. He believed he looked like Alan Alda, something I was entirely unable to confirm. There were half a dozen men in our town who looked just like him: tall, white-haired, aging well. Dave and I had joked about the ubiquitous Dick look-alikes. I leaned across the table and gave his cheek a brushy kiss. He smelled good, like cigars and office furniture and toothpaste. He was sixty now. He smelled organized, effective.

  After we ordered, I said, “I need to know if I should leave Dave or try harder.”

  “Leave Dave?” he said, aghast.

  I told him about the legal notices, the bankruptcies, the process server. I hadn’t known how much debt there was. What if there was more to come, more of the past yet to be revealed? Everything was going to be in my name.

  Dick rested his hands on mine. He looked at me hard. I braced myself for the big I told you so. “Heather Laurie,” he said. “You have to stay with this.” Dave was a good guy, he said. Sure, his politics were a bit questionable, but he loved me, I obviously loved him, there were the boys, and I had married him. I couldn’t cut and run so soon. I had to stick it out. For better or worse. “You took vows,” he said. He made a wincing face. His hands were still folded on the table, but now his index fingers were pointing at me, like a church steeple.

  When the sandwiches came, we ate. After a bit, Dick said, “Let me ask you something a minute. See Marlene?”

  “What?” I scanned the restaurant, happy for a topic change. I didn’t see anyone I knew. I took his pickle without asking.

  “Marlene,” Dick said. “Marlene is right there, you see her.”

  “No.”

  “Heather.”

  “What?”

  “You are looking right at Marlene Cappatosto. The woman who waved over here a second ago? Why do you pretend you don’t see her? She thinks you hate her. Why do you always snub Marlene? She has mentioned this to me several times. She’ll see you and say hi and you walk past her as though you do not know her at all.”

  I thought of all the articles I had read. How complex recognition was. How was I going to explain it? People would think I was mentally ill. “I haven’t ever seen her and known it was her and not said hello,” I said. “I wouldn’t do that.” I couldn’t imagine how to explain face blindness without sounding like a complete wacko.

  “She’s a nice person,” Dick said.

  I shifted around in the booth. “I have a thing. It’s a thing. I can’t always recognize people.”

  He gave me a strange look. He said, “Oh, you do not.” He frowned in a pursed way. “You knew who I was.” He notched his face, as in Checkmate. “You always think you have something. Remember the Lyme disease? Remember that? Remember when you thought you had Ménière’s? And the whole dengue fever thing?” He laughed.

  I tried to explain. It was true, I had overreacted to mosquito bites and what was probably seasonal allergies. But sometimes I knew people. Sometimes I didn’t. Often, I didn’t know if I knew them or not. It was a real thing. Very rare, from what I had been reading, and most often caused by a stroke in midlife, but I had it. I knew who he was because he came up in clothes I knew to be his, and he sat down at my booth: he acted like someone who knew me. I wasn’t stupid, I figured it out. But not the same way he did. I couldn’t recognize the human face. I often said hello, I told him, to other men in town, thinking they were him. “A lot of men look like you,” I said. “This happens to me all the time.”

  Dick shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’ve never heard of anything like that before. Come on,” he said. He put down fifteen bucks, excused himself, took his coat from the back of his chair, and went and sat with Marlene and the other women.

  I always forgot why Dick and I broke up, and then I always remembered.

  A cop car trolled behind us on our way to the final inspection.

  As always, Dave drove ext
remely slowly. The boys, on their scooters, outpaced us.

  “Your seat belt,” I said to Dave. I was tapping his arm with my fingers, not nicely. I was like a crow. With my feet, I was trying to get the beer bottles under the passenger seat. Dave had been drinking in the car on the way home from work. We’d had our worst fight yet: he was on my car insurance and I wanted him to get his own. I vowed to stay calm, not to bring this up now.

  “I can see the fear in your eyes. You don’t want to live with us.”

  “It’s a cop,” I said. “These bottles are driving me crazy.” When had things gotten this bad? Why was he drinking? And why did I join him late at night, nearly every night?

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “You know it isn’t. How can you drink in the car? You can’t. You can’t do this.” Beer bottles were rolling around loose on the backseat floor. I had pushed them under my seat and they’d come out the other side. “We can’t move in together if you drink like this.” I meant something much wiser. I meant this to come out in a loving We’re a team, I’m in this with you way. The cop turned down a side street, but I did not relax.

  We pulled into the driveway of the perfect gray house. My split-level. The boys circled the car on their scooters. Dave cut the engine. He took my hand. He said he was sorry in a soft voice. In a different voice, he said he didn’t know what the drinking was about. He said, “I have to do something about it. I don’t know what it is. No one in my family has this. No one I even know.”

  I got out of the car and went inside, where the realtor was beaming with his clipboard. “Isn’t this a wonderful time?” he said. “Isn’t this an exciting day?” I sent the boys around back to explore the creek, the tree house, the shed.

  The inspector was upstairs inspecting. Dave had been on the roof and seen something he didn’t like in the chimney; now he was trying to get the working fireplace to light. I leaned over him. I was worried on all sides.

  “I do not get it,” Dave said. “I hate to think the guy is lying, but this thing hasn’t been used in . . . I don’t know how long. I don’t get it. I think it’s broken. This is just not a working fireplace.” Dave’s head was in the fireplace itself and his body was on the hearth. From where I stood, the man had no head. I sat on the hearth and patted his leg. I felt sick.

  “Easily fixed, no doubt,” the realtor said. “We can give the seller a list of everything you need fixed before closing; that’s typical—supertypical.”

  The inspector yelled, “I’ve hit the mother lode! You’re gonna wanna see this!”

  We found the inspector on the pull-down stairs that led up into the attic, his upper half swallowed by that space. We each took a turn peering in. Every cranny of the attic was insulated with spray-injected foam. There was controversy, apparently, whether or not it posed a toxic threat.

  “Whoa,” Dave said. “Excessive.”

  “What do you think about this stuff?” I asked the inspector.

  “They went all out,” he said. “Whoever put it in, they went whole hog with it. That’s for sure.”

  “We have to think. We were not expecting this,” I said. The realtor shook his head.

  “We didn’t say no. We just have to think. I’m not sure. I’m just not sure.”

  Reeling, I retreated downstairs. I discovered that the doors to the garage and the half-bath were split, splintered. I knew this kind of damage, intimately. It was damage done in anger, fury. I called for Dave.

  Keys jangled, and a man burst in.

  “What the fuck are you doing in my house?”

  I shook all over. I leaned against the wall, inching toward the bathroom, where Dave and the inspector now stood. Was I supposed to know this man? Had I seen him before?

  “We’re allowed to be here.” I said this to the floor with great confidence. I looked up, looked him in the eyes. He was like a person on fire. He was thrumming with rage. And then I knew: I could live with Dave and his drinking, I could live without dinners, I could live with a town full of Republicans, I could live with the lunar stuffing between the walls, but I couldn’t live in a house where this man had lived. I said to the man’s shoes, “We will never buy your house!”

  The inspector said, “VanderSluis? We went to high school together? Mike Van Lente. Hey, how’s it going?”

  “You’re inspecting now, I heard that. You got laid off? Why are you in my house? Isn’t the realtor supposed to be here?”

  I slid out of the vestibule and ran up the stairs, through the kitchen, out the front door. I ran to the car and got in fast, like I was being chased. I had recognized that man’s face. He had the look, the male version of my mother’s face. I knew that I could not live in this house where he had lived. Rage felt soaked into the walls. This house would never smile on us; inside of it, we would only be unlucky, uneasy, and unkind.

  The boys found me in the car, hopped in the back. I rubbed my face, refused to cry in front of them. “So, what’s happening?” Jacob said softly, nervously, slowly. I heard his feet clinking the beer bottles on the floor of the backseat.

  “We’re not getting it,” Junior said. He breathed out dramatically. “I knew it.” He slammed his body back onto his own seat. Then he got out and slammed the door so hard it bounced back open. He ran down the street.

  Jacob said to me, after a bit, “Whatever. You know that’s David.” Then he leaned over the seat. He said, “I’m going to go, though, okay, Heather? I need to do some things and stuff. . . .”

  Then he took off down the sidewalk, sliding around on the snow, catching his brother at the corner. I watched them hitting each other, reenacting the drama that had played out in the vestibule, that was playing out between me and their father, under the surface. Through the windshield, the house looked dark, closed and empty, but not the right kind of empty, not the kind I wanted so much to fill.

  The house fell through. The status quo prevailed. Married but not living as married. A family that wasn’t functioning like a family. Fine and not at all fine.

  A giant manila envelope came in the mail. Wisconsin post-mark. No return address. It was a letter from my cousin Patty, Katy’s daughter. Enclosed were photocopies of Katy’s skeleton drawings, and family recipes. I had forgotten I had written Patty back when I first contacted the scientists about schizophrenia and face blindness. She was the only one who had answered.

  Let me answer your questions one at a time. No, no one in the family has mental illness as far as I know. Aunt Florence had a severe paranoid reaction in Europe and had to come right back home, but do not bring this up to anyone—she doesn’t want anyone to know, especially your mother. I was in a mental ward for six months due to a breakdown brought on by exhaustion after I had my two children and working so much. My mother (Katy) died of agoraphobia and emphysema—she couldn’t leave her bedroom the last three years of her life. People always said your mother was peculiar, but there was no mental illness in the family.

  To the contrary, it sounded like every female member of the family suffered some form of mental illness, and childbirth was a specific trigger. The sheaves of drawings were the same kind hidden in my mother’s bedroom closet, the ones she’d forbidden us to look at. There was one of a snake eating a blood-drippy heart, the snake wrapped in other snakes. Dave asked me to put the drawings away. He was worried that spending time with them would upset me. But I liked them. I liked the boldness and weirdness. I liked being in the presence of the strange, dark, unstoppable creative impulse.

  I was in the tub with a glass of wine when the phone rang. I wrapped myself in a towel and answered.

  “Your mother is very hurt, very hurt, Heather, by your saying you do not love her, and you must make amends, you really must. She’s your one and only mother!”

  I didn’t recognize the voice at all. Had I ever heard it before? It was old and forceful, midwestern, Germanic, terrifying. I pretended to know whose it was.

  “Love is a two-way street, and she’s your one and only mother.
My circle is praying for the two of you to heal. It would be wonderful if you and me and your mom could go to church all together when we are up there. I can’t get her to go down here! She thinks she’s sinned too much! Oh, Heather! So much healing. So much—”

  “Who are you?” I said finally. My voice sounded polite and afraid.

  It was Bernie. She was visiting my mother in Orlando, and they were driving up to see me. They would arrive Monday. Hadn’t I gotten the letter?

  They’d gone to kindergarten together, my mother explained when she got on the phone. Bernie, she said, was her best friend. She’d talked about her thousands of times. They were looking forward to Michigan and nice cool weather. Wasn’t she lucky to have such a good friend? My mother’s voice was loud and clear, high and fake, like she was acting in a bad play. Or being held hostage.

  “How do you two know each other again?” I asked.

  “Bernie is my best friend!” she yelled dramatically, and I could tell she had an audience.

  “Have I met her?”

  “You were very little. I think very small.”

  I asked my mom if it was hard to talk right now.

  “You are so perceptive! I’m so proud of my beautiful daughter! I can hardly believe I’ll be seeing you in a couple of days!”

  When I suggested a hotel, my mother said that would be impossible: Bernie was a minister’s wife and could only stay in homes, because that’s what she was used to; plus, she was on a tight budget. But we would pay, I said. No, my mother said. It wasn’t possible. They wouldn’t be any trouble. Her voice was loud and strained, taut with forced cheerfulness.

  When we were little, my mother regularly gave us emergency words, white dog or pineapple. If we were ever in trouble, we were to work them into a conversation with her, staying on the line as long as we could. Our captors would not know, would not suspect, but she would get help. I wanted, now, to ask my mother if she needed rescue, if she wanted to use a code word, if she remembered the secret system.