In the Dream House

Home > Fiction > In the Dream House > Page 6
In the Dream House Page 6

by Carmen Maria Machado


  You email Val, feeling strange. She writes back: “I hope eventually we can be really good friends. I want to be in your lives for a long time.”

  Afterward, you feel happy. Then you feel guilty for feeling happy, then happy again. You’ve won the game. You didn’t know you were playing, but you’ve won the game just the same.

  From now on, it will just be you and the woman in the Dream House.15 Just the two of you, together.16

  15. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type T92.4, Girl mistakenly elopes with the wrong lover.

  16. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type P427.7.2.1.1, Poets and fools closely allied.

  Dream House as High Fantasy

  After that, nothing is the same. At first, it does what it is supposed to do: confirm every single sneaking suspicion you’ve had about your own value for so long. You are lucky to have met her. You are not some weird, desperate mess. You are wanted. Better yet, you are needed. You are a piece of someone’s destiny. You are critical to a larger plan that will span many years, many kingdoms, many volumes.

  Dream House as Entomology

  “I know we were doing the polyamory thing when I was with Val,” she says. “But I don’t want to share you with anyone. I love you so much. Can we agree to be monogamous?” You laugh and nod and kiss her, as if her love for you has sharpened and pinned you to a wall.

  Dream House as Lesbian Pulp Novel

  The cover tells you what you need to know. Depraved inversion. Seduction. Lascivious butches and big-breasted seductresses. Love that dare not speak its name.

  There are censors to get past, so tragedy is a foregone conclusion. It was written into the DNA of the Dream House, maybe even back when it was just a house, maybe even back when it was just Bloomington, Indiana, or just the Northwest Territory, or just the still-uncolonized Miami Nation. Or before humans existed there at all, and it was just raw, anonymous land.

  You wonder if, at any point in history, some creature scuttled over what would, eons later, be the living room, and cocked its head to the side to listen to the faintest of sounds: yelling, weeping. Ghosts of a future that hadn’t happened yet.

  Dream House as Lesson Learned

  You have a redheaded aunt, your mother’s closest sister. As a child you not so secretly referred to her as your “scary aunt” because she was known to fly into unpredictable rages; rages that, more often than not, centered on you.17 You dreaded the annual trips to Wisconsin because you knew it meant close proximity to a woman who clearly really hated you and did comically little to hide it. It was a power struggle, which was weird because you had no power at all. You cannot remember a conversation with her in which you weren’t tense, tiptoeing around unseen land mines.

  Things that you remember sparked her anger: the time you made popcorn with your cousin and sprinkled parmesan cheese on it; the time you and your cousin tried to make watercolors out of flower petals at your grandmother’s house; the time you started to describe the movie Return to Oz to your cousin. (It was too scary, apparently, even though the same cousin had read, and described to you in great, horrifying detail, the entire plot of Needful Things the night before as you clutched your stuffed dog and stared at her in the darkness.) In middle school, when you were always fighting with your mother, your aunt told you over AOL instant messenger that if your parents got divorced it’d be your fault, and she threatened to cut your father’s balls off. (Years later, after your parents’ toxic, miserable marriage came to an end, you traced back to that moment as the first time you felt the tiniest twinge of sympathy for your aunt, who had gone through a divorce of her own and never remarried.)

  Your mother explained away her behavior with any number of facts. Your aunt was a single mom, she said, a nurse who worked very hard to support her kids. She had a disease called endometriosis and was often in pain. (Years later, when the condition bloomed in your own body, you observed that you managed to get through the worst of it without screaming at small children, or anyone for that matter.)

  Your aunt met the woman from the Dream House, once. Your cousin, her daughter, was graduating from college in a nearby midwestern town, and the two of you attended a party thrown in her honor. Your aunt was stiff and polite, your cousin utterly delighted. Later, you felt ugly with regret: Why was the only girlfriend you took to Wisconsin the one who’d reinforce all of your conservative Catholic relatives’ perceptions of queer women?

  After that, when your grandmother passed away, you went for a drive with your scary aunt and your mother. Your scary aunt said, apropos of nothing, “I don’t believe in gay people,” and from the back seat—empowered by adulthood—you said, “Well, we believe in you.” Your mother said nothing at all.18

  17. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type S72, Cruel aunt.

  18. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type S12.2.2, Mother throws children into fire.

  Dream House as World Building

  Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.

  Later, you will you learn that a common feature of domestic abuse is “dislocation.” That is to say, the victim has just moved somewhere new, or she’s somewhere where she doesn’t speak the language, or has been otherwise uprooted from her support network, her friends or family, her ability to communicate. She is made vulnerable by her circumstance, her isolation. Her only ally is her abuser, which is to say she has no ally at all. And so she has to struggle against an unchangeable landscape that has been hammered into existence by nothing less than time itself; a house that is too big to dismantle by hand; a situation too complex and overwhelming to master on her own. The setting does its work.

  This world might as well have been an island, surrounded by impassable waters. On one side, a golf course—owned by the university, as was the house—where drunk undergrads would stagger like zombies, silhouetted on the hill. On another, a stand of trees that suggested a forest, mysterious and laced with wildlife and darkness. Nearby, houses occupied by strangers who either never heard or didn’t want to get involved. Last, a road, but the sort of road that led to another road, a larger one. Unfriendly to pedestrians. Not meant to be traversed, really. Miles from the town’s center.

  The Dream House was never just the Dream House. It was, in turn, a convent of promise (herb garden, wine, writing across the table from each other), a den of debauchery (fucking with the windows open, waking up with mouth on mouth, the low, insistent murmur of fantasy), a haunted house (none of this can really be happening), a prison (need to get out need to get out), and, finally, a dungeon of memory. In dreams it sits behind a green door, for reasons you have never understood. The door was not green.

  Dream House as Set Design

  The scene opens on a nondescript house in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Bloomington, Indiana, a few years after the close of the aughts. It’s a suburb, but one fringed with wildness; animals move over the property as though no one occupies it at all. A front door faces the street, but this door will remain closed. The driveway leisurely loops up the left side of the property like a creek, a mailbox at its mouth. The shingles are off-white; a red chimney is the only hint of character. Behind the house is a large tree with a wooden swing dangling from a low branch. It is opposite the only door the residents will ever enter: a back door that leads into the kitchen.

  The kitchen—like the rest of the house—is filled with a combination of the dense, dark wood furniture you helped her move down the stairs of her last place, and broken, mismatched pieces from the previous owner. A standing lamp with a fraying electrical cord; a small kitchen table; a creaking sofa whose springs are like peas beneath a princess’s mattress. The house is functionally a circle: a kitchen that opens into the living room, which opens into a hallway from which the bedroom and bathroom protrude, which leads into an office, which loops back into the kitchen. In the bedroom: piles of clothing, stacks of books, a bright
purple dildo, a bottle of men’s cologne shaped like a headless torso—Jean Paul Gaultier’s “Le Male”—half-empty. In the kitchen: a bamboo salt cellar for artisanal sea salt, weirdly dull knives.

  Everywhere in the house, there are cardboard boxes. Not new ones, either: they are soft and smell sweet like Pizza Hut boxes damp with grease. (Like Angela Carter’s Beast in “The Tiger’s Bride,” “The palace was dismantled, as if its owner were about to move house or had never properly moved in; The Beast had chosen to live in an uninhabited place.”) It is a bizarre mix of money and trash: like the belongings of a fallen aristocratic family. There is something desperate about the house; like a ghost is trying to make itself known but can’t, and so it just flops facedown into the carpet, wheezing and smelling like mold.

  The curtain rises on two women sitting across from each other: CARMEN, a racially ambiguous fat woman in her midtwenties with terrible posture. She is typing away on her computer. Across from her, THE WOMAN IN THE DREAM HOUSE, white, petite, and boyish, also typing, her jaw set hard. Around them, the house inhales, exhales, inhales again.

  Dream House as Creature Feature

  You go down into the basement exactly one time, and there are spiders down there, dozens of them. You don’t know what kind, but they are big enough that you can see details on their bodies—their faces! Their spidery faces!—even in the dim light. You run back upstairs, laundry basket abandoned, and beg her to do your laundry for you. She does.

  Dream House as American Gothic

  A narrative needs two things to be a gothic romance. The first, “woman plus habitation.” “Horror,” film theorist Mary Ann Doane writes, “which should by rights be external to domesticity, infiltrates the home.” The house is not essential for domestic abuse, but hell, it helps: a private space where private dramas are enacted behind, as the cliché goes, closed doors; but also windows sealed against the sound, drawn curtains, silent phones. A house is never apolitical. It is conceived, constructed, occupied, and policed by people with power, needs, and fears. Windex is political. So is the incense you burn to hide the smell of sex, or a fight.

  The second necessary element: “marrying a stranger.” Strangers, feminist film theorist Diane Waldman points out, because during the 1940s—the heyday of gothic romance films like Rebecca and Dragonwyck and Suspicion—men were returning from war, no longer familiar to the people they’d left behind. “The rash of hasty pre-war marriages (and the subsequent all-time high divorce rate of 1946), the increase in early marriages in the 40s,” Waldman writes, “and the process of wartime separation and reunion [gave the] motif of the Gothics a specific historical resonance.” “The Gothic heroine,” film scholar Tania Modleski says, “tries to convince herself that her suspicions are unfounded, that, since she loves him, he must be trustworthy and that she will have failed as a woman if she does not implicitly believe in him.”

  There is, of course, a major problem with the gothic: it is by nature heteronormative. A notable exception is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, with its powerful queer undertones between the innocent protagonist and the sinister, titular vampire. (“You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish,” Carmilla tells Laura. “How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me, and hating me through death and after.”)

  We were not married; she was not a dark and brooding man. It was hardly a crumbling ancestral manor; just a single-family home, built at the beginning of the Great Depression. No moors, just a golf course. But it was “woman plus habitation,” and she was a stranger. That is probably the truest and most gothic part; not because of war or because we’d only met with chaperones before marriage; rather because I didn’t know her, not really, until I did. She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood—a flood of what I realized I did not know.19 Afterward, I would mourn her as if she’d died, because something had: someone we had created together.

  19. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type T11, Falling in love with person never seen.

  Dream House as Idiom

  I always thought the expression “safe as houses” meant that houses were safe places. It’s a beautiful idea; like running home with a late-summer thunderstorm huffing down your neck. There’s the house, waiting for you; a barrier from nature, from scrutiny, from other people. Standing on the other side of the glass, watching the sky playfully pummel the earth like a sibling.

  But house idioms and their variants, in fact, often signify the opposite of safety and security. If something is a house of cards it is precarious, easily disrupted. If the writing is on the wall we can see the end of something long before it arrives. If we do not throw stones in glass houses, it is because the house is constructed of hypocrisy, readily shattered. All expressions of weakness, of the inevitability of failure.

  “Safe as houses” is something closer to “the house always wins.” Instead of a shared structure providing shelter, it means that the person in charge is secure; everyone else should be afraid.

  Dream House as Warning

  A few months before your girlfriend became the Woman in the Dream House, a young, upper-class, petite, blonde undergrad named Lauren Spierer went missing in Bloomington. The parents of the woman in the Dream House were apoplectic; she was not an undergrad but she was young and upper class and petite and blonde and thus a potential target for whatever monster spirited Lauren off this earth.

  (Years later, you learned that another girl went missing at the same time. Unlike Lauren, she did not come from a wealthy family. Her name was Crystal Grubb. The family struggled to get other people to care; eventually, they found her strangled in a cornfield. It is not an extraordinary thing to claim that some people are more valuable than others to the world.)

  You were both acutely aware of Lauren’s nonpresence in those first few months. Massive signs were hung and erected all over town; in them, her face was tilted, her sunglasses perched in her hair. Every time you went out, you thought about Lauren, last seen with no shoes, walking down the street on that humid June night. Where was she going? What was she walking away from?

  Dream House as Appetite

  You make a mistake early on, though you don’t know it at the time. You admit to her that you are constantly nursing low-grade crushes on many people in your life. Nothing acted on, just that you find many people attractive and do your best to surround yourself with smart, funny minds, and the result is a gooey, lovely space somewhere between philia and eros. You’ve been this way as long as you can remember. You’ve always found this quirk of your personality to be just that, a quirk, and she laughs and says she’s charmed by it.

  Over the course of your relationship, she will accuse you of fucking, or wanting to fuck, or planning to fuck, the following people: your roommate, your roommate’s girlfriend, dozens of your friends, the Clarion class you haven’t even met yet, a dozen of her friends, not a few of her colleagues at Indiana, her ex-girlfriend, her ex-boyfriend, your ex-boyfriends, several of your teachers, the director of your MFA program, several of your students, one of your doctors, and—in perhaps the most demented moment of this exercise—her father. Also, an untold litany of strangers: people on the subway and in coffee shops, waiters at restaurants, store clerks and grocery store cashiers and librarians and ticket takers and janitors and museumgoers and beach sleepers.

  The problem is that denial sounds like confession to her, so the burden of proof is forced upon you. To show that you have not been fucking those people, you become adept at doing searches on your phone, providing evidence that you haven’t been in contact with anyone. You stop talking about a promising student in one of your classes, because she becomes fixated on the idea that you have a crush on a nineteen-year-old who has just learned how to balance exposition and scene.

  One day, as she rubs her fingers over your clit, and you close your eyes in pleasure, she grabs your face and
twists it toward her. She gets so close to you, you can smell something sour on her breath. “Who are you thinking about,” she says. It is phrased like a question but isn’t. Your mouth moves, but nothing comes out, and she squeezes your jaw a little harder. “Look at me when I fuck you,” she says. You pretend to come.

  Dream House as Inner Sanctum

  I often think about how special it is for children to have their own rooms; the necessary sacredness of private space (of the body, of the mind). I am, my friends tell me, a traditional Cancer in this way: I love to nest, to make areas mine.

  I had a room to myself as a kid, but my mother was always quick to point out that it wasn’t my room, it was her room and I was merely permitted to occupy it. Her point, of course, was that my parents had earned everything and I was merely borrowing the space, and while this is technically true I cannot help but marvel at the singular damage of this dark idea: That my existence as a child was a kind of debt and nothing, no matter how small, was mine. That no space was truly private; anything of mine could be forfeited at someone else’s whim.

  Once, wanting space from my parents after a fight, I closed and locked my bedroom door. My mother made my father take the doorknob out. And while I’m sure they remember this horrifying moment very differently, all I remember is the cold sensation in my body as the doorknob—a perfect little machine that did its job with unbiased faithfulness—shifted from its home as the screws fell away. The corona of daylight as the knob listed to one side. How, when it fell, I realized that it was two pieces, such a small thing keeping my bedroom door closed.

 

‹ Prev