All the Houses (14 page)

I got off the bed, shoved open the window, and climbed out onto the section of roof that I could access from there, a shingled slope above the family room. In ninth grade, I used to sit and try to communicate telepathically with my future boyfriend. Later I would sneak cigarettes, less from actually wanting to smoke them than on principle. In the driveway, my father and my sister were out changing the tire again, and I thought about calling to them but didn't. I was freezing. A blurry crescent moon hung above the hulking forms of houses, above the streets I'd known as a girl, the brick sidewalks and holly bushes, and though I'd come back to the city it was as if I'd left this domain of well-off families and would not be allowed to reenter. People like my older sister were buying the kind of house our parents had bought, while I'd gone off track. And this teenage girl I'd been, the things she told herself, and the story I continued to tell myself about her—as I sat there in her spot on the roof it all started to seem too pat, the tale of the gawky, second-rate girl I was. I'd made up that story in high school, just as I'd invented the story of her better double, and told it to myself ever since. I sank my head back, stretched my chin toward the sky, and stared at a star that turned out to be a satellite. And I thought of all the nights I'd sat out here, resolving to eat nothing but apples, or nothing at all, to become weightless, to replace myself with a perfect, gossamer copy.

 

 

“You should come up to New York with me,” Maggie offered, at breakfast. Both of us felt more hungover on Friday morning than we'd felt drunk the night before. Dad had made us eggs and bacon, then left to run errands. Especially when we came to visit, he was a compulsive provisioner, always going out to buy lightbulbs or Dijon mustard, his random needs usually met by an eclectic grocery on Wisconsin Avenue that might as well have been built just to cater to him, with two floors of anything and everything. Maggie and I picked at our eggs, preferring the stale almond cookies I'd pulled from a cabinet. It was overcast outside, a blunted light entering the room by way of the window over the sink, but then a thin shaft of sun broke through and hit my sister's cheek, as though she'd been selected for some special assignment.

She was taking a midday train. There was a dinner party she'd been invited to, that was her excuse for leaving early. And papers to grade.

“I've got to get out of here,” I said, knowing I wouldn't go to New York.

“Did you ever hear back from that guy?” she asked.

I'd been proud of myself for not bringing him up, and so no doubt sounded oddly proud when I told her that I had not. “Possibly he's just been busy, but…”

“These busy men.”

“Yeah.”

“We just need to move someplace where there are more men than women, and people are not that busy. I'm wondering about the Dakotas.”

“You'll never move to the Dakotas. To either Dakota.”

She tried to break a cookie in half, and it fell apart, into crumbs.

“I didn't tell you, though, who he actually was,” I said.

“The guy? Some D.C. d-bag, it sounded like.”

“He's not so bad.”

“Not a douchebag.”

“Maybe a little bit of one. A douchebaguette?”

Maggie waited, and I told her who it was.

“Courtney's Rob? Her ex?”

“They didn't go out for very long,” I said. “I doubt she'd even call him an ex.”

“Wasn't he like a drug dealer?”

“I wouldn't say that. He was not a full-on drug dealer.”

“I know I was only in junior high at the time, but my understanding was that he gave people drugs and they gave him money.”

“It was just among friends, though. He was not a real dealer.”

The sunlight had left her face, and I could see that she wasn't going to accept my distinction between offhand drug sales and genuine dealing, but she wasn't going to pursue it either. In that way she was more sensible than Courtney and me, who would've spent another five minutes debating the point.

“Did you tell Courtney?” she asked.

“No. I shouldn't, right?”

“I wouldn't. She's been so prickly lately. I know she's still upset about losing the pregnancy—”

“Wait—”

“Oh.”

“What?”

“You didn't know.”

“No.”

“I assumed you did, but then last night, when you said she should have a kid, I wasn't sure…”

“Fuck.”

“Maybe I shouldn't—well, whatever, I already said it. She had a miscarriage. It was pretty early, but still.”

“She told you about it?”

“It's probably just that I happened to call that day?” Maggie said. “I guess they'd been trying for a while.”

“I thought she didn't even want kids.”

“She was on the fence at first, but Hugo wanted to, and she came around.”

I was having all the wrong feelings. I felt bad for Courtney, but a miscarriage was something I had no experience of and could barely fathom, and I was nearly as envious as I was sorry, mainly of my sisters' intimacies with each other, but also of the whole idea that marriage, even to an oddball like Hugo, could nudge a person past her ambivalences and propel life forward. Courtney in her lifetime had attracted more—I don't want to call it tragedy—let's say adversity, more than her share and certainly more than I'd had to deal with, and in my worst moments I envied that too. More adversity was still more life. More adversity made more life happen. For my part, I'd always thought that in some nebulous future I would have kids, picturing two boys, but now that I found myself in my thirties and single, I could sense, not a ticking clock, but those boys themselves fading away.

Something had curdled, and we fell quiet. Dad came home with his haul (batteries, a case of seltzer, razor blades, printer paper, and two chocolate bars) and then took Maggie to the train station.

“See you at Christmas,” I said to her before she left, and she told me again to come up and visit her. “I will, I will”—I said that and meant it.

There were dishes from the night before in the sink, along with the pans that Dad had used to make breakfast. I left them for the time being, put a spare key in my pocket, and stepped out for air, still woozy as I rambled around, and pissed off and sad in the same muzzled way I always felt pissed off and sad after family occasions, holidays especially—and add fifty points for a hangover. It's not right! It's not fair! Those childish complaints rang in my head without referring to anything, the “it” was life as a whole, and so I was walking around and waiting for those emotions to clear, what else could I do?

I could run, I thought. Running was much better for metabolizing all that crud, and so even though I was wearing jeans and boots, I started to run down the street, my boot heels clopping against the sidewalk, my jacket drawstrings bouncing up and down, my hair flying everywhere, dogs barking as I loped by. I ran after those imaginary little boys, who were so much faster than me, around the block and down Reno Road and past my old elementary school.

Coming back to Washington had not quite had the effect I'd hoped it would have—I'd hoped it would help me clear more space in my head. Now, though, I just felt like a woman who'd come to the end of the line. I had ridden back home disguised as myself and could ride no farther, having arrived at the shore to find the horizon flat and empty, not a ship in sight. They'd all sailed. It was too late for me, I couldn't stop thinking that. What else was there for me to do in the meantime but keep busy? I'd gone on temping, I'd read about Iran-Contra, and I'd tried not to ruminate too much on what my long-term plan might be—which is to say I didn't think about it at all, because I didn't want to go back to California, back to what I'd been doing, but when I imagined changing my life what I thought to change was the past.

But, I told myself, life is no stationary bicycle. Rest assured, change is the only constant.

But: I was not resting, I was not assured.

But! Only later do the toings and froings add up to a direction. You change and you don't notice, other people see it first, and you're someone you never expected to be, and at the same time you're the person you always were. I told myself this, believed it too. More or less. Even so I was terrified.

I didn't think of myself as missing L.A. I did miss the Honda that I'd left with a friend. I missed my old duplex apartment. I missed my L.A. friends, I missed Griffith Park and taco trucks, I missed my fruit guy, and I missed that balmy weather that sometimes felt like a benediction and at other times felt unnatural and menacing.

And now, because I'd grown up in D.C. and then left, it was both the place I belonged and a place I didn't recognize. I'd been raised in a well-off white blister attached to a black city I hardly knew, but the blister had since burst. Starbucks and yoga studios everywhere, and all these new apartment buildings, cute new shops. Defense contracts weren't the only thing that had brought them here, not every young professional in D.C. was part of the national security workforce, but I still felt as if the wars on the other side of the world were indirectly underwriting the colorful awnings and the artisanal ice cream; and though ten years earlier that fact would have disgusted me—I would've felt outrage, refused to eat the ice cream, etc.—now I reacted with the same learned helplessness I felt toward the stupid movies they kept making in Hollywood. I had no say in the making of war or in the making of stupid movies but had lived most of my life in cities sponsored by one or the other, and though stupid movies were not as damaging as stupid wars, my options seemed to be the same in either case, I could watch them or I could not watch them, and if I felt so inclined I could make comments about them in an online forum.

I'll acknowledge that this line of thinking seems a little pat. I could see that it might be flawed, but I couldn't shake it loose. I was the sty in my own eye, I'll say that much. And there were days when it all piled up, it all seemed too much, returning a phone call like lifting a car by its bumper, retrieving a prescription a trek across the tundra. The difficulty came not in spite of the trivial nature of these activities but because of it.

I walked the last stretch. I was not in shape, and not until I'd almost made it home did my breathing return to normal. Looking up at the house, our impervious, oblivious house, I thought: I should not be living here. This place could swallow me up.

Dad had come home while I'd been out. Because he wasn't on the first floor, that I could see, I called “Hello-o” in the direction of the stairs, and waited for his reply. He didn't answer. “Dad?” Still nothing. I climbed up halfway to the second floor. “Dad?” I heard the toilet flush.

“Helen?”

“Hey, I'm back.”

“Could you clean up those dishes please? The kitchen is a mess.”

I was silent, until he said “Helen?” again.

“Okay!”

“Thank you.”

 

PART TWO

 

 

Dick Mitchell was Dad's best friend—I heard Dad say that once. I don't know whether the best friendship was mutual. The Dick Mitchell of my memory is a bon vivant, a joker, not really the type to have a best friend, though no doubt he was more complicated than the affable operator he'd seemed to be. The main thing I know about him is that he killed himself; I don't remember how I learned it. After he died, our parents told us that he'd been sick. But we found out, somehow everybody at school seemed to know that Rob Golden's stepfather had committed suicide, a fact that kept circulating because none of us could absorb it. There were two girls at our school who'd tried to kill themselves but survived, and there was Ernest Hemingway, but before Dick Mitchell died I couldn't have conceived that a man like that, a friend of my parents, might take his own life.

The funeral took place at a narrow, slate-gray church in a transitional part of downtown, a sparse few blocks lodged in between more residential and more commercial neighborhoods. Outside the church, on a blackboard shaped like a pope's hat, white lettering spelled out Richard James Mitchell, 1938–1988, and I remember the strangeness of seeing the current year written that way, as the year of someone's death. Courtney was away at college by then. Maggie and I wore Jessica McClintock dresses, lace bibs falling over floral prints, as if we were much younger than we actually were. We wore stockings and black Mary Janes.

I saw my father press his shaky lips together, look down at his shoes. I had the impression that he was supposed to give a eulogy, but he never did. We sang hymns, and I could barely hear his voice, though my mother's was strong, maybe a little too strong. Rob Golden was there too, of course, home from whatever school he'd gone to—Bennington, I think, or was it Wesleyan? He'd dyed his hair platinum blond and had an earring in one ear, and was sitting in the front row, his hair all the whiter by contrast with his black-suited shoulders. I didn't speak to him, too shy and also embarrassed by what I was wearing. Mom had bought us those little-girl outfits, and after the service we became little girls. We ran giddily, giggling, around a park across the street from where the reception was, sweating and scuffing up our shoes. We waited there while our parents drank wine and talked to people. We came home with bloody ankles because of those stiff shoes and had to throw out our stockings.

*   *   *

An obituary from the Branberry, Connecticut,
Weekly Record
, dated September 27, 1988, for Richard J. Mitchell, fifty:

Richard J. Mitchell, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, died suddenly at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, on Sunday. Mr. Mitchell had been an aide to the assistant secretary for international security affairs at the Department of Defense, an executive assistant for policy planning at the Department of State, and a deputy assistant secretary of state. He also served as a trustee of the St. Albans School and as an officer of the Metropolitan Club.