All the Houses (50 page)
Authors: Karen Olsson
But he'd had a long and varied career before then, and afterward went on to write two books, to give speeches, to live for many more yearsâand that, perhaps, was its own kind of victory.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
We're sitting at the kitchen table, Dad and I are. I'm peeling an orange, and he's scanning the newspaper. The phone on the wall rings. He tells me not to get up and speaks to the phoneâ
hold on, hold on
âwhile closing in on it.
He says hello and then asks a bunch of questions. “You've talked to him?⦠Pamunkey Regional Jail, where on earth is that?⦠When's the hearing?”
Dad was able to find the court-appointed lawyer representing Samed a.k.a. Sam, and over the last two weeks he's been hounding her about the case, hounding her and helping her too. He was the one who figured out how to locate the kid's parents in Turkey. My father would've made a good reporterâI have no idea how he's tracked these people down. As it is, he's taken his animus against the current administration and funneled it into trying to advocate for this kid. He's also contacted Daniel a couple of times, who has agreed to let Nina attend any court hearings that don't conflict with school. Presumably they'll all conflict with school, but we'll see.
Back at the table after the phone call, he tells me what the lawyer had to say, breaking it all down, the procedures, the time line, how the lawyer thinks there's a chance that Sam will be able to stay in the country, though not an excellent chance. I offer Dad half of the orange and the papers draw us in again. The radio is tuned to the classical station and the smells of toast and orange peel surround us, and I don't even mind the pseudospouse thing that we seem to be doing here. Maybe it goes without saying, but the relationship of adult child and parent has not been an easy or obvious one for us. It keeps on shifting too.
He's calmer these days. We both are. He still listens to melancholy music, but lately I've not heard him go off on the subject of the Bush administration, which is probably for the best.
How glad he'll be when Courtney tells him that she's going to have a baby! I might be happier for him than I am for her. I can picture just how her announcement will light up his face, how his eyes will widen and shimmer even as he makes his stilted reply. (“Very good,” he'll say, or maybe “Hurrah.” As though he were not allowed to use the word
I
, to say
I am excited for you
or
I am so delighted to hear that.
)
I'm headed back to L.A. next week and in a good mood about it. From a distance the city seems full of possibilities, and though I know that once I'm back there it won't seem quite that way anymore, I'm treating this good mood like a house plant, trying to keep it alive, to do better than I've done with my other house plants. I already have some meetings set upâthat is, I have one meeting on the books and some other tentative meetings. The scheduled one is with my manager's ex-wife, who recently joined one of the big talent agencies as a junior rep. I'm going to tell her about some new ideas I've had for Washington comedies.
On the table is a sugar dish that dates to my childhood, a white ceramic bowl that stands on legs, with lion's paws at the base, at least I always thought of them as lion's paws. They are paws of some sort. Two of them are chipped, but amazingly the bowl has never broken, and I consider swiping itâI've been scooping up tokens to take back to California with me, things I'll never need there, but for some reason I think it'd be nice to have this physics textbook, or that unfinished painting I made in tenth grade, or the sugar bowl, or snapshots I'll surely misplace: my sisters on the back deck, me on a hobby horse. I've been eyeing everything in the house. There's a part of me that wants to compress it all and bring it with me, even as there's another part of me that can't wait to escape one more time.
The phone rings again and Dad yells at it again, then picks it up. “Hi, Maggie,” he says, and then, “How's New York? Getting much snow up there?” Here, it's one of those days when the atmosphere seems to have arranged itself in distinct thermal strata: slow, fat snow falls out of a cold sky, through layers of warmer air, and melts upon landing.
He returns to his chair with the phone, a strand of hair falling over his forehead, his lips parting to speak, his torso filling and emptying. Here's this body that has lately become a disruptive guest, hinting at an intention to leave before the party ends. His eyes range around the room and I can tell he's waiting for an opening in the conversation, so that he can inform Maggie of some random thing he read in the paper. He'll share that, then offer to hand over the phone to me. He reaches for a section of orange.
I can remember watching my dad like this when I was a kid, looking on as he did his projects around the house. I can remember thinking a thought that had the force of an inner mandate, which was that I would not, could not outlive him. Oh no. That just wasn't going to work.
Better that he be frozen, I felt. And so I tried to freeze himâwe tried to freeze one another. As he wipes a bit of juice off his chin and tells Maggie about Sam's case, that same announcement sounds inside my head, as resounding as it is ordinary: I do not want to be here without him. No, no, I do not. I should tell him this, I think. Would it be so hard just to say it? Why can't we say these things to each other? Instead I get up from my chair on the pretext of taking a plate to the sink, and as I pass by him I reach for his shoulder and let my hand rest there. He tenses and then relaxes and then goes on talking.
Â
Thank you to everyone who read drafts of this book and offered advice and encouragement: Kirk Walsh, Dominic Smith, Amy Olsson, Alix Ohlin, Andrew Bujalski, Rebecca Beegle.
Thank you to the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. Thank you to Amy Williams.
Thank you to everyone at FSG, most of all Emily Bell, for masterful edits delivered sunny-side up.
And thank you to Alexander and Irene, for coming along in the meantime.
Â
Karen Olsson
is the author of the novel
Waterloo
. She has written about politics, science, and popular culture for magazines including
The New York Times Magazine
and
Texas Monthly
, where she is a contributing editor. She is also a former editor of
The Texas Observer
. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., she now lives in Austin, Texas, with her family. You can sign up for email updates
here
.
Â
ALSO BY
KAREN OLSSON
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CONTENTS
For a few years my father was known.
I remember a weekend afternoon â¦
He still lived in the house â¦
My first days at home with Dad â¦
“Did I ever tell you about the time⦔
I left my father at the AU campus â¦
When I was a kid the news was full â¦
I can picture Dick Mitchell's hairy legs â¦
Later, in retrospect, that abortive pool party â¦
I went to that job on the day of Dad's panel â¦
When we picked him up the following day â¦
“You should come up to New York with me” â¦
Dick Mitchell was Dad's best friend â¦
With the help of the Internet I found a place â¦
My father and Dick Mitchell both moved to Washington â¦
I had nocturnal bouts of sister-nostalgia.
Mid-August, 1986: the city â¦
No one else could rile me the way Courtney could.
“So Dad,” I would say to my father on the phone â¦
“It's fifty percent pure bullshit” â¦
Nobody sleeps. The men tasked with â¦
My neighbor Daniel didn't seem to observe â¦
Although Tim is the one who works on the NSC â¦
Dad had received all the usual holiday invitations â¦
For better or worse (in the end, probably worse) â¦
The next day I wished I were a wanderer â¦
It had been so reassuring to be ferried around â¦
And then I was disturbed by a different piece of news â¦
I'm not great with endings. Neither was Lawrence E. Walsh â¦
Â
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2015 by Karen Olsson
All rights reserved
First edition, 2015
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
    Olsson, Karen, 1972â author.
    All the houses: a novel / Karen Olsson. â First edition.
        pages    cm
    ISBN 978-0-374-28132-8 (hardback) â ISBN 978-0-374-71419-2 (e-book)
    1.  FamiliesâWashington (D.C.)âFiction.  2.  Domestic fiction.  3.  Political fiction.  I.  Title.
PS3615.L755 A79 2015
813'.6âdc23
2015023333
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This is a work of imagination that draws from the historical record. Some details of the Iran-Contra Affair have been altered, and although certain characters are based on real people, here they exist in an invented world.
