Homebody: A Novel (11 page)

He wasn't amused. She had followed him down the hall, she had embarrassed him, and now she was trying to joke him into smiling at her. He wanted to hit something, he was so frustrated. "Why don't I feel better? I felt guilty throwing you out, and now I feel stupid and angry about letting you stay." He turned away from her and slapped the wall. "When's the part where virtue is its own reward?"

Behind him, she spoke softly. "Let me practice staying out of your sight for a while."

"Eat the burger and fries before they get cold," said Don. He stalked on down the hall, feeling even stupider because now that she was respecting his need for privacy, the need itself seemed childish to him. He imagined himself as a little boy, running into his room and slamming the door, shouting I hate you, I hate you, leave me alone.

He stopped when he got to the end of the parlor wall and glanced back up the narrow hallway. She was still there, spinning down the hall toward the kitchen in little-girl pirouettes, touching the walls as she went. Between and behind the noises made by the Helping Hands guys carrying some big piece of furniture along the upstairs hall, he heard her intoning, almost singing, "Thank you, thank you, thank you." Then she suddenly stopped and pressed herself against the south wall, one arm up as high as she could reach, so the whole length of her body was touching the wall. "Thank you house."

She was as nuts as the women next door.

Well, what did he think? Why else would she be homeless? A college graduate, living in a boarded-up mansion full of corroded furniture? Of course she was a loon. And he had just given her permission to live under the same roof with him.

Not that he hadn't shared a house with a madwoman before. At least this particular loon, this Sylvie Delaney had never looked at him with that blank stare that said, I know you're talking but all I care about is how am I going to score some more blow? So he was living with a better grade of lunatic.

He wandered out onto the porch. The Helping Hands truck was almost half full. He could hear the guys starting down the stairs with whatever it was they were carrying. He opened the door all the way and walked around it so he wouldn't be blocking their path. As he waited for them to get down the stairs, he glanced down at the deadbolt he had put on, still shiny and new, and ran his hand along the smooth wood below it down to the old latchset.

The movers were at the foot of the stairs, stopping to catch their breath. He heard Sylvie's voice and stepped around the door to watch as she spoke to them. They were leaning on a huge bureau, which they had moved with all the heavy oaken drawers inside it. Trying to save extra trips up and down the stairs.

"Just so you know," Sylvie was saying, "my husband and I have decided you should leave the bed in the front corner apartment." She pointed up, indicating the room directly above the north parlor.

My husband and I. Don's blood boiled.

"Whatever," the driver said. "This is pretty crummy old stuff."

"You should look so good when you're that old," said Sylvie. "And we're keeping the big table in the kitchen back there. There's a Coke on it, if you want it before the ice all melts. And a burger and fries but they might already be cold."

"Hey, thanks," said the assistant.

"Oh, you think it's
your
Coke now?" said the driver. "Come on, let's go." They picked up the bureau. The door was wide, but the bureau barely fit through without smashing their hands.

When they were past him, Don looked back into the entry. Sylvie was standing on the first step of the stairway, draped against the wall again in some parody of a girlish pose. He glared at her. She winked at him, grinned, and then turned and ran up the stairs.

He made the conscious decision not to be angry. If he let her teasing get under his skin already, it was only going to get ugly and that wouldn't make either of their lives any better. He leaned his head against the edge of the door and took a couple of deep breaths. Behind him the Helping Hands guys were jockeying the bureau into position inside the truck. He looked down the smooth expanse of the door and then realized what it was that had bothered him before, when he first got back after the closing. The door was smooth.

There should have been ragged screwholes where he had pulled off the hasp to get into the house when Cindy first showed it to him and Jay. But there was no sign that there had ever been a hole in the wood. He looked closely. The holes hadn't been puttied and stained. The woodgrain was smooth, continuous, unbroken. All the way above and below the deadbolt.

He remembered what the Weird sisters had said about the house. A strong house. And getting stronger, with the work he was doing on it.

He tried for a moment to doubt his own memory, to insist to himself that the lock had been on the back door, or that he had drilled the hole for the deadbolt right where the screwholes had been. Wasn't that possible?

No it wasn't. He had noticed at the time that the screwholes were too widely spread to be covered by the deadbolt, and so he had drilled a little farther down, though still well above the original lockset. No, somehow this door had healed itself.

He looked over at the carriagehouse. There were Miz Evelyn and Miz Judea, on their knees in the front yard, digging dandelions. If they noticed him, they gave no sign.

Well what was he supposed to do now? Run screaming into the street? The house was strange or he was crazy, and he was betting on the house. But strange or not, he'd just closed on the deal and there was no backing out now. And it was possible that he was simply remembering things wrong. Your mind could play tricks on you, everybody knew that. You remember things one way but in fact it happened completely differently. That's all this was. Just a memory thing. He could live with that. He had only been spooked because of the crazy things the Weird sisters told him.

The city van pulled up to the curb, and Don walked out to meet the guy and lead him to the water meter. All he needed now was to have the new water heater installed and there'd be hot and cold running water in the house. Flush toilets and hot showers without having to go to McDonald's or a truck stop. Life wasn't all bad.

Tearing Up, Tearing Down

He couldn't accuse her of following him around the house, but that's what it felt like. Half the jobs he set out to do, Sylvie just happened to be waiting right there when he arrived with his tools. It always made him want to turn around and go find something else to do, but he couldn't work that way, ducking out of sight whenever she was around. Yet he couldn't bring himself to bark at her either. She always seemed so glad to see him. It must have been lonely here, hiding out in an empty house behind boarded-up windows. Maybe when the novelty wore off she'd leave him alone.

The water was hooked up and it was time to run the faucets to check for obstructions and leaks. Some fixtures he wouldn't even try—the cracked toilet would never have water in it again. But the upstairs bathtub, where he first found her, that one would probably end up being the one they used.

He caught himself thinking: We'll have to use this tub. It came too naturally, to think "we" instead of "I." And there was nothing wrong with it—as long as Sylvie was in the house, she was going to use the same tub and sink and toilet as him. So why not think of them as "we"?

Because that's how I thought of me and my ex-wife and our—
my
little girl. My child, my house, my tub. I'm alone here, despite the presence of this uninvited guest. And all the more alone because she's here, to make me say "we" and remember how empty that word is, what a nothing word, impermanent. How it evaporates and carries everything away with it.

There she was, doing situps in the hall outside the upstairs bathroom when he came up to run the water. So of course she quit and stood in the door, then at the foot of the tub as he turned on the cold water faucet.

"Oh, good, a bath," she said.

"Not till we get a hot water heater."

"Cold showers, then?"

"Whatever turns you on," he said. The faucet sputtered and knocked. Brown gunk squirted out, splashing all over his pants. She shrieked and backed up.

"It's just water and rust," he said. "You won't melt."

"How do you know I'm not the Wicked Witch of the West?"

"Because she was green."

"So's that stuff. Gross."

It was as gross as she said. Deep brown, a sickening color. Don stepped over and turned on the cold water tap in the bathroom sink. It did its own knock-and-sputter routine, and then choked out even nastier-looking gunk that splattered them both.

"Oh, this is an improvement, all right," she said, looking at her clothes.

"Nobody asked you to stand in here when I'm working."

She said nothing and he didn't look at her. The water wasn't getting any clearer in the sink or the tub. He didn't like the silence. But why should he let it make him uncomfortable? She needed to learn not to hover.

Instead of leaving, though, she broke her own silence. "You sure they didn't hook these pipes up backward?"

"It's just been standing in the pipes. Run it for a while, it'll clear out."

"Looks like the house has dysentery," she said.

"Don't use this toilet," he answered. "Look at the crack. I'm not putting water in it."

"Is there one I'm supposed to use?"

"Downstairs in the north apartment."

"Will the water look like this?"

"Till the pipes clear."

"If they ever do."

"Water heater should be hooked up tomorrow. Let it fill and heat, then we can bathe."

"Sounds indecent."

He looked sharply at her. She was joking, probably, but even so it was repugnant, having a woman so dirty and unkempt acting flirtatious. There was a reason people became homeless. In her case, it could easily be her bad taste.

He left the bathroom.

Sylvie called after him. "When do I turn this water off?"

"When it looks drinkable."

"I will never drink this!"

He was already halfway down the stairs, so he didn't bother answering. He didn't want to establish the precedent of shouting through the house. He could just imagine her screaming, "Don! Oh, Dahahn!" for the whole neighborhood to hear.

He went downstairs and turned on the toilet and sink in the bathroom he intended to use. Those and the outside hose were all he'd need, so there was no point in testing them until he had new fixtures hooked up to the plumbing. The drain in the downstairs bathroom sink was plugged up, so he did a little work opening the trap to drain into a bucket. A real stink. Wouldn't you know it. A mouse had gotten caught in the trap and drowned. But once it was cleared and reattached, the sink drained fine. Which was good, because in cold water with no soap it took three scrubbings before his hands felt clean again. He didn't put the mouse corpse in the garbage can in back—the last thing he needed was to attach that smell to anything that was going to stay around. Instead he flung it off the edge of the gully in the back yard. It flew ten yards out and twenty yards down, pitching lazily end over end as it fell, till it fetched up about halfway down the gully wall.

As he came back into the house, he knew there would be no more delaying it. He had to choose which section of the house to renovate first. Of course, ideally he would do the whole house at once. All the stripping, then all the breaking down of walls he didn't want to keep, then breaking open the rest of the walls for wiring and plumbing, phone lines, intercom, maybe lines for a computer network if he thought the money would hold out for a luxury like that. It was easier and cheaper to do each job for the whole house all at once. But that wouldn't give him a place to live while it was going on; and just as important was the fact that he needed the small payoffs of having finished this room and that room to keep him going.

Not the main floor. Couldn't do the north side upstairs, because that's the side Sylvie's apartment was on. South side upstairs, though, would be fun. Tear out the add-in walls, and it went from being two lousy bedrooms, a living/dining room, and a kitchen, to being two large bedrooms. They wouldn't do at all, of course, since they were too big to be practical and ended up wasting a lot of space. So he would open up the wall between them and put in a bathroom and two wide, deep closets. And in the back bedroom, which didn't have the fancy bay window the front one did, he'd open a ladder to a part of the attic, which he would make into a loft. In a house like this, every room should have individuality. No, more than that—it should have panache.

Armed with his prybar and a tough carpet knife, he went upstairs and began stripping the floor. It was a tough, durable carpet but it had been installed a lot of years ago, and under it the padding was a mass of decomposing filth. Dead insects made another carpet under that.

"How did all those bugs get under there?" Sylvie stood in the doorway.

Don stopped pulling the carpet. "What do you need?" he asked.

"Just curious. I've been walking on those bugs, I just wonder how they got there."

This was not science class, it was sweaty, nasty labor. What made it bearable was the trance of concentration he drifted into while his hands worked on. She had broken that, and for what? And after how many requests that she stay away from him? "I work alone," said Don.

Sylvie shrugged as if to say, Who, me? "So, I'm not trying to help you," she said.

"Exactly my point," said Don.

"All I did was ask how the bugs got there."

"The crawlers crawled, the wrigglers rigged. Now I've told you, let me work."

She looked angry for a moment, but then she backed away out of sight. Not for a moment, though, did Don imagine the struggle was over. She was a shmoozer. He was going to have to be rude to her again and again, just to get some peace, and he hated being rude for any reason. But this woman just couldn't keep a promise or follow instructions. What did he expect? If people like her had skills like that, they most likely wouldn't be homeless.

He got the carpet rolled up and tried to hoist it up onto his shoulder. He could have done a clean-and-jerk with more weight than this, but there was no good handhold on the thick carpet roll, so he ended up having to drag it. This got tricky at the door, where he had to bend it to get it out into the hall and down the stairs. For a moment he thought of calling Sylvie to help, but then realized that if he ever asked her for something, that would open the floodgate. She would be sure that he needed her and she would hover until the house was finished.

So he went back and forth from end to middle to end of the carpet, bending, pulling, bending more, pulling more, until it was finally out in the hall and headed down the stairs. From there it was a simple matter to drag it out the front door, off the porch, and out to the junkpile on the curb.

Coming back in, he glanced over at the carriagehouse. There on the porch sat Miz Evelyn and Miz Judea, eating delicate little triangles of cucumber sandwich with the crusts cut off. He imagined a huge bowl of bread crusts and cucumber peelings being carried upstairs to Gladys, who for all he knew was an omnivorous crocodile or a large fat sow, eating whatever slops came her way. They waved cheerily at him. He waved back, not cheerily.

Dismantling kitchen cabinets was always a pain. It was easiest, of course, to remove each piece as a unit, but not always possible. Though the kitchen in the south upstairs apartment was a dark, narrow, makeshift affair, whoever installed the cabinets was apparently trying to make them tornado-proof. Don crawled into the cabinets every which way, removing every screw and nail that connected the cabinets to the back wall and to each other, but still they wouldn't come out. Finally he had to resort to the wrecking bar, and even then the cabinets didn't come away clean. Someone had replaced the lath-and-plaster walls with two-by-four studs and glued the cabinets directly to them, in addition to nailing and screwing them. Fortunately, the studs weren't structural, so it didn't matter if his wrecking bar chewed them to bits. By the time he had the last cabinet detached from the wall, the upstairs kitchen looked like a tornado had struck after all. Studs were broken, gouged, or sticking out like snaggle teeth. Didn't matter. He'd be taking them all out. He would entirely take down the new wall that separated the kitchen from the parlor, rejoining them into one room; the studs between the original timbers he would replace with new ones on 12-inch centers. Don's standard of sturdiness was even higher than that of the guy who installed the cabinets.

He'd never dismantled an upper-story kitchen before, and it was backbreaking work to get the cabinets down the stairs without dinging anything. He could have used another pair of hands and a strong back to help, but dammit, he worked alone.

Standing at the junkpile, which now looked like a madman's kitchen, Don wanted to go back inside and lie down and sleep. Wasn't this a whole days work? Hadn't he done enough?

But it was only three in the afternoon, and he knew that the temptation to knock off early and take a nap or go for a walk would be with him more and more if he ever gave in to it. There was always another job to do. He had to put in at least eight hours no matter how tired he got. That was the rule. And most days he tried for ten. That's how he could get the house finished even though he worked alone.

That was the main thing an assistant was good for anyway. In Don's experience you usually ended up having to redo the assistants work or supervise so closely you might as well have done it yourself. But having someone there, watching, was an incentive to keep plugging away. Didn't want to look like a slacker in front of somebody else. Don couldn't stand the thought that he might only be working for show, to impress someone or keep their good opinion. He worked for the job's sake, or for his own self-respect. And so he did not, could not lay off early, take a day off, or even call in sick. Who would he call? He had the sternest boss in town—breaks he would routinely give to an employee he never allowed himself.

Except there by the fence stood Miz Evelyn, holding up that metal pitcher with water beading on the outside so fast it looked like it was raining, all those drops forming, running down the sides, dripping off the bottom. Whatever was in that pitcher must be really cold. And even though it wasn't all that hot of a day, no more than eighty-five degrees, he wanted that pitcher right then with all his heart and soul. Enough to accept it from a crazy woman.

"Yoo-hoo!" she was calling. "Mr. Lark!"

He sauntered over to the fence, trying not to look too eager. She held out a tall metal glass, which was sweating almost as much as the pitcher.

"I've never seen a body work so hard," she said.

"Helps me sleep at night." He drained the glass almost in one draught. It was lemonade, just a little tart, not too tart: just a little sweet, not too sweet. It was a good thing neither of these ladies was his grandma. He'd have moved in with her long ago.

"You can take the whole pitcher if you want."

He wanted. "Thanks," he said, and now, drinking from the rim of the pitcher, he tanked it down so fast it gave him a headache. But the headache wouldn't last, he knew, while the lemonade rushed through his system so fast it caused sweat to bead up on his brow almost as fast as water had beaded up on the pitcher. The pitcher empty, Don wiped his mouth on the upper part of his sleeve, which was marginally cleaner than the forearms.

"Oh my," said Miz Evelyn.

"Sorry. I've got a working man's manners."

"Not to mention a working man's appetites."

He patted his stomach, which now sloshed with liquid. "Nice of you to share that with me."

"We're just glad that you came to see it our way."

Uh-oh. "But I didn't," said Don.

She gestured toward the junkpile. "It looks like you're tearing it all apart in there."

"Just clearing out the ugly stuff." She looked a little disappointed. "I'm going to knock down the added-in walls, too. But the structure of the house—I'm not touching that. In fact I'm restoring it."

"Oh."

"So I guess I got the lemonade under false pretenses."

"You got the lemonade because you needed it and we're Christians."

"Well thanks. I did need it." One good turn deserves another, that's how Don was raised. So: "As long as I'm here, if you ladies need any work done on
your
place, let me know."