The Hundred-Year House (11 page)

Gracie didn’t look at Bruce at all, just blinked at Miriam. She said, “I can’t help but think it’s a shame you never had braces, Miriam. It really does mark a person. I always say, if you want to know someone’s lot in life, look at the teeth.”

—

Zee returned to the kitchen as the main course was served, and there was something about her smile, her slow pace, that made
her look like a drunk trying to walk a straight line. She kissed her mother’s cheek, and Miriam scrambled for another place setting.

Gracie was going off about the Internet, and Zee joined the group of baffled, nodding heads. “What’s so horrifying is they can just put your name on there, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” Gracie said. “Even for the phone book they have to have your permission! And correct me if I’m wrong, but I have the impression they can even show photographs. I don’t know if you need a special computer to get them, but just think! Miriam, have you seen this? In your work with the computers?”

Miriam protested that she was a technophobe in disguise, and Doug could practically hear the creak of Zee’s eyes rolling beside him. “Some of my
planning
is on the computer,” Miriam said, “but then it’s all hand work.”

“Tell them about the secrets!” Bruce said. “All her secrets are under there!”

Miriam’s neck turned red. “Oh. Behind the materials,” she said. “After I’ve outlined my shapes, and before the mortar, I write a secret in paint. People like knowing it’s there, I think. If a buyer asks, I’ll sometimes tell what it said.”

Case said, “Secrets about me, right babe?”

“I didn’t know it myself, till we read that article last year,” Bruce said. “Miriam, have they seen the article?”

Zee said, “It’s amazing the secrets people can keep. Isn’t it.” There was something wrong with her. Doug put his hand on her knee and she jerked away. “I used to think I could tell when someone had a secret. I really did. And it turns out—”

But Gracie shrieked and they all turned to her. “There was a ladybug!” she said. “Right on my plate.”

30

Z
ee rose from bed like a heavy animal, her legs slow and numb.

Out at the table, the two of them giggling over breakfast. “Happensack—the luckiest town in New Jersey!” Miriam could hardly get her breath.

Doug: “It’s the karma that gets you stuck on the turnpike!”

Zee couldn’t look at them.

Miriam: “It’s a sack full of four-leaf clovers!”

“It’s when someone accidentally kicks you in the nuts!”

Doug’s book bag lay on the floor. He was headed to the library, he said. She wanted to tear the zipper off, to see what was really inside. Books about adolescent girls, love letters to Miriam, a hundred bags of cocaine. The possibilities were endless.

Instead she said, “Miriam, why don’t you meet me for coffee this morning? We haven’t had a chance to talk much lately.” They’d had nothing
but
chances to talk: right now, for instance, and the million times Zee swept past the sunporch pretending to be absorbed in the mail.

Miriam said, “Oh, lovely,” and Zee said, “There’s a chance I’ll be waylaid by the dean.”

And at ten o’clock, with Miriam waiting at Starbucks, with Case off at the doctor, chauffeured by Sofia, Zee drove back to the house and slammed her way into the silent, cold porch. Finished canvases leaned three deep against the walls, but the piece centered
on Zee’s yellow cotillion dress was still in progress, laid out on the floor like a corpse. The black swirls around it were finished—river stones and coffee beans and checkers and an old Escape key and barrettes. The dress was only half covered, in yellow but also orange and little spots of brown and green. The green: It took a minute to realize why the green looked so familiar. Here were the shards of her mother’s celadon vase, the one Case had knocked to pieces. Had Miriam even asked to keep these? Had she stolen them that night? Zee wiggled her thumb under the bottom of the hemline and yanked up. Stones and scraps flew off, skittered across the floor. Some of the fabric tore. It was only half a dress, really, as Miriam had cut the back entirely away. But here were the words, the secrets, just as Bruce had said. Zee left the dress attached by the left shoulder and read what she could of the black painted script below, obscured by glue, bitten around the edges by the mortar and stones.

The hair just below

Your navel

Curls to the left

Let me untwist it

That was near the top. Farther down, below an unreadable swath:

Lick the scars

Up your knees

Taste what

You drank

And down by the hemline:

I forget to look

In mirrors

My guts have all

Sprung loose

She slapped the dress back down. There was an ugly satisfaction in finding what she’d known she would, despite the sudden light show behind her eyelids that was like the beginning of a migraine, but with a drumbeat.

Zee dragged Hidalgo from the big house. She got saltines from upstairs and sprinkled them all around, behind Miriam’s trays of beads, under her papers. Then she shut him in. He might get free, but not before doing a lot more damage and clawing up the windows. He watched her leave, his eyes black and questioning. “Be bad,” she said.

Her face, her smile, her breathing, would be fine at the coffee shop. If she could smile at Sid Cole, she could smile at Miriam. As she sped to town she developed the leaden sensation, though, that she hadn’t just been right in her fears, but had actually caused something, yet again, to happen. That she’d willed this into being as surely as she’d brought about Cole’s implicit confessions. She was getting everything she wanted, but also—like in a nightmare, where you’re the author and also the victim—she was getting everything she feared: Miriam’s crush, Doug’s ineptitude, even the appearance of that stupid dress. She thought,
I need to be careful what I fear next
. And then she thought:
What I fear next is madness
.
What I fear next is madness
.
What I fear next is madness
.

31

I
’m so glad we can chat,” Frieda said, though she didn’t sound glad at all. Doug had gone on an absolute tear the past few weeks and finished the two new books, FedExing the diskettes and riding his bike triumphantly home from the post office.

“Something tells me I messed up.” He sat down with the phone base in his lap.

“Well, we can fix it. It’s not unusual that our writers find their voice and start embellishing a bit, and please take that as a compliment. You’re a real writer.”

“It was the eating disorder thing.”

“The problem, in this case, is that it’s the topic of the next book in the series,
What’s Eating Molly
, which has already been written. And then—the Cece book is wonderful, you really have an ear for her, but we meant for the character of the neighbor to be peripheral. As it is, you’ve fleshed him out so much that I think readers would expect him to return.”

“Right. Okay.”

“What it boils down to, really, is that you’ve made uninvited changes to the world of the story. And you know, a little thing can have huge repercussions down the line. Someone discovers they’re allergic to peanuts, for example, and then five books later—”

“I get it. How long do I have to fix this?”

Frieda sighed—an actual sigh, a rope around Doug’s neck. “At
this point, you know, you’ve been fabulous, but we have faster writers, ones who can do this in their sleep. I’m going to bring one of them in, and they’ll split the payment.”

—

Doug was surprised how upset he was. There was the money issue, to be sure, the four thousand dollars he’d counted on cut down to two or less, and there was the ignominy of being, essentially, fired. But moreover he felt a sense of failure, of stupidity. He’d messed up something that should have been a piece of cake. And for what? For trying too hard. When here sat his other project, the
real
project, for which he’d accomplished nothing at all beyond breaking and entering.

He poured yesterday’s tepid coffee into his thermos. He was searching for milk when he heard Miriam sobbing again, this time from inside the rooms she shared with Case. He was about to make a silent joke about another dead Kennedy when he realized Case was in there with her, that the sobs were covering the rumble of an angry male voice. Doug heard the word
disaster
, and he heard
actually
and
Texas
and
forget it
. He waited longer than he was comfortable, listened for any reason to break down the door: slaps or crashes or sudden screams. But it was just this torrent of words and crying.

Doug started humming loudly as he dumped in a scoop of sugar and shook the thermos up. He gave words to the humming:
This is my cue to leave.
This is my cue
to leave
. Okay, then. He dug in his desk and found the diskettes that were Edwin Parfitt’s prison, and he found the bound copy of his dissertation, and he found last year’s research—Xeroxes and notes and outlines. He stuck them in his bag with the thermos. It had taken a punch in the balls from Frieda and Melissa Hopper, it had taken hysterical Texans spooking him from the house, but he would finally get to work.

And what was more: He was done being a baby. If there were files twenty yards away from him, he was going to help himself.
The fund-raiser was a week away, but that was enough time to plan the details. He’d have knocked on Miriam’s door right then to tell her so, if she hadn’t been indisposed. Instead, he headed out the door and into the rain.

In front of a library computer, he spread things out. He borrowed a stapler and some markers from the front desk. By the end of two hours, he had a plan for a new shape to the book, given that something, anything, could be found in the files. Parfitt was famous (if he was famous for anything, which he wasn’t) for periods of hyperproductivity followed by long fallow stretches. This was often attributed to his depression, though Doug had never found any signs of the man’s mood swings other than his offing himself—and Doug wondered if he could piece together some other theory, based on the poet’s time at MacDowell and Laurelfield and his publication schedule. The MacDowell archives were at the Library of Congress, and maybe he’d be allowed access. Those librarians couldn’t be harder to get past than Gracie. And the sickness Parfitt had mentioned in that letter to his niece—there might be something about that in the Laurelfield files. That he’d had to leave early, that he was depressed, that he had some condition like lupus that would have immobilized him for months or years. Perhaps he’d had, like Doug, an invisible troll sitting on his shoulders keeping him from his work—until, one day, the troll hopped off.

32

A
s the days grew short, as the ghost stories of the semester piled up in her dreams and (as fifteen-page papers) in her inbox, as she lay awake half the night and walked sleeping through the day, Zee began to wonder if her sanity, her residency in the rational world, wasn’t a thin veneer. Something ready, all along, to crack.

She’d always believed she could read Doug like a book, but apparently this wasn’t true. She hadn’t even known what he was writing. She looked at him in the mornings and wondered who he was.

So what was real? And who was running the show? She used to think she was the one in charge. Now she began to fear this same thing.

She found herself pressing on the kitchen counter to see if it would give way, if it would turn to a liquid or a vapor.

—

The last weeks of November passed in a dull and angry blur. Chantal asked if she was feeling all right. “No,” she said, and walked away.

In the bathroom of the English building, she noticed her arms had grown thin. There she was in the glass above the sink, still visible, fluorescently lit. What had once been a nice, symmetrical face had grown bony and shiny, like a cartoon of an unfortunate stepsister. As she stood at the hand dryer, the tiles on the floor
began rearranging themselves, jumping to new spots. No. It was scraps of toilet paper, blown by the hot air.

Doug didn’t seem to notice that she’d spoken maybe twelve sentences in the past week. She’d climb into bed and pretend to fall asleep immediately. He’d keep reading for an hour, his face glowing in the lamp and from some deeper contentment too. She found five hundred dollars in his sock drawer and figured he’d gotten it from those horrible books. She wondered if he was spending it on Miriam. She took a fifty from the stack, and used it to buy the bottle of vodka that lived in her office desk for the next week till it was empty.

—

She walked in to find her ghost seminar in deep debate. Sarah Bonheur was red in the face, practically shouting. “It would be a statement on how this school feels about women,” she said. “Like, look at their date rape policy. Oh, excuse me, their
lack
of policy.”

Chad Crosley, polo shirt and ratty cap, shorts despite the freezing weather, leaned back and said, with authority, “You know why they’ll never fire him? He’s an alum.”

“
Exactly
! It’s the old boys’ network. The alum thing is a
male
thing.”

Zee, setting down her papers, shook her head. “He’s not, Chad. He went to Indiana.” Fran was agreeing loudly with Sarah. “Look how long it took them to build sorority houses! Like we’re some afterthought. If Dr. Cole is still here after Christmas, I’m transferring.”

Zee—maybe it was the swig of vodka before class—snapped. “Look, Fran, you don’t know the whole story. We’re trying to teach you to think like adults, and you’re jumping to conclusions like children.” Fran stared, cowed. Zee wondered why she’d just defended Cole, without ever deciding to. “Professor Cole has
nothing
to do with your sorority house, Fran.”