The Stager: A Novel (3 page)

“I love that pig, too,” she says.

“If you shake it, it sounds like there’s sand inside.”

“I know. But the rule isn’t just about objects. It’s about things like color. You want to have three different things going on—say, one shade on the wall, another on furniture, and a third for accents, like throw pillows.”

“There were also Three Bears and Three Billy Goats Gruff.”

“Very good. Listen, sweetheart, I really need to go now. Let’s just put the dolls away and clean up all this food.”

“No! We can’t put the dolls away!” I say. “Let’s just feed them some dessert before you go.” I dig around and find a Key lime pie. It’s chewed up pretty badly, too. We both stare at it for a moment.

“He’ll come back. I know he will,” she says. “Rabbits have an amazing sense of smell. They can find their way home from hundreds of miles away.”

I’m pretty sure she’s making this up. “I think dogs are the ones with the good sense of smell, not rabbits.”

“Oh, I don’t know, I wouldn’t be so sure. Rabbits are pretty remarkable creatures. Just think of all the books about rabbits. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dominique shows up at the door any minute.”

I want to believe her. But anyway, if she’s right, Dominique probably ran away on purpose because of the bad smell in our house!

“What rabbit books?” I ask.

“Well … let’s see. There’s a rabbit in
Alice in Wonderland
, right? And there’s Peter Rabbit, and there’s…”

“Oh! I know, there’s these ones that I love about a rabbit brother and sister named Max and Ruby,” I said.

“I know those books! I love them, too!”

“My favorite is the one about the egg,” I say.
“Max’s Breakfast
.
”
I stand up and walk over to my bookshelf to find it.

“I remember that one,” the lady says. “‘Eat your egg, Max,’ said Max’s sister Ruby. ‘BAD EGG,’ said Max.”

“I can’t believe you remember that!”

“My nephew was obsessed with those books. I used to babysit him a lot when he was little.”

I flip the book to the page where Ruby is standing on a chair. She’s wearing a pink dress and tasting the egg. “Here’s my favorite part: ‘See, Max?’ said Ruby. ‘It’s a YUMMY YUMMY EGG.’”

The lady starts laughing, and I do, too. Soon I am laughing so hard I’m having trouble breathing, so I stand up and go over to my nightstand to get my inhaler.

“Are you okay?” the lady asks. “Should I get your nanny? I mean, Nabila?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Okay. Well, tell me if you’re having any trouble breathing, okay?” She looks at her watch again. “I hate to leave, but my dog…”

“What’s his name?”

“Moses. She’s a girl.”

“A girl dog named Moses?”

“Yeah, it’s actually kind of a funny story,” she says. She unloosens Molly’s braids, finds a brush, and starts to run it through her hair. “The dog was supposed to be named Moose. That’s the name I decided on when I brought her home from the pound. I don’t know what kind of dog she is exactly, but she’s big and a couple of different colors, mostly brown, probably part Lab and part some sort of terrier, and, well, she actually looks a little like a moose—her ears are so big they reminded me of antlers. So, anyway,” she says, “I sent my husband an e-mail at work and told him I thought ‘Moose’ was a good name … But when he got home that night, he said, ‘Hi there, Moses,’ to the dog, and I said, ‘No, it’s Moose.’ And he said, ‘No, you told me it was Moses,’ and we had this fight. Well, ‘fight’s the wrong word…”

“Was there shouting? Or crying? Did your husband lock himself in his room?”

“No, no. I guess I didn’t mean to use the word ‘fight.’ Anyway, we just went back and forth about this for a while, and he was really insistent. It started to become kind of absurd, so we went into the office to pull up the e-mail on the computer.”

“Don’t you have an iPhone?”

“Well, yes, I do now, but this was a long time ago. So I found the sent e-mail and he was right, it actually said ‘Moses.’ And then I realized that my spell check must have changed ‘Moose’ to ‘Moses.’”

“I don’t think it would do that. Maybe you just made a mistake typing.”

“I don’t think so,” she says. “Well, maybe. But anyway, then he…”

“He? You mean your husband?”

“He’s my ex-husband now, although we never bothered to actually get divorced, and believe it or not he’s very expensively on my COBRA right now … Go figure! Sorry, that was sort of inappropriate of me.”

“You have a cobra?”

“No, no, COBRA’s what you call it when you lose your job and need to extend your health insurance for a while.”

“But I thought you had a job. I thought you were working with the Realtor.”

“I am now. But this is a new job. It’s not really a real job. Well, it’s a real job, but…”

“My mom’s phone did that once.”

“What?”

“Her phone changed a bunch of ‘xoxoxo’s to ‘socks.’ I didn’t know why she said ‘socks’ at the end of her message. So I asked her, and she said she didn’t say ‘socks.’ And then it happened again! Do you and your mom text?” I ask.

“No. My mom’s been gone for a long time. Before there were cell phones, even.”

“
My God!
That’s so sad! My grandma died last year—my mom’s mom, not my dad’s mom. My dad’s mom lives in Sweden. But my mom’s mom didn’t have a cell phone, either,” I say, hoping this might make her feel better, although my mom says two wrongs don’t make a right, so I suppose a second person being dead and not having a cell phone doesn’t make it less bad about the first person.

“She died? I’m so sorry to hear that. Had she been ill?”

“She had Alzheimer’s. She was sick for a long time.”

“Oh my. How rough! It must have been especially hard for your mom, having her in California.”

“We brought her here and had a nurse stay in the house. Her name was Lucy. The nurse, I mean. Not my grandma.” I’m surprised that she knows my grandma had lived in California, but I’m surprised by everything lately, because no one tells me what’s going on. They don’t want to bring up the subject of moving, because they think I’ll get upset, so instead weird stuff like this kept happening—strangers coming into my house, bad smells, and now my rabbit runs away.

“Anyway, it’s become a joke with me and my mom. Instead of saying ‘I love you,’ we just say ‘Socks!’”

“That’s sweet,” she says, but I’m not sure she really thinks so.

“Do you think the girls might want to change into their pajamas after they finish dessert?” I ask.

Before she can answer, Nabila appears at the door. “Elsa,” she says, “it’s time for dinner. Plus, don’t you think you should begin your homework?”

“I don’t have homework today.”

“Elsa, sweetie, I don’t think that’s true.”

Of course it’s not true. I always have so much homework that I can spend my entire life doing nothing but homework. But I don’t want the Stager to leave. I have more questions about her dog; also, the thing about the American Girl dolls is that you can let them sit there like this and not play with them for a really long time, but then, once you get started again, you remember how much fun they are. For a while I was so into them that for every birthday all I wanted were things from the catalogue, and then I ended up with so much stuff! This is a little embarrassing to admit, but at one point I think it might have been true that I had everything there is to buy in the catalogue. I think my mom bought me everything she could, just to make up for the fact that she wouldn’t let me have a dog.

The lady stands up and adjusts her skirt, which has crept up and is wrinkled. Also, her shirt has come untucked.

“Listen to Nabila,” she says, stuffing her shirt back inside the skirt and yanking the skirt around so the zipper is back on the side, where it belongs. “You should do your homework. I’ll be back tomorrow. If we have time at the end of the day, we can play a little bit more.”

“Do you promise?”

“Absolutely.”

“What about if we bake? Or paint? I have an easel and I have a really nice box of art supplies that I’ve never even opened. Can you paint?”

“Absolutely. Yes. I used to paint chairs.”

“Chairs? Like, you painted the actual chairs, or you painted pictures of chairs?”

“Pictures of chairs. I illustrated furniture.”

“Was it in museums? My dad likes art a lot. We bought a really famous yellow painting in Spain last year, for his birthday. He says it’s his favorite painting in the world and it makes him happy every time he walks in the door because it has such nice bits of light.”

“The one downstairs in the foyer?”

“Yes. Did you paint like that?”

She laughs. “No. I mean, I did just for fun, but for work it was more straightforward illustration.”

“Let’s paint some chairs!”

“Okay, come on, Elsa. Stop being such a chatterbox and let the lady go home.” Nabila has her hands on her hips. “Who did you say you were again?”

“I’m the Stager.”

“I know you are ‘the Stager,’ but do you have a name? What are you doing in here, playing with Elsa? She’s supposed to be doing her homework, and you are supposed to be … Well, I don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing exactly.”

“Nabila, don’t be mean. She’s really nice and she has a dog named Moses and we were just feeding Molly and Kaya some pie.”

“Nabila is right. You should listen to her and do your homework. I’ll be on my way.”

The Stager runs down the stairs quickly, like she’s frightened, and I hope I haven’t said anything wrong. I hear the door slam and I go to the window and see her pull her keys from her pocket and get in her car and drive away.

“The lady forgot her bag,” Nabila says. This is true. We both look toward the spot in the corner where she’s left a big orange bulging bag. It’s open, and her things are spilling out of it onto the floor. A hairbrush, a notebook, a French fry.

“I guess she’ll be back.”

“I don’t know,” says Nabila. “I’m going to ask your mom. Something about this smells a little fishy to me.”

LARS

On our way to meet the Craigslist contractor, anxiety attacks me. That’s really how it feels, like I have been jumped from behind in a dark alley and anxiety is tightening his meaty, angry fist around my throat. Although, in this case, to be more precise, he grabs me as we emerge from the taxi on East Heath Road. I begin to sweat, even though there is enough of a chill in the morning air so that Bella and I are wearing coats. Apart from the malaria-like delirium in which I’ve spent the last few nights, I’m not generally a spontaneously sweaty kind of guy, but as soon as I glimpse our new house again, I experience an episode of real physical panic, animal in its pureness and intensity. By the time we get to the front door, I must be a mess, because Bella unwraps the scarf that is draped artfully around her neck and hands it to me to blot my excretions.

She looks at me less as a husband than as a lab rat in a cage, with a sort of morbid curiosity.

“You okay, Lars?” she inquires casually, as if I have merely stubbed my toe getting out of the cab.

“Fine,” I say. “It was just a little suffocating in there.”

The ethos of our marriage demands that I always say I am fine even when I’m clearly not. I’d say I was fine even as my fingers fell off from frostbite, fine as I was being burned to a crisp in a fire, fine as I bled internally, which in fact I fear I am doing right now—which is to say, I am unsure of my answer, and wonder if I am possibly on the verge of a catastrophic event.

Bella thinks the problem, or at least the part of it that involves the light, began when I first saw the house three days earlier. And though it’s true, that visit marked the first time my anxiety manifested as a physical thing—it felt as if my heart were being squeezed, or crushed, or pulped for juice—the matter of the light is nothing new; it has been growing inside of me for the last three years, ever since I swallowed, inadvertently, the first seed of truth. Or maybe since I swallowed the first blue pill, the one meant to cast some shade on the brightness. (I don’t mean to be obtuse, but it’s hard to separate these events entirely, because they were roughly simultaneous.) (Truth and light are roughly simultaneous, too.) (Or maybe what I mean is that they are close relations.) There is even a passage in the Bible about this—“Whoever lives by the truth comes into the light.” I would tell this to Bella, but she is not easily impressed by religious symbolism. Still, you don’t need religion or symbolism or truth or pills to appreciate that the darkness in the house we have just purchased is a tangible, toxic thing, like mold.

Poor Bella. That look of desperation three days earlier, when I first explained the problem of the light! She always thinks it’s about her, but it’s not. Not always. I’m not trying to punish her, although my forgiveness is something she regards with suspicion. Because I can see the light now, I can also see that there is so much to be gained in forgiving her that it actually constitutes an act of selfishness on my part to let go of her mistake, which I have, at least to the extent that I can when the past is present in my everyday life.

Anyway, there is no need to be dramatic about the fact that the house is deficient in light. Some houses simply are, the way some people are short, or bald, or too fat or too thin. It is almost certainly on the top-ten list of complaints a potential home buyer might have when inspecting a property for purchase, and it is offensive to insinuate that the person observing the gloom is demonstrating signs of mental illness or experiencing an adverse reaction to the pharmaceuticals his wife insists he take. Besides, all I really said on that first visit was that the place might benefit from a good washing of the windows. It was on the second visit that I had the idea that we should hire a contractor to put in a skylight.

It only took an hour to identify a carpenter on Craigslist. He was willing to begin right away, and to do it for cheap, so there was really no need for Bella to make this a bigger issue than it was. But she began to obsess on the subject. She said she knew it had been a mistake to buy the house without me there, to believe me when I insisted that anything she chose was fine, to think I was
better
. Every little thing in the present, it seems, goes straight back to the past, becomes a low-hanging fruit, ripe with significance, when really, seriously, all I want is a little more light!