Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Biography of a House

2007; Wiley; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-8705.2007.00752.x

1467-8705

J. C. Lee,

Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism

Above the Monongahela River, where I live, spring has arrived, miraculous again in its coming. What a surprise, I think, another year. Outside, the blossoms of the dogwood hover in the half-light, a thousand bone-colored moths. The house is so still. Below, the city pauses before taking a first breath, and it is as if we are suspended in fog, the wet roped bridge swaying. The birds sit mute in the branches. Down by the river, the trees put on their red and green earrings, jewel seeds hanging by silk threads. Spring is the time of old women and of little girls, all dressed up, the woods made of pretty ears. Thirty years ago, we found a girl in the woods, the old man and I, walking together behind Doris's house. Young, the woods spread their sapling fingers over farmland bought out and left behind. In a nest of leaves at the base of a slender oak, we thought her an old white ball, roughed up in the hands of children and rolled down the hill. Or foxes – there were scores of them roaming the knolls where pokeweed grew and spilt its inky berries. The old man's dog barked and bounded, then backed away, and with his toe, the old man nudged her, battered white ball, turned her over. Together we saw the dark sockets, the ragged holes for breathing. Her jaw was gone – we saw this too – and it occurs to me now that this was all we really knew, the old man and me. Things material and mute, like the way the girl surprised us, looking up and blinking into the light. In a year, Doris would be dead, but the old man and I went on as if such a thing could never happen, stumbling over the facts adding up before us. Soon, the woods would gather color about themselves like scarves, first the forsythia cutting yellow across the hills, then the redbud trees with their violet arms. Down by the creek, skunk cabbage punched out of the banks. When you knelt down and pressed your nose to the plastic spathes, you smelled the rotten meat. You could look in and see the black water, the plant so alive it melted the snow in its growing, fashioning for itself little mud skirts. This morning, I look for what the cat has killed. She leaves me birds – a wren beneath the pear tree, a mourning dove beside the rose. She is my little painter, composing still lifes in the yard. To the house she brings field mice harvested in the night, dozens in a single season. A mouse a day, I tell my friends. I find them in the corners of rooms, tucked beneath the radiators, sleeping on my pillow. Today, she has left one in the bathtub, its eyes black and wet as the seed of a fruit, its head like the top of a bottle popped off. The year we found the girl, I had come to live with Doris and the old man at the end of a ragged summer in the west, where the landscape was battered by drought, washed in light. I had come to be fed and clothed and kept out of my mother's way so that she could go to school and become a nurse, like Doris, and so earn enough to keep us likewise fed and clothed. With skirts and buckled shoes, Doris replaced my trousers worn at the knees. She let my hair grow long and saw with what love I regarded my mother. Doris would teach me to live my life as a woman, which meant, of course, that she would teach me to live alone. At first, the days unfolded in gray light. The hills rolled softly and there were shadows and a sun always fighting its way through water. There was the walk lined in white petunias, in boxwood and ageratum – blue-mist flower. There was the long gravel drive and the elm tree split and blackened by lightning. There was the hill with its rows of locust falling away to the creek. When I arrived, the grass beneath the persimmons was slick with fruit, an amber jelly into which flies and bees, trapped for a thousand years, would become jewels. I did not know about birds or trees or rain then. A bright child, I was loud and fast moving. Wind and clouds I saw, weather moving across the flat plate of the sky, and earth heaped in the fields. But the subtle distinctions I missed altogether, as one misses hue or tone or temperature. The singing of a bird I could not distinguish from the wider din of the world, or patterns of flight from the arrival of a storm or a shift in the light. Walking with the old man, he scanned the trees for dark silhouettes – the finch's sturdy beak, the flycatcher's long tail. In this way, I began to wake up, to see. Later, he would search for names in books bound in green linen. He knew by the curve of the wing, for instance, or the patterned feathers in flight, the difference between a hawk and a harrier, a swallow and a swift. How does a house come by its name? Sugar Hill was first a farm parceled out, the old house painted white, the sloping land rimmed in apple and yew. Lot 3B. Doris arrived by way of the sea, from her father's farm to small seaside towns, moving farther south and further inland with each passing year. Her young husband, not yet the old man, not yet having imagined my mother or me, was nevertheless already a watcher of birds. They would not live by the sea, he told Doris. And she, a good young wife, wrote from her father's farm, whatever you wish, I will do. Doris would build a house to salve her disappointment, a place she could own, and so the drawings arrived by mail. No matter there would be no salt to gray the clapboard, no wind tossing gulls in the air. Still, her longing would not leave her sentimental. Doris would build her house from brick, sturdy and settled, and they two, the house and the wife would be reconciled to the landscape in which they found themselves. They bought the land, Doris and her husband, recording their payments in a ledger. But it would be ten years before they could knock the old farmhouse down, she with a sledgehammer and trousers rolled to the knee, her dark hair rubbed out of place. They ate tomatoes with salt, and with knives pried open oysters, sat in the grass and drank beer. Their children hauled broken stones and wood and then disappeared into the thicket. On her father's farm, the soil was riddled with stones and what grew there had to be coaxed or beaten from the dirt. So, at Sugar Hill, Doris kept the cherry tree and two pears, plums and apples, and planted a rose. Fruit fell to the ground and rotted, played host to wasps and bees, a glorious waste. To her house, she carried her mother's hutch, her grandfather's oxen bow with its oiled and heavy wood, the great brass ring hammered out. What she could not carry – the sea, her mother – these were desertions for which she, dutiful daughter, would hold herself always accountable. Looking up at my house, you cannot help but notice how it leans, all skinny lines and pitched roof and drawn onto the side of a hill. To walk from east to west in any room is to walk downhill. You can see the cluttered hillsides across the river, the spires of a small cathedral catching the sun, sending signals heavenward. Barges push boxes of coal against the current, and the bridges are dark humps. Old women once swept soot frost from their porches and the gloves their daughters wore turned black. They thought the sky was the color of sulphur. What early spring light there was that day the old man and I walked into the woods, hesitated at the edges of the trees. After we found her, we walked out in shadow, and though we did not yet know her name, or where she had lived, though we did not know how she had come to rest in the woods, or where to find her jawbone, her vertebrae or her pelvis, the old man held her upright as he walked, letting her see the path ahead. At Sugar Hill, he stood before a shelf of books – the Audubon Water Bird Guide, A Field Guide to Mammals. These were the gifts he and Doris exchanged on Mother's day and at the new year, her birthday, books filled with the names of things. Doris took photographs, while behind the old man, the locust trees were black smears against the sky. Digging in the pocket of her sweater, Doris discovered there among the alcohol swabs and syringes, the stethoscope and aspirin she carried on rounds through the night, the key to the hospital cupboard where they kept the morphine, the sweet sleepy Demerol, vials to stop the heart. Of all the things a nurse must not do, she must not keep this key for herself, and so Doris dressed and got in her car, and went back to work. The old man grew sullen then, his audience having departed, his wife. Later, of course, we would think of the cupboard with its glass bottles, its recipes for quick sleep. We would remember how easily Doris kept the key. I looked at the seams in the girl's head, the way her skull had been sewn together, though by whose hand, I did not know, and it seemed to me then that there were two kinds of words and that they lived in two distinct places – in books and in the mouths of people. The first gave shape to the world, outlined its forms with sounds like bird, flower, tree. This was why the dictionary lay always open on its stand, the pages turned to color plates: gems and seashells – the spiny oyster and sundial, lightning volute and alphabet cone. The second, words in the mouths of the living, seemed most often to ruin. Wreckage was the sound that came to mind. When I found my house, I had not been looking. My friend, though, was looking for something cheap, a fixer-upper he could purchase for a few thousand dollars, and we drove up and down the rickety hillsides together. This was how we happened on a little red house with trees, a chain-link fence and broken cement steps. Inside, the house smelled familiar, old, of coffee and wood, and we walked into each room, up first one flight of narrow steps and then another. Out the windows, blackbirds pecked at the grass. The woman who had lived and died in the house had left palm fronds on the sills and empty jars in the pantry, one labeled ‘Cinnamon Sugar’, another ‘Holy Water’. Soon, I found myself alone in the basement, a cavern dug into the side of the hill and shored up with stones. There, I rummaged through wooden boxes filled with bolts and skeleton keys, one of which I placed in my pocket. I cannot explain why a woman knows her house or how a house lays its claim upon her. I cannot tell you why she presses her hands against the walls as she walks from one room to another, or speaks aloud though no one is there. The year I lived with Doris and the old man, I learned about the bones in things. When the rains came, green rushed in and lit up the place. Water filled the window wells where the cat hunkered down and chewed her kills and the frogs slept, waiting for spring. Rain loosened the frogs and you could see them through the basement windows, kicking, unable to find purchase. How I loved saving the living from the dead, trapping the frogs and lifting them onto the new grass, feeling their tiny amphibian hearts, their flat slick heads pushing to get away. In my room at the top of the house, I kept the skulls of birds fished from the wells once the waters receded again, set the bones on toy chairs, which Doris had given to me, and in the drawers of bureaus with tiny locks and keys. The room in which I slept had been the old man's, and it was hung with the portraits of birds, the shelves lined with trophies won for marksmanship. In the closet where I kept my clothes, a box filled with paper targets, shot through. As soon as the grass had grown long enough to cut, Doris set out on her tractor to mow it down. Once, she swept a turtle into the blades. She bent down and picked up the pieces of shell, the bright flesh torn from its house. From my room, I heard the engine cease and saw her walking up the hill. We ate dinner that night as usual, the meat on its plate, the baked potato with butter, the pale salad. Water gathered on glasses and the old man said something, but no one listened. In Doris's house, the men were the guests and also the ones who spoke first, but the women wound their silences around themselves, tight as nooses. The sky filled with lightning and the rains broke the air open. Above the fireplace, the girl in golden light leaned in her half-door, and Doris pushed the door at Sugar Hill open, letting in the smell of the storm. When it rains, water seeps into my house through gaps in the shingles, blistering plaster and paint. Cold air surges in through the window frames and lifts the curtains, rustles papers lying about. The cat huddles on the bed and looks at me reprovingly. When the weather warms, I throw open the doors and haul the screens up from the basement. Moths arrive as if by magic and bang against the lights, and spiders that have wintered in the corners of the ceiling vanish from their cottony nests. I find little bundles of sticks hanging from the ceiling, their inhabitants sleeping soundly within, and a man comes to the door to sell me home improvement schemes meant for the old and infirm, the anxious and lonely. He carries a stack of bright fliers –Hauling, basement cleanouts!– but is surprised when I appear. He mutters something about the roof then hurries down the street to visit my neighbor, a woman in her eighties who tells me gypsies are roaming the hills again, breaking into houses and stealing change from jars. The girl's name was Evalyn. Evalyn, in her Easter egg dress, walking home from a talent show at the junior high, a prize in her hand. What did the principal say about her, Evalyn who wanted to be an actress? She was so popular. The car came up the road, its headlights making of her legs a silhouette, the car lighting her up. And the newspapers, what did they say? A discovery of two women's headless bodies, apparently unrelated. The police searched the woods where the old man and I had walked, but they found the rest of Evalyn sleeping in a field nearby. This is what I say –Foxes, foxes, down the hill they rolled dear Evalyn's head. If the skeleton is made to protect the soft tissue, the delicate inner organs, then what does a house protect, with its rafters and copper pipes, its stairways and landings and lights? Is it a matter of keeping one thing out while keeping another in? The first night I slept alone in my house, I turned the locks on the doors. I wanted to sleep the sleep of the protected, the safe. Later, I left the doors open to let in the air, and I never worried. The house wraps me in solitude, and I have come to live only with ghosts who, though they might knock the soap from its dish or slam a cupboard door, do not speak, do not withhold speaking. Still, with its peeling shingles and wavy glass windows, its hulking radiators and termite pocked floors, my house wants, I sometimes fear, to fall into the street. In this way, it threatens to abandon me, to leave me homeless. I dream the locust in the yard has heaved and split, rotten at its heart, its massive trunk carving through the meat of the house. Everywhere, broken limbs and bags of plaster spilled, a gash in the house, and above, the empty sky. Ten years after Doris died, we parceled out her things, labeled them and tucked them away in a warehouse not far from Sugar Hill. The secretaire with its paper and stamps, the sewing table with its spools of thread and bright, sharp needles. For days, we wandered through the house, emptying the contents of drawers into boxes, listening to the starlings in the trees, their voices like wet balloons rubbing together. By then, the old man was living elsewhere, unable to speak. What would we do, we asked one another, with the old man's dark room, the black and white photographs hung from the ceiling like laundry? What of the sofa, coarse and solitary in the basement, on which no one would sit? I stood mute beside it then, but now I want to know, why lay down here, in the dimness, where water fills the wells. How does one decide on a room in which to die? Why not a room filled with light? When I bought my house, my mother and I went to retrieve Doris's things. Now, the old man was dead, Sugar Hill sold. We drove the truck through the countryside, stopped at a diner and ordered crab-cakes and beer. We ate and looked out the window, and my mother said something about how it puzzled her, the way she felt so little for Doris, thinking of her now. Finally, she said, Doris had receded, grown faint. My mother's love for her own mother having worn itself out. Still, my mother attempts to rid herself of the clutter. She opens her garage door and dumps Doris's things into the alley – a bureau with a matching mirror, three tables that fit one into the other like Russian dolls. Nesting tables. A young woman pushes a shopping cart away with boxes of dishes and the mirror. She will return for the dresser with its drawers lined in crackling blue paper. At the end of the day, the dry sink sits at the lip of the garage, waiting to be booted out, and my mother calls to ask if I will take the ginger bowls. She is standing before her kitchen cupboards, looking up. I can't use them for anything, she tells me, and I can't throw them out. At the diner that afternoon, my mother and I had sat at a table beside the parking lot, keeping our eyes on the truck. Across the road, someone had planted a quince, and its flowers were like a fish cut open and spilled onto a blank sea. Did Doris speak, you may want to ask, before she settled to sleep, and if so, then what did she say? I want to tell you, for I have seen it so many times in my own mind, though the thing itself is now long gone, yes, she left a note. But perhaps the question you should ask is to whom? To her children she wrote, my work is done. To the old man, Doris said nothing. Was there ever a silence so definite, an absence of words so deafening? Upstairs, the books bound in green linen, the dictionary on its stand, its pages closed now, and in the wells, the frogs struggling to leap out of the water and the grass shocked green again. On a ship sailing the sea was one daughter, the other out west, where, as happened so rarely, it was raining. Here, in April, the old pear huddles in the yard and throws out a few flowers. Solitary, its mate is a gnarled stump in the middle of my garden. Each year, I wonder where the pollen comes from to make the fruit, but it does, and pears fall to the ground and are eaten, some of them, by rabbits and squirrels. The others rot and scorch the grass. Soon, the family of raccoons who live in my chimney will abandon their winter home for the brush pile at the back of the yard, but lying in bed at night, I can still hear them turning and purring in their dark nest. Beneath the pear, where the earth around the roots is soft and easy to dig, I bury what the cat kills. I think about how we make our houses out of the dead, the way we gather their bones to us, the sea by which they wanted to live, a girl standing at an open door. Or, I think of the way we try to shed them, to walk out of their houses as a cicada walks out of its shell. Setting off with a shovel and the mouse, I thank the cat for her gruesome little gift. Out front, the yellow voiced daffodils light up the garden and I do my best to put things to rest in this bone yard, this house.