Some Kind of Happy Life
Excerpt from: “Some Kind of Happy Life”
Donna, my mother, leaves messages:
“Call me.”
“You never call me anymore. Why don’t you call me?”
“If you call me between five and six, if you call me in an hour, in ten minutes, I’ll be there, so call me then.”
She’s itching to talk about her new house. She’s getting ahead of herself. The house isn’t hers yet—the man it belongs to hasn’t asked her to move in yet—and still she wants to tell me the span and slope of the walls, how she plans to rearrange the furniture. It’s all we talk about anymore. Houses.
Donna has always loved a good house. There were quite a few, in the years between leaving my father and me leaving her. The houses she found were scattered around the Hudson River Valley, in towns like Catskill and Cairo, Red Hook, Woodstock, Stone Ridge, Neversink. I remember pale-brick split-levels, farmhouses, even one crumbling three-story Victorian. There were houses with secret rooms in the attic, houses that had garages filled with things the last tenants left behind, and houses still tagged from the construction site. In one house, there was buried treasure in the blocks of the foundation. In another, a jar of pennies under the sink.
Donna wasn’t happy with any of them. She knew the right house, the one meant to be ours, would show its face one day. The problem was that it’s hard to know for sure from just an exterior or a single tour. Blue houses, white houses, brick and stucco and stained wood—any could be the one. She carried her hopes around with the real-estate listings. Every FOR RENT sign was meant for her alone to see.
*
Donna couldn’t stay in a house for too long. There was a house we had near the bank of the Hudson. It was one of our first, but it wouldn’t last. We felt this coming in the way the house squirmed as we slept—with groans and with wheezes and loud sighs—and in the way the drainpipes shook in the wind, trying to wriggle their way off the roof.
This was the house with the windows that slid open on their own, that could not be locked down. It was the house with the floorboards that had worn in a slant toward the front door. The house was pushing us out. Sometimes Donna and I would be coming in with a bag of groceries and the storm door would get stuck in its frame. She’d pull and I’d pull and the door would only come open with the greatest of force, like our own kitchen was a place where we should never have been.
What Donna told me while we lived in this house was everything—or so she said—but there was one time, as there would soon be others, when she refused to let me in. What separated us had to do with a man. There was always a man in the house with us, one man or another man, in this house or the next.
This time in this particular house, she stayed the whole night in the hallway, pacing the landing of stairs between one floor and the next. From there she had a view of the driveway. She was waiting for a man to come back to her. As each car passed, she could be found at the window, open of course because we couldn’t keep it closed, leaning out to see which set of wheels might make the turn in. Didn’t she listen to herself? If a house doesn’t want you in it, it will find a way to let you know. And if a man has had his fill of you, he’ll just park his car somewhere else.
*
Wednesday night, Donna finally gets me on the phone. She wants to know why I don’t like the new man she’s seeing. I don’t use his name. I call him “Him.” She wants me comfortable, she wants us as we were, able to talk about anything, so she calls him Him, too. “There are things I want to tell you about Him,” Donna says. “There are things about Him I want you to understand.”
“I want you to be happy,” I say. “If he makes you happy, then I don’t need to know anything more about Him.”
“He wasn’t drunk. I asked Him. And he told me.”
“The car was swerving all over the road. We almost hit a tree.”
“I think you’re jealous. It could be any man. Any man at all, and you wouldn’t want to share me with him.”
I don’t answer her calls for three days after that.
*
There was one house where objects lost their space in the world and disappeared. Donna’s boyfriend at the time found us this house. Its shingles hadn’t been painted in so long they had faded back to gray.
The objects we lost there could be anything: a shoe, a French schoolbook, a dinner plate left unattended, a phone cord, a pen. They were always ordinary objects, and always, at point when they were discovered missing, absolute necessities.
The house made us suspicious. We became irrational, hoarding clothes, counting the loose change in our wallets. When we left the house, even if just to the supermarket, we carried anything we thought we couldn’t live without. Inside our bags and backpacks at any given moment could be a stapler, a favorite bra, a set of colored markers, five books, a green sweater, a mix tape.
Guests to the house suspected none of this. They’d leave a coat in the hall closet and expect it to be there when they were ready to leave. When the coat was gone, they’d wait for someone to retrieve it. They wouldn’t trust us when we came up empty-handed. They’d search the closet themselves—behind the vacuum cleaner, separating every hanger, pulling out the old scarves and mittens from the top shelf. They wouldn’t think to leave the house without their coat. They didn’t realize this could take years.
It wasn’t until Donna kicked the man out of the house that we discovered his stash in the shed: keys, sneakers, textbooks for French 101 and Earth Science, and the coats and hats and purses belonging to my or Donna’s friends. Not that it mattered. She’d found us a new house, white, with rosebushes in the lawn. We’d dig a pond. We’d make new friends. It might take her a few months, but she’d find us another man.
*
“I’m lonely,” Donna says on Saturday. “Have you seen the men my age? They’re losers or they’re married or both. At least he’s not married.”
“I think he’s a loser,” I say.
She gets quiet but doesn’t hang up. After a pause, she says, “He’s here. I think I heard his truck.”
*
There was a green house we lived in once, a kind of muddy yellow-green that made us say we wouldn’t stay there long. In that house there was the room with the coat-stand and the room with the couch and then another room—only large enough to fit our dining table-and from that room, through a swinging white door, the kitchen. In fact, the entire first floor of this house could be circled upon itself (coat-stand, couch, table, kitchen, coat-stand, couch, table, kitchen) and so it seemed that in passing through the rooms we never reached where we were going, that we kept meaning to go there but ended up somewhere else.
Only one room didn’t connect to the others. It was an ascending gap beneath the stairs that we called the crawlspace. When we stood inside, it seemed to climb to the highest peak of the house, the underside of the stairs folding up like an accordion to the roof. Donna used the crawlspace for storage, cramming in whatever she could fit onto the shelves. If she managed to get something up on a shelf but couldn’t see where it was, she used the end of the broom to retrieve it, knocking around on the uppermost shelves until she sent it crashing down.
Of course, there was always the hazard of knocking something so far back on the shelves that we wouldn’t see it again. When this happened, Donna decided to let it be—giving up her oven mitts and grass-woven basket—leaving it up to fate. She had a belief that the crawlspace gave up only what we needed at the moment we needed it, that if we happened to go in looking for something and came out with another thing entirely, it was a find worth saving, that if the crawlspace took something from us—say my camera, or the old wedding album featuring my father—it wasn’t ours to have.
Donna went through three men while we lived in this house. They fell into her arms, stayed awhile, and were then lost to the outer reaches of town. Once they were gone, she said she didn’t like them much anyway. They were like the winter coat with the broken zipper that we’d found in the crawlspace—it was far too small for me—and also the tennis racket, since neither of us knew how to play.
*
“I got your message,” Donna says. “I know you don’t agree with my decision, but you don’t have to be so . . . cruel.” She clears her throat. “I’m calling because I need a favor. I could use some help with the move. Could you take the train up? This Saturday? I’m really counting on you to come.”
The line hisses as she thinks of some way to convince me. “After all,” she says, holding out the card of all cards, “I am your mother.” . . .
(excerpt modified from the original / 2007, The Portland Review)