On the other side of town, where other people lived, a man named Noel and a woman named Nitchka were in an apartment, in the kitchen, having a discussion about music. The woman said, “So you know nothing at all? Not a single song?”
“I don’t think so,” said Noel. Why was this a problem for her? It wasn’t a problem for him. So he didn’t know any songs. He had always been willing to let her know more than he did; it didn’t bother him, until it bothered her.
“Noel, what kind of upbringing did you have, anyway?” He knew she felt he had been deprived and that he should feel angry about it. But he did! He did feel angry about it! “Didn’t your parents ever sing songs to you?” she asked. “Can’t you even sing one single song by heart? Sing a song. Just any song.”
“Like what?”
“If there was a gun to your head, what song would you sing?”
“I don’t know!” he shouted, and threw a chair across the room. They hadn’t had sex in two months.
“Is it that you don’t even know the name of a song?”
At night, every night, they just lay there with their magazines and Tylenol PM and then, often with the lights still on, were whisked quickly down into their own separate worlds of sleep—his filled with lots of whirling trees and antique flying machines and bouquets of ferns. He had no idea why.
“I know the name of a song,” he said.
“What song?”
“ ‘Open the Door, Richard.’ ”
“What kind of song is that?”
It was a song his friend Richard’s mother would sing when he was twelve and he and Richard were locked in the bedroom, flipping madly through magazines: Breasts and the Rest, Tight Tushies, and Lollapalooza Ladies. But it was a real song, which still existed—though you couldn’t find those magazines anymore. Noel had looked.
“See? I know a song that you don’t!” he exclaimed.
“Is this a song of spiritual significance to you?”
“Yup, it really is.” He picked up a rubber band from the counter, stretched it between his fingers, and released it. It hit her in the chin. “Sorry. That was an accident,” he said.
“Something is deeply missing in you!” Nitchka shouted, and stormed out of the apartment for a walk.
Noel sank back against the refrigerator. He could see his own reflection in the window over the sink. It was dim and translucent, and a long twisted cobweb outside, caught on the eaves, swung back and forth across his face like a noose. He looked crazy and ill—but with just a smidgen of charisma! “If there was a gun to your head,” he said to the reflection, “what song would you sing?”
· · ·
Ruth wondered whether she really needed a project this badly. A diversion. A resurrection. An undertaking. Their daughter, Mitzy, grown and gone—was the whole empty nest thing such a crisis that they would devote the rest of their days to this mortician’s delight? Was it that horribly, echoey quiet and nothing-nothing not to have Mitzy and her struggles furnishing their lives? Was it so bad no longer to have a daughter’s frustrated artistic temperament bleeding daily on the carpet of their brains? Mitzy, dear Mitzy, was a dancer. All those ballet and tap lessons as a child—she wasn’t supposed to have taken them seriously! They had been intended as middle-class irony and window dressing—you weren’t actually supposed to become a dancer. But Mitzy had. Despite that she was the fattest in the troupe every time, never belonging, rejected from every important company, until one day a young director saw how beautifully, soulfully she danced—“How beautifully the fat girl dances!”—and ushered her past the corps, set her center stage, and made her a star. Now she traveled the world over and was the darling of the critics. “Size fourteen, yet!” crowed one reviewer. “It is a miracle to see!” She had become a triumph of feet over heft, spirit over matter, matter over doesn’t-matter, a figure of immortality, a big fat angel really, and she had “many, many homosexual fans,” as Terence put it. As a result, she now rarely came home. Ruth sometimes got postcards, but Ruth hated postcards—so careless and cheap, especially from this new angel of dance writing to her own sick mother. But that was the way with children.
Once, over a year and a half ago, Mitzy had come home, but it was only for two weeks—during Ruth’s chemotherapy. Mitzy was, as usual, in a state of crisis. “Sure they like my work,” she wailed as Ruth adjusted that first itchy acrylic wig, the one that used to scare people. “But do they like me?” Mitzy was an only child, so it was natural that her first bout of sibling rivalry would be with her own work. When Ruth suggested as much, Mitzy gave her a withering look accompanied by a snorting noise, and after that, with a cocked eyebrow and a wince of a gaze, Mitzy began monopolizing the telephone with moving and travel plans. “You seem to be doing extremely well, Mom,” she said, looking over her shoulder, jotting things down. Then she’d fled.
At first Terence, even more than she, seemed enlivened by the prospect of new real estate. The simplest discussion—of door-jambs or gutters—made his blood move around his face and neck like a lava lamp. Roof-shingle samples—rough, grainy squares of sepia, rose, and gray—lit his eyes up like love. He brought home doorknob catalogs and phoned a plasterer or two. After a while, however, she could see him tire and retreat, recoil even—another fling flung. “My God, Terence. Don’t quit on me now. This is just like the Rollerblades!” He had last fall gone through a Rollerblade period.
“I’m way too busy,” he said.
And before Ruth knew it, the entire house project—its purchase and renovation—had been turned over to her.
First Ruth had to try to sell their current house. She decided to try something called a “fosbo.” FOSBO: a “For Sale by Owner.” She put ads in papers, bought a sign for the front yard, and planted violet and coral impatiens in the flower beds for the horticulturally unsuspecting, those with no knowledge of perennials. Gorgeous yard! Mature plantings! She worked up a little flyer describing the moldings and light fixtures, all “original to the house.” Someone came by to look and sniff. He fingered one of the ripped window shades. “Original to the house?” he said.
“All right, you’re out of here,” she said. To subsequent prospective buyers, she abandoned any sales pitch and went for candor. “I admit, this bathroom’s got mildew. And look at this stupid little hallway. This is why we’re moving! We hate this house.” She soon hired back her Forrest Gump realtor, who, at the open house, played Vivaldi on the stereo and baked banana bread, selling the place in two hours.
The night after they closed on both houses, having sat silently through the two proceedings, like deaf-mutes being had, the mysterious Canadian once more absent and represented only by a purple-suited realtor named Flo, Ruth and Terence stood in their empty new house and ate take-out Chinese straight from the cartons. Their furniture was sitting in a truck, which was parked in a supermarket parking lot on the east side of town, and it all would be delivered the next day. For now, they stood at the bare front window of their large, echoey new dining room. A small lit candle on the floor cast their shadows up on the ceiling, gloomy and fat. Wind rattled the panes and the boiler in the cellar burst on in small, frightening explosions. The radiators hissed and smelled like cats, burning off dust as they heated up, vibrating the cobwebs in the ceiling corners above them. The entire frame of the house groaned and rumbled. There was scampering in the walls. The sound of footsteps—or something like footsteps—thudded softly in the attic, two floors above them.
“We’ve bought a haunted house,” said Ruth. Terence’s mouth was full of hot cabbagey egg roll. “A ghost!” she continued. “Just a little extra protein. Just a little amino-acid bonus.” It was what her own father had always said when he found a small green worm in his bowl of blueberries.
“The house is settling,” said Terence.
“It’s had a hundred and ten years to settle; you would think it had gotten it done with by now.”
“Settling goes on and on,” said Terence.
“We would know,” s
aid Ruth.
He looked at her, then dug into the container of lo mein.
A scrabbling sound came from the front porch. Terence chewed, swallowed, then walked over to turn the light on, but the light didn’t come on. “Was this disclosed?” he shouted.
“It’s probably just the lightbulb.”
“All new lightbulbs were just put in, Flo said.” He opened the front door. “The light’s broken, and it should have been disclosed.” He was holding a flashlight with one hand and unscrewing the front light with the other. Behind the light fixture gleamed three pairs of masked eyes. Dark raccoon feces were mounded up in the crawl space between the ceiling and the roof.
“What the hell?” shouted Terence, backing away.
“This house is infested!” said Ruth. She put down her food.
“How did those creatures get up there?”
She felt a twinge in her one lung. “How does anything get anywhere—that’s what I want to know.” She had only ever been the lightest of smokers, never in a high-risk category, but now every pinch, prick, tick, or tock in her ribs, every glitch in the material world anywhere made her want to light up and puff.
“Oh, God, the stench.”
“Shouldn’t the inspector have found this?”
“Inspectors! Obviously, they’re useless. What this place needed was an MRI.”
“Ah, geeze. This is the worst.”
Every house is a grave, thought Ruth. All that life-stealing fuss and preparation. Which made moving from a house a resurrection—or an exodus of ghouls, depending on your point of view—and made moving to a house (yet another house!) the darkest of follies and desires. At best, it was a restlessness come falsely to rest. But the inevitable rot and demolition, from which the soul eventually had to flee (to live in the sky or disperse itself among the trees?), would necessarily make a person stupid with unhappiness.
Oh, well!
After their furniture arrived and was positioned almost exactly the way it had been in their old house, Ruth began to call a lot of people to come measure, inspect, capture, cart away, clean, spray, bring samples, provide estimates and bids, and sometimes they did come, though once people had gotten a deposit, they often disappeared entirely. Machines began to answer instead of humans and sometimes phone numbers announced themselves disconnected altogether. “We’re sorry. The number you have reached …”
The windows of the new house were huge—dusty, but bright because of their size—and because the shade shop had not yet delivered the shades, the entire neighborhood of spiffy middle management could peer into Ruth and Terence’s bedroom. For one long, bewildering day, Ruth took to waving, and only sometimes did people wave back. More often, they just squinted and stared. The next day, Ruth taped bedsheets up to the windows with masking tape, but invariably the sheets fell off after ten minutes. When she bathed, she had to crawl naked out of the bathroom down the hall and into the bedroom and then into the closet to put her clothes on. Or sometimes she just lay there on the bathroom floor and wriggled into things. It was all so very hard.
In their new backyard, crows the size of suitcases cawed and bounced in the branches of the pear tree. Carpenter ants—like shiny pieces of a child’s game—swarmed the porch steps. Ruth made even more phone calls, and finally a man with a mottled, bulbous nose and a clean white van with a cockroach painted on it came and doused the ants with poison.
“It just looks like a fire extinguisher, what you’re using,” said Ruth, watching.
“Ho no, ma’am. Way stronger than that.” He wheezed. His nose was knobby as a pickle. He looked underneath the porch and then back up at Ruth. “There’s a whole lot of dying going on in there,” he said.
“There’s nothing you can do about the crows?” Ruth asked.
“Not me, but you could get a gun and shoot ’em yourself,” he said. “It’s not legal, but if your house were one hundred yards down that way, it would be. If it were one hundred yards down that way, you could bag twenty crows a day. Since you’re where you are, within the town limits, you’re going to have to do it at night, with a silencer. Catch ’em live in the morning with nets and corn, then at sunset, take ’em out behind the garage and put ’em out of your misery.”
“Nets?” said Ruth.
She called many people. She collected more guesstimates and advice. A guy named Noel from a lawn company advised her to forget about the crows, worry about the squirrels. She should plant her tulips deeper, and with a lot of red pepper, so that squirrels would not dig them up. “Look at all these squirrels!” he said, pointing to the garage roof and to all the weedy flower beds. “And how about some ground cover in here, by the porch, some lilies by the well, and some sunflowers in the side yard?”
“Let me think about it,” said Ruth. “I would like to keep some of these violets,” she said, indicating the pleasant-looking leaves throughout the irises.
“Those aren’t violets. That’s a weed. That’s a very common, tough little weed.”
“I always thought those were violets.”
“Nope.”
“Things can really overtake a place, can’t they? This planet’s just one big divisive cutthroat competition of growing. I mean, they look like violets, don’t they? The leaves, I mean.”
Noel shrugged. “Not to me. Not really.”
How could she keep any of it straight? There was spirea and there was false spirea—she forgot which was which. “Which is the spirea again?” she asked. Noel pointed to the bridal-wreath hedge, which was joyously blooming from left to right, from sun to shade, and in two weeks would sag and brown in the same direction. “Ah, marriage,” she said aloud.
“Pardon?” said Noel.
“Are you married?” she asked.
He gave her a tired little smile and said, “No. Trying to make it happen with a girlfriend, but no, not married.”
“That’s probably better,” said Ruth.
“How about this vegetable garden?” he asked nervously.
“It’s just a lot of grass with a rhubarb in it,” said Ruth. “I’d like to dig the whole thing up and plant roses—unless you think it’s bad luck to replace food with flowers. Vanity before the Lord, or something.”
“It’s up to you,” he said.
She called him back that night. He personally, no machine, answered the phone. “I’ve been thinking about the sunflowers,” she said.
“Who is this?” he said.
“Ruth. Ruth Aikins.”
“Oh, say, Ruth. Ruth! Hi!”
“Hi,” she said in a worried way. He sounded as if he’d been drinking.
“Now what about those sunflowers?” he asked. “I’d like to plant those sunflowers real soon, you know that? Here’s why: my girlfriend’s talking again about leaving me, and I’ve just been diagnosed with lymphoma. So I’d like to see some sunflowers come up end of August.”
“Oh, my God. Life stinks!” cried Ruth.
“Yup. So I’d like to see some sunflowers. End of summer, I’d like something to look forward to.”
“What kind of girlfriend talks about leaving her beau at a time like this?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean—good riddance. On the other hand, you know what you should do? You should make yourself a good cup of tea and sit down and write her a letter. You’re going to need someone to care for you through all this. Don’t let her call all the shots. Let her understand the implications of her behavior and her responsibilities to you. I know whereof I speak.”
Ruth was about to explain further, when Noel cleared his throat hotly. “I don’t think it’s such a great idea for you to go get personal and advising. I mean, look. Ruth, is it? You see, I don’t even know your name, Ruth. I know a lot of Ruths. You could be goddamned anyone. Ruth this, Ruth that, Ruth who knows. As a matter of fact, the lymphoma thing I just made up, because I thought you were a totally different Ruth.” And with that, he hung up.
She put out cages for the squirrels—the squirrels
who gnawed the hyacinth bulbs, giving their smooth surfaces runs like stockings, the squirrels who utterly devoured the crocuses. From the back porch, she watched each squirrel thrash around in the cage for an hour, hurling itself against the cage bars and rubbing bald spots into its head, before she finally took pity and drove each one to a faraway quarry to set it free. The quarry was a spot that Terence had recommended as “a beautiful seclusion, a rodent Eden, a hillside of oaks above a running brook.” Such poetry: probably he’d gotten laid there once. Talk about your rodent Eden! In actuality, the place was a depressing little gravel gully, with a trickle of brown water running through it, a tiny crew of scrub oaks manning the nearby incline. It was the kind of place where the squirrel mafia would have dumped their offed squirrels.
She lifted the trapdoor and watched each animal scurry off toward the hillside. Did they know what they were doing? Would they join their friends, or would every last one of them find their way back to the hollow walls of her house and set up shop again?
The bats—bats!—arrived the following week, one afternoon during a loud, dark thundershower, like a horror movie. They flew back and forth in the stairwells, then hung upside down from the picture-frame molding in the dining room, where they discreetly defecated, leaving clumps of shiny black guano pasted to the wall.
Ruth phoned her husband at his office but only got his voice mail, so she then phoned Carla, who came dashing over with a tennis racket, a butterfly net, and a push broom, all with ribbons tied around their handles. “These are my housewarming presents,” she said.
“They’re swooping again! Look out! They’re swooping!”