Chapter 1

My house stood naked and exposed to the world, her roof peeled away like burnt skin, her walls ripped from her withered bones, her ceiling collapsed, her floors a littered patchwork of scarred tiles and broken slats. She was a ruin. I stood watching her shame, and knew her shame in my own bones. I was naked, too.

            I had done this to her. I had done this to myself. This was our moment of accountability. It was, too, our moment of rebirth. Although the birth process takes far longer than a moment, doesn’t it? It takes an entire lifetime, a series of small births and small deaths, waking from the dead, again and again, to reclaim life.

            I rolled a stray iron nail between my fingers, bent from hammering. Well, then. Let us begin. Push, I thought. Push until your body feels as if it will split wide open, head to foot, rib cage cracked open to an exposed heart, flesh unzipped, raw muscle and vein pulsing, stud and bone, a tangle of gut, from your core emerging this fresh, new life.

            It had never occurred to me to apologize to a house before, but I whispered an apology to her now. It was only in this process of her denuding that I had begun to think of her as a “she.” The builder asked me her age, and at first I cringed at this lack of courtesy, as if asking an elderly woman her years, then realized my foolishness—we were talking about a house. Weren’t we? I shrugged. I wasn’t good at math. If memory served, that faulty mechanism, then that original stack of papers I had signed at that long ago closing had stated thirty-seven. That would make her … I ticked off the years in my mind … a little past fifty now. Slam. Like me.

            I looked at her with new eyes: like me. We had come through this together, and just as I had known a harsh betrayal, so had she. We were two women in midlife, showing the ravages of abuse and neglect. We were two women who had nearly given up the ghost and now were screaming to be reborn again. We, too, deserved to be loved. If only by ourselves, and one the other.

            Standing on my front lawn, hers, littered with her debris and a detritus of a dozen years or more, I whispered: “I’m sorry.” I took a deep breath, then said it again, “I’m sorry. Forgive me. You deserved better.”

            As did I. Such tears. Oh, I still hate them! I dropped the bent nail, then picked it up again, tucked it into my jeans pocket, wiped my face with the back of my hand, and went back inside.

Living Room

I wonder why they call it this: a living room. Is this where we live? And in the other rooms, do we not live there equally, or even more? This great room of first entry, in many ways, it is the mask that must come down as intimacy grows. It is our best foot forward. Our face with makeup on. Our Sunday outfit.

          Only mine was a ruin. Little of it had reflected me at all. It was a façade, a collage of others in my life, a series of adopted faces and me, hiding behind those others. I did not want my face to be seen. Only the bookshelves had been mine, and now, in the midst of this renovation, only the bookshelves would remain.

          The bookshelves stood emptied, streaks of dust across the individual shelves, prints and outlines of books that had crammed their inner space. I had brought the books upstairs and dumped them in the spare bedroom, once my son’s, then my own den, then a guest bedroom for a returning child or friend dropping by.

          Twice, I had let Jake sleep there. Twice, after making it clear he no longer belonged in my bed.

          I shuddered. He had never belonged in my bed. There, the truth of it.

          Yes, well, and his presence was here, too, in this so-called living room, but somehow here his ghost chilled me less. These were more pleasant hours, Sunday mornings still in robes, sipping just brewed coffee from freshly ground beans. Small luxuries. I would always light candles on Sunday mornings, grouped together on the tiny coffee table, if one could call it that. An oversized ceramic pot, topped by a round piece of glass. It served well. I would keep that, too, if no longer as a table, but, finally, back to its intended existence—as an oversized pot.

          “It’s not a pot. It’s a vase.” I could hear my mother’s voice.

          The couch had been hers. The love seat, the chair, the ottoman. Dirty brown monstrosities, streaked with the colors of rust and burnt orange. I had hated the pieces when they were new, I hated them now. I had always hated them. How had she managed to get them into my house against all my protest? How did that happen?

          Heavy things, and with them had come a general heaviness into this room. I had liked this living room well enough when I had first walked into it, desperately looking for shelter, a roof over the heads of my two children, of my own head, the fuzzy little heads of my pets, a trio of cats, each with their own rescue story. We were all a rescue story. I was fine with the idea of living in a house empty of furniture, but my mother would not hear of it.

          “Where will you sit? Where will your guests sit? You can’t sit on the floor.”

          And why not? I felt safe closer to the ground. Perhaps my guests would not have been so inclined to overstay their welcome if I had had no seating to offer them. I feared that once those heavy, dark pieces were brought into this room, I would never be rid of them. The couch would root itself into the floorboards. The love seat would banish love, and cement itself to the wall in hardened determination, stubbornly hateful, immovable, anchored. The chair would be a dead stump, uprooted only by a stick of dynamite properly placed and ignited, and the ottoman a shifting block on casters for shifty guests, skimming conversation, skimming human connection, rolling on its casters from place to place.

          I had banished the guests. Years ago. This was no place for them. Even while the dark, heavy furniture remained. Even the doorknob to the front screen door had loosened and finally come off completely. It was a sign. There was no welcome mat outside my door, and this, this was no room for living.

Dining Room

Not really a separate room at all. The living room was L-shaped, and the top branch of the L was the narrow space for my old dining table, and the far wall, that top tip of the L, was a sliding door that opened onto a weathered deck.

          It was all table, and the table had traveled with me across many miles, through many relationships, all the way back to my first marriage. Through my second marriage. Through the unremarkable relationships between—no, that wasn’t fair, every one of them was in some way remarkable—until this last, which was, I now knew, truly my last. I couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t survive anything like this again.

          The wood was still smooth and cool beneath my hand. The table was tipped on its side, legs out into the room, like a knocked over dead animal. A torn sheet draped across its exposed corner. How many meals had been served on this table? In how many cities, how many houses or apartments, to how many friends, too many by now forgotten, left behind, faded into another lifetime.

          It would go, too. I no longer wanted this table. This table on which I had placed Thanksgiving turkeys, basted golden. This table under which I had played with my children, all of us on our knees, the tablecloth forming wispy walls, transparent to light. This table, on which Adam had made love to me, leaning me back across his arm and my body turned to liquid, draped silk over his arm, my arms stretching across the surface of the table in willing sacrifice.

          I will not have this table. The games played on its surface or in words flying like weapons across it. A table is a gathering place, and too much had gathered around this one, too much, and I wanted it all gone.

          This must be a starting over. A clean and good thing. Those I invite to my table in future days, I swear it, will only be those who nurture me as I will nurture them, serving meals made with loving hands and open heart.

Kitchen

This hub, this gathering place of the family, hearth that tugs at friends, bumping elbows while dicing carrots, sharing tears over chopped onions, blurred by rising steam into an otherworldliness where one felt safe, nourished, nurtured. An oasis. This, truly, was the living room. Mine was open to the dining room, leading into the living room, all connected but divided by a single, freestanding wall in the middle. Circle, and you will eventually find that one spot where you could stand all evening, sucking gravy from your fingertips, watching the cheerful toil of others, tossing out clever lines to amuse and entertain.

My best conversations happened here, between ladling the soup and turning the steak on the broiler. Stolen kisses, too, pats on the rump, beef and mine. It was a play room, where stressed out pals detoxified from busy days while anticipating a shared meal. Mamas across the globe understood this. Women enticing men got it. The preparation of food was foreplay. In family, it was the glue. I did not wonder at the unraveling of current family structure; we had stopped sharing meals and ate alone over sinks, not even allowing for a proper mess. But you know what they say: there are no omelets without breaking eggs.

I had spilled plenty of yolks in mine. My kitchen, this kitchen, had gone from nourishing meals to the food of desperation. Friends cleared and faded away as a hunger entered that could not be fed, a void opened that could not be filled.

Stairways

 To the right, they lead up to the bedrooms; to the left, they sink into the darker and cooler space of the family room. So called. Not that for mine. But I sank to my knees on these stairs more than once, had skidded down them on my ass, had sat on them to tie my shoes, or simply to talk on the phone when it was still tethered to the kitchen wall, a few feet away. There was something noncommittal about sitting on stairs.

            Steps down: I had laid on them once, stretched out with my body in loose lumps, the haggard and deboned body of a drunken woman. Who had cleaned the vomit, stinking of cheap wine, from the stairs? I could not recall. My son? My daughter? It would have been her, for even at a girlish age, women learn to cope with the fluids and exhausts and ugliness of the human condition in a way that men rarely do. She would not have backed away from it. She would have prepared a pail of soapy water, dipped the scrub brush into it, on her own knees, and scrubbed, upper body leaning into the motion, scrubbed, scrubbed, until all evidence of her mother’s deterioration were gone. As if it had never been.

            Which one of us had saved the other? We took turns. Guilt washed through me, and it was something I could never scrub away. My falling apart required too much of a young daughter. A child still. Abused, I, too, became an abuser. Lost in my own void, I left her alone too often.

            She had forgiven me. Eventually lost in her own dark abyss, it would be my turn to pull and scrub and support. If anyone was keeping score, we were even, but I wasn’t, and a love between mother and daughter was like that. I had forgiven my mother. My daughter had forgiven me. Forgiveness was the thread to connect generations, seven tiers back and seven tiers forward, until we were all allowed to be broken and human.

            I stood on the stairs and thought about forgiveness. I had forgiven. Over and over and over again. I had forgiven Jake. Yet he repeated his transgressions—he called them “indiscretions”—with escalation. He made no amends. He was not, he said the last time we talked, he was not sorry. He was not. He indulged in his addictions with flags flying, with full knowledge of the industry he supported, the exploitation of women his greatest and perhaps only pleasure. He pursued women like trophies, guns loaded, and choked out false apologies when pressed to the wall, only to repeat the cycle again. He didn’t just make mistakes—he worked them into his schedule. Muttering epitaphs to me on forgiveness, that I must, always and again, endlessly, as my woman’s duty and partner’s role, forgive the unforgiveable. Anger, he chided me, would ruin my health.

            For six years, I never allowed myself to know anger. In the seventh year, a rage roiled over me that would become the steel in my jellied spine. I would at long last unleash my fury, and in that moment, begin the long process of reclaiming my health.

            I would not lie down on these stairs again. I would not sit here, in the middle of these stairs, between the up and the down, planning my own demise. My climb would be determined, my descent would be to uproot, and I would dance here, someday, someday.

Family Room

We never gathered here. My family of three, plus pets, dispersed each in our direction, each into our own misery. I sometimes referred to us as the Three Musketeers. There was always a battle to wage, a war to be won, and we were three battered warriors wielding our swords, out on our own front lines, but always aware one of the other. I had their backs, they had mine.

            Watching the television, however, was not one of our family activities. The room itself might be to blame, but I was unconvinced. It was an afterthought. What might have been a two-car garage was instead for one, and this was that leftover space, barely enough to squeeze in a small sofa, a three-tier bookshelf, facing a compact entertainment center with a television.

            American family rooms are built around the television. That screen, it was like an altar, constantly moving images and bursts of color and noise mesmerizing its audiences, swallowing time, filling homes with a cacophony that might disguise loneliness and provide escapism for those who most needed to reflect. I had, on occasion, used it that way, too. Empty noise. Meaningless images. Anything to get out of my own head. At other times, it was my safe haven for a good cry. All I needed was a sentimental commercial to appear on the screen, a background scree of violin, and I was off and weeping. Sobbing like a madwoman. To wipe my face at the conclusion of 30 seconds and get on with it again.

            Blessing amidst the madness: my children never caught on to television. Nor did they grow up to become avid readers, which does disappoint me—among my most cherished memories are our story times just before bed, huddling in a warm bundle of pajama babies, one child on each side, eager for the magic. Perhaps that was enough to inoculate them against this televised hypnosis. Their lives were otherwise too cluttered for sinking into a book.

            I would trade this television room for a library without hesitation. I note the thought for the coming renovation.

Laundry Room

Dirty laundry. We all have it. I am not without stain. If there is any excuse at all—and I am not trying for one—it is that I have never hurt others with malicious intent. I have merely been a fool too long. An innocent. Easily trusting, and so easily manipulated by those without conscience or scruples. Which is not something I can readily explain, because the world thrust itself on me early and never quite released the stranglehold it had around my throat, giving me a good, hard shake now and then for emphasis.

Yet we do as we can, we go on, and I am a woman—meaning that I know how to remove stains with the best of them. If the machine wasn’t working, I could do it with my hands, scrubbing cloth across my bare knuckles as if they were a washboard. There wasn’t a machine out there that could remove stains the way a good hand washing could. 

  I did my own dirty laundry and I did it for others. If I was ashamed of my own filthy things, I was even more ashamed of those belonging to others who dumped their load onto me. I scrubbed clean the stains and those I could not scrub away, I helped hide.

Crawlspace

At first, I wanted a basement. Everyone needs one, yes? The underbelly of a house, where we warehouse the stuff we don’t need, don’t want, can’t bear to have around anymore but can’t bear to discard. We stash it down here, in boxes and bins and bags, so that we might forget, yet pretend we had not.

            Mine was a small and narrow space, not under the entire house, but below the central level—the living room, the dining room, the kitchen. Hunched, I could almost walk through it. The floor of it was gravel, so my pets had discovered it soon enough as, logically, an extended litter box. The single light bulb burned out, the crawlspace receded into oblivion, truly the underbelly that no one saw. When we moved in, anything that couldn’t immediately be unpacked and used ended up down here. Boxes were dropped in here at random, and after a few years, I forgot what they contained, and after a few more years, I forgot they existed.

It was probably a good thing that I did not have a basement, only a crawlspace. It limited how much I could shove underground. It is not good to ignore this dark, hidden place too long. Anyone will tell you this, although few of us make use of the advice.

Downstairs Bathroom

The tiny one. Just barely room to turn and twist trousers down for bare bottoms. It was a bathroom for a man, standing proud and unzipped, one step to the left and dip hands under a quick spurt of water, and out the door again. But Jake nearly always used the upstairs bathroom, while I snuck down here for a quick peek in the time-smudged mirror, my face distorted, I could never quite tell, from the wavy ripples of the cheap square of warped mirror or the reflection of my despair.

            Hide it. Must. I looked just long enough to arrange a smile on my face. The rippling of the mirror deformed it back to me. It was the smile of a fool. I knew it. And still, I smiled, if not for me, then for him. I didn’t want to make him angry, and any signs of despair, any twitching at the corners of my mouth, any wrinkling of my brow, any sheen of liquid pooling in my eyes, might anger him. I didn’t want to anger him. I never wanted to anger him. I just had to try harder. Smile.

            There was a thin, silver line drawn diagonally across that mirror. As thin as the edge of a broken fingernail.

Garage

One car. Who in this country still owns only one car? Only people alone, living in solitude. Not women in safe and pleasant marriages. Not single mothers raising teenage children.

Not women who had someone to care for and about them, park beside them and pull out the lawnmower, help with the chores, hammer back a loose board, trim a falling shingle, whack the weeds into oblivion. Not women with someone to help dig up the garden in spring, spade slicing into just thawed earth, turning it in round clumps like brown baby bottoms, opening the earth to new life. Not women who sipped drinks with floating, tiny paper umbrellas in hollowed-out coconut shells while steaks sputtered and sizzled on smoky grills. Not women who shared fall flurries of leaves in fiery colors, raked into piles and ruined again by gleeful leaps. Not women who were fearless of deep winter snows, blizzards that merely tucked them inside a safe circle of protecting arms, the shoveled drive plowing entry to a world only too easily left outside.

I owned one car, a cobalt blue Honda, dependable and almost never in need of a mechanic’s care. It was a car a woman could trust to never break down, never fail her, never leave her stranded and vulnerable on the roadside. It was car that was ever ready for the road, for the chase, for the escape, for the race out and back again.

I had learned to park my Honda in the garage with the precision of a surgeon.  My shovels and rakes leaned against the right side of the garage, my recycling bins and gardening tools to the left, and a cluttered counter took up the far end. I could park my car in that empty center with my eyes closed, precisely centered, press the button to close the garage door behind me, shift gear to park, engine still running, invisible to the world.

Launching Pad

It rather is. Square at the top of the stairs where one stood in the crux of decision. Which way to launch? Through which door? To the left, the main bathroom. To the right, my son’s tiny bedroom. Ahead, two doors side by side, were my daughter’s bedroom on the right side, and mine on the left. Overhead, the ceiling fan whirled, a steady chunka-chunka-chunka, spraying a thin layer of dust against the walls. The smoke alarm had its battery pulled out. Two tiny red wires hung loose, waiting in silenced warning.

            Sometimes I took the stairs up to this point two at a time. Sometimes I stood here, stuck. At those times, I would sit, cross-legged, right here, the fan chopping through air above me, my thoughts a cloud of dust, my body forgetting how to move.

Bedroom One

I can’t really call it my son’s any longer. He’s been gone from it for years. It is tiny, just room enough for a twin-size bed, a small desk, shelves on the walls for books and random boy things. A tiny closet tucked behind the door, and a window that looked out on the street between two evergreens and the occasional surprise of a climbing rose.

            I wonder if he ever sat, just looking out this window. I did know he sometimes climbed out of it. Jumped into the bushes below, scampered away into the night, sometimes disappearing for days, even weeks at a time. Then I would come into this room, sit in his bed pushed against the wall, and look out this window, and see nothing.

Bedroom Two

You sense the girl in the walls, in the now withered stems of flowers woven across the tops of the windows, around the curtain rods. Poetry written in large, rounded cursive letters on the pale pink paint. Shoe scuffs from first high heels and swirls of dancing fancies. The closet still has the perfumed scent of her clothes, now hanging in another closet, in another house.

            As messed as her brother’s room could be, hers was always clean and neat; everything in its place, even when there wasn’t much of anything.  She knew how to create beauty from thin air. Wave a wish and produce something light and airy, stylish and entirely her own. It was a talent she had, inherited, I always said, from her grandmother. They were both professional bargain hunters. Put them inside an empty room, and two days later they emerged with two suitcases packed.

            I was pretty sure she did gaze out these windows. Into a future only she could imagine. Into the night, sending a protective karma over her disappearing brother, for whom she had always had a fierce love. And if she had her grandmother’s shopping gene, she had her father’s strong will to make the impossible possible. On occasion, they would both succeed. Protecting those she loved was one of those impossible, nearly impossible, missions she had set for herself.