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This is the house. The house on a hill
in a part of town that no longer has a name. White, two-storied,
and so squat it resembles the kind of box a birthday cake might
sit in. Next to the house is a church (Lutheran, with a small,
fluctuating flock) and an adjoining grassy parking lot with patches
of brown where the tires have worn it to dirt. Behind the house
and church is a gas station with inexpensive, diluted petrol sold
to motorists stopping off the major thoroughfare, a street known
for disaster—about 57 fatalities per year—and which
has earned the moniker, "Death Boulevard." Taking Death
Boulevard north eventually leads to a major expressway that links
two separate sections of a very large city, to which the house,
the church, the boulevard all belong.
Just east of the boulevard sits a small motel, which because
of its discrete entrance and proximity to really nothing at all,
made it very popular once several years ago, when it catered mostly
to old men and their mistresses, and conversely, mistresses and
their younger men. Now, only hip, engaged couples frequent it,
popping quarters into beds that vibrate, their young teeth chattering
as they embrace across quivering mattresses.
From the back of the house the motel can be seen, a fluorescent
block cutting into the night sky surrounded by a moat of cars
and speckled mica. From the
front, there is only the appearance of a quiet residential neighborhood.
Sometimes there is the cooing of a pigeon in the branches of
a tree. The small electrical
death of a car engine.
This is the living room of the house, wet with paint, windows
thrown open. The chemical odor permeates each of the three bedrooms,
through corridors, down stairs, into the basement, shifting through
doorways. Underneath the new paint—an unforgiving white with
a tinge of green—are layers of old color, including: yellowey
white, bluish white, pale, pink elephant white, and her favorite,
creamy white, the color of old photographs. This is the color remembered
best, the color of the walls before they left. Since then, the
rooms have been a pale cornflower blue when an old woman and her
dead son lived here, and after that, a stark, gallery white chosen
by a divorced couple, the ex-husband a housepainter by trade. She
knows only the shade of white from when she resided here many years
before. Now only she can see what is there under layers of old
paint.
This is the doorframe. A side entrance from the living room into
the kitchen once covered by a smattering of fingerprints and strawberry
jam. Its surface is rough now, but several coats ago it was smooth
as an egg shell, and cool against her head as she leaned against
it, her grandfather marking her height, three foot five. Every
year or so they'd mark it again. Three foot eight. Four foot one…His
pencil would mark her visible height and age all the way up the
wall until she was old enough to keep track herself. The chart
ends when she was fourteen and exactly 5 feet tall, a skinny teenager
with sloping shoulders and fuzzy vision. The only time she seemed
to stand up straight was when she checked her own growth, chin
up, back flat, the pencil in her quivering hand.
Later, when she grew to be an old woman living alone in a much
larger house on a hill some three thousand miles away, she would
still dream of herself as a young girl, running through these rooms,
her grandfather chasing her, marking her. She would forget that
she was an old woman with grandchildren of her own, a mother several
times over, a generative woman, and concentrate only on the sound
of her own breathing as she ran to the kitchen, catching the doorframe,
the chart of her height under her sweating palms. She remembers
then the humidity of a summer evening, the coolness of the wooden
floors against her bare feet, catching her breath, hiding from
him, pretending to blend in with the walls.
These days she can only keep track of the littlest things. The
sound of the summer air in the evening. The ground stirring
beneath her feet. Her shallow
breathing as she struggles to remember it all. The house. The chart. Running.
Did you know that her hair has turned the color of paint? Tell
her. She believes it's still black.
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