DOMESTICA by Charles McLeod
In the photo her back is turned and the light is that late afternoon light that at least in the photo, and through the white linen curtains, past her, seems self-conscious, shy or otherwise mild, a kind of light that does not want to be there but has accepted itself as having to be there, a sad portion of the capitalized Light, a castoff bit of light, the aunt without children, the friend who remains unmarried or otherwise without partner, the part of light that enters into any situation awkwardly and wants nothing more than to be gone but cannot be; light that would not be termed bright but has not yet gone gray nor been afforded some bit of color from the impending sunset, flat light, forgotten light, a dying species of light, and her back is turned in the photo, and she is standing off-center in the jamb of the doorway to their bedroom, and she has her hands in front of her, near to her chest, in the manner one would when reading a book or saying a prayer or struggling with the clasp on a necklace, some task that requires a bowed head and at least a bit of focus and it is October, in the photo, late afternoon, and they have come upstairs so she can get a sweater, a striped sweater, a horizontally-striped gray and orange sweater, a cardigan, the collar of which sits low on her back, pulling down her shirt collar with it and showing fully the pale skin of the nape of her neck, those two inches between the collar and her short blonde hair and because she is wearing the sweater, has it on in the photo and is standing with her back turned to him, she knows that they have lingered longer in the bedroom than the time it would take to just grab the sweater and go, but she has no idea now where they went that day, only that it seemed a necessary thing to get the sweater and put it on before they went, and that in that span of time something else caught her eye or otherwise overrode the idea of leaving, something that involved her hands and a bowed head, but she has no idea now what that thing was.
And the Craftsman two stories with hardwood throughout, Norwegian blonde fir he’d imported, sanded on-site by a team of Nez Perce who’d come west from Spokane and before that from Idaho, leapt from the rez and its trenchant malaise, its government food, its gunshots, and she often ate lunch with these men on the porch, brought them sandwiches from the deli of a nearby supermarket as she grew to know and then trust them, and at first they said thank you and nodded their heads and when they trusted her, requests were then added: I want it on Dutch Crutch, I don’t want tomatoes, if we can’t have beer I want root beer, and these men spoke of winter and mothers and death, and one of the men’s nephews had killed himself, and had done this by dragging his parents’ living room rug out to State 12 in the middle of nighttime, and had lain down on the blacktop and wrapped himself in the rug and had waited there, rolled up like sushi, and the other men laughed when the uncle of the dead boy (who was sixteen when the semi had crushed him) made this analogy, and she didn’t laugh and couldn’t see how these men might find something like that to be funny, and kept bringing them food but no longer lunched in the shade of the porch, the smell of sawdust hanging about them, and instead took her Volvo to some other place – ran errands or said that she had to; drove east from Ballard up steep narrow streets, past Phinney Ridge into Greenlake, and bought fabric for pillows or some foreign Merlot that she thought would be nice for a Saturday evening, as his work consumed him, and he did not have much time to blindly devote to hand-holding and warm conversation, and one day she came home and the Nez Perce were gone but her thoughts of the boy remained with her, and at bedtime, the lamps off, the room lost to darkness, she pulled the sheets and duvet tight around her, and tried to imagine the night air and hard road and the hum of the truck, getting louder.
And the house is a house that she knew from her youth, had passed by on her long walks to high school, mid-block and not special and painted dark blue, the trim somewhere between rust and copper, the brick walk halving the front lawn to twin squares, cordoned off from the sidewalk by waist-high white picket, and here the oak porch swing, its metal rungs gleaming, and here the braided brass doorknob she polished this morning, and the white-painted door with the circlehead window and vintage brass hinges with figurals of storks etched into their metal, and the side of the hinge that faced out to the street had the stork with its head raised and inside, there was the second stork, the stork with its neck curving downward, the stork that did not and would not and would never look toward the staircase that led up to their bedroom and now she must sell it, this house, her address of two years, must sell the stork hinges with the parasol finials, must sell the doorknob and quaint squares of lawn and every other small part of the property: the black latch on the yard gate and fireplace mantle and cast iron bathtub with wooden block cradle, and the tub was two grand and had shipped from Kentucky and the house held dozens of items like this, things purchased to make their home special, because every square inch was all theirs and should look it, and should not look like it could be anyone else’s, and since his work consumed him these choices were hers and she took to these tasks, she enjoyed them, and talked down the tile guy by four hundred dollars and found a chrome-finished range that was perfect, that went with the wall tile and triple bowl sink and flatback toggle-bolted track lighting, and went too with the floor tile and checkered hand towels and near-silent onyx dishwasher, and now these things were things she would not see again, were her things but aren’t now, will not be.
And sun in Seattle after so long with none, after three months of rain through the gutters: sun down in Belltown where the white-belted hipsters wore frowns while they ate burritos; sun on the ryegrass at Safeco; sun on the slab docks at Seattle Pier 50, cars queuing for transport in the bellies of ferries, awaiting voyage to Vashon and then Point Defiance; sun on the statue of Lenin in Fremont; sun on the U-Dub Hospital gift shop; sun on the Aurora Expressway – sun in mid-February, miraculous sun, sun so bright it arrives as unwelcomed, and makes too clear each spot on each living room window, sun that pours in as though it were water, and now she sees patches of dust on the floorboards and where did these come from or how did she miss them as she scrubbed with a toothbrush in each poorly-lit corner, as she made her bed then unmade it, tucking the sheets in, the next time, much tighter, and cleaned out the self-cleaning oven, and used her compact’s mirror to check underneath the interior lip of each toilet, making sure that not one single flake of whatever might have escaped her attention because today they were coming, the buyers, the prospective couples, three couples, each of them interested, and since she’s done this herself, without agent or company or help of any kind whatsoever, every square inch of the house must be perfect or no one will buy it, no checks will be written, and she’ll have to live here through winter and spring and then try again when the days are much longer, when clear skies are constant, and she just can’t do that, can’t wait in this house for a more proper season, and stare half a year more at the backyard and bookshelves, at the blender and knife blocks and steel empty bowl of the Kitchen Aid mixer, and the curtains she made for the upstairs spare bedroom, their light blue, their sheen, the fabric like silk, so soft that one’s hand slipped straight from it.
And in this bedroom’s closet a shoebox of photos, flotsam in form of emulsified paper, hundreds of photos and she can’t recall placing one of them in the box, ever, nor is she sure where the box might have come from as she owns no shoes by this man, this designer, and the shoebox so full the lid won’t close completely, and some of the photos are bound with bright post-its, and some of the photos are dog-eared, and here is the photo of both of them posed near the door of their favorite diner: pre-brunch, late morning, the last Sunday in April (the date stamped in bright orange in the bottom right corner), and she is two weeks away from a birthday, her third to last before she turns forty, and he has a tie on, and wore a tie always: to brunch and to dinner, to lunch at her parents’, to the patch where they picked out their pumpkins, and the ties that he chose were appalling, and the day he found out about her trips to Vashon the tie had been white and green diamonds, and over these diamonds a grid of bright purple, bright purple lines at perpendicular angles and who thought this tasteful but that’s not the aim, he’d said when she’d asked him about it, when they’d reached a low point and all talk was critique and all moods were some shade of bad mood, the aim is to stand out and make people remember because once you blend in, you give up, you surrender, and this had been more than just funny to her – his earnestness was an embarrassment – and in the middle of dinner had snorted, had drawn up her napkin to cover her face and issued a chortle into the ivory triple-stitched linen, and across the table, the dining room table, the cherry wood, walnut-stained, bracket-foot table, part of Broyhill’s Louis Phillipe series, he had responded: I gave you all this and now you are laughing and she answered no, we gave us all this, and I made these choices, and yes, I am laughing.
And her friends down in Belltown had all said not this one, and so did her sister and with time her parents, not he of the pockmarks and front-pleated slacks, not he of the Microsoft Business Division, not he who ate meat and commuted to Redmond by Humvee, not him, are you serious, but the answer was money, was money and children, and yes he was too thin and some shoes had tassels and there had been talk – he had been truly serious – of a concert on New Year’s Eve at Key Arena, a concert by the Quebecoise singer, the hook-nosed chanteuse who defined self-important, and see also: corporate and see also: pathetic, and he, via work, could get third-row tickets, and they would go fast and what did she think and what she thought was this: that’s fine, I will go, because we are married and that means being selfless and his tastes will change because we have money and I can take care of keeping things tasteful and we will get older and we will have children, and taste matters less once children arrive and one is caught up in bedtimes and diapers, in play dates and daycare and preschool and grade school, in the unceasing tasks of the parent, and she wrote all her friends off as unrealistic, as they too wanted marriage and babies, and did they all think that the guy they would marry would walk in to the rock club on some Thursday evening and propose between set list and encore, as they just wouldn’t – one had to go where these men congregated, and that meant the nice bars more near to downtown, that meant dates to steakhouses, meant giving up one thing to then gain another and now none of these friends had called her in years, had come to the wedding then dropped off the radar, and this wasn’t an issue as she had a spouse now, and they had a house, and had money, and once children came the Craftsman as realm, a land all their own, the smallest of countries.
The first couple arrives at twelve noon exactly – the bell rings and she is still looking at pictures and the sound of the chime makes her jump and her fingers convulse and she pulls from the shelf the whole shoebox of pictures, and now on the floor, at the closet’s threshold, a puddle of image: one half of a photo from a trip to Vancouver covered up by a shot from the deck of a ferry in turn covered up by a shot of her sister, a person that she isn’t currently on speaking terms with, and the photo of her with her back turned she takes, tucks into her skirt and with one of her feet sweeps the rest of the puddle back into the closet, and then runs downstairs and opens the door and the couple is smiling and he is enormous, so fat he looks somehow aquatic, and she is tiny; there has to be one full foot of height difference and who were these people and you can’t come in here and you will not live in this house of my making, and she needs some air and says let’s start outside and walks down the porch stairs and points out the marigolds, did the two of them notice the marigolds, their blossoms of mustard and crimson, and the photo’s sharp corner is pricking her thigh, some bit of skin between femur and labia, and the fat man is sweating, and the woman is maybe not even five feet and both of them look like experiments, as though someone had located human spare parts and did what they could with the items provided, and the man’s eyes are slats and his nose only nostrils and the woman is waif-like and sallow and pimpled, and she has forgotten to edge the lawn’s grass and blades lay limp on the pathway’s red brick and she hears herself speaking of vibrancy, that something bright in the garden can counter the winter, can fight off the rain clouds’ low ceiling, that marigolds are not only pretty but hearty and the man says we find this all very nice but we aren’t big on flowers can we go inside, please.
And five minutes pass and then ten and fifteen and she grows to feel drugged as their hands dirty railings and she listens to the echo of footfalls off ceilings and these sounds, these pedestrian reverberations, make her stomach go queasy, and she moves from her spot by the sink where she’s leaning and goes out to the backyard and stands by the apple, the Jonagold that never once fruited, and did not fruit, she found out, because this type of apple relied on a different species to seed it, it needs some other tree’s pollen, her sister’s husband had told her, while they sat in the skybox above the ryegrass at Safeco, watching the Mariners lose to the Yankees, this two summers past, prior to Vashon, prior to waiting in line for the ferry, prior to wrecking two households at once and how did this happen and how did I do that and shame gathers like a storm front in the sky of her brain, in the deep high blue of her consciousness, and nearby a neighbor has steak barbequing and she now recalls her first date with her husband, and sitting inside the Metropolitan Grill and her porterhouse being brought to their table, and the steak was almost as big as the plate and she’d laughed and her husband had shot her a look, a gesture of pure, vitriolic disgust that arrived and was gone in an instant, and she cut at the meat with the wood-handled knife that the waiter had brought her, cut lumps of red flesh and then ate them, and had not eaten steak for perhaps fifteen years and in minutes felt sick but kept eating, kept chewing warm meat while her husband-to-be spoke of Rousseau’s Social Contract, that sovereign was false without genuine sanction and union required the quelling of ego and from out of this quelling and union and sanction both parties became indivisible, and she’d nodded her head and tried not to throw up as the steak turned to sharp jagged shards in her stomach.
The couple has questions and both come outside and are asking her now about fuses and heating and how loudly the pipes work from behind their walls, the pipes, the man says in between rasps, the pipes, are they quiet, and she says that they aren’t, that the pipes are quite loud, that one can hear clearly the rush and the push of the water, and that two fuses have blown since the rains have begun and that once, early on, the basement had flooded, and from somewhere far off comes the bass thrum of thunder, sound-lava, not liquid yet fluid, molten, foreboding, and she sees in their faces deflating hope and this makes her happy as she now knows that this couple won’t buy and says let’s go inside, did you see the couches, and opens the screen door that leads to the kitchen and the three of them walk the floor plan together, traipse the hall of blonde fir that runs past the front door and leads into the main room with recessed bay window and here are the sofas of aniline leather, deep brown and uncolored and thereby allowing the leather to breathe better, regardless of climate, and did the two of them notice how well the couches match with the oversized pink/salmon rug, the hand-knotted Persian, the Lilian rug made by the nomadic Kurdish and did this couple know that these types of rugs were once used as trousseaux, as dowry items, what the wife brought the man to show proof of worth, to signal intent and accept his protection, and that this custom existed since well before Christ, as shown in the Code of the king Hammurabi, and the couple are wide-eyed and stare at the floor and the man says they’ll call, there are more homes to look at, and she shakes their hands and then shows them the door and with the house empty she draws out the photo of her in the cardigan sweater, and tries to remember what she was holding that day, what sat in her hands, what item.
Because so many items have come through the front door: a brass bed frame, four rugs, eight vases of glass, twin armoires, the nicest of blenders; three tartan blankets of extra soft wool, platters and teapots and sauce boats and creamers; the digital toaster with extra-lift levers, the wood-framed tile-topped drop-leaf breakfast table; the Eames-era chaise, its curved frame, its six cushions, the upholstered back arm chairs that went with the dining room table, the pedestal desk in the upstairs spare bedroom, the one they’d replace with a crib, toys and monitor, and what she wants so badly is to become such a thing, to evolve into something inanimate, to sit on a counter or mantle for decades, and gaze mutely at what she’s imported, as the plain mirth of life, that dumb joy, that soft warmth, was a concept that always escaped her, and she did not like pets and she did not like laughing and when one was five-ten and when one was size 6, one did not need to be extroverted to garner a surplus of attention – one could be glum and still highly desired, and in college she’d dated professors and doctors, the former encountered through classes at U-Dub and the latter through work at the college’s hospital gift shop, and these men had money and many had wives, and bought her boots from Nine West and earrings of diamonds, and took her on trips to Vancouver and Portland, and granted her access to high-end boutiques and taught her techniques of much worth in the bedroom, and once they devolved and turned back into boys through the youth she afforded, she promptly dropped them, reminding, each time, of their wives or their titles, should they choose to do something stupid, but none of them did: there were no loud words, no acts one could term as pernicious, and in the long hallways of fourth-floor care wards or brick-walled university buildings, she would pass by them a stranger, all but forgotten.
The next couple is late by an hour then more and she calls the number they gave via email and gets right away the greeting they’ve left on their messaging system, and here is the man saying the name of the wife and the wife saying the name of her husband, and just as the message is about to wrap up, there comes the jubilant gurgle of a baby, quick happy gibberish, and she calls back eight times in a row just to hear it, the sound of new life, the cadence of promise, joy so pure it defies comprehension, and sits down on the brown and red herringbone ottoman, and hits redial over and over, and stares out the recessed bay window, and how many times has she looked out this window at this span of street, at the trio of elm trees, at the cream-colored Garrison owned by the Burstroms, part of the old Scandinavian guard that family by family was dying, selling their homes for ten times the cost and moving to Flagstaff or North San Diego or Taos or Lake Havasu City, somewhere with dry air and senior communities cordoned off from the rest of society, and her parents, Swedes too, had a time share in Tucson, and showing up lately on their breakfast table were high-gloss brochures for accredited living facilities, resort-atmosphere compounds rising out of the mesa with views of not one but two mountain ranges, and these places had bike paths and Tai Chi instructors and ballrooms and Internet lounges, and specialized nurses that dealt with dementia, and counselors that counseled, and showers with railings, as her parents were now nearing eighty years old, and both were still well but no longer drove and no longer went out when the sun was not up and had wondered aloud if the wise thing to do was not preempt some minor disaster, and move to a place where care was built in and her answer, each time the topic came up, was you can’t move, I need you, and you are my parents.
But her parents were old, and were not getting younger, and needed now to think of themselves first or only, and were not in a place to assist or provide, and were for the first time in her life rather fragile, and because of this did not know the why of the what, the reasons behind both of their daughters divorcing: of her mid-morning trips out to Vashon by ferry, or the subsequent trips to motels in Tacoma, dun ugly lodges within walking distance from the piers and the slips that comprised Point Defiance – of the poly-acrylic bedspreads thrown back, of clothes pulled off as though they’d ignited, and her sister’s husband was almost six-four, and her sister’s husband went rock climbing, and her sister’s husband had grown up in Manhattan, and went on to Yale and then Harvard Law and had moved west to protect the environment, gave up his place at the firm in Midtown to stick it to timber and save all the forests, and had done very well and now most of the loggers held jobs at the prisons, the prime moneymaker for so many towns in the tri-state Pacific Coast region, and his house out on Vashon was full self-creation, the floors made of recycled plastics, and lining the roof were blue-black solar cells, and the wood beams near the ceiling were pulled from a fire, and the home’s insulation was cotton from blue jeans, and her sister, for work, travelled often, was two years her junior and shorter and wider, more fun but lacking refinement, and this man of New York, this fan of the Yankees, had told her he craved her tact and precision, that women out west were sloppy or lazy, and that she was perfect, and this specific disclosure, told New Year’s before last, was something she’d found quite exciting, and now that house on Vashon was gone from existence: the plot sold, the home razed, the driveway jack-hammered, the dirt turning to mud once the weather went rainy.
And now she gets up from her spot on the ottoman and moves down the house’s short hallway, and here in the dining room the sheen of the Broyhill, and against the west wall the case for the china – all of it Lenox, the Autumn collection, a gift from his parents, who at one point adored her, slim Californians who lived down in Turlock and made what they could from the raising of almonds, grim sturdy people and he’d been so embarrassed by their ties to the land, by their pickups and Wranglers, by their mother-of-pearl plaid western shirts, by the way that they spoke (the pace of a turtle), because even with Senate approval of farm bills, they would die broke if he didn’t make money, and not just enough and not middle tax bracket but the sort of work which afforded him briefcases of money, metal valises with dual-key locks, their insides lined neatly with hundreds, cases that he could attach to his wrist until safely within the high-ceilinged confines of Hummer dealerships and realty offices – a job whose wealth was not quiet – and after their wedding they’d flown to Tahiti, and stayed for ten days in a white-painted villa with white leather couches, and she walked the beaches while he crunched his numbers, as his work consumed him, and while on these beaches would pause and gaze out beyond the lagoon to the dark line of coral, and knew sharks swam just past the reef’s quick descent, that the water was colder, the light fractured and faded, and after a dinner of swordfish and pilaf they’d gone down to this same stretch of beach and embraced there, hugged as though one of them were going to war and would not be back for a long time, if ever, and the moon on the black of the water was stunning, and he produced from his pocket a 6×9 glossy, and there stood the Craftsman, and not once in her life had she felt so safe, so sure of her place, so calm, so claimed and invited.
And now clouds take the sun and the shadows’ sharp lines, and the first specks of mist coat the living room windows, and what was it she held on that day in the picture and did she still have it and how could it help her, as she wants only to sleep and for things to get better, for someone to come here and repair the damage, but her husband has moved to a condo in Greenlake, and her sister has moved down to Portland, and her sister’s husband is back in New York and she knows that her parents will leave for the mesa – that she’ll walk once again down dark streets alone, without coat-of-arms or escutcheon, and should something happen no bells would sound from their towers, and no armored party would arrive on its horses, and out on the street a car’s engine turns off and she hears the shutting of vehicle doors and her eyes search the house like the walls were on fire, and here in the hallway the oak antique coat rack, the one that she’d bought at her first estate auction, and next to the coat rack the rosewood wall mirror, and tucked into one of the living room’s corners the kerosene lamp from the late 1880’s, the egret floor lamp that she fell in love with: its base cold-painted bronze, the bird’s body life-size, the metal maintaining patina, the light’s globe bright green and adorned with white roses, and perched on each end of the fireplace mantle the twin Sevres vases that she’d bought in Paris, ten inches tall and in rich cobalt blue and mounted on two-inch square-gilded bronze plinths and she’ll have to buy boxes and pocked, plastic wrapping and stow things securely and hide them away: confine every item to some tiny dungeon, some per-month Elba she’d run like a country while she tried to pretend that she still possessed power, that her items were mighty or would be again, as no land existed without its own customs, without rites that were vogue only inside its own borders, and when one forsook praxis, cast off application, consigned these odd acts to the coffin of theory, one gave up title and castle and kingdom, but she’d allowed long ago for her flags to be lowered, and helped spawn the revolt that had spelled her undoing, and like Huns at the gates the climbing of steps by a duo of beautiful strangers, and now on the porch the day’s final appointment, and the chime sounds and she slides off her black leather flats, and then slinks to the door and looks through the peephole, and past the round piece of glass the last wave of marauders: nomadic, exotic, both hopeful and brave (she remembers when she looked just like them), and the chime sounds again and she stands very still and then takes down her skirt and merino wool tights and draws up her hands to the front of her blouse and undoes, in silence, each button, and then drops the shirt to the blonde hardwood floor and what was she holding and how could she find it, and why did the boy take the rug to the highway, and what did he know that she didn’t, as the chime rings a third time and her hands go behind her, as she pinches the back nylon straps of her bra and undoes the hook-and-eye closures, and places her hands on her flat perfect stomach, and puts for the last time her eye to the door.
Charles McLeod’s work has appeared in Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Third Coast and ZYZZYVA.