“Well, this leaves something to be desired, doesn’t it?” the woman said, alone in the doorway. Light streamed in behind her, obscuring her features and making her look like an angel. I felt a tickling in my bones that I hadn’t since the children had left; I tried to straighten myself up, make myself worthy.
Here we go, I thought.
She was lonely. I learned that right away. Her loneliness was like a presence, a pet she carried around with her. In that, we were well matched.
It had been years—maybe decades—since anyone had seen me, but she really saw me. She spent hours looking, at every nook and cranny, every chip in the paint, every broken floorboard. She peered into my crevasses, always with her phone in hand, its flashlight beaming and a Notes app open. After a morning of this, she’d leave, and I would start to sink down again. But she always came back, weighed down with bags: cleaning sprays, roller brushes, cans of paint, tool kits. Once, she even came back with a 10-pack of toothbrushes that she used to scour the grout in the bathroom and the little spot at the back of the kitchen faucet where a sponge couldn’t reach.
There was a reason she was doing this. I wasn’t inconsequential to her. Or, rather, I was, but her work on me wasn’t. There was a reason she pushed herself to exhaustion every day and then collapsed on her bed every night. And there was a reason she was doing it alone. No one ever helped or checked on her or marveled at her progress. She never spoke on the phone or wrote letters or got dressed up for a night out. Just: investigate, errands, work, crash.
And so it went. And I was happy.
+++
I didn’t know at first which man was mine. The group of them finished their work, cheering as the last doorknob was screwed into the last door, and then, for a week, I sat empty, wondering what I’d been made for. And then, the man—the young one with the handlebar mustache and the most enthusiasm—opened the door with a young woman on his arm. They were both smiling in their Sunday best—the man with freshly-pressed trousers, suspenders, and a pristine button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and the woman with a light blue skirt that reached the ground and a matching shirt with puffy sleeves and a row of tiny buttons. She carried a bouquet of white lilies.
Within only a day or two, they’d made life cozy inside and productive outside. They worked together in the mornings—she with the chickens and the cows and the gardens, he with the plow and the horses. In the afternoons, after a brief lazy spell during which they joked about baby names and read to each other or just laid down, their limbs tangling, the man went back out to work in the heat and the woman stayed inside, sewing curtains, scrubbing dishes, sweeping the floor. And singing, always singing, to herself.
A baby came before long, on a night when storms rolled across the prairie like tumbleweeds. There was moaning and chaos and thundering horses’ hooves. Another man, carrying a small pouch, came. He ran up the stairs and shouted down to the man for a bowl of water.
Two more babies—a girl to join the first and then a boy—followed quickly, coming into the world with shouts and hollers. And then two more, twins, who came and left without so much as a breath. I thought the cries would never stop after that.
But they did, first quieting and then stopping altogether. And, soon enough, there was another baby, a boy. The man and woman still worked hard, now with help. The woman showed the girls how to bake bread, how to reuse an old shirt, how to feed a hungry man. The man showed his boys how to shoe a horse, how to lead an ox, how to shoot a coyote in the field.
One by one, the children grew up and left, taking the new road that led to the train station, the road that had cut my fields in half and caused the man to sell off the cows. Some of the children went east, some west. The man and the woman were alone again, like in the first days. And, like in the first days, they spent their days quietly—slowly, now—fulfilling their tasks and then lay down each night, surrounded by warmth and peace.
Until the morning when the woman got up and couldn’t rouse the man. The children came home, with men and women and children of their own now. A crowd of people gathered in the living room; the Reverend said a few words and then the children passed out sandwiches and drinks. The woman looked old, her children said. Like she’d never looked before. And it was true—she was bent a bit, and tired. But then, so was I. We’d grown up together, and we’d grown old together.
The oldest came back home with her family. As she had, her children woke at first light, gathered eggs and fed the chickens before putting on their clean clothes and heading off to the nearby school—part of the town that had somehow sprung up without me noticing. They came home in the afternoons, the boys dusty and wrestling, the girls chattering excitedly, and the woman sat at the table, peeling apples with the knife in her gnarled fingers and smiling.
The other children came home to visit every summer and every Christmas. Everything was lively with them there. Filled with good food and good smells and cousins and aunts and uncles and mothers and fathers, and one old grandmother, I thought I would burst. Don’t mind if I do, I thought to myself. Even the arguments, about Wilson and the war in Europe and whether women really needed the vote, were good natured and usually ended in time for pie.
When the old woman passed away, people again filled the living room. The Reverend spoke, and the children—old men and women now—served sandwiches and drinks for the gathered crowd.
And then something happened that never had before. The old woman’s daughter put everything into boxes and then those boxes were taken away. Where, I never knew. Everyone walked the property, cried a little bit, and then they drove away. They never came back.
I didn’t know what was happening when, shortly after, a different man opened the door with a flourish and gave a little bow to a woman who entered close behind. “Oh, it’s just darling,” she breathed, twirling a little in the sun-lit room.
“Knew you’d like it,” the man said, closing the door and walking toward her. She giggled and swatted his arm, but he didn’t seem to care as he leaned in close.
+++
Things were bustling again before long. This man and woman played music at all hours. They loved to dance and were always rolling up the living room rug to twirl and shuffle across the floor, working themselves into a sweaty, delirious, laughing lather. Children came; they danced too. There were parties, loud affairs full of people drinking and smoking elegant cigarettes while someone pounded on the piano and sang show tunes. Children cried and were shushed, twirled around until they laughed. There were arguments too—shouting matches that I was sure neighbors overheard, but no one ever seemed to worry.
As the children grew, they attended the school in town. Their friends came over in the afternoons, and they all ran around outside, staggered in for glasses of cold water, and ran back out again. Day in, day out: people, music, food, drink, shouting, laughter.
The change came on so slowly that afterwards, I couldn’t look back and see when it had started. The man came home one day, early and dejected, but the woman didn’t look surprised. He didn’t go out the next morning, nor did he for several mornings after that. The woman kept up a cheerful facade when the children were home, but while they were at school, the man and the woman had tense, anxious conversations behind closed doors. Women from town sometimes brought their sewing or their laundry, coming again the next day to pick it up. The man left the house before dawn each day and never came home until after dark. He was sometimes triumphant. But, more often, he slumped up to bed hopelessly. Once in a while, a piece of furniture or a box of clothes disappeared. Sometimes, the man came home and, instead of going to bed, he took a beer out of the fridge and sat at the table, drinking and thinking, until it was morning.
One of the children got sick. A cough that didn’t go away, and a fever that came and went and then came back again with a vengeance. A kindly old man with a neatly trimmed beard and a small black pouch came, listening to the boy’s heartbeat and repeating Hm quietly. That night, there were tears and strangled words behind the man and woman’s door. The next day, the woman packed the Victrola into a box and gave it to a man in a truck, pocketing the bills that he gave her in return.
The boy got better, slowly but surely, but something had broken inside the woman. She still sang to the children, shooed them out to play in the afternoons, put a meal—whatever it was—on the table at the end of the day. But in her moments alone, she sat and smoked and stared out the window for hours at a time. The man still carted his children around on his back, twirled them around to make them laugh, kissed the woman goodbye when he left. But he, too, often sat and drank and stared out the window for hours every night.
And so it went, for years. The children grew. The man and woman held on, held on.
They all heard it on the radio when Pearl Harbor was hit and Roosevelt gave his speech. The woman looked fearfully at the man and then at her son. Her son who, I now realized, was no longer a boy. He was staring down at the table, running his thumbnail along a groove in the wood. He stood. His sisters began to cry. He looked at them all and left the house. The woman all but collapsed. The man went to the window and watched as his son crossed the street and headed toward town.
+++
He came home years later, having lost an arm and gained a wife and a child. The woman, frailer now, and her daughters with their own families underfoot, spent weeks preparing for his homecoming. The man, who no longer spent nights staring out the window, stayed busy making his own preparations: washing and waxing the car, mowing the lawn (no longer a farm or even a field), and running errands in town. Men were coming home and starting up businesses in droves, so there were plenty of errands to choose from.
When the son walked in the door, tall and proud, there were lots of tears. My, but he’s handsome, I thought, doing my best to appear clean and friendly and familiar. Immediately, the woman turned on the radio, where Nat King Cole crooned. They began to dance, and it was just as it had always been.
+++
There were some good years after that, for a time and then, one day, the man didn’t come home. A week later, there was another gathering of friends and family in the living room. More sandwiches and drinks. The children, not children anymore, visited their mother often after that and, slowly, the visits became longer and longer until the woman was never alone anymore. Late-night phone calls, whispered conversations, glasses of amber liquid. The woman fell and broke her leg, she forgot to turn off the oven, and, once, she walked out into a winter’s night wearing nothing but a nightgown. But there were good days too. They still shoved the furniture out of the way and turned up the music when they could. No cigarettes, but plenty of laughing and plenty of shouting to be heard. I felt it in my bones—that reverberating timbre.
And then, silence. The woman didn’t wake up. The children came and packed everything away. For a while they or their children visited periodically, always with a tape measure and a notebook in hand. Then the visits stopped. A woman came and stuck a sign into the front yard; a few months later, she took it out and didn’t come back.
The town grew up. The land was cut into ever-smaller pieces, each one home to a pre-fabricated building, each one spilling over with people, belongings, children’s toys soon after its construction. Cars, rounder and larger now, zoomed by. Sometimes music blared from their windows; more often, the windows were rolled up tight. I remained where I’d always been, squeezed on both sides.
The strain showed in my cracked walls, in the steps that sagged on my front porch, in the hole that appeared in the back wall and was never repaired. I waited for someone to claim me or to find me, but no one ever did.
I used the time to remember. The pride on the man’s face when he’d put the finishing touches on the porch steps or a bedroom door. The dress the woman had worn the first time we’d seen each other and how proud it had made both of us to belong to something so beautiful. And every child—I remembered them all.
All those people. I held them in my walls.
+++
And then. On a day when nothing was straight anymore, and hardly any of me was still standing. The woman. I hadn’t known she was coming.
+++
She came in the spring—such a time for new beginnings, I almost didn’t trust that she was real. By the height of the summer, my crooked bits were straight again. She attacked the work like she was exorcising a spirit.
One day, she put a picture on the mantel, her first decorative touch. It was a color photo in a simple, cheap metal frame. In it, a man smiled and held a little boy on his lap. The little boy had cake smeared on his face and was also smiling. They both wore party hats.
She put the picture on the mantel slowly, her fingers shaking. She took a few steps back and just…looked…at it, for a long time, the tips of her fingers covering her mouth.
“I don’t feel you here,” she whispered, finally. Then, she laid down on the floor, stretched out in front of the fireplace and covered her whole face with her hands, palms flat. She shook, but she didn’t make any sound. Curling onto her side, she held her hands in front of her like she was cradling a baby.
Something similar happened every day—sometimes more than once a day—for weeks. She would pass the picture, stop in her tracks, murmur something, and cry. Sometimes, she crumpled to the floor or threw something. Sometimes, she was silent as her shoulders shook. Sometimes she called out a name. Eventually, she would wipe her cheeks, sigh, and attack her list of chores with a new determination. But she never caught all the tears. I felt them seep into me, as I felt her weight when she fell against me. Just as I’d felt the weight of the dancers’ pounding feet, all those years ago.
+++
As the summer turned toward autumn, and the light became ever more golden, the daily ritual ebbed. She missed a day here or there, or she just stopped for a moment and then shook her head. I kept myself ready to catch her if she needed me, but she didn’t seem to. More pictures went up, and a fabric-covered chair by the window. One day, as she walked through the kitchen, the view through the picture window caught her attention. The sun had just crested what little bit of the hills could still be seen in the distance and—for a moment—it looked like the whole earth had been poured in liquid gold. She gasped and pushed the door open, moving as if she were being pulled.
Once she got outside, she just stood there for several long moments, taking in huge lungfuls of air. I could see her shoulders rising, her back expanding, with each inhalation. She would hold each one for several seconds and then—whoosh—let it out in a rush. Her hands went to her hair, gathering it into a ponytail high on her head before letting it go. She bent down and picked something up before coming back inside. It was a goldenrod. One perfect, solitary goldenrod. She put it in a glass next to the sink and stood at the counter for a long while, looking so much like the women who’d stood in this kitchen before her.
“I’m here,” she said. “Today, I’m here.”
It felt like she was saying it to me.
Beautiful. Just beautiful.