A House, A Summerhouse, by Paul Lisicky
The house had been dead for years. No pants lifted off its hangers, no shirts churning in the washer. I walked through the thick, sweet, mildewed air, room to closed-up room, looking for trouble: jimmied slider handle, humming fuse box, overturned bureau drawer. But who was anyone kidding? The house could have used an intruder, someone who cared enough to covet the stuff in these junked-up rooms, the cracked slab of the jalousie porch. At its best, the house was a glorified storage locker: boxes of sheet music (Finian’s Rainbow, Oliver) sat beside pitted tools, engineering books stored in apple crates. At its worst, it was a mausoleum in which nothing had breathed for years. The floors almost seemed to exhale with each cautious step of mine.
I splayed my hand on the piano, played octaves up and down the scale. In terrible tune, but I liked the way it shuddered in the damp drab cave, dissonance buzzing the legs of the chairs, the hat tins filled with buttons, safety pins. Happiness had been here once. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I had the sense that if I sat here long enough and played in my limited, clunky way (I could hear my wife telling me to stop the noise, please stop the noise!) I believed I’d see the children who lived here. I imagined an awkward boy playing Where is Love while his brothers screamed outside, poured a box of laundry soap into an inflatable pool, frothing up the surface like a dessert. Wasn’t that me out there with them? And the mother with her hands on her hips crying, you’ll get a rash from that water. Stay out.
I pulled back the draperies from the window. Weeds as high as my waist, and a wooden raft pulled out of the lagoon, boards crumbling like stale wedding cake wrapped in a napkin.
Had someone died? Had the children grown up, grown distant from their parents, and spread out all over the country, made lives of their own? Had a brother fought another brother? An argument with the neighbors? Perhaps the answers could be assumed from the basket-weave fence, now greened, warped, and pocked with mildew, clearly thrown up in spite. The question was crucial: why would someone leave a house, a summerhouse, place of pleasure and rest, in this condition? My sister-in-law would have her theory: money. Little houses like these got three-quarter million dollars these days, I knew that. But that explanation didn’t sit well with me. The reason people hold on to things is more complicated than that, more heartbroken and extreme. Maybe it was just a case of stubbornness, someone unable to let go, if not of a place then of a time, and they’d cling and they’d cling until death and the law did what they did to settle things.
At least someone was concerned enough to think that the house needed a friendly hand, even if it was only a single day of the week.
I leafed through the contents of a wine box. Beneath the receipts, deposit slips, news clippings, programs, and movie ticket stubs: loose snapshots of a family. A boy in bow tie and blazer, bending over a cello as if he’s protecting something cherished: a brash living thing. A second boy with the pensive expression of a medieval rabbi, already mourning his lost youth, though he couldn’t be a day past thirteen. They weren’t the happiest children I’d ever seen, but they weren’t the most desolate either. So what if they let a little seriousness drag down the corners of their eyes when they smiled? At least they weren’t like my own relatives, people who tried so hard to look happy and strong that they ceased to be human.
Well, I’d do it for them, the boys in the photographs. I picked up a cloth and started cleaning. People had no idea how fast things wanted to fall apart if left to what waited for them: rust, mold, rot, tarnish, corrosion. If only they knew, they’d be different about life, I swear it. Those boys—men now—would come running, from wherever city or star. They’d find out one thing: the world was never so easy to leave, however sorry your fortune.
