Dwight's House and Other Stories

Dwight’s House

Susan

There were many explosions the year the comet returned: Space Shuttle Challenger, the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, Mummar Qaddafi's house in Libya. Far fewer people heard the explosion at the lake.A slow, steady, muffling snow had fallen for two days. On the East shore, winterized houses began to light up as the skiers came in, but the West shore houses were dark except for one on the water's edge and one back in the hemlocks.

In her father's fishing cottage in the hemlocks, Susan Hurlburton sat wrapped in a garage sale afghan, holding a book in her lap, trying to remember its name. The book was wedged between her thumbs and forefingers, so she could tell by feel that it was a paperback, but she couldn't remember the title. A mild panic spread through her body and she peered around the room. The double lump on the couch was her boys, the bigger lump in the chair was her daughter Fern. Maybe the gray winter fog had crept into the room and her mind. On the television, by squinting, she could make out the tracer light of the exploding space shuttle again.

Nearsighted, she could, of course, have simply looked down and resumed reading, but she was caught up in the sensation of panic. Sensations had always occupied her, resided longest in her memory. She remembered with great vividness Dwight's grin the day they met and rain trickling down his laugh lines. She remembered her other lover, too, her first lover, Smitty, especially his voice when he said, I drift with a restless wind, babe, but I'll always remember you. She remembered Smitty’s exact tone—which was fake cowboy whereas Dwight's was real hillbilly—and how it ran over her shoulders and down her spine. Smitty was the first person she ever felt skin to skin. He would slowly move his nose and upper lip over her whole body—neck, collarbone, shoulder and down her back. As long as she wanted, just traveling over her skin.

That sensation and the music of his farewell were always within easy reach. The consequences: embarrassment, terror of childbirth, blame—usually lost in the fog. But the memory of the babies’ skin stayed: Fern and then Mikey and Junior. Skin-to-skin with the babies was the loveliest sensation she ever knew.

The rest of her life was slivers and snapshots: the boys as babies, a cotton knit dress of Fern's with a spring print of tiny strawberries on her first day of school. A Christmas table decorated with pine cones sprayed gold. All the Halloween costumes, although not in order and not whose was whose. She remembered her mother's illness and Pop's sobs, and Dwight's hands on Pop's shoulders. But she did not remember the funeral or the wedding.

Lately she had begun to forget what she was reading. She knew the book in her hands was not a classic, and she was pretty sure it wasn't a biography, because she could remember being sad when she finished the stack of biographies: Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland and Eleanor of Aquitaine. The book was not a romance either, because she had let Dwight and Fern throw those away when they moved back to western Massachusetts. She could feel herself getting closer: tracking down the title. She remembered her conviction that the woman in the story was about to be killed. It wasn't anything in the plot that told her this, just reading so many books. The woman was about to be discovered in a pool of blood with a small red bullet hole in her forehead, or maybe her throat slashed like a second mouth. So it was a book with violence in it.

Susan's eyes fell on the rug: chocolate-green, it had been there since she was a little girl and her father had bought this cottage at Three Mile Lake. Pressed into the rug were fragments of potato chips, paper curls from spiral notebooks, chips of plastic from stepped-on toys. Her mother would never have stayed out here without a vacuum cleaner. Her mother would have refused. Even in the summer, her mother would never sleep over. They would come for a cook-out, and her dad would stay over so he could get up and fish in the dawn, and once or twice Susan got to sleep over, but her mother never did.

And if she had—thought Susan. If her mother had been stuck out here in winter, with no vacuum cleaner, there would not have been potato chips in the rug anyhow. Her mother had been large and thick, her hair white as long as Susan had known her, with an old-fashioned weak heart, but her mother would have been on her knees panting, huffing and puffing, picking at the bits of dirt. The kitchen sink would have been clear of dirty dishes and the drainer emptied.

This cottage, thought Susan. This cottage is a crime—

Elmore Leonard.

It came to her now. The book was an Elmore Leonard crime novel. There had been a stack of Elmore Leonards at the Paperback Exchange, and she had bought them for their titles. She liked them at first, especially the ones set in Miami, but after awhile it had begun to bother her, the throbbing certainty that the decent people were doomed.

She wished for something not grim and not squalid.

She wished for her romances back. They were like bags of miniature chocolate bars that you ate till you felt sick, but she could read the same one over a month later and get the same pleasure from it. They were dependable friends. She wished very much for a friend. She felt vaguely that cleaning up the cottage would be possible if she had a friend. She still had her best books, Jane Eyre and Gone With the Wind, but they weren’t the kind of friends who encourage you to clean the house.

She needed the kind of friend who gave advice. She had always liked loud mouthed women who wore big earrings and laughed a lot, like Janet Tasso in high school or Reva Byrd in Detroit. If they could have kept the apartment in town instead of coming out to the lake, she might have gotten to know the woman downstairs a little. One of those women, Janet or Reva or the woman downstairs, would have said, Now look here, Susan, you tell that Dwight–

It was actually Reva's voice she heard, Reva from Detroit. A mountaineer twang, like Dwight’s, but tougher and kinder. Reva saying, He's going to make you move again, Susan? I'd say to him, look here Dwight– but she couldn't remember the rest.

He had moved them from Berkshire County to Detroit, and from neighborhood to neighborhood out there, and then back here, which had made her hopeful for a little while. Moving back here had made her think Mikey and Junior would get to join the Scouts and go hiking. But Dwight hated pumping gas, and he hated being bossed and got himself fired again, and they couldn't pay the rent. He wouldn't move in with Pop, so they came out here to the fishing cottage, temporarily. Dwight was not, of course, responsible for the weather. Dwight hadn't known the car would break down beyond his ability to fix it, that a deep snow would come early. That Pop would go on a drunk and forget to bring them groceries. The kids not go to school.

Between her eyes and the book, Susan brought out the principal dancers. When she was small, she used to read all the books in the library about ballet, then made up these imaginary ballerinas. They were about the size of a three year old child, but with the lithe figures of adults. Each one had her own pastel color—skin, hair, and leotards. They filled empty spaces and hid ugliness.

Sometimes they lightly toed on her bare arm, across her back, moving with grace and dignity and beauty. They made her want to cry the way she cried at the good parts of Gone With the Wind and Jane Eyre.

They danced through the faint smell of propane gas that clung to everything, they danced over the stains on the plasterboard walls where someone had thrown coke or beer. She needed them because Junior wouldn't sit in her lap anymore and Dwight didn't shave most days and his cheeks were rough and his eyes angry and his knuckles had oily dirt deep down in the wrinkles that he never scrubbed out.

The principal dancers were the balance to, the protection from, the other ones, the hatchet faced ones she was not permitted to look at directly. If she could either read or watch the principal dancers, instead of thinking of the other ones, the ones in the corners, everything was okay.

Down here in the cold, only the touch of the principal dancers didn't chafe her skin, so dry and scaly. Everything else chafed. Dwight in particular. She tried not to notice, she tried to keep the principal dancers in front of her eyes when he wanted to have sex, but she knew he knew, and she knew it made things worse.

Reva Byrd said once, They aren't worth much to start with, honey, so if you don't like what they do in bed, you just might as well walk out now.

Susan thought that maybe her daughter Fern was going to be one of those brave women. Fern stood up to Dwight the night he broke a kitchen chair and put a hole in the bathroom wall. He started screaming Goddam it I'm not going to hit anybody, why doesn't anybody believe me? Nobody believes in me, no wonder I have such a hard time getting it all together when nobody believes me. Your wife is supposed to believe in you. A woman is supposed to stand by her man!

And Fern, who was fourteen, put a hand on her hip and said, Isn't that a song, Dwight? Isn't that some stupid country music song? God, I hate those whiny songs, Dwight.

Dwight stood there, made a fool of, dropped the chair, and grabbed his jacket and went out. That was when the car was still working, before they got snowed in. He came back after they were in bed, and she heard him all night in the kitchen with hammer and nails, fixing the chair, patching the wall. He was good at fixing and making. He used to make shelves for her, first thing, wherever they lived. He didn't use the metal runners and brackets, he always built real wooden shelves, sturdy enough to sleep on. In one apartment he had rehung the windows, taking the wood apart and repairing the rope that held the little counterweights for ease of lifting.

And when Fern said, after that night with the chair, Mom, you should leave him, Susan had thought of his left hand, with three fingers relaxed, taking no weight, just lightly balancing on the pine board while his thumb and forefinger held the nail. And he never missed and never cursed and never smashed his finger.

Elaine

At the other lighted house on the West shore, Elaine Roth stared out at the snow. It covered the frozen lake and lawn equally, and there was no way to identify the exact edge. This troubled and fascinated her. She had walked across the lake an hour earlier after parking her car at the boat launch, carrying shopping bags, thrilled at the adventure of walking on water. The boat launch plowed by the ice fishermen who had little tents and fires out on the lake. Now, at dusk, they were all gone, and Elaine seemed to be totally alone, the world perfectly silent. At home, in New York, there would have been noises: steam pipes, the elevator, sirens, news on the radio, news on the kitchen TV Jerry calling. He was probably calling now, long distance, and all she had to do was put the phone back on the hook and let him apologize.

He should never have announced who he slept with. Adultery was one thing; sloppy confessions were another. Elaine had not always been faithful, but she never endangered their marriage by telling him who she slept with. And of all people for Jerry to have an affair with—Desiree Gold, for crying out loud. I don't want to hear it, Elaine had said. I really don't want to hear about it, Jerry.

Especially not now, she had thought, but not said. The timing like a bad joke. The very Saturday morning she had felt the little hard button in her breast that she had been waiting for most of her adult life. She and her friends talked about cancer, joked about it, then stopped when one of them had a biopsy. Now Elaine bargained about it: I'll die of something else, she would say. A terrorist will dump me out of my wheelchair like that poor tourist on the cruise ship. I'll have a heart attack or choke on a chicken bone. Maybe she had felt wrong anyhow. She only felt it once, then went into panic mode.

It was darker and quieter, and in spite of electric baseboard heat, she shivered in her colorful hand-knit sweater. Was it possible, she wondered, that she had lived half a century and never spent a night alone? She felt more cheerful to have a psychological puzzle to worry at. She need a project; psychology was her favorite.

She had certainly never been alone until Barbara and Richard were in school. In school? Didn't she mean college? Summers up here, Jerry on weekends, but she had the kids, and her sister and her kids too. Before kids, she and Jerry had been so inseparable they used to miss their subway stop because they were kissing. Before Jerry (had there ever been a Before Jerry?) there was her sister, their cousins. Always in apartments with other families above, below, across the air vent. This place was the first property they had ever owned. They had a rent controlled apartment like they don’t make them any more, and they had always rented at the lake, so this was their first house and their first new thing too. It had a whirlpool bath and double sinks in the master bedroom; it had a built-in video library stocked with vintage black and white Warner Brothers movies; it had a switch to open the shades in the skylight. It had a climate controlled wine cellar and a computer room/den with an air-filtering system.

But Jerry! she had complained, the air at the lake is clean, Jerry! Isn't clean air why we come here? I want breezes from the lake! I want a rustic cottage! New England farmhouse not shelter magazine chic! Scrap the fancy sound system, I want a Victrola!

Of course, he got her one, but in addition to, not instead of. That was Jerry.

This was Jerry's big project. When he spoke about this house, he murmured lovingly: Top drawer, he crooned. Birch and oak. Electric heat with back-up wood stoves. This place is going to be so energy efficient it'll run on ten cents a day. I've had it with charm, Lainie, this is about efficiency.

He read books on passive solar; he wanted to sink half the house into the side of a hill, but their property was all lake front, so he settled for thermal glass and big windows on the sun side. He had been particularly proud of his ability to ferret out local craftsmen. He inquired in drug stores and at service stations: who would you trust to build your house? Electrician? Septic system? Which lumber yard?

And when the house was done, they had made a party for all the workmen and their families. Set out galvanized wash tubs full of beer on ice, every brand domestic and foreign (excluding the Fascist Coors of course). Talked a friend into flying his plane to Maine for a load of live lobsters. Come anytime, said Jerry to the local guys. I mean it, anytime you want a swim, you want to take out the boats. Mi casa is your casa. Drank too much and peed in the woods and told them they were the salt of the earth. He had to embrace everyone and their wives, and Elaine loved him for the generosity of how he made a fool of himself.

So the house was all Jerry—open plan, redundant systems, excessive but simple, true-blue, and clean-hearted. Was it possible that he had never been unfaithful before? Was that why he had confessed his fling with Desiree? She thought it was an unspoken rule they had agreed on, to kiss occasionally but not tell. Not to make a habit of it, but to enjoy the occasional spice, the unfamiliar odors, the compliment to one's own drawing power. Why would Jerry confess Desiree, unless he had never done it before?

This was much more interesting than illness. She had never been good with illness. She only kept the kids home from school if they were vomiting on the floor. She bulled her way through her own viruses, headaches, sprains. She would, of course, do the right thing, go see Dr. Grubstein first thing Monday morning. The x-rays, the bad news. She would think about it tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day. I'll cry tomorrow. Go home tomorrow or drive straight to Grubstein's on Monday morning. The rest of tonight, Saturday, then Sunday, was her own. She had French bread in the freezer, wine, melodrama on video. She had been angry and terrified when she left, not paralyzed. She had garlic and fresh basil from the city, oranges to squeeze for breakfast, a bag of oat bran muffins. Soak in the tub, drink, eat, and which tape? Bette Davis? Not Dark Victory, thank you. Maybe Jezebel. She dropped her arms from their self-hugging, took deep breaths to center herself, and