Post by HED on Jan 2, 2016 19:31:40 GMT
Another short story from my Advanced Creative Writing class. This one is an episodic story. It was meant to be a reinterpretation of another story I had started writing at the time. To my surprise it ended up being much better.
The hailstones on the ground crunch beneath my boots as I walk through the garden of my front yard and down the muddy road that is the street I live on. The weatherman on the news last night had promised sun, not a cloud in the sky. I've long since given up believing predictions of the weather in Montana, so far removed in pattern from what I learned growing up in California.
All the mailboxes for the houses on the street are clustered in a single metal fixture at the end of the street. It still strikes me as wrong, even after twenty years of living here. Mail should be delivered to a little metal box by the driveway, not this impersonal prison at the end of the road. There’s so much inside my box that getting all the mail out after I open it is a struggle, and I bend several letters in the process. The new mailman is careless with the way he shoves everything inside. I wonder if he even checks the addresses carefully. I tuck the mail under my arm and head back.
I dump the mail in a heap on the kitchen table and sit down. It covers my mom’s old tablecloth, which I use despite its being much too long for the table. Glossy catalogues and manila envelopes of various sizes cover the white and red of the cloth. Sorting through the mail, I divide it into two piles. The larger of the two is composed entirely of the unwanted catalogues, sacrifices to the plastic maw of the recycling bin. The other consists mostly of bills, with a letter from Carl's family mixed in. Sure enough, there are a few letters for my neighbors, misdelivered. I place those in a third pile to themselves, further away from me than either of the others. As I sort through, I notice a letter from my real estate agent in California.
The letter informs me that they've found a buyer for my mother's house. I know I should feel relieved. The prior year, I had been the unlucky teacher without tenure and got laid off. I'd quickly grown tired of all the time at home unemployment forces on me, but none of the schools were hiring. Carl’s salary barely supports us. We couldn’t afford the additional property taxes, not without the fund my mother left for us. Anna had swapped out her stake in the house in exchange for that, leaving me in a quagmire.
I feel my heart rate increase. I breathe deeply, slowly. Vacating the chair, I pace around the room, feeling the cold wood of the floor against my feet. We had finally covered up the bare concrete of the floors ten years ago, and in the end we’d chosen the wood over a carpet. Cleaning it is easier than a carpet, but it feels impersonal. The cold is a lesser concern. Putting on warmer socks sounds appealing, but the climb up the steep stairs that retrieving them would necessitate, much less so.
Once more the hail begins clacking noisily down on the roof. Within a few minutes it escalates, a rapid-fire bombardment upon the roof. I walk over towards the kitchen window and look out, watching the white balls cover the dull green of the lawn. For a moment, I worry about the windows on the side of the house, and the windshields of the cars outside. The few times it hailed growing up, I'd always been so concerned. Anna would mock me for my worry. She's younger than me, but even as children she always believed herself more mature, more reasonable than me. I shake my head like I have water stuck in my ear, attempting to banish thoughts of Anna from my head. A cold draft passes through the room, its ghostly presence my only companion in the house.
The draft, I realize, is coming from Beth's room. I walk from the kitchen into her room, the next room over. I've been the room's only visitor since Beth enrolled in college. Occasionally I venture inside, watering her collection of plants and opening her window when the house needed additional air circulation. Carl mostly alternates between staying in our room upstairs, grading homework, and lounging on the couches. Beth won’t be visiting home for another month.
I cross the room, still a mess of cheap furniture, art magazines and books. Just as Beth likes it. At the other end of the room sits her bed, adjacent to the window. Her plants, a cactus and a couple varieties of small house ferns, sit by the window. I reach over them gently, closing the window with a soft thud. To my relief, the sill is dry. The only thing that had blown in was the wind.
I look at the cork board that sat above the head of Beth's bed. Pressed in with pushpins is a calendar, pictures of faraway mountains, and a postcard of Costa Rica. Anna had sent it, while she vacationed there. I swallow. Every new thought of my sister puts a heavy uneasiness at the back of my throat. The only thing that pains me more than knowing my sister had forced my parting from home is that I know she’ll never understand why it matters to me.
I had never talked with Anna about what we'd do with the house when mom passed. In hindsight I can recognize that as an error on my part, but I don’t think that any amount of planning beforehand could have changed her mind. Even without talking, I should have known what she'd do. It was never going to go any other way.
The gravel underneath my feet felt foreign, out of place. It assumed the place and the role of the green lawn my childhood, and while I knew that it was the water-friendly choice I resented the change. I walked with Anna through the yard of our mother’s house, where we had spent the past few days in general uncomfortable silence, picking through the house like vultures on a corpse. It was our house, now, our contentious inheritance. Three days ago Anna and I began arguing over it. Anna, perennially penniless, insisted upon selling it. I thought there was still time, that once I found the right words I could convince her otherwise.
I walked to my rental car with Anna. Her flight would depart in a few hours time, and she needed a ride to the airport. She carried a bag with her, full of the things she’d taken out of her old room. I couldn’t believe that the only thing she wanted from the home were her own belongings. No mementos of our parents, no family heirlooms, not even our mother’s doll that had so entranced us as children. No, all Anna took were some old books that sat unloved on her bookshelf for decades.
Anna stopped and turned towards me as we reached the car. Her greying hair was blown slightly by a cool breeze.
"Iris," she said, looking at me. The wrinkles under her eyes give her a perpetually serious look, "There’s something you need to know."
As soon as I heard those words, I should have known. Instead, I let myself hope that Anna would tell me what I desperately wanted to hear. I looked at her, expecting a cascade of words about how I had been right, that home was too precious to be sold on a whim. I breathed in deeply.
"I'm selling you my share of the house. I turned in the paperwork yesterday."
I don't remember what exactly I said to her, only that I turned away and stormed back inside the house. I kicked my shoes off in the entry room, feeling the cold linoleum beneath my feet, and locked the door behind me. I felt tears leaking down my face.
Boxes were piled up by the door, full of the things I’d claimed for my own household. Carl would drive out in a few days, when Beth’s high school got out for spring break, and when he arrived we would stuff the boxes in the back of our car for the drive to Montana. At that moment, I was alone. I knew Anna “was too proud” to disturb my isolation. She would never knock on the door in apology, begging for a ride. No, she’d call herself a taxi, or maybe contact an old friend in the neighborhood. Whether or not she’d arrive at the airport in time for the flight, I didn’t know. I knew that I wouldn’t see her again, not for a long while, but nothing else felt certain.
I walked through the dining room first, a majestic hall that could fit our entire extended family with ease. The dark oak dining table had been covered with paperwork, leftover from the lawyer’s visit the day prior. I gathered the pages into a single neat stack and left them on the end of the table, exposing the elegant table cloth beneath. The same red and white, untouched and remarkably unstained after so many years. My mother would lay it out each night before dinner, telling me more often than not how her mother had done the same. I ran my hands over the cloth, soft but textured.
I stopped in the doorways of the next room over, nominally my old bedroom. I still thought of it as my father’s study. I walked into the room, the sparsest in the house. Anna had insisted she get a room all to herself when she reached middle school and I was moved into my father’s old study. I’d only spent a few years in the room before enrolling in college. They transplanted my old bed into the room, but there had been no room elsewhere in the house for my father’s desk, so I had de facto received that as well. I appreciated the desk’s presence in the room only for the fact that it had spared it from disposal. Otherwise, I resented it for being a continual reminder of the room’s true purpose. The light wood of my bed contrasted with the dark polish of the rest of the furniture. Besides those two pieces, a row of bookshelves stood along one wall. A green area rug, situated squarely in the center of the room, bridged the gap between the furniture.
The rug was another thing the room had inherited from its days as my father’s study. Memories of watching my father’s long hours of late-night work in the room, clearer than most of the memories of childhood, were retrieved from the deep storage of my mind as I looked at that rug. I remembered reading on the floor, sitting on that rug, seeing him hunched over the desk when I looked up at him, pencil scratching away. Occasionally, he’d take a glance at me, and as we made eye contact we’d smile.
Finally, I walked into the room that had been our parents’. The blinds had been closed over the window, filling the room with stifling shadow. Their king-sized bed absorbed most of the space in the room. Our mother would gather us all on the bed for the purpose of watching the sunset, when she could manage it. After a certain age Anna lost interest, and when her protests became loudly vocal, my mother stopped the practice altogether. I pulled the cord on the blinds, watching the light shutters ascend in time with my motion, gathering at the top like a map that had been folded up once again. Before my eyes appeared a distant expanse of blue, framed by the oak trees of our yard. As I stared out at the miraculous view, I wondered how it was possible that Anna could hate this house.
"I love this house, Iris," Anna said, looking at me from across my kitchen table. She stood by the fireplace. In conversation and in my mind, I referred to it as the fireplace out of habit, even though it was a freestanding iron stove, and not an element built into the wall like at home. A small fire burned inside.
"That's very nice of you to say," I responded. I patted my stomach absentmindedly. "Thank you,"
I didn't see what Anna liked about the house. The floors consisted of just bare concrete, only the occasional rug covering it. The kitchen, dining room, living room, they were all the same space. Even the table we sat at was a pitiful specimen, something closer to a picnic table than a dining table.
Anna walked past the stove and the couches towards the steep wooden staircase. She took a couple exploratory steps up, slowly, like a climber testing the side of a mountain. The planks creaked under her weight. After looking up for a moment, she turned her head back and looked down at me.
"You and Carl are up there?"
"Yes indeed." I took a sip of tea. I had just begun drinking it, and liked it watery and weak.
"I always wished we had a second story at home," Anna said, walking back down. "Didn't you?"
"I never really thought about it," I responded. I leaned back in my seat. "I think I liked having everything on one floor."
"Ready for old age, are you?" Anna laughed. "I'm convinced that's why mom and dad chose that house."
I said nothing, but simply shrugged my shoulders. Anna turned to her side as she walked back towards me, inspecting a shelf. She grabbed the vase that sat inside, pulling it out as reference. The fact that it took her so long to recognize it surprised me. The vase, a blue and white china piece, had been sitting in our home from before she had been born. I imagined that its transition to my house left a gaping absence at home.
“Why do you have this old thing?” Anna said, frowning.
“Mom gave it to me,” I answered. “As a housewarming gift.” I frowned as well. The vase had always been one of my favorites.
Anna placed the vase back on the shelf and finally finished her return. She grabbed the back of a chair with her hands and leaned forward. "Which room is mine again?"
"The only other room in the house." I pointed towards the door on my right. "There. Our guest room’s first and last guest."
"Don't tell me you've replaced the bed with a crib already." Anna laughed again.
"Oh, don't worry, they're surprisingly comfortable." I smiled at her. "I'm sorry if the bed isn't."
"Can't be worse than what we had back home." Anna said.
I flinched at each of the continual jabs at our childhood home, even as Anna tried to compliment my own. "Speaking of home, I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving," I said. "Comfortable beds or not."
"You're thinking a little bit farther ahead than I am," Anna said, pulling out the chair and sitting.
"Thinking about the future kind of comes with the condition," I replied.
She turned, looking away. "Not sure if I'm going."
"What? Why not?" I asked. "You know mom would pay anything if it would get you home. Especially for a holiday."
She sighed. "I never did enjoy going home as much as you did.”
I was visiting mom and dad the first time she came home from college. I'd been dropped off for the week by Carl, who was just my boyfriend at the time. The long drive from school exhausted us, but both our families lived in the area. I knew how much the holidays meant to my mother.
I was sitting on the couch of the living room, staring at the black screen of the television. I knew that getting in the way of my mother when she was tidying up was a foolish endeavour. The couch was thus the safest spot for me, so long as I avoided disrupting the arrangement of pillows.
I'd never seen her in such a frenzy. Having already vacuumed every floor and dusted every conceivable surface, she had reached the level of adjusting coasters on the table that sat beside my father’s favorite chair. She abhorred the notion of the house not being perfectly clean for the return of her other dear daughter. Of course, neither Anna nor I cared about the cleanliness of the house. I loved it either way, finding a certain appreciation for the way that dust made the house look like something from another era. Anna just didn’t care.
"So, what's for dinner?"
"Salmon," she answered, which came as no surprise. Mom prided herself on her salmon and served it on every special occasion. To this day, no taste makes me think more of home than a piece of well prepared salmon.
A moment later, the noise of a car break screeching reached our ears. My mom began her way over into the entry room, hovering around the door, feet shuffling on the linoleum. We heard the sound of a car door closing, followed quickly by footsteps, and finally I heard the door click open.
"Anna!" I heard my mother yell, in the same way she yelled when I got home. Then she spoke again, shock evident in her voice. "Your hair!"
I turned around on the couch. I saw my mother, arms still embracing my sister but head drawn back, inspecting her. Anna's once long, brown hair had been cut just below the ears and dyed a jet black.
"What about it?" My sister's response was terse.
My mother recovered. "It looks wonderful on you."
I didn't believe that for a second, and I knew Anna wouldn't either.
I followed Anna as she trudged down the hall, lugging a heavy bag with her. She settled in her old room, the room that we had once shared. As Anna dropped her bag to the floor and flopped on the bed, I stared at the still-familiar ceiling, decorated with glow-in-the-dark stars. The space where my bed had been was filled only with a rug, and still looked unnaturally vacant. I had the same sort of feeling that I felt when I saw an empty lot in place of a favorite old restaurant.
“Mom was just surprised, that’s all,” I consoled my presumably angry sister. “Don’t feel bad.”
“I don’t.” Anna looked at me like I was an idiot. “It would worry me more if she liked it.”
I sighed and sat down on a chair. "So, how're your classes?" I asked, looking around the room. She'd covered the walls posters of punk bands and album artwork, things I never cared much for. They’d gone up only months before she’d left for college. Anna had the habit of changing the room at an unbelievable pace. In her closet a pile of neglected posters sat, stopped from spilling over the floors only by the doors.
"They're fine. Kinda boring." She said, sitting up. “But you never told me how great college would be.”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” I said, forcing a smile. For me, college consisted of an exhausting whirlwind of dorm rooms and apartments from the beginning. Worrying Anna with that sort of talk had seemed unnecessary, and so out of evidently misplaced concern I had always been brief when we’d discussed the subject.
"Getting out of here just feels good, you know?" Anna said, her hands sweeping around, indicating the room and presumably the rest of the house as well.
I frown at her. "I'm not sure I do."
"This place is just so..." She gesture about with her hands, looking for the right word. She tightened her hands into fists, evidently a sign of failure. "I don't know, stale."
"Stale." I repeated.
"Nothing ever changes here," Anna said, standing up. "Always just the same old normal."
"I don't know, it isn't so bad," I said, averting my gaze. I always appreciated the consistency of home.
"For you, maybe." Anna started unpacking her clothes from her bag into the drawers of the my old dresser.
"What's that supposed to mean?" I furrowed my brow at her.
"Come on, Iris." Anna glared at me. "You've always been their favorite child.”
I watched my father take apart my bed, piece by piece. Anna sat cross legged on her bed, a satisfied smile on her face. She had blocky headphones on and was listening to a cassette, her head bobbing along with the music. Anna, at last, had achieved her great victory, and she appeared as satisfied about it as I had expected. After years of nagging our parents, she'd finally have a room of her own.
"Could you hand me that?" My father pointed towards a tool that had been set a few feet away from me.
He had suggested the idea of my participation in the deconstruction, and eventual reconstruction, of my bed. Participation, he believed, would facilitate my acceptance of the new status quo. In practice just meant handing my father a new wrench every few minutes. An encyclopedia of Greek mythology sat open on my lap, one I’d read hundreds of times before. I reached over, grabbing the tool with the tips of my fingers. Each wrench felt heavier than the last as I passed them along.
The room hadn't been such a mess in years. I'd begun insisting on a clean room space when Anna began arguing with me over if certain sections of the collective mess were her's or mine. The spaces of the room that were Anna’s could have been divined by observing what part of the room lacked clutter. Once Anna had the room all to herself, I had no doubt the mess would spread over the rest of the space, like a creeping fungus.
A piece of the bed came loose, a long curved piece that defined the foot of the bed. My father looked around for a vacant spot on the floor. The piece needed a good deal of space to lie flat. With every spot within arm’s length around him filled, he handed me the piece. I took a hold of it, grasping it lightly.
"Might as well put these in your room, right?"
"It's not my room," I whispered.
"Not yet!" My mother said. I looked up from the floor and saw her standing in the hall outside the room. Evidently, I had not whispered as quietly as I believed. "But soon."
"That's not what I meant."
"I think it's exciting," she said, reaching down picking up a few of the smaller pieces of my bed.
Closing my book, I got up and followed her at a sluggish pace. I dragged my bed piece on the carpet like a caveman dragging a club. We reached the door of my father's study, upon which a sign bearing my name had been unsuitably transplanted.
Inside, we began a pile of bed pieces in the area that I had designated, a spot by the left wall of the room. The fear that my father would have no clue how to rebuild my bed struck me. He’d surrender, preoccupied by concerns of time and appropriate effort, and purchase a new bed for me, a cheap and unfamiliar piece.
"Come on," My mother turned, smiling at me. “You have to admit that it is a little exciting.”
I shrugged my shoulders. The idea of living in a separate room from my sister was not what troubled me. Tempted by the lure of privacy, I supported my sister’s urges for separation. For a long while, I labored under the assumption that as the older sibling, I would get to keep my room. I discovered the truth too late.
"You know, in a few years you'll be off to college," she said, still searching for a silver lining for me. "Think of this as practice."
"Whatever." I averted my gaze.
My mother shook her head and sighed.
The movement and reconstruction of parts took most of the day. By the time my father finished his work, the sun sat on the horizon, orange light cascading through the windows of the house. In our old room, Anna had turned on a lamp, the artificial white light bleaching out the color of the room. She stared at me as I walked slowly across the room. She raised an eyebrow at me, evidently in response to my sluggish pace.
"I don't get you," Anna said. "It's just a room."
I grabbed the last of my things from the room, a few stray books from the shelf. Looking around the room, I saw that Anna had already left a few sheets of paper and a pencil on the floor where my bed had previously rested.
"Not much point in explaining myself now," I asked, hefting the books into my arms. “Unless you’re suddenly willing to switch rooms.”
"You have so many fewer things than I do," she continued on, answering an unasked question. "There's no reason why I should move instead."
If her argument consisted of one element that I couldn’t deny, it was that she had more things than I did. She had already claimed the dresser that had previously been mine, and I had no doubt that it would soon become as cluttered as the rest of the room. Taking a last survey of the room, I walked back out the door.
"You'll see, Iris," Anna said as I left, in a tone that grated on my ears. "This will be the best for both of us. You'll see.”
As I swung the door shut behind me, I took a last look into the room I had spent my entire life in. I had read, written, bled, cried, fought disease, grown up in that room. The door clicked shut. In that moment, I was forever separated from it on a level I couldn’t quite articulate. It would remain there, the four walls still standing, but the door would no longer open when I wished it. If I were ever returned, I’d find it changed, familiar in only faint ways, like how my voice comes back as a faded, distorted echo from the depths of a canyon.
The hailstones on the ground crunch beneath my boots as I walk through the garden of my front yard and down the muddy road that is the street I live on. The weatherman on the news last night had promised sun, not a cloud in the sky. I've long since given up believing predictions of the weather in Montana, so far removed in pattern from what I learned growing up in California.
All the mailboxes for the houses on the street are clustered in a single metal fixture at the end of the street. It still strikes me as wrong, even after twenty years of living here. Mail should be delivered to a little metal box by the driveway, not this impersonal prison at the end of the road. There’s so much inside my box that getting all the mail out after I open it is a struggle, and I bend several letters in the process. The new mailman is careless with the way he shoves everything inside. I wonder if he even checks the addresses carefully. I tuck the mail under my arm and head back.
I dump the mail in a heap on the kitchen table and sit down. It covers my mom’s old tablecloth, which I use despite its being much too long for the table. Glossy catalogues and manila envelopes of various sizes cover the white and red of the cloth. Sorting through the mail, I divide it into two piles. The larger of the two is composed entirely of the unwanted catalogues, sacrifices to the plastic maw of the recycling bin. The other consists mostly of bills, with a letter from Carl's family mixed in. Sure enough, there are a few letters for my neighbors, misdelivered. I place those in a third pile to themselves, further away from me than either of the others. As I sort through, I notice a letter from my real estate agent in California.
The letter informs me that they've found a buyer for my mother's house. I know I should feel relieved. The prior year, I had been the unlucky teacher without tenure and got laid off. I'd quickly grown tired of all the time at home unemployment forces on me, but none of the schools were hiring. Carl’s salary barely supports us. We couldn’t afford the additional property taxes, not without the fund my mother left for us. Anna had swapped out her stake in the house in exchange for that, leaving me in a quagmire.
I feel my heart rate increase. I breathe deeply, slowly. Vacating the chair, I pace around the room, feeling the cold wood of the floor against my feet. We had finally covered up the bare concrete of the floors ten years ago, and in the end we’d chosen the wood over a carpet. Cleaning it is easier than a carpet, but it feels impersonal. The cold is a lesser concern. Putting on warmer socks sounds appealing, but the climb up the steep stairs that retrieving them would necessitate, much less so.
Once more the hail begins clacking noisily down on the roof. Within a few minutes it escalates, a rapid-fire bombardment upon the roof. I walk over towards the kitchen window and look out, watching the white balls cover the dull green of the lawn. For a moment, I worry about the windows on the side of the house, and the windshields of the cars outside. The few times it hailed growing up, I'd always been so concerned. Anna would mock me for my worry. She's younger than me, but even as children she always believed herself more mature, more reasonable than me. I shake my head like I have water stuck in my ear, attempting to banish thoughts of Anna from my head. A cold draft passes through the room, its ghostly presence my only companion in the house.
The draft, I realize, is coming from Beth's room. I walk from the kitchen into her room, the next room over. I've been the room's only visitor since Beth enrolled in college. Occasionally I venture inside, watering her collection of plants and opening her window when the house needed additional air circulation. Carl mostly alternates between staying in our room upstairs, grading homework, and lounging on the couches. Beth won’t be visiting home for another month.
I cross the room, still a mess of cheap furniture, art magazines and books. Just as Beth likes it. At the other end of the room sits her bed, adjacent to the window. Her plants, a cactus and a couple varieties of small house ferns, sit by the window. I reach over them gently, closing the window with a soft thud. To my relief, the sill is dry. The only thing that had blown in was the wind.
I look at the cork board that sat above the head of Beth's bed. Pressed in with pushpins is a calendar, pictures of faraway mountains, and a postcard of Costa Rica. Anna had sent it, while she vacationed there. I swallow. Every new thought of my sister puts a heavy uneasiness at the back of my throat. The only thing that pains me more than knowing my sister had forced my parting from home is that I know she’ll never understand why it matters to me.
I had never talked with Anna about what we'd do with the house when mom passed. In hindsight I can recognize that as an error on my part, but I don’t think that any amount of planning beforehand could have changed her mind. Even without talking, I should have known what she'd do. It was never going to go any other way.
The gravel underneath my feet felt foreign, out of place. It assumed the place and the role of the green lawn my childhood, and while I knew that it was the water-friendly choice I resented the change. I walked with Anna through the yard of our mother’s house, where we had spent the past few days in general uncomfortable silence, picking through the house like vultures on a corpse. It was our house, now, our contentious inheritance. Three days ago Anna and I began arguing over it. Anna, perennially penniless, insisted upon selling it. I thought there was still time, that once I found the right words I could convince her otherwise.
I walked to my rental car with Anna. Her flight would depart in a few hours time, and she needed a ride to the airport. She carried a bag with her, full of the things she’d taken out of her old room. I couldn’t believe that the only thing she wanted from the home were her own belongings. No mementos of our parents, no family heirlooms, not even our mother’s doll that had so entranced us as children. No, all Anna took were some old books that sat unloved on her bookshelf for decades.
Anna stopped and turned towards me as we reached the car. Her greying hair was blown slightly by a cool breeze.
"Iris," she said, looking at me. The wrinkles under her eyes give her a perpetually serious look, "There’s something you need to know."
As soon as I heard those words, I should have known. Instead, I let myself hope that Anna would tell me what I desperately wanted to hear. I looked at her, expecting a cascade of words about how I had been right, that home was too precious to be sold on a whim. I breathed in deeply.
"I'm selling you my share of the house. I turned in the paperwork yesterday."
I don't remember what exactly I said to her, only that I turned away and stormed back inside the house. I kicked my shoes off in the entry room, feeling the cold linoleum beneath my feet, and locked the door behind me. I felt tears leaking down my face.
Boxes were piled up by the door, full of the things I’d claimed for my own household. Carl would drive out in a few days, when Beth’s high school got out for spring break, and when he arrived we would stuff the boxes in the back of our car for the drive to Montana. At that moment, I was alone. I knew Anna “was too proud” to disturb my isolation. She would never knock on the door in apology, begging for a ride. No, she’d call herself a taxi, or maybe contact an old friend in the neighborhood. Whether or not she’d arrive at the airport in time for the flight, I didn’t know. I knew that I wouldn’t see her again, not for a long while, but nothing else felt certain.
I walked through the dining room first, a majestic hall that could fit our entire extended family with ease. The dark oak dining table had been covered with paperwork, leftover from the lawyer’s visit the day prior. I gathered the pages into a single neat stack and left them on the end of the table, exposing the elegant table cloth beneath. The same red and white, untouched and remarkably unstained after so many years. My mother would lay it out each night before dinner, telling me more often than not how her mother had done the same. I ran my hands over the cloth, soft but textured.
I stopped in the doorways of the next room over, nominally my old bedroom. I still thought of it as my father’s study. I walked into the room, the sparsest in the house. Anna had insisted she get a room all to herself when she reached middle school and I was moved into my father’s old study. I’d only spent a few years in the room before enrolling in college. They transplanted my old bed into the room, but there had been no room elsewhere in the house for my father’s desk, so I had de facto received that as well. I appreciated the desk’s presence in the room only for the fact that it had spared it from disposal. Otherwise, I resented it for being a continual reminder of the room’s true purpose. The light wood of my bed contrasted with the dark polish of the rest of the furniture. Besides those two pieces, a row of bookshelves stood along one wall. A green area rug, situated squarely in the center of the room, bridged the gap between the furniture.
The rug was another thing the room had inherited from its days as my father’s study. Memories of watching my father’s long hours of late-night work in the room, clearer than most of the memories of childhood, were retrieved from the deep storage of my mind as I looked at that rug. I remembered reading on the floor, sitting on that rug, seeing him hunched over the desk when I looked up at him, pencil scratching away. Occasionally, he’d take a glance at me, and as we made eye contact we’d smile.
Finally, I walked into the room that had been our parents’. The blinds had been closed over the window, filling the room with stifling shadow. Their king-sized bed absorbed most of the space in the room. Our mother would gather us all on the bed for the purpose of watching the sunset, when she could manage it. After a certain age Anna lost interest, and when her protests became loudly vocal, my mother stopped the practice altogether. I pulled the cord on the blinds, watching the light shutters ascend in time with my motion, gathering at the top like a map that had been folded up once again. Before my eyes appeared a distant expanse of blue, framed by the oak trees of our yard. As I stared out at the miraculous view, I wondered how it was possible that Anna could hate this house.
"I love this house, Iris," Anna said, looking at me from across my kitchen table. She stood by the fireplace. In conversation and in my mind, I referred to it as the fireplace out of habit, even though it was a freestanding iron stove, and not an element built into the wall like at home. A small fire burned inside.
"That's very nice of you to say," I responded. I patted my stomach absentmindedly. "Thank you,"
I didn't see what Anna liked about the house. The floors consisted of just bare concrete, only the occasional rug covering it. The kitchen, dining room, living room, they were all the same space. Even the table we sat at was a pitiful specimen, something closer to a picnic table than a dining table.
Anna walked past the stove and the couches towards the steep wooden staircase. She took a couple exploratory steps up, slowly, like a climber testing the side of a mountain. The planks creaked under her weight. After looking up for a moment, she turned her head back and looked down at me.
"You and Carl are up there?"
"Yes indeed." I took a sip of tea. I had just begun drinking it, and liked it watery and weak.
"I always wished we had a second story at home," Anna said, walking back down. "Didn't you?"
"I never really thought about it," I responded. I leaned back in my seat. "I think I liked having everything on one floor."
"Ready for old age, are you?" Anna laughed. "I'm convinced that's why mom and dad chose that house."
I said nothing, but simply shrugged my shoulders. Anna turned to her side as she walked back towards me, inspecting a shelf. She grabbed the vase that sat inside, pulling it out as reference. The fact that it took her so long to recognize it surprised me. The vase, a blue and white china piece, had been sitting in our home from before she had been born. I imagined that its transition to my house left a gaping absence at home.
“Why do you have this old thing?” Anna said, frowning.
“Mom gave it to me,” I answered. “As a housewarming gift.” I frowned as well. The vase had always been one of my favorites.
Anna placed the vase back on the shelf and finally finished her return. She grabbed the back of a chair with her hands and leaned forward. "Which room is mine again?"
"The only other room in the house." I pointed towards the door on my right. "There. Our guest room’s first and last guest."
"Don't tell me you've replaced the bed with a crib already." Anna laughed again.
"Oh, don't worry, they're surprisingly comfortable." I smiled at her. "I'm sorry if the bed isn't."
"Can't be worse than what we had back home." Anna said.
I flinched at each of the continual jabs at our childhood home, even as Anna tried to compliment my own. "Speaking of home, I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving," I said. "Comfortable beds or not."
"You're thinking a little bit farther ahead than I am," Anna said, pulling out the chair and sitting.
"Thinking about the future kind of comes with the condition," I replied.
She turned, looking away. "Not sure if I'm going."
"What? Why not?" I asked. "You know mom would pay anything if it would get you home. Especially for a holiday."
She sighed. "I never did enjoy going home as much as you did.”
I was visiting mom and dad the first time she came home from college. I'd been dropped off for the week by Carl, who was just my boyfriend at the time. The long drive from school exhausted us, but both our families lived in the area. I knew how much the holidays meant to my mother.
I was sitting on the couch of the living room, staring at the black screen of the television. I knew that getting in the way of my mother when she was tidying up was a foolish endeavour. The couch was thus the safest spot for me, so long as I avoided disrupting the arrangement of pillows.
I'd never seen her in such a frenzy. Having already vacuumed every floor and dusted every conceivable surface, she had reached the level of adjusting coasters on the table that sat beside my father’s favorite chair. She abhorred the notion of the house not being perfectly clean for the return of her other dear daughter. Of course, neither Anna nor I cared about the cleanliness of the house. I loved it either way, finding a certain appreciation for the way that dust made the house look like something from another era. Anna just didn’t care.
"So, what's for dinner?"
"Salmon," she answered, which came as no surprise. Mom prided herself on her salmon and served it on every special occasion. To this day, no taste makes me think more of home than a piece of well prepared salmon.
A moment later, the noise of a car break screeching reached our ears. My mom began her way over into the entry room, hovering around the door, feet shuffling on the linoleum. We heard the sound of a car door closing, followed quickly by footsteps, and finally I heard the door click open.
"Anna!" I heard my mother yell, in the same way she yelled when I got home. Then she spoke again, shock evident in her voice. "Your hair!"
I turned around on the couch. I saw my mother, arms still embracing my sister but head drawn back, inspecting her. Anna's once long, brown hair had been cut just below the ears and dyed a jet black.
"What about it?" My sister's response was terse.
My mother recovered. "It looks wonderful on you."
I didn't believe that for a second, and I knew Anna wouldn't either.
I followed Anna as she trudged down the hall, lugging a heavy bag with her. She settled in her old room, the room that we had once shared. As Anna dropped her bag to the floor and flopped on the bed, I stared at the still-familiar ceiling, decorated with glow-in-the-dark stars. The space where my bed had been was filled only with a rug, and still looked unnaturally vacant. I had the same sort of feeling that I felt when I saw an empty lot in place of a favorite old restaurant.
“Mom was just surprised, that’s all,” I consoled my presumably angry sister. “Don’t feel bad.”
“I don’t.” Anna looked at me like I was an idiot. “It would worry me more if she liked it.”
I sighed and sat down on a chair. "So, how're your classes?" I asked, looking around the room. She'd covered the walls posters of punk bands and album artwork, things I never cared much for. They’d gone up only months before she’d left for college. Anna had the habit of changing the room at an unbelievable pace. In her closet a pile of neglected posters sat, stopped from spilling over the floors only by the doors.
"They're fine. Kinda boring." She said, sitting up. “But you never told me how great college would be.”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” I said, forcing a smile. For me, college consisted of an exhausting whirlwind of dorm rooms and apartments from the beginning. Worrying Anna with that sort of talk had seemed unnecessary, and so out of evidently misplaced concern I had always been brief when we’d discussed the subject.
"Getting out of here just feels good, you know?" Anna said, her hands sweeping around, indicating the room and presumably the rest of the house as well.
I frown at her. "I'm not sure I do."
"This place is just so..." She gesture about with her hands, looking for the right word. She tightened her hands into fists, evidently a sign of failure. "I don't know, stale."
"Stale." I repeated.
"Nothing ever changes here," Anna said, standing up. "Always just the same old normal."
"I don't know, it isn't so bad," I said, averting my gaze. I always appreciated the consistency of home.
"For you, maybe." Anna started unpacking her clothes from her bag into the drawers of the my old dresser.
"What's that supposed to mean?" I furrowed my brow at her.
"Come on, Iris." Anna glared at me. "You've always been their favorite child.”
I watched my father take apart my bed, piece by piece. Anna sat cross legged on her bed, a satisfied smile on her face. She had blocky headphones on and was listening to a cassette, her head bobbing along with the music. Anna, at last, had achieved her great victory, and she appeared as satisfied about it as I had expected. After years of nagging our parents, she'd finally have a room of her own.
"Could you hand me that?" My father pointed towards a tool that had been set a few feet away from me.
He had suggested the idea of my participation in the deconstruction, and eventual reconstruction, of my bed. Participation, he believed, would facilitate my acceptance of the new status quo. In practice just meant handing my father a new wrench every few minutes. An encyclopedia of Greek mythology sat open on my lap, one I’d read hundreds of times before. I reached over, grabbing the tool with the tips of my fingers. Each wrench felt heavier than the last as I passed them along.
The room hadn't been such a mess in years. I'd begun insisting on a clean room space when Anna began arguing with me over if certain sections of the collective mess were her's or mine. The spaces of the room that were Anna’s could have been divined by observing what part of the room lacked clutter. Once Anna had the room all to herself, I had no doubt the mess would spread over the rest of the space, like a creeping fungus.
A piece of the bed came loose, a long curved piece that defined the foot of the bed. My father looked around for a vacant spot on the floor. The piece needed a good deal of space to lie flat. With every spot within arm’s length around him filled, he handed me the piece. I took a hold of it, grasping it lightly.
"Might as well put these in your room, right?"
"It's not my room," I whispered.
"Not yet!" My mother said. I looked up from the floor and saw her standing in the hall outside the room. Evidently, I had not whispered as quietly as I believed. "But soon."
"That's not what I meant."
"I think it's exciting," she said, reaching down picking up a few of the smaller pieces of my bed.
Closing my book, I got up and followed her at a sluggish pace. I dragged my bed piece on the carpet like a caveman dragging a club. We reached the door of my father's study, upon which a sign bearing my name had been unsuitably transplanted.
Inside, we began a pile of bed pieces in the area that I had designated, a spot by the left wall of the room. The fear that my father would have no clue how to rebuild my bed struck me. He’d surrender, preoccupied by concerns of time and appropriate effort, and purchase a new bed for me, a cheap and unfamiliar piece.
"Come on," My mother turned, smiling at me. “You have to admit that it is a little exciting.”
I shrugged my shoulders. The idea of living in a separate room from my sister was not what troubled me. Tempted by the lure of privacy, I supported my sister’s urges for separation. For a long while, I labored under the assumption that as the older sibling, I would get to keep my room. I discovered the truth too late.
"You know, in a few years you'll be off to college," she said, still searching for a silver lining for me. "Think of this as practice."
"Whatever." I averted my gaze.
My mother shook her head and sighed.
The movement and reconstruction of parts took most of the day. By the time my father finished his work, the sun sat on the horizon, orange light cascading through the windows of the house. In our old room, Anna had turned on a lamp, the artificial white light bleaching out the color of the room. She stared at me as I walked slowly across the room. She raised an eyebrow at me, evidently in response to my sluggish pace.
"I don't get you," Anna said. "It's just a room."
I grabbed the last of my things from the room, a few stray books from the shelf. Looking around the room, I saw that Anna had already left a few sheets of paper and a pencil on the floor where my bed had previously rested.
"Not much point in explaining myself now," I asked, hefting the books into my arms. “Unless you’re suddenly willing to switch rooms.”
"You have so many fewer things than I do," she continued on, answering an unasked question. "There's no reason why I should move instead."
If her argument consisted of one element that I couldn’t deny, it was that she had more things than I did. She had already claimed the dresser that had previously been mine, and I had no doubt that it would soon become as cluttered as the rest of the room. Taking a last survey of the room, I walked back out the door.
"You'll see, Iris," Anna said as I left, in a tone that grated on my ears. "This will be the best for both of us. You'll see.”
As I swung the door shut behind me, I took a last look into the room I had spent my entire life in. I had read, written, bled, cried, fought disease, grown up in that room. The door clicked shut. In that moment, I was forever separated from it on a level I couldn’t quite articulate. It would remain there, the four walls still standing, but the door would no longer open when I wished it. If I were ever returned, I’d find it changed, familiar in only faint ways, like how my voice comes back as a faded, distorted echo from the depths of a canyon.