Work at Life
Friday, March 13th, 2009
I first saw the house as a boy so my memories are tied to boyhood perception, cloudy and footed in snow just as the shape was on the hill. Houses can not lurk but they can be thought to be haunted by previous proprietors or by memories, and when an entire family has lived in a house for close to 70 years, the thoughts almost come to life when the door is pushed open and the bodies step back inside the past.
The pointed eaves of the outcropped windows, the broad walls standing on bricks as a castle would, are not in character on the street. In the shadows, the front resembled a façade propped mysteriously on a Hollywood set, behind which might only be two-by-fours and wood props at odd angles holding it in place. The ice was frozen in webs in the gravel driveway and on the winding stairs that lead to the front door, snow had crystallized in the moonlight coming to a glow in the places where it had been laid smooth and thick.
The middle boy answered the door. He was holding a dog by the neck – a black one whose immediate size was hidden on the dim front stoop. He held the dog’s powerful jaw upright. The animal was only a lab puppy, but his mouth came to a threatening point and his teeth showed the ferocity dormant for now but that would one day greet unexpected visitors.
These two figures were backlit by the same light inside I remembered when I was a boy and the house belonged to my grandparents. Light from an artificial bulb shined down on the lamp’s swollen orange pot belly crafted from blown glass colored the room the same shade as sweet tea, and it was the same lamp that I’d fallen asleep to when I was boy, when my mother would leave me on Friday nights so that she could be live a social existence. I wanted her to, even at 10. I understood. I’d fall asleep to my uncle’s late night newspaper rattling, then before I knew it, she’d carry me down those winding cement stairs, still sleeping, and lay me in the back seat.
The boy, uncertain and reluctant, pulled the door open. He recognized my mother and my brother and still hesitated. I guessed it was because he didn’t recognize the third shape – mine – moving from the top stair lip toward the door. After a late dinner nearby, we decided to visit the old house. I hadn’t seen in 15 years or more. I hadn’t been back since a short visit I made in college to help carry a new television set up to the house for my grandfather. My grandmother had passed away in a hospital bed set up in the dining room in the early 1990s. She died in the spring and it was a year later that my grandfather stood and carved the first turkey in the same space where she’d finally slipped away. Every year after, he stopped solemnly with the knife in his hands, teary eyed, and his children – the six of them and the families they’d made – looking down at their plates and pretending not to notice. The house had been inherited by an uncle and after a few years, he welcomed his brother, his brother’s new wife and small brood of children – three – from another marriage and so it became the six of them.
I was the last to enter and as I followed my brother inside, he seemed to be hunching and stepping over something in the door jam. I found my body starting to lean without reason, as his did, until I realized we were stepping over an aluminum storm door frame through the place where the missing glass would be if hadn’t been shattered. The boys were maintaining the house. Their father was asleep in a back bedroom and one boy went back to wake him. No one else was home.
The house had fallen to shambles over the years, as old houses do, but it had been accelerated somewhat by one of my uncle’s collecting habits. Behind one chair were old newspapers he’d collected and intended to read, the shelves were a mess of picture frames, knick knacks and digital clocks – at least three that I noticed. Several paintings and wall ornaments hung on the walls in the same places as they had since the 1970s or before. Against the wall in the same place since the days I was babysat there was a wooden cabinet housed my grandparents’ old records. The hallway was lined with beta and VHS videocassettes dubbed from original films. The carpet had been updated from what I remembered as a child, but it was wearing again. The furniture arrangement was the same.
Inside the door on the left, the longer of the two couches in the room was pushed under a painting. In the nearest corner, my uncle’s arm chair sat unoccupied. I remember at Christmas when the house was filled with children, they were shooed from the chair because everyone knew it belonged to my uncle. All these years later, it was still his space, his safe haven, and no one thought to sit there, not due to any fear, but because he always seemed to be there staking a claim to the corner, and though the chair was newer, it still was imprinted with his body frame.
On the farthest wall was the clock with the cuckoo I would watch for as a boy hiding under the furniture and playing under the antique dining room table. A display cabinet shaped to fit in the corner was still filled with my grandmother’s old collectibles, ceramic teapots and the like, in the same positions as they were 30 years ago, though dusted by the house’s new keeper, Connie, who was doing her best to work around my uncle’s piles and make a place for her children to be raised.
The boys were playing a game on the computer. Their father came down the hall, his hair still matted from the pillow. He had put on weight since the last time I’d seen him, four years ago. My mother had told me on the way over that he’d shed 40 pounds in the last week after a brief hospital visit. He’d had trouble breathing deeply. The doctors weighed him at almost 400. The extra weight was all water that his medications had stopped passing through.
The kids’ adopted dad has had his problems involving the city’s most sinister neighborhoods. There are stories – dark ones – that shape a man, even if the way to them are easy and evil, and in that case the boy’s father has been nearly perfectly molded. And then he found Diane, a woman he’d been with a few years and that I’d heard about, but never met. She and her boys changed him. Her husband passed away unexpectedly when the children were young, then the grandfather they were living with died and it was up to Mark, who came along having survived all these events, to be a father to the boys. The boy’s father had done every job from parking cars at an airport car rental agency to managing grocery stores, a profession somewhat related to his father – my grandfather – who owned his own grocery store and was the first to sell to African-Americans.
He has fallen somewhat short in comparison to my grandpa’s legacy. As a boy, he’d stay with my grandparents on occasion when he was down on his luck, and I idolized him. He was fun, he could relate to children and he would play with you. He had an imagination and there was part in him that would never grow up, and then it was unclear to me that it was his larger part, and that it was a serious thing to have so much in yourself not grow up. He gave me a Christmas present one year, unexpectedly, when he didn’t have to, when there were so many children in the family, and it was clearly the best toy I gotten that year, a diesel truck that transformed into a robot, a part of the reason for its grandeur was that it was unexpected.
I thought about much of this while he stood there explaining his health improvements, describing the magic socks (as he called them) that caused the inflammation in his ankles to come down, how he described how the puppy licked him in the enclosed bedroom when our cars pulled into the drive. While he talked, his wife came home with the older boy and I met her. Diane, in good spirits, his caretaker and a good mother. They were in love and after what they’d been through, individually and as a family, it was easy to see that their love was the realest kind. And the children were beautiful and playful. When they spoke, it carried something familiar that I realized later to be wisdom that only children from rough places acquire. I was taken back and I was taken forward, small children coming of age in the same backyard, under the same cigar tree I’d lie under and sing to the birds and listen to them call back. The February cold was outside, but they’d turned the living room to a den warmed by voices and hopeful children. I was proud to see a turnaround and the connection, a couple working to make life work. Another boy was in the house again – only in memory, of course – and he threw open the back door and ran outside to much warmer weather. He jumped on the picnic table and laid his back down again to see if the birds were still here. He could feel the flecking paint against his back, the warm summer sun, and he missed the days when before he’d jeopardized so many other lives.
