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fictionary-tales · 4 years

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Excerpts from House Huntress

Here’s a place where we could live together: an apartment in the city, up some concrete steps with a discolored wrought iron railing that’s more likely to impale someone than do any kind of saving and the palms of my hands have the scars to prove it. Yours do not. The building is brick-red, or rain-stained-concrete gray, and the door, though the ivory paint is peeling in places, has a brass knocker and an eye hole for testing whether it’s worth ever opening again once we’re inside. There are some tiny planter boxes you made with your brother – the oldest one who can do things like that, whose name I never remember – and maybe I said I’d grow vegetables but I forget all about that when I see flowers, so instead of half-dead tomatoes we’ve got half-dead snapdragons and African daisies that I am clumsily trying to save after weeks of mistreatment.

There’s a kitchen just big enough to turn around in, everything that came in it already off-white or fake wood overlay, and the countertops are scattered with unorganized half-used glass jars of rosemary, thyme, basil, paprika, and old husks of garlic cloves that were rubbed clean and then forgotten. The cupboards rattle with too many coffee mugs, thrift-store finds that will never match one another and they rattle and clink against each other when you’re trying to select a particular one. The cutlery matches in that it doesn’t, so many knives and forks taken home from assorted twenty-four-hour diners to make up for the ones I keep losing and the ones you accidentally throw away with the leftovers. The fridge has at least two different kinds of non-dairy milk in it at all times, and no meat. It buzzes and groans.

Over the half-wall of the kitchen counter we have cobbled together the furniture we retained from past lives. What was once second-hand is now third-fourth-fifth-hand; at least the stuff that I bring is. You bring the overstuffed powder blue couch I love and this is its first time being co-owned by anyone, or even this far away from the nearest dirt road. Nashville is a cool city the way Austin is a cool city: an oasis of metropolitan tolerance in a desert of fucking bigots. In time the couch will be stained with candle wax and wine and what’s left behind any time you push my skirt up to discover I’ve forgotten to do laundry and so I’ve run out of underwear again. There’s books of poetry by Dickinson and Lowell on a coffee table scratched from cups, bottles, keys, lighters. There’s two poorly done paintings on the wall above the couch, portraits of two girls: one yellow-haired and the other a brunette, dressed in some early twentieth-century pink or blue gowns complete with parasol and over-the-shoulder coquettishness. A palette of faded blues and yellows and greens, the girls have the hollow black eyes of distant dreams. We found them on vacation together and had to save them.

The bedroom is small and the bed is smaller, dressed in lilac and crisp white. There’s a certain throw pillow in the center of other throw pillows that holds a secret, a zipper in the folds of its hemming to keep it. The nightstand beside my side of the bed I found next to the dumpster at my old place and it’s filled with bracelets, multicolored rings, knotted nests of necklaces, and weed in unlabeled bottles. The nightstand on your side of the bed has been in your family for three generations and I don’t know what’s in it. The bathroom smells like your perfume, like a pre-scented sample on a perfume ad insert that comes in any women’s fashion magazine. When I turn the shower on, old love-messages written on the mirror with your finger re-appear like magic.

…

Here is a place we could stay together: an antebellum house in the countryside, maybe close to your family. Close enough that you can walk a dirt path through the dry grass that’s tall as your hips. It’s a path lined with day-glo orange and gold poppies, and purple nettle flowers that sting to touch. You visit your father, your brothers, whenever you want. The middle brother who you’re so worried over all the time despite his being older than you, Angus, he comes over regularly to sit in our cool parlor decorated with see-through white linen curtains where he drinks bourbon and talks about Edna St. Vincent Millay and W. H. Auden and grumblingly refuses to show you or anyone else any of his own recent poetry.

The house is smaller than the one you were raised in, and bigger than any house I’ve ever called home or even been inside for very long. It’s an adjustment for both of us. Outside there are columns that sit beneath the second-story balcony. When we bought the place it was all whitewashed, but since then most of it has been painted a muted pink and I’ve planted ivy and bougainvillea that creeps up the columns in deep greens and explodes across the sides of the house in shades of magenta that refuse to die, despite me not knowing what I’m doing. Errant cats wander the property with dusty brown paws that leave prints across the white planks of the front porch and on the seat of a swing. Light streams in through windows half as tall as I am and onto end tables and decorative shelving to reveal intricate doilies and gold-rimmed porcelain candy bowls, ancient copies of books thick enough to kill a man with if used properly, and glass vases filled with bouquets of wild flowers we both pick for each other on any given weekend.

The ceilings are so high that I can hear you singing to yourself in the kitchen from the other side of the house; your smoky lounge-singer voice that you typically only show off for family Christmas carols now bounces off of support beams to reach me wherever I am. Our guitar in the corner stays tuned and clean and in the evenings I play and you sing, or the other way around, or we take turns. In the kitchen, brass pots and pans hang from above, over a restored-vintage stove, along with hanging bundles of drying herbs: rosemary, sage, basil, lavender. Storage containers of descending size with painted-on sunflowers contain flour, sugar, and rice separated by variety. The freezer is stuffed with mason jars equally stuffed with jam: blackberry, marionberry, raspberry, orange marmalade, strawberry, blueberry, fig. There is one hook for multiple aprons, there is a multitude of decorative dish towels which are separate and different from the actual dish towels and this is true even when used interchangeably like I do on accident (to your chagrin). Coffee grounds and cat hair and the plastic ties from long-gone loaves of sliced bread fall between the gaps in the counter and the stove.

The stairs will never stop creaking. The second floor has endless guest rooms for friends and family to stay in, the kind of family who will never be introduced to your own, the kind that will wake up early and make breakfast for us to say thanks, and then they say it again with their lips and their eyes and their embrace on the way out the door. Our bed is big, queen-sized, with a white iron frame that twists and turns like it grew that way from nature, and the sheets have tiny blue flowers on them the color of your eyes. We cover rings in the wood on the nightstand with squares of pale green linen. Batteries roll around back and forth against silicone inside the drawers, and we’re careful not to be too loud for the neighbors’ sakes, but that is half the fun. On weekends and days when I can’t get out of bed, you close the curtains to the sun, crawl under the covers with me, and we spend all day trying to come up with a good reason to get up.

…

Here is a place where we could grow old together: somewhere forgotten by the sea, away from the dry heat of summer. A house that is wider than it is tall, with new paint and an old garden that we make new again. Everything I plant turns to green. There is sand stuck into the fibers of the welcome mat, and smooth stones that we have collected and arranged into spirals and borders for garden beds keep everything from touching that we do not want touching. The door has more glass than wood on the front, multi-colored and mosaic so when the sun shines through it makes patterns on the floor for our feet to dance in. There is a backyard with a fence so high no one can see into it, except for the sunflowers which stretch up and up and up and over.

Inside there are bare wooden floors that we cover here and there with rugs collected from our worldly travels, purchased from artisans with a smile and many thanks. The furniture we use is purchased in a similar fashion; it is made of sturdy pine and oak, built to last, and stain resistant, with covers and cushions the colors of the ocean outside. The bookshelves hold volumes of poetic verse written by Keats, the fragmented desires of Sappho, biographies on Frida Kahlo, and lamentations of Sylvia Plath. At night the sounds of the waves can be let in or shut out through the many windows, and when it rains the whole house sounds off with the plunking of drops on glass like the pickings of my guitar.

The bay window in the kitchen over the sink holds flowers waiting to be pressed or dried or just picked in haste and then forgotten: violets, little daisies, hydrangea, and lots and lots of lavender. The counter tops are wooden, like you could cut right on them, and there are knife marks to prove it here and there in collections. There’s a china-blue bowl of oranges with only two left. Bulbs of garlic hang in a basket by the sink. An errant smell of sage and sea salt sinks into all our food, and the flecks of soil on the tile near the backdoor can never fully be swept out for good. To drink we make lemonade of all kinds: blackberry, strawberry, raspberry, mint, or water infused with cucumber and lemon, or hot tea with names like Rasperry Zinger and Orange Spice, and Sleepytime for late nights. A glass jar of honey sits on the counter next to the stove and it is always oozing. There is a table for two tucked into the corner, with bare wooden chairs we picked up from antique sales. They don’t match, but it’s hard to tell.

In the bathroom the shower has walls of tall frosted glass and connects to a bath tub deep and wide, soap scum fitting into the corners of the walls and in the grout of the tile. The rim of the tub is littered with half-empty bottles: baby pink, sea-foam green, and pearly white. It is so good for washing the salt from your hair.

There is no guest bedroom. Our bed is four-poster, with lavish fabrics draped around the beams, all indigo and white and cornflower blue. There are so many pillows of similar colors that it takes a concentrated effort to remove them before bed each night and replace them again in the gray mornings that follow. And sometimes we don’t replace them, and sometimes we do. The drawers of the nightstand beside it are stocked and arranged in an arsenal of silicone sexuality that we never worry someone might stumble upon. We are as loud as we like.

In the winter when the wind howls, there’s a blackened fireplace that we bring back to life. It crackles and spits while we turn against one another under the covers. A hamper in one corner is overflowing at all times. There’s a dresser that is taller than it is wide, almost to the ceiling, filled with scarves and summer dresses and sweaters; and, in between the socks and stockings in one of the smaller drawers, a collection of love poetry I’d forgotten I’d written to you. Your vanity holds pearls and perfumes, necklaces on silver hooks like branches worked to resemble a dead tree, and the mirror is pristine and round the way all mirrors ought to be. Sometimes in the evenings before bed, you let me brush your hair in front of it even though you think it’s silly. You sit on that little white wooden bench in front, with me standing behind you so you watch me in the mirror working the brush through your beach-blown curls. You don’t ever have to tell me when I’m hurting you because I already know.

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