Single Family Residence

Somewhere before her memory begins, she stands in a kitchen floored with this same linoleum.

 
Inside the fifth open house, she opens the door to the upstairs bathroom and finds the linoleum, tiny squares of goldenrod and brown arranged in repeating patterns. The tiles curl up at the seams, pulling away from the floor.

A flutter of recognition rises from deep inside her memory. It is an instinctive, sure knowledge, as familiar as the map of lines through her palm. She has never remembered this memory before.

She grips her husband’s forearm.

He says, “Ow,” louder than she thinks is necessary, and twists away. “Those talons are sharp.” He gestures toward her nails, which are indeed long, but also expertly manicured. His showing off is for the benefit of the real estate agent hovering behind them.

When they entered the house, her husband introduced her as his wife by saying, “Now that I got promoted, and with the—” he gestured toward her stomach, “she wants a house.”

He smiled as he said this, so she had to smile too, had to let him hang his arm around her shoulders. She had to resist saying, that until this most recent promotion, her salary as a bank manager had been higher than his in software development.

As soon as the real estate agent turned away to get a card, she stepped out from underneath his arm. She likes their apartment, which has a large window in the kitchen. A bougainvillea vine grows over this window, so when it blooms, their meals are tinged pink.

She feels no need to flirt with the realtors, but they do not yet have an agent of their own. When her husband reveals this, she can hear the ones in the open houses shift into a higher gear. Her husband seems to like this added attention, because he tells each new agent, tries to charm them all, male, female, whatever age or persuasion.

“Some of the fixtures are a little old,” this real estate agent says, “but imagine how nice this room could be.” When she smiles, she reveals a smear of lipstick on her front tooth. The coral color is too orange for her complexion and clashes with her cotton-candy pink blouse. “And the yard is big for this part of Los Angeles. There’s plenty of room for a play set.”

“Of course,” she murmurs in an attempt to get the real estate agent to look away. The women’s overly eager eyes bother her. They are protuberant and too wet, as if the ball is slowly being squeezed out of each socket.

It is obvious that some old person has recently died in this one-story ranch, and the children, or grandchildren, are selling the family home for the cash. The walls are painted a searing white intended to freshen the dingy rooms. The yard has been razed down to the dirt and a single limp palm tree. They did not spend the money to replace the shag carpet or linoleum.

The real estate agent pushes her bulging eyes closer toward them. “This charmer has a lot of potential for a young family with good taste and vision.”

“Let’s see the third bedroom,” she suggests, to make her husband and the real estate agent back out of the bathroom. For one second, she is alone with linoleum and can draw a full breath before she has to follow them.

The third bedroom is even smaller than the first two, with one square window, and a large stain spreading up the far wall that even the new white paint cannot hide.

As they exit the bedroom, she whispers in her husband’s ear, “Can we go? This place makes me sad.”

She wants to follow the foot and find the hand, pull it back to the top of her head, so she can feel that easy affection again.

Later that night, she sits in bed. She has completed her nighttime routine, removed makeup, showered, applied lotion, dried hair, and wrapped herself in a white nightgown. Now she sits with a home furnishings catalog open in her lap.

There are pages and pages of knobs. They vary in appearance in slight degrees, shiny silver, brushed nickel, smoky gray, round, rounder, roundest, a shape she is learning intimately.

She does not really care about the differences, but the catalog tells her that she should. That the difference between the classic Victorian designs, and the more modern Deco ones, have great implications about her personal taste, and so her moral character.

From the other room, she can hear her husband playing his video game on the television. Dark mood music, panting, screams, and a lot of gunfire. It is a first-person shooter game, so in the foreground there is always an enormous automatic weapon. The gun moves with the player’s view, is in fact the player himself. Her husband has played every version of this game for over a decade since college. When he lived in the fraternity house, the guys would egg each other on, shout and celebrate, as if the losses and victories were real.

She turns the page in the catalog and finds rows of square knobs.

After the house with the linoleum, she and her husband saw one more property. It was a two-bedroom cottage inhabited by parents with twin sons. Although the tiny rooms were crowded with table, couch, piano, a desk, bunk beds, it all was so carefully organized, cheerfully decorated, that the smallness was not noticeable. She liked it and turned to her husband to say so. Before the words left her lips, she saw the artificial smile he was presenting to the realtor. They needed something bigger, he told the agent, not a starter place.

In the living room, her husband shouts, “Oh!” at his video game. A sound of loss.

She lets the catalog fall slack in her lap. The linoleum rises in her mind. The squares arrange themselves, a single brown one surrounded by a layer of yellow, then a layer of brown, and one more of yellow. This repeats itself in rows, until her entire mind is tiled in this pattern.

Somewhere before her memory begins, she stands in a kitchen floored with this same linoleum. She is very small and looking down at her own, even smaller feet. A hand slides a plate onto the linoleum beside her toes. It has a slice of bread with mashed, browning banana. This is for her to eat while she stays quiet in the kitchen so the grownups can talk.

The hand lifts to pass over the top of her head. There is affection in the touch of the hand, a careless comfort in the curl of fingers around her ear. The hand leaves her head, and a foot steps into her view. It is bare, the heel cracked. The nails each have a black halo of dirt underneath. There is a sliver chain around the foot’s ankle, with tiny silver bells attached. Above this dances the hem of a gauzy skirt. The foot lifts and steps forward, out of her field of vision. The tiny bells chime with each step, getting softer, until the foot is gone. She wants to follow the foot and find the hand, pull it back to the top of her head, so she can feel that easy affection again. But she is supposed to stay inside the square of linoleum and cannot go. 

She is caught between these conflicting imperatives, between the desire to see and to turn her gaze away. Something squirms inside her. She is not sure if these feelings are from now or from then.

Her husband’s video game lets out a twisting scream of agony. There is a shredding sound, the thud of a knife into virtual flesh, and then the death groan. The funerary music sounds almost triumphant.

“Fuck!” her husband calls out.

She listens, wondering if he will come to bed. The game’s music plays a swirling, gathering tune, and a deep voice announces, “New Game.”

She sets the catalog on her nightstand and turns out the light.

These places are too clean, too blank, without the archeology of past inhabitants.

The next weekend they see only new properties. This is her request. It means there is no chance for her to find something like the linoleum again, like the hand curling over her head, the tinkle of bells around the ankle.

Their first visit is to an orange stucco condo. They wear blue paper booties over their shoes, so they do not track dust on the white carpet. It is spacious, and flimsily constructed, even to her untutored eye. The glass in the windows is rippled, the doors are too light to the touch, hollow and made of plastic rather than wood.

Next, they tour two homes inside the same gated community. Both are furnished by a professional company in a calculatedly neutral style. Fluffy pillows invite her to lie down on the bed. The wide couch is ready for sprawling. Scented candles make the rooms smell like fresh cookies. Both houses have four bedrooms, two and a half baths, the same inexpensive flowers planted in the landscaping. They are mirror-images of each other: what is left inside the first is right in the second. One has a blue bedroom for a little boy, the other a lavender one for a girl. Her husband lingers in the purple room, touches an unusually careful finger to the curved headboard of the white crib.

These places are too clean, too blank, without the archeology of past inhabitants. All the newness gives off a caustic, chemical smell. It makes her dizzy, light-headed.

When she mentions this to her husband to get out of visiting a semi-detached home in a cul-de-sac, he puts his hand on her forehead. “You’ve been tired a lot. Should you call the doctor?”

She pushes his hand away. He does not remember the doctor’s name.

“I don’t have a fever,” she tells him. He has never felt her temperature before, so she is sure he would not be able to discern any irregularity. “I’m allowed to be tired.”

 

The following Saturday it rains, and she tells her husband she does not want to go house-hunting. He decides to go alone, says, “We only have so much time to find a place.”

She assures him that it is fine. While he is gone, she does laundry, five loads. In their apartment complex laundry room, there are ten gleaming washers and ten dryers, so she can do all five at once.

To watch over their clothes, she sits in the laundry room on a folding chair while the cycles run. She brings the home furnishings catalog but does not open it. If they owned their own home, her husband says they would not have to guard their underwear from theft. They would not have to bicker with the upstairs neighbor who always parks in the spot allotted for her car. The one-bedroom apartment is too small for them, even now.

But in their own house, she would not have access to all these washers and dryers. The five loads would take days to complete, not one afternoon. She would not be able to enjoy the old man playing his trumpet in the apartment two doors down.

She listens to the patter of the rain, the whoosh and whirr of the laundry machines, and lets her mind fill up with the yellow and brown squares of the linoleum until there is no room for anything else.

The problem with this almost-memory is that the house she thinks of as home has high ceilings, Spanish accents, terracotta tile, and iron rails. It is warm and light-filled and neat. The woman she calls Mom is the one she shares with her younger sister, the one her father married when she was six.

She does not know how to apply different meanings to these words, other than the clean white house she grew up in. Other than the woman who packed her a school lunch every day, cut the sandwiches into triangles, remembered she did not like bananas because their smell made her nauseous.

The place in her mind from before these definitions begin is empty and gray, except for the pattern of the old linoleum.

That evening, her husband brings home a flyer for a house way over their price range. It has an entertainment room with a large screen, built-in sound system, and cushioned armchairs.

“Not much was open in the rain,” he tells her, so he watched the second half of the baseball game in a bar to not disturb her.

When she replies that she did laundry all afternoon, he says she should have rested, taken time for herself while she still has the chance. He could have done the laundry.

If she wears her sunglasses, nods, then floats through the rooms with the flyer in hand, the agents do not bother her much.

Her husband goes away for a week for his company’s annual training conference in Florida. Other spouses and children tag along. While she is not yet to the point that she should not fly on an airplane, they agree it’s better for her to stay behind.

“I hate to leave you,” he tells her as she drops him at the airport. “Call your sister if you need company.”

The airport loading zone where they say goodbye is windy and smells like fuel. The Homeland Security cop eyes them suspiciously. They have taken too long, her husband carrying each of his three bags—suitcase, laptop case, and briefcase—to the curb one at a time.

He kisses her once more, a moist smash of lips, and then heads toward the sliding doors of the terminal. A large family with several luggage carts, the women dressed in jewel-toned saris, crosses between them. Once they pass, she cannot find his shape in the crowd. Her husband is gone. She stands alone in the wind of the loading zone for another moment, even though she knows she must move on. 

In the car on the way home, she tosses her sunglasses on the empty seat beside her, turns the radio from Vin Scully narrating the Dodgers to a classic rock station. She rolls the window down, even though she drives on the freeway, and the speed whips everything in the car into a whirlwind.

It is Saturday. The Open House signs are posted everywhere.

 

After a few unsuccessful attempts, she learns to look for older houses, the square post-war bungalows, the flat roofs of the 60s. The more rundown the better, cracked cement in the driveway, patched shingles.

She learns to search out the darkest corners, to look in the tiny bedroom upstairs, through the swinging door of the kitchen pantry, the floor of the laundry room, inside the closet where the old carpet has not been replaced. She learns to wait in her car until someone else, a couple, enters the house before her. This way she will not have to talk to the realtors. If she wears her sunglasses, nods, then floats through the rooms with the flyer in hand, the agents do not bother her much.

One exception is a skeletally thin man showing a foreclosure. He follows her room to room as if she will steal something. He does not stop talking, even when sweat breaks out across the dome of his bald head. She wants to tell him there is nothing left to steal; even the plates of the light switches have been removed.

Inside the houses that still have residents, she is confronted with the raw details about the lives of the inhabitants. Pictures of babies long grown up, magazines next to the toilet, a closet hastily stuffed with dirty laundry. In one, there is a hospital bed, the remnants of an oxygen tank. In another, the extra bedroom holds only a treadmill and a stack of books about infertility. She thinks these silent tragedies should not be on view for any stranger who wants to see.

All of her efforts are worth it because she finds what she is looking for.

On an orange Formica counter, scarred with knife cuts, she discovers in her mind a green glass ashtray, a hand tapping a cigarette against the side. The wrist has many glass bracelets, and they clink when the hand raises the cigarette from the ashtray. There are no rings on the hand, just the pale line where one used to be.

An argument volleys back and forth over the counter. It is one she has heard before. Although it is directed toward the hand with the cigarette, it is about her. About how dirty she is, how hungry. About the flea bites on her legs, the things she shouldn’t see. The hand jabs the cigarette against the ashtray so hard that the white paper crumples and a bit of ash is pushed out of the tray onto the orange countertop. She tries to follow the hand up so she can see the mouth talking, the face, but the counter, and the memory, do not reach that far.

In another house, in the dusty smell of a heavy velvet drape, she finds a belly button set into a tan stomach. She is hiding behind the curtain. She stands very still, so quiet. They are playing a game, and at first it is fun, but then there is annoyance and a thread a fear. The belly button flexes inward as the voice rises in volume.

There is anger, a tight grip on her arm pulling her out from the drape. She gets a sliding glimpse of collarbone, throat, collarbone, separated by the straps of a crocheted top. The grip on her arm is too hard, pinches, but she knows not to complain. She is shaken once, hard, and tries not to cry. It is her fault for hiding.

Late in the afternoon on the day before her husband comes home, she finds a soggy couch hidden behind a garage. It is green corduroy with covered buttons that make dimples on the cushions.

A new sensation forms—of thighs, cheap silk moving over warm, almost hot, skin. Her cheek rests in the bowl of a bony lap, the back of her head cradled underneath loose breasts. The seams of the skirt bristle with black thread against her face. She and the thighs are sweaty, trapped inside a thick acrid smoke and the woodsy scent of unwashed bodies. An unfamiliar voice, one not attached to the lap, a man’s voice, fills the room, hovers inside the swirls of smoke.

Under her cheek, the thighs shift, flatten their soft bowl into a plank, until she slides off the couch with a jolt. It is too hot for her to sit in the lap. She should not cling. She should leave the grownups alone now.

She looks at many old houses, and even more old pieces inside of those houses. Most of them do not speak to her. She does not know where the few fragments come from, how they erupt inside her body and claw their way out from a time when her mind was not yet old enough to fit together the pieces that make up a story.

But she keeps driving, expanding her search radius, even into the dark when no houses will be open.

What about you? What did you do to keep busy?

After two weekends of open houses, her husband returns on an evening flight. At the airport, once again in the wind and car exhaust, she does not recognize him among the other travelers.

He is just another man in a polo shirt, rumpled khakis creased over his thighs, sandy hair beginning to creep back from his temples. It is not until he hugs her, squeezing her ribs too tightly, that her mind catches up, reminds her that she knows this man, that she lives with him. Only then does she remember to kiss him back. He smells different, like unfamiliar rooms, but his tongue tastes the same.

He insists on driving, so she does not tire herself anymore. He adjusts the seat in the car. His pale skin is red with sunburn across his forehead and down his nose, into a V at his neck.

It is not until they arrive at their apartment, after he has showered and put on sweatpants, that he asks, “What about you? What did you do to keep busy?”

She considers the speech she practiced to explain the open houses and what she has found inside them. The memories of a woman she thought she had forgotten, a name she has not said in twenty years. But she cannot get past the word.

After searching the homes of all those other people, what she is left with is a mismatched jigsaw, an unfinished puzzle. The outline of a woman, of a house she used to live in, but no other definition of what it means to be Mother.

So it is easier to step close to her husband’s chest, to press the round of her belly into his hip, her nose into his neck. He finally smells like himself, his mint shampoo, their laundry detergent. His arms pull her body against his, so she can feel each part of herself in the line of contact.

It is easier to say, “I missed you.”