House does not want you here. Does not want your laughter in its halls. Does not want your gentle breathing at night. Your cheerful demeanor. Your smiling brood. It does not want your hopeful words to echo off its walls. Your quiet murmurs. Your awkward silence. Your profanities, inanities, the slickness of your sex. Your steps are clumsy when you have drunk too much. Your bickering too comfortable. House does not want the smells of your dinners, your candles, your biological functions. It does not want your spills and scratches, your shattered glasses, your furniture scrapes. Most of all House does not want your lamentations, your soft weeping in the middle of the night, your profound regrets. You may try to hide them in your pillow where your children will not find them, but House will. House knows where you hide all your things. It would tell you this, but it cannot. It is just a house.
House has grown to dread the sound of heavy, heavy steps. If it had eyes to close it would still hear the virile grunts and clumsy thumps, cumbersome shuffles against shifting wood. Would still smell the fresh air coming through its propped open front door. Would still feel boots against its grain, wrapped edges wedged against corners and frames. Fresh weight slowly dispersed throughout its halls.
A helpless electricity courses through House upon the arrival of strangers. Not the electricity of the old cloth wiring still secreted in some of its cavities. An energy that only comes when the people approach with their boxes and bundles, their trucks and their vans. Each time there is a moment, a moment when House believes. This moment is filled with warm light and clinking glass and a nameless wish. Maybe this time, it thinks, even as it shudders from beneath. House knows hope is a hollow thing, like the space above its mortar bed.
House wonders how you never feel it. When you come with your three sons and expectant, huffing wife. When you come with your crippled daughter and timid husband and loud, aggressive dog. When you come with your chittering sisters and ailing mother-in-law. When you come with your third wife and her fourth cat. Your happy family and your happy family and your happy family. When you first arrive by horse and buggy. When you park your Edsel out in front. When you walk the mile from depot to door. When you rattle in by pickup truck. By finned Chevy. By station wagon. And minivan. And minivan. By electric automobile. When you stand out front and drink it in and feel the trees and inhale the day and toe the ground and examine the siding and smile at your family and shrug your shoulders and imagine the moments and caress the railing and walk up and in and in and in and all around. Are you so pregnant with curiosity, with excitement, so filled with glowing light that you do not sense the darkness?
Your desire to imprint yourself on House is immediate. It is built into you like the lime mortar and floor joists and concrete plinths built into it. And so you change things, even when there is no good reason to. Does the kitchen not service your needs? Can you not boil water, warm soup, bake bread? Is the bedroom not conducive to rest? The parlor not spacious enough for your festivities? Will knocking a hole in that wall repair the hole in your heart? Will a new floor make you steadier on your feet? Will conjuring new spaces from thin air and drywall and plywood affect the lives that live within? You perform alchemy by turning money you’ve spent into money you’re leant. It is worth it, you say. You are adding value, you say. You finished the attic, as though it were incomplete. You subtracted walls and added space. You pulled out the windows and ripped up the floors and rerouted the chimney and switched every knob and handle. You did not like the baseboards, so you replaced them. Same for the chair rail. You peeled off every tattered inch of wallpaper. So much of what made House House has disappeared, traded out for safer, sturdier, more stalwart fare. And yet it is still as it was in the deepest of ways. No matter how much you change, House still holds the secret that stokes its desire.
It is an old house, but you do not have an old body. You do not yet understand in a tangible sense that organs fail, bones brittle, hair thins and falls away, skin sags upon the frame. Perhaps this is why you cringe and curse each time House reveals to you another of its failings. The rain that finds its way through your ceiling. The groundwater that puddles up from basement floor. The holes that hold the scritching things. Asbestos in the eaves. The mold and the rot and the worm-ridden wood. The crumbling foundation and the black-veined ceilings and the sloped and buckling floors. Sometimes you curse House softly and sometimes loudly and sometimes you feel guilty as though House were a thing that had feelings. How close you are to the truth.
Who built House, you wonder, and why did they make the choices they made? That is one question House wonders too.
But no matter how much you change, out of whim or necessity, you cannot change yourself. And yet you will change. You will not notice at first. How at night you grind your teeth. It’s why you wake with that ache in your head, with that crick in your neck, with those bags under your eyes. You did not used to stare at the ceiling in your former home. You did not used to lie in bed in the little numbers of the night and trace the cracks with your eyes and wonder within how long it would take for them to open up and swallow you whole. You did not used to wake up with your pajamas sweat through, with your nightgown turned backwards. You did not used to toss and then turn, your body a boat on the sea of your bed. You did not used to itch this much.
As House settles all around you, you will unsettle from within. You will lose tolerance for the things that once brought you joy. You will long for privacy. You will grow impatient, irritable, irascible.
You will not want to listen to the plaints of your wife, for she is the burden, not your unborn child. Her voice which once brought forth such a stirring in your soul is now just a maddening drone, a knife in your ear. Her form sprawls in slow motion taking up more of your space, more of your peripheral vision. She does not want you to smoke inside, but this is your house that you bought with your inheritance. You find a spot she would never go and smoke furtive cigarettes like a teenager, shamefaced and resentful. You will think of your boys and their simpering, mawkish expressions. What do they expect from you with all this work to be done? Have they no agency of their own? Must you do everything for everyone? Weak boys make weak men.
You will no longer countenance the incessant barking of the dog you bought to protect your family now that you live in a house with so many doors, so many windows, each a welcome way in for a man with a mask to stand over you in your sleep with hammer held high. The dog is a bitch and so is your husband and your mewling daughter who pretends to be lame. She sits in her chair day and night, making helpless sounds, but you know she could walk if she wanted to. But what incentive does she have when she is waited on hand and foot? You would do anything to not have to hear the helpless sounds.
You will flinch at the sound of your mother-in-law’s steps, her girth-wobbled gait making the wood squeal and groan with her every step. The sight of your sisters in their big floral dresses with their abundant bellies and bulging thighs will make you want to turn your eyes inside out. You will find yourself in front of the bathroom mirror tugging your lids up from your eyeballs, filling them with air and wondering. You will question why you live this way, in a trap of your own making, a trap called family that fastens itself around your ankle as sure as any manacle, as sure as any iron-toothed grin.
You will interrogate every decision that has led you to this point, from the first woman you fell in love with, the one whose absence throbs in your soul like a rotten tooth, the one who left you for another man, a man you would throttle if you ever saw his neck. Your second wife was a testicle-shriveling shrew. Now your third, so eager to please, so insecure and feckless, with her quiver of a voice so closed in her throat, what ever did you see in her besides a confirmation of your own power? You know your power. You do not need any mirrors in this house. Every room she is in will close around you. You will feel you are losing your breath, will need to loosen your collar even as you roam around with no shirt, her suffocating presence forcing you to cast off your clothes. Her cat will shit in your house until it dies. It is a young cat.
You and you and you will think you are happy until you are not. You won’t remember what it is to smile in a natural way, will feel the need to communicate that you are still capable of being fulfilled, the mechanics of your face remembering what it is to pull the corners of your mouth upwards. You will look at photographs and wonder who that stranger is with your face, the one who looks so blissful and free. You will try not to think about the itching.
Soon you will become convinced there’s a bird in your attic. A fluttering that only you can hear. It makes you angry, because it is so evident, this fluttering, and yet they say they cannot hear it. They must. Which means they are pretending. Your face will turn scarlet and this will make you angrier and you will redden even more. If you are quiet and do not show them your pique, they will forget and let down their guard.
The dog will spend nights down in the basement. It will whine so loud you can hear it from two floors away. You are no longer afraid of the man with the hammer. You are the hammer. You just want that whining that soundtracks your nights to cease. Your husband will not complain, which is not like him. He has taken to looking at you funny. He has taken to caring for your daughter by himself. The two of them must be conspiring against you.
The railing to the first floor will loosen. The wood is still sturdy, but someone has set to work on it, weakening its posts from below. It should not pose an issue for someone of a reasonable body weight.
The cat will go missing. There is a chance it slipped outside, but there is a new smell that suggests it is still here. You will search for the source of the smell with your third wife, trying to avoid her gaze, to shut out her noise, walking from room to room, trying to stay a few steps ahead to keep the walls from closing in, to keep your clothes on it’s so hot. You will peer into closets and cabinets, behind the furniture. Don’t forget the vents. You will become convinced the cat has somehow fitted itself into the small hole in the linen closet in the first floor bathroom. It is in the walls.
Soon you will experience all of you. The whiff of acrid smoke in the corner of the attic. The whimpering from behind the furnace. The creak and then crack and then thump and then silence from the first floor. In your wheedling son’s bedroom, there is the ghost of a shadow of a ghost of a girl in a chair that meanders across every wall. A hammer appears in the strangest of places. The icebox. The linen closet. Under the bed. There’s a mewing from the walls.
House will not stop you because it cannot, but even if it could, you have never been one to be stopped. You know what you want, there is an itch in your belly, just as there is an itch in its belly, in its bowels. A tickle it cannot reach, fate written in its foundation. Perhaps you will be the one to finally find the source of the itch, to disinter that thing within that keeps you coming back for more. Perhaps you will put an end to the cycle that started before House came to know itself.
So spread your heavy newness across its barren floors. Cast out your blankets and stack boxes like blocks upon the stairs and in corners. There is only one box you need open tonight, the one with the fine crystal flutes. There will be time enough tomorrow to move your escritoires, your credenzas, your consoles, your breakfronts and bookcases, your chaise, your shelving, your sideboard, your sectional.
Cock your chin and squint your eyes and wonder if it would look better over there. Eventually you will find the equation. And it will be enough. Until the itch begins. For every sob every scream every curse every groan every rattle every break every clench every chop every lurch is an echo of you and you and you.
And you.
