The Property

This short story was submitted to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, hosted by Middlebury College. 

I can’t say when I started watching the house or why. If pressed, I would blame the windows and, of course, my own proximity.

It was one of those new houses, built to look like a small, converted barn, although, to my knowledge, no barn had stood there previously. The windows were floor to ceiling on one whole side of the first floor, revealing simple living quarters: a single open room, with a kitchen island anchoring one side and a fireplace on the other.

I knew the view would be dramatic without ever having been inside.

The first couple to move in was young and stupid. Just being honest, not mean. I didn’t see it at the time. They were also well-intended. Ann and Andy were their names; I am not joking. Like the most popular rag dolls of all time. I assumed they were newlyweds in the way they took up playing house. The man waved his finger around when he talked and closed his car door with an important slam. The woman scrubbed the floors on her hands and knees, performed calisthenics most mornings, smoked and ate ice cream out of the carton most afternoons, and then spent ninety minutes perfecting her hair and makeup before another important slam announced the man’s return.

The lawn seeding and bushes the building company had provided failed to thrive, likely due to the amount of bleach that was used to keep the inside and outside spotless. But the newlyweds seemed oblivious. This seemed out of character. They were otherwise so anxious, installing burglar alarms and fire alarms, and obsessively checking the house on Zillow, watching its climbing market value on the computer screen. Yes, that’s how well I could see through those spotless windows.

Eventually they must have gotten an offer they couldn’t refuse. They moved out and a pair of teachers moved in.

That’s partly my invention. I have no idea what the couple did for a living but his scholarly beard and her nape bun and glasses, led me to think of them as “the teachers.” They were just as orderly as the newlyweds but used a lot less bleach. They put in the garden, including a small vegetable plot on the sunny side of the hill. He pinched her butt as she walked by with a basket of weeds.

The teachers brought in furniture – more than the newlyweds had had. A large flannel couch that came pre-loved and a round coffee table with a shelf underneath to store books in mid-read. Floor lamps and a loveseat, stools for the kitchen island, old fashioned appliances and rugs filled the space with possibilities for comfort.

They also placed a large painting over the fireplace. It was at a hard angle for me. I could only see it from the corner of the house, and my walks only took me there when their car was missing from the driveway. There were new bushes on that side, bringing honeysuckle, and likely bees, up to the kitchen window. If I pushed through to the roots, I had a direct view to the fireplace and the painting above.

It depicted a nude corpulent man, but you know, beautifully obese, no cellulite or wrinkles, just one Rubenesque sphere after another, the type that begs to be caressed and squeezed and celebrated for the pinnacle of the well-fed and coddled human form. He stood in mid-stride.

Surrounding him were well-dressed individuals from every time period. There were togas and flapper dresses, suits and fur pelts, corseted waists and braless tie-dye. Each outfit had been carefully rendered, capturing not only the style and stitching but the bodies underneath – bodies that had been pressed into reverence to the naked man. They bowed, curtsied, nodded with hands folded or lay fully prostrate on the ground. Most eyes were closed.

Almost hidden by all this detail was a small child, standing in the right bottom corner, in nothing but a cloth diaper and a precariously placed safety pin. Her eyes filled half her face, the way they can in young children and do in cartoons. She had a fingertip pressed to her top lip, as if considering speaking.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this painting. But I knew Ann and Andy would have detested both it and its placement in the room. Above the fireplace was the most obvious place for a television. I stopped to give the picture an occasional gander for a few months, but then forgot all about it. I mean, a person has better things to do than look in other people’s windows.

The teachers seemed happy in the small house. Their work week looked hectic but every Saturday, she would become absorbed on the couch, feet up on the coffee table, and then suddenly straighten her back and motion for him to come, come quickly. He would rush from the kitchen island and lean over the couch. Gestures would be made at a book, or a website. Banter and discussion would lead to kissing and inevitably they would climb the spiral staircase out of view. Like clockwork. As predictable as their morning coffee-and-toast routine, their Sunday 10 am jogs.

I felt bereft when they moved out, even if I knew their lack of goodbye was out of simple ignorance, nothing more. They left behind many of their belongings.

The lovers moved in next. Both men cooed over the view, of course, but also adored the abandoned furniture and garden. There was lots of gesturing at the painting. I assumed they appreciated the unabashed celebration of male nudity, but perhaps that is stereotypical of me. They moved it from above the fireplace to an awkward spot next to the spiral staircase. I pushed through the honeysuckle to see what they had put in its place. As suspected, there was a large flat-screen tv. It had digital fish moving across it. These spooked me and I never trespassed again.

I called them “the lovers” in my mind because I didn’t like the sound quality of their names: Zucker and L. Murdoch.  I found these among other details in their mail. Amazing what the U.S. Postal Service provides. I gathered Zucker’s shoe size, learned they had a penchant for expensive wine and jarred delicacies, subscribed to all the tv networks and the best magazines, and were accumulating frequent flier miles. I was even able to deduce their cell phone numbers from account updates and service bills. But it was taking this info over to Google that helped me understand they were both important influencers on multi-level platforms. In other words, they helped manufacture the very self-consciousness that was the lifeblood of the companies advertising on their sites.

The lovers did their best to take care of the things they loved about the house and improve the not-so-great aspects. The style of shrubbery was changing: for example, round was out. They tried to cut the hedges themselves and then discovered it was too challenging to get the straight edges that were so in vogue. They hired someone to come and do it right. It all made me uncomfortable but who was I to speak up?

Next, the reconstruction crews came, one lover’s attempt to keep the other lover ensnared – although I never could quite tell who was trying to impress whom. Apparently, the crews also felt confused. Some minor cosmetic changes were made but mostly the men stood around, looking at their phones, waiting for someone to take charge. After the newlyweds, no one wanted full responsibility.

Speaking of them, Ann and Andy checked back periodically, even doing a random clean here and there. It was odd, no doubt, but the teachers had tolerated their eclectic intrusions, clucking almost enviously at the newlyweds’ toothsome nostalgia, but holding their noses to the bleach.

For the lovers, it happened on a Saturday morning, when the unsettled sun had made the cloud cover a bilious yellow. Murdoch was digging around in the flower bed, planting bulbs, and Zucker was in the vegetable garden, doing who knows what. The newlyweds arrived – Ann with her mop and a jug of bleach and Andy with his rake and power drill. They must have found the front door locked because they came around the back, giving me a perfect view of the whole scene.

Ann said hello and Murdoch stood. Andy waved at the house, pointing to the siding, the gutters and then back at the crooked mailbox. Ann gestured at the windows; the streaks there did nothing to hide the clutter inside. Murdoch asked a question and Ann and Andy nodded in unison. He asked another question, raising his voice. I braced myself and then relaxed when I saw Zucker approach.

Zucker aligned his shoulders with Murdoch’s and their chests puffed in unison. Ann raised her chin but when Andy put his hand on the small of her back, she turned to him and cried. It was a high-pitch pathetic cry. Murdoch and Zucker remained still, with arms crossed in front of their chests. Andy helped a distraught Ann limp away. She became composed with righteous anger within seconds from the lovers’ sight.

Seasons passed and Zucker and Murdoch began to fight about the very things they had loved. They would start in one corner of the house, point and wag their fingers, taking it apart piece by piece. Just as they had praised it in isolated units, now they condemned it in chunks. To the end, they remained incapable of seeing the house as a whole.

The arguments carried on, more and more heated, as if finding a victor was possible. I couldn’t hear them clearly, but I could read their bickering in their flails and gestures. Zucker’s face was crimson; Murdoch’s was magenta. Zucker ran a finger under his collar and fanned his shirt tail. Murdoch wiped sweat from his brow.

Watching them was getting exhausting.

I quickly googled air conditioning units, in the size that would fit the small window above the kitchen sink. I texted the listing to them, anonymously, with the simple advertorial message “Time to cool off?”

Simultaneously, they looked down from the fight at their buzzing phones. And then, also in perfect sync, they covered their lips with their fingers, looked at each other and then peered out the enormous window. I covered myself and chuckled.

They moved out soon after. Zucker laid out kraft paper and a flexible sheet of foam on the floor. Murdoch walked in just as Zucker began to lift the painting off its hooks. There was wild posturing and Zucker stormed out empty-handed. Murdoch yelled after his U-Haul but to no avail.

Afterwards, Murdoch spent several hours alone in the empty house, which looked smaller now, with their clutter all packed. He ran to the bathroom once, clutching his stomach and a hand clasped to his mouth. The next I saw, he was curled up on the flannel couch staring at the painting. He didn’t move for so long I assumed he fell asleep. And then he was gone. The painting remained.

Next, several kids moved in. Yes, I thought of them as kids, as that is what they looked and acted like. Again, not being mean, just honest. They had no respect for the place, seemed to think it was just there for housing them, not understanding the stewardship aspect of house occupancy at all.

They did zero upkeep inside or out. They partied every night. Pizza boxes piled up outside and cereal boxes and dirty bowls cluttered the kitchen counter. The couches seemed to be used just as often for clothes and papers as human bodies. In fact, if one of them wanted to sit down – which was rare actually – the clutter from the couches was simply pushed off and strewn over the floor. Animals ransacked the vegetable garden. Weeds and grass took over everything else. I honestly considered hiring them a housekeeper and even a gardener but I, of course, did no such thing.

Instead, I just tried not to look. Or rather looked at myself. I pulled my hair out of my face, looped an elastic through it and used a rounded fingernail to pick at the treads of my boots. Soil fell, joining the dirt on the wooden floor. I tended to spend an inordinate amount of time here, in the greenhouse that stood awkwardly adjacent to the house. It was small, safe and warm. Years ago, I had found a packet of seeds on the ground, just inside the door. I kept trying to coax one seed after another out of its coat, sure it would unfurl into something mesmerizing – or at least something worth spending time with. But each round of efforts shriveled with neglect as my attention was called back to the drama and demands of the house.

It was as if the house was both inescapable and just out of my reach.

I managed to partially block the house out, only occasionally noticing the disrepair with a dull ache. I nearly cried when the kids broke the skylight but worse was when they replaced it with transparent pink vinyl sheeting and duct tape. I looked away and tried to hold my tongue, busying myself with the type of inessential work that feels so necessary at the time.

The kids calmed down over the years, and if they never got good at upkeep, they at least stopped trashing the place. They let Ann and Andy hose the house down once and then kept it decent after that. They even started planning a little vacation for themselves, which I saw as a sign of maturity. There were travel guidebooks and proper suitcases. They wondered if I could get the mail, feed the cat.

I asked for the key, and they just laughed at me. Their laughter made me irritable. I knew they left a key under the big white rock in the former vegetable garden, but did they know that I knew?

I hated them in that moment. My ego looked for a way out. Maybe they were drunk. Maybe they hadn’t heard me correctly.

When their cab pulled away, I went directly to the vegetable garden and retrieved the key. I questioned my own excitement about going in. I could see nearly every cranny through the floor-to-ceiling windows. I wasn’t going to see anything new.

But once inside, I realized, it was my other senses that had been starved. The silence was textured here, wrinkled with previous expression. I stroked the cat, a one-way street of silk, and breathed deeply, detecting baked oatmeal, sweat, putrid tomatoes, orange-scented soap, spilled wine.

I sat down on the teachers’ couch and ran my hand over the aged flannel and fingered a dusty book from the bottom shelf of the coffee table. I put my feet, shoes still on, up on one couch arm, my head on the other and pulled over my chest the fuzzy, starry purple blanket Zucker had long abandoned. I closed my eyes. The fuzz smelled of Zucker’s admittedly adorable cockapoo and something acidic. Juice, vomit?

I pushed the blanket off and sat up. There were cracker crumbs on the carpet and a couple coffee cups on the table, both still warm with recently abandoned swill. I carried them to the kitchen and dumped the remains down the sink. On one side, there was an enamel built-in drainboard with emerald mold growing along the edges. I thought of Ann and her bleach as I used a warm towel to wipe the ridges clean.

The cat mewed and I turned, scanning the familiar room from a new angle. Made of heavy wood, the filing cabinet under the spiral staircase caught my attention. It had always stood there, stoically ignored. I was surprised to see that it was built into the wall. I assumed it held important documents, birth certificates, taxes and the like.

Obviously, I should have left everything alone. Just feed the cat, drop the mail and leave. What gave me the nerve to be in here like this, going through other people’s belongings? People who had their own opinions and needs and damaged psyches. Some things are private.

The top drawer of the filing cabinet was a bit snug, as if it had come slightly off its tracks. Inside, were the usual hanging folders, soft forest green, labeled with hard plastic rectangles, sticking into the air. The white slips of paper, wedged inside the rectangles, had been written on by hand. The first one read “House.”

My thumb and forefinger pushed open the file revealing a deed placed in horizontally. No one was watching besides the cat, so I pulled it out. And put my other hand to my mouth. And then to my heart.

The house was in my name.

All those years I had been watching this house, a lifetime really, empathizing with its disrepair, and over-repair, wanting better for it, wishing someone would come along and give it the attention it deserved…

The kids came back from their vacation ten days later and found me lounging on the sofa, with cat on lap, book in hand, steaming tea at right elbow. I was faking it, of course. I didn’t feel as comfortable as I looked. But I had to start somewhere.

I explained what I had found.

They didn’t even look surprised. They said they weren’t staying for long. They had discovered they had houses of their own.

That sorted, I realized I could finally do what I had always dreamt of doing with this house. I could fix that skylight and let the garden become overwrought with wildflowers. I could let books and dust pile in one corner and scrub the kitchen island. And then I could change my mind, and let the books clutter the island and put a desk in the corner. I could bake biscuits at dawn in the oversized oven and whip my own butter and clean up the mess another day. I could put a heavy curtain over the large window or maybe it would be a sheer white.

I put my feet up on the coffee table and examined the view. How different to be looking out, rather than in. How jealous I had been all these years.

“This house is mine,” I thought, amazed.

I felt my bones stretch into the frame of the house and my flesh fill out the walls. I breathed into it. My lungs and organs surrounded the mess and clutter, finding nourishment in their chaos and beauty. Even the weeds, mosses and molds, I realized, were part of me, offering tiny sprouts, hints of inspiration to come. And the view. The view was from my very own eyes.

“This body is mine,” I thought again, amazed.

The lovers came back a few months later. They were holding hands and a moving van stood behind them. Murdoch had a crate of magazines at his feet. They had made up, they exclaimed, and their love belonged in this house. They would do it better now, they promised. They could see that the house had reached maturity and needed different things. They were ready with new answers.

I explained that it was my house. That in fact it had always belonged to me. But now I knew.

Murdoch kicked the crate, hard, tipping it over so that glossy covers spilled over the door jam. Zucker raised his voice and his fist. A caterwaul threaded fur between my ankles. It acted like a spur. I slammed the door in the lovers’ faces – faces that had suddenly gone from movie star perfection to monstrous sneers. They pounded on the door as I turned the deadbolt. I grabbed the cat and lunged toward the couch. The banging continued as I stepped directly onto the flannel and sat with my feet tucked under me. The blanket went over my head, hiding both myself and the cat on my lap, a pathetic purple pyramid. We huddled there, in oppressive heat, until the lovers stopped yelling through the door, until I heard their moving van pull away. The fact that the blanket had originally been Zucker’s was not lost on me.

The teachers returned next. They slipped a handwritten note in the mailbox. It said they liked what I had done with the place; could they come for tea? I went into a panic, cleaning this, vacuuming that, weeding there. It never occurred to me that I could say “no.”

When the time came, I had tea, and biscotti, and fruit cut like flowers, all laid out on the kitchen counter. I wouldn’t need to apologize to them about the lack of a dining table. They would know nothing fit.

At 4pm sharp, as I was adjusting the position of a bud-shaped strawberry, I heard the front door open and peeked down the hall to see a man with a familiar beard heft a large suitcase over the door jam. It rattled me as it was rolled into the living room. The woman, her hair still twisted into a knot at her neck, settled a bulging shoulder bag on top of the suitcase, looping the leather straps around the extended metal handle. She put her hand on the man’s arm before he headed back out. “We can get the rest later,” she said.

I tried to be gracious, offering them tea and snacks, conjuring conversation topics out of thin air. But they mostly ignored me, happily looking around the house, taking note of changes and exchanging memories.

Finally, I stomped my foot. I live here now. My eyes inexplicably filled with tears.

The bun nodded and the beard shifted uncomfortably.

“Of course, honey,” she said.

“We were just bringing you a housewarming gift,” he said. He gestured at the suitcase on his way to the bathroom. They left without saying goodbye. I sat on a kitchen stool and broke one biscotti after another into tiny pieces, and then the pieces into crumbs.

I wasn’t brave enough to unzip the suitcase until the next morning. All genres of books spilled out, along with land and nautical maps, star charts, and depictions of Earth’s prevailing winds. When I opened my front door, the stoop was teeming with bags, containing more books, as well as academic journals and files. Their car must have been filled to the brim.

I carried everything upstairs and stacked them in a dramatic, bridged tower. Whenever the mood struck, I adjusted the structure into different shapes, the way children do with blocks. My favorite design was two tall towers, taller than seemed possible.

The hardest was when Ann and Andy came back. They said they knew I “kind of” owned the house, but they still had their own jobs to do. They just needed to check on the gutters and make sure I was cleaning the oven properly. Besides, no matter my ownership, the house had a responsibility to the rest of the neighborhood. It couldn’t become a blight. Part of the house’s job, didn’t I know, was to support the property values of all the other houses.

Their anxiety flooded me. Perhaps I was the one who was mistaken. How selfish of me to think it was all mine, that anything was really all mine. Obviously, it was only mine to share.

Shaken, I let Ann and Andy in. Ann sniffed the air and swept at cobwebs in the corners. She didn’t notice the creativity nor check for living breathing spiders, before the crushing fall of her broom and the finality of the dustpan.

Andy grabbed the small rug in front of the entryway and beat it, inside the house, encouraging tiny pieces of gravel from the ribbed pile to fall on the floor. He gingerly placed the carpet over the dirt and gestured at the now-pristine carpet. He grinned at me, seemingly unaware of the specks that had jumped for the corners.

Satisfied, they pushed past me to the kitchen, the one place, I felt, I kept clean. Ann took the catch-all out of the sink and ran a gloved finger as far as she could down the drain. She tsked.

Andy examined the fridge handle and checked his own reflection in it. It was unsatisfactory. He polished the chrome and moved on to the door, scrubbing avidly to reveal a vaguely familiar mirror finish on the entire fridge and lower freezer, including the rims. I could now stare at my softening face, in the most unflattering position, as I fished out my nightly ice cream.

Not that I got any that night. Ann and Andy crowded the kitchen, moving briskly, making grilled cheese sandwiches and pouring themselves tall glasses of rum. I excused myself and went to bed hungry.

The next morning, I woke to a lawn mower attacking my wildflowers. I ran downstairs in a groggy daze and aggressively slid aside the glass door to the patio. I was smacked with the smell of bleach. Ann was on her knees in a housedress. She had a scrubbing brush in one hand and her favorite brand of cleaner in the other. She looked at me over her shoulder, smiled a good morning smile, and then poured detergent on the beautiful mosses that grew in the cracks of the patio.

I became enraged.

I turned on my heel and ran towards the filing cabinet. Ann called after me, “Honey, you really shouldn’t leave the door open like that.”

I was back before she had finished her sentence. The house was just that small. But it was also mine. I pushed the paper towards her. See.

She squinted up at me, still on her knees, and reached for the paper. I flinched and clasped the paper to my chest. She stood and looked at me as if I had completely lost my mind. Maybe I had, but it was mine to lose.

She walked slowly towards Andy, who powered off the mower when he saw her. They argued. Andy yelled. Ann cried. They made up. They talked in hushed tones long enough for me to become engrossed in the endeavors of ants moving house, and even to become parched and consider the ingredients for lemonade.

But then they were walking together, back towards the patio, hand-in-hand, smiling softly at me. Calmly, Andy sat down next to me on the patio wall. He put his hand on my knee. “You know we are only doing this to help you.”

“Where does that idea come from?” I asked.

His hand went still and then he withdrew it. “It is, just, well, it is just obvious if you have lived as long as I have,” he said, now sounding hurt.

His hurt wounded me. I don’t know why. I looked at the deed in my hands and tried to focus on his actual words, to block out the guilt and shame that was inexplicably rising over me. Ann stood over us, her scrubbing brush at her forehead, shielding the sun. Her shadow made the deed a cadaverous blue gray.

I purposely thought about the word “deed.” Vocabulary and etymology have always been a steadying force in my life – something about going from the lizard brain to the frontal cortex, someone had once suggested, although they likely had explained it more eloquently than that. I was struck now with how close “deed” was to the word “dead.” And yet “deed” could also be an action of course. Usually, a good one. It was obvious, he had said, that their actions were good ones.

“Is it?” I whispered.

Ann gasped. Andy said, “What?” He was hard of hearing.

“Is it obvious?” I said, clarifying. I thought of the teachers’ painting for the first time in a long time. It had been sitting in the corner for so long, ignored by the kids, and blending into the walls of my own visual awareness. But the little girl, with her fingertip pressed to her lip, jumped into my mind’s eye. It was time for her to speak. “I don’t see this helping.”

Ann and Andy became ruffled. They became so uncomfortable they stopped listening and threw their hands up. They didn’t want trouble.

I felt small after they left. I examined the deed by candlelight that evening, looking for a sign it was a hoax. The seal, however, was the real deal. The bumps and indentations were like coded braille messages of authenticity.

Satisfied, I closed my eyes and let my proprioception expand to its rightful proportions.

“This body is mine,” I thought again, amazed.