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Nothing
Sarah Bailyn
I’ve been standing on the parkway for at least five minutes, staring. The cold seeps through my unsuitable jacket, which adds to my general sense of numbness. I was so sure it would still be here. Obviously not literally, but I thought I’d be able to feel it somehow. Like an invisible sci-fi force field maybe, or a change in atmospheric pressure. But there is nothing. I’m shocked by the nothingness. There had been a house here, for God’s sake. A fairly sizeable three-bedroom house. It was a big solid thing, filled with smaller solid things: furniture, dishes, books, toys, pencils. They were there for so long you’d think they’d have left some kind of echo. But there is only a patch of dirt, scattered with brick dust and stones.
The empty space gapes like a missing tooth between the houses on either side. I am suddenly overcome by the sensation that the whole place has been stolen. Stolen is better, a momentary shock and a feeling of violation, but stolen things can be recovered or replaced, a life rebuilt. That can’t happen here. The house is in pieces and its contents sold at auction. This in itself is almost incomprehensible. The parts that had formed the whole had seemed so firmly locked together, like the parts of an atom stuck to one another with electromagnetic force. But now they’re all dispersed, separated and weak. A table here, a cupboard there. I suppose most of them were period pieces anyway, ripped from their original settings and sold to my parents at antique fairs, so I suppose it’s only right that they should separate again and re-form with other pieces in other homes. But that’s a broader view than I can presently manage.
I walk along the borders of the lot. I can’t bring myself to walk across it, right through the house. I concentrate on practical things, to control the force-10 gales blowing around inside my head. I pace out where the living room had been, the dining room that was used twice a year at Thanksgiving and Christmas, the kitchen. I put my hands up and trace the outline of the upstairs bedrooms. There was my room, facing out the side. In that room I cried every summer because I didn’t want to go to camp, and in that same room I cried two months later because I hadn’t wanted to come back.
It had been a small room, as bedrooms go. More an extension of the space inside my head than a three dimensional box. Green and yellow. Who chose that?
Maybe a leftover from the previous inhabitants. I wonder if they ever drove by the house, just to see how it was, whether we’d done anything to it.
Eventually I lower my eyes. I’m ready to go in. Through the doorway, of course. I’d feel like a ghost going through the walls. I turn right and go into the living room. A beautiful room, but too dark and quiet for anyone to spend any time in, like a Victorian parlor.
I quickly move through it to the family room, just as everyone did when it still existed.
I’m standing in what had been the most cluttered, unlovely room in the house. It was also the room everyone spent the most time in, by far. I can see my mother sitting in her chair, coughing and clearing her throat. Dad is slumped in his, dozing, the cat on his stomach. Hour after hour of television had poured out into this room. The dirt here is probably toxic.
Millie’s red two-door pulls up at this point. She looks pale as she gets out. She smiles, a bit tentatively. Is it OK to smile, she’s probably wondering.
“You’d think the tree would have fallen,” she says. The oak that had leaned against the house for years is still there. Dad’s birdfeeder hangs off it like a plumb bob.
I say, “It was my escape route, you know, in case anyone ever broke in.”
“I planned on playing dead.” She hesitates, shocked at what she said, then continues to walk towards me.
“Wait!” I call.
“What?”
“You can’t walk straight through.”
“Why not?”
“Doesn’t it feel weird?”
“Not really.” Millie has always been a pragmatist.
Not to be outdone, I hold my arms in front of me for protection and walk straight across. I feel ungrateful, like I’m belittling everything my parents worked for.
I am astonished at how quickly I can walk from one side of the house to the other. It’s only a few steps. How cramped life is! We tread the same small circles over and over again, like an ice skater practicing figure eights.
“We should’ve moved,” says Millie. “This wouldn’t be so hard if we were army brats.”
“I just can’t get over the fact that the house is simply not here anymore,” I say. “Not here. How can it not be here? I feel like I’m in some kind of alternative universe that’s exactly the same as ours, with the exception of the house.”
Millie kicks the tree. “It’s in your head, though. And mine.”
I feel dizzy. I can’t carry it all in my head. It belongs out here, locked in upholstery and carpeting.
“But in my head I’ll forget things. I’ll forget whether the downstairs bathroom was white or blue. I’ll forget where the crack in the front window was. And when I die, that’s it, gone forever.”
Millie starts to cry.
“No one will ever say, ‘The Perrys lived there. The older daughter had the smaller bedroom, but she’d chosen it herself, age two. In 1978 her parents attempted to lacquer a slice of pine tree to form a coffee table, as was the fashion. Half-finished, the slab sat in the basement for the next twenty-five years. In 1987 Mrs. Perry finally threw out her orange La-Z-Boy and bought a leather one.’”
“Stop it, stop it.” Millie pleads with me. The cold air makes vapour rise from her tears, like a soul from a body. “Everything has to go sometime.”
I turn to her. I’m nearly shouting. “Why does everything have to go at once? Why couldn’t we get rid of a few things at first? Take our time over it. Then sell the house.”
“Why are you making this so hard?”
“It is hard!”
Millie screams, “You wanted to get rid of it all, Marsha, not me! You said we’d make more money on the empty land. You sold all the stuff!” She sobs into her hands.
I feel exiled. As if the world was a place I’d been on holiday, but now I’m stuck there.
We sit in Starbucks for most of the afternoon. Always the rebel, I order tea. There’s no paperwork to sort through; we hired someone for that. So we just sit there, not saying much. Millie watches the snow come slanting down. I stir my tea. It’s like we’re sitting shiva for the house.
At about five, my brother-in-law phones. Apparently Jonathan, my sister’s little boy, isn’t feeling too well and wants his Mommy. Millie starts to tell him she’s busy but I shake my head and mouth, “It’s OK. Go home.”
I leave soon after she does, and go back to my apartment downtown. It’s cold inside. I never did get around to asking Dad how to bleed the radiators. Grabbing a comforter I wrap myself up on my ancient couch. I still can’t cry, but maybe I’m getting close.
I sit for a long time. A familiar wave of guilt washes over me. My parents did not do anything to deserve this. Not to say they were ideal care-givers – far from it – but they loved and provided for us. I’m not sure why I’ve always regarded their house on Theobald Street as a kind of supernova, a collapsed star with infinite gravity that I couldn’t approach without getting completely sucked in and destroyed. So I stayed away. But in fact my rebellion was always rather weak and unsuccessful. My many and small rejections hurt my parents without truly setting me free. Would I finally feel free now? Both they and the house are gone, and soon I’ll have some money in the bank. This could be a whole new beginning. But in fact, it feels much more like an ending. Not even a real ending, one with fireworks or epiphanies or a marriage. Just the frustrating type that dwindles down, distracted, unresolved, slowly petering out to nothing.
