And, only a few days ago, I noticed a fine layer of dust on the dining room table—the dust she had devoted her life to dusting away. It was already accumulating in gray layers, and it had only been seventy-two hours since she’d left. When I went into the living room, I saw it there, too, swirling around in the air, settling on the arms of her chairs, the coffee table, a galaxy of dust collapsing from inside itself in slow motion, burying us.
It was what she’d been doing, chasing dust, all day, every day.
So I went to the kitchen to get her feather duster with its pink plumes out from under the sink, but when I got back into the living room with it, I had no idea where to start. Dust was everywhere. It was in the light. It was in the air I was breathing. It was graying my hair. I was afraid to use the feather duster, which seemed weightless in my hands. I thought it might make it worse, kick up a whole new storm of dust that would choke or blind me. So, when my father got home from work, I said, “We have to call the Molly Maids. We can’t keep this house clean by ourselves.”
“I did already,” he said. “They’ll be here tomorrow. They’ll be here every Wednesday.”
“Shit,” Phil says, untying the sturdy laces of his brown boots. “How could she do this to you?”
“She wanted out,” I say, looking at Phil’s feet.
When his boots are off, I see holes in his black socks, and each of his big toes looks vulnerable to me, raw on the beige carpet, as if two sacks of skinned mice have spilled, and Phil looks down then, too, as if he’d like to gather up those spilled mice quickly. Then he shrugs.
“So?” he asks the wall behind me, where a painting of the ocean hangs, all melancholy flotsam and churning water.
Seascape it’s called. It’s the only real painting that hangs in our house—a dark ocean my parents bought in a motel lobby in Toledo the year I was born, the year my father got his promotion, the one that turned his youthful energy into a heap of laundry every night at my mother’s feet, the year they moved with me to Garden Heights.
STARVING ARTISTS’ SALE, the sign on the highway said, and although my mother must have muttered, “That cheap junk, who wants that?” my father insisted they go, and they went. He took one look at Seascape and happily paid the forty dollars to own it.
Sometimes, I’d run my fingers across that canvas just to feel how thick and sticky the paint in all that choppy water was, the places the painter had gobbed on too much blue. The horizon was ominous and, with some imagination, you could smell salt, dead dolphins, weeds reeking on a beach. A thin line separated the water from the air, and though I hated the painting itself, that line was definite. Incontrovertible. There was absolute emptiness between the sea in that painting and the sky. It was a space that existed simply because nothing was in it.
“That’s no excuse,” Phil says.
“Who needs an excuse?” I ask.
He looks at me. There are snowflakes melting on the bridge of his nose, and his eyes are wide. I see myself in the small blue ponds of them, seeming brighter and sweeter than I am. My face is pouty and young in this reflection. I lean a little closer, looking for myself, surprised at what I see, and wonder what I’d expected: Had I expected to see my mother?
Phil looks at me strangely, looking at him, and says, “I’m worried about you, Kat. Your face looks frozen.”
I try to stop smiling.
He says, “You’re going to crack.”
ONCE, I SAW A SHOW ABOUT EARTHQUAKES ON PBS. THERE was footage of bridges buckling and families shuffling through the open-air wreckage of what had been their homes, as a professor from Stanford explained in the background how there are huge movable plates under our continents and oceans and drugstores shifting around while we’re watching television, or eating party mix, thinking about other things.
And even though the families picking through the trash for their belongings were either Turkish or from California, it seemed like a likely event to me. It seemed to me that something like it could happen to us at any time: an earthquake here in the part of the world where there were no faults, where, instead, a thick layer of mud kept our pharmacies and supermarkets and houses stuck.
Garden Heights is, as I’ve already mentioned, proud of its newness, the sameness of its designs, but the houses in our neighborhood seem like imitation houses. Cheaply made, pieced together overnight with materials that did not come naturally from this world—plastics, pressed woods, drywall.
The houses are not inexpensive, but they must have been put up hastily. Who knows what they were built on? When I stand in the kitchen, I can hear every footstep my father takes upstairs. When my mother was here, I could hear the hangers clanging in her closet while she got dressed, and every word she said to my father, and even the thin, atomized sound of her cologne as she sprayed it. When I’m quiet, I still can, as if the ceiling is made of onionskin and very flimsy hope.
Our house, like all the houses on our block, has three bedrooms—mine, my parents’, and a guest room, the door of which is always kept closed. On the rare occasions that door is opened, a cool breath of mothballs rushes into your lungs, as if the past is a guest, trapped in there for years and trying to escape.
The living room has two green-winged chairs and a floral sofa with a brocade trim, which matches the chairs, and in the den there is a tweed and over-soft couch—which is, I imagine, supposed to be the masculine parallel to the feminine living room. Informal to formal. Comfort to decorum. As though a line has to be drawn between my father’s world and my mother’s. Like the horizon in that Seascape, or the door between the finished part of the basement and the unfinished part.
The finished part has a pool table no one has ever used, the orange vinyl couch with black patches of gummy tape addressing its old wounds—something left over from my parents’ poor, early married days. On weekend evenings when Phil is busy with his mother, Beth and Mickey sometimes come over, and we drink Boone’s Farm Apple Wine down there, look at those Penthouses. That wine tastes like something sour squeezed out of a May day, and after a few glasses it burns greenly behind the eyes.
The unfinished part of the basement is our family’s personal wasteland: cement floor with a drain hole like a navel leading directly from our home to the sewer, the Chagrin River, then into the huge, burning cesspool of Lake Erie. Just the washer and dryer—water and air, those elements tumbling their fuzzy stars and flowers with our underwear, our socks, our soggy monogrammed towels—and a horizontal freezer full of meat and cookie dough waiting in wax paper, waiting for Christmas, waiting for my mother to bake. Fifteen cubic feet of limbo.
As we sleep, that appliance purrs beneath our beds, kicking on and off inside its strange private life like a big, dangerous pet. The great, white, humming brain of our house.
For sixteen years we have lived quietly in our suburb, with some elegance, some ease, but nothing out of the ordinary. When my mother disappeared, when I said to my father that we ought to call the police, the first thing he thought to say was, “Let’s go to the station. We don’t want them to come over here for all the neighbors to see. Your mother wouldn’t like it.”
And, of course, he was right.
My mother would have wanted to disappear without making a scene, without giving anyone anything to talk about. Every day, she worked hard to keep passion and its violence subdued in our house. From room to room, the tasteful carpet, the sturdy furniture, the neutral walls—nothing exotic, nothing bright. Even a little would have been too much, would have stood out, homely, sad, telling the story of her discontent, letting guests know she’d wanted—once imagined—more.