The House

I was sitting on the family room floor, going through the stacks of CDs, choosing which ones to bring along and which ones to let the movers pack.

“Pantera, no. Anthrax, no. Def Leppard, yes….” I mumbled to myself while I worked, putting the “no” CDs in a big pile to my left and the “yes” disks into a smaller pile at my right.

I stopped for a while, sitting back on my feet and looking around the room. It was my favorite room in the house, a warm and cozy basement room. There was a wood stove in the corner, an office room just behind where I sat, a bathroom, and a full bar. It was the perfect room for just the family and the perfect room for entertaining also. I loved that room. I lovingly ran my hands across the new carpet we’d picked out just five months before. I allowed myself to fall into a daydream, scenes of life in this house playing in my head like a slide show.

It was a bright September afternoon, two days after we moved into our house. I sat at the kitchen table with Dave, my eyes sore and tired from crying, feeling his hand rubbing the back of mine. My mother stood at the stove, scrambling eggs and frying summer sausage for a light supper for me. She had come over as soon as she had gotten the call: the ultrasound that afternoon showed that my 11-week pregnancy wasn’t viable. Nature was playing a cruel trick on me, and I was scheduled for D&C surgery in two days. It was my mother’s instinct to care for her wounded duckling, and for that I was grateful. The smell of the cooking was comforting, as was the solid wood of my table and the cozy atmosphere in my new kitchen. Mom set plates before Dave and me, then she sat down to keep us company for a while before she had to get home to Dad. Buying a house only four miles away from my parents was the best decision we ever made. The warm vibes here gave me a strength I’m not sure I would have felt otherwise.

………………………

I lay on the couch after the surgery, waiting once more for tears to subside. I was in the living room, wrapped in a quilt, listening to the sounds of my husband and my mother painting and arranging the bedroom for my eleven-year-old daughter. She was away for the weekend with her father, and we were going to surprise her with a room painted in an ocean theme. We’d picked out two shades of blue and found a dolphin-and-whale wallpaper border to separate them with. The carpet was the color of the ocean bottom. Once again, Mom had come to help us, bringing a homemade dolphin quilt for Katie and picking up a paintbrush alongside Dave. I was supposed to have complete rest for a day or two, but it felt nice hearing them work, knowing that their labors were helping to make my new house a home. We had been so thrilled at the thought of bringing a new baby home to this house, and while nothing could take away the anguish I’d felt at miscarrying, the house reached out to me and soothed me.

………………………

Dave carried me downstairs to the family room and set me up on the couch down there, bringing along the quilt I’d been using upstairs.

“Use this remote for the TV and this one for the receiver,” he explained, showing me how to operate the new satellite TV system he’d bought. He had hoped to find a way to fill my time while I recovered from the loss of my pregnancy and had bought the system as a gift for me. He tuned in the Game Show Network for me, lit a fire in the woodstove, and placed a kiss on my cheek before heading back upstairs to move the furniture into Katie’s room.

I watched reruns of The Price Is Right, The Match Game, and Password Plus. It was like entering a time warp for me, transporting me in an instant back to a more carefree time in my life, and I was grateful for the emotional escape.

I closed my eyes and rubbed them, shaking my head and suddenly feeling tired. I took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of the carpet powder I used, feeling again as warm as I had felt in those early days in the house. I was weary of the CD-sorting task, and gathered up the dozen or so that I had pulled out to take in our van with us. The rest could be packed. A dozen was enough. I shoved the others haphazardly back into the CD towers and put the good ones into a paper sack to take upstairs with me later. The prospect of leaving this house was taking its toll on my emotions. It was time for a break. I flopped into the cushiony couch and flipped on the television. Garry Moore’s smiling face and pleasant voice came out of the screen at me as he introduced the panel for “To Tell The Truth.”

“Too bad,” I said aloud, “It’s not cold enough to light a fire.” My mind wandered once more, remembering that first New Year’s Eve in the house. We’d had a roaring fire going then and a buffet of homemade appetizers and goodies set up on top of my 1964 Magnavox console stereo, a garage sale find I’d thought a charming complement to my 1964 house.

My brother stood laughing with my husband, taking a sip of beer and watching my sister throw her darts. My brother-in-law lounged against the bar, sipping his own beer and waiting his turn at the dartboard.

“Jackpot!” I cried as my sister hit the two bullseyes we needed to win the game against the men. My sister-in-law, sitting with my parents at the table around the corner from the stairway, looked up and smiled.

“Woohoo! Way to go girls,” she said, giving her husband a little smirk.

It was New Year’s Eve, our first in the new house and our first party. I’d enjoyed making the food and goodies, and my dad had brought over all the leftover champagne from the wedding. Earlier that afternoon, Dave and I had picked up an enormous – ENORMOUS! – bottle of Spumante, but Dad’s contribution of the champagne made it an extraneous purchase.

I felt complete here, hosting an open house for my loved ones and surrounded by my family. Dave’s parents came by too, sitting and chatting with everyone. The mood in my family room was festive and genial. I felt such a sense of rightness and comfort that I decided I wanted to make this party an annual event. We’d eat and laugh and play games ‘til long past midnight, ringing in the new year with those we loved.

………………………

Three months later, another party, a birthday celebration for my mother-in-law. I was tempted to open the still-unused bottle of Spumante, but Dave’s parents and grandparents had come bearing wine for us to share. I smiled at the big Spumante bottle at the back of the bar, reflected in the giant mirror there. It looked at home among our vintage barware, and I was a little glad we didn’t have to open it just yet. It had become a fixture where it was.

We had rum cake and wine, laughing and talking and listening to music in the basement. My mother-in-law and I got more than a little tipsy, happily engaging in birthday merriment. I tried on three 1950s dresses I’d bought on eBay, showing them off for my in-laws.

“A little tight for me on my bacon butt,” I said ruefully, twirling the skirt, “But just the right housewifely look for me anyway.”

“Oh, piffle,” Bonnie said, shaking her head at me. “They look just perfect on you. The vintage style suits you, just like this house.”

I smiled at this last memory, fondly recalling that birthday gathering and the fun we’d had that night, both during the party and after our guests had gone home. At that thought a new memory washed over me, bringing a smile to my face. I leaned back and closed my eyes.

I knew what would happen even before I picked up the stick, a quiver in my hand as I did so. I’d done this what? Two, three, four times a month since late October? I sensed – no, I knew – that this time would be different, that this April Saturday afternoon would bring me the news I’d been waiting for.

It did. There was a second pink line there, as clear and dark as the control line it paralleled. I was pregnant for certain. I slipped the test into a drawer in the bathroom vanity and briefly wondered about the morality of withholding this information from my husband for a little while longer. He didn’t know I suspected, didn’t know I’d taken the test. We’d had so much disappointment since the miscarriage that I’d stopped raising his hopes every month. I wanted to save the news and tell him in just the right way, clever and creative and memorable. Was it right to keep it from him just a bit more?

We went to Old Chicago to play darts. Dave drank a couple of beers, and I sipped on a bottomless glass of fresh lemonade. We whiled away the afternoon happily tossing darts and listening to the jukebox, but later, after we’d gotten home, he seemed out of sorts. I asked him what was wrong.

“I don’t know. I’m just crabby.”

The right moment had arrived.

“Would you feel better if I told you I’m pregnant?” I stood back and watched the dawning realization cross my husband’s face.

“Are you kidding? Please tell me you’re not kidding.”

“I would never kid about something like this.”

I was sure his whoop of delight could be heard on the next block, so great was his excitement, his previous crabbiness forgotten. He picked me up in the hallway and spun me around. Our prayers had been answered.

My eyes snapped open, and I sat up, sighing. I had a lot to do yet and didn’t need to be wasting time on memories and game shows. I shut off the television, picked up the bag of CDs and headed up the stairs. Halfway up, I turned and glanced back, trying to burn an impression of all the good times we’d had there into my brain and heart. It was going to be very hard to leave.

In the kitchen, I wadded up newspaper and packed a few of my vintage kitchenware pieces, things I didn’t feel like trusting to the movers. I set some things aside and glanced at the kitchen door, the casual side entrance we used almost exclusively when coming and going from the house. Again my wandering mind stole me from the task at hand and whisked me into the past, images of us loudly coming in the door late the previous December.

“We’re home,” Dave announced, setting down my bags and smiling at the infant in my arms. Katie followed from the car, shutting the kitchen door behind her.

“It’s cold,” she admonished us, stroking the baby’s cheek. “Do you want her to freeze?” Dave and I looked at each other and laughed, sending Katie into the hallway to turn up the thermostat. It was the day before New Year’s Eve 1999, and we had brought home a beautiful new daughter.

………………………

New Year’s Eve, so different than the previous year’s. With a brand new baby in the house, we’d decided against the open house we had wanted to make an annual event. The four of us sat upstairs on the couch, watching “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” and waiting for the med supply company to deliver a breast pump for me. Jenny was having trouble latching on correctly, and we thought we might have to use bottles to feed her. Dave and Katie sat on either side of me, and I held the baby on my lap, occasionally attempting to feed her. I thought of the bottle of Spumante in the bar downstairs and smiled a little.

I grabbed my box of kitchenware and the bag of CDs and stepped outside the kitchen door. The van was parked in the driveway. I opened the back and loaded in the box, then tossed the bag up front. Slamming the door shut, I looked up at the sky. It was overcast, the capricious October whether turning gray and chilly this late afternoon. My eyes moved over to the spacious backyard where the grill sat on the deck and the clothesline opposite the oak tree.

The breeze was warm against my bare arms as I reached up to hang the laundry from the line. I loved the fresh, sunshiny smell of line-dried clothes, and even more, I loved sunny early-summer mornings out here in the backyard, the baby happily sitting in her saucer watching me hang the clothes. The dewy-fresh morning air reminded me of my own childhood and June's promise of endless summer days stretching before me. Mornings out here with my baby were one of the simplest pleasures I enjoyed. I envisioned hot July afternoons splashing in a wading pool, and balmy summer evenings cooking steaks on the grill under the vast expanse of sky. I could feel my roots settling into this house and this place. The feeling was good.

Enough. I had to stop this daydreaming or I’d never get done. Fast snatches of memory snapped through my brain as I went back into the house to organize clothes for the trip. The day that Dave had come home telling me of the promotion and transfer offered to him. The agonizing decision over what to do. I wandered through the upstairs, peeking into Jenny’s nursery and feeling tears spring to my eyes as I looked at the cheerful Baby Looney Tunes wallpaper border we’d lovingly put up for her.

“Who will love this room the way I do?” I wondered aloud.

I opened the hall linen closet, so very much like the one in the house I’d been raised in, and drank in the smell of fresh towels and sheets. I peeked into Katie's room, my heart giving a little lurch at the thought of the labor of love that turned this room into an ocean fantasy. Would the new owner repaint it, obliterating our mark on the house? The organization of clothes forgotten, I roamed the house, looking out windows, touching the walls, and remembering. I saw the pine rail and balusters my husband and his stepfather had sanded and stained and installed by hand. I looked at the new carpet, the oak floor behind the bar, and the bar itself, that Dave so lovingly and carefully finished. The remodeled bathroom. The tiny corner office. The fireplace. The couch where I’d lain to recover from a broken heart. I didn’t want to leave this house, and, oddly, I felt as if it didn’t want us to go either. It was a fanciful thought, and while it might fascinate a psychiatrist, I didn’t have time to dwell on it. I had packing to do.

………………………

The movers had come and gone, taking with them most of our worldly possessions. A supply of clothes, food, and toys loaded down our van, ready for the long trek across the country to our new location. Both girls were already in the van, waiting for Dave and me. We were going to spend the night at my parents’ house and leave at dawn the next day. Dave walked around the back of the house, making sure nothing was forgotten. I stood just inside the kitchen, the door open behind me. I was to leave the keys on the counter and lock the door from the inside before slamming it shut to go. My feet felt frozen to the kitchen floor, reluctant to leave. Dave stepped inside and touched my arm.

“Donna,” he said gently. “We have to go.”

“I know. Just let me walk through one more time.”

“No. The kids are waiting. We really need to go.”

“Okay, okay. Okay,” I said, tears filling up my eyes. I snapped the key onto the counter and went out to the step first, Dave following and locking the door. As we walked to the van, he put his arm around my shoulder.

“Honey, you’ll be okay. It’s just a house.”

“Yeah,” I whispered, looking back once more and trying not to cry. “I know. It’s just a house.”