me here, I tend to make another to keep it company. Mistakes need friends, just as we all do. And so I glance over at Judy.
“How about it, Jude. Since we’re close to the old neighborhood, what say we drive by our house?”
Judy shoots me a baleful look, but doesn’t reply.
“Let’s just drive by and take a look. I haven’t seen the place in years.”
I turn right two blocks on and head into another haunted part of town, a place you can’t get to by roads alone.
The closer we get to our old street (named after a French philosopher no less, a fellow who knew a thing or two about the void) the less believable everything seems. The Mdewakanton Dakota used to pass through here on their way to collecting wild rice on lakes a bit north, but the present neighborhood was mostly built in the 1920s and ’30s. Tall shade trees once lined the streets, but Dutch elm disease has killed off most of them. The few left behind look skeletal and misplaced, like the odd rotten tooth in a mostly toothless mouth. We turn onto our old street and I start scanning for our house, pretending to be casual. Judy scrunches down in her seat, refusing to look.
“Well, there she is, Jude,” I say breezily as I pull the car up to the curb. I don’t feel breezy. Judy peeps over the bottom edge of the car window, like a soldier in a trench wary of snipers. It occurs to me that she likely hasn’t been here since shortly after Mom and Dad’s funeral. We walked out of the house a few weeks later, each carrying a suitcase, headed for Uncle Lester’s. And Judy has never been back, not until just now. No wonder she’s lying low.
The house looks strangely innocent, all whitish stucco, wrought iron, and one upstairs shuttered window by the chimney, but I know better. In my mind I walk myself up to the rounded front door—think ovens—and through the entryway into the living room on the right. Nothing has changed. Hardwood floors, gapped but shiny. A motley collection of furniture, not quite comfortable anymore, but too familiar to consider replacing. My father’s stuffed chair, the right arm darkened from years of buttered popcorn. In the corner by the window is the small, primitive television. It was old and outdated by the time I came along, but it had caused a stir when my parents got it, one of the first families in the church to get one. The pastor made it clear he didn’t think televisions belonged in a Christian home. My mother told him a lot of Christians she knew didn’t belong in a Christian home either. At least that’s what Aunt Wanda reported years later when I asked what my mother was like.
I see my parents and us watching reruns of The Honeymooners. “Bang, zoom, straight to the moon, Alice!” We don’t know enough to be offended. My dad laughs every time Norton comes into the room. Says he used to have a hat like that when he was a kid.
On the walls cheap prints compete with even cheaper studio photographs of the family. No one looks believable. Our skin sort of glows, like those plastic Santas with a light bulb screwed into their backs. And then there are the portraits of the dead. The faces are colored a kind of buttered-toast gold. You can’t imagine any of them ever telling a joke or sneaking a drink.
The snapshots are more compelling. Here’s Grandpa Nick as a young man among his co-workers in the oil fields of Southern California. He stands on the platform of a well, short and stocky, the collar of his shirt open and a confident look in his eyes. He’s just back from kicking the Kaiser’s butt in France and looks ready to do the same to life in general.
And yet, by the time I first saw that photograph, Grandpa Nick was already dead. Heart attack in his forties. I could never quite reconcile the living figure in the photograph, all breath and expectation, with the knowledge that he was dead and disintegrated long before I was even born. It seemed to me that this photograph somehow kept him alive—or at least in existence—and I worried that we were too casual with it, letting it just hang there by the entryway, liable to disasters of every kind.
In my mind I walk through the living room, turning left into the small dining room that joined it at right angles. We only sat at the dining room table on Sunday afternoons and when company was over. But all four of us are sitting there now. My mother is instructing Judy.
“If the butter is closer to someone else than it is to you, Judy, you should ask them to pass it, even if you think you can reach it yourself.”
My father is telling me he’s glad there’s a pro baseball team in Minnesota now because he gets to take me to games, like his father did with him when he was a kid.
I drift out of the dining room into the kitchen. The white refrigerator with the rounded corners sits, as it always will, next to the back door. Its long silver spike handle pulls forward like a slot machine. After one summer Bible camp where the speaker dragged us step by bloody step through the crucifixion, I couldn’t look at that handle without thinking of giant nails being driven through Jesus’ hands. It kept me from looking in the frig for a snack for weeks.
The kitchen table is red, with shiny silver edges and metal legs. The chairs match the table—curved metal with red vinyl seats, split after years of use, the white fibers sticking out like gauze on an open wound. I see oatmeal steaming in a bowl, vapors rising in twining spirals before disappearing in the air.
I lean over the sink and look out the kitchen window into the backyard. Huge. Bigger than it can possibly be. It is terraced, the lawn rolling up higher near the back fence, like old Crosley Field in Cincinnati. I imagine Vada Pinson gliding back to catch a long fly ball against the fence and throwing it back into me at shortstop. I see our dog, Blue, lying in the sun, her tongue hanging out as she pants, at ease, satisfied with her place, without thought for past or future.
I walk out of the kitchen through the second interior door and back into where the entryway meets the living room, facing the front of the house. I turn right down the hallway, and see the two bedroom doors, one on the right and one on the left, at the end of the hall. But as I walk toward them, I come to the steep narrow stairs on my right that lead up to Judy’s tiny dormered bedroom.
I look up the stairs and feel a hollowness in my stomach. I see the bookcase at the top of the stairs, filled with the first books that had come to my aid. The bookcase is covered in shadows. In my mind, I try climbing up the stairs, but my feet are heavy, very heavy. My knees will not bend. I somehow get to the first step, then the second. I hear a noise, and the hollowness in my stomach turns to pain.
dont go up there you fool
A squeal comes from the bedroom, like a mouse being crushed by a boot.
run away you coward run away before its too late
Judy grabs my wrist and I look into her terrified eyes. The door to our old house starts to open from inside. I pull the car away from the curb and accelerate down the street like Ichabod before the Headless Horseman.
EIGHT
After the blowback from driving by our old house, it’s several days before I’m myself again. Then again, what does that mean, “I’m myself”? Which “myself” is the real one? What is a “self” anyway?
Where’s Pratt when you need a good deconstruction?
oh thats right hes dead end of self
I remember him quoting a warning from another Melville novel once, something about being careful about seeking self-knowledge, you may mistake yourself for someone else. I know I have. I mean, I’m pretty sure there’s more than one of me. My wife said so. And Uncle Lester before her.
me and my shadow strolling down the avenue
