House Waning

by Sharon Mollerus

I can only say what happened. It’s too bad about our beautiful house, the house I was born in, on the second floor which is now boarded up. The pretty white wooden house with the planters with cheerful red pansies under the picture window. The house with all the beautiful windows, which the house looks out of: the bay window in the kitchen nook, the French windows in my parents’ room, even the fanlight window above the front door which lets the tinkling light in through the beveled glass. The only things left untouched here are the windows, like bright eyes that still follow me down the walk.

When I was ready to be born, the OB bus drove up with the midwife and backup surgery team, and they rolled all the equipment in, bumping the carts up the stairs. Everybody said the house was perfect then. And so was I, my father adds. I popped right out in their bedroom, in the same place I was made. I was a bit slow to scream, but with a few shakes I woke up, and my mother says I haven’t shut up since. I looked out over the world for the first time with my big blue eyes, my father says, and took a good look at the two of them and, of course, the house. They cleaned us up, my mom and I and the splattered floor, and went off to the next job, bumping the carts back down the stairs. So then I grew up right here, happy as a clam as they say, or snug as a bug in a rug, at least until the beginning of junior high. I don’t remember much from before; everything was going so well, with one day just tumbling over the next. Suddenly something made it all change, but I don’t know exactly what. Like I said, it happened.

Maybe it began when the house started talking back, using other people’s words. Naturally, it has none of its own. The basement hoards an echo from the living area, and the bedrooms store bottled voices in the attic, like the talk carried by a string between two cans. A house muffles words, good ones, bad ones, and swallows them whole, including the muttered complaints, the swear words that slide below hearing or comments about one person whispered to someone else. And there are the phrases laid over years of conversation, which gather meaning like the moss on the rolling stone. Walls eat this stuff up day and night, and usually they’re tolerant, but this house happens to be sensitive, as the environmental analyst says, and took in more than it could digest; it throws them back up, the quiet words swollen with hostility. At least that’s how my parents argue--sideways. They have their own language, and you’d have to be around a while to catch on. They lived together seven years before they had me—unexpectedly, my mother says; serendipitously, according to my father—adding up to about twenty years altogether. They decided to get married four years ago, just before they moved into the association. It was a very big deal, in the association chapel, a gazillion people including all the residents, and at the party the champagne bubbling from glass to glass, ladled out of a frothing fountain. And then people were jumping in the fount with their tuxes and gowns and shedding them; high heels and panties were floating over the surface, and the guests were barely keeping their necks above the fizzy drink as they groped for other necks.

The walls repeat things, they gossip, like the vhone conversations: my mother talking about a showing; my father talking investment options; my mother’s breathless metal vhone voice, “meet me”; my father ordering “Ms. Sexy Serenity” for his v-booth; or off-line my parents’ evasive couple-chatter. And the house repeats everything in these sassy digital echoes, recycled phrases on some haywire loop. Tessie and I, my best friend, we don’t talk on the vhone on principle, first of all because we know exactly how easy it is to reprogram all the recorders and speakers in the walls—my ex-boyfriend taught me a few fun things before he was sent to the group home. But mostly it’s because I can’t recognize the tinny distortion of her melodic voice or her wavering v-image which looks like about 70% of the other girls at my school. I’m aware it could always be someone else pretending to be her, like one of the girls from the other crowd. We talk all we want when we’re scuffling around in the leaves outside the complex, or at the pool hall where we all get down. Anyway, my own words got spit back at me by the spiteful house once: it was mimicking me (with the sociable language controls whacked out) saying, “Can’t you turn that vucking vhone down?” over and over. I did a real job on its wires for yammering at me like a scratched CD.

I still say it started with the house, before my sensory sensitivity. This is how I explained it to my therapist Julianne. They all love that diagnosis—anything environmental, because that’s at least something you can sometimes change. I said I could no longer tolerate the noise and lights at home where I’d lived all my life. My father said I was having growing pains. I told them that I got all sweaty and clammy when the 3DTV advertising came on. I screamed over the piped-in ad voices: cheerful jingles, ardent dialogue, audience laughter, that conglomerate of voice and message which, by contract, chimes through the house every daytime hour and all weekend. Of course the volume adjusts up and over any competing noise. It escalated with my shouts until I pulled out my porta-PA to compete in my bullhorn cheerleading bellow (which I use not for football games, of course, but for my girls when we’re hanging around). The association sent out a mediator for our altercation; they tried to make an intervention: teen vs. Madison Avenue. My parents asked to revise the 3DTV contract based on disability (mine not its), but, without a doctor’s letter, it was an unalterable contract wrapped into the house and neighborhood package. I was told to play outside until bedtime or I would have my eardrums sealed in with prescription wax. Bedtime isn’t well-defined, but I usually stay out long after whatever it is.

Soon after the echoes started, the vhone rang and my mom picked it up super quick, blanking out the video and giving “yes” and “no” answers, like a twenty questions game. The ivory colored vhone started blushing bright pink, and my mother giggled and flushed fiery scarlet beneath her blonde bangs. The wires glowed beet red while my mother’s fingers were wrapped in the coils of the cord, like a mouse being swallowed by a snake, and she said “ouch, shit” and sure enough, her fingers were burned. “I’ll call you back when I can.” I saw the white seared welts across her palms, and she took ice from the freezer and held her hands together, like she was praying. I explained to the fire department how it started suddenly with the vhone and how the wires sparked out to the street. Something sure got fritzed, they said, and they wanted to know if anyone had been in the house lately, anyone with some serious technical knowledge. They wanted to take her to the clinic, but she wouldn’t go and smeared butter over her fingers instead. The vhone company couldn’t explain it, not a cloud in the sky but the wires burned up like from lightning. They coiled new wire inside the walls.

Around then, I took a shine to darkness and turned off every light in the house as it came on, which happened in reaction to any shadow entering, like mine. So I would run through the house backwards, fleeing/chasing a round of respond/stop-respond lights with my claps and commands. My parents sat rigid in their chairs, avoiding any sudden move or heavy breath, anything that would start another flash of light. We lit candles in the rooms, the flickering of which the censors had been programmed to ignore, although my mother was forever blowing them out, sure I’d start a fire. In fact, we had two small ones involving curtains which she was able to put out in time. In time to save the house, but not to avoid the attendant chaos in both cases of three fire trucks, five police cars, and every other association cop off-duty and just passing by.

I love the dark. At night I’d take the screen out of my window and climb out onto the roof, lying slantwise and watching the stars. The neighborhood patrol told me to go in, and I’d yell something back at them. I’d find my own constellations: Ursa Major, Orion, Cassiopeia, the Pleiades.

The next thing with the house was the baseboards started rotting, the ones trailing along the outside of the master bedroom; evidently something nasty was growing out of the wall. My parents slept there, usually at different times, my mother was the night owl and my father had his banker’s hours. My mom preferred sitting in her indoor garden room with the glass ceiling and potted plants in a round, dialing up her friends and meeting them in a v-conf, their images projected together on the stone benches as they drank scotch and told stories of their college days, complained about their kids and murmured about their lovers. My father mostly stuck to his office with the door locked, talking on the vhone or engaged in the v-booth with ordered entertainments. The imported Indian rug in their bedroom with the deep red swirls and gold borders became frayed and molded on its rubbery bottom, and the wood planks of the floor beneath it had softened. The tropical-design wallpaper was falling down the wall in strips like a peeled banana, with the pale porous wall looking just like that fruit when starting to brown. I thought this must be what a real gingerbread house is like, all edible and being eaten. My parents said it just needed a little paint. The house analyst asked if the gardener had been in the house planting mold or if someone was bathing the walls with river water or some other chemical solution.

Then the house started bleeding this rusty ooze from its pipes, under the bathroom sink and in the utility room and dripping straight into the washanddry. It honestly looked kind of like a girl's period, except it was constant, more like a hemorrhage. The rags stained brown when you tried to clean it up. The house wept out of the faucets and spilled over even with closed taps. Hot water ran cold, and the cold froze and spat out blades of glassy ice. Faucets would spurt suddenly and drown a bathroom or send a flash flood into the bedroom. Once I saw my parents’ four-poster floating like an ark the middle of the room, and it would have sailed out the window had the opening been any larger. Somebody found tools clumsily left out in the basement; of course they were always looking for some intentional actor to avoid liability, but my parents were already planning a lawsuit against the association as the real culprit.

The supporting beams in the basement were being eaten alive with bored holes and started to bow. Worms squeezed through pinholes in the wood like eels in a reef; I saw them. My father put up metal braces to support the cross-beams and added them until there was a solid row of iron pillars. With the pipes weeping around them, the metal rusted and ran down like brick red nail polish. Quarter-size holes popped open under the banister, in the door jambs, and along the fireplace mantel, like white polka dots shaken out onto a dark red cloth.

Then I developed a sensitivity to the waterless chemspray shower which is supposed to leave you all clean and tingly and still keep your skin tender and soft, whether your hands are greasy from working on old cars or grass-stained from gardening. I hate the nauseating smell and irritating superfine spray, which is so light it’s hard to tell when it’s on and off. They say it was used by the feds as an investigation aid before it hit the consumer market. My mother doesn’t understand my fascination for stomping in mud puddles and washing off in cold hose water. Why aren’t you sensitive to dirt and mosquitoes like everybody else, she wants to know. I ask her what’s the difference between that and her weekly mud bath? I hose my body over with the hard outside water, setting the nozzle right on the top of my head where my hair sprouts out, and it streams down my shoulders, curving like a waterfall and sloshing out into a pool around my feet in the wonderfully scratchy grass. The hard water leaves my hair knotty and my skin bumping cold. She gave up scolding me and makes me throw all my clothes in the washanddry and have another chemspray. So I go back outside and wash all that sickly sweet lotion off me, and it goes on like that until one of us gives up, usually her when she has to go to work. My therapist calls this passive-aggressive behavior. I call it trying to get clean.

This sensitivity of mine was also the reason I turned off the atmosround in my room; it’s ominous: they always program these messages for your brain to take in to throw you off track. My parents love a wooded scene projected on the four walls of their own bedroom with the gurgle of a recorded stream and the synthi-touch of cold stones and bladeless grass beneath their feet. They used to set it to ocean surf in the grand room with the cathedral ceilings, with the waves crashing over the kitchen table, and then the living room was a dune without the soppy seaweed, and the kitchen floor held a layer of soft sand that never kicked up in your eyes. My father would surf the gauzy waterless waves, but the artificial breezes went wrong and blew into a hurricane with real rain and wind, knocking glasses and plates off the shelves and sending a tidal wave of salt water across the house. It soaked the main floor carpets and flooded the basement, leaving a standing saltwater pool covered with floating palm fronds. Another time, the briny ocean taste on the tongue malfunctioned in the kitchen and poured a bucket’s worth of saltwater down my mother’s throat nearly drowning her. I found her choking and gasping for air in the kitchen and pulled her out to the sandy shore projection in the hallway where I turned her over and slapped her back until she spat the seawater up. My father looked at the purple marks on her neck and stared at me, but she just held her throat and sobbed. We had to keep it off after that; my parents were tired of fixing things.

They speculated that I might be allergic to electricity itself, although supposedly it’s a rare condition, and the tests were negative. This worried my parents no end because the homeowner’s association is quite strict: the residents are survey-selected, and people have been known to be evicted when something unexpected pops up with a kid, something they didn’t catch in the social, medical and genetic checks. If they could, they’d pick your parents for you. In fact, it happens: there are couples who won’t conceive until they’re both cleared. Fortunately, I was already born before that. Tessie can’t come over because she couldn’t get a visitor’s clearance. Her background is a little checkered, as they say, with some volatile genetic markers which the lawyers won’t allow them to divulge for privacy reasons and so you never get to challenge it. I didn’t even try with the others. We hang out in the downtown park and follow street musicians from corner to corner, homeless people mostly; we listen to their warbling voices and the clean twangs of their guitar strings. They play my favorite songs, because I always throw coins in their cases. My mother complains, what’s the point of having a safe neighborhood if I’m wandering all over the city streets, and my father says there’s nothing they can do with me.

I sleep on the porch swing in the summer months, and everybody knows the house is unreliable and that the beds might flip over or the floor cave in. My dog Taurus sleeps at my feet, resting his snout over my ankle and watching the house, because he knows where the real threat is. My asthma is worse inside, even with the air filtering pills. I also hate being rifled by that fakey inside atmosphere regulator. You’re supposed to be able to set it so the air swirls around you at your preferred temperature, but it gives my sun-loving mother a personal layer of permafrost and my cool-preferring father the perpetual blast of a hot oven opened in his face. They both deny it and claim it’s just me, being sensitive again. But I saw my mother’s goosebumps and her freezing fingers shaking and unable to grasp a pen, and then my father sweating at the brow, his shirt sopping from the chest around under his arms. It was never right for me in the first place, because it can’t be outside inside.

The house then took on more echoes, weird whistling noises when there was no wind outside, stomps and door slams. I could be sitting in the living room with one or other of my parents—they take turns being with me--and we’d be watching the 3DTV with the lights out and the sound mute, and suddenly there’d be this loud whump. And my parent would not jump, though I would nearly fall off my chair. I’d be the one to get up and investigate, and they would just say, see, when I came back without finding anything. It couldn’t be the wind, because nobody leaves the windows open with all the pollution.

The house would sulk and billow with self-sufficiency, as if, feeling neglected, it was acting like it didn’t care. The walls, when they weren’t corroding and withering, would sometimes expand and bloat. The roof ballooned as if swollen up from some bee sting or allergy. The house was bagged and purified three times, and despite my mother’s assurances to the contrary, it made no appreciable difference.

Or the house sometimes seemed so defeated that it would bend and blow in the wind, the wind that it would somehow let in. You had to hang onto your book or magazine or papers or they might fly out in a flurry of ruffled pages with or without a quick gust. The outside siding fell off and shattered into pieces; the gutters slid and bent and hung off the roof; the shutters would skew and rattle on a breezeless afternoon. And, as if the house’s bones had atrophied, beams and joints would snap under any added pressure.

The house became very neglectful, leaving attic windows and porch doors open, so that rain sloshed in and warped the floors, and the wind blew in a litter of flung sand from our artificial lake and rotting leaves filched from the yard. It gathered squirrel droppings in the kitchen like acorns; it pocketed dead rats and live beehives in the bathrooms and closets. The house unlocked the front door once and let in a thief who stripped it, not of our jewelry and furniture, but of its own baseboards, curliqued cornices and elegant moldings, right down to the brass doorknobs. The housekeeper says something watches her through keyholes and mirrors, laughing and just waiting to undo her work. The woman crosses herself and sprinkles holy water throughout the house as she vacuums and dusts. Overnight the house reclaims its floors and walls to its own disorder. Even the grass outside sprang weeds though it was just reseeded last summer. The dandelions and foxtails are prodigious and impossibly tangled together.

Like I said, nobody can say for sure which came first, the house problems or my sensory sensitivity. My father says it doesn’t really matter anymore. As much as they could, my parents just routinely dismissed everything, because they didn’t want to encourage me and, if you think about it, none of it made sense. I could understand their reaction, because kids do tell lies and make things up, and sometimes they just get confused, or even delusional. I knew a girl once who thought there were spiders crawling in her hair, but the bug zap hoops were checked out and found to be functioning properly in every door and window of school and home. Besides, she lived in a domed community, so how could any real creature spin a web over the doorway to launch baby spiders out into nests of unkempt hair? But weirdly enough, the insect bites on her scalp were confirmed when laser-biopsied.

I can only say what happened, and I saw the invoices from the contractors for the fixes; I was there when the city inspectors and maintenance engineers and social workers came, and when the lawyers met, ours and theirs. They all came and took videos and argued and interviewed me about what I saw. It’s all documented; you can find copies of the v-reports in two filing cabinets, upstairs, where now they can’t be reached.

I agree with my parents that after a while it’s just too much. When there are that many unaccountable things, you just want to shut the door, or block off the staircase. It’s like, if you’ve seen a snake in your basement, you start to wonder if there’s anything there you need to get at that badly. You can’t be sure if the serpent’s still there or if it’s moved along by now. Sometimes I thought I must have made it up, or some of it, or confused it with some dreams of mine. Yes, I’ve dreamt of bugs too, like everyone, of worms and moths, butterflies and spiders even, but never of bleeding pipes and mashed banana walls. Julianne, my therapist, also got the house problems and my symptoms mixed up, claiming that all this was just a way for me to insist on being unhappy, when I would be better off being happy about things that just are the way they are.

There was this list the lawyer was writing up. It’s still in my parents’ file cabinet, which, as I mentioned, is inaccessible. He looked at my parents quizzically, and then at me sympathetically, as if he knew who to believe but was more sure of who was paying the bill. They tried to downplay the problems, but he hired a private investigator to check into the sabotage. They even checked up on me to see if I had instigated any of it. But nothing showed up, and he had no explanation. How could all these things happen? As he said, they just did. The point was who was going to pay for it and what, if anything, could stop this process of deterioration.

The environmental analyst eventually came to diagnose the house, and he brought in someone else, and that lady brought in a third person, who was a certified house psychic. The first two couldn’t explain what happened. The third pointed out that the damage started from the interior, so it indicated a kind of malaise. She explained this is a new field in environmental health and cosmic disturbance. When challenged, she said they hadn’t completed their study, but there was plenty of anecdotal evidence. Of course, my agnostic mother believed wholeheartedly that this was some kind of pseudo-religious scam.

My mother said a house can’t have a malaise, only people can. The lady respectfully begged to differ. She called it a systemic malaise which had as an effect a weakness over all its systems, water and electricity, structure, heating, floors, walls, roofing. It used to be just termites, tornadoes, earthquakes and aging which assailed a house, much like the parasites, accidents or natural demise which humans endure. But now it’s recognized that there are all kinds of diseases of the house as well. A malaise for a domicile is like an emotional illness with somatic features. This should be a content house given this neighborhood, but it's not. She said it’s like a maladjusted child who has constant stomachaches and headaches which eventually turn into ulcers and a brain tumor. They left my parents a long questionnaire to answer, mostly about them and me. The analyst said something about doubts, that the whole house was full of them. It seemed the house kept shifting, it was restless; it was a kind of anxiety, arising undoubtedly from the doubt problem. It was swaying and had come unmoored from its foundation, in a metaphorical sense, or maybe metaphysical. How could an 8,000 square foot sprawling house with marble counters and platinum fixtures be lacking faith? This is voodoo, my mom said. The lady tried to explain patiently: the house sighs; it mourns; it’s what you’d call a sympathetic house. It absorbs the emotions of its residents. Then it should be a happy house, my mother said. Maybe there’s something wrong with its sensors. Didn’t anyone check to see if the thermostat is working correctly? It’s an indefinable illness that rises up from its roots, the woman said. It’s not a tree, my mom said, doh. And even for people, unhappiness is always definable, according to my mom. One can find the reason with a psychiatrist worth her salt in a half-hour or two. The woman was clearly a charlatan. My mother wanted to know how much she charged an hour anyway. A house seer of all things. My father said to wait and consider things first. The psychic might have a point. People who have disappeared loved ones and have tried everything else sometimes have to come to the point of looking for a different source of help. My mother was losing patience, even though patience was a virtue that she really believed she did possess. You’re not hearing what she’s saying, my father said. His eyes are red a lot. He says he has a sympathetic virus, it started in one eye and now it’s moved to the other. There’s anger in the house too, the woman said meekly, that’s why you have these holes punched out, see? And doors pulled off their hinges. Nobody is breaking anything around here; in fact, the windows are all perfectly intact. I don’t know where it gets it. This is all so preposterous, my mother said, after she fired all the analysts and fortune-tellers.

The staircase incident happened on a humid late summer day, the evening of the surprise disengagement party held in the backyard. My parents had invited their family, friends and neighbors for a special announcement, that is, to celebrate their upcoming divorce, and this news was supposed to be a revelation for me and all the others, except my grandmother who knew all along but was sworn to secrecy. There were caterers and blue umbrellas and fans set around the yard that shot cool mists past overheated guests. They also brought in the portable v-confs for the people who couldn’t make it in the body because of other commitments. There were two canopied areas for the guests whether there or not, one for my father’s friends and the other for my mother’s. And they had a full bar, although the virtual guests brought their own drinks, of course, from wherever they happened to be at the moment. Unfortunately, Tessie couldn’t come in, so it wasn’t much of a party for me.

There was a big yellow ribbon tied around the whole house for the cutting ceremony. See, this house was built for separation, in that popular new Siamese design, which can be halved along the middle wall. Each side slides apart across the property into separate units for a simple and inexpensive breakup. It was one of the association’s popular selling points. The six bedrooms become three, four baths become two. According to the plans, a second kitchen and living space could then be snapped onto the smaller twin at what was originally the center seam wall. The kitchen is the heart of the house, as everyone knows, the realtor explained, and so it’s a lot like having a heart transplant. I was to have my own room in each, as is customary for divorced kids. The two tractors were ready to move the house halves, and the snap-in prefab kitchen was standing ready; my father would get the original one, and the new one would get attached to my mother’s side. But when the ribbon was cut and the house was split, the staircase on my father’s side going to our original bedrooms fell down in piles of slats and railings and bars.

I hung out in the pool, sitting waist-deep in the shallow end and just letting the water float my outstretched arms. My mother won’t come too close to the water; she says she was almost drowned there—that’s when the pool tried to suck her under. But the house never comes after me; with me it was mostly a matter of noise and special messages. Maybe it just wanted conversation. We began to understand each other well. My father kept checking in with me every five minutes to make sure I was still happy, and then he was always watching me from his circle. The other kids were running around me and jumping in, whether in clumsy splatting cannonballs or elegant dipping jackknives. When they splashed me, I was annoyed but ignored them. And my grandmother came with Uncle Ray, her third husband—he’s “Uncle” Ray because he says he’s too young to be a grandfather--and they're very happy too. They said they just want me and everybody to be happy, and that’s all my parents want and that they would always live close to me and I’d see them both everyday. And wasn’t it such a great surprise. That was when my father handed me a towel and wrapped me in it and walked me barefoot to the front of the two houses, while my mother stayed back in her circle, holding hands with her friends, just following me with her eyes until I left her sight. At the curb the association cops were standing waiting for me, every last one of them in a line, to pick me up with my stuff.

When I turned back to look at the house, they were rolling out the “Good-bye, Daniela” banner which unfurled on a cord suspended from the top story windows of the one house to the other. The only intact parts of that split house are the watching windows, but eventually they’ll have nothing holding them up for the house to look out of. I wonder how long it will be now until the windows fall down and the glass is swept up as so much debris by our very meticulous association.

2005