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Overview
The nine remarkable stories in Above the Houses compel the reader to experience what the author has elsewhere called "a kind of ecology of consciousness: how to use well and not squander our stupendous human resources for insight." The dramas they describe—ranging from death, divorce and murder to a torrential Midwestern rainstorm—provide a context for the author's astonishing ability to capture subtle human feelings, whether those of old people, children, lovers or the lonely.
In the title piece, the wife of an academic nomad faces by herself—without her children, who have flown the nest, or friends, who are yet to be made—the adjustment to a new community. In the passage of a single ordinary day, she makes intricate new connections "as if long-estranged beings had been tapping from both sides at once of a door that has simply dissolved." In "Time's Body," a man still in mid-life, worn down by the dying of his wife, rises up from his exhaustion to face the monumentality of everyday living.
Set in the heartland of America and suggestive of writers like Alice Munro and William Trevor, each story, in its own extraordinary way, poses the dilemma of the father in the volume's concluding story, "Rain," when he asks "to be told why I care so much how I live if it is all to end anyway." And each offers the answer he gets: "because it does not end."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781883285302 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Delphinium |
| Publication date: | 04/29/2008 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Above the Houses
By Susan Engberg
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2014 Delphinium BooksAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4532-1323-0
CHAPTER 1
Above the Houses
YOUR fingers test from the smoldering, plum-colored center of impact down to the eyebrow, the swollen lid. It's just a bruise, one more thing. Reaching for your toothbrush, you grimace at your mirrored self: shiner, spiky new haircut, the shocked face of upheaval—in short, a sight.
He appears behind your image. Even now, in his gray sixties, your husband's face is fresh, like a precocious child just up from a nap. "My God, what happened to you?"
Two weeks ago, just before the move, he said the same thing about the hair.
You decide not to dwell on damage. This is his first morning on the new job, and you feel how his thoughts are already pulled elsewhere toward new colleagues, new corridors, physics in yet another academic hothouse. For you, for now, gravity is made of boxes and more boxes, a locksmith, the plumber's return, a carpenter if you're lucky.
You tell him you walked into a wall in the night. You shrug. The bedroom was dark, the door wasn't there; your body forgot you'd changed houses, that's all—nowhere near the end of the world.
"Oh, poor head." He places a gentle, salubrious kiss. "What was that story about someone's visiting relative who fell down the stairs?"
"Sally's uncle."
"Terrible."
"I suppose I'm lucky."
As you bathe, you are gentle with the contusion, gentle with yourself in this context of extreme change, but you are too smart to complain. You argued your case months ago; now you have agreed to do this with him. Yes, you have left behind an intact, harmoniously functioning life—city, job, friends, neighbors, doctors, stores, garden, buried pets, the works—but presumably not your wits. Your eyes widen lopsidedly at yourself in this different bathroom mirror.
Sally's old uncle got up in the night in his daughter's house; he stepped toward what he must have expected to be the same level but fell through what was not, never regained consciousness, and died within a week.
The bruise throbs.
"Tom, do you think the heat is more humid here than at home?"
"This is home now."
"Please answer my question."
"Yes, all right, maybe. But pretty soon it'll be cooler."
Then you remember your dream: a job offer, to be editor of a magazine, called—was it really?—Core and Correlative.
You tell him.
"Joan." He looks searchingly at you, holding your shoulders. Then he tells you that you will become reestablished here; you will find a new life, he promises you will; it's only a matter of time.
You are supposed to be reassured; perhaps you are.
A few minutes later, clean, you sit beside him on the bed to meditate, each at your pillow station, not touching yet locked like molecules. Together you have raised two sons. Together you are living on earth now. You close your eyes, breathing alone, yet with everyone.
Your litany of losses is a useless scrap of grocery list on a table somewhere else; you've already bought that food, eaten it, moved on. Shelters change, you tell yourself.
Everything changes but what does not. What does not is why you both sit, like this. One must be ready, you have been told, to take the final leap.
Nearby a crow gets riled up, then another and another, flaps of sound.
It's too early for the barking of the shut-up dog next door on the north, but the woman across the street is calling her cat again—Nammo—something like that. Houses here are so close the outdoor spaces feel almost like communal rooms. After only four days, you're already wondering about the neighbors, their lives, why this woman, for example, calls her large yellow cat so many times a day. Nammo, Nammo, Naam-mo! At breakfast your husband looks stoked with anticipation. The different city and house, the boxes, the nighttime wall, your promises, your children, the never-ending education of your heart are some of the consequences of loving this man. From him today you extract a promise to get the name of a good carpenter. Without more bookshelves, you insist, neither of you will be able to survive. The fervor of your small request makes you feel somewhat better.
When his car backs out the narrow driveway between houses, the crows start cawing again, out there in the busy world rooms where you may or may not still have a part to play. In the kitchen is a hot, skewed stillness, everything stationary but out of place, and nothing will be set to rights without your energy. It is a chaos you have ordered five times before, for him and for the advancement of Physics into ever more subtle realms, which funnily never changes what is always left to do, here in the kitchen where the molecules appear so big and adamant.
In your former kitchen you argued that you didn't know if you could do it again. You said to him that after a certain age trees were too old to transplant.
He said humans had legs for a reason. This was a calling.
For him. For you, everything would have to be put together all over again.
He said you were being called: he was calling you.
Then you looked out the window, not this present one cheek by jowl with the people next door, but into that former modest vista of flowers, linden tree, honeysuckle hedgerow. You saw the cardinal's flying flash of red to the sunflower seeds. You were crying by then. You saw Sally helping Jim, home from chemotherapy, walk from the car to their back door. Tom came up behind you and wrapped his arms around your waist, his face in your hair— the long hair you recently had. You were crying for all the lives you had learned to live near over the years, who made the great web that held you to your task, some for decade after decade, others only for a moment, like that baby who had been toddling alone down the sidewalk in diapers in May—how it was you, you who rushed out to him, scooped him up, saw the small handprint of blood on the bottle of juice. You covered his ears as sirens ripped the sky. It was for him you were crying that day in your old kitchen, and for his murdered grandmother, and for the students who every night all summer pushed themselves who knows where on the porch swing of love across the street, and crying, too, for the new widow with the light burning all night in the window of the upstairs room, and for Sally and Jim, good friends, good neighbors, and their long ordeal.
Welded against your husband, you were splitting apart. You were everywhere. You were missing your own children as if they had left only yesterday, a raw, wrenching loss; you didn't know how you had ever managed to part with them. You grieved for the gone cat who had slept like a sandbag across your feet and the setter whose ashes had felt like an atomized replica of the old living dog, bones and silk. You were crying for the young bird, flashing back and forth like a red shuttle in the air, and for you yourself, who had moved over and over to new places, new people, each time locating yourself all over again in the mesh of life, from which someday you will necessarily be released. There was nothing left of you that day but feeling, and it had lost all of its containing walls.
You said to him, your husband, the one who was asking you, again, to do it all over again that, all right, if you were going to go, you were going to scoop up the whole compost pile and have it taken along in the moving van; you'd worked on it too long to leave it behind. Did he hear you? This was non-negotiable.
Without more than a face-down nod to you at the back door, the burly plumber from yesterday heads straight for the basement. Over his shoulder he tells you damn if he didn't lie awake all night over your venting problem. What a mother. People want to do all these fancy modern things upstairs no one ever heard of when the house was built, and then he's the one who's got to make it happen down below. Maybe he's getting too old for all this.
You follow his squat figure down the cellar stairs into cooler air. The last time you were his height might have been in sixth grade.
Yeah, he says, he's getting too old to take the headaches—they didn't used to keep him awake like this. The old houses are the worst, and the inspectors! They don't give a damn what you're up against. But anyway, he thinks he's got this one worked out in his head, and he's going to be pretty proud of himself if it looks the same in the light of day as it did in the middle of the night.
He purses his lips and breathes heavily through his dark nose hairs as he shines his flashlight up along the cobwebbed network of ceiling pipes, angled every which way among the rafters, a rough filthy grid that supports the whole enterprise above, where in trust you slept, showered, sat on your pillows and closed your eyes, holding to nothing, assuming you were upheld. He paces slowly, beaming his light here and there, face tilted to the heights, an astronomer kept awake by the myriad problems in his dirty heavens.
"Well goddamn, Ernie," he mutters, "if you don't still got what it takes." Then to you he says, "Okay, missus, we're in business. I'll go get what I need outa the truck." But he stops and holds the flashlight out to the side of your face. "Hey! What happened to you since yesterday?"
You tell him about the wall.
"And that's it? I don't need to worry you're in trouble, do I?"
Gratitude spills to your eyes. To be cared for by Ernie—astronomer, gnome, squat god of wakefulness on your behalf!
Music rises in your mind as you fill the kettle and several pitchers with water to tide you over while the main line is cut off: Bach, phrases of girding order. Yes, what this house needs is music, music to tell its bones who's living here now, music to tell yourself you can be alive anywhere. So the boxes you'll open first this morning will contain CD player, speakers, discs, but now do it adagio, adagio: the swollen eye is reminding you to be deliberate in your work, girded with order.
With your good eye you catch a glimpse of the chunky nine-year-old from the house next door to the south as she comes again through her gate and across the shared driveway, fourth day in a row, this morning in a pink leotard, feet bare. Why has she apparently attached herself this way to you and your boxes? Her name is Lily. She disappears alongside your house.
Only last week, from your former window, you watched Jim sitting in his backyard in this same late August sun, his legs folded one over the other like useless parallel walking sticks, his stick fingers lifting a cigarette to the purple crack in his cadaverous face. One of these mornings Sally will call you long distance to say the medics came again in the night, but this time there wasn't a cell of remaining space into which breath could be pumped.
You set the containers of water on the counter and cover them with a clean towel.
Lily arrives at the back door just as Ernie returns from his truck with some lengths of pipe.
Lily says, "Here I am again."
Ernie says, "Can you get that door for me, sweetheart?"
After he disappears down the basement stairs, she asks, "Why did he say sweetheart to me?"
"Well you must be a sweetheart. Is that what you want to be?"
"Yes!"
This child is sweet, though with her thick little body and gappy front teeth and one droopylidded eye, she hardly seems to belong to her mother, Margot, who is startlingly, casually, opulently beautiful.
"What's that on your head?"
As you tell her, she puts a hand reflexively to her own forehead, above the droopy eye. Lily has already told you she is to be operated on for her "defect." Any opulence she has inherited from her mother shows, so far, in her cascading brown hair and the luxuriantly lashed eyes.
She comes closer. "Can I touch it?"
"All right." You bend toward her.
The tips of her fingers are like hot sunshine. "Does it hurt?"
"I'm living with it."
"I have dancing today."
"I see you're dressed for dancing. Do you like it?"
"I don't know. I guess. Mom says I have to do it for grace."
"Really! Well. I've heard it's good for that."
"What's this thing?"
"That? It's a sweet red pepper. You have peppers at your house, don't you?"
"No. All my life I've wanted to eat a red pepper."
"Well! That's a long time. Do you want a little taste now?"
"Okay. Please. I go back to school on Monday."
You watch her biting into the first red pepper of her life—can it be?—her wide-open eye surprised, her drooping eye secretive.
"Do you like the taste?"
"Yes," she says, determined.
"If you don't want it all, you can put the rest in the sink."
"Mom says Dad eats like a cowboy."
"Oh? How do cowboys eat?"
"They only eat what has legs, nothing with roots."
"Pepper plants have roots," you say.
"I knew that."
Lily's father, Larry, the first day you met the family, let his wife manage the conversation while he stood wide-legged and conspicuously masculine beside her in the driveway, allowing his insistent daughter up onto his back, a good-humored horse for an overgrown rider, evidently an old game. Margot, you've been told, is in the art department at the university—film, video, something like that.
"Look!" says Lily at the sink, standing on tiptoe. "You can see right into our kitchen!"
"I know. When you're in your house, can you see into ours?"
"Yes."
"Weren't you ever in this kitchen before we moved here, Lily?"
"Nuh-uh. But I wanted to all my life."
It does seem as if she has been waiting a lifetime for your arrival, you and your boxes and red peppers and who knows what else. What are you going to do with this spontaneous trust? "Romeo and Juliet," reads Lily as she takes another disc from the box. "I've heard of them."
"That's ballet music. Shall I put it on for you?"
Off goes Scott Joplin, on goes Prokofiev, and the expression on Lily's face gets more complicated.
"What have you heard about Romeo and Juliet, Lily?
"I don't know. Was he her brother?"
"No, but they loved each other very much."
"Why?"
"Well...because nothing was more important than that, I guess. It's a sad story, though, because their parents didn't want them to love each other."
"Why?"
Why. How to tell a story that is so much larger than the size of itself it seems it could contain at least one way to look at all of history? Meanwhile, Lily's arms are lifting away from her torso, which is like a stubby piece of pink pipe, her heels are lifting, she's pointing her toes for one step and then another. In the welter of the living room you have only, it seems, begun to live in today, Lily now makes a tiny leap and thuds to the maple floor. Your heart lurches. She is like yourself. You're nine, you're fifty-nine. For you she's dancing, stepping off into air, smiling a gap-toothed smile. Her arms come together and again extend, her face collecting itself, as she leaps once more and lands in a heavy graceless barefooted slap. Young Juliet at play, before the great love of her life.
The music continues, but all at once Lily stops. Then you see what she has seen, the beautiful woman on the other side of the front screen door, her mother, who is shading her eyes, peering into the room.
"Hello, hello? Lily, is that you? Come right away, please, or you'll be late for your class. Hello, Joan, how are you getting along? I hope you don't mind your helper—she insisted you needed her."
"And so I do, it seems. Come in, Margot."
"I'm sorry to be in such a ridiculous rush. You wouldn't believe the kind of day I'm having. Hurry now, Lily, here are your sandals." She slides the shoes across the floor to her daughter.
You press the button that sends Prokofiev back to Moscow, Leningrad, St. Petersburg, back to the years before the war, the war that in taking your father shot away part of your childhood, which in its absence feels sometimes like the loss of one of your own dancing feet. You became what people called a somber child.
"I got tied up on the telephone," says Margot, her glance circling your mess. "It was Berlin. These international calls, you've got to take them when they come, there are so many other obstacles as it is—oh please, Lily, don't make this one of your dawdling days!" Margot is wearing blue jeans and a linen jacket whose sleeves she now scrunches higher above her silver bracelets.
Lily has sat down on the floor to buckle her sandals. Her cheeks are almost as pink as her leotard. She's taking her own sweet time, you're pleased to see, but you're also anxious for her.
In the absence of the music you hear banging from the basement, metal against metal, and now that muffled barking again from the house on the north side, same as yesterday and the day before and the day before, starting about this time and continuing off and on for the rest of the day, the dog that is evidently shut up alone. You're about to ask Margot about this other neighbor and the poor dog, but she is stirring the air with her hand to hurry the stolid pink child on the floor.
"Seventeen minutes, Lily, that's all we have." Then she notices your face. "Whatever happened to you! What a nasty bruise—are you all right, Joan?"
You tell the story with utmost swiftness.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Above the Houses by Susan Engberg. Copyright © 2014 Delphinium Books. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
ABOVE THE HOUSES,MOON,
BEGINNING,
MOTHER OF CHARTRES,
RIVER HILLS,
TIME'S BODY,
FORTUNE,
REUNION,
RAIN,