The Lady of the House By Colleen Nial

Joseph Gage CC




The Lady of the House

We start looking at houses before we can afford them. We can never really afford them, actually, but it becomes urgent. We see two abandoned buildings near Inman Square, with expanding foam in the dryer vents. Rats, the realtor shrugs nonchalantly. We are too new to shrug also. Rats.

We look at condos that used to be houses, divided up like mazes. We see old candy factories and biscuit warehouses, the bolts from the assembly tables still rough in the floors. I crouch down to touch one and realize we can never really live in this town. 

Once there are babies, we look north, where living spaces come with green grass. We climb a stair ladder in Hawthorne’s carriage house and I think about Wakefield - the man not the town - watching as his wife lived on without him. There’s a beautiful captain’s home north of north, where the commuter rail doesn’t touch, whose walls are soggy graham crackers. When my toddler pokes his finger at one, it vanishes into the ochre. But the Indian shutters! the woman exclaimed. A cistern, a gatehouse, a kind of willow tree that snakes in through a cellar window and back out through the steps. Mushrooms along the petal pink bathroom toilet. We ask ourselves in the car on the way home, two boys asleep in their carseats, could we be these people? 

Later we see houses without kitchens. Former carpet stores with picture windows. We consider how much it might cost to jackhammer the hot top to make way for soft grass, and count ourselves out. We take the kids - three now - to a hotdog shop in a strip mall on the way out of town and the girl at the counter tells us not to buy on any streets named after ladies. Trees only. Or ocean words. Harbor, seaview, something something shores. There’s a house named for the first plumber in town, smaller than our apartment, and when I sleep I still hear the baseball games in the walls. There’s a harpoon pinned above the header to the dining room. The day we move in there is a dead sparrow right below. 

We never stop looking. We settle in, our furniture arriving in flat pack boxes because that’s the only way they will fit up the stairs, and we polish the soft pine floors and the fir stair treads but the feeling something better is still out there, is still waiting for us, something that fits, remains. 

The houses we see get bigger. And weirder. One has an elevator shaft but no lift. Another has a dumbwaiter full of squirrels, one so close to the seawall the yard fills with salt water in a storm. Rocks get displaced from the shoreline and settle in the driveway. One Sunday morning we make the long drive north of north of north and up a private way filled with towering junipers and gullies where there’s still snow despite the season. Just looking, we nod to the gentleman blotting his brow in the main hall. The floor tiles sipped home from someone's honeymoon in Italy sweat. She’s a big house. She rambles. She was built, the gentleman tells us, as the summer home of a prominent historic figure. An Adams of sorts. The butler’s pantry smells like ripe apples. The dishwasher drains to the yard. From every window you see only green, hear no other neighbor clanging pans on their stovetop. The third floor is blocked with insulation panels, and we slide them aside to discover from here we can see both Little Misery and Great Misery islands. This is where the servants slept, he hollers from the second floor. 

My daughter finds a triangle of broken glass and tinks her nail upon it. In the garden there is a reflecting pool with three dead frogs. I want a reflecting pool, my son says, and I can see him out here, net in his sticky hand, scrunched over to catch tadpoles. We could get a big dog. We could modernize, bring the plumbing up to code. We could breathe the same air as the sails on the boats out there, while ghosts hold tea parties in the sun. The realtor tells us the lady of the house had a hard time filling all the rooms, and sent for her furniture from New York by train. I picture the caravan of men and settees, hutches and trunks, climbing the hill road, the gullies rapid with rain. 

On the way home, a carhop where we let them order sodas. There’s an easement. Some handshake with the town, which makes the taxes too high. We will keep looking. Another family will buy the house and raise honeybees in the orchard. Our neighbors are too close. The meat they grill fills the shower with gray smoke. A train rumbles by. I think of the lady of the house and her fine things, clanging up the Hudson and over the Connecticut, the Assabet and the Charles, wrapped in blankets with utmost care. Was she glad to see them in this new place? Was she sorry for all the trouble? Or was she tempted, for just one second to see how far they could go on that train. How at least then, something was moving. 

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Colleen Nial is a mother, teacher and writer from Troy, New York. Her upcoming work will appear in Folklore, and previous work has appeared in MER Literary, Molecule and LampLit. She has an MFA from Emerson College and a pair of cardinals at her window. She has been away from her desk for twenty years,