A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [132]
I didn’t let myself think about what the things up in the attic and in the outbuildings had meant, what their purpose was, who had handled them, who would next own them. I went from shed to shed making piles of trash here and auction goods there. Emma and Claire knew they were to keep close, to stay clear of the pond, and out of my way. They were getting to be resourceful, my girls were. They had thick, black dirt under their fingernails and their hair was matted in the back. They watched TV until it made them sick and tired and then they’d go out in the yard and pull a cat’s tail and kick at each other. When they got that out of their systems they settled down to make collections of stones and seeds, sticks, and bird berries. They’d build up a city, make it perfect, and then fight about it and wreck it. At night we fell dead asleep. In the morning I woke up and again looked at my list. I dug in with such grim determination it might have been mistaken for zeal.
One afternoon near the end of August we drove to Spring Grove, a small town near Racine, a place where no one knew us. I had told the girls that we might stay in an apartment before we began the rambling life. We looked at a spot above a shoe store for one hundred and seventy-five dollars a month. It had a flea-bitten carpet and the stench of a long history of beer drinkers. There was an appealing cottage that would have been fine if it hadn’t been right next to the sewage treatment plant. We went through a duplex, the low-income housing complex, and a group of condominiums along the river. We finally settled on a unit. It wasn’t a home. It wasn’t an apartment. It was a unit. It was a unit in a whole string of units. Together the group of units was called Pheasant Glade. When we walked in the door Emma, who had not said a word since lunch, sang out, “This is a nice one. This would be okay for us.”
Alice used to think that things which weren’t at all amusing were in fact funny. That trait in her over the years had sometimes provoked me and driven me into a kind of quiet. But I was beginning to understand how something could be so astonishingly black you couldn’t help laughing. Emma’s easy pronouncement that the Pheasant Glade unit would do, after living on four hundred acres, was so far from what was true that it was like slapstick. “I’ll be able to ride my bike down the driveway,” she said. “No gravel.” Claire pointed to the corner where there was a station of metal mailboxes. She called triumphantly, “That is where Mom’s letters will come!”
I wanted to be out before the closing so that when the cash came through we’d already have made the break. We would go get Alice and hole up in Pheasant Glade, waiting for what came next. I had not yet realized how pitiful our house was until I tried to make a last-ditch attempt to care for it as I packed it away. I caulked around the shower and washed the windows. I tried to scrub the rust out of the toilets and the sinks. Sandy and Mrs. Reesman had not looked inside because the place was clearly in need of the wrecking ball. I had not prepared it for a viewing and now, when it was doomed, I wanted to give it a last token of care. We hadn’t ever had time to keep house. We had moved in when Emma was an infant. Alice had gone to school, and found a job, and then had Claire. I worked around the clock. Paint was peeling from the windowsills and the molding. We had never purchased curtains. In the bathroom we had a worn towel that was held up by thumbtacks. We had long ago stopped seeing the rust, the holes in the linoleum, the cracks and water spots in the ceiling. We had grown used to having the spilled milk in the kitchen flow downhill into the bathroom. The house had given us a sense of history and belonging.