The Geometry of Love Read online

  It is a big old house, and when I got older I slept in the attic room up top with the roof stretching like a sky over my bed. I had grown up in the room at the end of the second floor, one of three bedrooms upstairs with three identical doors, as if they were meant for triplets, although there is only me. There was an old maple bedroom set that had belonged to Grandma June split among them with scattered odd pieces filling in the bare spots. The bedroom windows let in a breeze off the chicken yard, hot and dusty, and an indifferent view, each snapped from a slightly different angle but easily interchanged. My room had always seemed a little precarious, unsafe. The hall floor is a road map. If you check behind the doors, it’s as easy as one-two-three to find me. It was, too, above the kitchen, and it seemed as if whatever was going on downstairs would leak up through the floor like the smell of dinner cooking, the voices raised, a shattering like glass, the sound of something breaking, of things happening. I could sniff the discord, pulled up through the floor like so much hot air rising.

  In the alcove at the head of the stairs there was a little door with three wooden steps leading up to it. One rainy Saturday when I was about ten, it was impossibly quiet in the house. She was in the basement, doing wash and reading a magazine in front of the open door to the outside. I examined the scene from the top of the stairs to the kitchen, a sliver of my face showing at the door frame. I tested the sounds below: washer, dryer, the rocker’s creak a harmonious line, behind them all the hum of soft rain. The boarders were mostly out. I could hear the spikes of rain on the roof, watch the chill air fog the windows. I went to the second-floor landing, hearing downstairs the television where Mr. Stuart was watching football in the front room, waiting for something to happen.

  My mother had arranged a little reading table in the alcove in front of the door. I sat on the window seat, looking out at the damp day and idly thinking about the time I had snuggled myself into the compartment of the window seat, where the cushion hinged over a cubbyhole, a box just big enough for my six-year-old self. When I pulled the lid closed above me, it seemed to seal that strange horizontal space, to compress the air and light into unbreathable blackness, and I held my breath, listening to the darkness, straining to hear noises from the house outside, and picking up only a sound like footsteps, regular, stealthy at first and then quicker and pounding, before I had to throw the lid off, let the light in, breathe, heart thumping. My mother, one surprised hand on her heart, stood at the top of the stairs and laughed.

  The rain whispered its restlessness, and I sat on the window seat, waiting for something to happen and examining idly the horizontal seal of that little door. When I opened it, it showered dust in my face, like breaking a seal on something saved. There were more steps inside, up onto a platform of floored wood. It was dark, tangy with disuse, my feet left bare footprints, as if in reverse, in the dust. The space was empty but for a couple of boxes and the baby things. The storm-hued light came weakly through the two big dormers and an octagonal window in the roof, an odd, slipped dormer as if it were smashed out of shape by the roof. The space between the big windows seemed just my size. The rest of the attic was deep and dark, furnished with ductwork and pipes, gigantic and strange and coated with dust. When I pried the first window loose, it stuck stiffly, moaned, then came up fast, releasing the cool wind on my face, freckling my skin with pricks of rain. I let the cool come in to ruffle the static air inside, not minding the rain. The view was dangerous and strange, too high up and all clouds and shattered with lightning in the east. For a while I watched the rain come down; listened to the chorus of it on the leaves, the wood shingles, the rim of window glass; felt the cool on my face and arms, felt like flying.

  Once the room had cooled, I took the broom from the closet in the hall and swept the upstairs clear, scooping up the fluttery feathers of dust, waving the broom through the cobwebs among the low roof’s braces. Then I was downstairs again one, two, three doors. I took the mattress off my bed, clearing off the ruffled bedclothes, and hefted it by its elastic handles to carry it out into the hall. I had to bend it and put my weight behind it to get it through the little doorway and up the stairs. The mattress fit into the place between the windows, where the roof came to meet the floor, like the end of the horizon where the sky meets the ground, and this is where I made my bed.

  I spent the afternoon sweeping out and carrying things from my old room. I bumped the chest of drawers across the floor, one edge resting on my foot, carried it up the steps one by one, a gradual movement, a careful flight toward the sky. The drawers came up singly, handles rattling. Mr. Stuart went to his room late in the afternoon, but he didn’t bother me. I could hear him through our shared wall, the bedsprings wheezing under his weight. I went cautiously down the back stairs into the kitchen for some nails and the hammer for hooks to hold my hang-up clothes. I took the baby things downstairs to my old room, the crib, a rattling load in pieces, the high chair, other things: a box of small clothes, some almost forgotten toys. These I unpacked on the floor of my old room and turned them over and over in my hands, as if examining them for the first time, but my hands remembered them, my fingers could trace the bonnet pattern on the baby blanket, knew what to do with the busy box, found the place to spin the mirrored cylinder, could rattle the rattle and make the bell sing. The shapes were like some fragment of music, some phrase from a hymn stored in my heart, but I put them back in the box and sealed the flaps for good.

  From the old room, I didn’t want to carry too much up the stairs. I didn’t take things I didn’t use, so both rooms were left looking a little bare, the stuff diluted by the extra space to fill, and afterward my old room seemed like a place where no one really lived, as if it were arranged to hold, without distinction, the things of someone missing or dead.

  A place is defined by the things it holds: Does an attic become a child’s room with the arrangement of a child’s things? What about a basement, a closet, or could we wiggle into the idea of the crawl space. Does something become what it is said to be? Imagine the big room at the front of your house, the one at the foot of the staircase, just off the foyer. Can you make it a kitchen by installing a stove? What will it take? The kitchen sink? Let’s see how far we can we take this. Could we, for instance, move the bathroom to the porch—provided we are willing to unzip, to unbuckle, to peel and shed, to excrete and wash, to reveal against the enameled light of day.

  In a while the rain stopped, and I lay resting on my new bed, sneezing the dust out of my nose and listening to the tick of the clock by the bed, while the damp air did the rest of the work, carried in the smells of mist on the fields, the weedy smell of alfalfa, of the world.

  When she called me for dinner I came down as usual, although a little dustier. She said only, Do your homework? and I nodded, Yes, yes. Over the course of the next couple of days I brought more things to the new room, and then I didn’t go to the old room anymore, though it was just down the hall. I smuggled food upstairs, an extra slice of bread or a piece of a cookie, carefully wrapped in waxed paper, and stowed the package under my pillow as if I were planning an escape, but the mice found it there and shredded the paper to get to the food, carried away the paper scraps to make their own nest.

  One day I came home from school to find she had moved the chair out from in front of the door; I had left it there as camouflage. She had been up there with one of the men who did electrical work to install an outlet, nail up some curtain rods. We didn’t talk about it; when I came in from school she said only: I got you a lamp, so I could have light in the evenings, although the glow from the downstairs windows bounced around the angled ceiling, lighting the room like a companion to the moon.

  In a week or two Arley from down the road moved into my old room, I came down for dinner, and there he was at the table, helping himself to the potatoes. As I washed my hands at the sink I could see the scrap barrel out back was lit, sending up black smoke where the rest of my stuff and the baby things were burning, bits of paper and cloth fl
oating up in ash butterflies as they were consumed.

  When the phone rings in my house I do not answer it. That was how it started between you and me, the shattering insistence of the phone, and I picked it up, as if nothing could happen to me over the phone.

  Hello?

  How are you? charming, fresh. Your voice is new and not new, like something found, as when I found my old bracelet between the cushions in the couch. It was long missing but fits my wrist as ever, worn smooth to the curve. Your voice, it fits me too, falls back into the place it had vacated in my heart.

  I don’t want to talk to you. Hang up, hang up, I tell myself, but down inside the other part of me is hopeful, wishes for things I cannot make happen.

  Why are you being this way? your hopes too, added into the mix. I’m worried about you. I love you, let me help.

  I hope my hang-up sounds hard and final but in a few minutes the phone rings again, and my hand goes to the receiver by rote. Hello? willing you to act right. Sometimes I imagine we could make a turning, we could find the right thing to say, make our way back into the script of our marriage but your words are hard-edged underneath, I do not trust your words.

  I have to see you.

  No.

  Listen, can I come over?

  No, emphatic. I can’t, please leave me alone. That sentence is hard, like a door closing, and I hope somehow to avoid you, to avoid the sound of your voice. If I can get you to stop calling, to forget my number, perhaps I can get on with things, without anything being my fault.

  You’re like ice, and this hurts. You’re so cold.

  Later I will hear your truck pull into the drive, and the dog will bark welcome to you. All I can do is sit on the floor of the hall away from the windows as if to take shelter from a tornado, from the whirlwind that is you.

  The grade school bell rings twice in short bursts for a tornado drill. We file out of our classrooms, our faces flushed with the expectation of uncertainty, all of us talking about the weather, too many kids piled out into the hall to keep from being stepped on or shoved. Chucky Lawrence heads for the boys’ room, but Mrs. Woolridge calls him back, slapping her thigh, calling Hey, Chucky, as if for a dog.

  We kneel on the cool linoleum, foreheads pressed to the floor with our hands over our heads, protective, all of us crowded in together, thigh to thigh, elbows poking, heads to the wall, whispering jokes and waiting for the bell to break the stillness so we can get up. With our heads down we cannot watch, can only hear the heels of the teachers on the floor behind us, reassurance that this is only a drill. The spelling quiz will resume in a moment. I look to the side because Emmitt is making faces at me, oddball eyeball and tongue-out faces that make me laugh. I say: Commerce has two m’s and two c’s. And then Mrs. Woolridge comes by to wag her reading glasses at me, nudge me with her toe, Hush now, Darcy.

  Although I now am too big to sit on the floor, to huddle in the hall, I want to put my face against the cool tile and wait for the clouds to pass. Instead, I listen to the fearsome sound of your knocking, your voice, your footsteps on the porch, and I try to make myself small. I have a broomstick in my hand, although I’m not sure what I will do with it when the time comes. Your conversation pauses between frames, as if you were forgetting your lines and had to keep pulling the script from your pocket.

  I know you’re in there.

  Open the door.

  Come on, Darcy, please we have to talk.

  Please. I love you.

  Next comes an urgent whisper into the crack where the door meets the frame: This is crazy, all the neighbors are watching.

  You are exasperated, charming, and I know I should go to the door and open it. I have my own script, unsaid: Won’t you be nice? I want to believe you. I want you. I want. You. You keep going, like one part of a two-part harmony:

  It’s normal that people fight.

  Things don’t have to happen this way.

  We’re married, for Chrissake.

  I tell myself No, thinking of the look of your face in the sun-bright kitchen, of the look of your face, angry. Instead, I cover my mouth with my hands and try, like a child, not to make a sound when I weep.

  In a little while, the knocking stops, it is quiet outside, although I know you are still out there somewhere. It will always be you are out there unless you are in here. I can imagine you walking around the house, looking in the windows, one hand cupped against the screens. I can hear the metallic slip of the gate latch, your voice talking to Sam: How’s my boy? His tags jingle under your caress. That’s my good dog. I can hear his bark as in the old days, trying to get you to play. In the bathroom where the screen is missing you try the window, but it is locked. I hear your footsteps on the back patio. From where I sit in the hall I can catch the flicker of shadow, like a cloud across the sun, that you make on the glass door in back. I draw myself up as small as I can, arms wrapped over legs, keeping myself in close so that no part of me strays into your line of sight. You make the circuit of the house, fingers fumbling at latches and handles, running along window frames. In front I hear the screen door open again and the zipper slip of your key in the unwilling lock. Under your breath I hear, shit, when it will not turn. I know it is coming but it startles me, your body like a battering ram, a weapon slams against the door. Bitch. Still later, from the darkening hall I hear your truck start up, grind into reverse under your angry hand.

  I cannot bear to watch as you pull away, can only examine the changing light that seeps into the hall. In the deepening evening, it turns to grays and blacks, fades as if to let the credits roll. In a little while, when the silence has gone on long enough, I get up and put the broomstick back behind the door where it waits and go to the kitchen to make a cup of tea.

  Five

  It was a big old, tumbledown house, and after my father died she took in boarders, a succession of men, mostly temporary hands like you at the fertilizer plant or on the neighbors’ farms, grimy from outdoor work and stinking of cigarettes and sweat, chemicals and creek water.

  At first it was only Mr. Stuart from town, I came to the table one morning, very young. I can remember the scuffing of my slippers on the tile, hauling myself up into the wood chair, almost too tall to reach, and coming face to face with Mr. Stuart. He was bent close, smiling an odd smile, his face pushing up around his mouth and eyes in ways it wasn’t supposed to. He was about my father’s age, I think, and his face was chapped from time outdoors, the wind, the sun, but his hands were white and soft, and his nails were very clean. He smiled a lot, I guess, but it seemed strange to me that day, when he said What have we here? like the line before The better to eat you, my dear.

  She was at the stove, just then, and I reached out to take a hunk of her skirt in my hand but she turned around quick, and bent close to my face, smiling hard. I could feel the warmth of her face on mine, as if it were on fire: Say hello to Mr. Stuart, honey. He’ll be staying with us for a while.

  He didn’t stay very long that time, and he was in and out through the years, depending, I learned later, on the mood of his wife. Later on he took the second bedroom downstairs, although he used the bathroom upstairs, and I think it was convenient only in its proximity to my mother. I got used to seeing him around. In the evening Sam and I poked around in the yard, me looking for a stick to throw and him just looking. Mr. Stuart kept candy in his pocket, and after dinner he’d sit on the steps of the porch, paring his nails and sucking a piece of candy. He was listening I think, to my mother in the house, rattling the dishes around in the sink, and waiting for her to get free of the clearing up.

  Sam was excitable, chasing my stick, his paws barely touching the ground, prancing, butt in the air, playing, but after a while we got tired and hot, and he went to the bare ground under the porch to collapse and pant as the evening cooled. I went around back, though, playing around the clothesline, letting the laundry flap against my face and threading my way through the clothes as though it were a maze until my mother called from the window, G
et away from there, Darcy, don’t you be dirtying up my clean laundry.

  As I came nearer the porch I looked at Mr. Stuart on the steps. He was idly breaking a twig into match sticks, worrying the bark with one thumbnail. Want a piece, Darcy? he asked, pitching the twig out into the yard. Want a piece?

  Some trick, I thought, Piece of what, Mr. Stuart? expecting him to pull out an old clod of dirt or a piece of the stick to fetch. I’d been standoffish since the first, what with that unnatural smile and everything. Piece of what?

  This, he said, stretching out his leg to pull loose a little cellophane-wrapped square from his pants pocket. Piece of candy.

  Thank you very much, I said, but I still couldn’t make myself come close enough to where he sat on the steps to take it.

  Well, get over here, he said, and Sam was up and sniffing at him, sensing something to eat. Or I’ll give it to Sam. He wants it. Quick now. And he held his hand out, palm up, like a man making peace.

  I slowly crept close to the porch and put out a shy hand to take the candy. He moved his hand a twitch in closer to his body, like a little game, moved it, moved it, and I followed, but at last I hesitated he grabbed me up quick in an embrace. I don’t know why I didn’t cry out, so sudden it was. Gotcha, he said, laughing, pulling me up against him, squeezing the air out of me in an embrace, my feet dangling like a doll’s, my hands on his shirt, my face against his smiling face, his coarse beard. He gave me a kiss then, a harmless smack with his mouth on my cheek and let me loose. I was quick off the porch, practically falling, pinned to him by his grip on my wrist. I twisted as if to get loose but could not. It seemed so quiet and still, then, just a burble of laughter from him. He put the candy squarely in my hand then, wrapped my fingers in a tight fist around it, squeezed. His voice goes low, You’re a standoffish thing, he says. I look in his face then, watch the laughter die back, withering black like plants under the first frost. And then he lets me loose.