Come Sunday: A Novel (15 page)

Suddenly Solly barks, hearing the garden gate open. Oh God, Greg’s back, I think, and I consider hiding in the closet till he goes away. But the doorbell rings and an unfamiliar male voice hollers an impatient “Hello!” I dredge myself out of the shoe pile and make the long journey down the stairs to the front window, shouting at Solly to stop making a racket. A fidgety tattooed man in a brown uniform stands next to a box that is four feet high. “Delivery,” he says when I open the door, and then he sees me and grows very still. Even his frenetic gum-chewing ceases.

“You have the wrong house,” I say, not calling Solly in, not apologizing for the barking.

“1886?” he says, reading his gadget.

“Yes, but there are six houses at this address.”

“House C?” he asks tentatively. “Deighton?”

It is my turn to look afraid. What has come?

“Would you mind putting it in the living room?” I ask, taking his clipboard to sign. He hesitates, as though I might deliver a well-placed rabid bite, then lifts the package and takes a wide berth around me, the monster with hair like sprigs. A burnt bush, that’s what I am; a singed remnant, smoky and brittle. Not the burning bush Moses encountered, the kind that makes you remove your shoes and bow your head and avert your eyes. “I Am,” declared the unconsuming fire. No. Ravaged by the Great I Am, I make people turn away. Yesterday it was Gillian Beech with the agenda for the annual homeowners’ association meeting and her campaigning for Mrs. Chung’s resumption of the presidential seat. The day before that, Greg’s secretary, Betty, with another casserole. They come and go, with their downcast eyes; So sorry, they say, or nothing at all. Just those marshmallow faces. Why don’t they burn? How come there are no singed places around their edges, no smell of sizzling hair?

The UPS man leaves without saying a word, and without looking back.

And there it has alighted, a box the size of an oven, in the middle of the living room floor. Kneeling down and turning my head sideways, I read the label: COTTAGES 4u. The smoldering coals in my belly begin burning again. Cleo’s dollhouse.

A plastic dollhouse. Now, that’s something that doesn’t leap into flames. It has small parts that can choke a child under two, warns the label, but it is not combustible. I had packed away every button, every washing machine quarter, the month Cleo was born. I all but nailed shut the kitchen cabinets under the sink long before she could crawl. Every time I found a pushpin Greg left lying in the study, I picked it up, centered it on my palm, and ceremoniously walked it over to him. His carelessness could do her in, I implied, but only ever said, “We need to be more careful.” After reading a magazine article about how a child had strangled herself on the blind cords while her mother was putting on the kettle, I became a cord vigilante too. My house became a yacht with all its sheets knotted down in place. There was no way she could hurt herself. It was impossible.

GREG AND I have called on parishioners whose houses take on appearances. Appearances that say, All is right with the world. Clutter-free countertops, carpets vacuumed till every fiber snaps to attention, gleaming toilet bowls, for-show-only couches, lampshades still wrapped in plastic, and fireplaces stocked with unused candles—dead giveaways of things running amok, if you ask me. The smell alone can make me panic: the smell of trapped air, windows kept closed for the fear of neighbors’ wandering ears. Air breathed in and out, over and over again, siphoned through pinched lungs, lungs used for shouting or crying or, worse, squeezing it all in.

Houses like that make some women envious, and had I not lived in one when I was sixteen years old I might be one of them. Because
when you have lived in one you know that it is all an act, a façade behind which a demon runs loose.

My mother never picked up those important papers from City Hall. Instead, she stayed at home, day in and day out. It was as though she were punishing the house, disciplining it in the hopes that what took place in it still had a chance of being “normal.” She beat the cushions till they swelled; she struck the rugs with the broom till they coughed up big clouds of dust. With the duster she lashed out at the corners of each room whether a web had been brave enough to occupy it or not. Every inch of the house took a beating, and even though it did exactly as she wished, things only got worse.

For one, we ate less, at least she and I did. With my mother’s household allowance cut, there were no longer bowls of fresh fruit on the table. Sandwiches of ham and cheese were replaced with ones of jam. The fridge, once stocked with cheese and sausages, housed mostly my father’s beers and eggs from my grandmother’s farm. We took to eating food out of boxes and cans, sometimes for weeks in a row till my father would complain.

“Christ, Louise, if I come home to one more macaroni and cheese dinner or one more goddamn Vienna sausage, I’m going to spit!”

“We can’t afford anything else with twenty rand a week, Harry,” my mother protested one night.

“Well, maybe if I had taken that promotion instead of having to take charge of you, we might have more money, now wouldn’t we?”

And just like that she left the table to go slap the sheets on the clothesline while my father yelled, “Tomorrow, by God, I want a roast on my table!”

The following day, before she sent me off to school with her sad eyes, my mother asked me a favor: “Could I borrow some money?” Other kids got pocket money, but I only ever got money for birthdays and Christmases. Still, I had saved enough for a new tennis racket. She saw the look on my face. “Ten rand,” she pleaded. “Just enough for a small leg of lamb. I’ll pay you back, I promise.”

That night, while my mother, the lamb, and I waited at the dining
room table for my father to come home, the house took on a smell that to this day can make me break a sweat: burnt meat. It was close to midnight when he came home. My mother was still seated at her chair at the table in front of her ruined dinner. He was loud enough that I woke up and opened my bedroom door in time to see him pick up the lid off the roasting pan and peer at the meat shrunk to the size of a tennis ball. Then he looked at my mom and said in a billowy cloud of alcohol, “What would your fancy boyfriend think of you now?”

I closed the door on his laugh and wished with all my might that it would be his last.

MY HOUSE, you could say, suffers from neglect, but it is a premeditated neglect. Stuff piles up in the corners where the geckos hide their eggs, the windowpanes are streaked with dirt. Rather than burnt dinners, the air is full of the smell of dead flowers, of the stagnant water in which they wallow. It is to this home, where there are no appearances, where things seem exactly as they are, that Greg returns at seven o’clock, the time I get up from my afternoon nap.

Heating something in the microwave, he comes to hug me as I walk in, a gesture that now strikes me as peculiarly out of place. “Dinner is nearly ready,” he says.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Eat something, Ab.”

“I did already,” I lie, and he knows it because there are no dishes in the sink.

I can tell he has been crying, and for a moment I can’t think why. But then I look over at the dollhouse sitting in the middle of our living room, the dollhouse with its decorated bedroom and en suite bathroom.

“What should we do with it?” he asks.

“Leave it there,” I say, and it comes out contrary.

“Why don’t we give it to . . .” and I know he’s trying to think of a child he knows, but the names do not come. “Charity?”

“Why don’t we keep it?”

“It just doesn’t seem right,” he says after a deep silence.

It is the longest conversation we have had in days, since Sunday, and I am already tired out.

“Leave it where it is,” I insist, and walk out of the kitchen.

My grief is a bully, I notice—people cave in so easily at its obstinacy. I don’t need to say much, but its weight and size make them back off. It is not a good idea to keep Cleo’s new dollhouse in the living room, God knows we have enough reminders that she is not coming back. It isn’t good for me, it isn’t good for Greg, but good is not the point; good is taken away and all the best intentions amount to nothing.

I cannot stop and think about how I make other people feel, because there is too much feeling in the world. I am afraid of them, with their suffocating blankets of feeling. I only want them to stay away. Greg, I imagine, knows this too, but when the two of us come head to head, it is usually my bully who prevails. So the dollhouse stays up, and tomorrow, I think, I will set up the miniature kitchen.

GREG BOUGHT ME a dollhouse once. I told him long ago how I had wanted a dollhouse as a child but never got one; instead, my father handed me a tub of bulky LEGOs more suitable for a toddler, and left me to build my own box of a house into which my dolls could never fit. We had been married five or six years when I found a receipt from a place called Gardens and Paradise on Greg’s desk for $ 180. He hadn’t brought anything new home, so that night, when we were getting into bed, I asked him about it.

“You snoop!” he accused, smiling. “It was supposed to be a surprise for your birthday,” he sighed.

“Right.”

“No, really.”

“What is it?”

“Can’t you just wait for your birthday?”

“No.”

“Okay, it’s a garden gnome,” he said. And I laughed so hard, but then I saw the crushed expression on his face. I had hurt his feelings.

“Honey, a garden gnome?” I frowned.

“Well, it’s not just your common garden-variety gnome,” he explained. “Its hat is also a birdbath.”

I snorted.

“I thought you would like it,” he said miserably.

“I will,” I lied, and snuggled into his chest. “I’m sure it’s very nice.”

But the next day, after I swore Betty to secrecy in the print room while she ran off copies of Sunday’s bulletin, I told her her boss had bought me a garden gnome that doubled as a birdbath. “No!” she said. And we laughed till the tears ran.

The big box arrived a week before my birthday and Greg let me open it that afternoon because it was no use waiting. And there it was, a beautiful Victorian dollhouse in the sweetest shade of lavender, complete with a shingle roof and wraparound porch. I immediately burst into tears.

And then he bought us a life-sized dollhouse when he knew Cleo was on the way. Borrowing from his mother and using the proceeds of the sale of a small plot of land in Ohio that his grandfather had left him, Greg exchanged the rent-free parsonage for an indigestible mortgage on the little two-story chalet perched on a hill overlooking Honolulu. It was met with a mountain of disapproval by the church’s finance committee. “Why pay him a housing allowance when the church owns a perfectly good parsonage?” Kelsey Oliver grumbled. A retired financier, Kelsey Oliver was a short, stocky man with glasses that made him look like an owl. He had a slight limp, from an injury during his service in the Korean War, but walked with a briskness that was hard to keep up with. Always arriving late on Sundays, as though the invocation and hymn-singing at the beginning of the service were mere preamble, Kelsey would slip into the second-to-last pew next to his old friend Warren May and talk throughout Greg’s sermon. Then he and Fay, his wife who seldom spoke at all, would leave before communion to take their places in the parking lot, the site of many unofficial meetings to which Greg was never invited.