A new piece I'm working on called, "Home"

I had this dream of building a home. Of making something beautiful and peaceful where we could live with love and harmony. I started in our small duplex. The finish on the floor was peeling away; I suppose the landlords didn’t want to spend the extra money on a higher quality brand. That, or the wheeling around on the office chair and the sliding around of furniture for a year began to wreak its havoc.

When the weather was warm, the bathroom ceiling would start to rot. Little tiny black bumps would pimple out of the ceiling. “Black mold?” we joked. A swift wipe down with bleach and water and the pimples would disappear. I knew they would come back, but, for the time, I was doing all that I could. I was keeping the surface clean, but a damp heaviness still lingered in the room. The claw foot tub wasn’t the glamorous antique I had hoped it would be. Cat hair and dust clung where the feet met the legs, like a ring of gray paint. I got down on my knees and wiped it away with the bleach and water towel.

When I was down there, I inspected the floor. A black, gummy substance was growing out of the cracks. I scrubbed the floor; the gummy substance stuck to the towel like it would the pigtails of the odd girl on the playground, stringy and sticky, holding pieces of hair together at odd angles. I felt this lump in my stomach, this lump that wanted to come up, and was coming up, like a tiny ball lodged in the back of my throat. I leaned over to the toilet, lifted the seat, and the ball spewed out, split into a yellow liquid. I looked away, holding my head from the dizziness of something coming out the wrong way, and pulled the “wrong way” handle to the right to flush. After the water surged out and back in, the toilet kept on with this monotonous trickle of water flowing in or out, I couldn’t tell. I looked in the toilet bowl; the black pimples were creeping in there too, down from the edges hidden from the naked eye. I reached for the toilet bowl cleaner and sprayed with haste. I grabbed for the brush and fought to remove the black pimples leading from, what I saw now, was a giant brown ring. I scrubbed while large flecks of brown and black jumped into the still running toilet.

After about two minutes, I stopped and looked down at my work. The pimples were gone, at least. The brown ring had been penetrated, but like everything else brown and black in that bathroom, I knew it would come back. I could never get ahead of it. I knew it was always just there, just below the surface, threatening any potential for sustained happiness. I got up off my knees and jiggled the handle of the toilet. It stopped running. I grabbed the bottle of bleach water and the muddied, nearly disintegrating washcloth. I ventured down the stairs, the blue carpeted stairs, like a cheap doctor’s office waiting room threw out the edges and our landlords glued them to the stairs. I couldn’t help but wonder what was underneath that carpet that had been so hastily and steadfastly glued down. My feet left the last step, the last of the rough edges irritating the silken bottoms of my feet, and I entered the kitchen. The towel had no other place to go than the trash. It needed to be destroyed, any ounce of the darkness that could be removed or destroyed felt like an accomplishment, but maybe I was just chipping away at an ever-growing monster. The real problem was hanging back; retreating from my desire to clean it, make it right. I returned the bleach water to its home under the sink. Just then, I heard the door open, in the crunching way it always did, the crunching of everything peeling away and rubbing together with any sort of movement or change, of everything being a little too small to fit properly in its place, like everything was expanding, dying to burst free. My body tensed at the sound, but I reminded myself of the darkness baring down. “Go to the door with a smiling face,” I told myself. It was my tiny fight against what was eating us.

I ran to the door, smile on my face and open arms, ready to give you a hug, to not let the weight of this place and the world out there swallow you. I could swallow you instead, at least, for a moment. But I saw you were wearing that clay mask that made your face heavy. It was hanging down. I couldn’t see your eyes, but I knew, if I looked at them, they would just be these glowing, rounded surfaces, convex shapes that you had clearly already retreated from. Were you standing in there, just to the side, but still out of reach? I could see you back in there, over to the side giggling, a child playing hide and seek. I tried to pull you out. I put my hand on your shoulder, “What’s wrong?” You pushed me away and walked through to the kitchen. I guess I should have yelled, “Olly Olly Oxen Free!” Maybe that child would have come out, playfully wearing the mask, making fun of the monster in the closet.

“Nothing,” you said, still not looking at me. You walked right through the kitchen and out the back door. I just stood there for a moment, taking it all in as I heard you scramble in that back room where we stored our bikes and a mélange of overflowing belongings. I heard you yell, “Fuck” and “Shit” and “God damn it!” Tears started to roll down my face, but then I heard you open the back door again. “I’m going for a bike ride,” you shouted.

“Okay,” I said, swallowing the tears trembling in my throat. “Be careful.” The back door slammed. I walked into the living room and melted into the couch. The cushions were hanging off at an angle, but I was too exhausted to fix them. I lied down and stared up at the ceiling as my left arm disappeared into the crevice created between the pushed out cushions and the slippery leather back of the couch. I thought about how the Velcro I had applied to the back of the cushions never helped. I thought about how nothing I did here ever helped. I told myself that I wasn’t doing enough.

I leaned my head to the right and stared at that picture of us that was next to the TV. I looked happy, maybe a little chubby, like I had been eating my feelings and trying to jog them off but my emotional calories outweighed my exercise pay off. At least my smile was genuine in your embrace. You had your arm around me, but your body was pulling away, like there was something you couldn’t quite let me touch. I figured if I kept smiling, one day you would let me touch it. One day that glowing light in your eyes would be more than reflection; it would come from within, and we would be happy. I sat up with that thought, hoping that you would find something warm and real to bring back to us on your bike ride. I decided to go for a walk.

Novel Excerpt

There she was, Amy Gerstein, over by the pool, kissing my father. She must have just climbed out of the pool in that tiny white string bikini because her Groucho Marx eyebrows were dripping water like two caterpillars stuck clinging to a leaf during a rainstorm. All I kept thinking was that either the carpet didn’t match the drapes, or there was no carpet. The white bottom was truly white, not a shadow of pubic hair in sight.

            Grooming aside, Amy Gerstein presented a problem as a 20-year-old kissing my nearly 57-year-old father. The problem was whether or not I should tell mom about Amy. For all I knew, this had happened before with Dad. For all I knew, it was a part of their marriage agreement, a little underage action on the side: Eyebrows mandatory, pubic hair optional. My parents were both attractive and fit 50-somethings. Who was I to tell them how to make a relationship work for the long haul? But, there was still another problem, I didn’t want to see my father kissing Amy Gerstein.

            In a public place, I felt comfortable that the kissing would stabilize as such. I toyed with the idea of making my presence known to them. How would my father react if his eldest daughter suddenly appeared at her father’s side while he was ignobly making out with a girl ten years his daughter’s junior? I couldn’t even begin to imagine. All I could see in the movie theatre inside my head was the girl’s caterpillar brows jumping to the middle of her forehead. I saw it zoomed in and played on repeat like a clip of an eyeball from Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou.

            So, I hovered behind the white-painted wooden pool house, so old now that the paint was beginning to chip away. I looked across the sparkling, chlorine-scented blue pool to the shiny new gray and white laminate building. At least no one was getting splinters, but the building was sterile, like a place kids would go to get a vaccine rather than their place for kicking splashes across the baby pool and challenging each other to breath holding contests in the deep end. Sterile, like the white coat draped over Amy Gerstein’s bikini, the white coat that said, “Dr. Georges,” so clearly on the right breast pocket.

            I realized I was conflating memories. Amy was not wearing my father’s doctor’s coat by the pool that afternoon, but I knew that she had worn my father’s coat. I knew that was where this whole thing had gotten started.