Setting the Bones
We trailed the real estate agent’s Buick. Turning the corner, an imposing white house with an irregularly peaked roofline and ill-suited black shutters dominated our view.
“Oh, it can’t be that one, can it?” my mother wondered aloud. The realtor pulled into the driveway under the branches of a heavy oak and we had our answer. Parking behind him, our family of six climbed out of the car, my little sister and me wiggling out through the rear of the station wagon.
“Now remember, it’s a fixer-upper,” the realtor said as we followed him up the steps to the back porch. “That’s why the price is right,” he added, winking at my dad. Keys rattled in his hand as he turned the lock and the door opened with a heave. A cavernous hallway led to a cockroach infested kitchen. Blinds drawn, you could tell every surface was coated with grease.
I shadowed my older brothers as we tiptoed through the kitchen and wandered the rest of the first floor: an immense parlor, its extravagant woodwork poached, pocket doors exhumed. An overbearing dining room, board and batten panels and a box-beam ceiling painted the same unpleasant mustard as the parlor. A dim hallway led to two bedrooms — one with dated 1970s paneling wrapping the walls, another with water-stained wallpaper peeling from the corners. Between them was a bathroom covered in rust spots and soap scum, swirls of fools gold in the Formica countertop.
The walls held so many stories, faint echoes whispering in empty rooms.
We heard our mother calling. Retracing our steps, the narrow servants’ staircase off the back hallway led us to the upstairs apartment. War era kitchen cupboards wore heavy coats of lead paint. Passing through a swinging door, we were met with the overpowering stench of dog piss. Wrinkling our noses, we stepped onto the soiled carpet. The walls were painted a flat, dingy white and the windows were curtained with cobwebs.
My oldest brother flipped a light switch. Nothing happened.
“The electricity’s been shut off since the fire,” the realtor explained, when he heard the familiar click. My mother let out an awkward laugh. “Come along, it’s through here,” he added.
In the next bedroom, swollen plaster hugged the ceiling, walls clouded by smoke damage and sooty fingerprints smeared on the woodwork. Debris littered the ruined hardwood floors.
We stood around awkwardly. “What started the fire?” my father finally asked.
“Oh, probably the boys’ Atari, or Nintendo, or whatever,” the realtor suggested, waving off the question. “Hard to get a straight story out of these people.” His tone implied these people were not worth discussing. He walked across the room and paused as he reached for another door handle. “Now, you girls be careful,” he warned, leaning down and looking us in the eyes. “There’s all sorts of nails and broken boards around here. Best not to touch anything.”
Through the next door was the Burned Room.
As if swallowed whole by The House, the fire’s damage was limited to these two rooms: one choked by smoke and drowned with water, the other chewed down to bones. Flames had licked up the walls, exposing layers of forgotten wallpaper. A skeleton of lath revealed behind the broken skin of plaster walls. Paint burnt black, peeled away from the surface of the Victorian woodwork. A broken Palladian window was the room’s only source of light.
Before we left town that day, we all knew The House was meant to be ours.
The shit-encrusted carpet was the first to go. Our brothers spent a day ripping it up and dragging it out to the second story balcony before pitching it over the edge and into a dumpster waiting on the lawn. The next day we mopped the newly exposed wood floors with vinegar, trying to kill the stench. The stains would have to wait until we could sand and refinish them.
We scrubbed everything, trying to erase the stories we didn’t want to read. Hardwoods, vinyl, linoleum that never came clean. Miles of sloppily painted woodwork. Acres of wavy glass windows. Our mother got down on her hands and knees, washing cracked porcelain tiles and bleaching stained clawfoot bathtubs. My sister and I wore our brothers’ old tube socks like hand puppets and wiped down the grungy baseboards and window sills. We played house.
Dad fiddled with fuses, wiring, light bulbs, and got the electricity working again. “Light! Let there be light in the kitchen,” we cheered. But with lights on and surfaces clean, the downstairs kitchen still felt oppressive. Mom cooked in the upstairs kitchen instead. To get there we passed through the shadowed back hall where the heaviest memories of The House seemed to hover, waiting for their retelling. Racing up the steep maids’ staircase, I refused to look at my reflection in the rippled window at the top: I didn’t want to see if something had followed me.
We painted nearly every room, a short-term fix until we could enact the long-term plan. Upstairs: pastels with an eggshell finish, trim in semi-gloss. Ivory was rolled over the mustard to brighten the main floor. The Victorian windows were too tall for store-bought curtains and custom draperies were too expensive, so our mother made her own. Sometimes she bought and repurposed twin bed sheets, two to a window and cheaper than buying fabric by the yard. Our bunk beds never had matching sheets, but now our windows did. I hoped she’d save two more sets for my sister and me.
The House was four stories. It had five porches, four staircases, and more than fifty windows. Missing glass in the attic left the floorboards speckled with pigeon shit and feathers, nests sheltered high in the Queen Anne rafters. Dad replaced the windows and the birds moved on. The eaves were so steep that flashlights couldn’t reach the peaks, leaving the edges of the attic always blurred, unknowable. I refused to venture up there alone.
The limestone cellar was a maze of low-ceilinged rooms I didn’t dare explore, but at the bottom of the stairs was an ancient furnace wrapped in asbestos, a massive plaster of paris cast that held together the bowels of the boiler. Throughout winter, radiators hissed with steam and pipes reverberated between the walls, The House telling bedtime stories through Morse code. I slept soundly. I breathed deeply.
We peeled back the rug in the small downstairs bedroom and discovered the original foyer’s parquet floor: squares, triangles, chevrons woven together, discolored from years spent decaying under cheap carpet. On the other side of a wall, the elegant front door had been demoted to use by the upstairs apartment. A once-stately entryway had been walled off to make a bedroom when the house was split in two. We wanted to live in it as if it were whole again, as if we were whole too.
Floral wallpaper withered at the corners: a pathetic façade. My oldest brother pointed a crowbar at a wall that never should have been there. “Let’s tear it down,” he dared our father.
“Should we wait and talk to Mom?” my other brother asked. But they weren’t listening.
Wielding a jigsaw, Dad gnawed an opening through the drywall: a doorway reconnecting the room to the home’s original grand entrance, to the staircase, to its purpose. Light poured in through the transom etched with 706. The oak staircase led up from there, and at the landing was a window seat framed with century-old leaded panes, an overgrown lilac bush pressed up against the glass.
“Girls,” he said, “go tell your mother she can finally enjoy her window seat.” We ran shrieking through the roughed-in doorway and bounded up the stairs together to find her at her sewing machine.
Upstairs in the Burned Room, crumbling plaster was torn away and scorched wood was discarded. Dad cut new glass to replace the busted window. Stripped to a skeleton, the room became our da Vinci’s cadaver. From there we studied the anatomy of The House: the width of the lath, the square heads of old nails, the joinery and dovetails of 1883. And it revealed its stories to us: when electricity was wired, where a door was added or removed. We learned to look for these scars everywhere else. We tried to suture back together the mangled, disfigured wounds of The House, as if healing it would do the same for us.
We stalked salvage yards for the remains of other homes, looking to replace the missing pieces of our own. The Burned Room held the last bit of original woodwork in The House, DNA we took along with us to find a match. Rosettes for the doorways and plinths at the baseboards. Different widths and heights of trim, varying by the original use of each room. We memorized the sequencing and noticed it everywhere, the way you recognize your parent’s profile or mannerisms in a distant relative. When we found near matches we bought as much as we could, never asking where it came from or why it wasn’t needed there anymore. Folding down the back seats of the station wagon, we stacked the woodwork and crawled in next to it for the drive home, our father plotting out which rooms he could reconstruct with these fragments.
In the evenings, Dad drafted new interior elevations, mechanical pencil on vellum with a t-square and clear acrylic triangle. His lines were level, plumb doorways impossible to recreate in reality. He never got around to framing the new opening in the foyer. We tracked drywall dust back and forth for months.
With so much to attend to, our attention slipped from room to room. Stories began in every corner but we started a new chapter before we finished the last one. Books opened at random, pages turned. We never even found the climax.
Along the main stairwell we steamed off decades of wallpaper. In sunlight, prismed glass threw rainbows on the tattered walls. At night the black window was a mirror and I watched the reflection of my parents balanced on ladders, naked lightbulbs swinging from extension cords. Strips of wallpaper fluttered down and I swept them into dust pans and heavy duty garbage bags, a century of stories torn to bits. I wanted to gather and read them all, but there wasn’t time to piece them together. Some stories aren’t meant to be passed on.
When we finished, the bare walls were cool to the touch. Our father smoothed plaster over the cracks we’d exposed in them, repairing fractures where he could, setting the bones. He was recording a story for someone else to read, but we never wrote the ending.
The House should have given up under the weight of it all, but it didn’t. My family couldn’t hold itself together, but The House is still standing.
