Mortar and Bones

by Rebecca D. Martin

You went back once, to patch the walls and collect the piano. The little gray Cape Cod, all dormered and picture windowed in front. Little doll house. Never mind it was the first home you ever owned. Never mind you brought your first baby there, one year after acquiring your first dog. When you brought your daughter home from the hospital, tiny eyes peering from under a knitted pink cap and the purple and yellow patchwork quilt gifted by a great aunt you’d never met, you carried that bulky, removable car seat through the hidden front door and placed it on the dining room end of the piano bench. You, your husband, and your mom sat at the table and ate a meal you immediately forgot. A squeak emanated from the sleeping baby’s mouth and the dog froze and pointed, hastening on his stubby legs you always laughed at to investigate this thing that was already here and he hadn’t known it. You all laughed. The day was the coldest on record for mid-December; today is summer. 

You first saw the place in summer. That’s not true. You bought it in summer, carting in your few and small possessions under the bearable heat of a Southern mountain July. You first saw it in the aftermath of a heavy snowfall, empty, the owners gone to California ten months back. “So bright!” you exclaimed, ready in an instant to claim this piece of construction as your own. “I can’t take credit for the light off the snow,” the real estate agent responded. The brightness casting back and forth between the back dining room double windows and that wide front glass panel sold you in a second. Just wait till you saw the blue attic room where you would become the writer you already were. You are certain you didn’t notice, at the time, the beige paint turned purple on the living room walls or the patchwork wallpaper in the kitchen. All you saw was the way you’d live life there.

You left during a different July, after repainting patched places in the walls - yellow it turned out, though you’d meant the color to be cream - and making plans for retrieving the piano. In October, you handed the keys over to the couple who came to tour it on that day of return. They wanted the place immediately: the gas stove, the herb garden out back. They cooed over the diminutive rooms, exclaimed at the attic, now seafoam green. It’s some consolation. They liked it like you had on that snowlit first day, that old 1940’s mortar and bones. You left. The sun through the double dining room windows you wished afterward were still bordered in dark green, rather than the pearly white you’d slathered over the trim. The sun clear through to that front living room window and all the light you still can see. Close your eyes.

After moving in, after the flurry of scrubbing floors, peeling wallpaper, and painting the walls an accidental sunny yellow, after arranging the furniture just-so and buying a new sofa, you could hardly rest your mind about the place. You would sit on the new couch and fix your eyes on the seam in the ceiling trim where the wooden strip changed from white to off-white, and you would imagine that no one - no one at all - would want to buy this house from you when the time came. You would worry that bead, that seam in the ceiling, for three years. And once, when you were walking the neighborhood streets - shambling houses and dotard trees - you pushed the six-month-old baby in her borrowed stroller and told your husband, “I am so happy right now.” The public library was a ten-minute stroll away. “I have never been this happy.” 

When you go back, the house is always as bright and reflective as that first time, and perfect. It isn’t even the most meaningful place you’ve ever lived, though it’s close. You go back without meaning to, over and over. You are asleep. You wake, and the impact of loss compounds itself with the wakings of the last time you dreamed yourself home there: now the current owners sell the place back to you, now you never sold it at all. It’s an idea that would never do; the house was tiny. Two bedrooms, the whole place unairconditioned. The microscopic kitchen, the single bathroom with a window directly onto the neighbor’s driveway. You imagine he still stands, well into his sixties, smoking and talking on the phone directly under the open window as you try to relax in the bath. 

The dog with his funny short legs is gone, doubly gone, to friends whose son loved him until the end of his canine days. Eight years ago, you brought a second baby home to a different house, the same quilt covering her in the car seat carrier, though, in true second child form, you don’t remember where you placed her once you entered that other house that you do not dream of. It was a rental and smelled of mothballs. Your husband works from home now after a pandemic upended almost everything, and the musty hole of a basement beneath that marvelous first house would never do for his home office. 

You wake again. You open your eyes. No one has gifted you that first house, or sold it back. It drifts into its proper place in time and pretends to stay there. None of it would do now, but you feel like crying, anyway.