Mind in the Gutter
Laurie Stone and her partner Richard Toon bought a house in Hudson New York and moved in this season. She has been posting on their life there for her Facebook Friends…
Notes on the house. It was like buying a house that is a heroin addict. Can’t tell the truth. Can’t show up. Can’t get clean. There is a serial killer/Unibomber aspect to the basement. The kind of basement you expect to find a femur under a blue plastic tarp. Richard assembled a shop vac. We load the car with random boxes from the storage unit. Things I expected never to see again are back. Fancy contractors we liked came today, and we bought a couch in Great Barrington. The views from every window are beautiful. This is what we improvised from today’s unpacking.
When we went down to the basement one day with our realtor, he unfolded an old, blue plastic tarp, and out jumped a commune of black spiders. I said, “What are they?” He said, “Poisonous.” I said, “Should we kill them?” He said, “You could.” I have taken to wearing pink iridescent gardening clogs. Every step matters. We have taken to falling asleep at 10 and waking up at 4. We are learning about the house after the fact, the way I have learned about every relationship I have ever been in. In the basement, I picked up a circular metal thing I guessed served an electrical purpose and felt a sudden jolt of pain in the pillow of my thumb so surprising I didn’t know what kind of pain it was or what had caused it. I dropped the thing on a metal table and walked away. Then something clicked below consciousness and I walked back. It couldn’t have been a shock, so it must have been a sting or a bite, and sure enough when I inspected the metal thing again, the head of a wasp or hornet peeked out. The insect was indolent, one of those bugs past flying that scuttles along improbably on a cement floor. I hit it several times with the thing it had been living in because I was angry and afraid, and a few moments later saw myself as witless and cruel. The sting did not hurt very much. Everyone who looked at the house before us was stopped by the corroded metal shelves, duct tape remedies, and decades of mounded dirt. The first thing I thought when I saw the tragic carelessness of the banged out wall between the two basements, the bloody, chipped-tooth, broken mouth aspect of the hole in the wall was, I can make it beautiful. I was thinking the other day, Any man with a sexy mouth is going to have a better life. I was thinking there are no good endings. All endings are bad. That is why it is difficult to end a story, and you have to stop before the end. The standard ideas about endings–just no. Arrival, no. Death, no. Marriage, no. A baby, no. Love gained, no. Knowledge acquired, no. Today I bought a cotton mop and two pails and Pine Sol.
xxx
I was watching “The Good Place” when I went to the unconscious place. Richard said, “I’ll take you up.” He sat on the toilet seat while I brushed my teeth. I said, “What time is it?” He said, “8:30.” I said, “This is bad. ” He said, “Have a long sleep.” At four I thought life was good and pictured the basement. I went down and cooked a pot roast. Then I painted the face of the boiler that was streaked and rusted and covered with carbuncles and now isn’t. After Richard got up, he sawed a piece of wood we found in the rafters of the garage into scaffolding for the grotto entrance I am building between basement one and basement two. I mopped the floor of basement two with Pine Sol. Richard ate the pot roast for lunch and wanted it for dinner too. I ate chocolate bread. On Tuesday, we will rent a uHaul and bring the last of our things from the storage unit to the house. Richard shlepped cartoons of books today and carried them to the basement. I can’t understand how he can be so strong for such a wiry person. Maybe it’s the pot roast.
xxx
Younger, the dreams of sudden discovery–the rooms at the end of a hallway or through a closet–are numerous and expansive. Older, I discover a warren of rooms through a dark and dingy corridor. There is space I didn’t know about, rooms I could have inhabited, but they are decrepit and crammed, dirty and flaking. I discover where I live is semi public. Strangers wander in and out. The dreams are sluggish. I understand nothing. The thing I dislike about psychoanalysis is the analysis. We brought the last of our belongings to the house today. As we were tugging our giant mattress down the hallway, I forgot there was a step behind me, and I went flying into the air and landed hard on my back. I lay on the floor, yowling the way one does, and Richard brought ice wrapped in dish towels. I had time to see that the basement is the dream of deranged spaces I discover. I love obsession. I love poking broken shards into joint compound and working 15-hour days. I said to Richard, “The dirty, hidden rooms are me.” He said, “No.” I said “I think I feel this way.” In the dreams I lack the power to make things beautiful.
xxx
Last night we had drinks with the neighbors to our right. A giant family that has lived for almost a century on this road. A sister used to sleep in our house before stuff took over the lives of the owners. P said her brother-in-law owns a liquor store and supplies their wine. “It looks like we’re alcoholics.” I said, “We are alcoholics.” She said. “We are, too.” The people who owned our house used to fire bisque doll heads in three kilns in the basement. Clay is part of the dust we are vacuuming up. P’s husband is a volunteer firefighter. He invited us to the wild game dinner in February and said, “One year there was pickled gopher.” Everyone in the family has had Lyme Disease. We bought the house in the dark, the same way we danced when we met. Our rooms are warm. At night our solar robot absorbs light from the moon. The hibiscus plants we bought on sale in August produce red and pink and cream colored blooms each day in the bay window.
