We Fled The Trembling House
By: Felicia C. Sullivan
Tags: Women, Mental Health, Writing, Fiction, Relationships

We Fled The Trembling House

A short story about women on the verge.

“And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,

this the nightmare you wake screaming from:

being forever

in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.” — Galway Kinnell

Most days it’s hard for me to look in the mirror. My body was once a house in a constant state of repair. The kind of house that didn’t get clean no matter how much you scrubbed; a home perpetually caught in assailing storms, which flooded the basement and drowned all the rabbits. I kept the lights on by subsisting on Lean Cuisine, Starbucks, and red wine.

But the power outages — you wouldn’t believe. I had a guy come out every two weeks to fiddle with the fuse box. He left me with flashlights and full-figured bills. The lights, which had once burned bright, flickered and flared out. I was left in darkness. Faulty wiring was to blame — it was easier I guess, back then, to blame the darkness on genetics. On faulty wiring.

2.

I fell in love with a man who filled our home with Danish furniture. It was a mess of wood and expensive minimalism. After a year he said, I think I could see myself marrying you. I think.

Do you think? Make me a list, then, of the things you know, I said.

You’re almost as thin as the girls I used to date, to which I responded, I’m a size 0, were you fucking negative integers? He went on about the mess that was my family and I countered with, your father nicknamed me felatio at Thanksgiving dinner and we coped by day-drinking and hate-fucking.

And that’s the other thing, he said. You drink too much. I laughed. This coming from a man who walks around Manhattan with a scotch-filled flask.

A week later, we visited a friend of his who lived in a tony apartment building on the Upper East Side. The apartment itself was tiny, threadbare, and coming apart at the seams. I might have remembered some minor flooding in the bathroom, and when I said as much the man I loved said, you don’t get it. What mattered was the address, the lobby’s plush velvet chairs, and the doorman with gloved hands. That’s your problem, Felicia, you’re focused on the interior when you should be thinking about the facade.

The problem was I was all facade, only not enough of it. Only enough for the plaster to fill me up and whole.

3.

Someone asked me if I’ve been in love since. I think about Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares: Kiss the mouth which tells you, here, here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

No, I said, no man has yet to be home to me.

4.

My mother is buried somewhere in Long Island — a grave marks her permanent address, but I’ve been denied trespass to this home because I’m the bad daughter unworthy of a mother’s love. I wrote that cruel book about her and told all of our secrets. I should have kept my mouth shut about all the alleged pain and abuse I went through. My mother’s second child, the do-over daughter, tells me this over an enraged email following my mother’s death. For the whole of her life, the do-over knew the version of my mother I barely remember — the second child’s non-fiction is my fiction and I’m too tired of making notes in the margins to reconcile the two.

Though, in private, I write my letters even though mailing them feels like sending burning paper into cold air. Or stuffing an envelope in a reindeer sack headed for the North Pole. There goes that still-beating heart burning!

5.

Years ago, I attended a wedding in Connecticut where everyone’s pain reverberated just below the surface. The bride hated her sister, who was the maid of honor and my best friend at the time. The groom hated everyone, especially the maid of honor’s husband. Before the ceremony, I stood uncomfortably in a house filled with angry tears flooding white satin and tulle. Yet everyone practiced their high-wattage smiles for the camera.

During the wedding, the maid of honor’s husband, the designated driver, drank everything in a two-mile radius. Give him another hour and he’d be hitting the turpentine.

In the car, in the not quite dark, he slurred his words while jamming the key in the ignition. The bride’s best friend and I sat in the back seat petrified until I screamed get the fuck out of the car. The best friend seethed. The maid of honor wheedled and admonished. Maybe the husband cried. I kept saying, this is crazy. I’m not getting in a car with someone who’s drunk. Our drama was on the level of a telenovela. It would take a lot of pride-crushing, face-saving gestures for the husband and wife to switch seats. They were a nuclear bunch. We rode home in silence.

They’re terrible people, the best friend whispered later than night. Now you see? It would take me years to finally see.

Come morning, the husband apologized but all I wanted to do was get in a car to New Haven while the maid of honor white-knuckled the steering wheel. I wanted to close my eyes on Metro-North and pretend the last 24 hours were part of a pilot I watched on TV.

I promised myself my home would never be a place that welcomed strained silences with open, broken arms.

6.

One winter my apartment didn’t have heat for months and I spent nights blowing cold breath into gloved hands. The windows shook from the wind and I’d put on my wool coat in the bathroom after I took a shower. Every few days a man would come into my home with a box of tools and a modicum of hope to then leave mumbling fucking foreign parts. I sat next to a lone space heater, afraid to bookend myself with another lest I torch the joint.

One night my space heater died and I called my landlord who told me to nab one from the empty apartment one floor below. I opened the door to another cold apartment but I felt warmth. The following month I moved floors and thought I’d live out my days in this heated space.

Months later, I heard a woman beating her front door with a shovel, screaming. She held the shovel with one hand and her small dog in another and I yelled from the hallway, I can call the police if you want me to. She took that as an invitation to climb up the stairs with the shovel and storm into my apartment and tell me how horrible her life was.

She said I know what you must be thinking. White woman. Black man. Shovel. I said I didn’t know what to think but it certainly wasn’t that. She said, but it’s really me. I told him to lock the door to protect himself from me because I went off my meds and had too much to drink. Do you get it? Do you see?

My cat howled in the other room. Her miniature dog fled down the stairs. She took inventory of my apartment, its contents, and said, your home is nicer than mine. Bigger than mine. Probably happier than mine, to which I replied, you don’t know that.

A month later I lived amongst boxes because my mother died and I was moving to California, 72 and sunny — a whole state warmed by a space heater.

7.

I tell people I live in a city where buildings and restaurants don’t have roofs, but everyone’s eyes glaze over and I switch topics to the popular cable show everyone’s been talking about. It’s set in a beach town in California, where all the rich people came down with the sads, and a man beats on his wife but it’s okay, completely fine, to talk about this sad, sad show because isn’t it beautiful? Don’t you just love the soundtrack? The floor to ceiling windows in their homes? People are nothing if not predictable in their desire for safety and false “normalcy.”

8.

Most days it’s hard for me to look in the mirror for it’s become a window through which I could revisit all the territories I once occupied. My reflection barely fits into the frame.

There is a fraction of an eye, a cheek, a part of a lip. It’s hard, really, to find yourself when all this memory crowds the frame.