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Which is much worse than anything else.
8
I could never spend a night in this house,” the chimney sweep said.
A few months after moving in nearly two years before, she’d hired the sweep to assess the six fireplaces branching from the house’s center chimney. He was tall, and though she warned him about the stairway height, he’d hit his head there, and again on an upstairs doorframe.
“People were shorter hundreds of years ago,” someone had told her, “that’s why these doors are so low.”
She’d fact-checked and found that heights hadn’t changed in the nearly three hundred years since her house was built, let alone in the two hundred years since the nineteenth-century addition—the kitchen downstairs and the low-ceilinged stair leading to the useless half room, half hallway upstairs—had been inelegantly sewn onto the back side of the place. Given the addition’s original purpose had been to house servants, most likely ceilings and doorways were low because it was easiest to build and cheapest to heat.
Same as it ever was.
She assumed the sweep’s hesitation was because he was clearly far too tall to live in the house comfortably. But then he side-eyed her, said, “Have you seen anything yet?”
“Like what?”
“You know.” He rubbed his arms as though chilled. “Ghosts.”
He shuddered, visibly shuddered, and she followed his gaze around the room, trying and failing to imagine what the chimney sweep saw among her belongings. Jealousy wiggled in her skull that the sweep was able to believe badness, hauntedness, was isolated to this or that building; pain sealed in the past instead of lurking inevitably in the future.
Wouldn’t that be comforting?
“Least the chimney is in good shape,” he conceded.
The sweep leaned inside the iron door of the beehive oven, bits of light from his flashlight escaping around him. As he pulled himself out, she was reminded uncomfortably of a breech birth, the oven a round womb, and looked away from the odd intimacy of it.
“You used the beehive yet? It’s been restored at some point. Modern firebrick. Good stuff.”
The sweep irritated her. He worked slowly, chatting and expecting her attention yet ignoring her warnings about the stairs and doorways. Worse, his unhurried visit had interrupted her focus on illustrating a client’s elegant pollination drone, its tiny motors that angled for roll, pitch, and yaw. So she found herself needling him, saying, “You know, I haven’t seen anything. But thereisa graveyard out back.”
“A graveyard? Not really?”
“Really.”
“I couldn’t do it.” He shook his head dolefully. “I couldn’t live here.”
For the first four months at the outskirts of suburban New England, she regularly thought about that chimney sweep as she floated around her in-laws’ apartment, silent and invisible as one of his ghosts. Any word she said was met with her father-in-law’s resentment, as if she’d pushed into his home with an unwelcome “boo.”
With the children placed in front of a television so as not todisturb their grandfather, she did her in-laws’ laundry, made dinner, prepped breakfast and lunch for the next day, tackled bottomless dishes, made sure the chocolate-flavored Ensure was waiting chilled in the fridge, the only thing her mother-in-law could stomach. All while the old man pointedly read his paper. Watched golf with his feet leisurely crossed on the ottoman. Assessed what she’d accomplished with a derisive snort.
She flitted away from her mother-in-law’s “you don’t have tos” and “I’m fines.” Because despite her protestations the older woman would fall asleep on the couch under the light of her grandchildren’s cartoons, their soft limbs draped around her, waking to repeat, “Thank you. Thank you.”
As she assisted with intimate things—the bathroom, the bathing, the physical reactions to treatments—her father-in-law would break his malevolent hovering and flee, revolted by the physicality of these tasks. In his absence, the older woman shed small talk like a worn-out skin.
“Dear, would you tell me about what happened to your mother?” she’d say, or “My father was an unkind man, which somehow made it more difficult when he died. Unresolved problems…they fester,” and “I’ve always been a ‘go along to get along’ girl. What a waste.”
As pieces of horrible news landed at doctor’s appointment after doctor’s appointment, her mother-in-law sat calmly, saying, “I see. I understand. That’s not what we’d hoped, is it? I know this must be hard news for you to deliver, but thank you, Doctor.”
Yes, the older woman stared the Grim Reaper straight in the eye and didn’t show a trace of fear, just marveled, “Really? You’re bothering with me?” as he lowered the scythe a little closer.
She admired her mother-in-law’s resilience. Wondered at the still-hidden depths that might have created it. What her own regrets, her own strengths, would be, when her time came.
“Your mother is one tough lady,” she told her husband. “Sick as she is, she’s still thinking of everyone else.”
“Yeah, I’m sure she’s pretty loudly being the noble sufferer,” her husband grumbled. “She’s an expert martyr.”
“Or it’s grit. I mean, I’d be wallowing and snapping at everyone. Or, I don’t know, crying all the time.”
