Starter House: A Novel

Chapter One

IT WAS ALREADY JUNE, and the Miszlaks still hadn’t found a house. Eric wanted guarantees: no lead, asbestos, mold, termites, crime, or trouble. Lacey wanted triangles.

Triangles, Eric said, as if he’d never heard of such a thing. They shared the backseat of the Realtor’s Tahoe, he with his binder of fact sheets organized by street name, she with her sketchbook, outside of their one hundred and eighth house. Lacey wanted to like it. She wished she could say, This is the one, I love it, for Eric’s sake, because he was getting anxious as their list of houses dwindled from the twenties to the teens, but she just couldn’t. This house with its square utilitarian front, so naked and so poor—if Eric settled for it, he’d be miserable by Christmas. They’d had enough of square houses, bland rooms no better than the motels she’d grown up in and the apartments they’d lived in together, houses without memory. They couldn’t live that way anymore, with the baby coming.

Triangles, she said, shaping one in the air with her hands. Gables. Dormer windows. Look at that thing; a person could die of actual boredom. What about the one with the bay window?

Eric flicked through his binder. Bad neighborhood. Two title loan stores and a used car lot right around the corner.

The Realtor turned in the front seat. She was on the phone with her office, trying to find another house in the neighborhoods acceptable to the Miszlaks. Although three thousand homes were for sale in Greeneburg County (many of them in the city of Greeneburg itself) this first week of June, the Miszlaks’ requirements limited them to Forrester Hills, on the northeast side of town. Lacey, three months pregnant and planning her baby’s perfect childhood, had mapped the attendance zones of the good schools. Eric drew a circle around his uncle’s law office, so he would have no more than a twenty-minute commute. The circles crossed only here.

CarolAnna Grey, the Realtor, had become steadily less blond over three weekends of driving the Miszlaks from house to house. Lacey felt sorry for her; she kept taking them to houses that failed one or more of their criteria, usually Eric’s. He had grown up in Glenaughtry, Greeneburg’s finest golf neighborhood. He had standards.

This is my neighborhood, CarolAnna said. I’ve lived here all my life.

I’m not buying anything that’s walking distance from Austell Road, Eric said.

You’re going to have to open up your search.

No, they said together, and Eric turned pages in his binder and said, What about the blue house around the corner, Lacey? It had those windows you like.

Lacey fanned her sketchbook and found her impression of the house: a toadstool with fumes rising from its gills. Smelled of mold. It smelled like a basement apartment with carpeting so dirty it sticks to your feet. She’d spent too much of her life in rooms like that already.

Why don’t you just look at this house? CarolAnna Grey said.

Eric and Lacey got out of the Tahoe. We could look, Eric said.

Lacey looked. It was a square, no question. She dug in her purse for the bag of pistachios. In the last three months, besieged by morning sickness, she had gained ten pounds, though the baby itself was smaller than her thumb; she had to eat all the time, dry salty food, to keep the nausea under control. She wandered to the corner, seeking shade.

The neighborhood was exactly right. She loved the way the streets curved. She loved the cul-de-sacs and the big trees, the gardens all flashed with pink and white as the last dogwood flowers withered in June’s green heat. She loved the big lawns prettified with gazebos, fountains, swings, wishing wells. A flock of little boys on skateboards flurried through the next intersection. Their voices hung in the air behind them like a flight of bells. She could live here forever, in the right house.

Forrester Lane curved counterclockwise, an arc of lawns and trees. She poured the pistachio shells back into the bag and walked along the sidewalk. It was broken in places, shattered from below by the heaving roots of oaks and maples. She liked that. It showed that the people who lived here valued trees more than concrete. Here was shade, under the biggest maple she had ever seen, effortlessly shielding two houses at once.

She looked up suddenly, her eye drawn to some motion not quite seen, and there was the house. She looked at it and her heart turned, like a key in a lock. Her house: a Cape Cod, dusty rose, its face naked and bruised. The shutters were piled on the porch, a sheet of plywood sealed the upper-right dormer window, tire tracks rutted the lawn, and a blue Dumpster stood crooked on the grass, filled with rolls of brown carpet and green foam-pad. A rust-stained claw-foot bathtub lay upside down on the porch.

Eric came up behind her and touched her arm to pull her away. Look, she said. It spoke to her. Its brokenness and emptiness called her, and the discarded carpet was a mark of hope. This house had been someone’s home; it had suffered and been damaged, and it was ready to be a home again. Look, this is our house, Lacey said.

It’s a mess.

You’re not looking. She pointed to the house on the left. Also a Cape Cod, it gleamed immaculate in the shadow of the big maple. Its siding was a yellowed cream, the shade of egg custard, and the shutters were golden caramel. Three white rockers sat at friendly angles on the porch, under hanging ferns. Someone had mowed the lawn in perfect herringbones. They’re just the same. It could look like that, if we took care of it. She couldn’t turn her back on this house; there was something in its expression, the angle of the dormers, so quizzical and innocent and appealing. It needed her. It’s just so cute.

Cute? Be serious. The down payment, it’s all the money we have.

The porch steps were broken. Lacey got her left knee onto the porch and hauled herself up, ignoring Eric’s protests. The front door, scraped of its paint, swung open to her hand, and she walked in.

The entrance was surprisingly wide. To the left, an open arch led to the formal living room: two big windows and a gray marble fireplace. The floor was bare wood, with a sander standing in the middle. Lacey was glad the carpets were gone; they must have been horrible. To the right, another open arch, and a smaller room, with the same big windows. A roll of carpet stood in one corner, its underside stained in broad circles of brown and black. Straight ahead was the bright heart of the house, a staircase beautiful even under its mud-colored Berber. A porthole window, a quartered circle, shed yellow western light down into Lacey’s eyes. The last six steps broadened and curved out and back, with the lowest step describing a complete circle around the banister post.

Lacey could see her someday children there. They would sit on that round step in the sunshine. She saw a boy folding paper airplanes, which he meant to throw from a bedroom window. She saw a girl leaning against the post with her head bent over a book. The girl tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. She read as Eric did, biting her upper lip, her eyebrows tucked into a frown. The light hid their faces from her, but she already knew them. Someday, here. They had chosen their home in this house.

Eric took Lacey’s elbow and pulled her out of the house. You can’t just walk into someone’s house, he said. You don’t even know if it’s for sale.

Lacey let Eric help her off the porch, where CarolAnna Grey caught up with them. This is the house I want.

You don’t want this house, CarolAnna said. She looked as if she could say more, but Lacey didn’t want to hear it. After one hundred and eight shoeboxes, she knew a real house when she saw it.

We don’t want a fixer-upper, Eric said. I won’t have time to work on it, and you can’t, not by yourself.

Someone’s fixing it up already. Fixing it to sell.

You can’t know that, Eric said, but Lacey knew it by the house’s emptiness. Her someday children would never have appeared in another family’s home. A family would have moved their furniture from room to room, not taken it all away. This house was getting ready for a new life.

The maple cast a green darkness over the lawn, a whisper of busy hands, and CarolAnna shuddered and moved away from it. There’s a real cute condo in a new development west of the mall, she said. With a swimming pool.

Eric walked backward across the lawn, squinting upward. Roof looks good.

They’re getting ready to paint, Lacey said. If we make an offer fast, we can choose the colors. Inside and out.

If the shutters were green, dark mossy green . . . She wanted a green door, like the door of Grandpa Merritt’s house, which had closed behind her forever when she was six, her last real home. They’d paint the baby’s room sky blue and stencil stars and butterflies on the ceiling. They could do whatever they liked and not have to ask a landlord’s permission or worry about the damage deposit. They would have a dog. She added a golden Labrador to her vision of the someday children on the staircase; then she pulled out her sketchbook and roughed in a drawing of the house’s face and the maple.

The house looked happy in her picture. This was why she preferred to take sketches of the houses, rather than photographs. Snapping a picture was quick and easy, but the drawing told the truth, like the difference between e-mail and real conversation, websites and books.

You could rent an apartment and wait a couple months, CarolAnna said. Come July, there’ll be thirty more in your area.

Is there something wrong with this house? Eric said.

Next door, in the twin Cape Cod, the front door opened and a tall white-headed man came out onto his porch with a watering can. He looked over and said in gentle surprise, Well, it’s you, CarolAnna Grey. This isn’t Tuesday.

It’s Sunday.

And how’s little Madison; is she practicing?

Not so you’d notice.

The tall man courteously left a space in the air for CarolAnna to introduce Eric and Lacey. She set her mouth and said nothing. Lacey stepped into the painful silence, folding her sketchbook open on the picture of the house, and said, I’m Lacey Miszlak and this is Eric. What do you know about the house next door?

Harry Rakoczy. He smiled at CarolAnna. I’ve known this one since she was tiny, and now her little girl’s taking lessons with me. Violin. You’re interested in the house? I’m getting ready to sell.

Lacey said, Yes, but Eric said, Maybe. What’s the history?

Harry, they don’t want it. CarolAnna touched his arm. He looked at her hand until she let go. It’s not right, she said.

Harry ignored CarolAnna and smiled at Lacey. It’s been a rental for years. Roof’s two years old, heat pump’s practically new, and I’m renovating. He waved his watering can at the old bathtub. Get that thing out of there. It’s time.

Harry, CarolAnna said. She glanced at the upstairs window of the empty house and moved away, as if someone might see her. Harry, no. She’s pregnant.

He set down the watering can and smiled at Lacey. Looks good on you.

The second trimester begins today, Lacey said. And my due date’s Christmas. She told everybody she met, now the first trimester was over and it was safe; she wanted the world to know.

What are you asking? Eric said. He was never lost, not in a confusing map or a meandering conversation. Eric always knew where he was going.

A hundred ten.

Lacey was surprised. The other houses in Forrester Hills ranged from a hundred fifty to over two hundred.

Harry, CarolAnna said anxiously.

Is there something wrong with the house? Eric asked again. Lacey wished he wouldn’t. The house was obviously perfect. They could deal with anything—termites, mold, radon—but they could never make an ugly house their true home.

Yes, Harry said to CarolAnna, is there?

CarolAnna licked her lips, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She looked at the bathtub on the porch and said to it, People died here.

People die everywhere, Lacey said, though the words gave her a shiver. Poor house, no wonder it was lonely. When did it happen?

A long time ago, Harry said. It was very sad.

If it doesn’t bother you, Eric murmured, and Lacey shook her head—she didn’t care at all. These houses were thirty, forty years old. People must have died, had babies, gotten engaged, married, divorced, hurt each other in a thousand ways, reconciled and forgiven, passionately hated and desperately loved; if you abandoned a house whenever something significant happened, people would live in tents. This house had known life.

Ninety-five, Eric said to Harry. Pending the inspection.

Ninety-five, Harry said thoughtfully, as if he might actually consider the offer—it had to be worth a hundred seventy at least. Lacey felt she should tell him so. Just then a green Hyundai pulled into his driveway. Here’s Lex and the baby, I’ve got to go. CarolAnna, send me the offer and we’ll talk. And you tell your Madison, ten minutes of bow exercises every day, and I’ll know if she hasn’t done it.

A tall man got out of the Hyundai and unbuckled a baby from the back. He stooped under her weight, and she seized two fistfuls of his colorless hair and pulled his face up. The baby’s voice pealed in a high wordless cry of greeting, bright as a bird.

Harry shook Eric’s hand again and hurried back to his own front door before Lacey had a chance to ask about the bathtub. She loved old-fashioned furniture, and the claw-foot tub was beautiful. She wanted to know if it was rusted out, or if it might be refinished and reinstalled. While Eric and CarolAnna returned to the Tahoe, Lacey picked a few flakes of white enamel off the tub and rubbed the rusty iron beneath. The tall man stared at her from Harry Rakoczy’s front porch, the baby squalling impatiently, until Harry urged him inside.

The Tahoe honked. Come on, Eric said. She says there’s a new subdivision zoned for Burgoyne Elementary.

Lacey patted the bathtub. She already knew everything that mattered about the new subdivision: small lots, no trees, the houses all alike. You stay right here, she said to her house. Wait for me. They’d have to be quick; if Harry meant to accept Eric’s offer—ninety-five thousand, practically giving it away—they’d have to grab the chance. There was no time to waste on condos and subdivisions.

Chapter Two

SEVEN WEEKS LATER, on the first Tuesday in August, the Miszlaks moved into 571 Forrester Lane. CarolAnna Grey got over her inexplicable reluctance to sell the house when Harry Rakoczy added an extra percentage to her commission. He told the Miszlaks he needed to sell because he had retired from the orchestra and would soon be moving to Australia to be with his son’s family. Lacey was disappointed. She’d been looking forward to taking her baby next door for violin lessons with the old man in five years.

Though Eric called it their starter house, Lacey planned to live in it for ten years and maybe forever. She wanted her someday children to attend the same school from kindergarten through fifth grade, to have teachers who’d seen them grow and friends whose toddler birthday parties they’d attended. Her own childhood had been furnished with cardboard boxes and duffel bags, always moving, always ready to move. Lacey had attended eight different schools, and she couldn’t count the moves or even define them. There were times they’d slept in the car. Was it moving if they parked in a different spot? Did a shift to another room in the same shabby motel count as a move?

She knew what she wanted for her baby. She wanted the home that had been hers when she was six, when she and her mother had lived with Grandpa Merritt in the white house with the green door and the big magnolia tree. Grandpa Merritt’s house, like 571 Forrester Lane, had a smiling face, a sense of welcome. She wanted to be able to walk in the dark and recognize the sound and texture of every room.

Everything would be different when they were settled in the house. She hated moving, but if she had to do it, it might as well be in August, her New Year. For Lacey, a teacher, January was the trough of the year, when the children faced her across a barricade of desks, both sides exhausted beyond compromise. Now in August, the crayons were fresh in their boxes, bright as the children themselves. Every year, she bought new sketchbooks, leaving the last pages blank in the old ones. As soon as they moved in, she’d go from room to room, sketching doors and corners, making it her own.

They’d driven the route a dozen times in June and July, viewing the house, meeting with the Realtor, the bank, the lawyers, Harry Rakoczy, and the painters. They’d both driven it yesterday, coming up in two cars to leave Eric’s Mitsubishi in the Greeneburg U-Haul parking lot. It had always been an easy drive; they’d never seen traffic like this.

Highway construction delayed their arrival until seven thirty. Eric had planned for noon. Being late put him in a terrible mood, and if they didn’t deliver the empty U-Haul by nine, they’d be charged an extra day. Let’s get started, Eric said. We can pile everything on the lawn for now. Just get the van empty.

Can’t we pay the fifty bucks and do it in the morning?

I’m not paying just so we can park overnight. Come on. I’ll get the books and furniture, you get the light stuff. Forty minutes and we’re done.

Can we give it a rest, this once?

No, they could not. He was right and she knew it; she wished he wouldn’t be so completely right, all the time. He backed the van into 571’s driveway. The west was fat with gold, and most of the houses on the street already had a few lit windows. Harry Rakoczy’s house was dark and his car was gone. Lacey had hoped Harry could talk some sense into Eric, but they were on their own.

I’d rather unload the futon and finish in the morning, she said.

We can do this. Eric yanked at the van’s back door. It accordioned up into its slot and stuck halfway. He started pulling out boxes and laying them on the lawn. Get the light stuff, he said.

Lacey leaned into the van, breathing the smell of their lives, the years of their young-married student poverty: clothes washed with never quite enough cheap detergent, the orange Formica dinette, the futon Lacey bought for fifty dollars from an old roommate. The smell of garage sales and thrift shops, old textbooks, off-brand coffee, slightly irregular sheets worn thready at the hems.

She grabbed the nearest box, which gave a glassy jingle. She balanced it on her belly bump long enough to get her right hand under it, turned toward the house, and tripped over the curb. As she stepped high to get over it she could not see, a bell rang. Surprise made her stumble, and she caught her balance, the box chiming in her arms; she hoped nothing had broken. A child rode a bicycle along the sidewalk. She hadn’t heard him coming until he rang his bell, though the ticking of the wheels was loud enough. He had sprung out of the grass in the tree’s shadow. Her heart closed and opened. She took a breath and talked sense to herself: Just a kid on the street, settle down.

Her teacher’s eye said Nine, but small for his age: a boy with fair, wavy hair and a gray T-shirt stained with long rusty streaks. Trouble at home. Something about the way he stared straight ahead, something about the grip of his small fingers on the handlebars. She hoped he didn’t live too close. He rode his bike along the sidewalk to the edge of Eric and Lacey’s new property, still marked with a row of orange survey flags—he rang the bike’s round bell once, ting, and then turned and rode to the row of flags on the other border. He braked by jamming his heels into the sidewalk and rang the bell again. Ting.

Lacey started across the sidewalk and there he was again, suddenly, pedaling in front of her. His shoulder brushed the box, and she dropped it. Salad plates and dinner plates, bowls and coffee mugs, hit one another in one great shout of destruction. Do you have to do that? Lacey cried. Right here? Do you have to?

The boy stared at her, a look of challenge, like a dog too long chained: Come closer and see if I bite. Who asked you to come here talking to me? he said. The strange ferocity of his response made her step back and raise her hands.

Eric ran to the box. I said leave it alone! He opened the box to a mass of splinters and shards, with one intact dinner plate on top from the stoneware set they had bought at the Dollar King last June, on sale for nine dollars (marked down from fifteen). These were good plates. They could have lasted us for years. Look at this, all this waste. He laid the pieces out to match the bigger parts together and see if some of them could be saved. White ceramic dust drifted in the bottom of the box.

Lacey could hardly believe how a single impact destroyed the dishes so completely. We can get another set, she offered. They were cheap.

Nothing’s cheap when you’re living on borrowed money. You don’t know, Eric said. So angry, like it was her fault, the traffic eating up the day—like she’d dropped the plates on purpose. You don’t know what it’s like, he said. Just this. Just everything. But if it’s what you want, fine, we’ll do what you want, like we always do. Buy new plates. Buy new silverware while you’re at it. New tablecloths, why not. Spend a hundred dollars. Five hundred. Whatever, what difference does it make, I don’t care. He pulled the accordion door down in its slot so hard it bounced, and he had to catch it and force it down again.

Wait, Lacey said. The day had been just as hard on him as on her—harder, because he’d been driving. We can finish. We’re almost done.

He got into the driver’s seat, and the slamming door was his only answer. At the corner, he stopped and signaled before turning left. His carefulness so exasperated Lacey that she had to chew on her knuckles to keep from shouting after him.

She sat on the grass, holding her knees and rocking, with a dozen fragmented conversations rattling in her mind. You should have known—you think you know so much—I could have told you—why don’t you ever listen to me? Another stupid argument, their fourth this week. He said she spent too much, they had no money, why couldn’t she understand—which was good, coming from a guy who’d grown up with all the money in the world, a two-million-dollar trust fund and a vacation home on the Isle of Palms, until it all disappeared. And he was telling her what poverty was like, as if he knew. This wasn’t poverty; this was just a temporary low point between her job ending and his beginning. They were building up some debt, but it would all be gone in two months, except the student loans. If they couldn’t handle the stress of moving, what kind of parents were they going to be?

She breathed quietly and listened to the maple. Eric always left when they fought. When he came back, he would be all love and sweetness, and neither of them would mention this fight again.

She lay back. After a while, she began to hear the sounds of the grass. When the wind brushed her face, the blades rubbed against each other, sharing friendly news. Bees worked the blossoms of the tall purple clover and the short white clover, the small sweet buttercups. A wood dove called, "You-u. You-u." Children’s voices rang, far off. The ticking of wheels gathered in the rustling stillness. And the little boy rode his bicycle up and down the sidewalk, turning at the property line.

The whirring wheels seemed loud but distant, like a recording played back at too high a volume, and each time the rhythm of his stop and turn was identical, his heels bouncing and then scraping on the sidewalk, the wheels slowing, his quiet grunt as he picked up the bicycle and turned it, and then the bell at last: ting. How did he do it exactly the same every time? More and more, Lacey felt she was listening to a recording, and not a real event. If she opened her eyes—which she would not do, nothing could make her look—she would see the sidewalk empty except for a boom box playing a CD on infinite repeat: Ting. Ting.

Chapter Three

THE HOUSE WAITED, its windows golden in the evening light. Lacey yearned to be inside, to open the windows and let the fresh air carry away the smell of new paint, to decide where to put the futon—opposite the window, or diagonally in a corner? She’d have to wait for Eric to come back with the keys. She lay on the grass with her hands lightly woven over the belly bump, sensing the odd fishlike twitches, the clear sense of something in her that was not herself, a stranger in the dark red heart of her life. Her favorite pregnancy website, YourBabyNow.net, said that at eighteen weeks she wouldn’t feel the baby, but she’d felt it from the first day. For two months they tried, and halfway through March she woke up one morning with a blunt, foreign feeling in her cervix. Something new, hello, little stranger. She waited two weeks for the test, but she knew, and she felt it now, though the website said the baby was no bigger than a large olive. She breathed quietly, and the child knocked and twisted, and finally lay still. Even in its stillness she felt it, the hard wall of her womb under a half-inch shield of fat.

Someone alive, someone new. On the day she took the test—the first day of her first missed period—she had parent-teacher meetings, three hours of parents, variously nervous, belligerent, businesslike, guilty, proud. She discussed handwriting and spelling, recommended math-game websites. The only meeting she remembered was the last, a young mother who sat in Lacey’s classroom with her three-month-old daughter on her lap. The baby was bald except for a tuft of transparent hair. She wriggled and murmured, and her round eyes never left her mother’s face. Ten minutes into the meeting, the baby began to fuss. The mother, never missing a word, lifted the baby up to her face, and the baby lunged forward, then latched on and suckled on the mother’s chin. Lacey had never seen a gesture so intimate. She forgot what she was saying about the woman’s older child and simply blurted to this stranger, I’m pregnant.

The young mother shifted the baby to her shoulder and rubbed the back of the round fuzzy head. Your first, right? she said. It’s worth it in the end.

The life inside Lacey was a mystery, not a communion. In its first weeks, this child, a creature smaller than a fruit fly, took her body by storm, three months of nausea. The baby filled her ankles with water, unstrung her knees, and tormented her with a starving hunger worse than she had felt on even the strictest diet.

The world was full of other people’s babies, so beautiful, with their big round eyes; they looked at her with a deep gaze, knowing something she had long forgotten. Even if she’d known it would be this hard, she would have welcomed it, the someday baby coming closer every day. But the struggle was hers alone. Not even Eric could understand.

Cloud shadows shuttered across her eyelids, cool, warm, cool again, and a small wind walked around her, plucking at her hair with teasing fingers. A darker, nearer shadow fell over her. She became aware of presence, the sound of breath, a weight in the air. How vulnerable she had made herself, lying on her back, half asleep, in a place where she knew nobody. She opened her eyes.

Harry Rakoczy from next door, whom she had last seen in Eric’s uncle’s office during the closing, loomed over her like a mild-mannered predatory bird, dangerous only to the fish in his shadow. Most people loomed over Lacey, but Harry was at least a foot taller than she, though he couldn’t weigh a pound more—probably five pounds less.

She felt she was seeing him for the first time. Before this, she’d looked at him through the house, her desire for the house; he was the owner, the opponent, the obstacle, her ally when Eric got cold feet; his was the signature that made the house hers. Now she looked at him as if she meant to draw him. He had the habitual stoop of the unusually