Estate

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I wrote this in 2006, and it is semi-autobiographical although it was mostly based on a dream and not real events. I am almost certain a revision exists, but I don't have access to that computer file any longer, so unfortunately I am going to have to present this edition. I am boldly presenting it without any new edits. This used to be my favorite short story I had ever written, and barring finding the revision, I hope to revise it into something I can continue to be very proud of. That said, ANY and ALL feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for looking, skeletons!


-------------------------

I. The Herringbone

The house was shaped like an amateur dollhouse: the sort fashioned out of an old shoebox, whose inner walls were a pair of crudely cut cardboard rectangles set into a crosshair. It was decorated much in the same style that a young girl might adorn that dollhouse, with a simplistic table and set of chairs in the kitchen and a luxurious couch with little to no other furniture in the living room. The door was weatherworn and old, but gained character for the fact and swung easily when pressed. It had not been latched in place.

We wiped our feet on the doormat out of respect, filing into the square living room and examining the price tags attached to each item. A bookshelf for ten dollars, a pair of end tables for thirty. Boxes of smaller items were strewn about the floor, and Amy began digging within them. She pulled out a pair of Depression glass bowls and set them on the tawny carpet. Her cinnamon hair fell from behind her bent shoulders, creating a shroud around the box and prohibiting me from seeing any further finds.

There was nothing that even closely resembled an electronic or appliance in the room. Each piece, as old as the walls themselves, was either a bare necessity or a frivolous decoration. I could feel a frown turning into a smile. Marty separated from my side, taking to her own search. She ignored the boxes on the floor for the moment, studying the room's design before examining two dining room chairs which sat out of place, their seats begging to be reupholstered.

The open doorway into the kitchen beyond was occupied by a man of moderate height, the direction of his eyes concealed by glare from the lamplight streaking over his thick-framed glasses. His caramel colored hair was short but choppy, as if fingers had gently ruffled it. He stood at such leisure that I expected to see his hand resting against the doorway, but instead found him perfectly erect. After realizing that he had no price tag on him, and thus was not an appropriate object for staring at, my eyes filtered back to that luxurious couch in the corner.

"The couch is for you," he said. His voice was a high tenor which rang in the Depression glass Amy had collected so far. Startled at the break in silence, I whirled to face him once more. My confused eyes scattered to the still open door and out to the sign in the yard proclaiming the sale within. Marty and Amy had postponed their wandering hands to look at the couch, me, and then the man in the doorway who neither of them had noticed before.

"It's the only thing here you're going to want," he added, coming forward in a welcoming gesture. How wrong he was – shaking his hand was not an option. He began to introduce himself but was interrupted.

"Maddox Heathman – you wrote The Herringbone." By the obvious awe in her tone, Amy had no need to emphasize her enjoyment of the book.

"Yes, I did – a lesser known work," his high voice seemed to waver a little bit with the overwhelming feeling of being recognized, but as he realized all of our looks were of shock, he apparently ruled us out as stalkers and relaxed.

After finding it in a used bookstore per the moderately attractive clerk's recommendation, The Herringbone had exchanged itself between the three of us and a few of our other close friends a few summers back. It found a permanent place on all of our bookshelves as soon as we had money to spare. Marty and I had gone so far as to purchase all of Maddox Heathman's other work, which included two novels and a non-fiction. The About the Author sections had informed us that he lived in Massachusetts, but after moving here ourselves we must have forgotten.


II. Pink Lemonade

The couch was a velvety pink color, almost coral, tucked into the curving back of a fine Victorian oak border. I smoothed the folds in my skirt nervously, suddenly very aware of the way my legs bent and how the skin covering them appeared in the lighting of the room. I crossed them tightly, the hem of the fabric pulling taught across my mid thighs. He reemerged in the doorway with two glasses in his hands filled with clinking cubed ice and strawberry lemonade the same color of the couch.

"I can't say he didn't teach me well," he said, and I noticed his hand upon the couch – his finger tips inches from my leg. "It's just that I didn't learn everything from him. I think at least fifty percent of who I am is in direct rebellion of my father. And I do – I do thank him. I would never have gotten published were it not for him. But I am trying to appeal to an audience. And now, all I get is my father's colleagues picking up my books and expecting Landon and receiving Maddox instead. I'm just a disappointment for them. I'm sure you can understand why that's not what I want."

"Am I the audience you're appealing to?" I asked, watching the ice in my drink slowly melting. He was taking a sip of his.

"If I could appeal to one person in the entire world, it would be you," he flattered. He laughed softly at his quip, but nodded. "I would not be so bold as to define my audience. Easier to define are those who are not among it. Stuffy old psychology majors among them."

I nodded, politely smiling at his joke. I could see through to his eyes, a light cadmium blue, and saw in them that he could read me as well. My cheeks flushed at this realization, connecting his comments with reality. He knew. He already knew. I uncrossed my legs.

No one in the room was talking, but our ice was conversing loudly. He took the drink from my hand, leaving only the glass' perspiration on my nerves. "Would you like another?" He asked as he stood up, our desperately drank lemonades now empty in his hands. I shook my head, but he headed for the kitchen anyway. Suddenly worried to be left alone in the room, I left the couch and followed. The kitchen was the same shape as the living room. The west wall, where the couch would be in one room, was the only wall in the kitchen which had any sort of counter or cabinetry. A stove and refrigerator were also crammed along the short wall.

The object which made up the majority of the space was a rectangular table and four chairs, set closer to one wall than the other and looking rather misplaced because of this. In the middle was a Depression glass punchbowl containing the coral lemonade. Maddox, shortly ahead of me, had placed the glasses in the sink and walked past me into the hallway. Before he returned, music did. It had the crackling of a record player and the sound of the fifties.

"You really should center your table to balance the symmetry of the room," I suggested, keeping my voice intentionally low. Standing silent like a house plant in the kitchen was an older woman, her face worn into an empty expression which lingered on the open doorframe. Though she hand barely breathed since our entrance, I couldn't help but feel she was focusing on us. Wasn't the entire room?

"May I?" He asked, extending his hand and opening his palm on the downbeat of the music.

"Is this not dancing on his grave?" I asked, fearfully looking back and forth between him and his mother. I shifted on my feet, my balance unsteady since the drink, and my hand fell into his before he could answer.

Pulling me toward him into an amateur waltz, we began circling the kitchen. Dizzying rather rapidly, I lowered my head to his shoulder. "He is not dead," he whispered, setting the fine hairs inside my ear on end.


III. The Price Tag

A year minus a month had passed since Marty, Amy, and I had each said goodbye to life on the West Coast. The term year becomes strictly scholastic in this sense, meaning we had been here for an entire school year and the summer that followed. In a month, we would dig out our messenger bags, notebooks, and pick up at the college where we left off.

A strange polarity had drawn us back home for our winter and spring breaks, forcing us to board planes which were both nauseating and expensive for us. But even as we sucked the juices from turkey legs and laced our tongues with pumpkin pie, neither experience felt at all familiar. We began, after a time, interchanging the word "home" to mean both Boston and Tacoma. The latter's importance to us wore off more rapidly than we had expected until we were left with our decision to remain in the former for the summer.

Our new apartment, too small for the three of us but still too expensive, lacked any furniture. In fact, we lacked any suitable essential utensils for life on our own. Our transitional past year was one filled with furnishings and arrows pointing us in the right direction. We had spent the past few weekends at garage sales with our arms buried in boxes. What treasures we had found.

The price tag on the couch read sixty-five dollars, an amount I was willing to put forward. Marty had fallen silent in the presence of her obsession, not able to do more than produce her name and stare vaguely around the room. Amy, on the other hand, had begun quizzing Maddox on the more obscure points of his work.

"When Susan stopped combing the beaches, though, she didn't stop any of her other patterns. How significant of a metaphor could it have been?" She asked.

The man, slightly boyish in his expression and demeanor, shook his head, clearly overwhelmed at the focus being entirely on him. He stumbled over words. "I don't write metaphors," he replied humbly. The overview of one of his books would clearly show that it was littered with them, though. "They just happen," he explained.

Marty and I exchanged a glance. It was, after all, Amy's way to read into things more than we had. There was a sort of surface tension on Maddox's work which allowed us to glide across it, never becoming submerged; never drowning. Amy was somewhere in Atlantis, looking around and wondering why the city had been abandoned.

"So was it a symbol of her death or not?" Amy persisted, her cache on the ground sparkling in forgotten splendor.

"Umm, no," he replied, clearly at a loss. His eyes skimmed the ground and eventually found their way to me. "I'm sorry I can't offer you drinks or anything," he said to the whole of us.

Amy took her hint. Her assertive questioning had not resulted in what she had been after. The two had been conversing for a good ten minutes and at last she had surrendered. It was odd to loose a battle to one who would not fight back. She wanted only to prove to herself that he was real, but to her he was not. And her thoughts were still on the characters of The Herringbone, whose eyes were painted in our minds so vividly. Whose hearts were split and pouring blood all over pages – that blood arranged in letters we could read. Those same characters had given Amy, Marty, and myself a hope that real people still existed; the sort which we could at last identify with. And by real people, of course, we had all come to mean Maddox himself.

"Why are you getting rid of all this stuff?" Amy asked at last, hoping not to have lost him.

Marty knew. She and I put our eyes on the carpet out of respect. With a sort of childish silence she and I had directed the way to the small house in the first place. I knew now that it was a mistake to circle the classified ads and leave them open on the kitchen table. Maddox's address showed up beneath a red oval.

"It was my father's," he replied, and with a glossy gaze in my direction, he turned back to the doorway. "Please come and find me when you're ready to make your purchase."


IV. Susan, Himself

This was not a boy's bedroom. Though the furniture all adhered to a strict height ordinance, and everything seemed a little bit smaller than the rest of the world, it could in no way be considered masculine. From the walls to the window coverings, deep mauves and purples created a sort of dark miasma over the whole box. If the child who built the house were to come and pull off the roof, this square of the shoebox would be the favorite – linen scraps from her mother's sewing kit making neat little curtains on a cutout window.

But the roof did not come off so easily, and the door was hard to find once you closed it. I sat upon the bed softly, which took up most of the floor space, and tried to find a light source behind all of the purple netting. We were taking off each other's clothes, mouths hunting for one another. Our hand did not move rapidly, but slowly so as to make no mistakes. Each piece of cotton fell discarded, but folded itself as if ready to sleep in a drawer. When only his glasses remained, I looked to his eyes and saw experience. In the absence of ferocity was a bored assessment.

His hands were anemic and cold, sculpting me gently but tiredly. My skin did not feel this. Instead, I pulsed rapidly, burning his fingertips; heating the both of us. In terms of conquest, I had succeeded. In my mind, I would not have chosen the colors. Nor would I have selected the shrinking walls of the room, the small scars and imperfections in his skin, or the way he seemed to look everywhere but me. I did not mind the way he felt; we were two bodies which felt at all.

"I still love him," he said softly, his hands landing on the mattress at either side of me.


The words were in my head as clearly as if I had memorized them for a speech. No note cards were needed as I read them all over his walls. I pulled him closer, leading him forward. And at last, closed my eyes. "Don't try to redirect it," I whispered.


V. The Funeral

It was August 15th and the sun was no where to be found. The late Professor Landon Heathman had been a favorite among his students: a mentor, an inspiration, and above all a friend. He had taken a shine to the youth and our generation, easily working his lectures and ideas to fit so perfectly with what already stirred in our adolescent brains. He taught many courses, and among them was an introductory social psychology class which I had attended during my winter term at the university. He was not my favorite professor, but I had enjoyed his class and thought him intelligent. I was disheartened to hear of his death as were many students on campus.

In a group of graduate students who had known him more personally, a few of my classmates and I decided to attend his funeral to pay homage to a man who held a position we hoped to one day find ourselves in. It was the most polite thing we could do. And during the eulogies one voice spoke with an eloquence which I recognized immediately.

Beside the guest ledger sat a stack of pamphlets containing prayer. And on the back, a map to the location of the wake. As I reached for one I found instead a hand offered to shake. It belonged to a man who I knew to be twenty seven years of age, living in Massachusetts, and working on his fourth book. I took it weakly, looking up slowly to meet his eyes.

"I'm sorry for your loss," I said, and tightened my grip.