This isn't exactly a haunted house story. There's a house, to be sure, and it's possible that it's haunted (depending on how you define the word), but there's no crumbling Victorian Gothic mansion encrusted in ivy and webs, strange artifacts and curios layered in dust above self-igniting fireplaces. No portraits and pianos and music boxes that seem to have a mind of their own or peeling doors that creak open after you were certain you'd locked them. There's no family plot with its moldering headstones out back, no greenhouse crawling with poisonous flowers. Perhaps somewhere deep inside, I am that specter-filled structure, replete with horrors enough to drive one mad . . . aren't we all, a little bit? Had I had control over my making, it's what I would've chosen to be, but as it was and is, I'm really nothing extraordinary to look at.
I'm not that old, as far as houses go—in fact, I consider myself quite in my prime. I was built sometime after a war, during a housing boom, a standard one-story stone ranch in a quiet suburban neighborhood with its bike routes and puppy dogs and milkman. I had a nice little manicured lawn, a non-white picket fence, a stained glass window depicting a charming swan over the salmon tub in my hall bathroom, which also had little white tiles mimicking a beehive pattern. I had real hardwood floors in my dining and living rooms, two bedrooms with sunny south-facing windows, and the one bathroom already mentioned. There was nothing particularly large about me, but my appliances were freshly minted, and I sparkled with all the cheeriness of a brand-new starter home.
My first residents were the standard newlywed couple, he with his perfectly-coiffed hair and irritating smile and she in her flattering dresses and apron, always too eager to please. Though I was new to all of everything, I was savvy enough to know something unnatural writhed beneath their polished relationship. I never did like the way he got a bit too tense when she didn't have dinner on the table, or the fervor with which she dusted the furniture. Their taste was lacking, as well. Ugly floral arrangements and ugly serving ware with its yellowish butterflies and flowers, orange couches and bright cherry red table and chairs in the kitchen—overall, there were way too many colors, as if she in particular were overcompensating for the black-and-white television screen life they led.
I couldn't tell you their names, but I could tell you about the small bones that protruded from her fragile little wrists and knuckles; I enjoyed watching her hands when she'd raise them to straighten a picture or place something on the fireplace mantle. And her teeth—it was a treat to see them, as I so seldom did, the only time she smiled being when she prepared herself to step outside to greet him as he returned from work, pinching her cheeks as if to fit them into a mold. She'd also occasionally look at them in the bathroom mirror, a rectangular reflective glass with etchings of flowers at the beveled corners. She'd rub a waxed piece of string through them, or she'd touch at some perceived flaw there. Then I'd get a brief glimpse at those strangely too-small-for-her-face teeth, those tiny mouse teeth, ripe for chattering. I wished I could hear them chatter, as if it were wintry cold and she got a chill and couldn't control herself enough to stop. Oh, the thought of those mouse-teeth clicking against one another uncontrollably. It was a sound I was never privileged to hear.
The only sound that came close to what I believed her chattering teeth might resemble she made during those horribly uncomfortable nights when he'd do things to her on their bed. She'd always lie back and look up at me, try to mentally transport herself, I'm sure, and endure the unfortunate torment, and she'd press her nails against the bed post, click them against the wood in a strange way. Sometimes if I ignored what was going on in front of me, I could pretend her tapping polished red nails were instead her pearly white mouse-teeth.
I grew quite attached to her, in my own way, but I positively hated him. He had no respect for anything within my walls. He cared about the outside, argued about the shrubbery she'd over-trimmed and about hiring the right people to patch up the masonry and mow the lawn. He'd complain to the neighbors about her decorating expenses as he sat on the porch swing and yet never actually put in the effort to help her. But the worst of all were his hygiene habits. The little hairs he'd leave around the sink after shaving and the dirt he brought in off his shoes and forced her to clean up--such a lack of respect for both she and I! And then there were the more subtle habits of his, the ones that dirtied me but which he neither noticed nor seemed to care about. That disgusting pipe he smoked left foul stenches on my curtains and in the corners of the ceiling, and the mere aromas associated with his human male body were utterly stifling.
The few times they had dinner parties, I was intrigued to meet the others they brought in. Usually these "others" were men from his workplace whom, I gathered, he was trying to impress. All of these men were identical, with too-big foreheads and stupid tweed jackets, thirty-year-olds trying to look fifty, simpering women on their arms. She'd put on a big dinner—a roast, or a whole chicken—smile in some new lipstick, and afterward, he'd tell her everything she'd done wrong. Usually the leftovers sat on the table, neither of them inclined to clear them away, and by morning, the smell would permeate all of me. Once, her mother came to dinner; that'd been tense. I enjoyed seeing him squirm a little at her penetrating questions, but then he'd taken it out on her when the mother had gone, and that had negated any joy I'd had of watching him in his discomfort.
Sometimes, I tried to imagine what would happen if he suddenly fell down the basement stairs in his trek to do the laundry, but then I realized he never did the laundry and that, if he had broken a leg, she'd have had more work anyway. And as I grew increasingly agitated by her smallness and fragility, I couldn't bear to see her do more for him.
She was weak, but he was weaker. They were hopeless. Even their arguments were hopeless. She'd work to appease him when surely she only wanted to claw his face, and he'd sprinkle terms of endearment amongst his criticisms. So false. Which of us wore the façade? Which of us was a mere well-manicured shell, deceptively furnished empty rooms inside?
But they were my first, and I was young. I didn't know at the time that I wasn't the one that needed living in. I didn't understand what I grew to feel toward her. I knew only that I seemed to want something I wasn't sure I could have.
So when they beyond all rationality brought in a baby, I took it.
She never got over it. She always suspected me, but who could prove it? She'd walk absently through my rooms, an undead ghost, she more hollow than I'd been before they'd moved in. What she thought, I couldn't tell, but the way she'd look at me, and my walls—the way she'd run her fingers around my doorframes, kneel down upon my floors and carefully knock, as if expecting her ugly infant would hear and cry out for her . . . I shudder recalling it. She began to frighten me, truth be told, the way she utterly lost herself. She became unkempt, stopped caring for her hair and makeup and certainly for him and even for me. I began to feel a real aversion, an actual disgust toward her. The way she wandered, would sit on the toilet lid and just stare at the sink. It broke me, truly, to see her in such a state, especially as I never saw her smile and, therefore, never saw her teeth, again.
I know he tried to find some kind of help for her, but at some point, she took drastic measures, and someone arrived that night and just took her away. I couldn't be sure who they were or where they took her, but I can't help believing the mad woman ended up in an asylum.
He didn't last much longer after that. His drinking had been bad before she'd lost it, but he positively drowned himself after. It was all so ridiculous. He'd never seemed to like her much anyway; I would've thought he'd be happy to be rid of her. But he became a shade after her fashion, touching my walls in strange places, talking to himself as he mulled about, half-empty ice-clinking glass in his hand. But who was there to send help for him?
He helped himself.
They found him hanging from the light fixture in the living room, days after I'd had to watch him do it, watch the way he haphazardly arranged everything, watch the flash of regret in his eyes as the life drained from them and he tried to loosen the self-made noose. I sensed in those moments that he knew I was there, that I saw him, and I was pleased, gratified, in a way. The ones who cut him down made blithe comments, some sad, some rude. But was there a word for me? For my trauma? Hadn't I been the one who'd had to stare at his corpse for days?
I still see his bulging tongue and purple, swollen feet when I think of them, but mostly I think of her shiny red nails and the sound they made, how it must've resembled her chattering teeth.
Since then, I've been reserved, but I couldn't keep anyone for long. I don't think it was me, really; I think it was the story of the people that'd been there before them. It wasn't something really disclosed—that a previous owner had committed suicide within my walls—but it was known, if you will. Somehow, word got out. And while I had an occasional elderly person or middle-aged bachelor, for many years I never had a couple or anyone with children. It was as if youth knew. But I didn't feel tempted to engage with any of my dwellers, anyhow. Not since what had happened with my first. I'd played a little, usually when they were intoxicated or too senile to differentiate, but I'd grown wiser. I'd grown older. I'd found ways to dissociate myself from those within my walls, to avoid becoming emotionally attached. Perhaps it was made easy by the fact that none of them were particularly interesting characters.
The neighborhood around me changed, slowly at first, then quite rapidly. Over half of the small ranch starter homes that had made up my subdivision were demolished to make way for a freeway. I watched as the houses behind and around me were torn down, waited for the inevitable, but fortune was on my side, and rather than rip me to shreds, the construction crew that visited me one brisk autumn morning instead put up a wall, to separate me and the few remaining houses from the road about to come through. While to some degree I appreciated the privacy, I was somewhat disgruntled at what happened around me. Most of the remaining houses fell into some disrepair and were torn down only to be rebuilt into massive two-story travesties, with walls covered in windowless siding and pretentious columns that served no real purpose. For a brief while, I feared that I might face the same remodeling fate, and yet nobody felt inclined to touch me, likely because I was, after so much construction, at the dead-end of the dislocated street, on a little hilltop, where surely no one would pay to buy a brand new house.
But my bones were good; they always have been. And my interior, though it'd gone through cosmetic changes, was as firm as that of any modern dwelling. I had shaggy green carpeting in my living room, and the kitchen's teal formica countertops had been replaced with a rather presumptuous butcher block. The last resident had somewhat made up the basement, turning it into a not-quite-pleasant-but-livable space, painting the walls in the portion nearer the stairs, adding some cabinetry and curtains at the hopper windows, and even carpeting half of it (he'd had a gross sort of den down there, with a beer keg and dart board and a television on which he watched videos he was no doubt too embarrassed to be seen watching through an upstairs window--needless to say, I'd been relieved when he'd moved out).
My exterior needed some attention. My stonemasonry was solid and well-designed, and hardly a crack was to be seen on it. But my porch had begun to sag a bit, and my roof needed replacing. Even my chimney could've used a bit of flashing. But my curb appeal could've been greatly enhanced by some mere trimming and uprooting and planting.
I waited for a new resident, not so much because I wanted one, but because I knew that if I couldn't get one, I'd surely be torn down along with the others, and just when I was beginning to lose hope, she moved in. My current resident.
And I'm determined to keep this one, though she could never replace my original residents. No, as much as she piques me, you always remember your first.