The Lease

It is a rare and oddly specific piece of luck for people like Hollis and me to get a house like this one for a summer. Nobody our age inherits anything anymore. We rent, we renew, we measure our lives in twelve-month terms. Then one of the doctors Hollis trained with, a man I have met twice, called him out of the blue. His family had a place on the lake. It had stood empty for four years, he and his sister could not agree on what to do with it, and they would let it to us for the summer for the price of the utilities and the mowing.

Stood empty. Nobody said why.

I will say this much for it, in flat defiance of my husband: there is something wrong with this house. Otherwise why let it go for nothing? Otherwise why had nobody slept in it for four summers, in a bay where the summer people fight over dock space like it is the last water on earth?

Hollis laughed at me, of course. One expects a certain amount of laughing in a marriage.

He is practical in the extreme. He has no patience for instinct, an active horror of superstition, and he scoffs out loud at anything that cannot be measured, charted, and billed to somebody. When I told him on the drive up that the house was watching us from the end of its own lane, he said that was the trees, and turned up the podcast.

Hollis is a hospitalist and perhaps — I would not say this to a living soul, but this notebook is dead paper and nothing in it syncs anywhere — perhaps that is one reason I am not getting well faster.

You see, he does not believe I am sick.

And what is a woman to do about that? When the physician of some standing is a woman's own husband, and he assures the whole family that there is nothing wrong with her but a hormonal dip after delivery, a sleep debt, a temporary nervous depression with anxious features — what is a woman to do?

My brother Rowan is a physician too, and also of some standing, and says the same thing in a different vocabulary.

So I take the magnesium and the iron, and a capsule at bedtime I have stopped asking about, and I walk, and I sit in the sun, and I am absolutely forbidden to work until I am well again.

Personally, I disagree with all of them.

Personally, I believe that work I love, with a deadline and a little bit of heat in it, would do me more good than every green powder in the pantry. I designed patterns for eleven years. Wallpaper, fabric, the print on a hotel curtain you never notice and cannot stop seeing once you have. My hands know what to do. My hands are the only part of me that still knows anything at all.

But I did it anyway, for a while, after August was born — took the commissions, kept the studio at the kitchen table, told everybody it was only a hobby. It exhausted me, but it exhausted me the way a long walk exhausts you. Keeping it secret was the part that cost me. My God, the slinking. The way you learn to close a laptop with your thumb.

Hollis says the very worst thing I can do is think about my condition. And I confess it always makes me feel worse to think about my condition, which is convenient for his argument, and not for mine.

So I will leave it alone and talk about the house.

It is beautiful. It is, truly. Half a mile of its own lane, standing well back from the county road, with hedges, and stone walls, and gates that lock, and three small cottages for the gardeners, none of them gardened in now — one holds a lawn tractor, one holds bicycles from three decades ago, and one the family uses for storage they will not open in front of us.

There is a garden, a real one, large and shaded, box-bordered paths, and long grape arbors with benches underneath. There are greenhouses, all of them broken. There was some legal trouble, I understand, something about heirs and co-heirs and a trust nobody wants to be the one to break, so the place has sat for four years, and so it comes cheap, and so I get to look out a window that a woman with money planted a hundred years ago.

The spoiling of my ghost story, I am afraid. But I do not care. There is something strange about this house and I can feel it in the floor through my shoes.

I even said so to Hollis one night when the moon was up, and he said I was feeling a draft, and shut the window.

I get unreasonably angry with him sometimes. I am sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is the nervous condition.

But Hollis says that if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take great pains to control myself, in front of him at least, and it makes me so tired I could weep, and sometimes I do, in the car, in the driveway, with the engine running so nobody will hear it stop.

I do not like our room. I wanted the one downstairs, the corner one that opens onto the porch, with roses down the outside of the window and old chintz I would have been happy to lie in bed and look at. Hollis would not hear of it. Too much road noise. Too far from the bathroom for a woman who is up in the night. And he was not going to sleep on the other end of the house from me, which would defeat the whole purpose of the summer.

He is careful and loving and he hardly lets me stir without direction.

I have a schedule printed and taped to the refrigerator, an hour by hour, with the small chores on it in green and the rest periods in blue and my name at the top, WILLA, as if I were a client. He has taken all the care out of my hands, and so I feel basely ungrateful to value it so little.

He said we came here entirely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air there is. "Your exercise depends on your strength, dear," he said, "and your eating depends on your appetite. But air you can absorb all day for nothing." So we took the room at the top of the house, which is the whole floor nearly, with windows on every side of it, sun and cross-draft galore.

It was the nursery once, I think, and then a playroom, and then something like a gymnasium: there are bars on the windows, and iron rings bolted into the plaster at odd heights, and hooks I cannot explain, and nobody will tell me what any of it was for.

The paint and the paper look as if a daycare had used the room for a decade. The paper is stripped off in great patches all around the head of the bed, out to about the length of my arm, and in another great bald place down low on the far wall. I have never seen a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling, flamboyant revival patterns that commits every sin a designer can commit, printed by somebody who had learned the vocabulary and none of the grammar.

It is dull enough to confuse the eye following it, pronounced enough to keep irritating you, and just interesting enough to make you study it. Follow one of the lame uncertain curves for a little distance and it suddenly breaks its own neck, plunges off at an outrageous angle, contradicts itself, and destroys everything it was doing.

The color is repellant, nearly offensive: a smoldering, unclean yellow, faded unevenly by the slow-turning sun into a sickly sulfur here and a dull lurid orange there.

No wonder the children hated this room. I would hate it myself if I had to live in it long.

There comes Hollis up the stairs, and I must put this away. He hates to have me write a word.