Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

My wife and I had been living in our house outside Mount Vernon, Washington, for just about a month. The land around there is alluvial and soft, and over the years the house had settled awkwardly and was so weather-beaten in places, yet so new and marvelously current in others, that it would have been hard for an outsider to guess whether it was an old house that was falling apart or a new house with many sly touches of distressed authenticity. The previous owner had been a tulip farmer with a large family, and we supposed that throughout the years market fluctuations had dictated improvements — how frail and precarious the futures in tulips must have been! In some years, obviously, this family had been flush, while in other leaner years, they’d simply made do — the house recorded and quietly testified to the course of their fortunes. Our kitchen came equipped with a dishwasher and a disposal, but the screened porch was rotting and lopsided, leaking not only rain but clouds of mosquitoes, one always following the other rapidly. Out back, beyond the porch, there was a fair yard, a seasonal pond choked with purple loosestrife, a gnarled gray apple tree, and a thorny brake of blackberry bushes that separated our property from the tulip fields, still farmed by the same family. The old man had simply moved to town after his wife died, perhaps feeling that an old, questionable house, without a wife or kids, was no longer worth the persistent effort it would take to restore and maintain.

No matter — it was our dream house. Two flat strips of blacktop stretched away from it, falling off toward infinity, and we liked to imagine, in our private, silly moments alone, that the earth was our present, that the crossroads was the ribbon wrapping it, and that our house, shabby as it may have seemed, was the somewhat frilly bow atop this wonderful gift. Perhaps we’d lived as nomads in New York for too many years, and maybe the twin luxuries of space and ownership made us dizzy, but at times, during those first few weeks, we couldn’t help ourselves. I’d lie awake at night and press my palms flat against the cool white spaces of the sheets and revel in the knowledge that tomorrow night I’d be able to do the exact same thing. That it wouldn’t be taken away seemed a miracle. Those first giddy weeks, Meagan and I made love frequently and with renewed passion, exploring the different rooms and discovering each other at the same time, an intimacy that distance and the novel possibility of separation seemed to encourage. One night, however, just a few days after we’d celebrated our first month in the house, I woke and found myself alone — itself a rarity, after the cramped studios, the cheating one-bedrooms — and sprang up, startled and afraid. I searched the house upstairs and then down, and finally gathered the folds of my robe around my neck and went outside. The lawn glistened with mist, and a few high clouds scudded overhead in a clearing starlit sky. I could smell the wet dark soil all around me, and I could hear something too — something faint and far away that I couldn’t quite place.

Meagan was standing out on the road. A balmy wind blew across the open fields and stirred the border of forsythia, and I watched her hand rise slowly to her face and briefly rest there. Although it made for a strange picture, seeing my wife out on the road, in her bedclothes, I wasn’t alarmed. Her father and brother and her brother’s wife and baby were to arrive the next day — it was her brother Jimmy’s birthday — and I supposed that this visit, the first in our new house, in this new land we had decided to call home, had made Meagan both restless and thoughtful. To her the visit would in some way bestow official sanction on our choices, as a marriage is sanctioned by witnesses. This sudden convergence of her father and brother, as well as the absence of her mother, affected her outlook, I think, so that for several days, ever since the phone calls were made, the dates settled, then rearranged and settled again, she’d been seeing our house through their eyes and suddenly everything puzzled and depressed her. It was too much house, or not enough, too new or too old, and the landscape, of rivers and mountains and muddy fields, all sealed beneath a lid of gray and black and white February clouds, was too foreign, or too monotonously familiar.

“I just wanted to look at it,” she said, when I came up beside her. “It’s big, isn’t it?”

In fact, it was — far more house than was needed for two people who’d agreed, early on, that children probably wouldn’t be part of the picture. There was a huge attic with a row of dormer windows, out of which no one ever looked; they were an odd, decorative flourish without function. I wasn’t even sure how to get up there, although I assumed some sort of hatch-and-ladder contraption existed, perhaps a boarded passage hidden away in the back of a closet. In the house proper, aside from the master bedroom, there were two other bedrooms upstairs, and a third downstairs. The rooms upstairs were papered with Grecian pastoral scenes, and the downstairs room, obviously a young boy’s, was done up in a Western motif, with horses hitched to cacti and men gathered around a campfire. In a fit of rebellious mischief, someone had drawn crayon stick figures along the lower reaches of the wall — ambuscading stick figures aiming bows and wearing Indian headdresses, no less. The drawings were the primitive dreams, like the ancient petroglyphs of a hungry tribe, of a boy sent to bed without his dinner. Upstairs and down, the wallpaper was old, yellowed by age and sunlight, mapped with brown water stains, and in many places it fell off in big clumps to reveal the soft, flaking plaster beneath it.

“Hear that?” Meagan asked.

“I did before. What is it?”

“Somebody out there is playing the piano.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s lonely.”

To the west, across the road and below the levee, a ragged wisp of gray smoke rose in the wind. Our closest neighbor, Mr. George, lived down there in a one-room cabin along the banks of the Skagit River. The Skagit Valley is a flat stretch of fertile land that lies between the sea and the mountains, and at times, when the fog is low and rolling, or at night, in the dark, when the small, sad lights of some distant house glow like portholes, you can still imagine what it was like twenty thousand years ago — a cold, silent world buried in glacial ice, and then deep under water. At times the air is so damp and dense with fog you feel as if the waters had just yesterday receded; other times, the feeling is antediluvian and expectant, especially in late winter or early spring, when the rains fall and the Skagit floods. The winding network of levees generally holds the floodwater in check, and most houses, like ours, are protected — we carry flood insurance just in case. Yet there are remnants along the river of the days when people contended more openly with nature, and fearless or defiant men, or men who are simply too old and too poor and too proud, like Mr. George, still live in some of the ramshackle houses on the banks of the river. When the floods come, they simply take to their roofs, or hop in an aluminum pram, plying the oars against the current, and wait.

When I’d first come out, I thought the sky was clearing. It wasn’t. The wind had died out and in the stillness the fog was thickening around us. My robe was damp, the absorbent flannel heavy with sea air.

“Let’s go back inside now,” I said.

Early the next morning, Meagan shopped for Jimmy’s favorite foods (he was a fussy eater), purchased three sets of new sheets, emptied our modest liquor cabinet into a mop bucket and hid it beneath the sink, and in the bedrooms set vases of fresh flowers, each with half an aspirin dissolved in the water. It didn’t seem to me that family should be a source of so much anxiety, especially in our own house, and I was slightly annoyed at the elaborate, endless preparations, as Megan ran from room to room, wiping a fingerprint from a mirror, or restacking books on a night table. Perhaps because my own father died when I was young, and I, as the only child, was absorbed into a larger and more casual clan of aunts and uncles and cousins, my sense of family, and of love and loyalty, too, had always been friendly and equable rather than fierce and divided. The weight of my expectations, and therefore the burden of my disappointments, was spread evenly among many people, so that a typical Saturday in my childhood might find me baking a cake with a cousin in the morning and then drinking Roy Rogerses in a bar while my uncle shot pool until the Old Style beer sign in the window began to warm in the night air and it was time to return home for a dinner cooked by my mother.