Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

Blankly she considered the dingy tiles of the veranda, the wet black trees across the road, the bleak symmetry of the lawns—and at last panic caught up with her and overtook her.

The baby had fallen asleep.

What if she just stood up right now, and walked away?

The door issued a moan, and the realtor woman stepped out.

“Your husband wanted me to check on you,” she said, jingling the keys. “He’s inspecting the closets. Ah, Eugene is resting nicely. He feels at home here, I see.”

She looked at the realtor mutely.

“Eugene is such a lovely name.” The woman dropped into the chair next to hers, raising another, thicker cloud of dust. “So distinctive. Personally, I’ve always been interested in his namesake Eugene of Savoy, the famous Hapsburg general, you know. But of course, there is a bit of a family connection there: my father is a direct descendant of the Hapsburgs, you know, and—”

The door moaned. Paul emerged, remembering to duck his head.

“It’s great,” he announced with gusto. “We’ll take it.”

The realtor, flustered, tried to clamber out of the chair.

“I’m joking,” he said. The woman giggled warily, and sank back down. “I’m going to whisk my wife away on a tour now, if you don’t mind.”

“Go ahead, go ahead. I’ll stay here, give you some privacy.”

Paul held the inner door open. She rose, staggering a little under the baby’s bulk.

Just before going inside, she stopped.

“Paul,” she said, and smiled up at him to make it almost resemble a joke. “Do we even need a house?”

He laughed a short belly laugh, appreciative of her sense of humor.

“If we buy it, we’ll put the swing right here,” he said, pointing, and gently prodded her over the threshold.

By now, the ritual had become so familiar that she kept the overhead lamp off, going through the motions in an automatic haze. At four in the morning, the kitchen looked as if underwater, the cabinets and counters lost in shadows, her progress illuminated by a succession of feeble bluish lights: the subterranean glare of the refrigerator as she squinted into its poorly stocked depths in search of the bottle, the dim oven glow flooding the pans as she pushed them aside to reach the smallest pot, the purple flickering of gas turned down low as she put the pot on the stove.

As she waited for the milk to warm up, she leaned against the counter, swaying slightly. She was never fully awake these days (these weeks, these months), her reality blurring at the edges. She was never fully asleep either, her dreams only a baby’s whimper deep. She recalled The Cycle of Exhaustion she had written at nineteen—nearly a decade before—and choked on a sob of a laugh. The college all-nighters had possessed a bold hussar quality, a youthful devil-may-care flair, and their feel had been hard, light, and vivid in her triumphant, springing step. This sleeplessness was a wet, heavy weight, relentless and inescapable, creeping into her bones, turning the world gray, the urge to weep ever close to the surface. It filled her with an absolute despair—and, at the same time, a kind of sweet relief: it was good to give up worrying about achievements for a spell and let the weakness of her body take over—good to surrender to the inevitability of her temporary escape from destiny.

She was going to do this only once, after all.

Pale moonlight slanted through the narrow window; she could see a thin dusting of snow on the ground. She stirred the milk in the pot. Her feet were cold on the tiles. In the bedroom across the hall, her husband snored in a steady, energetic rhythm, and the baby—almost six months old now—made a meowing noise, a precursor to a bout of crying. On an impulse so vague it felt like the prompting of a dream rather than a conscious action, she bent to pull out the bottom drawer near the stove, sifted through a pile of partially unopened mail—advertisements, telephone bills, takeout menus—that nowadays seemed to drift through the house in unabated flocks, sprouting colonies in chance nooks and crannies. Underneath the envelopes lay a flat box scarcely larger than a pack of playing cards. She took it out. Plastic still clung around it, so she sliced through it with a knife, and lifted the lid.

Tiny bugs of words leapt out and ran all over the counter. She trapped them with both palms, scooped them up in handfuls, pinned their slippery, wiggly little bodies to the door of the fridge, then played with them sleepily, sliding them about, almost at random, in the quivering of the gas flame, in the blue glimmer of the winter moon, until the words began to draw together into lines and she saw that she was making a poem of sorts, except it was like composing on the other side of the looking glass, composing backward—not the usual hum solidifying into sounds, the misty glow of meaning slowly growing more defined, until it sharpened into disparate words, but instead, timid sense trying to sneak its way into the cracks between the silly words already there.

Also, she could barely read the letters in the dark.

Feeling comforted somehow, she stood pushing the half-invisible magnets to the left, to the right, stirring the milk, nodding off now and then, until it seemed like some memory from long before, the familiar excitement in her fingertips, the baby whimpering, the kitchen floating underwater, the cold in her feet, the baby crying, the swell and fall of the snores, the baby wailing… Waking with a start, she abandoned whatever dream she had been pursuing, rushed to test the temperature of the milk with her little finger, quickly poured it into the bottle, and hurried out to feed him; but at seven that morning, when she entered the kitchen with the baby sniveling in her arms, she discovered Paul standing before the fridge, a half-emptied glass of orange juice in his hand, his head tilted. The poem she did not remember writing snaked in wobbly, uneven lines through a widely dispersed cloud of unused adjectives and verbs.

“When did we get this?” he said, motioning with his chin. “My sophomore roommate had one of these. I didn’t know you wrote poetry, ha-ha!” He declaimed in a loud, exaggerated manner, grandly waving his free hand in the air:

The poem stopped abruptly.

“I would feel threatened if we had a garden,” Paul said, smiling, and finished the juice in one gulp. When he lowered the glass, there was an orange mustache above his upper lip.

“I think I was asleep,” she said.

“My turn.” He swept her lines aside, and as her five dozen words merged with the remaining two hundred, her small creation dissolved without a trace. Pushing the magnets off to the very edges of the door, he selected just three or four—she could not see which ones behind the broad expanse of his back—and arranged them in the middle of the empty space before stepping away. “Ta-da!”

I love my honey, read the magnets.

She moved to hug him, but the baby in her arms started to cry, so, aborting the effort, she settled him in the high chair and went to get more milk. When she slammed the fridge door closed, a bit too firmly perhaps, a couple of words were dislodged and plopped down to the floor. She glared at them, bleary-eyed, light-headed with sleeplessness, then began to flick all the magnets off one by one. An unpleasant image of roadkill being scraped off the pavement came to her out of nowhere.