Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“All right, all right… Hey, are you still awake?”

“I am.”

“Listen, I’ve been thinking. The other day in the city I saw this girl walking along the street, she was pushing a stroller and she had a greyhound on a leash. She was wearing a little round fur hat, and she looked beautiful. Not as beautiful as you, of course.”

“So?”

“So maybe we should get a dog.”

“What?”

“Don’t laugh. A dog. You know. A pet? People have pets. The kids would love it.”

“Honestly, I don’t think it’s such a good idea right now.”

“Do you ever wonder if you resist any kind of change so much because of all that preconditioning in your Evil Empire childhood?”

“Look, I’m not saying we can’t ever have a dog. Maybe when the kids get a bit older… It would have to be a very small dog, though. We don’t have enough yard for a big dog.”

“And that’s another thing. This house has gotten too tight for us, I think… Hey, are you asleep?”

“No.”

“You’ve been silent for a while. Did you hear what I said? I think we should move to a bigger house.”

“Paul. We just bought this house. I’m only now beginning to get used to it.”

“So if you aren’t used to it yet, you won’t miss it. I mean, it’s nice enough, but it has only two bedrooms, Emma can’t even have her own room. With her constant crying right next to us, it’s impossible to get a good night’s sleep.”

“You seem to manage with no trouble.”

“You know how it is… Anyway, about the house—”

“Paul, this house is fine .”

“You thought my one-bedroom rental was fine too.”

“And it was. People don’t just hop about from place to place every couple of years.”

“Actually, that’s exactly what they do. Did you know that an average American moves eleven or twelve times in his life?”

“Really? How terrible for the average American! That’s, what, something like sixty rooms the poor fellow has to furnish? The horrors of having to buy sixty rugs!”

“Probably more like forty—it includes dorm rooms and studios and poky little houses like ours. Which brings me back to my point. This house is too small for us.”

“Oh Paul, I don’t know. I just hate the idea of moving again. And again. And again.”

“What if we skip the remaining seven or eight moves, and just move this one time? What if we find ourselves a perfect place that we don’t ever have to leave again? Just think about it—living in your dream house.”

My dream house… Each room a different texture, a different mood, a different poem, and at its heart, a creaking ladder sliding along floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in a timeless oak-paneled room that smells of leather and eternity; and floor-to-ceiling windows that glow nightly with a soft, thrilling life, the laughter of friends and the strands of music and the sonorousness of words imbibed in the still hours before sunrise; and doors that open daily onto the world—the mountains to the north, the jungles to the south, the swaying of tall grasses to the east, and to the west, the islands of the blessed. And you can leave the house at any moment, go out into the unknown with nothing but a half-packed bag swinging lightly in your hand and a half-finished poem in your heart, and when you come back, it will all be waiting for you still, welcoming and unchanged and endlessly surprising, a warm place full of art and love and starry vistas, the volume you were reading just before you left still open to your page by your favorite armchair, your never-grown children safely tucked into their beds, your mother the mermaid in her turret singing songs and braiding her emerald hair, your father the sage eternally at work on his antiquated typewriter behind the closed door, and no one gone, and no one dead, and everything always the same and always different and always joyful. A dream house unfolding at some magical juncture of the past and the future, bypassing the dull, heartbroken, trivial present, born equally out of memory and promise…

“Hey, honey, are you asleep?”

“No. What do you mean, ‘dream house’?”

“I mean a house with two stories and a finished basement, and a real backyard. A bedroom for each of the kids and a couple of guest rooms. A master bathroom with a whirlpool bath. Large walk-in closets. A fireplace or two. A kitchen where we can turn around. A terrace where we can grill. Proper space for entertainment. Perhaps an exercise room, a media room, a wine cellar—”

“I see. You want to dispense with the forty-room requirement all in one fell swoop. I’m not sure I’m ready to live in something out of The Great Gatsby . It’s a moot point, though—you know we can’t afford it anyway. Of course you make good money, but I don’t work, and there are all your student loans, and your car, and Genie will be starting preschool in the fall, and then Emma. And I was hoping to get a car of my own someday too… Even this place is a strain. Unless your parents help us, and we’ve decided against asking them, I thought.”

“Well, but we won’t need my parents’ help. That’s just what I wanted to talk to you about. Remember when I turned in that proposal in the spring? Well, last week we actually… Hey, honey, are you asleep?”

“Sorry, I must have dozed off. You were saying?”

“I’m saying I’m likely to become full partner by the end of March. With the money we’d have we could get the perfect house. We could start looking in the summer, move in time for Christmas. Imagine having a real fire in a fireplace and the kids’ stockings hanging from the mantel. Eugene would love it, he would be four, the ideal age. And you too, you could use some happiness right now. How nice would that be?”

“That does sound nice… unrealistic but nice…”

“It will happen, you’ll see. Hey, your feet are still cold. Let me just—”

“Mmm… That’s nice… mmm… mmm… Oh, Paul… mmm… That was nice… But I really must get some sleep now… Oh. Paul? Paul! She is crying again, wake up, it’s really your turn now. Oh, no. Did you hear that? I think Genie’s up too.”

“Mama? I had a scary dream. There was a monster who ate all my socks. I’m thirsty.”

“Paul? Paul! Oh, hell… Hold on, sweetie, Mama will be right there.”

My dream house: a place where you can sleep.

Cards and gift baskets for Paul’s family. Check.

Tips for the mailman and the grocery man. Check.

New rug delivered. Check.

Fire burning in the fireplace. Check.

Silver garlands, bronze deer, gilded fir cones, red poinsettias, soft Christmas carols, smells of cinnamon and pine, trays of freshly baked cookies still hot to the touch, holiday cheer—all unpacked from various boxes, unwrapped, dusted off, aired out, arranged here and there. Check, check, check.

Four stockings suspended from the mantel, three of them identical, sporting names in green and red letters: “Paul,” “Eugene,” “Emma.” Paul’s was soft and worn-out, the wool, once white, graying with the accumulated soot of many Christmas fires; it had been knitted at his birth by an elderly great-aunt who was, miraculously, still alive nearly a third of a century later to present their children with matching stockings. The fourth stocking, her own, did not match and had no name on it, but, unlike the other three, it carried a small private memory with it. On a cold, windy day in November six years before, the two of them had wandered into a neighborhood antique shop; Paul had found the stocking in the dingy back room and, maneuvering it off the hook, had turned to her and, looking uncharacteristically nervous, said, “For when we have a mantelpiece.” That evening he had asked, and, unsurprised, she had said yes. Check.