Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

For the house, even as it lies fallow during Paul’s business trips, between my children’s and grandchildren’s visits, is never entirely empty. If I sit still enough, letting my mind drift free until it bursts the imprisonment of matter, I begin to see the riches of things that skip, slide, and dance beneath the surface of the world—and I can then sense ghostly women moving through the house. All with their own versions of my elderly face, they walk through the rooms on their different errands, possessed of varied degrees of presence and persistence—some mere echoes, glimpses, faint wisps of holographic lives, others coming through so clearly, so tangibly, it seems as if I could reach out and truly touch them. I understand that they are not really here, of course, for they are only a vast, cosmic branching of endless possibilities, of numberless outcomes—all of them variations on my own fate, passing through mirror dimensions, brushing by me, fading in and out of sight—an endless theater of myself, parading before me as I sit in the entrance hall, ruminating on the packing list (I can do without the passport, I think), dreaming of all the poetry I will compose once I am away.

The woman I see most often is an absolute bore, an expensively dressed phantom of a person with not an original thought in her exquisitely coiffed head. She spends her days straightening the rooms and leafing through magazines; her visitors are of the most prosaic sort, electricians and rug cleaners and dog walkers; in the evenings, when her husband’s car pulls into the driveway, she dabs a touch of lipstick on her faded mouth before the entrance hall mirror, and waits, smiling meekly, tilting her head at the sound of his key in the lock. Paul is kind to her, if ever so slightly dismissive.

A more disturbing presence is a Mrs. Caldwell who has only five children and whose husband abandoned her for his secretary two decades before, though leaving her in full possession of the house. She dyes her indecently long hair blond and has dabbled in plastic procedures. Every time the doorbell rings on a Friday night, she clatters across the marble floor in her stilettos, and I catch a terrible glimpse of my features drawn on a sixty-five-year-old flesh-colored balloon, stretched and bloated. I hurry to avert my eyes, just as she is letting in her much younger boyfriend, to whom she then glues herself in a long, slurping kiss. I believe the man is no good; he is after her money. She has started to write love poetry, too. I find her frankly embarrassing.

There are a few others here as well—a thin-lipped, dieting, strident Mrs. Caldwell who has gone to work at some downtown office doing who knows what, as well as a flighty Mrs. Caldwell who occupies herself with trying to translate her mother’s poetry and is prone to bursting into tears whenever any of her children visit. My favorite Mrs. Caldwell is plump and energetic, young at sixty-seven, with a bristle of unkempt hair and a marvelous touch with her grandchildren; her house is always overrun with them (Emma is divorced now and living here with her two daughters while she studies for her architect’s exam, and Eugene and Adriana often visit with their baby). She appears genuinely happy, and seems to love everyone, just as everyone loves her, and her entrance hall is always traipsed over with muddy footprints and wet leaves, chaotic with toddler shoes and lunch boxes and mismatched mittens and shed petals of flowers and the bustle of dogs. I think of her belly laugh, her jolly face, to ward off despair whenever I see that other woman, that obese, slovenly, gray-haired and gray-faced woman who lives all alone and drags herself through the house, dressed in a dirty pink robe and dirty pink slippers, sighing wetly, mumbling poems under her breath, never failing to twist my heart with pity. I do not know her story, but I can see death in her stark, empty eyes—a child’s death—and I turn away every time, horrified and ashamed for some reason.

There may also be a Mrs. Caldwell who is moving away—though, strangely enough, neither she nor Paul is organizing the move; it is only the children, much older now, who come to the house, arriving in somber groups of two and three. Maggie and Celia, I notice, have been crying, Emma is white-lipped as she speaks to Eugene on the phone, giving him details of some funeral arrangements, asking when his flight from Bucharest is due to land, and I overhear Rich consoling George as they stand in the doorway surveying the boxes. For the entrance hall has been filling up with boxes upon boxes in the past few weeks—boxes of porcelain, boxes of silver, paintings wrapped in cocoons of padded paper, precious plates buried in crates of packing peanuts, contractors and realtors coming and going, two electricians carrying the dining room chandelier trussed up like a slaughtered boar on a pole between them. As the movers shuttle in and out on moving day, the double doors stand open for hours at a time, and hour after hour I sit in the hall, revising the packing list in my head (I have resolved to leave the notebook and the pens behind) and staring outside, at the rectangle of the gray November sky above the movers’ heads, at the waving of the oak tree’s naked branches. When the final boxes depart, I feel relieved to be rid of all that useless stuff at last, but a bit depressed too. I catch a glimpse of a “For Sale” sign stuck in the lawn outside, and then the doors close, and the house stands empty and dark, a winter draft from below the doors blowing a dead oak leaf across the filthy floor. To the left, then to the right, then to the left again, flutters the leaf. I wonder if it has my name written on it, and attempt to smile at the thought; but I do not get up to look. The lights of the grand chandelier above me no longer come on, for the electricity has been turned off; I can sense the long winter night moving in.

The old panic takes hold of me roughly.

How would I know, I think wildly, if I were not myself, but one of these other apparitions instead—and if so, how would I know which one? How would I know if I were only a footnote in a story that has gone on without me—if some other, braver woman has not led an entirely different, wonder-filled existence in my name, never even setting foot in this house, never even coming near all this? How would I know if I were the ghost of someone long dead within these walls, unable to leave, trapped here as punishment for my waste of a life—as failed at death as I was at living? And if this really is some kind of purgatory, how will I know when I am forgiven for my sins, when I am allowed to leave it all behind?

But quickly I push these dark thoughts away. Because of course I am going to leave, I am going to leave just as soon as Christmas is over. In the meantime I continue whittling down my list—I have decided to take nothing but Celia’s one-eared bunny and the volume of Annensky, and soon the volume of Annensky seems superfluous too, as I find I remember his poems with perfect clarity, even as I can no longer recall a single line of my own. I recite his words for hours, for days, for months on end, sitting in the entrance hall, looking at the closed door.

It is not a bad way to spend one’s time. It could have been so much worse. This morning, for instance, I heard a siren wailing outside. The next thing I know, the doors are being flung open, and two men in white burst in, a stretcher between them, and disappear at a run inside the house. I sit in the darkened entrance hall, waiting for them to return. After a while they walk back across the hall, slowly now, bent under the weight of the body on the stretcher. I glimpse a limp strand of gray hair, a dangling pink slipper, a hanging fold of a dirty pink robe. I do not look closely; I do not want to know what the matter is with her. I just whisper a quick prayer for the poor soul, and feel grateful for having been spared, and, as I hear the ambulance start, say to myself: There but for the grace of God go I.