A two-bedroom house ten minutes’ walk up the hill from my father’s. Salt-blasted, storm-struck, weather-beaten, peeling navy well on its way to grey. Two white-trimmed windows facing the street. Two windows side by side beneath a pitched roof, cedar-shingled. A child’s drawing of a house. Redbrick chimney. A nice wide porch out front, and three steps down, a dead lawn and six cracked concrete pavers to the sidewalk, a sidewalk which takes you along a quiet street.
Ours was Mott. Named for who the fuck cares. Mott Street. 232. The house worse for wear, but not a dump. Room for improvement, which is what you want in a house. That’s what houses are for. What arrives finished is for people without souls, without imagination. I trust nothing finished. Nothing that doesn’t leave me some room for work.
Two bedrooms upstairs, windows on the street, and a bathroom in between. Downstairs a living room with a brick fireplace and brick mantle painted coats and coats of white, darts of char shooting up from within. A dining room. An old porcelain light fixture pointing at the floor, a white warhead at the end of a brass rod. Radiators that spoke in tongues. Beat-up wooden floors everywhere, except the kitchen, which was all yellow linoleum. White Formica counters edged in aluminum straight out of a 50s diner. Wood cabinetry painted yellow, a gas range—oven and burners, splintered enamel both, and a clock in the console, the old saw, telling perfect time twice a day. An angry fridge.
There was a yellow yard out back, home to two good apple trees, both behind a tall pine fence many years newer than the house itself.
All to say, we were happy.
The two of us at the Salvation Army, at Goodwill.
See Tess moving backwards up our porch steps? See the expression on her face? You ask her if she wants to trade places, if she wants a rest. I’ve learned my lesson. She takes no shortcuts. She takes no shit. She will not be helped. She is the bravest, toughest, fiercest. Strongest. Look at her face. Watch while that horrible green corduroy (the people’s fabric of White Pine) couch slowly slips out of her hands. While she loses her grip, inch by inch. The sharp end of a wayward staple cuts the soft skin of the inside of her right arm. See the blood there? You tell her to drop it. You tell her to take a break. It’s a single minute in a life, Tess. But she will not let go until the couch is inside and facing the fireplace.
It fits just right, just so. Like it was bench built for our new little world. The front door wide open and, outside, the tailgate down. Our brand-new plastic-wrapped mattress is piled with boxes of the cheapest shit the great town of White Pine has to offer. Tess’s jacket left on the lawn, flung off in frustration. How dare it inhibit her. How dare it keep her warm when she wants to be cool.
The middle of the afternoon. Warm despite the season. All the windows open. All the doors. House and truck. Our lives exposed to the world. And Tess, sitting on our corduroy, has me on my knees. One leg in her jeans, one leg out. One side bare, one side not. Her hands on the back of my head, she holds on tight. My fingers curling inside her—ring and middle—with my tongue pressed hard against her, no soft flicking, no light touch today. Today it’s hard pressure, and her fingers tightening, tightening, she comes quickly the way she does. She comes hard. And after, she pulls me up, pulls me to her and kisses my mouth and says my name the way she did then, more than once and in all its variations. Sometimes Joey, sometimes Joseph, sometimes Joe.
“We’re home, my love,” she says. “You and me.”
She laughs and returns her slender naked leg back to her jeans and runs into the sunlight singing to me one song or another.
And I am happy. The two of us, day after day filling that place, making it ours. Making it fortress and nest, stronghold and citadel.