In The Dream House: A Memoir

Later that fall, she asks you to join her at the Harvard-Yale football game. It is a favorite tradition of hers, and she has flown there for the occasion, but she needs to be back in Indiana earlier than expected. “If you drive there, you can bring me back,” she says. You drive from Iowa to Connecticut to meet her.

And so after a day of autumn temperatures and flask sips and people in furs and expensive bottles of champagne rolling around on the muddy ground like Budweiser cans, you sleep hard in an uncomfortable hotel bed. The next afternoon—after delays, and brunch with her friends, and more delays—you prepare to leave. She is a reckless driver—nothing has changed since that trip to Savannah—so you get behind the wheel of your car without asking.

You pull away from New Haven alternating between the radio, conversation, and silence. You scoot down through Connecticut and New York. In Pennsylvania the light drops away early, and rain glosses the pavement. Somewhere in the middle of the endless, hilly length of this state, the one you’d grown up in, she interrupts herself midsentence.

“Why won’t you let me drive?” she asks. Her voice is controlled, measured, like a dog whose tail has gone rigid; nothing is happening, but something is wrong. Dread gathers between your shoulder blades.

“You’re too tired, and you’re going to kill us,” she says. The timbre of her voice hasn’t changed. “You hate me. You want me to die.”

“You hate me,” she says, her voice going up half an octave with every syllable. “You’re going to kill us and you don’t even care, you selfish bitch.”

“You selfish bitch.” She begins to pound the dashboard. “You selfish bitch, you selfish bitch, you selfish—”

You pull off at the next exit and park at a gas station. She throws open the passenger door even before the car stops moving and stalks around the parking lot like a teenage boy who is trying to cool down before he punches a wall. You sit in the driver’s seat, watching her pace. The urge to cry is present, but far off, as if you’re high. When she starts walking back toward the car, her eyes fixed on your face, you hastily unbuckle your seat belt and run to the passenger seat. You don’t want her to leave without you, and you’re not sure she won’t.

Afterward, the drive is framed by the wet, dark mountains. You remember going through Pennsylvania around Christmas the year before and seeing eighteen-wheelers overturned on the side of these same roads, their engine blocks blackened by extinguished fires. And cars, too, on the highway’s shoulder, casually burning. She goes eighty, ninety miles per hour, and you have to look away from the climbing needle. The shadowy shapes of deer pass in front of you through curtains of rain. I am going to die, you think. You pray for a cop to pull you over, watching the side mirror for blue and red lights that never appear. You clutch the door when she accelerates, and when the car whips weightlessly over a hill. “Stop that,” she says, and goes even faster. “Sleep,” she commands, but you cannot sleep.

Midnight comes.²³ You enter Ohio, a state you’ve always found terrifically boring to drive across, but now your adrenaline—which you are sure will run out eventually, though it hasn’t yet—makes your hands tremble on your lap. You drive past dead animals by the dozens: raccoons blasted apart by speeding tires, deer whose muscular animal bodies are contorted like those of fallen dancers.

In the final stretch, when she exits the main highway and takes a two-lane country road south to Bloomington, the car begins to yawn to the left, kissing the double line, surpassing it, and then to the right, where the door passes within inches of a metal barrier. When you look over, the back of her skull is touching the headrest, her eyes closed. You bark her name, and the car rights itself.

“Now you’re too tired,” you say. “You’re falling asleep. Please, let me do this final stretch. We’re almost there.” You have never been so awake.

“I’m fine,” she says. “My body is my bitch. I can make it do whatever I want.”

She curls her lip, but doesn’t say anything else and doesn’t stop. Every so often, the car swerves drunkenly. You pass a religious billboard that asks you if you know where you’d go after death. In full daylight, this sort of manipulative propaganda would make you roll your eyes. But now, it tugs on an old childhood fear, and you whimper and then try, too late, to swallow the sound.

When you first came to Bloomington—when you helped her find the Dream House—it was impossibly bright. It was late spring, and the trees were electric, new-growth neon green. Now the leaves burn in red and orange, and brown ones spiral away from the branches. The season is dying and you are going to die too, you are certain, this night.

The car pulls into the driveway around four in the morning and sits there in silence. You feel like you are going to throw up. The leaves drop onto the car’s roof and the wind snatches them away with a papery scrape. Finally she reaches to unbuckle her seat belt, but you are watching the lawn. Two dark shapes are crossing it, like dogs, but not. Coyotes? It would have been a lovely sight at any time, but in contrast to this night’s terrors it is so beautiful your face tingles.

She starts as if you’ve struck her. Then she sees what you see. You wait for her coo, for her sweetness.

“Fuck you,” she says. She leans toward you and speaks directly into your ear. “You say ‘look’ without saying anything else, I think you’re fucking pointing out someone who’s going to fucking kill us. It’s the middle of the night. What the fuck is wrong with you?” She kicks open the car door; the coyotes bolt for the trees. You watch her stomp through the Dream House. Her silhouette is thrown up against a series of illuminated windows—kitchen, bathroom, bedroom—and then all the lights go out.

You get out of the car and sit against the side of the house, putting your winter coat on backward like a smock. The coyotes come back, after a while, trotting casually across the lawn. Deer too, and foxes, all paying you no mind, as if you are part of the scenery, as if you aren’t there at all.

You could go to bed too. Or, you could sit at the table in the kitchen and watch the scene from behind the windowpane. But that, you think, would be like putting this night in a museum—removed, too-soon forgotten. Sit with this, you think. Don’t forget this is happening. Tomorrow, you will probably push this away. But here, remember.

Your butt goes numb in the grass. The lawn is a theater of wildlife. Your little car, stalwart as any stallion, sits silent and bright in the driveway, finally cooling down after her long drive. Birds titter early-morning Morse code from the trees. A gaggle of drunk students crests the hill at the edge of the golf course and stand there looking at you—perhaps believing you to be a ghost—before shuffling down onto the street. “Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love,” Allen Ginsberg wrote, “past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?”

And in the same way that the wrist rotates faster when the door latch is about to release, the predawn night speeds up a little just before the day comes. And though it would not be until the next summer solstice that you’d be free from her, though you would spend the season’s precipitous drop into darkness alongside her, on this morning, light seeps into the sky and you are present with your body and mind and you do not forget.

In the morning, the woman who made you ill with fear brews a pot of coffee and jokes with you and kisses you and sweetly scratches your scalp like nothing has happened. And, as though you’d slept, a new day begins again.

23. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C752.1, Taboo: doing thing after sunset (nightfall).

Dream House as the River Lethe