One Story House

I was carrying the tortoise in both hands, holding it out in front of me like an altar boy's Bible or a divining rod as I walked around the periphery of the room. Each plate of its ruddy shell was distinct. It leaked as I carried it. More water came forth than a tortoise that size could possibly store. The creature was a fountain, a cleft rock in my hands, and when I awoke I realized that the room in which I paced was my childhood bedroom.

I had been wandering through that house every now and again ever since I'd left it at age fourteen. A quarter century had passed, and I still wasn't out of it, in my dreams. It was a classic suburban house of its era: single story, l-shaped. The houses children draw look like faces with upstairs windows for eyes and a door for a mouth. They have a solidity and a centrality that make them home like the head is home. This house, with its public rooms that opened one into another as though they were only distended passageways and its bedrooms appendix-like cul-de-sacs, had no center, but my psyche was stuck in it. The previous owners' plantings all around it were strange, exotic: bottlebrush and artificial strawberry tree, a spruce the same powder blue as the corduroy pants boys wore then, succulents and other plants that were nameless, unrecognizable, inedible, with shiny leaves or spiky ones. One plant up a narrow side plot in perpetual shade bloomed annually with a single colossal lily that looked as though it were made of crumpled black leather from some thin-skinned creature. In front of each of the two children's bedrooms facing the street was a misshapen juniper, and at night the headlights of passing cars made the shadows of their branches whirl around the walls like pterodactyls. Awnings, eaves, and patio prevented sunlight from reaching in directly to this place made of formica and tile and linoleum and dark-green wall-to-wall carpeting with a nap like aerial photographs of forests. Everything about it seemed to be made of chilly alien materials, and the swimming pool was strangest of all.

The pool was unheated, too cold for skinny kids to jump in most of the year, but it always needed sweeping and skimming to get the dirt and debris out, and the tools for doing that were fantastically long, like cutlery for a moloch with its head up in the clouds. It was the usual pale turquoise with a pink cement rim that abraded bare feet, and the sharp smell of chlorine emanated from its waters. There's something fearful and mysterious about every body of water, murky water that promises unseen things in unseen depths, clear water that shows you the bottom far below as if you could fall into it, though the water would buoy you up in that strange space neither air nor ground. The term a body of water is apt here, for here was a mysterious body thirty feet long, eight feet tall at the far end, a transparent captive into whose depths you could throw yourself. Even the lightest breeze patterned the water on the surface, and the sun turned those patterns into strange skeins of light that fled across the bottom, endless nets cast across a fishless sea. Afterwards, I dreamed over and over of the pool as well as the house. It was as though I couldn't find my way out of the house, as though I was still lost in it, but the pool was less part of the labyrinth than the house's holy well.

Terrible things happened in that house, though not particularly unusual or interesting ones; suffice it to say there's a reason why therapists receive large hourly sums for listening to that kind of story. Or maybe there's one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essences of life too can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a...