The Things That Live Inside You

I was built up from the ground and into it, with a concrete foundation and beams of good, solid wood. The workman used to stand inside my frame, wearing sleeveless undershirts they’d sweat through by eleven, eating lunches out of tin boxes packed by their wives, smoking cigarettes down to the butt. The good ones were respectful and cleaned up after themselves; the bad ones threw their butts all over. Some of those are still inside me, like bullets. All of those men are dead now. And I’ll be 97 this year.

Sometimes people ask me questions, but they are always the wrong ones. Usually it’s real estate agents, poking around at me like I’m a fattened cow for them to auction off. In chunky heels and power suits they’ll walk around, sniffing, place a manicured and well-creamed hand against a wall and say, “How much are you worth, huh? Just how much can I get for you?” As though I care about money. Even the good ones will stand in front of me and sigh and ask about paint jobs or wainscoting or, my least favourite word these days, “Renos.”

It’s because human beings only care about their outsides. I’ve noticed people don’t value anything that depends on them for life, even things that they need in return: acidophilus bacteria, mitochondria, the endless stream of viruses and microbes. Their own children. They don’t truly consider it a life until they push it out and set it down to take a breath on its own. That’s why it’s easier for me to befriend the slow-moving growing things, the garden and the yard – the plants understand what it is to be occupied, inhabited. How the things that live inside you tell you the most about who you are.

I could spell out every detail of every event that’s ever happened in me. I have total recall, though that doesn’t up my property value. I remember when the other houses and I were first getting to know each other. After we were all connected with telephone wires and were able to talk for the first time, each of us spent hours regaling the others with all the particulars of our interior lives. But I’m one of the oldest left now. I’ve seen too many of my friends ripped down and thrown in metal containers and driven away and replaced, and I can’t help resenting the newer homes that take their spots. I know it’s not their fault, but I don’t have to like them, besides which they seem pretentious to me – all about clean modern designs and new synthetic insulators and “smarthome” technology – they aren’t interested in my stories.

The family in me now is nice enough, but they travel a lot and leave me alone with nothing but dust and hours and hours to think. I think mostly about the nuns. And about Grant Fischer.

The nuns seemed nice enough at first. This was in the 40’s, and they were a small order of extremely devout Catholic nuns. They moved in, eight of them, and went about their quiet life, padding around barefoot at all times. There was one, Sister Dorothy, with a mass of springy auburn curls, who had a secret pair of wool socks. They entered me by way of the mail, sent by her sister, and Dorothy let out a little squeal when she opened the manila envelope and slid them out. They were thick and made from undyed, rustic wool, and knit in a simply pattern similar to the ones so many women had made for the soldiers overseas. Her sister had sent them. She would put them on in the privacy of her cell and hide them under her mattress during the day. No one – not the Mother Superior or any of her chosen sisters – no one ever found out about those socks.

The best part about the nuns is that they were good with the garden. Not everyone believes this, I know, but I have always felt that my physical body is connected to other life forms around me, and that they in turn affect me: my energy, my aura, the feeling people get when they look at me. A lush garden makes the ground happy, and I can feel that against my very foundations and it makes me happy, and makes all the living creatures happy.

In their garden, the nuns grew zucchini as thick as their arms and a variety of herbs I’d never encountered before. There were fruit trees – cherries and apples and pears – as well as beets and tomatoes and cabbages and varieties of green and yellow beans.

All of which they eventually stopped eating.

The nuns, zealots that they were, decided to starve themselves. They did this, at first, in solidarity with the poor of the city. But even long after this was argued to be fertile in the press and by concerned parishioners who beseeched them to eat, they did it to purify themselves for God, to offer their pain against the pain of the world, to suffer in order to help the souls in purgatory and the beleaguered here on earth. As though there were anything glorious or meaningful about their suffering.

For a brief time, it’s true, they were ecstatic: manic even, singing about the glory of God and sleeping little, praying all night in the chapel they’d made in the sitting room with the French doors, shouting about the spiritual clarity they’d achieved. My rafters echoed with strains of the Magnificat and choral hallelujahs. Then they peaked, all their endorphins and calories burned out at the same time, and they started their long slow descent. They were sleeping all the time, lethargic, weeping, in pain.

This was a very difficult time for me. My energy was sapped along with theirs, the vegetables in the garden were already ripe and started to drop off the vines and rot. The animals would not come and snatch them up, as though they no longer valued what I could offer, as if they couldn’t bear to come to a place of such death and despair.

The other houses wouldn’t talk to me anymore. It’s not that they judged me – they knew it wasn’t my fault – but they couldn’t bear to hear about it. I only had one friend at that time – a house in a distant city that was filled with women, illegal immigrants from the continent of Asia who were being kept prisoner before being sold. It was easier to deal with what was happening when someone was talking to me about it, forcing me to say the words, when someone understood what it was like to be a silent and powerless witness to such suffering.

It took nine days for all of them to die. I would contemplate them in their black robes, lying on the floor in patches of sunlight, curled and gnarled like the still bodies of flies on my windowsills. And I would think that they were already dead. Then fitfully they would open their rolling white eyes and moan. Their breathing became shallow, and then stopped. Some of them chose to be together, two or three in a room, and some chose to be alone.

Sister Dorothy was the last to go – she wasn’t someone who gave up easily. She wanted to live, abandoned her folly and started to crawl out to the garden. Poor thing was so weak she could barely move. It was torture to watch her taking hours to progress a few inches. She died on her stomach in front of the pear tree, arm outstretched in hopes of finding a fallen piece of fruit. After she died, I counted each pear that fell to the ground. One of them even rolled so far as to touch her hand, its yellow and green mottled skin touching hers, slowly bluing. They were the worst moments of my life.

No one wanted to live in me for a while after that. But people looking to buy a house have much shorter memories than mine.

Grant Fischer is my favourite of all the creatures who ever lived inside of me. He was born in this house, in a big tank of water his mother was submerged in that they assembled and filled a few days before and took out the day after. It was a strange and beautiful affair. Grant lived here until he was 15 years old, and that’s a long time for a boy.

Why do I love Grant Fischer? That’s what I think about often now, in the weeks I sit empty, because I can’t exactly figure it out. There have been other boys who lived here for similar amounts of time, other boys who played with dogs, skinned knees, broke windows. But none was ever as joyful or as kind as Grant Fischer. He healed me, somehow, after the nuns.

One night in a storm that giant pear tree was struck by lightning, and a huge branch of it fell through a flat section of my roof. That was almost three years before Grant moved away. His parents had the tree removed and he would run about playing in the sawdust and helping the workers. And then without warning he would run upstairs to where other workmen were fixing the hole in me. He would talk to them without being a pest, and he would scuttle around the room and get too close to the edge. He would pick up their cigarette butts when they were rude enough to leave them on the floor. It reminded me of when I was first constructed, when things seemed simpler, when I always felt I was a home and not merely a property or an investment.

Grant Fischer gave that to me, over and over. That’s why I love him, and why I can’t stop myself from wondering about where it is he might have moved on to. I suppose I mean, what kind of house he’s making a home in now, and whether he’s appreciated the way he could be, here, in me.