“The poetic Babylon Line,” Rochelle sighed. She had walked over to the porch. As she approached, her mother stood to free up the seat, and reached for the grocery bag.
“I’ll take these inside!” she said brightly. “You sit with your friend.”
Sally watched her snatch the bag away and move swiftly to the front door, which she opened, a bit, and ducked around. It closed behind her. The oddness of it all came over her in a wave. Beside her, Rochelle took the vacated plastic seat. “I gotta be honest,” she said wearily. “I wish you’d asked.”
“I wish I’d asked, too,” Sally said, honestly enough. “It was very spur of the moment, at Penn. I just … I saw the Long Island Railroad, and all the names of the towns. And I saw Ellesmere and I just, I thought…” (Here she ran out of steam, because she had run out of honesty.)
“I’m not even mad,” Rochelle said, and even to Sally, who was now horrendously mad at herself, she seemed not precisely mad. Though there was something else. Definitely something else.
And she remembered then, from when her roommate had gone home suddenly, earlier that winter: Oh, it’s the house. Too boring to go into.
Without thinking, she turned and looked at it, and it looked almost completely normal, not so unlike the other houses in the cul-de-sac, at least apart from those drawn curtains. White-painted vinyl siding. Black shutters made of something that wasn’t wood. The porch had been swept—in fact, there was the broom, leaning against the little porch railing. There was a garage door, but it was closed.
“You said you needed to help out your mom, a couple of months ago. Is she all right?”
Rochelle sighed. “By any reasonable standard, no. But it’s how she’s lived for the past ten years, at least. After my parents divorced, and then my dad died, she just lost control of this one thing. It’s very difficult for her. Wait,” she said, eyeing Sally, “you’ve seen inside?”
“Inside? No. We were … she brought me some tea outside.”
Rochelle frowned. “Oh. Well, she’s ashamed, you know. You need to try to think of it as an illness. It took me years to do that, but I do, now. I had a good therapist. And I still see someone at school, of course.”
Of course? Rochelle had never mentioned a therapist, at Cornell or anywhere else.
“Oh, that’s good,” she told Rochelle. “But, what about the house?”
Rochelle sat in her own plastic armchair, hands oddly open in her lap. Across the cul-de-sac, a woman emerged from another white-and-black house with a little boy, his legs zipped into woolly boots, unzipped parka flapping over a martial arts uniform.
“Hi, Mrs. Hennessey,” said Rochelle. “Hi, Barry.”
Barry, about eight or nine, ducked his head. Mrs. Hennessey emitted a faint smile. The two climbed into their car.
“Drinks,” said Rochelle. Then she pointed her way around the cul-de-sac: “Smokes pot every single day. Batshit crazy. Husband tried to grope me after I babysat for his daughter a couple years ago. Kid hospitalized for depression. I’d be tempted to call it just this cul-de-sac but it’s everywhere. My mom started bringing things home when my dad left, and she couldn’t let anything go, I mean ever. So, room by room, it just filled up with junk. It’s so sad, and nobody hates it more than she does. Well, I do, I guess. But whatever I tried backfired horribly. Like, once I tried to take out a bag of trash, and she went out in the middle of the night and brought it back inside and put it under her bed.”
“Trash?” Sally said. She was having trouble getting her head around this.
“Yeah. And then once I just told her I’m doing this, I’m clearing it out, and I spent a weekend not listening to her even though she was crying and yelling at me, and I hauled stuff to the dump so she couldn’t bring it back, but she got so horribly depressed after I did it. I was afraid to leave her alone. I mean, I didn’t go to school for almost two weeks. And I ended up apologizing to her and telling her I’d never do it again, never even sneak anything out of the house without her permission, which of course she’ll never give. At least not without therapy and medication, which she’ll never consent to.”
“But … what does she do when she’s finished with something? Like, I don’t know … a candy bar wrapper. Or a bottle of conditioner?”
“She’s never finished,” Rochelle said shortly. “She’s never prepared to be abandoned by a candy wrapper or an empty bottle. It’s too hard for her. My leaving the house is unbearable. I’m actually really proud of her that she’s been able to let me go, and so far away. Weirdly, I think of her as brave.” She looked out past the pot house, the groping father house, to the road beyond. “But I can’t let anyone in. I’d say I wish I could, but I don’t wish it, and you wouldn’t either, if you could see it. Or smell it.”
Sally recoiled. She couldn’t help herself.
“You mean, it’s dirty?”
Rochelle gave her a queer look. Then, with real compassion, she said: “Yes, Sally. Very dirty. Very smelly. Very uncomfortable for you, trust me. I would never have brought you here voluntarily, for your own sake. On the other hand, I’m not going to be embarrassed. Like I said, it’s an illness. People get ill, and sometimes they’re lucky and recover. But sometimes not. This is a not-recovery situation.”
“But … do you understand it? I mean, in therapy, did you figure out why?”
Rochelle crossed her arms. She was cold, too, Sally saw. She was still focused on the road beyond, the darkening sky over the trees. How late was it now?
“I thought I had, at various times. At one point I convinced myself it had to do with environmentalism—you know, keeping things out of landfills, or the ocean. Then I thought: it’s art. She’s making some kind of art. She’s expressing something she’s never been able to express. I tried very hard to make the world fit what she was doing, so I could make it acceptable, if maybe not exactly normal. I just thought: okay, my mom is unique. She isn’t the typical Ellesmere hausfrau, keeping up with the Joneses. She didn’t care about the Joneses, she cared about saving the wishbone from the chicken in a special wishbone jar. That was quirky. But then also the rest of the chicken in another jar. And then our neighbor’s chicken in another jar. Anyway, I gave up. Or no, I didn’t give up, exactly, I just downshifted to maintenance. Psychic maintenance.”
“Hers?” said Sally, crossing her legs.