In the Dream House Read online

  You and your friend are talking about television when she arrives; you have been complaining about men’s stories, men’s stories, how everything is men’s stories. She laughs, agrees. She tells you she’s freshly transplanted from New York, drawing unemployment insurance and applying to MFA programs. She’s a writer too.

  Every time she speaks, you feel something inside you drop. You will remember so little about the dinner except that, at the end of it, you want to prolong the evening and so you order tea of all things. You drink it—a mouthful of heat and herb, scorching the roof of your mouth—while trying not to stare at her, trying to be charming and nonchalant while desire gathers in your limbs. Your female crushes were always floating past you, out of reach, but she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time.

  Dream House as Memory Palace

  From the street, here is the house. There is a front door, but you never go in the front door.

  Here is what lines the driveway: all the boys who liked you as a girl. Colin, the dentist’s son, who told you in a soft voice that your dress was beautiful. You looked down to confirm for yourself, and then skipped merrily away. (A diva, even then! Your mother told you this story; you were so young you did not remember it on your own.) Seth, who, in sixth grade, bought you the brand-new Animorphs book—the one where Cassie transmogrifies into a butterfly on the cover—and had his mother drive him to your house so he could give it to you. Adam, your beloved friend who worked at the local movie theater and brought home garbage bags of day-old popcorn so you could watch movies your parents would never let you see: Memento and Dancer in the Dark and Pulp Fiction and Mulholland Drive and Y Tu Mamá También. Adam burned you so many CDs. Some of them were too weird for you. There was one band who just destroyed instruments into microphones, and you rolled your eyes and said, “This is stupid.” But then Adam’s mom took both of you to Philadelphia in January to see a Godspeed You! Black Emperor concert. The band started late, and you huddled together in a shared hoodie. The music was byzantine, kaleidoscopic, inexpressibly beautiful. You didn’t know how to even talk about the mix of audio and sound, the way the symphony of it washed over you, vibrated every part of your body. Once, Adam wrote a story about you and later, a song, when you went away to college. You did not know what to do with Adam’s love, the steady and undemanding affection of it. Then, Tracey, who had a twin brother, Timmy. They were Mormon and sweet, and you had a crush on Timmy, but Tracey had a crush on you. You once ordered a free Book of Mormon from the internet and ended up having a two-hour-long conversation with a young guy—he sounded so handsome—who was calling from Salt Lake City to gauge your interest in their religion. You couldn’t say, “I ordered it because I am in love with one half of a set of Mormon twins and the other half has a crush on me.” So instead, you bantered about theology for two hours before you regretfully got off the phone. Anyway, those boys. You were suspicious of their feelings because you had no reason to love yourself—not your body, not your mind. You rejected so much gentleness. What were you looking for?

  The back patio: college. So many unrequited crushes, and—ultimately—the worst sex. You once drove across four states to sleep with a man in upstate New York in the dead of winter. It was so cold your drugstore-brand astringent face wash froze in its tube. The sex was bad, obviously, but what you remember most clearly is what you wanted from that night. You wanted that drive-across-four-states desire. You wanted someone to be obsessed with you. How could you accomplish that? You were awake all night staring at the streetlight in the parking lot outside his bedroom window. Why did men never own curtains? How do you get someone you want to want you? Why did no one love you?

  The kitchen: OkCupid, Craigslist. Living in California and trying to date women, but failing because Bay Area lesbians proved to be pretty testy about the whole bisexual thing. So then, a parade of men: sweet men and terrible men and older men. Professionals and students. An astrophysicist, several programmers. One guy with a boat in the Berkeley marina. Then, moving to Iowa and going on a bunch of terrible dates, including with a man you kept seeing later in the waiting room of your therapist’s office. He played piano. A med student, maybe? You can barely remember.

  The living room, the office, the bathroom: boyfriends, or something approximating them. Casey and Paul and Al. Casey was the worst. Al was the kindest. Paul was knock-you-sideways perfect; he fucked you and fed you and tried to teach you to love California. It was all you ever wanted. He was so pretty. You loved his downy ass, his surprisingly soft scruff, the strength of his hands. You wanted to crawl up inside him and have him crawl up inside you. He made you feel special and sexy and smart. He broke up with you because he didn’t love you, which is a very good reason to break up with somebody, even though at the time you wanted to die.

  The bedroom: don’t go in there.

  Dream House as Time Travel

  One of the questions that has haunted you: Would knowing have made you dumber or smarter? If, one day, a milky portal had opened up in your bedroom and an older version of yourself had stepped out and told you what you know now, would you have listened? You like to think so, but you’d probably be lying; you didn’t listen to any of your smarter, wiser friends when they confessed they were worried about you, so why on earth would you listen to a version of yourself who wrecked her way out of a time orifice like a newborn?

  There is a theory about time travel called the Novikov self-consistency principle, wherein Novikov asserts that if time travel were possible, it would still be impossible to travel back in time and alter events that have already taken place. If present-day you could return to the past, you could certainly make observations that felt new—observations that had the benefit of real-time hindsight—but you’d be unable to, say, prevent your parents from meeting, since that, by definition, had already happened. To do so, Novikov says, would be as impossible as jumping through a brick wall. Time—the plot of it—is fixed.

  No, Novikov’s time traveler is the tragic dupe who realizes too late her trip to the past is what sealed the very fate she’d meant to prevent. Maybe you mistook your future voice shouting through the walls for something else: a heartbeat pacing and then rapid with want, a purr.

  Dream House as a Stranger Comes to Town

  One day, she texts you to ask if you can give her a ride to the Cedar Rapids airport. She needs to pick up her girlfriend, Val, who is visiting from out of town. You agree because, of course. Historically you’ve done just about anything for a beautiful woman. (Years ago, when you lived in California, your stunningly gorgeous coworker called you at seven in the morning because she needed help jump-starting her car. You were out of bed and on your way in ten minutes, and when you opened the hood of her car you made a point of contemplating the machinery below you, as if you had any idea what it meant.)

  In the car, you are so busy talking you miss the exit—blowing past a strip club, Woody’s, and the sign for the airport. When you finally arrive and park your car, you walk to the baggage claim and watch these two beautiful, tiny women run at each other. One brunette, one blonde; like Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe. The blonde sits and the brunette crawls in her lap; they laugh and kiss. (You would love that version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.) You turn away and examine a poster for the University of Iowa very closely.

  In the car, the brunette laughs easily and openly at all of your jokes. You watch her surreptitiously in the rearview mirror. You drop them off back in town.

  A few days later, you’re talking to your mutual friend. “I think she likes you,” she says.

  “She’s really hot,” you say. “But she’s seeing someone. I just, like, literally picked up her girlfriend from the airport.”

  “Oh yeah,” your friend says. “They’re in an open relationship, though. That’s what she told me. I’m just saying.” She throws up her hands with mock innocence. “She’s mentioned you a bunch.”

  Yo
ur heart launches itself against your rib cage like an animal.

  Dream House as Lesbian Cult Classic

  You arrange to hang out at her house. You are going to watch The Brave Little Toaster, a movie you haven’t seen since childhood but that you remember loving and being terrified of.

  You sit inches from each other on a green velvet couch, drinks sweating on the coffee table. When your favorite number is on—the junkyard cars singing bleakly of their erstwhile lives, reminding you that they are now worthless and about to die—her index finger drifts against your hand, and you feel a clench of desire. You know this move. You’ve done this move a thousand times: I am too shy to turn to you and tell you what I want; instead, I will pretend that I am not quite in control of this single, nomadic digit. The movie ends, and you both sit there in the dark. You start to nervously chatter about trivia—“Did you know the story this movie is based on won a Nebula Award? It—”

  She kisses you.

  Upstairs, you both tumble onto her bed. She never kisses you in the same place twice. Then she says, “I’d like to take your shirt off. May I?” And you nod, and she does. She slides her hand around your bra clasp. “Is this all right?” she asks. The room smells like lavender, or maybe you just remember that because her comforter was lavender. Every time her hand moves somewhere else, she whispers, “May I?” and the thrill of saying yes, yes, is like the pulsing of the tide over your face, and you would gladly drown that way, giving permission.

  Dream House as Famous Last Words

  “We can fuck,” she says, “but we can’t fall in love.”2

  2. Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955–1958), Type T3, Omens in love affairs.

  Dream House as Confession

  She was short and pale and rail-thin and androgynous, with fine blonde hair about which she was inordinately vain. Blue eyes, an easy smile. You are embarrassed now to say that you were impressed by her in a very strange, old-fashioned way. Despite being from Florida, she had a distinctly upper-class, New England air. She had gone to Harvard, looked dapper in a blazer, and carried a leather-encased hip flask preppier than any accessory you’ve ever seen.

  You have always suspected that you are shallow when it comes to desire, and there it was: all of those factors flipped your brain inside out and turned your cunt to pudding. Maybe you were always some kind of hedonist-cum-social climber-cum-cummer and you just never knew it.

  Despite the fact that you were the same age, you felt like she was older than you: wiser, more experienced, worldlier. She’d worked in publishing, she’d lived abroad, she spoke fluent French. She’d lived in New York and been to launch parties for literary magazines. And, it turned out, she had a weakness for curvy-to-fat brunettes in glasses. God herself couldn’t have planned it better.

  Dream House as Dreamboat

  You love writing across from her, the two of you tapping away with verve and purpose, and occasionally peeking over the edges of your laptops at each other with goofily contorted faces. When you go out to dinner, she orders tuna sashimi and insists on placing it on your tongue. It is sturdy, labial. It melts there. She orders dirty vodka martinis and you come to love their brine. She reads your stories, marvels at the beauty of your sentences. You listen to her read an old essay about how her parents never let her eat sugary cereal. You tell her, often, how hysterically funny she is.

  Dream House as Luck of the Draw

  Part of the problem was, as a weird fat girl, you felt lucky. She did what you’d wished a million others had done—looked past arbitrary markers of social currency and seen your brain and ferocious talent and quick wit and pugnacious approach to assholes.

  When you started writing about fatness—a long time ago, in your LiveJournal—a commenter said to you that you were pretty and smart and charming, but as long as you were zaftig you’d never have your choice of lovers. You remember feeling outrage, and then processing the reality, the practicality, of what he’d said. You were so angry at the world.

  You wondered, when she came along, if this was what most people got to experience in their lives: a straight line from want to satisfaction; desire manifested and satisfied in reasonable succession. This had never been the case before; it had always been fraught. How many times had you said, “If I just looked a little different, I’d be drowning in love”? Now you got to drown without needing to change a single cell. Lucky you.

  Dream House as Road Trip to Savannah

  It was your idea to go to Georgia over spring break. You’ve never been to the South, not properly, and you’re writing a story about Juliette Gordon Low and her house in Savannah. It’s a twelve-hour drive, a sneeze. Plus, it’s March, and freezing, and it’s been a long winter. You want some sun. So you ask her if she’d like to come with you. She says yes. You buy new underwear at the mall.

  She gets behind the wheel of your car, and you leave Iowa before the sun rises. You fall asleep almost immediately and when you wake it is snowing and she is speeding. You sit up, pick crust from the edges of your eyes. Road signs indicate that the lane is ending and she has to merge; she makes her move too late and hits a pothole at a diagonal. The tire blows.

  You are somewhere outside St. Louis. She pulls over; you call AAA. They come and put on the spare, and the guy recommends a place down the road to get a new tire. You do as he suggests, and when it’s done she takes the wheel again, but within a few miles back on the highway the new tire is flat too. You pull into a repair shop exclusively for eighteen-wheelers; there is something hysterical about your tiny Hyundai with all its liberal bumper stickers sitting among those behemoths. It is the early months of 2011; marriage equality is smoldering, catching fire in some states, doused with water in others. The Justice Department says it will no longer enforce the Defense of Marriage Act. Things are happening.

  As the two of you sit there, you start crying. You are embarrassed that your car has failed you so early in your journey. She apologizes, says it was her fault, and you tell her it wasn’t. “It’s not a great car,” you say, by way of explanation.

  She laughs. “I guess this is part of the adventure. And we haven’t even gotten there yet!”

  The mechanic seems to notice the two of you—that is to say, he notices your unbearable levels of queerness, the proximity of your bodies, the constellation formed by those details and the bumper stickers and, maybe, he just has a sixth sense—but he doesn’t say anything, for which you are grateful. He explains that the tire that was sold to you is full of huge, unpatchable holes. He’d put on a new one, but your car takes strange, specific tires in an uncommon size, and you’ll have to go to a bigger city to find them. He puts the spare back on. This time, you drive. Somewhere in Illinois, you get a tire that fits.

  When you pull into the parking space outside the hotel, she leans over and kisses you. She kisses your top lip, then the lower one, like each one deserves its own tender attention. She leans away and looks at you with the kind of slow, reverent consideration you’d give to a painting. She strokes the soft inside of your wrist. You feel your heart beating somewhere far away, as if it’s behind glass.

  “I can’t believe that you’ve chosen me,” she says.

  In the room, she takes off your new underwear and buries her face between your thighs.

  Savannah is warm and fragrant. The trees drip with Spanish moss, and the water in the fountains is dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day. The Juliette Gordon Low house is a beautiful, rambling mansion crowded with antiques. Underneath the “Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace” sign that hangs over the entrance, she eggs you on into increasingly ridiculous poses; you are both giggling when you go inside. The ancient women staffing it, who are all wearing drag-queen lipstick and eye shadow, respond to your excited pronouncements about your love of Girl Scouting with silence.

  Th
e tour is fascinating. Juliette, you think, sounds like a big dyke. The guide describes how she was constantly dissatisfied with her home—the furniture, the gate outside—so she just took on their design and modifications herself. She learned to smith metal. Why is it that badass women who don’t follow the rules always sound like lesbians to you? A psychiatrist would have a field day with that realization. (Though, in your defense, there is a portrait of her in a button-down top and with a hat like a park ranger’s and looking butch as hell hanging on the wall.)

  Afterward, the two of you walk through an old cemetery. She kisses you behind a mausoleum. She tries to get you to fuck her there, and you don’t want to out of respect for the dead, but she is so beautiful. Then an employee shows up and you rearrange yourselves quickly and leave, laughing.

  You drive to Tybee Island and order a platter of seafood—twisting open crayfish and swallowing scallops, eating nothing but the fruit of the sea. It is just mouthfuls of butter and water and salt and muscle. After the meal, you go to the beach and wade into the water. You see dolphins.

  Every so often, her phone rings, and she smiles and walks some distance away to tell Val about the trip. Even as she shrinks with distance, she waves at you.

  On your last day in town, a drunk man accosts you on the street. You are holding her hand when he comes up and grabs you. She shouts, “Let her go!” and does a martial arts move on his arm. He backs off in surprise, telling you to both go fuck yourselves, and staggers away.