by Yvette Neisser
The house swirled around me, spinning me with memories. I couldn’t stand it. I tried everything—getting rid of his stuff, rearranging, purifying the space by burning sage. And yet, everywhere I looked, there were reminders of him. Sometimes immobilizing. Being in the house, I felt slow as molasses. I vacillated between wanting to close my eyes and not look at anything and fits of frenzy throwing things away, cleaning, cleaning, always cleaning.
In 2027, GRACE & GRAVITY will be edited and published by the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Submissions for Volume 12: Grace in Justice are open through November 15th.
There were the curtains we had bought together, the furniture, the decor. I remembered each one, where we had purchased it, or who had given it to us: the reading lamps with fringed shades that we bought on a road trip, the peace lily that his tía gave us for our first apartment, the dark chestnut dining table that we selected after hours perusing a furniture warehouse. There were the remnants of his stuff, little things he used to use, like medicines or nail clippers that I would find at the bottom of a cabinet. Or things he never used, like the twenty-pound dumbbells that lay on the basement floor for years, untouched, as his belly got heavier and heavier.
But then there was the house itself—it hung over me like a shadow of my former life. The ceilings, the walls of each room he had painted. Part of me had always liked the house, but now every flaw spoke to me, magnified. The uneven spot in the kitchen floor, the stained window blinds, and how that pink never matched the bright yellow walls. It was like that when we moved in. But somehow, now, I blamed it all on Pedro—my husband, a home renovator, who spent his days meticulously beautifying other people’s homes. Yet at our house, he never fixed things, never replaced the burned-out light bulbs or touched up the peeling paint—like in our marriage, every rift was left unresolved, never to be repaired. They became permanent cracks in the foundation, features of the architecture that we had to sidestep.
I knew the house like the back of my hand. I had been there so long that I could navigate it in the dark during my sleepless night wanderings—no need to turn on the lights. I imagined what it’s like to be blind, making your way by retracing familiar paths, touching familiar markers. For me, coming downstairs in the dark, my marker was the half wall on my right side as I made my way through the living room to the kitchen. The familiar edge of that wall, the feel of plaster, firm but soft. I could picture the finger stains where my kids had touched it so many times, coming around that corner. Entering the kitchen, I knew the two light switches were on the left. I could turn them on without looking.
Sometimes I liked to just fumble around the house in the dark, feeling for those markers. Hand stretched out, waiting to feel the edge of a chair I knew was in front of me, or a wall just a few steps ahead. Then grazing my hand along the wall until I got to the sofa and felt the armrest, or the banister leading up and down the stairs.
Lately, I had taken to cursing silently all the things I encountered as I roamed the house in a sour mood—the fucking window that won’t open, the fucking stove that always burns, fucking cracks in the windowsills. The way the sofa cushions sagged and the curtains hung crooked. It was all so fucking symbolic, the marriage so crooked, so sagging.
The carpets were getting to me. Wall-to-wall carpeting in every room, every stair, beige, stained, it was suffocating. I wanted wood, I wanted raw. I wanted bare feet on the floor. I wanted every artifice removed. Every artifice that conveyed the illusion of normalcy, of a happy marriage where everything is okay. Everything was not okay, and I was tired of hiding it. I wanted to rip off the carpets, strip the paint from the walls, pull the railings off the stairs. Bring the colors down, their illusion of comfort, bring down the structure, the railings that could be leaned on, let visitors wobble on the stairs to feel how the marriage really was, unstable, nothing to hold onto. I wished the house would crumble to represent the crumbling of us as an entity. How could it continue to stand and hold things up as if nothing had ever happened? I wanted it to crumble in sympathy or burn itself down with my anger. I wanted kick and smash.
I couldn’t get enough air, enough light. Couldn’t open the windows wide enough to clear that suffocating feeling. Sometimes I felt myself gasping for breath. I felt the walls, ceilings closing in on me. I needed to see the sky. Wanted to cut open the ceiling. The walls blocked my connection to the outside.
Even the light fixtures had started irritating me. They were so brass, so fake, like the “chandelier” hanging over the dining room—a candelabra that’s lit with candle-shaped light bulbs instead of candles. Like Pedro’s pretense of love and affection belying emptiness. How he would put his arm around me at parties, making a show of affection, lavishing me with flattery—then at home, ignore me, leaving me to flatter myself in the mirror. Or to wonder if there was anything worth flattering.
I wanted out, out, everything out, wanted myself out of this place and into a new space with no weighted memories.
Yvette Neisser is the author of two poetry collections, Iron into Flower (2022) and Grip (2011 Gival Press Poetry Award). Her translations from Spanish include South Pole/Polo Sur by María Teresa Ogliastri and Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems by Luis Alberto Ambroggio. Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared inForeign Policy in Focus, Tikkun, Virginia Quarterly Review, 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (anthology), and Split This Rock’s The Quarry. Founder of the DC-Area Literary Translators Network, she has taught writing at George Washington University and The Writer’s Center (Bethesda, Maryland).
