Dream House
I recently published The Left Not Taken on Hobart. It’s a short story inspired by my life in Houston. Thanks to Stephanie Yue Duhem for the edits.
Following is another piece of fiction
Every night since the night she had her second kid, she woke up screaming, “I think I found it”. She’d then rush out of bed, her husband behind her - tired of this routine but half expecting that she had found something this time. She’d stub her foot against an RC car that her son had left in the middle of their tiny living room, jolting her awareness to, “It might just have been a dream.” Still, she’d soldier on to her destination - usually a kitchen cupboard or the single cramped closet where they stored everything that did not have a place. But whenever she opened the door, all hope deflated. She did not find what was apparent in her dreams.
For months, she had been dreaming of finding more space in their Brooklyn apartment. The dream was always the same. She’d be arranging all their overflowing belongings like a game of Tetris. The multiplying toys, the junk, the boxes of her old clothes that no longer fit. She’d look down and notice herself wearing white work gloves with black embossed lettering on the knuckles. They said “beauty” on the left and “space” on the right. When she’d look up from her hands, the objects seemed to satisfactorily click into place, revealing an expansive new reality. Before her was the space they had been craving for so long. People traveled from far-off lands to marvel at this miracle. The three kings - the mayor of New York, her landlord, and her dad, came to her little apartment to bear witness. They stood behind her as she kneeled in front of the new space that had been revealed. Then she woke up and rushed into her living room.
When the problem became exasperating, the couple finally sought a psychiatrist. He diagnosed her with OCD and prescribed her with a cocktail of drugs. The doctor knew drugs wouldn’t help with this fever dream, and she probably knew it too, but Psychiatry is a useful hypocrisy in service of exhausting all the options.
“It seems like there is one thing we have not tried,” said the doctor one day, after both the patient and he had reached their wit’s end.
She sat up expectantly, and the doctor said, “You should move to Texas, where there is a lot more space.”
Her back slouched again when she heard this. Upon noticing this, the doctor replied in his deep baritone, the one that he used to reveal truths to his patients, “Perhaps you have been dreaming about a house in Texas all along.”
We met in Texas. I was working another odd job as an apartment manager for a landlord who owned 3 homes in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Austin. All I remember about that day is her running around the two-bedroom house humming, “Wow that’s a lot of space.. a lot of space.”
I watched her as she stood at the door of the closet in the master bedroom. She closed the door, swung it open, and repeated that several times. Then she laughed, like a toddler who had just learned how to use the iPad.
She turned around to me and spoke, “You see, we are from New York, and I don’t know how much you know about New York, but there is not a lot of space.”
People always feel the need to explain the most basic things about the world to me. Perhaps because I am brown and have a thick Indian accent. They probably thought I only knew about making apps and running gas stations.
“Do you know where the nearest gas station is?” her husband asked. Then paused and stuttered before saying, “Not that you would know where every gas station is.”
There was silence in the room before her voice echoed from the other room. “Wow, I can’t believe how much space there is. We will take the house.”
Four months later, I visited her new home with my maintenance man. Hail had broken the window in one of the bathrooms. When I pulled up, there was no space in the driveway. They had bought a new minivan in addition to their old sedan. There was a stack of boxes at the door. “It’s stuff we have been meaning to find space for,” she said when she greeted us at the door. In the bathroom, I noticed that the tap in the bathtub had a hose connected that ran to a small washing machine that fit snuggly in the tub. “Is the washer not working?” I enquired. She scoffed and said, “Oh, that’s just an extra washing machine; you know, with two kids, things just pile up.” I nodded while the maintenance man looked for space to put down his toolkit. “We also just got another dryer..so many dishes ..so many dishes,” She said.
“I think we’ll look for a new place when the lease ends. It would be nice to have more space,” she continued.
The maintenance man took out his work gloves and put them on. It said “beauty” on the left knuckle and “space” on the other.
***
Thanks to Camille Sauers for the edits
I think I know this woman