Turn Back the Clock, But Only for an Afternoon

The first thing their email said was “your letter moved us to tears.” I had typed the letter on my father’s old Smith-Corona and enclosed ten reprints of various photos of the house where I was born. I had addressed the envelope to “occupants.” Their names turned out to be Kellen and Jane and they’d owned the house for a year.

Recently a friend had her remodeled mid-century condo published in the Sunday paper. The original owner was moved by the article and mailed a packet of family photos that showed off the condo, back then an apartment. My friend was overwhelmed by the kindness and framed and hung the photos in the bathroom.

I copied the idea and mailed my own packet. Kellen was the one who wrote back to me. He copied Jane and I imagined them sitting together at a dining table, faces lit by the laptop glow, crafting the words just right. The dwelling was referred to as “farmhouse,”–in the real estate ads and by Kellen, as it had been by my parents–so we were both speaking the same language from the outset. It was at least thirty years older than the houses that surrounded it and once was the only home there, in the middle of fruit trees and cows, but that was long before I lived in it in the early 1960s. It was my parents’ first foray into home ownership, with a baby on the way, same as Jane was due in three months.

The house had character: eyebrow windows in the two bedrooms upstairs, a spooky basement (something all houses should have), paned windows, a tall-pillared porch. The angles of the photos made it look like a plantation, but it was nothing so giant. Inconveniently, the bedrooms were upstairs while the only bathroom was on the main level. My parents hadn’t liked that part, or the centered front door that dumped you into the middle of the living room and made it hard to lay out the room.

Kellen and Jane invited me to come by any time I was in Portland, three hours from where I live in Seattle. We exchanged happy emails, and I forgot about it a little, but as our first grandchild came, I thought of Jane, almost due, the chaos of birth, and how I’d better take them up on the offer.

They were so young! My daughter’s age. But of course they were. Kellen was tall and enthusiastic and couldn’t stop talking about this molding or that cornice, and did I remember if the stairs had been carpeted or wood. He had done a thorough job of researching the house’s history, both by what he discovered remodeling, and in the city’s archives. On his phone, he showed me a copy of a real estate agreement signed by my parents. Seeing my father’s handwriting displayed by a stranger gave me a jolt.

Jane was quiet and smiley, tired from her large belly, offering occasional commentary. Standing in the living room, photographs of my father and me flipped through my head – recently familiar from rummaging scrapbooks for his wake last year. When I was very young, he would come home from his advertising job and play his favorite Artie Shaw record and hold me in his arms and dance. There’s a photo of us watching TV, when TVs were furniture, and a photo of us opening presents at Christmas. I used to stand on the sofa under the window and wave to him each morning when he walked away to catch the bus for work. This was the house where my dad learned my mom was an alcoholic, or maybe she became one there. Whatever, it was a big shock that we never talked about.

Kellen took me down in the basement while Jane rested. The tight-turn old wood stairs were just how I remembered them, leading to blackness, as the boy next door and I went down there and pulled off our pants. He was a year older, probably five then, me four. All we did was look.

Jane identified the neighbors and their approximate ages, most young. In my era, it was a swinging street of men young in their careers, wives at home. Everyone had more children than my family, where it was just me. My father told a story of sitting on someone’s patio for a summer picnic, highballs in hand, smoke curling from the barbecue and the many ashtrays, the screeches of the children out in the driveway, when a six-year-old named Missy came back to the adult circle and mounted her dad’s knee. In a lull of conversation, she blurted, “Daddy, why does Mr. Ronlan want to kiss me in the gazebo?” My dad acknowledged it brought the party to a halt.

The women next to us were gay and went by men’s names instead of their real ones. The man across the street came home drunk one night and drove his car through the back of his garage.

Kellen took me into the side yard, around an inflatable pool, the kind meant for kids, but obviously set up for Jane to cool off in, the summer had been a scorcher. The side yard was much bigger than the back patio, where my footprint was once embedded in new concrete but we couldn’t find it. There was something reassuring about seeing the huge (now) maple, since my mother’s favorite photo was one of me very tiny, swaddled in white blankets on the grass, a perfect maple leaf having dropped on me. “I didn’t stage it,” she always said, slightly defensive.

Upstairs in my room, once pale yellow, the wall where my tall dresser had stood, and like eighty percent of children, I had pulled out the bottom drawer to stand on and the dresser toppled on me. I remember the hideous noise, the rush of footsteps.

The master was big. I didn’t tell Kellen and Jane that the eyebrow-window nook was the perfect size for my father’s double bed, that this house was the start of them sleeping apart, something that never changed, no matter where we lived. I didn’t tell them this was the place where all the unhappiness began, my father still clinging to a variety of hopes. One hope stayed with him long enough to sell the farmhouse when I was five, and move a block away to a huge Colonial, certain he was going to have more children.

When we were done touring and Kellen had exhausted his investigative stories, I asked them to pose on the porch. Then Kellen handed me one of the photos I’d sent, of me on the porch in a Sunday dress, and asked me to stand in the same place for a picture. We hugged good-bye, because it felt right. I walked slowly down the long sloping driveway. I’d parked in the street because it wasn’t my house, after all. At the car, I got my camera out and took a picture of the house, with its colored peace flags streamed across the pillars. Kindnesses of strangers, who didn’t feel like strangers anymore.

Leaning on the car roof at the bottom of the vast front yard my dad hated mowing, I felt the distance, like I’d stepped back over an invisible line. I am a long-ago someone who doesn’t matter to the creaky fourth step, the attic closet at the top of the stairs. Did I imprint the house in any way, or did it just imprint me? When we moved to the bigger house, my father used to quiz me: “What color were the walls in the living room of the farmhouse?” “What color was the floor in the kitchen?” I can imagine how proud he was to make his first home purchase, inviting over all his friends and swilling cocktails on the small concrete patio, my mother mixing vodka and codeine secretly in the kitchen.

It was time to drive away. The house and its new owners had welcomed me, and said come back any time, but I needed to leave with the bow tied, Jane with her beautiful smile and her perfect basketball stomach with a baby waiting to come out, Kellen grinning with his arm around her, proud of his historical facts. The house was safe now, away from the thirty years of renters. A baby was coming, like a baby had been coming in March of 1960. The house would nestle the three of them, in hot summers, in storms. There had been love there, despite everything. That was all they needed to know.

Martha Clarkson’s writing can be found in The Seattle Times, Clackamas Literary Review, Seattle Review, Portland Review, The Sun magazine, Mothering magazine, Feminine Rising, Quarter Past Eight, and Nimrod. She is the winner of the Anderbo Fiction Prize for the story “Her Voices, Her Room,” which has been produced as a podcast by PenDust Radio. She has two notable short stories in Best American Short Stories. Martha was a former poetry editor for Word Riot. Find her here: www.marthaclarkson.com