The Big House

Sensitive content warning: This story includes references to mental illness, substance abuse, child abuse and death

“Click, hiss, whoosh,” goes the stovetop as a blue flame breaks beneath the copper kettle. 

“I’m obsessed with your house, Adele” my new tenant Joan calls from the sunroom. 

Placing one herbal sachet inside each porcelain mug, I call back. 

“It’s the last Queen Anne in Southern Dallas.”

Joan says it looks like the house in “Up.” 

“You know? The animated tearjerker with the old man and balloons?” Her silky rich voice is familiar, cogent, and sincerely inquisitive thanks to a decade reporting for the local public radio station. 

A knot inside my throat tightens. Colleen sobbed through the montage. The movie intensified her interest in this place, rendered it magical. She tackled the task of fixing ‘er up with childlike zeal. I taught her basic carpentry, tiling and painting skills, home renovation techniques I’d acquired in my youth. We kept the place rather than flipping it, relinquishing a nice return on our investments, I believe, because of a cartoon. Silly as that sounds. Colleen was strange and prone to enchantment that way.

“I’ve heard that before,” I say, collecting myself. 

In a steadier voice, I inquire if I might add a touch of my special sweetener — “hints of cinnamon, brown sugar, mint …” 

I hold my breath. 

“Sounds delicious,” she says. “I have an intractable sweet tooth.”

You alcoholics usually do, I think, and suppress a giggle 

Add a drop of tincture (to both cups, for this is a celebration). Pour steaming water. Drop an ice cube in mine and drink until the amber elixir melts the last of that lump, warms my bones, smooths my stride as I cross the luminous living area, deliver Joan’s cuppa, and take my seat. 

She’s literally on the edge of hers. 

A bright and convivial yet impatient woman, Joan is one of those generation Xers who runs marathons and knows whether skinny or wide-leg jeans are in. Colleen was like that. 

She’s also a member of the Twelve Step group that meets a street over. From my third-floor tower, I’ve seen her coming and going. 

JOAN

Sweat dampens Joan’s hair and affixes her formerly pressed blouse to her aching back. She barely reaches the top step before her load slips, spilling shoes and belts at the door to the apartment atop Adele’s garage. 

“Made it!”

Stepping over stuff, she unbolts and throws open the door. A breeze escorts her across gleaming tiles and brushed wood and dilutes lingering fumes from a fresh coat of Summerdale Gold paint.

“Gorgeous!”

Except now she’s cold—because the humid January afternoon is conceding to the chillier evening, or because she’s perpetually perspiring or freezing these days. 

In the distance a leaf blower bawls and bays and that one voice inside her (the insufferable one) pipes up.

“Oh, shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Is this a mistake?”  

No. It’s just that sounds of certain lawn care and power tools put her on edge. 

“Get a grip,” her don’t-take-yourself-so-seriously voice responds. “This place is perfect. It’s exactly what you manifested — a remodeled garage apartment behind a witchy old lady’s ancient mansion.” 

She says “manifested” out loud in a very sarcastic tone.  

It hurt to leave Bishop Place, her first real Room of One’s own. Refuge after a decidedly rough patch. 

But the new landlord is raising rents and requiring tenants to sign a year-long lease. The latter caused a resistance to rise up within Joan. You can’t make me. 

She’s a fifty year old with an obstinate teen living inside … she’s working on that. 

Whiiiieeee! A muffled whistle from inside the big house reminds her — she promised the old woman she’d join her for afternoon tea “anytime I’m around.”

This angsty child inside her aged soul mysteriously is always agreeing to engagements she does not want to keep. “Pushover,” she admonishes the brat. 

Adele’s altitudinous abode is mind-blowingly fantastic, albeit cluttered with antique candelabras and paper flowers and parasols and precarious towers built of books and journals and a “Smash the Patriarchy” stitched throw pillow. Feline fur blankets a dark-cherry chenille chaise lounge and attaches for life to any bottom that risks a moment’s rest there. Joan had noted curious photographs (Adele with bestselling author Wally Lamb for example) and even curiouser art (deejay cat atop the words “Meow Mix”).

“OK, so it’s me in twenty years,” Joan quips to herself. “Except I’m not a home—or a cat—owner.” And you’ll never meet Wally Lamb. 

“Ha. Ha. Go make a payment on that karmic layaway,” Joan retorts to herself. 

There is something provocative about that tea. She answers its call. 

ADELE

Here she comes! I clap lightly and watch Joan kick at a pile of accessories then pull the door closed. Without locking up, she bounds across the lawn. 

“There you are!” I say in my sweetest old lady speak. 

“The kettle’s calling,” Joan sings back. 

Wearing no makeup and stringy hair, her beauty purports effortless equanimity, accidental attractiveness. But I’d seen her visit the med spa on Jefferson, where the locals go for Botox injections. She’s not intentionally dishonest, and only to herself. 

She’s thin and strong. For hours each day, she runs and walks the hills of Oak Cliff, past the Texas Theater and Tippit Memorial, stopping at La Reunion for an espresso shot, circling Kidd Springs. She’s planning a trip to Sawtooth Ridge next summer, climbing Matterhorn Peak, she says. 

Occasionally a rugged retired radio producer called Harrison, and sometimes his silver-fox husband, joins her. They form an aesthetically pleasing trio traveling at a swifter pace than Joan’s usual. She works hard to keep her friends happy, might be why she has so few. 

Most of the time, she is alone. Like Colleen. As children, someone must have noticed Colleen and Joan, disciplined them, cared about them. Later, boyfriends and spouses kept tabs on them, feared losing them, held them tight. So they know how to be alone. Relish it. 

Pragmatically, I understand this. My heart, of course, cannot comprehend. 

Nostalgia comes over me, a hunger for home, family, an emptiness in my gut, guilt, shame. 

No!

A sip of sugary tea gives way to a threadbare flashback of floating in space. I shut my eyes, shake my head to loose the grip of old memories, and they turn to clouds. Poof! 

Joan peruses my bookshelves, lingers over photos of Colleen and me, does a double take when she sees the one with the famous writer. 

“What’s this? You met Wally Lamb?” 

He signed a copy of “She’s Come Undone,” I say. It’s around here somewhere. As with all my visitors, I say I met him at a bookstore, not the truth, which is that he led a writing workshop at the women’s prison where I lived so much of my life.

Once she decided to move, Joan skillfully spread the word. On social media, on the support group’s bulletin board, she advertised her “vision: to rent a remodeled carriage house behind a witchy cat lady’s mansion — a duplex would do, too — where she could finish writing her book.” 

Well, this is it. Providence. 

I hired a Task Rabbit to help with whatever my old body could no longer handle and put the finishing touches on the Artist Cave that was ninety percent completed when Colleen fell ill. 

If it didn’t work out with Joan, I could rent it to someone else, I figured. Although, I knew. It would work out with Joan. Because she was perfect. A perfect mess. 

“Your tea, my dear.” I offer my full attention. “Now tell me what you’re working on these days.”

JOAN

Joan could not believe her luck. After six weeks of duds, people began telling her about Adele, an eccentric woman in her seventies who — can you believe it?! — just fixed up her back-yard cottage. It was ready to rent, once she found the perfect person, that is. 

“You’re going to love her,” Carrie H. from the group told Joan. “She and her partner used to host book club. You can see the top of her house from here! It’s badass.”

All the old-timers knew the house and its inhabitants. Joan heard how Adele cared for Colleen—a Julianne Moore lookalike ten or fifteen years her junior, sorta androgynous in aviator glasses and bucket hats—through years of chemo and months on home hospice. They’d had a dozen good years before the cancer came. 

Now in Adele’s living room, Joan mutters, “What the …”, as sweat beads bloom beneath her boobs.  

Joyce Carol Oats, Mona Awad, Tom Wolfe, Flannery O’Connor, and George Saunders’ presence on the bookshelf, practically mirroring her own heterogeneous collection, feels uncanny to her. 

Rather than speaking, she savors several sips of tea. Mmmmm sweeter and more delicious than usual. She sinks into a downy chair thinking, “cat hair — who cares?” Laughing quietly, she tries to recall Jack Kerouac's line about tea in “Dharma Bums.”

 “The first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is … “ Something. 

She forgets her boxes, her backache, her worries. Later she floats up to her apartment and writes late into the night essays about addiction and death. How wonderful.  

ADELE

No one imagines an old woman savvy enough to stalk someone’s Goodreads shelf so that she might facilitate feelings of solidarity through shared literary taste. But — determined to avoid forever that terrifying very lost sensation experienced upon re-entering society — I have remained diligently on top of technological advances since the dawn of the World Wide Web. 

In truth, Colleen already owned many of the books on Joan’s virtual “favorite” shelf. The women are kindred souls, I’m convinced.

Another thing people would never imagine is how much more I cherished Colleen in sickness than in health. 

If it sounds demented, it is. This illness—no, “a disorder” the psychiatrist called it— was in remission right up until Colleen’s diagnosis. 

The harder she cried, the more significant, important, needed, and loved I felt. As her life seeped out, I shined gradually brighter. 

I was an invisible child. When I was sixteen, a man at church saw me. I felt relieved, like a ghost who’d been detected, finally, by the mortal she’d been haunting. 

And when I was pregnant, oh how they noticed! I never spilled his secret. I rather enjoyed the attention that came with everyone worrying over who put the baby in me. Most girls in my situation would have gone to a home for unwed mothers, but I was white trash, no family to disgrace, too poor to pay for disappearing services. 

It didn’t matter what was said as long as they saw me. 

I’ll never forget the wonderful care I received during labor, the doting woman who called me “Sweetheart” and “Darling” and said “you’ve got this! You’re doing beautifully, Adele!” 

Most of that first year, the community ladies checked on my baby and me, provided for us, let me clean in return for our room. But in time they forgot me—us. So I had to make them care. 

JOAN

Harrison says Joan is not herself, and he’s worried. 

No. What he actually said is that she is behaving like one of her former selves, the one whose two-year bender the selves barely survived, which concerns him. 

“I’ve been quite productive,” Joan argues. “My Substack is blowing up …”

“OK. That’s solid. You haven’t gone full Howard Hughes. Yet. But are you seeing much of your family? (They’re mostly dead now.) Your kids? (They are in Chicago and Berlin, respectively. I miss them). Are you getting to meetings?”

Whiiiieeee! The post- inquisition silence is interrupted. 

“Join us for tea?” 

ADELE

Harrison seems to be here on assignment rather than friendship, the way he’s interrogating me. 

“Do you have any children, Adele? Any family around?”

Of course this was going to come up sometime. I was ready. 

“I had a child when I was very young and she was adopted. Everyone agreed on anonymity, a closed contract. She would have been fifty years old next year.” 

“Same as you, Joanie,” Harrison says. 

“Unnecessary,” Joan retorts then turns to Adele with a look of pure childlike love. “I did not know that, Adele. That is beautiful. I am so sorry I never asked.” 

“I think that was very brave of you,” Harrison patronizes as he sips his unsweetened tea. 

Feigning compassion, he says, “It must have been tough for you. With Colleen. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“I’m finally adjusting to a world without her. Having Joan around certainly helps.”

He scans the room as he speaks, like a damn TV detective. 

He observes Joan as she sips, relaxes, and further warms to me.

He’s protective of her, was the one friend who stuck by her through the relapse, the divorce, the midlife crisis, her resignation. 

She’s written about his loyalty, both in published essays and in the private notebooks she scribbles in each morning. And there are thousands of texts between them; he’s supportive, witty, and, often, worried. 

But he’s married, has a family of his own. And Joanie has me now. 

JOAN

“She went to prison in the 1970s!” Harrison whisper-yells. “She poisoned her kid! Munchausen by Proxy. Ever heard of it?”

He knows Joan is well-versed in Munchausen by Proxy, because they did a whole series about it at the station in 2008, Joan’s first year on the job.  

A wave of nausea hits Joan, and she runs into the yard—for air, to puke. 

Like an oopsy pregnancy—you know there’s something significant happening inside your body but you desperately don’t want to know. You need just another day of denial. That’s how Joan feels. 

But now the truth has hold of her, grips her shoulders, squeezes her throat, pulls at every hair on her body, penetrates her very blood until it boils and she breaks into a drenching sweat. 

Harrison rushes to her side. “Whoa there. You’re OK. It’s OK.” He shepherds her back inside. 

It’s the tea, Joan now knows. The sweetener, to be precise.

What’s in it? Some sort of opioid, a dash of psilocybin. She recalls the weekend she visited her daughter, when she missed tea. The anxiety, knots in her stomach, diarrhea. She attributed it to travel nerves. But she knew—she knew—what it was. Withdrawal. She has not missed tea time since, and her intake has steadily increased. 

She does not share her realization with Harrison. Instead she asks in a puny voice, “What happened to the child?”

"The child is dead, Joan," he whispers, panicked. "She murdered her own daughter." He says something else about “that bitch” and how she should be rotting but Joan was barely listening. 

“You need to move out,” Harrison says. 

“You’re not the boss of me,” Joan replies. It’s a silly thing for a middle-aged woman to say, especially now, but she is not joking. 

ADELE

Micro-dosing is all the rage these days, and psilocybin has all sorts of medicinal potential. Everyone’s talking about it! 

So I started with that. But magic mushrooms aren’t enough to get someone really depending on you. For that you need opioids, benzodiazepines. I had plenty of those. Colleen and I hoarded as much as we could, more than she could ever need, during hospice. Might as well, Colleen had encouraged it. 

I heard some arguing. And Joanie is puking in the yard. So I think she knows. 

Now, the question is, what will she do? I presume Harrison is asking her that very question. 

Or, if things are going my way, if he’s like so many men, he’s telling her what to do. 

They said I murdered my baby, but I was just trying to get her, us, the attention we deserved. I was so young. So lonely! I went too far.

I know more now, though, after all that hard time and therapy, about the virtue and procurement of drugs, of addiction’s unyielding hold, about loving oneself, and self care. If you have a desire, a dream, you have to go for it! 

I also know, after seventy one years of life, that no matter how bad you want to be good, you cannot resist your nature, your instinct, your needs. 

Joan loves drugs. More than her career, more than her family. She slips up time and again. Poor thing. I do not judge her for it. It’s not her fault. 

I love beautiful, strange and damaged women who are the age of the daughter I accidentally killed. I’ll do what it takes to meet my needs. Who can blame me? 

JOAN

As the kettle goes, Whiiiieeee! in the big house, Joan recalls the rest of that Kerouac quote, from “The Book of Tea” by way of "Dharma Bums."

“The first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is … madness …”

Joan throws open the door just as Adele does the same at the back of the big house. 

“Coming to tea?”

Joan looks down at herself, wraps wiry arms around her torso to test if she’s real. 

“... the fifth is ecstasy.”

“Sure thing,” Joan says.

She leaves her own door ajar and walks barefooted across the lush spring grass and into the big house.