Sigrid tried to be that sensible woman, if from a distance. She was more than prepared to vacate the position for a fresh candidate.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to help him. They corresponded once a month or so and spoke a few times a year. The tempo never increased, though, and the easy talk of their youth never returned. Yet she persisted because she loved him and because the strained relationship between Marcus and her father meant she must ensure their cohesion.
If he married, Sigrid reasoned, all that might change. She could befriend the wife and a new alliance would form of adult women managing their childish men. It was a popular model.
Now it’s a broken one.
These days, Marcus is earning meager pay from the state university and he is subsidizing this new life choice with prior savings. As a financial strategy it is a death spiral and there is no indication about how he plans to turn this around. Sigrid doesn’t see a path for Marcus, middle-aged and without a doctorate or a list of published books and peer-reviewed articles, to a stable academic career. And if this is not his aspiration by working as an adjunct lecturer . . . what is he doing there?
He had sent photos of his house to her by email about two years ago when he moved to teach the courses. She called him when the pictures arrived.
“Why don’t you come home?” she’d asked him immediately.
“You don’t like my new place?” Marcus had asked.
“What are you doing over there? It’s been . . . how long?”
“Eighteen years.”
“You were planning to go for three.”
“I got stuck.”
Reaching the house from the bus stop involves a charmless walk over roads of rubble and stone, cigarette butts and beer cans. The houses lining the streets look condemned. Many have boarded windows and graffiti tags that are as indecipherable as hieroglyphs. Most of the children in the neighborhood are black and Latino, which she hadn’t expected from upstate New York, but then . . . she knows nothing of the place. This is a poor neighborhood that is adjacent to a better one, which abuts the state university—so says the map. She is being given odd looks as she drags the suitcase behind her. None seem threatening, only curious; as though her presence might portend something.
Sigrid arrives on the corner near Marcus’s house and it is as bad as she’d feared. It is not the sort of place one is meant to stop because it is not the sort of place one is meant to be at all. This is a place you scurry past like a mouse hoping not to be noticed.
As best as she can tell, the house was once white, but any proof of its original color has been covered over or long since flaked off. It is an achievement in ugly, whether by intent or negligence. The front is too narrow and the sides too wide. The slope of the roof is too severe and the windows are small and don’t align. The entire structure sits awkwardly on its own lot—not facing forward, as such, because there is nothing left to face.
The house has no immediate neighbors. Sigrid suspects that the other owners sold their land to developers or the city and only this guy had held out for the American dream, which is always one business deal away.
Is this indicative of his state of mind and the condition of Marcus’s life? Is he inhabiting someone else’s failed dream? Or it is a waypoint—a stop to catch his breath before settling someplace where life could settle into a new permanence? Marcus has encamped, in this case, in a place where the streets and buildings around it clearly don’t want the house anymore. Whatever neighborhood it had once belonged in is now gone. A gray and concrete world has been erected around it, oppressing it, as though the city itself is a circling beast and is preparing for a slow kill.
“Everything has potential,” Marcus had insisted when she questioned him about the house.
“Well . . . to change, sure,” Sigrid had answered, “but not necessarily improve.”
Having come this far, though, Sigrid has no choice but to approach it. As she pulls her black suitcase a small stone from the sidewalk wedges into the well between the top of the wheel and the frame.
“Oh, no you don’t,” she says to it in English, as it’s an American stone.
Sigrid half rolls, half drags the luggage behind her. Reaching the curb, she makes an effort to dislodge the pebble by first backing it up the other way—with the expectation that it might fall out—but on seeing how this does not work, she opts to assert herself by picking up the whole damn thing and thumping it on the ground. This works. However, it’s more abuse than the beast can take, and the suitcase surrenders the wheel along with the pebble.
She drags the handicapped luggage, now irreparable, behind her as she approaches the house; the shade from the nearby overpass blocks the sun and bathes her in semidarkness.
Sigrid yanks the suitcase up the three steps to the front door, raps loudly, and then waits.
As she waits she cannot help but look at the house. It is truly awful. It is also big; More than one person
