Read Online The World Below by Sue Miller - Free Book Online

room. But I talked back, grateful and interested-sounding, I think.
    Finally she came to the point: how much she’d love to show the house—could I bear it? when I’d just got here?—to a couple coming up from New York next week. Not that she’d say it was on the market, just to give them an idea, an idea of what some of these old houses could look like with a little TLC. And maybe to get an idea, too, of the response to this one. That never hurt.
    “But I thought we had a buyer if I wanted to sell. A potential buyer.”
    “Oh, Eliasson. Yes. Well, but you don’t want to just hand it over, on the other hand, do you? I mean, it’d be nice to have the sense of others, waiting in the wings, as it were. We’d like to get what we can , after all.”
    Yes. Yes, I saw that. Though I wanted to remind her …
    Oh, yes, she knew. It wasn’t for sale. No problem. She’d make that clear.
    She’d moved back to the door now, and she turned to look around one last time. “It’s just it’s such a great story too, you know. This house”—her hands circled—“in the family for generations. Both your grandparents living here into their old age, and so forth.”
    “But none of that’s true!” I protested.
    “No?”
    “No, it wasn’t in the family for generations. Not at all. My grandparents bought it sometime in the twenties. They moved here from Maine. I don’t have any idea who owned it before then.”
    She laughed. “That’s still enough generations to make a good story for your average New Yorker. Your grandparents, your parents, you, your children …”
    I didn’t bother to argue any further.
    As I stood watching her cross the yard, I wondered why I’d recoiled so instinctively from her version. Maybe, I thought, I was just reluctant to think of myself as standing in for a generation, such a small quickly-summed-up part of the story, so easily over and done with.
    And then I thought, no. No, that wasn’t it. The truth was I didn’t want to think of any of us that way: my grandparents, my mother, me. Or to have our life here used as a selling point—all that pain and sorrow and joy—to make the house itself more appealing. We weren’t the house’s story , none of us. That was what I objected to. That, and the fact that the story was so much more complicated than she could know.
    I went back out on the porch, and one by one I slid the heavy cartons over the threshold into the house. From the kitchen, I got a knife to slit them open. Though I’d packed them only a week or so earlier, I felt a kind of childish eagerness to get at what was inside—to arrange the things I’d chosen to mark the house as mine for however long I’d stay.
    I spent several hours at it, setting my few framed photos on top of the upright piano in the dining room, standing the books up on my grandfather’s shelves. I got out the little espresso machine, the beans and grinder, and made myself what I thought of as a real cup of coffee. I lugged the clothes upstairs, hung them up, or put them in drawers. I claimed the shelves in the medicine chest with my cosmetics and my drugs, throwing away the Mercurochrome I found there, the rusted bobby pins in a little cup, the ancient-looking bottle of aspirin.
    I got waylaid by an old box of photos I’d sent myself—I planned to spend some long solitary evenings by the fire putting them into albums. Here was my life for twenty years or so, now that that life was over—photos of the children at various stages, photos of Joe before and during our marriage.
    I picked up a picture of my father and his second wife, Rosalie, standing in the overgrown abandoned vineyards behind their adult community just outside Calistoga a year or two before his long dying began—a series of cruel little strokes, each one waiting to arrive until he’d just begun to recover from the one before, until he’d just begun to be hopeful, as if to say, Oh, no, you don’t! I came to think of them this way,