By Inez Hollander, Ph.d With my husband, Jonathan, far away in
Denver, our newly‑bought house felt especially dark and lonesome at night. The house, an old ramshackle storybook cottage in the San Francisco Bay Area, was cold and creepy: the heater did not work, the roof leaked and rats would come out at night and prowl my kitchen. In the evenings I usually retired upstairs with the kids because it was a place where the rats did not come.
When I walked into the old bathroom upstairs to give William (4) and Caroline (2) a bath, I despaired. The lavender bathroom still smelled of the former owner, Ada Shaeffer. She had lived for years in the home’s decaying splendor like Miss Havisham, the eccentric old lady in Great Expectations. In my despair, I decided to ignore the purple tub and take the kids to the Jacuzzi, which had just been placed in our backyard.
Although the wind was whistling around the house, the El Niño showers seemed to have tapered off that night. I dressed the kids and myself in terrycloth bathrobes and walked them through the dark of the wet and windy garden. The moving tree branches made long and sinister shadows on the lawn. The little French doors in the back of the garage clapped with a vengeance. The doors were the entrance to the old studio of Neill Shaeffer, Ada’s dead husband.
“At night I see him everywhere,” Ada had told me just before we bought the house. I do not believe in haunted houses or the sensationalist shows on Network TV, but Neill had died in the daybed in the kitchen. He insisted on dying at home, just as he had insisted upon his wife never selling the house. So... shall I say it; do I even dare write it down? I saw someone in my peripheral vision once or twice; I felt a funny draft occasionally and William talked about seeing a ghost (he was also watching a lot of Scooby Doo at the time, so who knows).
Once when I was cleaning the bathroom cabinets upstairs, a little picture came fluttering out of nowhere. Having seen Neill on pictures in Mrs. Shaeffer’s house, I recognized the young man on the picture. It showed a tan and handsome Neill in a swimsuit. Memento Mori? For the longest time I did not dare throw the little black‑and‑white photograph away. It was as if the old man was watching over my shoulder.
After I lifted my blue‑lipped toddlers into the steaming bubbles, I let my own tired and naked body slide into the stinging water. While the kids were playing with their plastic cups and ducks, I tried to relax my tense muscles from another day in the trenches with the kids. I closed my eyes. The wind, the squeaky doorjambs of Neill’s studio and the innocent chatter of my kids faded into the background. If I relaxed a bit more, I could fall asleep. Sleep had become my new partner.
Every night, shortly after I put the kids in bed, I crawled under my covers with a book. The book and the sleep that followed it were a better world than the one I lived in. As I was nodding off, I suddenly heard William’s voice:
“What’s that man doing in our house?” he said innocently.
“What man?” I sat up and panicked, thinking I should have squeezed my voluptuous body into a bathing suit after all.
“Where? What are you talking about?” I asked as I looked at the cottage. The house, with its pointed gables and undulating roof, was the perfect backdrop for an Elizabethan tragedy. I just did not want to be in it.
“Where?” I asked again, gazing intently at the house.
“Over there, in the playroom,” William suggested.
Putting his little teapot down, he looked at the house again.
“Oh, now he’s gone,” William said, almost disappointed.
All of a sudden the warm water did not feel so good any more. My heart was pounding. Had I locked all the doors of the house? Were we dealing with an intruder, a burglar, a stalker... or was Neill paying us a visit again?
“Are you sure, William... or is it because Halloween is around the corner?”
Caroline caught the word Halloween and said, “I see a ghost...”
“Okay guys, cut it out.”
“Yes,” William said nervously, “There is no such thing as ghosts ‑‑ right mommy?”
I always have problems answering that question ‑‑ ruling out ghosts is akin to denying an afterlife and being as afraid of death as I am, that is the last thing I want to do. So as the wind was howling through the trees and the French doors inside the garage rattled with an empty sadness, I hesitated and then... felt a cold fear clutch at my heart when the light in the upstairs bathroom went out. It was not a power outage because the light downstairs was still on. William noticed it, too.
“Mom... someone switched off the light. Maybe it is the same man...”
“Oh, William dear,” I countered, “the lamp probably burned out or maybe it’s a fuse..." As I was saying this, the light went on again... and off ... and on.
“Shit,” I said out loud, no longer able to appease my children with my own hollow rationalizations.
“What is going on, mom?!” William asked. There is nothing worse than not knowing the answers to your kids’ questions, especially when you find yourself naked in a hot tub, while a burglar is being frivolous with your lights inside the house.
“Let’s hide,” came Caroline’s suggestion, a stock reply whenever there was a lull in a conversation or a quiet moment in her games for the day. Granted, I felt like hiding but we had a potential intruder on our hands and this was not the time to play peek‑a‑boo.
I considered my options, and then took action. Once, my widowed grandmother, who lived alone in a dark villa in the Dutch dunes, heard someone mess with her front door in the dead of night. She opened the window over the front door and yelled at the guy who, surprised, took flight. I figured resolute action might solve the mystery, if not the burglar.
After taking the protesting children out of the Jacuzzi, I barged into the house, making lots of noise. When I reached the bathroom, the light was still going on and off and the phantom intruder had mysteriously disappeared. And, I remembered. I had screwed in a bulb rather haphazardly, so that the light switched on and off as it made and lost contact inside the fitting.
This, however, did not explain the man that William had seen. So I inspected the entire house. Like a frightened child, I checked under the beds, in closets and behind drapes but found no one.
Maybe the house was not haunted, but my soul surely was. Jon’s absence during the week, the endless rain, the rats and the demands of small children had worn me down. On a good day I tried to escape in a novel. On a bad day I considered jumping off the Golden Gate. Since we had just moved, I had made few to no (local) friends, so there were no shoulders to cry on, let alone have coffee with. I was slowly reaching the point of a near‑nervous breakdown and rather than seeking medical help, find a priest or chase the blues away with an inordinate amount of St. John’s Wort, I escaped, once more, into reading.
Through Tom Wolfe’s Man in Full I revived my interest in the Stoics and their advocacy of a simpler life. From the boxes of books that I had not unpacked yet, I pulled out Seneca: “Philosophy calls for simple living, not for doing penance,” he wrote in his letters to Lucilius.
That did not help, for I felt like I was doing penance for a crime I had no knowledge of committing. I read on: “Limiting one’s desires actually helps to cure one of fear. ‘Cease to hope,’ Hecato says, ‘and you will cease to fear.’” I could relate to that. After all, what kind of appearances was I trying to keep up? If my children could be happy in a house that my brother ‑‑upon his visit‑‑ had referred to as a “garden shed,” I could or at least should be content, too.
This, however, did not stop me from writing a tearful letter to my former thesis advisor. I told him that my doctorate in English had neither prepared me for a career in the Academy, nor had it, in any way, qualified me as a general contractor for the remodeling plans of our run‑down house. The letter must have been a lot darker than I had realized, for upon receiving it, he called me, concerned I might hang myself from one of the rafters in the house.
The crisis of the cottage seemed to bring out the crisis within: after starting out as an academic with a book to my name, I was going nowhere professionally. I had opted for my children when they were born, thinking naively that the tenure‑track positions would be delivered on a golden platter to my address, after I was done changing diapers.
At a Thomas Wolfe Conference where I spoke as an independent scholar (read: a mommy who thinks, in spite of it all), I apologized for maybe sounding out of touch with my field.
“Women change after childbirth,” I told the audience, "my friend tells me that the ejected placenta, after the baby is born, is not really the ‘afterbirth’ but your brain.” As always, I tried to cover up the real drama in my life with a crude joke. But for me the humor had long since gone and the laughter had died out. I was unhappy as a full‑time mom and the dump that we called our house brought out the gathering disillusionment within.
Also, nurturing two kids, I was simply not ready to also nurture a house back to life. I could not convey my sadness to Jonathan but, in my mind, I was frantically running from the dark hole that was about to swallow me whole. Coffee mugs will point out the cliché that attitude is everything in life and while I, at first, hated those mugs for pointing out this platitude, my attitude was sorely lacking. I have always loved this country for the way in which people can re‑invent themselves. Obviously, my European rigidity held me back from renewing myself.
When I read my journal of those agonizing days now, I see a recurring theme: a real sadness over wanting to write creatively all my life but never living up to that ambition. “Write what you know” is the standard advice of every creative writing class. All I knew was ear infections, dirty diapers and a bone‑numbing fatigue at the end of every day. Why would I want to write about that? Who would want to know? Who was I to impose myself on the blank page?
Searching for answers (and a topic), I took a screenwriting class and wrote a black comedy about a woman dying, yet finding life in love. The screenplay had characters that were disguised versions of myself. The heroine, a struggling writer, had a way of wisecracking herself out of any difficult situation and her remark that “art does not pay but it sure does take the sting out of suffering,” became my mantra as well. The writer’s close friend was Carla, a mother of two young children, like myself. In order to transcend the wearisome routine of scraping her kids’ breakfast off the floor and picking up her husband’s dirty socks every day, she had long “conversations” with the magnolia tree in front of her house. She was a wannabe poet and dreamed of doing a magnolia‑version of Monet’s series of the Reims Cathedral.
Both women “survived” because they wrote and looking back on them now, it was my unconscious desire to be like them that created them in the first place.
Alice Walker once said that for people who are depressed, writing can be like the ladder out of the pit. Writing was my ladder. It made me happy, fulfilled and worthwhile. I returned to an abandoned novel that was as grand in scope as The English Patient. When the ambitious outline turned me into something of a mental patient myself, I ditched it and groped around in the dark, still in search of a topic.
Jokingly, I told my friends that “some day” I would write about our house. I would pen a quasi‑philosophical and engaging memoir like Frances Mayes had done about her Italian villa Bramasole in Under the Tuscan Sun. With the house’s fumigation still fresh in my mind, I was going to call my book Under the Termite Dust or Bramasole Gone Bonkers.
But “some day” is never a good day. Why not today? My topic, after all, had been in my face and I?! I was not writing. I was watching Oprah. That is, Oprah’s Book Club: I would be green with envy when yet another writer was pulled out of obscurity and destitution by Oprah’s almighty seal. So I started a memoir and thus avoided an uncertain relationship with Prozac and an expensive therapist. I felt reassured. Weren’t all the great writers manically depressed?
Through writing I could take distance from the house’s bad vibes and before I knew it, I was coming back into my own. And thus, the cottage, in all its decay, was the embodiment of my own mental stagnation and decline; but as the house was coming out of its long winter of disrepair with a new roof, a fresh coat of paint, new windows, new decks and an extensive remodel inside, so was my life being renewed and enriched. As the house was being patched up, so was my soul made whole again by the healing act of writing.
The home’s metamorphosis became my own‑‑ the cottage, ready to go under when we bought it, saved me from going under myself and thus became a beacon of hope and potential. Although the rats were still feasting in our crawlspace, I had found my way out of the black hole.
