Emily Fridlund
Door
The morning after Gracie locked herself in her room and wouldn’t come out, I didn’t waste any time pounding on her door. She was eleven, too old to force to do anything. I knew enough by then to knock a few times, leave. Return and knock again. On my third pass by her door, I casually mentioned that she’d missed the bus to school but I could still drive her. I held my breath. I stared at her painted white door—heavy wooden plank, the helix grain catching the light—then walked outside to the car and drove to work, came home again at four o’clock, as usual. I didn’t detour as I made my way through the sun-warmed house. I could see at a glance that Gracie’s door was still shut tight, but I didn’t roar out her name like a maniac, and I didn’t rush down the hall and rattle the knob frantically. Newton’s third law, the grandfatherly counselor at school told us once. Don’t shove if you don’t want to be shoved back. All I said was “I’m getting a snack,” as I glided to the kitchen in my pencil skirt and gently tugged open the freezer door. Then I sat down on the back porch steps in the sun and sucked a Popsicle. It was the kind of thing Gracie always requested, that stained her lips a tell-tale blue afterward. It was done up in a swirl of patriotic colors. Eyes open: sweetness perfected. Eyes closed: almost no taste at all. The backyard grass was whiskery in the September heat, ever un-mowed, ever tufted with seed. Our bad crabapple branches sagged with squirrels on haunches. I’d kept thinking—all that morning at my desk, all through my afternoon commute—she’s just sleeping or reading or loathing me in bed. I sucked the last of the blue dye from the ice on my stick, then chewed the wood raw, turning it over. She’s just sleeping or reading or loathing me in bed, and don’t little girls do things like that all the time? Isn’t that the kind of thing girls always do?
* * *
There are mountains between us, my mother used to say when she was mad.
Is that all? I’d wonder. But not out loud.
From my perch on the back step, I twisted and squinted back at the house. A beetle-ridden birch was dying outside Gracie’s window, and it occurred to me for the first time that she might have used that to climb out. She could have done it last night and closed the window behind her. She might even be out there right now in the raggedy fields beyond the crabapples. Stomping around in the corn, chucking rocks at other rotten old farmhouses like ours, bought on short sale. That Gracie had never done anything like this before, never once, made a fresh green protectiveness for her spring up inside.
“Hello,” Carl said, making me jump.
I’d left the front door unlocked. He’d come through the house. He had not two cupcakes in his hand but three, in a plastic tray that cheeped when he opened it.
“Hello.” I was conscious suddenly that I was soaked in sweat.
The saliva on his teeth flashed and flashed again. He was nodding into the sun, nodding too big and too long, and I could see how uneasy he was to be a visitor on this porch he’d planed himself from barn-salvaged boards. My ex-husband, the porch-maker. The certified public accountant who, when filling in his profession on a legal form once, had written in the tiniest of scabbed letters “carpenter.”
He cleared his throat. “New bakery downtown. Try one?” Then he was handing me a cupcake, and the cupcake was going deep into my mouth—frosting roof congealing around my teeth—before I could take it out and examine its mushy black heart.
“Vegan chocolate?” I couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh, the bribe of kings.” He wore his abashed-aggressive look. “The bribe of dads.”
“Or, well, the bribe of certain mammals to other mammals,” I said, “the ones unwilling to suckle the others to their graves. To be technical.”
“To be technical.” He raised his bushy eyebrows. “You a vegan now, too?”
“No, I—” I stood up, bitten cupcake in hand. I was about to rib on him for some other point—the only way to see if we were in faux-flirting or true fighting mode—but a bit of anxious pleasure still clung to my thoughts, a bit of tendrily, inexplicable happiness from imagining Gracie out there with her backpack in the corn.
So when Carl asked, “Is she ready for the weekend—?” I just shrugged. “Haven’t seen her since I got home.”
He frowned.
“Haven’t penetrated her lair,” I revised, to correct him for judging me the way he was— and, if possible, to initiate our old, parental glance, the one that said there’s two of us and just one of her.
“Shall I go knock on her door?”
I made myself shrug again, as if unconcerned. “Be my guest.”
* * *
It had been Carl’s idea, back when Gracie was starting school, to buy this old house. He’d had visions of goats in the backyard, homegrown cilantro for our tacos. Goats! I used to remind him, in vicious code, whenever the roof leaked and the pipes froze, when the river flooded out the basement one spring and ruined all his old college papers and textbooks. Now I followed him past the one bathroom with its peeling-paint tresses, past the big bedroom with its elaborately cracked plaster. Like everything else in the house, Gracie’s door at the short hallway’s end was a hundred years old. It had changed since morning though—all the hieroglyphic intricacies of the grain were gone. The light had moved. Carl set his knuckle on plain white wood. When there was no immediate answer, he rattled the knob a few times, then knocked again more sharply.
“Gracie-Grace? Open up, Sweetie. Don’t do this again. It’s me—it’s your dad.” His aging face against the door looked like a smashed loaf of bread.
He tried tempting her out. “I thought we could pick apples this weekend. Maybe drive to the lake?” I saw the cuffs of his pants, when he shifted his weight, appeared to lick at his loafers. He did a trip-el-it knock on the door, and his pants lapped at his tassels. “I have cupcakes!”
I held my breath for her answer.
Once, when I wasn’t being very kind, I’d told Carl that he must have learned to be a parent from watching sitcoms. He’d responded that he had learned to be a parent, in fact, by doing the exact opposite of whatever I did, and he’d said it because Gracie had just taken my glasses from my face, set them between the pages of Little Women in my lap, and slammed the book shut.
Now he was calling out, “What was that, hon? What was that?”
We leaned in at the same moment. He in his scuffed accountant’s loafers, me in my dentist receptionist’s skirt. Carl’s vegan cupcakes mewed, once, in their plastic tray, and I disliked us both intensely for a second, loathed how obsequious we were, and always had been, with her. Goats. We wiggled up to the door and listened.
“Gra—” I began. And swallowed the word.
* * *
I could easily envision what was on the other side. Along the wall of her room were her dollhouse, her desk, her little-girl laundry in clumps, her open empty dresser. On the window side of the room were the beds. When she was in her sunk-ship stage, Carl had built her a bunk bed in the shape of a two-mast barque. A few weeks back, I’d stormed in and ripped the blankets from the top bunk, then the lower, when she’d refused to get out of bed again for school. “If you don’t—” get up, I meant, I’ll leave without you, I might have said, but before I could, she tore out at me from behind, someone’s heavy padded bra swinging from her frail ribcage like something taxidermic. She wore Lion King underpants and clogs. The bra was mine. “Roar!” she went. I loved my daughter more than anything, I did, but the sight of her coming at me like that made my heart rise, then plunge, the way you feel when you skip to the end of a book, and you don’t recognize a single one of the characters.
* * *
Now Carl was banging on the door with one palm. His damp palm was sliding down the paint, leaving snaily tracks. He wasn’t angry so much as worried, and he wanted to go out to the garage, see if he had any tools left from three years ago that might be used to dismantle the hinges. For a few minutes, he became preoccupied with the tricky logistics of this, assessing the door now from a new angle. He got down on his haunches, ran a steady finger over the bottom hinge as if he were doctoring a bone.
“I don’t think that’s really necessary,” I told him. “Where’s the screwdriver?” he wondered.
Worry made him younger than he was, lithe, and I could hardly keep up with him as he moved through the house and out the door to the garage. He rummaged through bins, lifted and set down balls.
“How do you get by out here without even a simple hammer, Marin? How do you hang a picture up?”
“I like blank walls,” I told him. “They soothe me.”
“But where’d the calendar go, seriously? Where’s those photographs of Morocco we used to have up in the living room?”
“Listen, I was a girl,” I told him. “Stop. Stop. Stop.” He turned at last and looked at me. “Don’t do that.” “Do what?”
“Claim some special understanding with her because you share a supposed gender. She confides in me, too, you know? What if—” she’s hurt or dead in there, he didn’t say. “—she needs something?”
I could feel my heartbeat working against my shirt, a tiny foreign finger. “Girls need privacy sometimes. They don’t have so many ways to rebel as boys.”
“That’s just—” he was shaking his head at me, bewildered. He was marveling at how we had ever managed to fall asleep in a bathtub together. Or share a tube of toothpaste. “That’s just bullshit, Marin.”
I was bewildered by him, too. “No. No. It’s bullshit to take the door off by force. It’s bullshit to create all this drama fifteen minutes after you arrive just because she doesn’t want to go apple picking with you, Carl.”
Stung, he went out to his car and called his new wife. I watched through the living room window. I could guess by the tense way he spoke into his cell that Kelly was urging him not to give in the way he usually did, to take a stand. He came back inside with an ultimatum—“I’ll give her exactly one hour to come out”—which he issued in hushed tones to her door while setting the alarm on his cell. By careful, unspoken agreement we ended up on opposite ends of the couch watching Criminal Minds. I kept hoping the sound of screaming on TV wouldn’t freak Gracie out, and at the same time, I hoped it would scare her a little bit, enough to flush her from her room. But the episodes were quieter than usual, set in libraries and glades. They bled together. Did I doze off? I must have dozed off at some point because I woke to fresh yellow tape ringing another crime scene and Carl nowhere in sight. Twice, maybe three times, I’d seen him surreptitiously reset the timer on his phone before it went off.
I scrambled up from the couch.
“Carl?” I was disoriented by how dark the house had grown so fast. The floor was strobed in some TV chase, dogs lurching on leashes. No other lights. “Ca—” I began again, then thought better of it. Oh, hadn’t he been waiting for this? A familiar, almost reassuring contempt flooded my body. Hadn’t he always, all eleven years of her life, longed for circumstances from which to save our daughter? He’d taken her to a hippie therapist in the city, to a summer camp in the woods. He wouldn’t go down the medication route with a child, that he refused, but all eleven years she’d been alive he’d wanted to rescue-rescue-rescue her, and I’d long suspected that he’d simply been waiting for me to make my mistake, get distracted or fall asleep, so he could do just exactly this. Sneak back to her door, take apart the whole thing on his own—as if I had been the one holding her back all along, as if I had done all this to her.
But no. No. When I edged my way down the dark hall, I saw that he was standing perfectly motionless outside her door, hesitating. He was folding a piece of paper and sliding it with a crooked finger under the crack. I scurried away before he straightened up.
* * *
Sometimes, just before I’m drifting off, I can almost recall the quiet Pre-Gracie feeling I once had. The sense of being isolated and set aside, a finished vase. I never thought I wanted children. I assumed I’d be one of those women who glided straight through her thirties, unscathed—and then I met Carl. He lived with his aging mother across the street from the dentist's office where I worked the front desk, and I’d occasionally see him out raking leaves or shoveling the walk. After a few months of hello over hedges, he invited me into the yard to look at some tomatoes he’d planted, to eat one sliced with salt with his sick mother in the kitchen, to go to her memorial service. I sat in the back of that church—in my fucking khaki office pants—and hid my face in my hands when I saw him kneel to adjust the microphone stand for a seven-or-eight-year-old niece. I did not understand, not yet, why the sight of his big hands on the tender-bent neck of that stand made tears spring to my eyes.
I remember after the first miscarriage we were told that this happened all the time. The nurse who drew my blood insisted while tapping a vein, “Your kid down the line will make it feel like this couldn’t have happened any other way.” After the second, we went to a fertility clinic we couldn’t afford, a place with a gas fireplace in the waiting room, a coffee bar, and a cackling icemaker. After the third, Carl said he wanted to take a break. He drove me to dinner at a Mexican place downtown where I ordered many sedimentary cocktails. I got so drunk my fingers and toes went numb, and when we got home, I paced up and down our apartment hallway in the dark, talk-talk-talking. At one point, Carl tried to turn on the kitchen light, get some cheese, and I whirled around and screeched at him. “Don’t!” His shadowy hand froze in the air, reigned me into his chest. “I’m so sorry,” he’d mumbled. “Let’s go to Miami. Let’s get a dog instead. We don’t have to keep this up.” He thought he was being comforting. He thought, like everyone else, that I was upset—and I was I guess—but I also felt anointed, ferocious, as if the gods of misery and the gods of joy had colluded to strike me with blow after blow. I was being hammered into something new that I didn’t understand, and I did not want a fucking dog.
* * *
“I want nobody! I want nothing!” Gracie would yell out when upset, and it had been so cute at first in her little toddler voice, the force of her privilege and her luck drawing so many bodies and so many things her way inexorably. We mocked her. “I want noffing!” Carl and I said together when she was small. I remember how she sat on a blanket on the floor surrounded by blocks and dolls and those small cardboard books with rounded corners. Everything within reach of her creased baby hand, everything made safe for her toothless mouth, for chewing and sucking. “I want no-buddy!” we echoed, absolutely delighted in her.
* * *
In the dark living room, the TV was just a big box of noise. The picture was flipping from an anoraked reporter to a carrion shot of a police chase, and I wasn’t sure if it was an episode or news or something else, wasn’t sure what part of the night’s programming we’d come to. I carefully rose from the afghan nest where I’d fallen asleep. I moved around the coffee table, clipping my shin, and I saw—immediately, down the hall—a fat plug of folded paper stuffed under Gracie’s door. My throat tightened. A reply to Carl’s note? I glanced back at him, still slumped where he’d positioned himself, head tilted against the wall. I checked to be sure his mouth was open, his loafers off. Eyes closed. Then I flew down the hall to her door and snatched up her reply before he could get it himself. My fingertips made the paper wet. I ran to the bathroom to read it.
My dear, my most Amazing Grace,
I know that you’ve had a rocky start to sixth grade. But your teacher said that you’ve started to find your groove these last weeks. She told your mom and me at your conference that you’ve stopped hiding in the coat room during lunch and started writing letters to the lunch ladies. Even if these are complaints about the food options, I’m proud of you for using your time more constructively and for trying to make friends with people other than Lizzie and those other girls who said they wouldn’t eat with you. The school should offer vegan options. You’re right about that. Do you want to write a letter to me, too? Do you want to tell me what’s bothering you tonight, why you don’t want to come with me back to the city for the weekend? If you don’t want to talk to me directly, maybe it would be easier to write it out. I’m all eyes, ha.
Love,
Your old Dad
PS: I won’t tell your mom if you have something private to say.
In the bathroom mirror, my lips were a dragony blue, still, from yesterday’s popsicle. Pencil skirt twisted backward, bra wire hasping one boob. I could write her a letter that was just as apologetic and fawning as his, promising just as much privacy and understanding. Carl wasn’t the only one who knew how to make her happy in the short term. I ripped up and flushed his letter down the toilet, got a fresh piece of computer paper from my bedroom. My Dearest Gracie, I began, and I really meant: Tiny Human I Once Calmed by Setting inside the Open Dryer. I meant: Dearest, Heaviest Weight on Earth. Then I balled that up and started writing again.
Dear Dad,
Why do you think it has to do with you at all? When I look at you, I think, Old Man, Old Man, and I don’t say that to be mean. Do you remember when I was six and you built me that igloo? Do you remember how Mom was yelling, so we went outside and made those ice bricks with a shoebox and the hose? And we worked so hard we started sweating in the snow and it got dark and we made those igloo walls in a circle that got smaller and smaller as it went? And then there was just a round hole in the top and that was the entrance? You couldn’t climb in, because that would mean crushing the walls, but you could lift me up and drop me in from above. It was a good igloo, and I was so mad at Mom. I sat inside in the dark and hatehatehated her. But you?
You’d moved out months before that. I didn’t even hate you even a little bit. You stood out in the snow shivering and I didn’t feel anything, not even sorry for you.
Gracie
A daughter behind a door could be sleeping. A daughter behind a closed door could be sulking, could have snuck out the door in the night to use the bathroom and collect junk food from the pantry, Twizzlers and cans of Coke. She could be eating a whole bag of Frito Lays in bed. Or she could be out cold from having stolen and consumed four Corona Lights from the basement stash. She could have discovered the orange bottle of Ambien behind the toilet paper in the linen closet, or the Lexapro in the cleaning supplies above the stove, but a preteen daughter is probably just reading Dragon Quest in bed the way she always does. She might have even snuck out last night in the predawn hours, gone through the window, closed it up afterward. She could have spent the whole hot day wandering through the shaven corn stalks, and the night—she could have hunkered down in the neighbor’s treehouse or even taken the 7 Bus from the corner stop into town, to the all-night diner she loves because they serve curly fries.
“Like Schrodinger’s cat,” my sister said on the phone near dawn.
I’d taken my cell phone out to the back lawn to squint a little closer at the woods. It wasn’t quite raining. Birds were sifting the crabapple branches, sending little black apples plopping in puffs of water into the grass. Dogs down the road were barking.
I laughed to keep down a sob. Quantum mechanics were my sister’s thing, not mine.
When we were growing up, my sister had done math to comfort herself, and I’d watched TV. For years, I watched for hours every night, crouching very close to the screen, drinking in as much TV as I could, like milk. “Do you remember that show,” I said, “the one that always freaked us out about the baby who’s stolen by elves?”
“Wasn’t that a movie with David Bowie?”
I was biting my nails. “Maybe it was a movie, actually.” “Listen Marin, how long has it been?”
“Since,” I took a breath, “Ms. Heller said Lizzie—”
“Who?”
“Her teacher made me pick her up early on Thursday. Apparently, she’d thrown this girl’s turkey sandwich in the fish tank. She was asked to apologize and totally lost it, I guess. Threw a pencil at her teacher. It was pretty bad. She went straight to her room when we got home and locked the door.”
There was a pause. “Wait. Wait, Marin. Are you saying she went in Thursday after school? What is that, thirty-four, thirty-five hours? Christ. Let Carl take down the door.” “No, no, no. I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
I didn’t know.
“Listen, if you don’t want Carl to take down the door, then hang up with me and dial 9-1-1. The fire department can do things like this. They have the—Marin? Marin, are you listening?”
The funny thing was, the baby was pretty well cared for by the goblins in the movie. I wanted to say something to my sister about that, actually, the thing in that movie that had always moved me.
But my little sister was scolding me. “You need to let Carl go at that door, Marin. Or the police! Do you understand what I’m saying?” Her voice was sliding up an octave, and I could hear her trying to bring it back down. “Try to be logical if you can. She’s probably fine. She’s probably just being a kid and needs some space or whatever, but for Christ’s sake—don’t you need to find out?”
There was a muffled yelling sound from inside the house. “Listen, I got to go,” I said.
* * *
Back inside, Carl looked terrible. He was sitting on the edge of the couch, knobby elbows on his knees, chin in his hands. His black socks were drooping so I saw the knobs of his ankle bones. I took a step or two down the hallway and realized with a jolt that my note was gone, so I couldn’t know now if Carl had found it and read it—or if Gracie had. I guessed Carl, by the dazed look on his face. I turned back. Bit by bit, Carl was straightening his socks and standing up, looking at me with a sorrowful, smashed face, a boiling surface of frustration. The TV was black. “I knocked again,” he said. “And—I’m afraid I maybe lost it a bit.”
He rubbed at the sides of his face. I saw that both heels of his hands were bright red. I was fascinated by this and frightened. It was so unlike him. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. But—I might have said some things I regret.”
I swallowed. “Did she say something to you?”
“I’m going into town. I’m getting a hammer for the hinge.”
I took a step forward, firm. “No, you’re not. It’s my door now. Mine. You can’t just take it off.”
“I’m getting a hammer, Marin.” “Did she say something to you?”
“She’s still a child, and I’m still her—”
“Did she say something to you?” I interrupted him. “Did she say something to you?”
* * *
The fourth time I was pregnant, I was sure it was a stillbirth. I lay down on the floor because there had been no movement for more than three hours, and I wanted to be as quiet as possible in order to sense the baby’s slightest kick or flutter beneath my skin. Carl wanted me to go to the hospital, he begged me to, but knowing seemed worse than not knowing for a little while longer, and so I lay on the hardwood floor of our apartment and only stood with Carl’s help when I felt the edges of the world seep into darkness. At the hospital I was given some drug that made the room rock like a boat, and then they set up a little curtain and cut something out, and there wasn’t any sound at first, and then there was, and so—I told Gracie all this on Thursday when driving home from school—it took three dead fetuses to make room enough for you in this world, a half-decade of doctors, four hours on the floor believing you were dead inside me, and all this, all this happened just so you could steal a turkey sandwich from another girl’s bag at school, a single turkey sandwich, and then throw it in the fish tank when your teacher said to give it back.
“Stop talking!” she’d said. “Stop talking, stop talking, stop talking.” Then, her face breaking open: “Why would you tell me this?”
Why would I? I looked at Gracie in the rearview mirror. Twisting the seatbelt across her chest, fighting off the thing always slamming through her body, making her want to open the car door and jump out, or if not that, run screaming through the house, the way she did once last year, pulling books off shelves and curtains off rods and picture frames from the wall. Fighting off whatever made her, her.
“Because it couldn’t have happened any other way,” I’d hissed. I don’t know why. I’d been so furious, so exhausted by her.
* * *
I hear the front door close as Carl leaves the house, a shudder of timbers through sheetrock. I stand at the sink and drink a big glass of tap water. Then, stomach sloshing, I approach her door. I feel a little queasy. It’s been so long since I’d eaten, more than a day since I’ve slept in my bed or changed my clothes. The painted white wood catches the glare of the sun and makes me squint. But it’s warm as skin when I put my palm to it. I’m sorry, I want to say, but don’t. I touch the knob but don’t turn it. There, beneath the door crack, is the white lip of a note. Oh. I can’t imagine what Carl could say to her after banging and yelling like that. What could he possibly have to say? I hesitate before bending down and fishing it out. For some reason, I want to stay in the moment before reading it. Then, fingers trembling, I uncrease the note—with its soft penciled words—against the wall.
Dear Mom
I’m staying in here as long as your in the house. When your gone I’ll go with dad. Thats the deal. Thats your choice. Its you or me.
All I can think in the first moment is, what a shitty thing for Carl to write. I feel the snot rise in my nose, but I don’t want to cry. What a perfectly shitty thing for him to say, I think, the cruelest, the worst thing he has ever said to me. I stand rigid in the hall till I hear his car door slamming outside, his engine starting. The house settles back to silence, and my throat opens up, and then I know that I’m the shitty one. The shittiest. A kind of laugh moves through me, but silently, a spasm. I slide to the floor and sit down.
* * *
There are mountains between us, my mother said.
Is that all? I remember thinking. Is that it?
* * *
Old house, everything creaks. There are all these rasps and creaks and sighs. There is always all this endless background noise, so it takes a little while before I hear it, but once I do, it’s so obvious to me. How much work it takes, how much patience and guts, to be quiet, that quiet, for so long. Is that you, I think? Is that, is that? I can almost hear through the door how she’s holding her breath. I can hear her holding in air and then slowly letting it out, the same way I’m doing so slowly with mine. I hear her not not not moving for a very long time. Then moving a little. Then moving some more. There’s a nearly imperceptible shift, maybe the doorknob, and my heart hammers in my chest. Still, I don’t say anything. I don’t move, I don’t speak. Not yet. It’s not that I think I can get very far pretending to have left the house. Ventriloquizing my absence, hoping that she thinks it’s me, not her dad, that drove away. She’ll find out the truth soon enough. And it’s not that I can’t bear for her to come out, or stay in, in equal measure, though maybe that’s part of it. It’s more that there’s a moment before a door opens, before consequences fall, that can seem a lot like winning after all. As if, by canniness or accident or luck, I’ve done the exact right thing. And so when she opens the door at last it doesn’t matter—it won’t matter, will it?—That she mistakes me at first for someone else, that her face changes in anticipation, in love, before she realizes she’s been betrayed again, and it’s just me.
Emily Fridlund’s first novel, History of Wolves, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. It was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. Fridlund’s debut collection of stories, Catapult, won the Mary McCarthy Prize. She grew up in Minnesota and teaches writing at Cornell.