This is Not a Good House:erotic memoir, creative non-fiction

This is not a good house. Bad things happen in this Gossamer House. Policemen wearing black padded vests and carrying rifles surround a house at the end of the cul de sac. They ring every bell and tell us to keep our blinds down and stay inside. In number nine, someone has taken hostages. For a split second I think Garth is taking the man in number nine down, but he's beside me looking out the window in our bedroom which is not the one overlooking the garden, the room with the ensuite and walk-in closet, Garth refusing to sleep there until we have a bedroom set. He takes me to remote shops in Scarborough strips and Keele and Highway Seven. So we set our box spring and mattress in the front room and I store my clothes in six stacked black plastic bins in the cupboard. During the week Talon is here, we fuck in the walk-in closet. We save ass-fucking for alternate weeks.

The man in number nine is holding three people hostage, a wife, her lover, and her teenage daughter. "How do you know?" I ask Garth. "I asked," he says. He has a way of reducing matters to their basics which I don't really call reducing-he hones in. He says he listens and pays attention to detail. If I have a problem and need to understand the underlying issues, I go to him. "I need some foundational listening," I say and he stops everything. I'm a mental pack rat and Garth is a stark minimalist which impresses me.

Toward the end in the Indian Road house, on one of Abie's two week returns from Geneva, as I lay stiff and unmoving in the middle of the night while Abie pounded away-it wasn't yet morning and he had woken up with an itch--Abie's prick finally wilted. He shoved me out of bed and I fell on the floor against the sliding mirrored doors of the wall-to-wall closet. "Don't you ever--" I said and I meant it. Ineffectual pricks have a way of sticking around; Abie's winding its way into the Gossamer House. The car dealership is after him. Payments are owing. Do I know anything about his whereabouts, a phone number or address? "But you must know," they say, "do you have children? Wouldn't they--""I'm the daughter of a union organizer," I say. "I know you want your cars back and goodness knows my girls and I have been through enough, but I can't. It's not in me."

I phone Abie. The hounds are after him. I bring in the red Neon the same afternoon. Yola co-signs the contract for a used Explorer. Around the same time Lisa receives an eviction notice, her father spewing his standard scenarios about holidays, delays, funds in transit across the Atlantic, and moves into the basement.

"Will you tell Lisa to close her lights?" Garth says showing me the electricity bill. "And would you tell her if she turns off the lights instead of conserving water by not flushing the toilet, our bill would be lower?"
"Tell him I'll pay for my electricity," Lisa says. I don't tell her about her decomposing shit in the basement toilet.

In this house, the ache in my heart takes root. Memories fall away like leaves in autumn. Even Garth can't help me remember the order and details of events. I need to remember how everything unraveled and I have only two photographs: in one, snapped at Kortwright when we're living in the Overbrooke house, a Rousseau rendition in which I'm smiling, arms akimbo, surrounded by ostrich ferns, and a second, a sparse backyard shot two months after we moved into this Gossamer house, in which I'm wearing Caroline's navy blue and white long cotton dress that is now too large for her and so has been passed on to me, and I'm not smiling, my already thin lips pursed together.

She refuses food. I visit Abie at his Teddington House. Sylvia has made a deep pot of sausages in gravy and sauerkraut for Christmas. "How about some yogurt?" I say, yogurt having been her first food,y homemade yogurt brewed overnight in the Highway 6 house. Still she refuses. Abie says hold her hands and tries to force food in her mouth. She turns her head side to side. And the thing is, the damned and evil thing is, I listen. I hold her hands. The same way I ran over the snapping turtle, over and over, back and forth with my Jeep Wagoneer, one eyeball popping out, a giant white marble on the freshly moved grass, the turtle flipping over. "Easy," Abie said when I called him, "you got the soft part now. You've got a jeep for god sake, just drive it like you're stuck in snow. Like we did in Montreal." I got back in the jeep and drove over that turtle, forward, brake, reverse, brake, forward again, a green leg, a thalidomide limb with claws at the tip, stirred. I screamed-three shrill wrenching notes. With poor Lisa riveted on the patio steps. And Caroline huddling beside the wood stove in the kitchen. The turtle was rabid, Abie said, otherwise it would not have left its place near the lake, finding its way to the pebbled walkway. "It can break a tree's limb in half. You have two children. Get ahold of yourself and do what I told you," he said.

She is so thin now, ninety-nine pounds just skin, bones, and heart ache. I lost all reason and listened to Abie. There are certain times I will always regret.

Abie says she goes into her closet and puts hangers around her neck. "Good thing she's a clutz," he says. One day he finds her holding a broken mirror. I live with Garth and his son. I work from seven to noon and sometimes one, counting reps and listening to complaints-a cleaning lady has the flu, a hairdresser's streaks are not thin enough, there's packing for a two-week cruise, and the strain of choosing kitchen tiles. How can I leave her alone with Garth who has hardly spoken to her in two years? He doesn't know what to say so he says nothing. "How about hello?" I say. "How about 'how are you?'" He says he'll try. "Two sentences," I say. "I go to work in the morning, rush home for lunch, sometimes there's no time even for that, and then I pick up Talon, talk to his teachers, play with him when you're on the phone, and you can't promise two simple sentences!" He stands in the doorway watching me cry, hearing my throat constrict after sentences, then phrases, and finally on words as they twist their way up, tangling and gasping as they surface.

Dr. Flak is Caroline's link at Mt. Sinai. She's been his patient since she was nineteen when she was being assessed. I was searching for another hospital, some place with a spot of light. Sunnybrooke would let me visit every two days and then just for an hour. "Let me out. Please let me out," an old lady had wailed from behind a locked door. Caroline had a once-a-day quota to call me. On her second day there, I took her out. "I'll take care of her at home," I said. I lose track of doctors: There was other doctor at Sunnybrooke--Dr. Bolous and also Dr. Theodoro, a handsome young Greek resident who later gained weight which is understandable given the wear and tear in his line of work. Caroline was an out-patient, just starting to take epival and gaining thirty-pounds with each additional capsule added on. I saw young girls with pretty figures grow larger and larger from one visit to the next. Caroline's hair changed texture; I didn't know how to manage the curls and rebellious jungle of tangles. Caroline can remember the names of all her doctors, only not when you ask her to list them. She's not good at sequencing. But sometimes she'll be going on and she'll name one of her doctors, like the one she saw in the Deloraine House whose name I often forget. "Remember Dr. Wright?" she'll say and I'll answer "What a memory you have!

We're at Dr. Flak's, Abie and I and Caroline. "Let me see if there's a bed," Dr. Flak says. I brush my eyes with the back of my hands. My nose burns, then fills like sink with the tap left running. My eyes overflow. I turn my head just as my face crumples. We settle her into a bed in a private room. She has a locker in the room and a bathroom with a shower. There are floral curtains. The windows are thick and impenetrable. I pull up a blue padded chair and sit with her.

I can't remember if she kept on talking- "minus levels thin, minus level plus, minus levels thin," or calling out "Trogolite! Trogolite!" her head rooting from side to side, or whether she sat unmoving, her head drooping. There is a song I remember playing on my autoharp when the girls were little, in the houses before the harp was seized along with my piano: "If somehow you could pack up your sorrows and give them all to me, you would lose them, I know how to use them, give them all to me." It's like that when they give her Adavan and ask me if I want to stay, a tube has to be inserted down her nose. "Yes, I can," I say, and I talk to her, "They have to do this sweetie, I love you, it's going to be alright now, I'm here, the tube is to give you food," I say holding her hand in mine, my voice soft and full; I have travelled to that dead zone beyond despair, where my breathing is shallow and my eyes hollow.

"You're amazing," they say. "So good with her."
"You're so brave."
"Thank you," I say, "Thank you."
Dr. Flak stands at the end at her bed. "I see you're sitting up," he says. She spits at him.

Twice she pulls out the tube and twice they reroute it down her nose. I gasp the first time. After the second time I rush out to Hasty Market and buy eight small containers of Astro blueberry yogurt.
"I want these on her tray," I say.
"These are for you, honey. I'm going to sit outside. I'll be right outside." I say, and I tell her that I love her, that she is my light as I gently close the door. And then I wait.