The Good Spirit
They always come when you least expect them: memories of a simpler time that might not even have been simpler but feels so in retrospect because you were so used to it. They are not important, earth-shattering memories, only little snippets of an everyday life that has stopped existing this way a long time ago and that he wishes he could get back, even though he knows exactly that it is lost forever and that it might be for the best.
It is something so usual and soothing to see a man who is still wearing his jacket although it’s pleasantly warm sitting on the living room table; above his head a crystal chandelier that, just like the massive, dark wooden table and a big part of the furniture he has bought abroad. He looks down to his hands that are crippled by a flexion contracture in which he holds an old fountain pen that he inspects intently. If one of his daughters sat down with him, they would risk hearing about this specific fountain pen’s history which is why they avoid joining him unless they want to have a conversation with him that spans over several hours.
What completes the picture is a small, dark-haired woman in her nightgown who, her hands resting on the table, is reading a book, maybe smoking or eating dry chocolate cornflakes noisily or rustling with a plastic bag. The man with the fountain pen does not appreciate any of those actions and flashes her annoyed and reproachful glances; repeatedly asking her to be quiet. She dismisses his remark, either because she tends not to listen to what anyone tells her, especially not him, or because she is so focused on her book and the ear she isn’t deaf on only perceives the noises of its surroundings selectively.
Should the bedroom, a room that is way too big with green carpets, a green and white tapestry and a big bed in one corner, be entered a few hours later, she will be in bed reading. The gobbling will have increased; in the worst case scenario it will fill the entire room. He will be either in a fetal position under his blanket on his side of the bed that is covered in crumbs and read as well – either a book or Der Spiegel* that he has been subscribed to for years – or he will be lying on the floor in front of the bed watching TV. It’s unavoidable that he will be talking to the television set which amuses her because she simply can’t understand it. When she talks – and she talks a lot – she wants answers.
She also talks in her sleep and makes noises as if chewing which prompts him to throw a pillow at her when she wakes him from his light sleep by doing so but she doesn’t even move, just continues to sleep. Needless to say, he hates unusual noises, especially when produced by fellow human beings.
When he comes home on weekdays and lets the heavy front door fall shut behind him thereby informing the entire house about his arrival, he puts the briefcase she gave him as a present a few years before on the hallway’s marble floor and looks if a new fountain pen has arrived for him. If that’s the case, he sits down with it in the living room table.
She’s usually taking a nap around this time or talking to her relatives on the phone. When she’s awake, she asks him if he’s hungry. He always says yes and sometimes she cooks for him, sitting across from him while he eats.
The children know when they have to be careful when they are doing something forbidden in their rooms that are next to each other and identical in everything but color and whose doors they aren’t allowed to lock even though they have the keys. She unknowingly wans them with her noisy steps on the stairs that can’t be mistaken for anyone else’s and can be heard in the entire house. It sounds like a herd of elephants, no matter if she’s losing or gaining weight at the moment – she always does either the one or the other.
But technically, there is very little the daughters have to keep quiet about because she hardly ever forbids them to do anything. Her mother always forbade everything and she did it anyway; she doesn’t want to be like her mother who leads such a carefree life that she has to make up her many worries and pains herself and inform everyone about it. She, herself, has no patience for it and her fear to become like her mother is so great that she takes the extra step to ensure it won’t happen. She has a book called “Oh no, I’m becoming my mother!“ on her nightstand and in the back of it, there’s a test that she does every couple of months to make sure that she hasn’t become her mother yet.
He makes fun o fit; frustrates her because of his relationship with his brother whom he has talked to five or six times over the past eleven years and only when she forced him to.
She likes to laugh about the stories the kids bring home from school but he can’t remember what her laughter sounds like. She loves to talk like no one else in the house and is the only one who manages to bring the house to life with her constant rustling, gobbling, stamping and her always slightly hoarse voice.
She barely smells of smole although she seems to be constantly sitting in the living room or the kitchen smoking. Her body odor is so weak that he doesn’t think he’s ever caught a whiff of it in all those years. He on the other hand leaves his everywhere: on his clothes, the bedding and even the two stuffed animals that he bought her years ago, a horse and a donkey she lovingly named after him and who haven’t left the way too big bedroom ever since moving in eight years ago.
She hates to tidy up the big house yet it’s always clean. Sometimes she wishes they had never built it and looked for a bigger apartment instead or, even better, returned to where she comes from, where her family lives. But she has long learned that he’d never do that; he says he hates the hectic there. Instead, he has realized the dream everybody she has gotten to know since getting married, seems to share: the dream of their own house.
Sometimes he asks himself if things would have been different if he hadn’t pursued the dream of the house that she had initially shared. If they had only talked about like so many others without ever doing anything would she still be there? But the house isn’t to blame. The blame is not to be laid on him, the children or even her. It’s just something that happened after they moved into the house and she loves the house that offers enough space for her clothes, bags and shoes for which there was no place in the old apartment just as there was no space for the souvenirs from all their travels, his valuable fountain pen collection or the kids that have grown up so quickly.
And so they built the house that combined her dreams with his: She wanted many bathrooms and big rooms; he wanted a place for himself and not to be in debt until the end of his life.
The house belongs to both of them but he’s a lot more attached to it than her who has moved so often in her childhood and every once in a while she dares to suggest selling the house that she thinks is too big. Her parents have built a house once, too, when she was little but only lived in if for a couple of months after a building period of two years until her mother told her father she didn’t like the house anymore. He sold it straight away.
But he isn’t like her father. He, too, thinks that the house is too big but he will never relent and sell it. He wants to live in it forever while she secretly dreams of someday, maybe when the kids have completed their education, returning to the place her heart still calls home. When she goes there, she says she’s going home even though she hasn’t lived there for twenty years now.
And then, one day, she does.
Now it’s quiet in the house. When the children come home, they are often enough under the impression that the big house is abandoned because it is so unusually silent now. One of the daughters turns on her stereo as loud as she can without receiving complaints which happens often enough to fell from the silence.
When he comes home now, he doesn’t ask about her anymore. He only talks about her rarely and only in the evening when he’s sitting on the living room table inspecting his newest fountain pen and drinking a glass of red wine. She doesn’t sit across from him now as she used to, expertly ignoring his comments about fountain pens.
He also has the bedroom for himself. He’s put an air mattress in front of the bed to make watching TV more comfortable, something she would never have tolerated. But he spends less time in the bedroom, sits in his office in front of his computer more frequently. When he wants to sleep or read, he is never disturbed by any noises – secretly, he misses it. Just like the daughters miss the stampede of the elephant herd. Nobody talks about it but the three of them know it.
When they sit on the table on weekends for the only two meals they eat together over the course oft he week, something’s missing – the forth person who completely misses the point because she has understood something totally different.
When, one time late at night, a glass of wine in hand, he says that the good spirit has left the house when she did, he is dead-on right about it, says everything there is to say about it in one sentence.
She’s fine where she is now. She is happy; feels like she felt before meeting and moving in with him, leaving her family behind for a man who in her eyes has no sense of family whatsoever.
Sometimes, she takes the phone and dials the number of the big house. He never calls; claims not to have her number that is saved in the phone’s memory. He and the kids have never been closer; all in all, things are going fine, but the good spirit that belonged to his dream has gone missing.
Author’s Note: The magazine the male character is mentioned reading is called Der Spiegel (The Mirror) and is a weekly magazine geared toward liberal-minded intellectuals.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
