Keeping House

The roses have done well this year. The salt air is hard on them — it always has been, even in the years when Alden’s mother was the one doing the cutting back and the mulching — but I have found that if you are consistent, if you attend to them every morning before the dew has quite burned off, they will give you something worth having. I go out early, before the light has fully come up over the water, and I work my way along the bed that runs the length of the south-facing wall: the Albas first, because they are the most temperamental, then the Rugosas, which would survive a war and do not really need me but which I like to fuss over anyway. The thorns catch at my gloves. The soil is cold and gritty with sand. I can hear the ocean, as I always can from anywhere on this property, that steady sound like breathing.

By the time I come inside, my hands smell of earth and rose oil, and the kitchen is warm from the oven, which I leave on low through the night in winter to keep the pipes from freezing. I wash my hands at the deep sink — the porcelain one original to the house, with the mineral stain that no amount of scrubbing will shift — and I put the kettle on. Two cups. The Spode with the blue rim for me, the heavier stoneware for Alden, who has never cared for delicate things and once told me, years ago, that a man should be able to set his cup down without worrying he has broken something.

He is resting upstairs. He has been having a difficult time of it lately, and I think rest is the best medicine, truly I do — better than anything a doctor might suggest, not that there is much point in doctors at this stage. I steep his tea the way he likes it, strong, with the bag left in, and I carry it up with the morning tray: two soft-boiled eggs, toast cut into triangles (he was particular about this, always, a holdover from the way his mother served them), and a small dish of the beach plum jam I put up last September. The hallway is dim. The lavender sachets I have hung along the picture rail give off their good clean smell as I pass beneath them. I use a great many sachets. The house is old and near the marsh, and old houses near marshes have their own smell, earthy and persistent, that the lavender does a great deal to soften.

The bedroom door needs a bit of a push — the frame has swelled with the damp, the way it does every winter — and the room inside is cool because I keep the window cracked. Fresh air is important. I set the tray on the bedside table, on the lace runner his mother made, and I straighten the quilt where it has bunched at the foot of the bed. I tell Alden about the roses. I tell him that the Alba nearest the gate has put out three new canes, which is more than I expected given the late frost. I tell him I am thinking of making a fish chowder for lunch, if the weather holds and I can walk down to see what the tide has left in the rock pools, though of course I could just as easily use something from the pantry.

He does not answer, but Alden has never been much of a talker in the mornings. I have always liked that about him. Some women want conversation first thing, want to be asked about their plans and their dreams and whatever else, but I have always preferred a quiet house in the early hours, the companionship of someone who is simply there while you go about the business of the day. I collect yesterday’s tray from the dresser. The eggs have gone untouched, the toast dry and cold. He has not been hungry lately. I do not press the matter. Appetite comes and goes. The important thing is that the meals are there, that the routine is kept, that the house runs as it should. I take the old tray down and scrape the food into the compost pail and wash the dishes and that is that.

I can see how someone from outside might look at the house — the spit of land it sits on, the quarter mile of scrub pine and beach grass between us and the Frazier property, the long dirt road that leads to the coast road and from there to town — and think it isolating. But I have never felt that way. The house is sufficient. It contains everything I require: my kitchen, my garden, my preserves lined up on the pantry shelves in their jewel-colored rows (the beach plum dark as garnets, the crabapple a pale, uncertain gold), my husband upstairs. What would town add to this? Noise. Opinion. People who want to know how you are in that way that means they want to hear that you are not well, so they can tell you what to do about it.

I check the front gate every morning after the garden — the latch is old iron, heavy, and it must be set just so or it will swing in the wind — and when it is latched, I feel the satisfaction that I imagine a captain feels when the last line is secured. I walk the fence after that. The property is not large but the perimeter takes twenty minutes if you are thorough, which I am: checking for loose posts, for places where the wind has worried the wire, for any sign that the deer have found a way through. The deer are a problem only for the vegetables, not the roses — they leave the roses alone, which I have always thought shows a kind of taste — but the vegetable garden is essential. I have not been to the market in some time. The pantry is deep, and I planned well — sacks of flour and sugar, tins of oil, the dried beans and rice that will keep indefinitely if you store them properly, which I do — but the fresh things must come from the garden, and the garden must be protected. Everything inside the fence is mine.

The laundry is Tuesdays and Fridays, or more often if needed, and lately it has been needed more often. Alden’s bedding requires attention. I strip the sheets and the pillowcases and carry them down in the wicker hamper, the one with the broken handle I keep meaning to mend, and I fill the deep sink with cold water first — always cold, for the stains — and add the bleach. A good amount of bleach. I have learned, over these months of caring for him, that there is no point in being conservative with it. The stains are — well. They are what they are. A body produces what a body produces, and there is nothing shameful in it, nothing that should not be spoken of plainly between a wife and the work of her house. I soak the linens for an hour, then wring them by hand. I could use the machine, but it is upstairs in the bathroom and I do not like to run it because of the noise. He needs his rest. The wringer in the cellar still works, though it takes some effort, and afterward I carry the wet sheets out to the line where they snap and billow in the sea wind like sails, and the smell of them when I bring them in — the bleach and the salt and the cold air — is one of the best smells I know. Clean. Completely clean.

The flies are a nuisance, I will say that. This time of year, with the marsh warming, they cluster around the upstairs windows especially, and I have taken to keeping strips of flypaper in the bedroom and the hallway. I change them often. I do not like Alden to be bothered. He always hated flies — would spend whole summer evenings with a rolled newspaper, determined to get every last one, and I would sit on the porch laughing at the sound of him swatting, the thwack and his little grunt of satisfaction. The memory makes me smile as I pin a fresh strip above the window. The marsh is a breeding ground for them, of course. There is nothing to be done about that. It is simply the price of living where we live, which is to say: the most beautiful place I have ever known, and the only place I have ever wanted to be.

The telephone stopped ringing some time ago, which is a relief. For a while it was quite persistent — I would hear it from the garden, that shrill mechanical sound cutting through the quiet, and I would put down my trowel and think about whether I ought to answer it. I decided I ought not. The calls were from Alden’s office, or perhaps from his sister in Vermont, and in either case there was nothing I could tell them that would be useful. Alden is resting. He is not available. I do not know when he will be available. These are true things, and I could have said them, but the saying of them would have led to other questions, and the questions would have led to people coming to the house, and people coming to the house would have disturbed the order of things, and so I let it ring. Eventually it stopped. I think the service has been disconnected. I have not paid the bill in some time. There are a number of bills I have not paid, now that I think of it — they are in the stack on Alden’s desk in the study, along with his other mail, which I sort each afternoon when the carrier leaves the bundle in the box at the end of the road. His pile has grown quite tall. Mine is modest: a seed catalogue, a circular from the church. I do not open his mail. That would be presumptuous.

The garden wants constant work at this time of year and I am glad to give it. The vegetable patch behind the windbreak is coming along — the tomatoes are still leggy but the beans have set and the lettuce is ready for cutting, that tender early lettuce that tastes of almost nothing, just green and water and the faintest bitterness. I have put in marigolds along the border to keep the deer out, and they blaze in the afternoon light like small, tattered suns. I compost everything. Eggshells, coffee grounds, the kitchen scraps, the things from the garden that have gone past their time. I turn the pile with a pitchfork and the heat rises from it, sweet and rank.

I have noticed the Frazier boy at the fence line twice this week. He stands there with his hands in his pockets, looking toward the house, and when he sees me in the garden he waves, a tentative lift of the hand that I acknowledge with a nod and nothing more. I do not know what he wants. I do not wish to find out. His mother, Joan Frazier, is the sort of woman who brings casseroles to people who have not asked for them and calls it kindness. I have nothing against Joan Frazier personally, but I have no need of her casseroles or her concern. The fence is in good repair. The gate is latched. There is no reason for the boy to be standing there, and I wish he would stop.

His name is Tommy. He came to the gate on a Thursday, while I was deadheading the Rugosas, and called out to me in that overloud way young people have. I set down my secateurs and walked to the gate, keeping to my side of it.

“Mrs. Parrish? I’m Tommy Frazier — Joan’s son? I’m home from school for the summer.”

I told him I remembered him, which was true. He had been a small, grubby child who once threw a tennis ball onto our roof and then cried about it. He was taller now, and less grubby, but he had the same anxious quality about him.

“My mom was wondering — we haven’t seen you in town in a while, and she wanted me to check in. See if you and Mr. Parrish need anything.”

I told him that was very kind of his mother and that we were quite well. I told him Alden was resting, that he had not been feeling his best, but that I was managing perfectly and there was nothing we needed. I said all of this with a smile, because I was raised to be gracious to neighbors, even when they arrive uninvited and stand at your gate as though entitled to an accounting of your life.

Tommy shifted his weight. He looked past me toward the house.

“It’s just — Mom said she tried calling. And some people in town were asking about Mr. Parrish at the hardware store, because he usually comes in for—”

I told him that we did not need anything from the hardware store and that the telephone had been giving us trouble. Both of these things were true in their way. He nodded but did not leave.

I offered him lemonade. It was the only thing to do. I could see that he intended to stay until he had satisfied whatever mission his mother had sent him on, and it would be easier to manage him with lemonade on the porch than with the gate between us. I went inside and made a pitcher — fresh lemons, cane sugar, cold water from the tap — and brought it out with two glasses on the tin tray we use for outdoors. He sat in the wicker chair and looked around with the frank curiosity of someone his age, and I sat across from him and waited for him to finish his inspection so that we could have our lemonade and he could go.

He asked about Alden. I said Alden was resting and did not care for visitors. He asked how long Alden had been unwell. I said it had been some time and that I was taking good care of him. He asked if we had seen a doctor. I said that we had not found that necessary. He drank his lemonade and I watched a drop of condensation slide down the glass and fall onto the porch boards, where it darkened the wood in a circle the size of a penny.

“Mrs. Parrish, I don’t mean to be rude, but — there’s kind of a smell?”

I told him about the salt marsh. I explained that the marsh is at its most pungent in the warmer months, when the organic matter — the grasses, the shellfish, the various things that live and die in tidal water — begins to break down. I told him it was one of the features of coastal living that one grows accustomed to. He did not look persuaded, but he did not press the point.

He asked to use the bathroom. I could not refuse — you cannot refuse a guest the bathroom, it is simply not done — and so I directed him to the powder room off the front hall, the small one with the shell-patterned wallpaper and the guest towels I keep fresh though we have not had guests in quite some time. I showed him where the soap was. I pointed out the towels. I was a good hostess. Then he went inside and closed the door, and I stood in the hallway.

I stood with one hand on the banister and the other holding my glass of lemonade. The stairs rose beside me, turning at the landing where the window lets in the afternoon light. I could hear Tommy running the water. I looked up the stairs. The upstairs hallway was dim and still, and I could smell the lavender from where I stood, and beneath it the other smell that is simply the smell of the house, of the marsh, of an old building near the sea. I put my hand more firmly on the banister. There was nothing to be concerned about. But I found that I preferred to be standing just there, between the powder room and the stairs, while the boy was in my house. I found that I could not have moved from that spot if I had wanted to, though of course I did not want to. I was simply waiting, the way any hostess waits for a guest to finish in the bathroom. That is all.

Tommy came out wiping his hands on his jeans — the guest towels were right there on the rack — and I had his glass refilled and the front door open. We finished our lemonade on the porch in a silence that I found perfectly comfortable and that he, from the way he kept clearing his throat, did not.

When he left, I watched him walk down the path to the gate, and I watched him latch it behind him — he latched it, which I appreciated, though I would check it again myself — and I watched him disappear down the road into the scrub pines. Then I went upstairs. I opened the bedroom window wider, because the room had grown close, and I adjusted the bedding, pulling the quilt smooth, tucking the edges. I sat on the chair beside the bed and I told Alden about the boy — Joan Frazier’s son, he would remember Joan, the casserole woman — and about the garden, how the beans had set and the lettuce was nearly ready. I told him I was thinking of making the fish chowder after all, the one with the potatoes cut small the way he prefers, and that I would bring him a bowl at dinnertime though I knew he probably would not be hungry.

I sat with him for a while. The curtain moved in the breeze from the open window. The flypaper above the sill had collected a good number and would need changing. I could hear the ocean. The light was starting to go gold. I went downstairs and started dinner.

Tommy came back on a Tuesday, and he was not alone. There was a woman with him — not Joan, someone older, with a clipboard, which I did not like the look of at all. I saw them from the upstairs window. I was sitting with Alden, reading aloud from the newspaper — I keep a stack of them, the ones from before the subscription lapsed, and I read them in no particular order because news, when you think about it, is mostly the same from one day to the next and the specific date hardly matters.

They knocked. I did not go down. They knocked again, louder, and the woman called my name — “Mrs. Parrish? Elodie?” — in that professionally warm voice that means nothing warm at all. I stayed where I was. I adjusted the quilt. Through the window I could see them at the gate, and then Tommy opened the gate, which meant the latch had not held, which meant I would need to fix it, and they came up the path to the porch.

They knocked for a long time. The woman tried the door, which was locked. Tommy went around the side of the house and I heard him at the kitchen door, which was also locked — I have become quite careful about the locks. They stood in the yard and looked up at the windows. I moved back from the curtain, though I do not think they could have seen me — the lace is thick enough to obscure, which is one of the many good qualities of handmade lace, and I was grateful to Alden’s mother for it.

I could hear them talking, though not the words. The woman wrote something on her clipboard. Tommy looked unhappy. I was inside my house. The house was clean, the garden tended, the pantry full. I had everything I needed. They were the ones standing in someone else’s yard, uninvited, unwanted, with a clipboard.

I went downstairs and began preparing dinner. Two plates, as always — the good china, because Alden has always believed that everyday meals deserve good china, that the practice of saving things for special occasions is a practice of assuming special occasions will come, and he would rather use the Spode twice a day than wait for a day that might not arrive. I set his place at the head of the table and mine at the side nearest the window, where I can see the garden and, beyond it, the water.

Eventually I heard them leave. The gate banged — the latch, I would need to see to it — and then there was silence, and then there was just the ocean and the clock and the sound of onions softening in the pan.

Dinner was good. I made the chowder after all, with potatoes from the garden and dried thyme from the bunch hanging in the pantry and a knob of butter — the butter is running low, but Alden’s chowder should have butter in it because that is how I have always made it. The kitchen was warm and steamy and the windows fogged with it, which I like, the way the fog makes the room feel smaller and closer, like being inside a shell. I ate at my place and Alden’s bowl sat at his, cooling, and I talked to him the way I do at meals, about what I had done that day and what I planned for tomorrow. Tomorrow I will stake the tomatoes. There is bread to bake — I have been making all our bread since the last loaf from town went stale, and I find I prefer it, the rhythm of it, the kneading and the waiting and the way the kitchen fills with that yeasty warmth that makes a house smell like a house. The Frazier boy will probably come again. I will handle it.

After dinner I wash up. The chowder pot, the bowls, the Spode — each piece washed by hand, dried with the linen cloth, returned to its shelf. I carry Alden’s bowl upstairs, untouched. I set it on the bedside table next to the tray from this morning, and I will collect them both tomorrow. I check the locks: front door, kitchen door, the cellar bulkhead. I wind the clock in the hallway, the tall case clock that belonged to Alden’s grandfather and that I have kept running perfectly for years, though it needs winding every three days and the key is small and easy to lose if you do not keep it in the same place always, which I do — on the hook inside the pantry door, next to the spare keys for the shed and the gate.

I bank the woodstove for the night. Even in summer I keep a small fire — the house is old and the walls are plaster over lath and the damp comes through, and Alden feels the cold. Has always felt the cold.

Then I go upstairs. I stop in the hallway to replace the lavender sachet nearest the bedroom door — it has lost its strength and I crush a fresh handful of dried buds into the muslin bag, tying it with kitchen twine. The smell blooms, sharp and sweet, and for a moment it is the only thing I can smell, which is what I want, which is always what I want.

I open the bedroom door. The room is cold — the window is wide open, as I keep it, and the night air off the ocean has a bite to it even in June. The flypaper is heavy and still. The quilt is smooth on the bed. I adjust the pillow. The lace runner on the bedside table has shifted under the weight of the tray and I center it again, because these things matter, because a house that is not kept will become a house that cannot be kept, and I will not allow that.

I tell Alden about tomorrow. The tomatoes, the bread, the Frazier boy. I tell him the roses are doing well. I tell him I will bring his breakfast early because I want to get to the garden before the heat.

I say goodnight. I touch the quilt where it rises over what I suppose I would call his shoulder, if I were describing it to someone else, which I am not. The fabric is cool. Everything in this room is cool, and still, and clean.

I close the door behind me. I go to my room — the guest room, at the other end of the hall, where I have been sleeping for some time now because it seemed better, seemed kinder, to let him rest without my tossing and turning. The guest room is small but I have made it mine: my book on the nightstand, my robe on the hook, the window that faces east so I wake with the light. I wash my face. I brush my hair. I get into the narrow bed and pull the quilt up — a different quilt, a lighter one, the one I pieced myself from scraps of Alden’s mother’s dresses, blue cotton and yellow calico and a dark green that might once have been part of a winter coat.

I can hear the ocean. I can always hear the ocean. It is the sound that holds the house, the sound that was here before the house and will be here after, and I find it comforting, the way you find comforting anything that is larger than yourself and your concerns and that asks nothing of you whatsoever. The wind moves through the scrub pines. The clock ticks downstairs. Somewhere in the marsh, something calls out — a night bird, or a frog, or just the sound the reeds make when the tide pulls through them. Tomorrow I will wake early and the day will be like every other day, and the day after that will be the same.

I close my eyes. I am very tired, and very content, and the ocean goes on and on.