Three Story House: A Novel (13 page)

She looked at the girl’s profile. “As long as I don’t land on it funny or somebody doesn’t slide tackle me I’ll be all right. It’s a wonder you aren’t worried about yourself, considering your condition.”

Sonja blinked and then turned away for a moment. “That leg of yours why you’re not playing anymore?”

Lizzie nodded.

“I thought so.”

Lizzie turned away from her and shouted at the girls to pick up the pace. She yelled at the ones still jogging.

“When you’re done healing, will they let you come back?” another girl asked.

Lizzie shook her head, trying to think of the girl’s name. It was an odd one, with an apostrophe in the middle—like a contraction. La’shondra, maybe. After the third lap, five of the girls started walking. “We’ll need to work on conditioning,” she said, urging on the walkers. When they finished the run, it was nearly time for the girls to head home. A few of them had parents or older siblings idling cars in the parking lot. Most of them lived within walking distance of the community center.

She started to explain to them about how they could put together a club team to play when she was interrupted. “I didn’t come here to play soccer,” the girl said. “They told us they was going to teach us how to get into college and stuff.”

“We’ll do that too,” Lizzie said, thinking about how she could integrate academic work and study habits into soccer. “But I want to keep you out of trouble. That’s what’ll prevent you from going to college. And the only way I ever kept myself out of trouble was exhaustion. After soccer practice, I was too tired to fight.”

They nodded, and Lizzie saw that she could win them over. Rosa May, who had continued to watch, walked over and indicated that she’d like to talk to Lizzie. Waving goodbye to the girls, Lizzie felt the familiar throbbing in her knee; she limped over to a wall and leaned against it. As she’d suspected, Rosa May had not forgotten about her earlier intentions.

“I think you should give a motivational speech to all the girls, even those not in the soccer track. We might be able to get some press out of it.”

The need for water attacked Lizzie’s throat. “Excuse me,” she said and made for the water fountain. Rosa May followed her in her sensible pumps. Memphis had the best water—she’d missed that when she traveled. In most cities the tap water either smelled like sulfur or tasted like feet.

She wiped her mouth with her sleeve and offered up her cousin as a bargaining chip. “I could get her to speak to the girls. Isobel does all sorts of motivational speeches.”

Rosa May nodded and then turned back to her office. “You don’t get the difference between the two of you, but you will. You will.”

Near the end of March, Lizzie stood in the kitchen listening to Isobel with half an ear. She was thinking about the girls and whether or not they were ready to play another team. So far, she’d had them scrimmaging with each other. Which, although instructive, wasn’t improving their playing skills. They were too timid with each other—they needed to learn to play with their elbows up. Outside, a large yellow machine that Benny had hired for some unspecified purpose groaned and whined, sounding very much to Lizzie like a brass section warming up. She covered her ears and rolled her eyes at Isobel.

“He’ll have to shut that down pretty soon,” she said. In preparation for the television crew that was coming to film Isobel for a segment of
Where Are They Now?,
she’d put her hair in Velcro rollers as large as toilet-paper tubes. She had also slathered on a home facial remedy of olive oil, honey, and avocados. It was hard to look at her without giggling.

“Of course,” Lizzie said, turning down the corners of her mouth in an attempt to avoid laughing at her cousin. Isobel had only just told them that this was the opportunity she’d been talking about over waffles. She’d been afraid of jinxing it before contracts had been signed.

“What room do you think they should film in? I told them to get exterior shots of the house for their b-roll. I think it’ll make for an interesting story—my agent said they were particularly excited when they heard I wasn’t living in Cali anymore.”

“The cupola is the only place that isn’t torn all to bits,” Lizzie said, wiping at a few breadcrumbs on the counter. All around her the insides of the house lay exposed, the wires and ductwork reminding her of the roots of the many houseplants she’d repotted over the years as they outgrew their containers.

“Or maybe on the edge of the yard, with the river in the background.”

“I thought you said they wanted to film you working on the house.”

“Oh, they will, but mostly I’ll talk about my new project.”

Lizzie wiped again at the crumbs, which seemed to be moving. “What new project?”

“Nothing too specific, I’ll tell them about wanting to form my own company that promotes films, but not just any films, ones that feature women prominently.”

“Since when?” Lizzie asked, walking to the table to pick up her glasses where she’d set them earlier. She knew that Isobel had flirted with feminism over the years—blaming the paucity of roles for her on patriarchy, but most of the time, she talked about the house. For most of March, Isobel had spent her time on the second floor stripping the front room of its wallpaper and then the rest of the month peeling the layers of paint from the doors and molding that trimmed the floor and ceiling. She’d even ordered a specialty iron, which when placed on the wood essentially melted the paint to a consistency that enabled Isobel to wipe it away with a rag. Lizzie bent down and looked closely at the crumbs on the counter. They
were
moving.

“There are plenty of people who’ll pay for ideas. There’s this Peter Taylor story where he talks about the Memphis Demimonde.”

“Yeah. But that’s a story written by a man.” Lizzie didn’t read much, but she was vaguely familiar with the story—having had one of her English teachers rave about it and then take them on a field trip to the Old Forest, where the story was set. Mostly she kept looking at the crumbs that had turned out to be tiny yellow ants.

“Demimonde.” Isobel pronounced the word as the French would have. “Isn’t that a great name for the company? And besides, the story is about women.”

“Doesn’t it mean whores?” Lizzie asked Isobel. “Do you see this?” She followed the tiny yellow ants from the countertop to the cupboard below the sink and hesitated before opening the door.

“Looks like ants,” Isobel said, leaving the table to stand next to Lizzie. “Translated from the French, it means half the world. It’s the idea that there’s a whole half of the world living contrary to what is expected of them.”

“Just like us,” Lizzie said. The thought didn’t make her happy. She squished several ants with her thumb. “I’ll get Benny to use that spray stuff and squirt it around.”

“I’d call somebody,” Isobel said, reaching around Lizzie and opening the cupboard. The trail of ants led to a small hole at the base of the hot water pipe. Isobel’s phone beeped, and she gestured that it was time to remove the facial mask. Taking a paper towel, Lizzie wiped away as many of the ants as she could and then sprayed the area with bleach before going outside to find Benny.

As usual, their contractor was in his RV, which remained parked on the vacant lot next to the house. She banged on the door and waited a full five minutes for him to step outside. Lizzie had never been invited into his office space, and she suspected that she’d find it resembled a bedroom more closely than an office. Benny looked at her with half-closed eyes, then stretched and scratched his stomach before asking her what she wanted. His lackadaisical attitude infuriated Lizzie. “What’s the caterpillar for?” she asked, gesturing to the large backhoe sitting on the small patch of grass between their property and the trolley tracks.

“Landscape,” Benny said, gesturing to the backyard. “I had to bring in more topsoil. Yours had been all but washed away, and I thought we’d give Isobel some sod for her big day.”

She wondered how much he knew about their lives. “We’ve got ants,” she said. “Little yellow ones that seem to be living under the sink. Grandma had a guy that used to do all the pest stuff, but—”

“Of course I can take care of it,” Benny said, reaching behind him into his trailer and rummaging around until he pulled out a canister of pump-and-spray pesticide. He looked at her and then smiled as if he’d remembered who she was. “I had my kid look you up on the Internet. You’re as close to an Olympian as I’ve ever met, and I don’t know why you’re wasting your time out there in North Memphis coaching those ghetto kids.”

“Benny,” Lizzie said.

He paused before putting a hand on her shoulder in an almost paternal gesture. “I grew up there. Didn’t used to be that, but it is now and you can’t tell me it isn’t.”

“I’m not an Olympian,” she said, hoping he’d stop before he vocalized the racism she suspected he was capable of. “We’ve been over this.”

He nodded and banged the can of pesticide against his leg. “Almost is good enough for us,” he said and moved toward the house.

Lizzie watched him walk away. He must have grown up when the neighborhoods up there were in transition from white to black. She turned her back to the house and watched the backhoe scrape the yard down to the sandstone that made up the bluffs. It took minutes for the machine to finish stripping the small yard of its grass. Benny’s men then moved in and started spreading topsoil that had been dumped in a large pile in the vacant lot. They transferred it to wheelbarrows and rolled it over. One man stood at the far corner of the yard and watered the soil as they spread it. As much as she disliked Benny, she had to admit that the outside of the house was much improved.

She left the men to their work and walked around to the front porch. Benny had wanted to change the color of the house, but Lizzie had been adamant about its remaining the same color it had always been. Who would recognize the house if it weren’t obnoxiously yellow? Lizzie thought that the house ought to own its identity and that trying to hide behind some paler shade of butter yellow or—heaven forbid—cream would make the house look even more strange. Behind her the rumbling of a large truck caught her attention. Turning, she realized that the film crew had arrived.

“We made good time,” a man in denim shorts called to Lizzie. “That airport of yours is tiny. I think we were the only ones coming in with bags.”

He continued talking, but Lizzie waved at them and then hurried inside the house, calling for Isobel. She’d hoped to be gone when the actual filming happened, but now she’d been caught in the house and there were too many things to take care of before she could head over to the community center. Isobel yelled back to her from upstairs, but Lizzie couldn’t make out what had been said. She assumed it was something along the lines of she’d be right there. She squeezed down the impossibly narrow hallway and moved through the beaded curtain without parting it.

Benny stood in the kitchen in front of the open sink cupboard, staring at a line of ants that marched like the veins of a leaf all along the countertop before splitting into separate destinations. “I think I screwed up,” he said. “These are the kind of ants you have to bait.”

Lizzie brushed past him and grabbed the bottle of bleach, spraying all around the counter. The ants appeared unaffected by the toxin and were slowed only the tiniest amount by the water.

“It’s poison, isn’t it?” Lizzie asked, pointing to the large container he still held in his hand.

“Yeah. It’s just that some ants die right away because they only have one queen, but others—” He scratched his head. The birthmark along his neck deepened to a reddish purple.

“Others,” Lizzie prompted.

“They scatter,” he gestured at the procession of ants marching along the kitchen, “and if these are pharaoh ants well, it’s going to take a bit to get them out of your hair.”

The continued commotion of the camera crew distracted Lizzie. She left Benny in the kitchen, thinking it was pretty obvious why two women had left him. She called again for Isobel and then, putting on the same conciliatory smile she used when she shook opposing players’ hands, she opened the door.

The man in the denim shorts now had a camera on his shoulder, although from the loose way he held it, Lizzie didn’t think he was filming. “This is some fuckin’ house,” he said.

“Isobel’s upstairs,” Lizzie offered by way of greeting.

A smaller man whom she hadn’t seen before stepped onto the porch and extended his hand toward her. She gripped it, surprised at its softness. The men she knew possessed calloused hands. “Lizzie, right?”

She nodded and he continued, moving from shaking her hand to placing his on the side of her arm, as if they were the same height.

“We were hoping to talk with you a bit about Isobel, you know, get some perspective on what she’s really like and maybe we can talk about the Olympics. If you have anything to say about Hope, Abby, or what is it you call Shannon? Boxxy? Everyone says they have a shot at the gold this year.”

Lizzie stepped closer to the man, who had a very large head. The shadow of his nose gave the impression of a mustache, which would have been his only manly attribute. He held his ground, which was perilously close to the top step of the porch. “I don’t talk about that,” she said.

Isobel appeared as if out of the wind, stepping next to Lizzie and embracing the small man. “Craig,” she said. “Nobody told me you’d actually be onsite.” The curlers had given her hair twice its normal volume, and it was pinned up in some way that made Lizzie think of the women in Peter Taylor’s stories. Looking at the thick smear of concealer on Isobel’s face and the shadowing around her cheekbones, Lizzie realized how little makeup her cousin had been wearing while in Memphis.

“I was asking your cousin about what you’re like in the South. I’d expected to find a regular Southern belle and here you are all turned into Cinderella.” He lifted her hands, which showed the signs of her work upstairs, for inspection. In addition to the few nicks, her knuckles were scraped up and a fresh Band-Aid covered her thumb. “What’ll I find under here?” Craig asked, teasing the edge of the adhesive with his manicured fingernail.