Keeping House

by Mallory Locke

Ernest hated to think that he had “fired” her; he preferred to tell himself he’d “let her go.” Certainly Maureen hadn’t done anything worth a “firing.” “Firing” was the kind of word Wall Street big shots threw out across big desks because someone cost someone else a few billion dollars, and Maureen hadn’t ever lost a dime…in fact she’d found more than a few lingering between the cushions of the checkered loveseat in the downstairs parlor. She was a rather large woman, but she moved about the house quietly with a wonderful domestic grace that Ernest could never quite understand, let alone mimic. Once he’d tried calling her “Maid Maureen” in a chivalric attempt at a compliment, but she’d merely smiled sympathetically and continued with the dusting; he still fretted about the remark and hoped she knew it was praise.

He’d hired Maureen after Cora died because of something Cora used to say. Cora came up with the one-liner one day after Ernest had knocked over his seltzer during a light lunch way back when. “Ernest Gale,” she used to say, “no one more aptly named.” She had laughed it out during their wedding when he dropped her ring down the carpeted altar steps, hissed it in a short whisper when he bumped into Charlotte’s wooden toy chest in the dark as they put her to bed—he used to send the whole lot of polyester pigs and pink teddy bears flying (“Who knew cotton could crash?” Cora said). With her hands on her hips, she would exasperatedly exclaim it when he sent trays of hors d’oeuvres topsy-turvy during dinner parties, or when this or that plate or vase shot through his fingers en route from the drying rack to the ever-waiting, often-disappointed cupboards.

When Cora had her stroke and the one-liner fell out of use along with the rest of her, Ernest began saying it to himself after every accidental overturning of the potted begonias on the front porch, following every renegade attack of the sturdy doorframe upon his unsuspecting hip or shouder.

Aware of his crippling absentmindedness, Maureen became Ernest’s weekly offering to Cora; in lieu of flowers on her grave he gave her Maureen, the perfectly pleasant youngish woman who came in to “keep house” by taking care of the little piles of laundry and dusting Cora’s orphaned knickknacks. Each Monday, Maureen dutifully feathered away Ernest’s weekly debris, his quiet dead dust that accumulated in creases and corners and formed little halos of stale age around the base of this or that. Ernest liked the way the counters and chair rails looked after Maureen left; he would sit in the parlor and gaze about at the neat surfaces, shining the way Cora had kept them.

But retirement can ruin a person, and Ernest’s active lack of a honey-do list was wearing on him more than the weight of an actual day’s work had. He relished the gentle disruption of Maureen about her duties, but he felt stifled by his own stagnation; while sitting on his front porch early one Wednesday evening, he found himself straining for breath in the scum of restless ennui, coated in a hopeless sense of idleness that he knew could be resolved if only he could “let her go” and thereby gain something, anything, to do.

Ernest kept his resolve, and Maureen didn’t appear the following Monday; he set to her routine with relief, following the rivets she’d made in the mauve shag carpeting from room to room, surface to surface. Unlike Maureen, who dusted with memorial disregard, Ernest paused carefully at the mantle in the parlor to admire its boxy brood: a bunch of framed family afternoons of clams in Nantucket during June, bits of brightly colored birthday cake on Charlotte’s face, Cora in her garden, Ernest with his back to the camera, head cocked toward the horizon. Next to each little lifetime rested Cora’s, incinerated into its billion bits of seconds and piled into a neat mountain inside the navy blue urn that Ernest and Charlotte had so awkwardly picked out at a fussy antique store in town. Ernest squinted at the surface, remembering how Charlotte had thought it dignified, how she’d embarrassed her father when she apologized for his lack of taste to the sales clerk who’d wrapped the thing up; Cora never would’ve stood for such a sting but Ernest had simply stood there. As he gazed at the urn Ernest softened, loosening his grip on the dust rag as he felt the stillness of the room, mulling over the way it was so fundamentally, so sharply antipodal to the decades before; the bitterness seeped slightly into the grooves of his tongue and crept nastily into what he’d thought would be just another occupied Monday afternoon.

Caught off-guard by the rush of solitude, Ernest groped forcefully at the first frame, running the rag firmly across the glass and its silver casing, erasing the heaviness of the dust and his grief. He set it back, did the others and then reached for the urn, taking the utmost care to push the rag into each tiny turn and every empty crevice.

As he polished he gazed at the surface reflection of the chandelier above him and the window by his side, both so still, shut off and closed tight. The parlor was no longer the affectionately-treated, wholly-unfortunate bastard child of Cora’s affinity for ‘70s modernism and the new American oaken set they’d received from his parents; no, the room was simply stoic; yes, it was a real piece of work that no one could really live in and in which only one person—one beautiful, spent person—really had. Aware of the lifetime he grasped in his hands, Ernest knew then what it was to watch a home turn into a house.

Slumped shoulders compressed, Ernest gulped at the air as he replaced the urn. Turning toward the side table next to the loveseat he heard, before he saw, the rough unfinished bottom of the urn scrape across the edge of the mantle as it toppled downward. Eyes widening, he heard “Ernest Gale” as the urn cracked open across the hearth, found himself deafened by the sound of his name echoing the little rolling waves of dust that thundered about the room. The dust settled as every bit of him fell down to the floor; Ernest sunk slowly down to the hearth, hands grazing his bony knees as he stared at the dust of the week mingled with the dust of his wife, two different kinds of dead.