M's Dream House

M loved the little house she shared with her mum, its magnolias and mansard roof. Inside, the smell of molasses and ginger had sunk into the timbers. Water mumbled from a hand pump, not a faucet tap. Music murmured, not from a radio, but from a soft piano. All was washed to softness—the sheets, the table linens. Even the gold rims on the old dishes were brushed down to a blur.
     M had been a surprise late baby, and her mother was almost the age of a grandmother. There were only the two of them—plus Maugie, their cat.
     M grew up thinking she understood her mum. But in fact she only understood her in daylight. The night world was where mum paced with her mountains of money worries. Down the hall M blissfully slept, and down in the basement Maugie moused, bringing her prizes up to the landing so M and Mum could find them first thing in the morning.
     And in the morning light Mum’s money misery vanished. She never spoke of it. But when Mum got sick, her worries magnified. Her illness brought the night world to daylight, though she still managed to hide it from her daughter. Mum could no longer hope for a miracle. Unbeknownst to M, just before Mum died, the ancient lady up and took misfortune into her own misguided hands. She sold their home to the neighbors who had always coveted it.
     Why didn’t she tell me? M plagued herself with questions all through the small funeral—she and her mum were the last of their line—and said to her distant cousins and her friends: She never ever mentioned money! Lawyers, real estate agents, and the neighbors of course were summoned. But the deal was done. Though M harbored murder in her heart for those greedy neighbors, she couldn’t get the house back.
     It’s all MY fault—I should have known, M moaned.
     It took a long time for her to settle these affairs. She’d taken a leave from her job at the museum, but eventually she had to go back to work. She and Maugie went to the only place M could afford to buy, a small but gleaming condominium. How could she transfer doilies and dusty velvet couches with broken legs into this glare? What was home any more? She had an iron bedstead, not a sleek futon. Of course Maugie kept finding her way back to the old homestead, and M had to keep quashing the mayhem in her heart as she retrieved the crafty little animal from that basement now full of the neighbor’s traps instead of mice.
     Up in the condo, M’s dreams began. Each night she dreamed of a ruined house. Mornings she woke to a smell like something left in an oven too long, a whiff of burnt molasses. Sometimes in a dream a window without a wall fell to the ground in mockery. Night after night in her sleep M shouldered mountains of blame. But then came morning.
     All she could do was embrace the day. With her long shapely arms, she put on her makeup, donned her mackintosh, and struck out for the museum, determined to muddle through.
     “It’s not my fault, I know,” she said to McM, the man who occupied the next desk. “I just miss my home.” He offered her a meatloaf sandwich. She said, “I never knew my mum, after all.” M’s dreams went on mortgaging her nights. When she startled awake, there was only Maugie at the foot of the iron bedstead squeaking an unsatisfactory plastic rodent, and a monstrous stink of burnt molasses and cat pee.
     M decided to bake. Using her mother’s measuring cups, she chased the aftermaths of the dreams away by spicing the smells. With cinnamon, with allspice, with vanilla and cardamom, she made muffins, mousse, and meringues in the open-concept kitchen. She used all her mother’s bowls, and all her mother’s spoons, to expunge the smells—and she almost did.
     Meanwhile, Maugie knew whenever workmen propped open a staircase door. The cat would slip into the hall, then escape down the stairwell through the service door. And M would get a call at the museum from the mingy mean-spirited neighbors.
     “And what am I going to do with Maugie?” M moaned to McM.
     “Your cat is lonely,” he said. “Does she have service potential?”
     Maugie would be tested. McM agreed to help.
      The minute McM walked into the combo of gleam and old wood and velvet and iron, the marvelous smells wrapped around him. “You’ve been baking,” he murmured approvingly, “in your farmhouse in the sky.” But M was busy wrangling Maugie into the carrier.
     Shortly the cat was deposited on the welcoming laps of ancient ladies in wheelchairs. That champion purr eased the ladies’ hearts. Maugie aced the test. Seeing the ladies, something in M eased, too.
     “My mother is a mystery I may never solve,” she said to McM on one of their lunchtime trips to the old ladies. Maugie now went willingly into her carrier.
     And so the bright weekday activities wore down the mountains of dreams. Blame became a molehill. M’s nightmares became so predictable they were almost friendly. Metamorphosis set in. McM lingered when he held M’s coat, and she lingered as he slipped it on. Their hands met when they put the cat carrier into the car. But these were the gestures of daylight.
     Thinking she was ready to brave the evening light, M had made the mistake of inviting McM for Saturday dinner. When the day came, she lay in bed with a fever, vacuuming was abandoned, her mahogany hair unwashed. Though the mushroom soup gurgled on the stove and the mousse slept in the fridge, the main course had never been started. She left a message canceling.
     McM arrived anyway with merlot and magnolias. He merged into M’s mess. It smelled of cough drops and kitty litter and dust and the fragrance of a woman in a slept-in nightgown. She slid beneath layers of consciousness like the layers of the blankets he straightened for her. And then balancing two hot toddies, fully clothed, he climbed into the bed. Maugie obliged him with a space.
     M was too weak to protest. She woke and drank and woke and slept. At midnight M sat up and slurped the mushroom soup held by McM. Magnificent . . . 
     And then she sank. That night of course she dreamed of a house, but this house was merely old, not ruined. It was the homestead, magnolias laden, sheet music still in the piano bench. When she woke, she smelled McM, still fully clothed at her side, his glasses on the floor, batted about by Maugie. Nothing smelled burnt. Unlike her mother, M didn’t believe in miracles. She believed in muddling through. Slowly something had risen in her, like those moons you sometimes see in an afternoon sky, night inside the persistence of day. M sat up in bed, hugging her knees, looking at McM sprawled beside her. The house at last is inside me, she thought. I’ve finally moved.