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/*Nobody’s Property, a speculative memoir, is the first offering on Stop Casting Porosity. It combines audio in the form of a legacy true-crime podcast with brief text and images responding to the podcast. The audio makes sense without the text and images but the text is not meant to stand on its own. Please listen if you have the time! Just hit ▷ above.*/
Rose was making up the bed in the room that faced the volcano. A small window with raw wood shutters, darkened with age, framed the view up the mountain to the sleeping peak. The walls were whitewashed and bare. There was a small writing desk under the window. Guests never seemed to sit there; the chair was always pulled aside, belted pants thrown over the back of it, or sometimes a sheer nightgown. Or both! And she did not begrudge the tourists their little moments together. Downstairs, possibly, their children were mercifully sleeping as they stole some fragment of their life back. No, she didn’t mind seeing evidence of that.
This chapter had been hard. Bencomo had gone out the front door to the golf course, shaking his head, right after this one. He had stood up from his chair and paced as the results from the University at Heidelberg had been described. Had Iris listened yet? Rose was still waiting on the call from Iris, asking for an explanation.
And after this chapter, things got so much more complicated.
She took an athletic approach to making beds, lifting the mattress and tucking the sheets with teutonic precision, as Michael’s mother had shown her. Not fluffing, but pounding and slapping the pillows. Forcing the corners of the soft linen coverlets into strict envelope folds. Her own mother, Edith, had not been one to exert herself physically and preferred thick fitted coverlets, with flat pleats and box corners, that could be draped to hide whatever disorder lay underneath.
This room: she could be here dispassionately cleaning and tidying and arranging now for the northern guests who would expect a place that had been maintained habitually, not hurriedly tidied on occasion. A room that contained no secrets, where the corners had been swept clean. And Rose could give that to them, not because it was her job; not because anybody was paying her; not because her life or her livelihood depended on it; they did not. She could give that to them because in this room time did not pass; it was the one place she allowed herself to remember her own talent for belief, for trust, for acceptance and for love. She had all the time in the world for cleaning this room.
It was not a large room but it contained her whole life.
Rose’s Journal
When you’d returned from Las Palmas, it became clear that Michael was never going to make it to the princess bed without an invitation. Of course he had kissed you, and you had kissed him; on the truck around the mountain, on the boat, on the beach. You felt it was almost a show: the young university student and his lost girl, in brown sandals. You felt yourself slotting into some fantasy he had about himself, just having missed the student protests of ‘68, wanting to prove something, to someone.
You lay in bed one morning, very early, listening to waves. The sun had not yet come up. The sky was half lit by a weak moon and you could see one very bright star through your window; was it the Polestar? You didn’t know. You kept the gauzy curtains open at all times to glean whatever light, whatever view, you could.
You lay there and argued with yourself. Would it be now? Michael’s mother was asleep downstairs, in a small room off the patio. You felt a bit guilty about it then, and it didn’t occur to you that of course this was all according to plan: she had a plan for him, and you, and your second-floor rooms were no accident. Your own mother had always seemed to be so much the antithesis of anything about sex that this was inconceivable to you. And so it felt unseemly, somehow disrespectful, to go to him now. Well, of course it did, and part of you found this appealing. Going down to breakfast with this secret between you, you felt, would be thrilling. Your period had just ended and you’d started a new wheel of pills and you didn’t know how you would get another, here, and it seemed as good a time as any. You heard Pearl speaking to you from beyond the grave: get it while you can.
You walked down the hall in the sensible flannel pajamas Michael’s mother had brought you, because the nights could be chilly. For one ridiculous moment you wondered if he would mind your waking him. You slipped into bed beside him and whispered “I’m cold.” The flannel chafed the dry linen sheets and sent small sparks into the air.
First he spooned you, one hand held politely over your rib cage. After a few minutes of fastidiously motionless spooning, his hand moved to your breast, almost as if it were a separate entity with a will. “It is okay?” he asked you. And how beautiful that was, how thrilling! No boy had ever asked you if anything was okay. They had only ever tried to see what would fly. “Yes,” you said, turning toward him and kissing him. For the first time, you understood the cliché about feeling someone’s heart beating as if it would burst out of his chest.
“We can’t have sex,” he said then, which was the strangest thing for a person to say in the circumstances. Get it while you can, you thought.
“I’m on the pill,” you said.
“It’s not that.”
And you thought you knew, so you did not ask, that it was the presence of his mother downstairs that made him hold back. You thought the decision was all yours. You thought you were offering him a shared something that would make you both happy, a completion of something begun in the forest. He had asked if it was okay, and you had said yes.
And now he asked again, lying next to you and touching you, if it was okay. And you asked him the same question, as he lay on his back.
It was messy, as such things always were in your brief but fairly complete experience, and over too soon. Out Michael’s window the volcano slept on, backlit now by the sun coming up stealthily to the east.
You thought it was some scrupulousness on his part, some sense of responsibility, or simply fear of his mother, as all men have, that held him.
It had been so exciting to be asked and to say back yes…yes…yes: you thought consent was all yours. But as he lay there breathing next to you after you’d done all you could do for him, after he’d done all he was willing to do for you, you felt his anguish radiating through the half light. You were still in your camisole and pajama bottoms. You didn’t know how you could feel it, but this was the first time you felt the weight of all you hadn’t consented to enter the room.
When you went down to breakfast the next morning, Michael’s mother smiled at you. “This is so lovely, having you here. I have always wanted a daughter.”
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Chapter Nine: Only Go Forward