CHAPTER FIVE
TRANSCRIPT: Session 8, Lydia Bishop.
Dr. Alice Stockman, PhD.
May 29th, 2018
LB: Is this being recorded?
AS: Yes. It’s something I’m trying. That way I can focus more on you and less on taking notes.
[pause]
AS: It’s solely for my personal use. It will never leave my office. But I’ll understand if it’s making you uncomfortable, and I can stop.
LB: No…no. Not at all. It’s fine. [nervous giggle] I mean, yesterday I went and signed release forms to live in a high-tech aquarium so I can hardly object to a little tape recorder, right?
AS: Is that a question you’re asking me or yourself?
LB: I’m just…I still can’t believe I did that, you know? And a tape recorder. That’s so quaint somehow. With a cassette inside and everything. I didn’t know they still made blank cassettes.
AS: Sometimes I think it’s best to go low-tech.
LB: I couldn’t agree more! Well, I know I’m a total hypocrite for saying that.
AS: What was it like, signing those papers? Let’s unpack this.
LB: Oh. They wooed us. I really can’t come up with another word. They sat us down in this gorgeous room, one table and three chairs, two for us and one for that woman, Clarisse. I guess they were going for intimate—the irony. And an assistant brought us espressos and a plate of biscotti. But if we’d wanted to, we could have had champagne. She offered. I thought it was weird, kind of inappropriate. To be under the influence while taking a step like this? But they were just trying to put us at our ease. They gave us a week with the papers so there was nothing new in them. They actually encouraged my husband to have his lawyer look at them. But he ended up asking Faye. I wasn’t so sure about it.
AS: Why?
LB: I don’t know…I would have paid someone. Someone qualified. Someone impartial.
AS: And your sister wasn’t qualified enough? Or impartial enough? You mentioned that she just got promoted at her law firm—
LB: [laughs] Oh no, she’s plenty qualified. Of the two of us, she’s the one who went to an Ivy League school, you know, and I swear, she has worked that fact into every conversation for the last ten years. And yes, they love her at the law firm. She went over the contract and said it was all pretty standard stuff. There’s worse on your iPhone user agreement—that’s how she phrased it. And that never stopped anyone, did it?
AS: The real question—and the reason we’re here—is, does it bother you?
LB: Oh, I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t. She knows her stuff. It’s just that this seems like a family matter, and by family I mean my husband and me, not my sister. Besides, she’s going to go and discuss it all with our parents, and I like that idea even less.
AS: That’s not what I meant, Lydia.
[brief pause]
LB: If you’re talking about the house…
AS: I am.
LB: I can’t explain it. I thought it wouldn’t bother me. I mean…I should be glad, right? After everything that happened. After Walter.
AS: I hear a lot of uncertainty. A lot of should and would and might.
LB: One thing I’m unequivocally happy about is the safety. That’s for sure. I don’t doubt that part for a second. I’m much safer there than I ever was in my old house. Most people take it for granted but I don’t.
AS: Would you like to talk about what happened at your old place?
LB: I thought we talked about this. Not yet. I’m not ready.
CHAPTER SIX
The truth is I liked my old life. I liked our old house. It was old in more ways than one. It dated back from the 1910s, a quaint art nouveau beauty that was a bargain, comparatively speaking, because it hadn’t gotten as much care as it should have over the years. The former owner, an elderly lady, was happy to sell it to a young couple who planned to raise their family there.
Even considering all this, we offered twenty thousand dollars more than the listing asked. That, our real estate agent explained to us, was the market. The neighborhood was up-and-coming, trendy. On a nearby commercial artery, an organic grocery had just opened, and little high-end cafés and shops were popping up like mushrooms. Hip young families were buying up the duplexes left over from the neighborhood’s working-class origins and turning them into airy condos or single-family homes, keeping only the picturesque façades with their brick patterns as an embodiment of living history.
It was the exact opposite of the place we live in now. I loved being able to walk for five minutes and have a cup of fair-trade French roast in a cozy coffee shop while reading a book. It added something to the monotony of my days as I worked from home, gave me a break from staring at the computer. Most important, it fit the image I had of myself, of us, the kind of family we would be. McMansion in the suburbs—not for us, not for the Holmeses.
Our old house was one of the nicer ones. Fully detached, on a street corner so we only had neighbors on one side. Back then it was an asset, not something I ever thought would turn against me. It had a vast, albeit overgrown, yard out back, and a beautiful maple out front that provided a little shade in the summer, without its bare branches blocking too much light in the winter. It hadn’t been remodeled in decades and was full of those old-house quirks: rooms a touch too big or too small, closets in odd places, a little nook in the hall that had probably been designed to house a little console for the phone and the chair next to it, back when such things were practical. The door had a stained-glass insert at the top, as did the windows. Multicolored light fell on the parquet floor on sunny days.
It had a habit of creaking and groaning in windy weather and in winter when you just turned on the heat for the first time and the house seemed to stretch its old articulations and bones as the boards adjusted to the temperature. For no reason at all. It was cozy instead of creepy. If there were ghosts, they had to be friendly ones.
I liked living in it. I liked cooking in the too-small kitchen. I’d weeded the overgrown garden, mowed the grass, and put up boxes of flowers. Scott started to complain almost immediately. Small things got on his nerves. He’d bump into walls and trip over floorboards. The bathroom, he said, was too small to put in a bigger tub, the kitchen needed a remodel, and the wall between the living room and the adjacent bedroom could stand to be torn down to get some light and air into this place. The floors had to be sanded and the tiles replaced. We have the money, he’d say. Why not just hire a company and have it all done within a couple of weeks?
I’d say something about the noise, the dust, how annoying it would be to have all that banging in the background while I tried to work. But the truth was that I could have gone to a café or outside into the yard or taken a break from work altogether, two weeks wasn’t that long. But I was reluctant. I didn’t want the house to change. I was afraid, against all logic—Scott’s logic, in any event—that I would love it less.
But then the other problem became evident, harder and harder to ignore every day. And that one had nothing to do with the house, with the supposed decrepitude of its fixtures or the outdated bathroom cabinets. It was a problem with me. With us. I put off the doctor’s appointment as long as I could but knew I couldn’t put it off much longer.