Chapter 14. The Yard

Marlie's ex pokes around outside Rainwood House

Blake kicks through the leaves thickly scattered over Rainwood House’s long front yard. He focuses his camera on the left side of the house, where the edge of the wrap-around porch has rotted away, drooping down from the house like a torn hem.

Irritation prickles his body like hives. He slips a finger under the neck of his black windbreaker and pulls it away from his skin. Pressing a hand against his diaphragm, he feels the tightness of anxiety. Returning to Rainwood House like this stirs uncomfortable emotions, but identifying them and noting the accompanying physical sensations helps him regain his composure.

Blake backs up to get a wider view, trips on a tussock of overgrown grass, and angrily swipes his camera case at the mess of dead sunflowers flanking her so-called garden.

The Yard - Juliana Barnet

He takes some calming breaths, relieved he hasn’t actually knocked down any of the ungainly things. Marlie always refused to cut down dead flowers or throw them out when they withered in vases. They have a haunting beauty, she would say.

Blake shakes his head. Surely not even she can find beauty in the horrendous tangle that remains of what once was a fine vegetable garden. He himself was never much of a gardener, but Marlie and some of the other union comrades grew greens, peppers, watermelon, all kinds of good things. It had been a nice collective activity and helped supplement their food when funds were scarce. Blake had enjoyed watching Marlie push back her damp curls with her wrist as she tied up the pea plants and cucumbers, or squatted to harvest the basil leaves for pesto. And he’d loved how she would send their little Ana Violeta and whatever other kids were underfoot out to the garden to scatter the birds when they pecked at the tomatoes.

Now it’s a sad mess, like everything about the house and most everything Marlie does—not because she is incompetent but because she always lets her emotions run away with her. Truth be told, he’d seen this from the first, with the field project she’d been working on for her anthropology degree when he met her in Mexico.

She had been teaching a children’s class she called Creative Expression, doing art and theater with the kids in a church basement. Blake calls to mind how her eyes would light up with passion as she talked about creating cultural change in her working class neighborhood. Then they flashed with anger as she described how the nuns disapproved of her free-thinking activities. Shortly after Blake and Marlie got together, the nuns shut down her program. Naturally, Blake had taken Marlie’s side, and even encouraged her to stage a protest against the injustice.

He shakes his head, feeling slightly embarrassed. At the time he blamed the nuns for their narrow-mindedness, and the children’s parents for not defending Marlie’s program. Now he wonders if part of the problem had been Marlie’s own style of doing things.

Despite himself, a wave of longing sweeps through him for their old times—in Mexico, in DC, and especially here at Rainwood House. The work parties, with all the union folk together, fixing up Rainwood House—at least, the kitchen and a few bedrooms—to make it the new Cleaner Conscience Campaign organizers’ group home and office. Singing and discussions and laughter and bustle, with Marlie at the center and Blake as the anchor, the coordinator, making sure they kept on track with their work, whether organizing a march, drafting a contract, or painting the kitchen cabinets.

He smiles to himself, and sweeps his gaze over the expanse of Rainwood House with a more positive eye, appreciating the generous space, indoors and out, with so many great play areas for Ana Violeta and the kids who always tagged along when their mothers came for meetings and to hang out.

And there were the house’s excellent out-of-the way nooks, useful for making himself hard to find when necessary for his peace of mind. And, later, for him and Olivia—spaces where Marlie’s neuroses prevented her from entering.

Blake gazes up into the blue depth of the Maryland sky, recalling how Marlie bewitched him the moment he saw her, with her exuberant black curls, smoldering eyes, high cheekbones and smooth chestnut skin. How alluring she’d looked performing on that small stage, luscious mouth open wide in song, shapely fingers strumming her guitar. She had enchanted him, true enough. He recalled the floaty feeling he’d gotten when he first approached her.

And when she’d surprised him with her sharp wit and perfect English, Blake realized that beyond her attractiveness and lovely voice, she solved the problem he’d been puzzling over, namely, finding a qualified person to help organize Latin American office cleaners and bring them into the Cleaner Conscience Campaign, which the Service Workers Union had just appointed him to coordinate in Washington, DC.

Marlie had indeed been ideal for making the initial approach and gaining the workers’ trust. She was just like the cleaners in a lot of ways, coming from a working class Mexican family where the mother’s job was cleaning houses and buildings; and yet, her education, bilingualism, and experience in Mexican social justice movements gave her superior skills and leadership qualities.

Yes, Marlie was great at connecting with the workers, especially women. Yet as time went on, he realized she was like an underground thermal spring, her emotions seething just beneath the surface. At first, he never knew where they might burst out. Later, he learned to predict her eruptions as accurately as Old Faithful’s. Any remark about respecting rules or hierarchy, for instance, was sure to cause her to blow. “This is an organization, Marlie,” he would tell her as patiently as he could, for the thousandth time. “Even a workers’ union has to function according to rules and structures.”

She would shake her head angrily, making that furious face with the turned-down mouth, and then she’d go on and on about how adopting corporate structures would corrupt the union. She saw corporate structures everywhere, just as she saw sexism everywhere. It drove him nuts.

Naturally, he also hates sexism and oppressive structures; his entire career is about challenging them. But you have to behave in a structured, orderly way to accomplish that. Sometimes he’d tried to get her to recognize how he could have chosen to work on Wall Street or K Street, like so many others in his Stanford Law graduating class. Instead, he had devoted his skills to pursuing justice for low-income workers. Marlie never seemed to appreciate this.

Blake drags his thoughts away from the past and raises his camera to capture the mossy green patches furring the black roof slates.

How could he have left historic Rainwood House to her since…was it really since 1985? Twenty-one years in Marlie’s hands—no wonder it’s now in such rough shape.

Blake shakes his head at himself. Back then, he should have figured out how to keep control of the house. When he got the big promotion he could have afforded to buy Marlie a small house near her parents in Edmonston, the “Pequeño México” of PG County. Unfortunately, his ability to plan several steps ahead, which usually serves him so well in chess and contract negotiations, deserted him back then, overridden by his feeling of urgency to get away from Rainwood House.

Not just from Marlie’s chaos, though that was key, but also the chaos of Rainwood House itself, on which Marlie thrived. It was like they fed each other—her emotional upheavals interweaving with the incessant comings and goings and meetings and people yammering and children shrieking and frenetic activity at all hours, with no divide between union work and personal life. All mixed in with the wailing pipes, the hissing radiators, and all manner of other strange noises. The turmoil had begun to drive him nuts.

There was something beyond even that, if he was to be honest. He glanced quickly around the backyard where he now stood, as if to guard against being spied on. The thing was, Rainwood House stopped feeling welcoming to him. He felt like the house itself was hounding him out.

He yanks at a strand of ivy at the base of one of the big trees, reliving his distress at falling prey to fantasies—like Marlie! Of course he never revealed them to anyone, but they spurred his urgency to get away.

Blake sighs and takes several steps back from the house to photograph the whole roof, with its sharp angles jutting crazily in different directions. As he paces the outer perimeter, he pictures the orderly and fulfilling life he’d made with sweet, sane Olivia ever since they moved out of Rainwood House. Which Ana Violeta—Vivi—had become a part of, once he won custody from Marlie and brought the child to live with them in California. He was proud of how he countered Marlie’s influence, providing Vivi the best education and a tranquil upbringing with Olivia and his own educated, cosmopolitan parents.

Blake rounds the long wing that juts out in back, and comes up on the maple tucked behind it, startling a pair of crows perched on a low branch. Yes, everything about Vivi’s childhood had gone great out in California until…bam! Ink barely dry on Vivi’s high school diploma, Marlie’s craziness had detonated in their daughter’s brain like a time bomb, turning the girl from a straight-A student and varsity gymnast who’d earned early admission to Stanford, into a hippy nomad, a street mime, of all things, who at barely eighteen had birthed a baby in the back of a school bus!

Poor little Samantha, he thinks, scanning the dormers and wondering which is her bedroom, hoping that living with her off-kilter grandmother isn’t exacerbating the child’s oddness.

He shakes his head hard to clear the memories and continues photographing the evidence of Marlie’s neglect, as he had done all those years before when he built his case for custody of their daughter.

He snaps a closeup of the English ivy’s lethal creep up the trunk of one of the old oaks beside the back fence, his thoughts returning to historical preservation. Admittedly, Rainwood House’s history is not terribly interesting. Being built in 1873 makes it historical but, as far as he knows, no important people or events are associated with it. Still, he’s convinced filing for historical status is the best way to save the house from collapse. And from Marlie.

He runs a hand through his hair, soothed by its silkiness and by the reminder of how well its sandy blond color masks the gray. His parents warned him that buying the vast old place would expose him to all kinds of unforeseen problems. They said much the same thing about his marrying Marlie. It rankles, but he has to concede they were right on both counts.

As Blake moves around the back to the far side of the house, the worst offender to historic sensibilities comes into view: those big ugly plywood patches nailed over the old wood siding. They had been there when he and Marlie bought Rainwood House from that desperate union member and his mother. And there they still were, after all this time, no one even knowing why. What other disasters must lurk in Rainwood House now, after all these years Marlie has lived here alone?

His conscience pricks him, slightly, as these harsh judgments echo in his mind. Marlie is disorder personified, but he believes she is loyal to Rainwood House in her own way, and he knows she is conflicted by her inability to care for it. And one thing is certain: she loves Samantha. She always makes sure the child is clothed and fed, with some but not much help from the child’s father, and less still from Vivi; at least, not financial help, since his daughter still lives an essentially indigent life with that theater troupe.

Once again, he pulls the windbreaker away from his neck. After he won custody of their daughter, other than paying for Marlie’s rare visits to see Vivi in California, and Vivi’s plane tickets for her summers at Rainwood House, he always felt too awkward to send Marlie funds directly. And she has only asked him for monetary help once, that time four years earlier when Samantha and Vivi got so ill.

Blake is aware he and Marlie embody the stereotype of a couple breakup making the man financially better off while lowering the woman’s socioeconomic level. He’s convinced that was mostly Marlie’s own fault, but it’s still a rough deal. Getting her out from under the burden of Rainwood House will be his way of making amends.

Blake comes around to the other side of the house, stopping to take a close-up of a worm-eaten porch column, its base littered with wood flakes and paint chips. Samantha is too old to eat paint, but playing in all this decay has got to be unhealthful.

He takes a few steps along the porch and aims the camera up at the gnarled wisteria embracing the columns in a death grip, and the mass of dried vines and leaves spilling over the gutters. No wonder there are leaks and rot everywhere. Unless something changes, Rainwood House will literally disintegrate.

With a sigh, Blake remembers his ex college roommate Kurt, who had called to offer him a job as his corporate lawyer, a few years after he and Olivia had moved to California. Kurt’s is one of the few dot.com firms that stabilized and survived the nineties, and Kurt is now a multi-millionaire. Occasionally, he wishes he’d taken that job.

But no, he reminds himself; he has opted to use his skills for the working class, especially low-wage female immigrant workers. No temptation or obstacle has knocked him from that path. Nor would it now, as he moves back East to start his own labor law practice, a decision he came to after he and several close colleagues supported what turned out to be the losing ticket in the union’s latest elections. Time to go out on his own.

And he’s tired of California. He put three thousand miles between himself and Marlie’s volatility, only to find that the entire state reminds him of her. Brash colors, loud music, hippy garments, dangling jewelry. Spanish with Mexican inflections. Folks who talk and sing to themselves worse than she does.

Blake completes his circuit, photographing the broken lattice work under the porch, which allows in squirrels, raccoons, and who knows what else. He aims the camera up at the soffit overhang, full of birds’ nests built with the dried grasses so handy to them in this overgrown yard.

Loud cawing bursts out behind him. He whips his head around, grazing his nose on the camera, and spots a raucous conclave of crows gathered in the maple.

Blake pictures little Ana Violeta jumping into the carpet of fallen leaves below the tree, but the squawking crows overpower the pleasant memory. He winces with an oncoming headache, resolving to research a safe crow repellent.

Rounding the house again to the front, Blake stops to stare up at the crooked old tower. It seems to look down on him with an unfriendly gaze. He lowers his eyes and pulls his hat down tighter. The November afternoon is definitely getting colder. He can only imagine how drafty it is inside Rainwood House.

When he decided to return East he had been nearly set on the idea of living here at Rainwood House. Now he casts the house one more long look and shakes his head. Today’s tour is pushing him toward selling.

Blake glances at his watch. After three. Olivia is picking him up at the Happy Hog at three-thirty. With long strides, he crosses the front yard and hurries up the crumbling walk toward the street.

“Hello, Blake!” The old neighbor, Missus Crick, calls to him pleasantly from across the narrow street.

He remembers how she used to watch everything that went on at Rainwood House from her little house. Back then she disapproved of the rowdy union folk, but Blake had found her to be the sort who preferred to correct folks, not reject them outright.

He surveys her pristine dwelling. A wreath of red-orange leaves and colored corn hangs on the front door. A family of china turkeys adorns her stoop.

She is some kind of local historical preservation buff, Blake recalls. It could be worthwhile to chat with her, share a few lamentations about the sorry state of Rainwood House, stress their common desire to see it better cared for.

“Hi, Missus Crick, how have you been!” he calls out as he closes the front gate behind him.

I hope you’re enjoying these serialized chapters! Later this year the full version of Rainwood House Sings, a Movement Mystery, 2nd. Edition, will be coming out! Stay tuned for info on how to preorder!

In the meantime, support this publication by offering a like and a comment. And by noticing, as you read and watch fiction, how (and if!) activists are portrayed in stories. Share your observations!