yellow house

Yellow House By Rachel Dean

My grandmother’s yellow house in the South is something of an amalgamation—a physical structure, yes, but also an essence— a place and attitude we deliver ourselves to once or twice a year. We’ve been going for as long as I can remember, and so I’ve gathered a collection of oddly mundane impressions—the light wood floors and the pineapples sewn on pillows, the coffee cups with their cobalt rims and silver handles. Each time I return, I expect the house and its atmosphere to be different, but nothing has ever changed. The grass outside is still brown, the algae congregating at the lip of the manmade pond.

Time. I am supposed to be thinking about it. The passing of it, the stuck-ness of it, the way it orders my existence like an overbearing parent. But actually, perhaps even fittingly, I don’t need to summon this thinking. It’s always already on my mind.

During the 14-hour car ride to the yellow house, I read a book by an Irish writer, Mark O’Connell, about transhumanism. There is a movement, largely among the rich and privileged, to cure death by technology. To eventually upload consciousness to an operating system, and if this proves impossible, to merge fleshand-blood forms with varying mechanical parts. Many of transhumanism’s loyalists believe that our bodies are apt to betray us, and that at the moment of birth, we begin an inevitable wandering toward our own obliteration. This isn’t untrue, but it’s perhaps a cynical way looking at life—a glass-half-empty sort of reckoning. The finish line is death, yes, but for the lucky, there’s a good amount that comes before it. In any case, O’Connell, in his gonzo-journalist style, makes their idealism about a cyborg utopia sound garish—an affront to what’s natural and normal. I agree, but then I get to the yellow house where my grandmother is dying from cancer and I think: maybe we’re our truest selves when we’re

Time. I am supposed to be thinking about it. The passing of it, the stuck-ness of it, the way it orders my existence like an overbearing parent.

trying to avoid mortality. My grandmother weighs 90 pounds now, and mostly sleeps on the blue and green striped couch on the first floor of the house. She is still sharp—asks me about the book I’m reading, which is my mentor’s newest release, a sprawling novel about a woman who deliberates, in nine different versions of her life, whether or not to have a child. Sometimes I wonder if my grandmother would enjoy a novel like this, one that mulls over questions that were likely never available for her to answer. She had three sons and worked full-time, and the running joke in our family is that she never knew where the boys were once they were old enough to run away from her. I know enough to recognize that this attempt at humor is more or less a commentary on the way she mothered, which is more or less a commentary on who she was. There are a hundred things I could ask her, but everyone says this when a person is nearing the end of their life and the time has been surrendered—I should have said, I should have asked, I should have tried harder to understand.

The night my mother tells me my grandmother has been admitted to the hospital because of a COVID-19 infection, I begin a documentary called My Octopus Teacher. In it, a man who lives in South Africa begins to visit an octopus each day, observing its impressive intelligence, its habits and patterns. He dives without scuba equipment or a breathing apparatus because he prefers the freedom that free-swimming allows. The documentary is a series of gorgeous visuals—the floating forest of ocean seaweed, the shimmering water dappled by sunlight. The octopus eventually dies, of course, and the man is forced to contend with the banality

of the ocean’s ecosystem—the way everything turns in on itself with time, a boundless and efficient machine. You don’t start a documentary of this kind without knowing what you’re in for— tears for the beloved creature’s death, tears at the man’s voiceover when he notes that the friendship with the octopus has clarified his understanding of the interconnectedness of all things. I fall asleep after running rounds of anxious thoughts. The next night, I go to dinner with my family. When I sit down at the table, my mother—the first one there—asks me what’s wrong. I’m having a hard time, I say. Then I start crying, and she puts a hand on my back, moves it in small circles between my shoulder blades. By the time the waiter appears and we’re all settled in, my face is still wet, and he begins reciting the specials. We have a really great octopus dish tonight, he says.

I don’t need to summon this thinking. It’s always already on my mind.

Three years ago, during the interim between my first and second semester of grad school, my boyfriend at the time moved to California for work. A few nights before his departure, I told him the truth: I was tired, I didn’t want to try long distance, I was afraid we’d ruin the good thing we’d built. By good I meant easy, and by easy I meant noncommittal. If we were to stay together, we’d have to reckon with what we were doing, which I still couldn’t name to anyone who asked. It’s serious, right? My friends would say. You say “I love you” to each other, right? I’d shrug at the first question, shake my head at the second. So much time had passed, and yet it felt like we were treading water. When I said this—spoke the words I’d been longing to say—he looked at me sadly over the small corner table where we were sitting, in a dark restaurant outside of town. I took a sip of my wine, touched my hair. I wanted to appear beautiful and removed—like I was above the fool he was making of me, a woman who was suddenly afraid

I wanted to appear beautiful and removed—like I was above the fool he was making of me, a woman who was suddenly afraid to be alone.

to be alone. When we finally said goodbye I was a wrecked mess, and drove the whole way home from his house listening to a melodramatic playlist I’d constructed for the very occasion. The following day, my father and I were flying to the South and the yellow house to see my grandmother and spend a week with her. She’d recently received her cancer diagnosis. It was cold, not the best time to be there. Most days were mild, the sky an appropriate slate gray. I slept in the big bed across from my grandmother’s room, swamped in sheets that smelled of Gain detergent, deleted all my social media, and spent long days laboring after the completion of my thesis. I woke each morning to coffee my father had prepared, and without these markers of reality—homework, texts from my boyfriend, the long commute to and from campus— I began to forget what day it was, how much time had passed since I’d arrived. The yellow house, I sometimes thought, might swallow me whole. I could then become some kind of feminized architecture, a part of the place being visited, rather than the person doing the visiting.

Sitting outside with my grandmother one afternoon this year, she says that so much has changed here since she and her husband—dead twenty years now—first bought the house. It’s funny she says this, because it doesn’t feel to me like anything has changed about the place where we are. As I sit outside, sunning myself, it feels possible to believe that I am still very young, that she is also young, that I am on the beach and bending down to pick up seashells and she is watching me from a short distance away. But then I think about it, really pause, and decide that it’s

more like some conjurer has arrived in the night—a magician of time—and struck us all with fast-forwarding spells. I’m 25 now, I don’t agree with my parents’ politics, my brother can’t ever run the dishwasher and so my existence sometimes feels like an eternal elongated act of moving things in and out of the upper and lower racks, my apartment is too expensive, I’ve published nothing. Sometimes I meet myself in my current life as if I’ve been dropped into the present from a more ambiguous past—I’m forced to reorient myself to the moment and to who I’ve become. I don’t like this; it’s a sort of vertigo. I’ll see people out at a bar drinking heavily, hear the ensuing laughter on the street, and feel an alluring call. I’ll watch a film or read a novel where a woman destroys her relationships, burns them down for the sake of excavating her own rage, and wonder why I didn’t keep at it—that self-denial I once considered noble. Then I’ll remember: oh, I am not that person anymore. There is no grief there, not even regret, just a kind of curiosity. It’s better now, my life. Time has passed.

My period arrives the day we depart for the yellow house. For most of the week I’m bleeding profusely, emptying my menstrual cup into the toilet, blood spilling crimson into the bowl. This feels like a strange contrast to what’s happening in the house, which is the slow devolving of my grandmother’s body. Hers is stagnant, and so she’s been instructed by a physical therapist to get exercise, to stand up every hour and walk, to eat foods with fiber and drink more water. Conversely, my body can’t be stilled; it’s

There are a hundred things I could ask her, but everyone says this when a person is nearing the end of their life and the time has been surrendered—I should have said, I should have asked, I should have tried harder to understand.

churning and processing, I’m bleeding through every pair of underwear I own. I think back to O’Connell’s book, to the transhumanists who want to end these corporal inconveniences. Surely they’d consider our individual problems—both mine and my grandmother’s—nuisances that should be cured. And yet, that my body submits to a cycle, to an internal construction of time, is a reminder that I’m not powerful, that I own so little of myself. My cramps can double me over, render me immobile. I am struck again and again by the warmth of my blood, which runs down my hand, my forearm, when I maneuver the menstrual cup incorrectly. Sometimes it looks like I’ve slashed my own wrists. I have ridiculous urges to take pictures of the toilet bowl—the clumps and clots of uterine lining—and send the evidence to my boyfriend, M. Say: Look, this is what my body endures. It doesn’t make sense, this desire—it wouldn’t prove anything. He knows, anyway, I complain about it enough, and he’s a patient listener. But still, I think. I am just a collection of flesh, bones, blood—a simmering organism that submits to time and its accessory processes.

I finish O’Connell’s To Be a Machine; I close the book on all the deranged and genius and sorrowful people trying to resist life’s processes, and I think: I don’t want to be a person so obsessed with mortality that she’s unable to recognize the sand dwindling in the hourglass. But I also understand the appeal of resisting it, of violently working to withhold death’s encroaching promise. I don’t want my grandmother to die. I don’t want to die. That seems like a simple desire—one that we should have figured out by now. These days, I’ll find myself enjoying something—a particularly good cup of coffee, the sun on my back, the sight of the small purple flowers that pop up near M’s place as the weather warms, and I’ll think: my grandmother is dying, and I don’t deserve to be thinking about anything else. The joy is brief before guilt’s crash. It’s worth noting that I’ve never been immune

to this feeling, not even in childhood—my life thus far has been a dogged chase of finding and catching pleasure and then submitting to guilt. On the phone with a friend from grad school, I tell her that I sometimes fixate on death for so long that it makes me nauseous. I didn’t know that, she says. She sounds concerned. I try to explain. I’m worried that everyone I love will be taken away from me. And surely this is a realistic worry, not an irrelevant fear: one day, they all will, or maybe I’ll go first. A few days into the week at the yellow house, while my grandmother sleeps on the couch downstairs, my father looks me straight in the eyes and says: This is a reminder that you should just do what you want to do in life. It doesn’t matter, any of the rest of it. It’s a cliche, right? That this realization arrives when we face a loved one’s mortality. I want to resist my father’s aphorism—I want to say, cruelly—it’s all futile and it doesn’t matter and what’s the point because you’re going to die one day, too, and that will ruin me. But he’s right. Or maybe we’re both right.

To the general impatience of transhumanists everywhere, we have not been able to grant ourselves—via science or religion— immortality here on earth. I think about this often—what life would be like if people weren’t consumed, constantly, with a sense that time was running out. What they might enjoy, what they might discover about themselves. Painting or birdwatching or forest strolls or sunbathing—long, luxurious acts that defy our culture’s call for productivity. But conversely, there’s something I resist about this neat narrative (and all narratives that lack certain nuance). I am not sure I could make sense of a world, or my own place in it, if I knew it was mine to explore forever. Or maybe what I’m saying is a bit more complicated—that I could make sense of it, yes, but I wouldn’t be any better for it. If I were to chart the way my empathy has grown over the years, I imagine a soft line running parallel—that as I grew older I came to reckon with compassion only when I understood my own insignificance

and vulnerability. That I was a self-involved child, an insufferable teenager, and up until recently I believed that much of what happened around me, or as a direct result of my impassioned choices, was not my responsibility. When I think about the world’s problems—the flagrant violence of climate change, enduring political upheaval, glaring human rights issues splashed in my morning paper—I wonder if maybe we’d all be better for acknowledging our dire fragility. In fact, the charge toward some infallible future is maybe the worst thing we could do. That we really are confined to corporeal bodies—ones that will betray us when they want to—means we should care about other people, we really should, because that’s maybe the surest way of also saving ourselves.

It feels difficult to explain any of this to anyone—the yellow house, my love for my grandmother, the guilt I notice when I remember that I have years ahead of me and she doesn’t. I don’t pretend to think that everyone else is as hung up on death as I am, either, but the worries we think we face alone tend to also be the most seductive to parse out. As a child I was consumed by The Book Thief, a YA novel written by Markus Zusak that featured Death as the ironic narrator of the story. I read and reread it. And despite the fascinating characters, and I loved them so—Liesel, Rudy, Max—I came to love Death the most by the book’s end. I loved Death’s frankness, his funny and smart way of speaking, his complete committal to the task at hand, regardless of the

Sometimes I meet myself in my current life as if I’ve been dropped into the present from a more ambiguous past—I’m forced to reorient myself to the moment and to who I’ve become. It’s a sort of vertigo.

associated sadness. And I loved that Death understood the people he took—he saw them, he didn’t skip over their details. While I don’t believe I should spend my life pursuing immortality like the transhumanists, I’ve decided that I shouldn’t devote myself to funeralizing my own life, either, to being the stoic person who can’t get out of her own way. The person in the corner of the room at the party who—while everyone else gets blitzed and dances stupidly and beautifully in their strong and broken bodies, says, isn’t tomorrow Monday? The barefaced truth of mortality is unchanging, yes, but I don’t have to sacrifice my life to it, either. I don’t have to run from the joy. I think my grandmother would understand that best of all.

the sea by the yellow house