Brick Houses

The house made of bricks held an interesting family. It was five bedroom, three and a half baths and to be quite honest, when they bought the house they didn’t even know what a half bath was. The bricks themselves held up well but the house seemed far too old. Not crumbling, for it was steady but it was a strange house. Not the kind of building you’d expect to see in the area but beautiful and enviable nonetheless.

            The first bedroom belonged to the eldest daughter and painted a sunny yellow. White carpet, white pillows. And a crimson duvet. She had blackout curtains ready to drop at a moment’s notice. And there she sat, on that crimson duvet, with a hand on a paperback book whose cover was too bent to ever close, staring at a dusty guitar. Yet she was the only one in the house that knew that under the floorboard that was below the guitar rested not one, not two, but fifteen essays from upperclassman from when they were taking the classes she was taking. And the girl’s desk at home looked just like her desk at school; gum was stuck to the bottom without care but the papers were all organized and not one inch out of line.

            And then she turned to yell. She turned to yell through those sunny yellow walls and into her older brother’s light green room. And he promptly ignored her, turning back to his homework and wishing he’d cleaned off his whiteboard that was covered in all of his formulas or compounds from Algebra and Chemistry. The bunk beds he laid on – but didn’t share- were unmade and his closet was his floor. And he didn’t even notice that the Advanced English notebook he’d so desperately been looking for was sitting on top of his television, opened haphazardly to some half-baked drawing of the Greek Gods as the solar system on one side and on the other was a hand drawn maze that no one had been able to solve.

            Down the hall from the two eldest children, the parents were cleaning up the master suite. Mom was cleaning off the three-sixty-degree mirror in her closet so that it was perfect like the rest of the space, not knowing about the coffee stain she’d left on the plush rug only minutes ago. And she’d sent her husband off to make sure the vanity in their room wasn’t dusty but his two cell phones that had been sitting on one of the twin bedside tables kept buzzing and vibrating and anything else they could do. So when he decided to ignore that too, he went to clean up his desk. The kite from China went in the trash, as did the empty wine bottle from Italy. Why, even a painting from his youngest daughter might have been thrown out accidentally. But the Swiss watch had to stay, no contest. And the collection of beers he brought back from Germany had not yet been finished so he might as well keep those. The crumpled letter in the back of the mother’s drawer saying that she’d had yet another miscarriage would not be discussed by either of them.

            The young twins shared a room, of course. Nothing else would do, and it left room for a guest room. A boy and a girl were the ones occupying the white walled room. It wasn’t so much a room as it was the entire attic. Lavender bedding for the girl, orange for the boy. The floor was impossible to see since the girl’s dolls lay strewn across the floor. The boy’s beheaded action figures were organized in neat rows in his drawers, with little paper-made plaques reading their name and cause of ‘death’. There are marker drawings on the wall from the girl, and the boy’s little bookshelf is filled with the heroic if not fear-inducing tales of good and evil’s power struggle. 

          It was an interesting family. The members themselves grew up well but the family seemed slightly off kilter. Not falling apart, because they were steady but it was an odd family. Not the kind of family who usually occupied the neighborhood but beautiful and enviable nonetheless.