The Attic Star

          I conceived a dislike for her when she told our agent she wouldn't sell us the front porch bench. Long and low under the tank-shaped front window, the short spindles of the back like piano keys, it seemed to define the house—as I had first seen it in photos.
          Carrol with two r's had paid cash for the house in 2006, coming in from the exclusivity of Mt. Desert, sampling Ellsworth life like you might try a decaffeinated tea or a new hairstyle, her father funding everything with the transfer of some golden island property that must have made her purchase as easy as picking up wine. Somewhere, also, implied or guessed, there had been a successful divorce.
          So that a decade later it had a full line of Swedish appliances. The farmish balustrade of the front porch, just a box of painted boards without ornamentation, was pulled away, leaving a theater stage with large, thickly-planted ferns for footlights. Now the posts were longer—sexier—as they met the floor planks. The kitchen was gentrified with hanging copper skillets and Le Creuset. Bowling balls of smooth Bar Harbor granite held the bedroom doors open. A gazebo was placed on the lawn.
          She had agreed to Friday, September 16, then informed the team, about a week before, she would not be attending closing. Booked into a motel at the edge of town, I walked past the house the evening before fantasizing that I might see her in the driveway, stuffing the car with some last-minute boxes. Stepping a little bit up onto the driveway in the dusk, I would say "Well, you're cutting it close!" But the house was dark, and the curtains were drawn. I headed back out the Bucksport Road with my Gruyere and flagon of Cabernet in a plastic bag that knocked against my knee as I walked, no snappy introduction made.

* * * 

          The morning of closing came sweetly, the September sun older, bright but mild, made softer by the clear fall air. Our agent's enormous vehicle—one of those full-size pickups with the wheels that stick out at the sides, a four-door cab, and a flat bed like a small pool—arrived, and as I climbed into the passenger seat, stabilizing myself with my arms like a hiker on a granite ledge, he sang out "Let's go buy a house!"
          "Are you excited?!"
          Travis was the best agent in town, and his name appeared everywhere on signs as you drove through. He was basketball-star long with a narrow face, lanky. A glorious high school career and boyish, chummy amiability—now combined with chess-player foresight and a smiling, cut-throat professional acumen—had never worn off. But the forties were upon his face, and he kept his sporty sunglasses on more often than was justified. Age refined him in ways that he seemed to resist yet with which he simultaneously complied: he still climbed through tiny garage windows for his buyers when the automatic door opener wasn't available, or crawled down into windowless earthen basements that were like hastily-dug graves with pipes. Yet, his tartan short-sleeve shirts, stopping mid-bicep—(he was huggable, certainly, still eliciting a wife's gratitude and proprietary affection)—looked merely paternal, the juxtaposition of fabric and muscle no longer ... incendiary. He was a person happy in life.
          I clutched my checkbook.
          Arriving at the bank, I felt like a minor celebrity, or a bride. This was my day, and I said yes to some coffee just to test my sovereignty, to extend the moment. Gary could not be with me, yet the chores of the purchase were weightless to me, acts of love, opportunities, for the first time in our life together, for me to be seriously involved. Gradually, the emails and repetitive exchanges of documents became personal, an achievement I celebrated with Gary yet maintained as privately as a pet dog, my name eventually falling first on each paper—the house dependent on me, growing closer with each signature, waiting, devoted.

* * *

          As I recall it was about 12:10.
          I remember getting out of Travis' truck with a sort of slolum to avoid falling onto the sidewalk, but I do not specifically remember walking—for the first time as the house's owner—back the driveway to the kitchen door.
          The key didn't work at first, and I had to put the bank's gift basket and my thick folder of papers down and concentrate.
          Inside, everything smelled like someone else. I opened a window and the top pane crashed down onto the sill. Thereafter, every window I opened I first embraced at the top with my hands before gently releasing the lock.
          At 12: 23 I stopped and took a photo of the stair hall for Facebook, captioning Am finally home.
          There was no sound, only light from the southeast falling on the empty kitchen floor and clean, slippery wood stairs. I was in the center of a moment—just like a wedding, or the first half hour with a new puppy—in which it is most appropriate to cry a little, or sing, or to made a short statement, if one is not alone, of dedication.
          Instead one grips onto the banal present, with nervous laughter, in feigned exasperation, an involuntary rounding off—a putting back into the carton of too much ice cream—the system glutted, balking, hastily adjusting, negotiating such joy, poisoning it with tiny injections, testing and dismissing it, and then, finally, rolling it back over the tongue like an impossibly good wine, tasting it like a first, unexpected kiss from an impossible person, from precisely the right person—exhausted from resisting one's own happiness. 
          It's a kind of anxiety, such good luck. After a life of disappointment, satisfaction comes like a menu printed in a foreign language—the groupings of the dishes arbitrary, vegetables indistinguishable from meat, their names cluttered with diacritical marks.
          I peed in the downstairs toilet but could not flush it. The tank was old, and I was afraid it would explode if I tugged the handle too hard.
          I desperately needed that frustration—the touch of self-hatred on my shoulder, a stinky, comforting old scarf.
          After wandering the bedrooms and discovering the view from each upstairs window, after running my stockinged feet over each of the vast, vacant bedroom floorboards like sampling different chocolates, touching the cool surface of the ceramic door knobs with my fingertips like the lips of some new lover, I came back into the kitchen and found a card, a small craft candle, and a bottle of champagne left on the counter top by the previous owner—by privileged, selfish Carrol with two r's.
          Congratulations! I hope you'll be as happy here as we have been. All the best, Carrie Lange.

* * *

          It was Veuve Clicquot yellow label, and the absentee gesture seemed in contradiction with her refusal to cover Travis' fee, to appear at closing, or to just leave a rotten old bench where it had wintered for a decade.
          But over the next three days and nights more practical gestures—a new bathroom scrub brush I used after touching poison ivy, a box of snack bags I depleted, a three-ring binder of appliance manuals, painstakingly annotated bags of door hardware, an enormous box of safety matches, a few paper plates, a flask of paint thinner, rolls of paper towels—redounded in a ghostly beneficence. And although the house was empty and clean, left on the refrigerator with the same heart magnet was the card I had seen in the earliest photos of her furnished rooms, the penmanship a lipstick-cursive font, the color red as blood: Love rewards the brave.
          An altogether different biography of the seller began to form in my mind as I sat on the bottom step—the only seat in the house—describing the rooms for Gary. 
          At night I ate salami and cheese, squatted on the living room floor. I lit two candles on the mantelpiece with the chunky matches and angled my Droid to blast Argerich's Brahms G Minor Rhapsody through the hollow, vacant rooms. I was falling in love with the house. 
          Saturday evening, fortified by an inky Zinfandel, I finally climbed the steep wooden ladder to the attic. The 5:30 light through the two windows was enough to dispel any gremlins, and I inhaled the familiar smell of my grandmother's attic, comforting and just as full of imaginative possibilities.
          And in the window a pink star was hung, with holes for lights and tiny reflective circles of foil, facing the street like a cheerful but slightly lunatic servant—the solitary item in the darkening, vaulted old wooden room. The cord and switch I turned on and off and on again as I climbed the ladder—thinking it operated a light—belonged to the star, and now I clicked it again, gently. 
          The star lit up, casting its quirky pink light, aimless and languid—a poetic capitulation for the overstimulated day, the endless discoveries and raw pleasure, coming at me in waves each time higher than I could ride, the difficult, reluctant acknowledgment that I was not, apparently, always to be passed over by fortune, that I was not the person defined by the slackness of my mother's face, the antihero of my own red-covered diaries and their roll call of dead-ended friendships, my head bruised from insomnia and regret.
          Like the message on the refrigerator and the paper towels and champagne, the objects left behind, and my encounter with them, seemed awkwardly, touchingly intentional. 
          I was, in fact, quite at home.