Three Story House: A Novel (42 page)
Read Three Story House: A Novel Online
Authors: Courtney Miller Santo
“I don’t want the house,” Lizzie said between sobs. She pushed her mother away. “I want a normal family.”
“Then sell it,” her father said. “Use the money and start over. Make the family you want.”
Isobel moved to her cousin’s side. Elyse joined her, patting her back and making soothing noises over Lizzie’s sobbing. “If you two want to fix this, you’re going to have to come clean to everyone. Own up to what you’ve done then and now.”
Her father nodded. “I’m not afraid anymore.”
Lizzie’s mother stood up. “I’m putting the house in your name. When we move into the new house next month, it’ll be yours to do with what you want.”
Isobel sent Elyse to the car with Lizzie and then she hugged her aunt and uncle. “There’s no way to fix this right now. You need time. And you have to know that if she doesn’t want to fix this with you, then that has to be okay.”
“Someone should tell your mother the same thing,” Aunt Annie said.
New Year’s Eve was unusually warm. Isobel shucked off her jacket and stretched out on the blanket they’d laid on the bluff in the backyard of Spite House. Tom hooked his leg over hers and touched his head to hers. Behind them, she listened to the noises of Lizzie’s younger siblings as they ran through the house, gathering stray belongings in anticipation of the move to their larger and more suburban home the next day. Elyse stepped out of the kitchen and walked over to them.
“Ollie, ollie oxen free,” she said before joining them on the blanket.
“Are we base?” Tom asked. “I don’t know, but I’m tired of running.”
“She coming out?” Isobel asked.
“I think so,” Elyse grabbed for Isobel’s mink muff and shoved her hands in it. “T. J. told me he was going to pop the question out here.”
“Is she going to be okay?” Isobel asked.
Tom pulled Isobel on top of him and put his hands in her back pockets. “I think she’ll be fine. You girls are like those weighted punching bags—always bouncing back up.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Elyse said—ducking a mock punch from Tom.
“That’s true enough,” Tom said, and said more, but Isobel didn’t hear any of it over the fireworks that lit up the sky.
Lizzie stepped outside. “Hurry up,” she called to those still inside the house.
Isobel watched the explosions, thinking how much they all had to look forward to. Elyse would leave tomorrow for Boston. Her father had recently retired and had pushed her to come home. If she had to guess, she thought that he’d help her find what she wanted. She might have to put in a few more years tending bar, but she’d find her way to her dream. Isobel and Tom were flying to Missouri the next week to start filming an episode of her new show. The homeowners lived in a converted grain silo and had a list of repairs taller than the structure itself. And Lizzie. She looked behind her. Right then, T. J. was kneeling down asking her to marry him.
Behind them, Rosa May and her family clapped. The joy on their faces was brighter than the explosions of light in the sky. Aunt Annie and Uncle Jim stood back a ways, smiling but careful not to get too close. There was no way to fix everything, but they’d started and the love that existed between them gave Isobel hope. In her mind’s eye, Isobel saw a long and happy life for her cousin. One where she coached teams to victory and had the children she needed to heal the damage done by her family.
She looked then at the house—with its imposing wall of glass and saw the best of themselves reflected in it. Despite everything, Spite House had saved them all.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
A Brief History of Spite Houses
Spitefulness: The Short Beginning of
Three Story House
Reading Group Discussion Questions
More from Courtney Miller Santo
Photo by Jenny Lederer
COURTNEY MILLER SANTO
spent the first eighteen years of her life in the West and the last eighteen in the South. She doesn’t know which to call home and alternates between using “you guys” and “y’all” as her preferred second-person plural. She became interested in writing when she learned that letters form words but thought that to be an author you had to be a dead, bearded white man.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism at Washington and Lee University because it was the most practical way to see her name in print every day. She worked as a reporter in Charlottesville and Roanoke, Virginia, and tried very hard not to make her true stories better by lying. Eventually she gave up and discovered public relations, where businesses were happy to pay her to make their true stories better.
When her husband secured a job that provided health insurance and her children were old enough to tie their own shoes, she went back to school and wrote the novel she’d always wanted to write.
The Roots of the Olive Tree
, published in 2012, is loosely based on her great-grandmother, who could touch her toes and play Ragtime right up until she died at age 104.
Redbook
magazine selected the novel as its pick to relaunch its book club. Since its publication, hundreds of book clubs have enjoyed reading the story of five generations of mothers and daughters and asking one another “How long do you want to live?” and “What secrets will you keep from your children?”
Currently, Courtney teaches creative writing at the University of Memphis, where she earned her MFA. She lives in Tennessee with her husband, their two children, and their retired racing greyhound. Her newest book,
Three Story House
, like her first, is based on one of the stories her family tells when everyone is gathered together. 
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A Brief History of Spite Houses
G
IVEN WHAT
I
KNOW
about human nature, I’m almost certain that people have been building spite houses as long as they’ve been building houses, or tents for that matter. I can imagine an Ice Age family staking their mammoth-skin tent in a place that intentionally blocked the view of the know-it-all who routinely kept the best firewood for themselves. I became aware of spite houses when visiting Washington, D.C., in college. My roommates and I were at a restaurant (which was more like a bar) on Queen Street, and the waiter told us about a tiny house built in an alleyway down the street.
I found out more about the Hollensbury Spite House after that trip, but that night, staring at the alley-size house, I became an instant fangirl of all houses built out of spite. (I also snagged a commemorative brick from the sidewalk.) The idea that someone would build a house just to stop horses and buggies from traipsing through the alley next to his house delighted me, and I started to make up a story about who might live in the house now.
Over the years, I’ve collected stories about other houses. In Boston, I found the Skinny House, which is only ten feet wide and according to the legend was built when one brother tried to screw another out of his inheritance. He divided the property so that his brother’s portion would be too narrow to build on. In Seattle, where my grandparents lived for many years, there is a house shaped like a piece of pie that was built after a disastrous divorce and unfair settlement. My sister married into a family who had a part in erecting a view-blocking addition in San Francisco’s Nob Hill, and then I discovered that Memphis had its very own version in the Winchester Mystery House, where out of spite a local lawyer kept adding to and altering his property, and ended up being forced to purchase his neighbor’s property.
There are, of course, thousands more houses built out of spite. I’d love to have you join the conversation and post pictures of your spite houses or just tell your spite stories. Join us on Tumblr at spitehouses.tumblr.com or feel free to post to www.facebook.com/courtneymsanto.
Spitefulness: The Short Beginning of
Three Story House
A
FTER HAVING HER PICTURE
made in front of a bronze statue of Elvis, a woman wearing a dress several sizes too large boarded a trolley and took the seat nearest the driver. She was thirty-two years old and a minor celebrity thanks to her recent appearance on a weight-loss reality television program. Her first week on the show she lost twenty-seven pounds, which got her voted off. She returned for the last episode having lost another eighty-three pounds. And now, according to the scale, the woman was as thin as a rich man’s second wife, but needed the too-large dress to cover the folds of skin that had lost their elasticity. The town where she lived didn’t have the right kinds of doctors or even proper medical facilities, and so she’d come to Memphis. In a few days, a doctor would anesthetize her and perform what he euphemistically called a body lift, and yet as far as she could tell his work involved cutting away instead of lifting up.
The trolley driver cleared his throat and the woman turned her attention from the window where downtown passed as slowly as if she’d been walking. They were alone in the car. “Sightseeing?” he asked, and continued speaking even as she nodded in agreement. “I got a whole spiel I can do if you’re interested.”
“Spiel,” she said, glancing out the window as they rounded a corner and the river came into view.
He slowed the trolley as they approached the next stop. “You want more than that?”
“Don’t we all,” she said, thinking that the way he looked at her twice and then once again meant that he’d recognized her.
“Well, then,” he said, pointing at the smooth stucco of the mansion high on the bluff and telling her that Cybill Shepherd had once lived there. Had she ever, in her time in Hollywood, met Cybill?
The woman blinked and then turned to look at the house.
She ought to look out for famous people the driver continued. They were all over Memphis—musicians and athletes walking around unseen. The litany of names took several minutes to recite. “And then,”—the driver paused to open and close the doors, as if to let on a passing ghost—“there are the places that are more famous than the people.” He lifted his hand from the throttle and pointed at a house on their left that appeared to be made of glass. Bringing her hand up to shade her eyes against the reflection of the midmorning sun, the woman could only see the reflection of the green trolley in the windows of the house. “You know about that place, Spite House?” the driver asked.
She didn’t know, but she understood that the driver would tell her as they made their way around the tracks. He started the story at the beginning, when trolleys had been a meaningful way to transverse the city. And as he spoke he seemed to be building up to one particular anecdote. Something he felt he had to tell her. The woman listened, trying to slide her thumb underneath the compression garment she wore to contain the folds of skin. She wondered, as she listened, whether she’d miss the constant pressure of these garments once her skin was gone.
The trolley lurched forward and the driver whistled. He took a breath and for the next forty minutes of the ride he talked. He kept talking as the lunch crowd gathered on the trolley, handing over crumpled bills and apologizing for not having change. The whole time the woman listened. She knew that he spoke to her for a reason, with purpose, because there was part of her that was religious. Not a big part of her, not so big that she’d do more than wear a cross and go to church on Sundays, but sometimes, like when she’d sent in her video to the show, she got the feeling that God wanted her to take action. That day on the trolley, with August hot outside the windows, felt like a nudge from God’s own finger. She listened as she would have to a lecture and afterward, although she didn’t know it for a long time, she realized she’d gotten the answer to a prayer she hadn’t offered.
