The House on Westdale Avenue
by Maeve Barry
The door was locked the afternoon that I arrived at the house on Westdale Avenue. The door was locked, and I did not have a key. I paced around the yard for a bit, stretched my arms and stubby fingers out and up. The sun was bright, it was August, and the house was in Eagle Rock. When I awoke later, I was coiled into a ball on the straw that was intended to be a lawn that had all dried up. Do you wanna go inside? He asked, standing over me, his shadow casting a dark shadow. He pushed the door open easily and looked back at me. I swear it was locked.... I think before a garage door leaves its hinges and clammers down at the auto shop next door.
The house on Westdale Avenue was green and had a straw yard in August. An arch formed by shrubbery framed the kitchen window that was also green. My walls were yellow, Leah’s were grey, and Sonya and Lara shared a room with white walls that were covered in pictures. Alex’s room was purple, and His had no color. His blank walls left my yellow paint no longer cheery but blinding. We moved into the house on Westdale Avenue for our final year of college. The house was built on a colony of anthills. A homeless man passed out on the front lawn our first week living there. We found him on our way to class pressed up against the bushes and sleeping. Someone had shit in our trash bin. Flies swarmed around it like someone had died and we couldn’t turn on the hose to clean it.
We loved the house on Westdale Avenue with its stacks of dishes and textbooks and bongs and plain penne pasta. The front door never quite closed, and the back door to the porch that was adjacent to my yellow bedroom swung open erratically, a condition only worsened with the onset of the Santa Ana winds. We loved the house on Westdale Avenue and its bulbous Christmas lights that wrapped their way through and around the living room, which doubled as Alex’s bedroom. They weren’t very efficient at giving off light, and one bulb burst onto Alex and so we worried the house was filled with lead and ammonium. No one was ever poisoned at the house on Westdale Avenue, not unless you include the kind that is self-administered until someone is no longer living.
During the day, we mostly left the overgrown house on Westdale Avenue, and walked four blocks over. We’d pass the bar that was once a family plumbing business that now housed vintage pinball machines and hard ciders priced at fourteen dollars a can. Men with handlebar mustaches and ironic hats turned towards us. Women in sundresses and floppy hats clutched designer dogs and stared at us. We’d walk four blocks and reach a campus with benches and grass that never turned to straw. There were sometimes roses around the benches, but they only bloomed when parents were scheduled to visit or there was the potential for prospective students.
Sometimes, I heard whispers on the wooden, well-kept benches. There were other women who didn’t live in the house on Westdale Avenue who sat on them. They didn’t sleep near Him or his colorless walls. I heard whispers about what He did to that girl at that party, about what happened during his sophomore year. Whispers formed through passive voice, wary of names, wary of solidified accusations. One time on a bench on green grass, underneath an oak tree, I heard the word rape-y, but I ignored it because of the extra ‘y’ tacked onto the end. I walked home, passed the handlebar mustaches, and floppy sun hats. They stare quietly.
I slept differently at the house on Westdale Avenue. At first, I thought this was due to there being too many bodies. I’d fall asleep in the empty bathtub inside the purple bathroom. He came and stood above the tub and I knew that He was there even though I was still sleeping. He covered me in a blanket instead of waking me, instead of asking me to get out. I woke up with a crick in my neck and I smiled.
The air got cooler on Westdale Avenue, the lawn was no longer straw, and I was still not sleeping. It was during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, when the country decided to let another rapist onto the supreme court when I listened to professors and uncles and Him and Alex discuss the validity of rape accusations for entire. He finds me crying on the black-and-white checkered kitchen floor, and I tell him about the first time I was raped. He rubs my back for a little too long, two inches too low, and my earlobes are shorter. They are attached when I always knew them to be detached. Then I’m not sleeping because sometimes I hear him walk towards the purple bathroom beside my bedroom door. I hear him open the front door and I lay still until I hear it close again. I decide to no longer sleep but to take inventory instead.
The couch in the living room at the house on Westdale Avenue is mud brown and slouchy. It’s the sort of couch that is easy to get stuck in. You must either engage your abdomen and remain vigilant when watching television, or you are lost to it. I vomited on the slouchy mud couch on my third weekend living in the house on Westdale Avenue, but it was the color of wine, a refreshing purple, and so I fell asleep in it. I sit erect on the quick-sand couch one night with His head in my lap while we come down from Molly. I want to be comfortable and to sleep, but instead, I draw circles on his scalp so that He is comfortable. I stay like this until the sun is all the way up and I can move without him waking.
My yellow room inside the house on Westdale Avenue becomes stale. He comes to my room most nights. We smoke in my bed, thigh against thigh, only five steps from the door that leads onto the porch where we could smoke without ever stinking up the room or setting off the smoke detectors. But he doesn’t want to get up. He puts his ashes in my vase that only once held flowers. He leaves me to sleep in my stale and clouded room with remnants of smoke and breath swirling above my head like a wreath. I curl up and let what’s left of him settle around me while I pretend to sleep. On nights when He doesn’t come, I sit there waiting.
Our thighs are pressed together and so I know that I need to ask about the whispers that I hear on the benches. I ask Him about the whispers and their sources, but He calls them crazy without ever asking who they are. “A crazy girl who caught feelings,” He explains, still touching me. He says that he doesn’t know why this keeps happening to him. He is glad that I’m not like them; that I’m not her. That I’m not crazy. That night, we go out, and I spread glitter on his eyes, sliding the sticky, shimmering potion across lids. The curtain that separates the living room from the kitchen crashes down. He sleeps in my bed and his body is longer than mine; it doesn’t mold and squish like mine but is firm and flat, and I want to keep squeezing closer into it. I can’t make eye contact, but his hand slips up my shirt and grazes my skin. A gurgling noise comes from low in his throat as He boroughs into my bed with sheets that never quite reach the corners.
His steps are louder, and I no longer feign sleeping. He is in my room at night. Things are better when we leave the house on Westdale Avenue and drive to Koreatown where I cat-sit. I coil around Him like a snake and he cups my breast, but it’s ok because we’re not in Eagle Rock. He kisses my mouth: teeth first, breath hot, and it’s ok because we’re not in my mockingly yellow bedroom. The washing machine on Westdale Avenue floods the morning that we leave for Nevada City for His grandmother’s house on a dull Thanksgiving Day where everything is grey. We fuck on his grandmother’s basement floor; the air is cool and there is nothing but farm and mist. Rain pools and dribbles and pools on the wide glass door until it dissipates and repeats. I look down, and I cannot find my fingers.
There aren’t mornings or beginnings or starts or finishes when we return to the house on Westdale Avenue. He stomps around the kitchen and slams doors that are already breaking. He pops up at the foot of my bed most nights once everyone is sleeping and the walls become less yellow. All I know are yellow ceilings with chipped paint, and all I know is to check the indents on my mattress and my skin to see if he was in them––in me.
On the morning that He tells me not to tell anyone, he came in through the porch door that’s always creaking; the porch door that slams open so hard and fast that Alex once shut it so hard and caused it to shatter the mirror on my yellow wall. When He finishes, says that I cannot tell. He leaves through the porch door again, then loops around to the front before entering his bedroom next door, slamming his door that is not broken.
Strands of hair wrap around my rib cage, but they can’t be mine because my hair only reaches my collar bone. The hair is dark and full, and mine is blond and dry. He is on top of me and doesn’t seem to notice. He is moving fast and doesn’t see that I’m not there, won’t acknowledge my clenching and silence, doesn’t notice that I’m not me, and that the full lips of the girl who He called crazy are creeping across my own, taking their place, clamping them shut. My eyes tilt up and backward, find a crack in the yellow ceiling until He is finished. They are no longer green but deep and warm and brown.
The toilet on Westdale Avenue is broken on the day that I can’t stop vomiting. My fingers tap the edges of the bowl while I wait for more bile, and they are long and slender and would probably have an easy time playing piano scales. I know mine are short and can never reach the correct key. A test that I take in the purple bathroom on Westdale Avenue tells me I am pregnant. I bury it deep in the trash bin that someone once shit in so He won’t see.
That night, I wake to distinctive thumping. A twin-size mattress ramming into a wall, saliva swishing between opened mouths, a light moaning and Him mumbling that he’s almost finished. An announcement and never a question, without a pause or ever waiting for an answer. I can’t move, and my hearing is heightened, maybe because of my attached earlobes and expanded auricles, and it’s like I’m in the room with Him, with her, a younger girl we both know, who I identify through muffled giggles. My stomach constricts as I listen to them fucking. I stomp around the hallway, slam my full water bottle into the sink, empty it, and refill it. I sit over the toilet, dry heave, and listen to her small pretty moans that were mine, only less pretty, the night before. I wait for her to leave, wait for the front door to creak open before closing, for Him to drive her home. The next day, I take a test at the Health Center near the green grass and well-kept benches. I am no longer, was never, pregnant.
He is back in my bed the next night and my teeth are no longer mine when He calls me a bitch for complaining about the girl inside of his colorless bedroom. My stomach that is doughy and pale cinches and tightens and it’s as flat as the girl who is crazy. I’m inside her tanned rib cage on the first night with Him that I cannot, or will not, remember, on the morning I wake up covered in bruises. But they aren’t on my own skin, and so I cover them with concealer and look elsewhere.
This night repeats until the Wi-Fi at the house on Westdale Avenue stops reaching the bathroom. My toes are no longer partially webbed, and my jaw softens, and He continues coming and the porch begins to rot. The kumquat tree is dead, and Alex shatters another light bulb. The bruises are back, and He slams my door even though He says that I need to be quiet. The bruises don’t matter much though because they’re no longer on my neck but on a neck that is long and slender. The bruises no longer cover my breasts that are large and heavy; I look down and see small, shapely breasts that are bruised and point skywards.
It’s been months and it takes longer to recognize because it is happening to a body that isn’t my own. I eventually tell him that He hurt me, or the body that I occupy. I tell Him because I miss seeing my own face reflected in the mirror. I tell Him in the car park that only has space for two cars when the house on Westdale Avenue needs five. He yells at me; yells that I’m crazy, that I need to get over it, but I’m no longer there, and I watch the last of my original face melt and mold into hers in the reflection of his car window. I am not there, I am only the crazy girl, and He can’t see that my nose now has a hook instead of being straight.
I am the crazy girl, and I’m four inches taller and three waist-sizes smaller, and my face is not my own. But I sleep in the yellow bedroom on Westdale Avenue, and no one seems to realize. They look at me like my nose is straight and my stomach is doughy, and like my hair is still blond and short and dry. No one can see that I am now the crazy girl until I imply that He hurt me. Then I watch their faces twist and so I know that mine must be twisting, too. My features are shifting, and they creep backward and away.
My face is gone and the house on Westdale Avenue is still standing. You can see it on Google Maps. The paint is still green; you can’t see that it’s peeling unless you zoom in. The colony of ants never took over the house, and it was never boarded up due to asbestos concerns. The year is over and so is our lease. The cilantro plants will not make it. He moves into the tall pink house across the street and two blocks over. He moves into the house that is pink and tall, and I am left in a body with a face that is not my own. I watch as the woman in the pink house who is with Him becomes doughy and blond, with detached earlobes and partially webbed toes. As I watch, her face becomes mine. She sleeps in the armpit where I slept, and I imagine her crying in the closet where I hid. I walk up Westdale Avenue, past the bar that was once a plumbing company where the men with handlebar mustaches and the women with floppy still stare. They stare longer and harder as I crinkle the face that is not my own. But it is me; I am her, and the green house on Westdale Avenue is still standing. The pink house is two blocks away, on Eagle Rock Boulevard, and it is also still standing. I know this because my face is inside it, because I’ve already lived there, and its kumquat tree is dying.
The house on Westdale Avenue was green and had a straw yard in August. An arch formed by shrubbery framed the kitchen window that was also green. My walls were yellow, Leah’s were grey, and Sonya and Lara shared a room with white walls that were covered in pictures. Alex’s room was purple, and His had no color. His blank walls left my yellow paint no longer cheery but blinding. We moved into the house on Westdale Avenue for our final year of college. The house was built on a colony of anthills. A homeless man passed out on the front lawn our first week living there. We found him on our way to class pressed up against the bushes and sleeping. Someone had shit in our trash bin. Flies swarmed around it like someone had died and we couldn’t turn on the hose to clean it.
We loved the house on Westdale Avenue with its stacks of dishes and textbooks and bongs and plain penne pasta. The front door never quite closed, and the back door to the porch that was adjacent to my yellow bedroom swung open erratically, a condition only worsened with the onset of the Santa Ana winds. We loved the house on Westdale Avenue and its bulbous Christmas lights that wrapped their way through and around the living room, which doubled as Alex’s bedroom. They weren’t very efficient at giving off light, and one bulb burst onto Alex and so we worried the house was filled with lead and ammonium. No one was ever poisoned at the house on Westdale Avenue, not unless you include the kind that is self-administered until someone is no longer living.
During the day, we mostly left the overgrown house on Westdale Avenue, and walked four blocks over. We’d pass the bar that was once a family plumbing business that now housed vintage pinball machines and hard ciders priced at fourteen dollars a can. Men with handlebar mustaches and ironic hats turned towards us. Women in sundresses and floppy hats clutched designer dogs and stared at us. We’d walk four blocks and reach a campus with benches and grass that never turned to straw. There were sometimes roses around the benches, but they only bloomed when parents were scheduled to visit or there was the potential for prospective students.
Sometimes, I heard whispers on the wooden, well-kept benches. There were other women who didn’t live in the house on Westdale Avenue who sat on them. They didn’t sleep near Him or his colorless walls. I heard whispers about what He did to that girl at that party, about what happened during his sophomore year. Whispers formed through passive voice, wary of names, wary of solidified accusations. One time on a bench on green grass, underneath an oak tree, I heard the word rape-y, but I ignored it because of the extra ‘y’ tacked onto the end. I walked home, passed the handlebar mustaches, and floppy sun hats. They stare quietly.
I slept differently at the house on Westdale Avenue. At first, I thought this was due to there being too many bodies. I’d fall asleep in the empty bathtub inside the purple bathroom. He came and stood above the tub and I knew that He was there even though I was still sleeping. He covered me in a blanket instead of waking me, instead of asking me to get out. I woke up with a crick in my neck and I smiled.
The air got cooler on Westdale Avenue, the lawn was no longer straw, and I was still not sleeping. It was during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, when the country decided to let another rapist onto the supreme court when I listened to professors and uncles and Him and Alex discuss the validity of rape accusations for entire. He finds me crying on the black-and-white checkered kitchen floor, and I tell him about the first time I was raped. He rubs my back for a little too long, two inches too low, and my earlobes are shorter. They are attached when I always knew them to be detached. Then I’m not sleeping because sometimes I hear him walk towards the purple bathroom beside my bedroom door. I hear him open the front door and I lay still until I hear it close again. I decide to no longer sleep but to take inventory instead.
The couch in the living room at the house on Westdale Avenue is mud brown and slouchy. It’s the sort of couch that is easy to get stuck in. You must either engage your abdomen and remain vigilant when watching television, or you are lost to it. I vomited on the slouchy mud couch on my third weekend living in the house on Westdale Avenue, but it was the color of wine, a refreshing purple, and so I fell asleep in it. I sit erect on the quick-sand couch one night with His head in my lap while we come down from Molly. I want to be comfortable and to sleep, but instead, I draw circles on his scalp so that He is comfortable. I stay like this until the sun is all the way up and I can move without him waking.
My yellow room inside the house on Westdale Avenue becomes stale. He comes to my room most nights. We smoke in my bed, thigh against thigh, only five steps from the door that leads onto the porch where we could smoke without ever stinking up the room or setting off the smoke detectors. But he doesn’t want to get up. He puts his ashes in my vase that only once held flowers. He leaves me to sleep in my stale and clouded room with remnants of smoke and breath swirling above my head like a wreath. I curl up and let what’s left of him settle around me while I pretend to sleep. On nights when He doesn’t come, I sit there waiting.
Our thighs are pressed together and so I know that I need to ask about the whispers that I hear on the benches. I ask Him about the whispers and their sources, but He calls them crazy without ever asking who they are. “A crazy girl who caught feelings,” He explains, still touching me. He says that he doesn’t know why this keeps happening to him. He is glad that I’m not like them; that I’m not her. That I’m not crazy. That night, we go out, and I spread glitter on his eyes, sliding the sticky, shimmering potion across lids. The curtain that separates the living room from the kitchen crashes down. He sleeps in my bed and his body is longer than mine; it doesn’t mold and squish like mine but is firm and flat, and I want to keep squeezing closer into it. I can’t make eye contact, but his hand slips up my shirt and grazes my skin. A gurgling noise comes from low in his throat as He boroughs into my bed with sheets that never quite reach the corners.
His steps are louder, and I no longer feign sleeping. He is in my room at night. Things are better when we leave the house on Westdale Avenue and drive to Koreatown where I cat-sit. I coil around Him like a snake and he cups my breast, but it’s ok because we’re not in Eagle Rock. He kisses my mouth: teeth first, breath hot, and it’s ok because we’re not in my mockingly yellow bedroom. The washing machine on Westdale Avenue floods the morning that we leave for Nevada City for His grandmother’s house on a dull Thanksgiving Day where everything is grey. We fuck on his grandmother’s basement floor; the air is cool and there is nothing but farm and mist. Rain pools and dribbles and pools on the wide glass door until it dissipates and repeats. I look down, and I cannot find my fingers.
There aren’t mornings or beginnings or starts or finishes when we return to the house on Westdale Avenue. He stomps around the kitchen and slams doors that are already breaking. He pops up at the foot of my bed most nights once everyone is sleeping and the walls become less yellow. All I know are yellow ceilings with chipped paint, and all I know is to check the indents on my mattress and my skin to see if he was in them––in me.
On the morning that He tells me not to tell anyone, he came in through the porch door that’s always creaking; the porch door that slams open so hard and fast that Alex once shut it so hard and caused it to shatter the mirror on my yellow wall. When He finishes, says that I cannot tell. He leaves through the porch door again, then loops around to the front before entering his bedroom next door, slamming his door that is not broken.
Strands of hair wrap around my rib cage, but they can’t be mine because my hair only reaches my collar bone. The hair is dark and full, and mine is blond and dry. He is on top of me and doesn’t seem to notice. He is moving fast and doesn’t see that I’m not there, won’t acknowledge my clenching and silence, doesn’t notice that I’m not me, and that the full lips of the girl who He called crazy are creeping across my own, taking their place, clamping them shut. My eyes tilt up and backward, find a crack in the yellow ceiling until He is finished. They are no longer green but deep and warm and brown.
The toilet on Westdale Avenue is broken on the day that I can’t stop vomiting. My fingers tap the edges of the bowl while I wait for more bile, and they are long and slender and would probably have an easy time playing piano scales. I know mine are short and can never reach the correct key. A test that I take in the purple bathroom on Westdale Avenue tells me I am pregnant. I bury it deep in the trash bin that someone once shit in so He won’t see.
That night, I wake to distinctive thumping. A twin-size mattress ramming into a wall, saliva swishing between opened mouths, a light moaning and Him mumbling that he’s almost finished. An announcement and never a question, without a pause or ever waiting for an answer. I can’t move, and my hearing is heightened, maybe because of my attached earlobes and expanded auricles, and it’s like I’m in the room with Him, with her, a younger girl we both know, who I identify through muffled giggles. My stomach constricts as I listen to them fucking. I stomp around the hallway, slam my full water bottle into the sink, empty it, and refill it. I sit over the toilet, dry heave, and listen to her small pretty moans that were mine, only less pretty, the night before. I wait for her to leave, wait for the front door to creak open before closing, for Him to drive her home. The next day, I take a test at the Health Center near the green grass and well-kept benches. I am no longer, was never, pregnant.
He is back in my bed the next night and my teeth are no longer mine when He calls me a bitch for complaining about the girl inside of his colorless bedroom. My stomach that is doughy and pale cinches and tightens and it’s as flat as the girl who is crazy. I’m inside her tanned rib cage on the first night with Him that I cannot, or will not, remember, on the morning I wake up covered in bruises. But they aren’t on my own skin, and so I cover them with concealer and look elsewhere.
This night repeats until the Wi-Fi at the house on Westdale Avenue stops reaching the bathroom. My toes are no longer partially webbed, and my jaw softens, and He continues coming and the porch begins to rot. The kumquat tree is dead, and Alex shatters another light bulb. The bruises are back, and He slams my door even though He says that I need to be quiet. The bruises don’t matter much though because they’re no longer on my neck but on a neck that is long and slender. The bruises no longer cover my breasts that are large and heavy; I look down and see small, shapely breasts that are bruised and point skywards.
It’s been months and it takes longer to recognize because it is happening to a body that isn’t my own. I eventually tell him that He hurt me, or the body that I occupy. I tell Him because I miss seeing my own face reflected in the mirror. I tell Him in the car park that only has space for two cars when the house on Westdale Avenue needs five. He yells at me; yells that I’m crazy, that I need to get over it, but I’m no longer there, and I watch the last of my original face melt and mold into hers in the reflection of his car window. I am not there, I am only the crazy girl, and He can’t see that my nose now has a hook instead of being straight.
I am the crazy girl, and I’m four inches taller and three waist-sizes smaller, and my face is not my own. But I sleep in the yellow bedroom on Westdale Avenue, and no one seems to realize. They look at me like my nose is straight and my stomach is doughy, and like my hair is still blond and short and dry. No one can see that I am now the crazy girl until I imply that He hurt me. Then I watch their faces twist and so I know that mine must be twisting, too. My features are shifting, and they creep backward and away.
My face is gone and the house on Westdale Avenue is still standing. You can see it on Google Maps. The paint is still green; you can’t see that it’s peeling unless you zoom in. The colony of ants never took over the house, and it was never boarded up due to asbestos concerns. The year is over and so is our lease. The cilantro plants will not make it. He moves into the tall pink house across the street and two blocks over. He moves into the house that is pink and tall, and I am left in a body with a face that is not my own. I watch as the woman in the pink house who is with Him becomes doughy and blond, with detached earlobes and partially webbed toes. As I watch, her face becomes mine. She sleeps in the armpit where I slept, and I imagine her crying in the closet where I hid. I walk up Westdale Avenue, past the bar that was once a plumbing company where the men with handlebar mustaches and the women with floppy still stare. They stare longer and harder as I crinkle the face that is not my own. But it is me; I am her, and the green house on Westdale Avenue is still standing. The pink house is two blocks away, on Eagle Rock Boulevard, and it is also still standing. I know this because my face is inside it, because I’ve already lived there, and its kumquat tree is dying.
Maeve Barry is an artist and writer who moved from LA to Brooklyn in 2019. Her work has been featured in Ms. Magazine and Tart Magazine. She teaches writing and painting to kids during the day and hangs out with her dogs and listens to music that makes her sad most afternoons.