Someone an Awful Lot Like Me

An attempt has been made, the house polished and perfumed with the fragrance of lemon and pine. All for nothing. This house, Rosa knows within a minute of stepping inside, is pure crap. She sees the slug-colored tiles, the yellowed doilies, the kindergarten-bright floral wallpaper that whispers laziness and vulgarity, and she knows that anyone with this sort of taste would let a house go sour in ways not obvious.

Standing in the hallway is a real estate agent that Rosa has not encountered before: female, younger than usual — obviously no college degree, Rosa thinks, no other viable options — wearing a pressed blazer over dress pants, a sparkly necklace, a glossy-lipped smile. Outdated, but earnest. Worth some of her time.

“I’m Denise,” the agent says. “Would you like a tour?”

Rosa is in her Sunday best, a navy-blue skirt whose zipper doesn’t quite close at the top, a white blouse with yellowed stains under the arms, unseen if Rosa keeps her arms down. She’s not the kind of woman to wave her arms. She knows that real estate agents do not give priority to 65-year-old women, not their best house-buying demographic, but she is all there is. “Certainly.”

Denise takes her through the house, pointing out features obvious and unremarkable. Rosa sees vague watercolors on the walls, limp curtains in the windows, and in every room a scarcity of personal items. Rosa believes that prior inhabitants leave layers of residue like a palimpsest, the artwork she used to teach, residue she touches when she glides her fingertips on furniture, residue that lifts past conversations into her ears. This house presents silence. A house barely occupied. She thinks of the small apartment she shared with Manny, barely containing their life together, his booming voice, his ardor.

“Pay attention,” she tells herself.

The tour ends in the entryway. A business card pressed into her hand. Denise asks, “Are you looking for a house for yourself?”

“Are you asking why a woman my age would buy a house? Will I not live long enough to enjoy it?”

Denise’s face reddens. Not an attractive look, the agent’s fleshy cheeks highlighted, a chipmunk stuffed into a blazer.

“I just want to know how I can help. What is your name?”

“Rosa Taylor. I want a house big enough for my daughter and her family. They visit often. Camila has two sons. I’m a grandmother to teenagers.” Rosa waits as the hallway clock ticks off seconds, many seconds. “People tell me I don’t look old enough to have teenaged grandsons.”

“That’s true, you —”

“Thank you.”

Rosa leaves. The agent was obtuse, unattractive, and, like that house, not worth her time.

* * *

In her car, Rosa removes the top sheet of paper from the stack on the passenger seat, exposing a new sheet containing directions and a map to the next house. She learned to do this a few months earlier when she left an open house and couldn’t find her way to the next house or back home. She ended up in front of a nondescript bar in a strip mall, crying, before she called Camila, who guided her home, one street at a time, Camila speaking with a patient, pained voice.

Rosa plans her Sunday open houses carefully, looking up addresses on her computer, finding the simplest routes. She has taken to writing the addresses with a fat black marker because her doctor said her eyes are degenerating and she hated that, it sounded distasteful, her eyes corrupted and immoral.

Rosa’s mobile phone rings through the car’s speakers. Camila checks on her often, ever since Rosa’s husband, Manny, passed away several years ago. Rosa answers, “Hello.”

“Rosa Morales?” It is not Camila.

“Yes.”

The young man states his name and the name of her credit card company. “Did you recently purchase several items online? An Xbox? An HD TV?”

“I’m sure I’d know if I did. My memory is fine.”

“What about a bicycle? A mini refrigerator?”

That sounds like the day Rosa and Camila went shopping as Camila prepared for college, the bittersweet mood of the day, how proud Rosa had felt and how forlorn to have Camila leaving, the conflicting emotions weighing on her until every item she picked up took on an aspect of solemnness and, relinquishing her usual frugality, she bought everything Camila desired.

Pay attention, she thinks, the young man is talking. “What did you say?”

“You’ve been a victim of identity theft.”

Rosa tries to recall her kitchen that morning, the unwashed dishes in the sink, the dead houseplants on the windowsill, the stacks of books on the table. She reads histories and biographies, especially of the presidents, the good — shepherding the country through wars and recessions — and the bad — the slave owners, drinkers, womanizers — and the indifferent. The presidents had one thing in common; they were persons of consequence, they had mattered. Did she matter to anyone?

“I’m sure I’d know if something was taken,” Rosa says.

“They stole your identity. Someone used some of your personal data to get a credit card and pretend to be you.”

“Someone wants to be me?”

“They want credit cards that bill to you.”

Through the window, Rosa sees the hulking form of Mount Diablo. She remembers the long runs in the foothills with the high school cross country and track teams, her body chiseled, her mind sharp. She should have kept running, she could be one of those wiry elderly runners, lording over everyone their physical prowess, the sleek fit of their clothing, their mental clarity. “My daughter will take care of this.”

“We’re handling it. Your daughter doesn’t need to do anything.”

“I had a son.”

“Excuse me?”

“I lost him. Carlos.” Rosa pictured him with Manny’s size and charisma combined with her studious nature and artistic capabilities. He would have been something.

“Sorry? I don’t understand.”

“Manny thought I shouldn’t miss someone that I never laid eyes on. But I felt him inside me. I knew what he would be.”

Silence on the line, then, “We will cancel the card.”

Rosa pictures a college-bound teen buying those items to build a new life, to become someone of consequence.

“You won’t have to pay for those purchases,” the young man continues. “And, truthfully, the police don’t usually catch identity thieves. People always hope the thieves get caught.”

Why would I wish trouble on someone, Rosa thinks, someone trying so hard to get by, someone an awful lot like me?

* * *

Rosa resumes driving, the speakers playing a song from the playlist on her phone. “Wild Horses,” Mick Jagger’s voice melancholy and raspy, Jagger claiming he can’t let her slide through his hands. She’s let so many people slide through hers. They lapse away.

A few minutes later, she slows as she approaches the next house, a one-story ranch, lattice riding the fences, fluted white columns in the front. Scarlet O’Hara in a bungalow, Rosa thinks. Hearing Jagger’s voice in her head, telling her you can’t always get what you want, she does not stop. In elementary school, when Rosa first heard the Stones on the radio, she loved the vibrancy, the energy, the belligerence in their music. Her parents didn’t approve. That may have been part of its appeal. They didn’t approve of Manny, either.

Manny had been on the track team of another high school, a pole vaulter of all things, outgoing and energetic, accustomed to being seen hurtling through the air, the center of attention. He approached her at the end of a track meet, struck up a conversation, asked for her phone number. In a group of girls, all tanned and toned, in shorts and tank tops, she had been chosen. They went out that weekend to see Star Wars at the theater, her first date. When he picked her up at her house on Bartlett Drive, he called her “the Rose on Pear Street.” She saw that he carried something with him, some gravitas; it implied in that moment a whole future life of similar moments. The only man she had ever dated. That night, in front of her house, kissing her, he told her, the first of countless times, “You’re really something.”

Now, she lives alone in that small, old house. She and Manny lived in apartments, could never afford a house, until Manny died and she moved back in with her widowed mother. Two widows, decades apart in age, eating in silence, the only sound a scrape of utensils, a cough, two widows missing their husbands. Then her mother passed away and now Camila says that house is Rosa’s primary retirement plan. When Rosa tours nicer houses, she thinks her own house seems aged, inconsequential. Like herself.

* * *

She tours the next house on her own, finds the bedrooms lacy and colorful, an overtly feminine house. Their residue shimmers and she sees them: girls in ponytails, girls strapping on shin guards, girls dressing for dances in their brightest hopeful best, girls sharing makeup and arguments and secrets. She hears their conversations, conversations she should have had with Camila but felt that, as a mother, for propriety, she should keep a certain distance, a maternal aloofness, a president leading a family.

Rosa steps into a kitchen where a man hunches over a laptop, his shirt untucked around a paunchy waist, hair teased out to disguise a receding hairline. A man like that, Rosa knows without peeking at his hand, is not married and has given up on the premise.

Another agent Rosa has not met before. Another opportunity. Rosa says, “Hello.”

He looks up. There it is, that moment, she can always see it in their yes — young, strong eyes — when they suddenly perceive her as a prospective buyer, someone of consequence. “Can I show you around?” he asks.

“I showed myself around. While you were occupied.”

“Any questions?”

“I didn’t come here to exchange recipes.” She takes a deep breath, from the diaphragm; she’s been learning yoga. Camila says it is good for her. “Tell me about this house.”

The agent stands up. He’s talking now, but the words aren’t registering. She listens for conversations from prior residents that have accumulated in the corners of the rooms, left floating on drafts of air. She trails her fingers over the cool granite of the kitchen counter, hoping for dust motes spun up into air, each mote a part of the family that lived here, particles of family DNA alighting on her hand like ladybugs. She wants to feel the vibrancy of the girls who had lived here.

The agent says, “Solar panels decrease the electricity bill.”

Rosa pictures hideous black mats on the roof. How did I miss that? Degenerate eyes.

“Some days,” the agent continues, “you’ll produce so much electricity you won’t have to pay the power company. You’ll be off the grid.”

Camila once told her that since Manny died, Rosa has pulled away, become more independent, gone off the grid. Rosa did not understand but heard something like admiration in Camila’s voice and Rosa took to telling herself, you are the kind of person who goes off the grid. A recent forest fire, news on the television, the pretty girl talking about power outages, grid problems, no concern to her.

“I like to be off the grid,” Rosa says.

“Right,” the agent says. “Then this is the place for you, Ms.…”

“Fillmore.”

He hands her a business card. She deposits it in her purse pocket, the pocket bulging with dozens of the small, stiff cards, the pocket difficult to close.

* * *

In her car, Rosa’s phone rings. She pulls over to the curb.

“Mama, where are you?” Camila asks.

“Down the street.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. For the millionth time.”

“You aren’t visiting open houses, are you?”

There is an accusation in Camila’s voice that Rosa has become familiar with; her child now parents her. If only she’d gone to college, if only she’d worked in a smart business suit in a high rise building in downtown San Francisco, Rosa’s life would be different, her daughter would not talk to her this way. If only Rosa had kept running. She was fast. Her name was in the newspapers. She was someone.

“You’re only supposed to drive to the grocery store,” Camila continues, her voice softer. “I will take you anywhere else.”

But not to the open houses. Her life feeling as constrained as a prison sentence, Rosa looks forward to this; she needs something to give each week a certain dimension, a separation. Sunday morning Mass serves the same purpose, but she often misses it, misjudges the time, arriving to an empty church.

“Driving is dangerous,” Camila says. “Remember, the doctor said you had early onset de— … sometimes you have trouble remembering things. You might get lost again.”

Rosa feels as if her life has been taken from her incrementally — Carlos, her father, Manny, her mother. So much loss is depleting. She remembers her father working often on their old car, keeping it running. She needs someone to keep her running. Manny was not mechanical.

“I’m fine.”

“Mama, we can’t ignore—”

“Thank you, dear.” Rosa disconnects the phone.

* * *

The next house: a ranch house, squat and boxy. Rosa is barely in the door when an agent greets her. Fortyish, wide hips flaring out a dress that’s too tight, that looks uncomfortable. A woman, Rosa thinks, who has always been close — the cheerleader in the back row, a homecoming princess, a basketball player sitting on the bench during the final minutes of a game — and the constant effort to break through wears on her like the makeup she applied today with diligence but no artistry.

“I’m Tiffany,” the agent says. “Can I show you the house?”

Of course you’re Tiffany, Rosa thinks. A name as obvious as her makeup. “Certainly.”

Tiffany leads Rosa into the kitchen and it’s so bright as to make even degenerating eyes squint, light sweeping in from floor-to-ceiling windows. Tiffany bends to slide out a wine drawer, her dress tightening, and from the lines she sees that under the dress, Rosa suspects that Tiffany wears that skimpy thing, the thing that got the president, the one who played the saxophone, in trouble. Tiffany is too old for that.

“The drawer keeps wine cool,” Tiffany says.

“My husband always preferred beer,” Rosa says.

“Beer bottles will fit in the drawer.”

“Manny passed away.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Rosa doesn’t like the way Tiffany is looking at her, sad-eyed, as if Rosa is a lonely old woman, bereft of family and friends. She has friends who come over for dinner and card games, who hugged her at Manny’s funeral. She hasn’t seen them lately. Where did they go?

“Let’s see the rest,” Rosa says.

Walking behind Tiffany in the hallway, Rosa feels the liveliness of this house, a house unable to contain the energy of its past, the wallboards pockmarked from games of Frisbee gone awry, floorboards scuffed by boxes carrying siblings dragged like sleighs.

In her own house, she wonders what strangers would feel. In the small bedroom once inhabited by her mother Rosa keeps an easel, a tray full of crumpled oil paint tubes, canvases leaning against the wall. Rosa had been a painter most of her life, setting it aside with the absence of Manny, as if he might be her muse, something he would have found humorous. She had worked for decades as an aide in the nearby elementary school, eventually teaching art lessons. She never mentioned that she was a painter; it seemed dishonest, with no paintings hung on anyone’s wall, not even her own.

At the end of the tour, the handing of a business card. Rosa turning to leave. A slight tap on her arm, a cool fingertip to her skin. Tiffany, smiling, her eyes still sad. “Have a good day, Ms…”

“Pierce.”

Rosa feels the touch after Tiffany pulls her hand away. When had someone last touched her in the soft, lost places, touched her with tenderness or expectation? Like losing a limb, sometimes she can still feel it: his breath against her neck, the stubble on his checks, his skin against hers, they made life, they made Camila, they made Carlos. Who will now tell her she is really something?

Rosa finds it hard to breathe, the air gaining weight, her lungs unequal to the task. She is no longer what she used to be. She used to a painter, a wife, a mother, a teacher’s aide, a runner. What role can she still inhabit? Runner? What would her body do with sudden and surprising demands placed on it?

Something is off, the day shaping up to be ordinary and forgettable. She sits in her car, skips the playlist so she can listen to “Angie.” Did Manny ever think that of me, she wonders, like there is no other woman who could come close to me?

She feels herself sliding into one of her melancholy moods, as Manny called them. It sounded better than being depressed. It sounded old-fashioned and fleeting.

Driving, Mick Jagger’s words, ain’t it good to be alive, floating in the car. Rosa, wanting to believe.

* * *

The next house has a sloping gray roof from which two dormers jut out, jaunty and showy and out of place. Rosa follows a middle-aged couple through the house, listening as they whisper their observations.

“It’s ordinary,” the man says.

“It’s a good house,” Rosa says.

“What?” The husband turns to her.

“A good foundation. No cracks. Never settle for a house that settles.”

“Isn’t there a fault line near here?” asks the woman.

“This house will stand longer than you,” Rosa says.

Rosa leaves the room, heading for the front door, encountering a small knot of people. A young couple — she can’t see their hands, can’t see if they are married or shacking up — talking to two real estate agents, judging by their pretentious clothing and hearty manner. Is the young couple aware of the importance of a house purchase? A house holds a family like an envelope holds a letter; it contains their story.

The young couple leaves and Rosa finds herself alone with the agents. One is female, wiry, in her mid-30s, with short blond hair, lively eyes. The other agent is male, thin, eyes deep set behind fleshy gray pads, as if he’s peering over sandbags. A scarecrow on the front lines.

“Are you looking at houses?” the female agent asks.

“Dear, if you’re asking am I alone, yes, I am. Alone. Looking for a house.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to insult—”

“It takes a lot to insult me.”

“I’m Cindy,” the agent says. She states the name of her agency, but it’s lost as Rosa thinks, of course, Cindy Brady from the old sitcom. Perky. Grown up now. Kids of her own. More cute than beautiful when young but aging into something that might approach attractiveness if she encourages it, if she applies more sunscreen, seeks out shade.

Pay attention, Rosa thinks.

“And you are?” Cindy asks.

“Angie Buchanan.”

“Didn’t I meet you a few weeks ago?” Cindy asks. “The house on Keller Ranch Road with the oval windows you thought looked out of place?”

More than out of place, Rosa recalls, they were hideous, a submarine house, a Disneyland ride. “I don’t think so.”

“I must be wrong,” Cindy says. “Because I thought you said your name was Van Buren. I usually am bad with names, but I remembered that because my husband has Dutch relatives.”

The entryway feels tight to Rosa, the walls pinching in, bowed by the weight of the people upstairs looking at the house. This house doesn’t hold people well. “I’m sure I’d remember.”

Cindy offers a small smile, her eyes searching Rosa’s face.

“Wait,” the scarecrow says. “I met you a few weeks ago. I was showing the house on Salvio. You said your name was Jackson. I have a great memory for names and faces.”

Rosa sees that while he did shave that morning, dots of dark hair stipple his pallid skin, like the canvas of an untalented painter experimenting with pointillism. “I know my name.”

Cindy Brady and Scarecrow exchange glances.

A humming in her ears crowds out thoughts. Rosa fights the desire to turn, head out the door. She remembers fingering the tassels on her childhood bedspread, fingering them like rosary beads, as worries flashed through her mind. Deep breathes, she reminds herself, deep and cleansing.

The agents narrow their eyes. Accusing eyes. What is she being accused of?

“Are you okay?” Cindy Brady asks.

“Would you like us to call someone?” Scarecrow asks. He is so skinny that if he dove into a pool, he would make no ripples. An apt metaphor for his life.

She wants to say, I’m famous, I’m traveling incognito, I’m in witness protection. She says, “I have nothing to hide.”

“Jackson, Van Buren, Buchanan?” The scarecrow says. “What did you use after Van Buren, Tyler?”

Cindy Brady says, “What are—”

“Presidents,” Scarecrow says, with a look-at-me-I’m-so-smart smile. “She’s going through the presidents.”

“Young man, if you knew history,” Rosa says, “you’d remember that Harrison, with his very brief term, not Tyler, came after Van Buren.” She still remembers presidential history, all those books, etched into her brain.

Scarecrow opens his mouth to speak, something forming on his face, his muscles tensing with effort but nothing witty is available in there, it’s like watching her grandson as a baby sitting in his car seat, his entire body tense with the effort to expel something into his diaper. “Thank you for your time,” Rosa says. Then she is out the door, knowing the agents are talking about her, their words cut off by the closing door, words held in that house with all the other conversations.

She sits in her car and wonders which cars belong to the agents. She could look for them at future houses, avoid them. But she’s not sure she will remember the cars unless she writes down the license plate numbers, which feels like too much effort. Rosa does not remember when she first began to forget.

She feels tense, baffled by how unsettled her life feels. Her hands shake. When she reaches to remove the top page, the entire stack scatters to the floor. She picks up the pages, they make no sense, she can discern no order, they aren’t numbered. How to get to the next house? Giving up on that idea, just wanting to get home now.

She can’t call Camila, not again. Camila has threatened to take Rosa’s car. Rosa feels the morning tilt away, Sunday morning drained of possibility, the week upended. Her mother would have said give it up to God. Rosa is not sure she still knows how. She feels strange to her own life.

It begins to rain, not a steady, cleansing rain, just drizzle. The dreariness of it. She drives so many streets, looking for something that will orient her, Jagger singing about hanging a name on someone who changes every day. Finally, seeing the small park on Aspen, the park she used to run through as a teenager, her body knowing the way home from there.

* * *

At home, she finds her front door unlocked. “Mi casa,” she says. She sees her mother’s ofrenda, the statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the pictures of Rosa’s father and Manny, items representing things they had enjoyed, making them always welcome in the house. In the kitchen, Rosa finds a can of soup. They are so convenient now, no need for can openers, no need to add water. She sits at her kitchen table, next to a stack of presidential biographies. What names will she use now? She could use the names of her favorite biographers. Angie Ambrose, Angie McCullough, Angie Goodwin. She tries a new name for every new house, imagines herself for the duration of a tour a new person, in a new house, a new life.

The soup is cold. She forgot to heat it. She doesn’t bother, starts to eat, aware of the sound of the scrape of her spoon, the clock ticking. She lives alone, every day indistinguishable from the day before. Except for Sundays. Her week a long lead into Sunday and all those houses to visit, all those lives to briefly inhabit, all those real estate agents looking for someone to talk to. Someone like her.

She remembers being a young woman, her life a blank canvas. An early marriage, early pregnancies, Manny dying young. The painting left vague, and despite its age, unfinished. Rosa sifts memories like flour through her fingers. I used to bake, she thinks. Cookies for Camila. Polvorones. No, her mother made those for her; Rosa made chocolate chip cookies for Camila.

She looks at her soup: carrot segments, pale potato squares, meat. Bland and lifeless, not like Warhol’s can of soup. Viscous splotches of soup on her blouse, her skirt, hearing her mother’s voice telling her clean it, it will stain. Rosa feels stunned by a sadness she wasn’t prepared for. Bleak despair. She hadn’t realized until recently that melancholy was something that carried weight.

Perhaps it is time to take up painting again. Camila tells her to do something new, give your brain a workout she said, keep it stronger, like a muscle. Write a memoir, Camila said, as if Rosa has lived a life worthy of reading about. Take up golf, learn Russian. It all sounds so very energetic and she does not feel up to any of it. She could run again — she could stand to lose a bit of weight, she feels she has become stout — the memory of it perhaps still in her legs. She could lose weight, wear clothes that fit, her life reversing, getting fitter, smarter, returning to the person she once was, when there was still the possibility of anything.

* * *

She walks the quiet rooms of her house, the house she once lived in with her parents, then with her elderly mother, then alone. Iterations of family. She feels slow and ponderous, a heavy solitude descending, something like grief. She knows that feeling: Carlos, Manny, her parents. The house folds in around her, smaller and tighter.

She ends up in the garage. She presses the wall button and the garage door rumbles up. She wonders where she’ll put a mini refrigerator. She pushes aside empty boxes and suitcases to get to her bicycle; wipes dust off the seat. Flat tires. Maybe Camila or her husband can fix that. What is his name? Can I still ride? Is that secret balance still within me?

She sees herself a wispy teenager, browned by the sun, running in the low hills. She remembers being that girl, sleek and fast, the simple joy of it, knowing where she’s going, filled with aspirations. Her life, like the trail she was running on, stretched out in front of her. Did that girl know? Where it would all go?

Rosa realizes that she does not have the list of afternoon houses, does not have her purse or phone, does not have the paper with her own address. Retrieving all of that, finding all of that, feels arduous, overly ambitious.

She stands in the open garage door. Wind swirls dirt across the driveway. A car goes by. The driver, a middle-aged woman. Is that Camila coming to visit? It is not Camila. The driver slows and looks at Rosa. Why is the driver staring? Rosa feels scrutinized. Does the driver have sad eyes? Accusing eyes? Rude to stare like that. She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know that I’m the kind of person who goes off the grid. That I am the kind of person someone else wants to be.

Rosa looks down, sees bare feet and a blue terrycloth bathrobe, flapping open, her underwear on display. She cinches the robe. When did I put that on? Did I change at lunchtime? As a girl, I had a pink robe. Worn in places, tattered at the edges, very soft.

A melancholy mood. She needs to move, get out, like those long runs in the hills. There is only one thing to do — even in her robe and slippers, her body stout and soft, there is only one outlet for her grief. She gets in her car, turns on the Stones singing about not getting any satisfaction, starts the car, pulls away, driving down her street in the dreary rain, anticipating the houses she will visit, anticipating who she will be while inside them. A person of consequence.