Fiction: Where Will All The Buildings Go?
Ellen’s husband is unaware that the city has followed them to Connecticut. During the move, she promised to throw the model away, but instead she packed it in one of the boxes marked ELLEN’S WINTER CLOTHING, concealed beneath a nubby pile of sweaters. In the house, she keeps her city hidden in the linen closet, behind a stack of Tupperware storage containers. When her husband looks in the closet, it’s the picture of order; only she knows what’s underneath.
At a hobby store in New Haven, she gathered the necessary supplies: tubes of paint and brushes with fine tips, plastic baggies filled with miniature people. The whole time, she felt like she was on a covert mission.
On Sunday night, they go to bed together. They read for a little while, they turn off the lights. She waits for him to fall asleep, so she can work on her city. Downstairs, at the dining room table, she goes slowly, paying attention to every detail, testing different colors on the side of the skyscraper until she finds one that looks right. She spreads out all the miniature people. She picks up a woman in a blue dress. Tiny Ellen, she calls her. She looks at her parks and her skyscraper and her maze of streets. She tries to find a place for herself.
She’s been working for an hour when she hears a noise in the basement. A clank, a rustle. She rests her paintbrush on a Styrofoam wedge. She walks over to the basement door and presses her ear against it. She doesn’t hear anything right away, but she knows something in the house has changed. She opens the door and creeps down the stairs.
From the bottom of the staircase, she sees the girl curled up on the basement floor, on a large sheet of white paper. She stops. A sliver of light from upstairs falls on Ursula, and Ellen can see that the paper is smudged with paint. The girl’s eyes are closed. Her hands are wedged under her chin. Her breathing is fast, indicating that she is not really asleep, that she is just pretending.
“Ursula,” she says.
The girl’s eyes stay closed.
On Monday, she walks into her husband’s classroom with the blueprint rolled up under her arm. She’s dressed in the kind of clothes she used to wear to work: black slacks, a red silk blouse, heels.
It’s a gloomy, damp day. The students are sullen and restless. She leans the blueprint against the wall and takes a seat at the front of the room, next to her husband, who’s wearing the same pale blue tie he wore for his interview at the school.
He introduces her and talks about her accomplishments for longer than he needs to—her schooling, her awards. When it is Ellen’s turn to speak, she picks up her blueprint. She asks a student for help. A lanky boy in a rugby shirt and glasses glances at her husband, who licks his lips and nods. The boy holds the top of the paper against the chalkboard while Ellen unspools the rest.
“This is my current project.” She describes the parks, how each one will be encircled by lush trees and have a small lake in the center, and the bridge that will connect the two halves of the city and the skyscraper that will glow silver at night. She wants them to feel the force of the beauty.
A girl raises her hand. She has clear braces and a headband. “Where will all the buildings go?”
“Nowhere yet,” Ellen says, trying to smile.
Of course, a city isn’t a city until you have a place to put it. The children shift in their seats. The boy in the rugby shirt drifts away from the board. Her husband begins to rise from his chair. It is a struggle to keep the blueprint up on her own, but still she will do it. She is prepared to defend everything. She is tired of being misunderstood.
The bell rings and the children begin to move.
In her husband’s office, Ellen can hear children in the arteries of the building: thundering up and down stairs, through hallways. She wonders where Ursula is right now. For hours she watched the girl sleep, unsure of what to do, almost afraid to move. She could be in our basement this very second, Ellen thinks.
The blueprint is rolled up like a scroll and leaning against the wall. She sits in the leather armchair across from her husband’s desk.
“The blueprint isn’t all that’s left, is it?” he says. “You brought the city here, too.”
She sinks deeper into the chair.
“Ellen.” She notices a small stain in the center of his tie. “You were supposed to move on from all that.”
Move on to what? she wants to ask him. Next he’ll want to sit down and talk about her city and what needs to be done.
Instead her husband smoothes his tie. He tells her he’ll be back in a few minutes, to wait right here.
When he doesn’t come back, she examines the dark-spined books on his shelves. She steps out of her heels. She opens his desk drawers. This is the first time she’s been alone in his office. On his desk, a small silver frame holds a photo of Ellen when she was very young—a freshman in college, not so much older than Ursula. In fact, it takes Ellen a moment to realize the woman is her. She is sitting in the crook of a tree, her legs dangling. She remembers the tree being tall and her threatening to climb it and her husband laughing; her strangeness was funny back then. Her hair spills over her shoulders. Her mouth is open and filled with light.
Finally she goes back to the chair and turns it toward the window, so she can watch the children trudge across the quad, their backpacks like turtle shells on their shoulders. She looks for Ursula.
It is from this window that she sees her husband standing on the quad, talking to a small, blonde woman in a quilted jacket and a plaid scarf. He is leaning in, resting a hand on her elbow. He points vaguely in the direction of his office and she tilts her head, gives him a nod. There is a certain kind of intimacy that a wife—even a wife like Ellen—can recognize and she is seeing it here, on this quad, surrounded by students and brick and browning grass.
Five days pass without her seeing Ursula. In the basement, she finds an empty juice box and flecks of orange peel that still hold the scent of citrus. She opens the dryer door. Someone has taken the filter. The paint-stained paper is gone. She feels like a detective gathering clues, trying to understand how they add up.