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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Illustration by Charlie Powell
A blogger's words took me back to that rainy day when everything began to fall apart.
Oct 15, 2005 | It was a Wednesday morning in fall when I found the blog. I was in our front room, writing, raising my head periodically to look out the window. Sometimes, it felt like I'd been doing this all my adult life: sitting on a sun porch in front of a computer, gazing at trees that were leafy or blazing with color or skeletal against the sky.
The children had left for school. Ordinarily, I would have been at my office downtown, running from one staff meeting to the next, marking galleys, dashing out to Starbucks; but I'd had some minor surgery the week before and was working from home. Thanks to this convalescence, I had three chapters of a new novel nearly done. But my magazine editor was expecting an article the following day, so it was time to switch gears. I put away the fiction, checked my e-mail, poured another cup of coffee, and planned to get down to business ... right after I Googled myself.
It was a habit I'd developed when my first novel came out. Reviews would appear, people would cite the book in articles, and I would never know. Days or weeks later someone would say, "How did you like that piece in the Chicago Tribune?" and I'd run home to hunt for it. Now, I ran an Internet search every week or so and if the number of hits was dramatically higher than the last time, I'd look through to see what was new.
There was a minor bump this morning, from 3,200 to 3,670 -- something like that. I almost didn't check, knowing that I really should be writing a restaurant review instead, and that most of the hits would be identical: discount booksellers and notes made by librarians who'd added a single copy of my novel to their stacks. I made a deal with myself that I'd go through the first three pages only, then open my notes and begin on the review. It was toward the end of the third Web page that I ran into an entry titled simply "The Bug."
I clicked on the link, and there appeared a photograph of the front steps leading to a brick house. I recognized it immediately. A decade ago -- when I was married and in my 20s, the mother of three little children -- I had lived there. This was my first sun porch facing a wide sunlit street, the place where I'd begun writing.
Most of us buy our homes or move into our apartments and never again see or hear from, or about, the prior owners, the text underneath the photo began. What followed was a description of the remnants of various owners this writer had found in his 90-year-old home. At the end of the list: and, in our sunroom, pencil scribblings from one of the three children that used to live here. I scanned down the page. In Paragraph 2, the author mentioned having picked up the newspaper one day only to run across an article about "a debut novel by Ann Bauer." He included some very flattering quotes and a thumbnail sketch of my book, then the words: When I read this I was shocked: we bought our house from Ann Bauer and her husband in 1997. The pencil scribblings are theirs.
I read the entire entry with a voyeur's fascination. This was my own life, but it wasn't. It was my life from the perspective of a stranger -- one who felt bizarrely compelled to blog about it.
After a summary of the way the house sale between us had come about -- the fact that he and his wife had looked at our home, loved it, and bid to buy it even before it officially hit the market; a subsequent dispute over the deal that "ultimately ended in [their] favor"; and a portrait of me as the terse, stern wife of a gentle man that was accurate enough to make me squirm -- he set the scene for moving day.
When J- and I moved in, there was a pouring rain that seemed to augur bad luck. ... But move in we did, just as the Bauers worked hard to remove their last possessions and hurry to get out as we hauled our wet boxes inside.
Now it was I who sat, shocked, drinking my coffee and recalling in painful detail a day I'd worked hard to forget. A day I had, in fact, erased with fiction -- creating in my first novel a family with the good sense (at least) to stay in their beloved, worn and slightly tilted 1920s-era home.
The blog entry was beautifully written, for the most part; I wasn't entirely surprised to find that its author was himself an aspiring novelist. He mentioned that the article had referred to me as a single mom and speculated without malice on the cause of my divorce from "Mr. Bauer," a man whom he remembered as decent and kind. He admitted to feeling a mixture of admiration and envy for the fact that I am now a published author, while he continues to toil fruitlessly in the house where I once lived.
And he confessed, too, that he wondered sometimes if his writer's block could be the karmic result of having taken that house from a family that was, as he put it, "in the midst of hard times."
