The Spider Car, named for its new owners, for the day, three years after its abandonment, when my sister opened its door to check in and met only dense webs and heavy, spinning bodies. It brought to mind a car of my childhood, the broken-down Mazda that we never got around to removing from the weeds in the backyard where we left it when that last long-neglected repair decided to give out. I marveled, not for the first time, at the efficiency of this beautiful home, at the constant vigilance of this woman for whom two weeks was an eternity of procrastination. For at least a week or maybe longer, maybe two. ![]() The mouse has been living in her house for so long, she says. I ask her flattering questions: How did she do this? Where did she get that fruit? Is there complicated paraphernalia involved? But what she wants to know is: This time I tell her how much I love her food. (Do all the houses here have heated floors?) So this time around, I don’t compliment Susan’s house. But I started to get worried about making it sound as if I knew beauty from personal comparison, about getting the compliment wrong. ![]() Susan’s house is beautiful, and I told her so the first time I visited, back in the winter. ![]() In her city, in Portland, there are beautiful houses and there are ugly houses. But in another sense, if I look close into a cobwebbed corner of my mind-the one filled with mirrors and hats-really I am visiting my boyfriend’s mother. Really, we both are visiting the whole thing: the family, the place. I am visiting my boyfriend’s mother up in Maine, two hours north of our cluttered apartment in Boston.
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