Chapter 1

Naomi Nootbahr Roth strode through the front rooms of the new house, pausing to inspect the honey-colored floor and touching the glossy white paint of a doorway. She flung open the back door and walked down the creaking stairs that led to the yard. At the far end, she faced a crumbling retaining wall and deliberately turned her back on it. Instead, she faced the new house – well, new to her – and studied it. She frowned at recessed basement windows, old glass lined with chicken wire, studied the rippling glass of the first and second floor windows, and squinted into the sun to see the round windows of the attic.
“I’ll call it the garret,” she said aloud. “Or is that too much The Little Princess?” Naomi looked at the ivy that climbed the walls, and reached for a strand. It didn’t budge until she pulled harder and then it brought flakes of brown paint down with it onto her head.
“I don’t care,” she said aloud. “You’re my house and I’ll make you a showpiece, the talk of Orange Heights Avenue.” She leaned back against a thick willow tree and pictured the lawn tamed and the garage painted. A small garden trowel waited in the fork of two willow branches. She picked it up and tried to pull more ivy from the house with its rusty tines.
“It’s Goliath,” she heard her husband say, walking around the side of the house.
“It certainly is,” Naomi agreed. “But that makes me David. Might doesn’t beat right.”
Ben looked at her quizzically. “I mean the mover is here. You know, Goliath mover. The guys you hired to get us here from Brooklyn.”
Naomi followed Ben to the front of the house, where she watched a white moving truck negotiate the narrow street. Their house, number 219, was at the dead end, which she had described to the driver as a “cul-de-sac.” She watched the driver now, slowly backing up as Ben and another mover signaled to him to stop and go. Finally, the truck shuddered to a halt, not parked as much as simply stopped.
The driver and the other movers, dressed in identical t-shirts bearing the name Goliath, stood in front the house, staring up at its four stories and wiping sweat from their foreheads. Naomi looked at Ben, who was doing the same. Only his t-shirt, which said New York Athletic Club, was different. Even the expression of wonder mixed with a question about how many stairs the queen bed had to climb was the same.
When the truck was unloaded, the driver reversed the entire length of Orange Heights Avenue. The beer Ben had handed him was still in his hand, and Naomi shuddered to think what might happen if he shifted gears suddenly. From the safety of the broad front porch, she listened to the beep-beep-beep of the truck’s reverse gear until it died away. Naomi turned the doorknob of the house – her house! – and walked through the rooms slowly.
The basement was cool and damp, and she heard water running for Ben’s shower upstairs along with a worrisome thumping from the hot water heater. She walked deeper into the basement than she had previously, when visiting with the realtor, and found lumps of coal below a rusty metal chute. The basement floor seemed to end there, and only earth was below her feet. She imagined worms and bugs and suddenly the basement seemed dark. Naomi rushed upstairs to the second floor, where she found Ben lying flat on their bed, beer balanced on his chest.
“This is the house, Ben,” she told him. “This is where we’ll be forever. Just think of all we can do with it, how we’ll make it our home.”
“Did we pay those guys extra to move us on Memorial Day?” he asked with his eyes closed. “I tipped, but still, it sucks for them to drive back to Brooklyn in the holiday traffic.”
“Ugh,” she replied. “I’m never going back to Brooklyn again. Me and Brooklyn, that’s over.”
Ben opened his eyes and looked hard at Naomi. “Hon, we need to make this move work. This time it’s for real, right?”
She reached for his thigh, patted it and smiled. When his eyes closed again, she went to the window seat and gazed at the five houses that surrounded her on Orange Heights Avenue.
Her own house was the oldest and the tallest, the matriarch of the neighborhood, upright and Victorian. Two Colonial houses, as square and regular as if they’d been built with Legos, flanked her home, and a set of smaller split-levels followed.
“Hello, neighbors,” Naomi said, touching the windowpane with her hand open in greeting. Then she quickly wiped the glass clean with the hem of her t-shirt, until there was no trace of her wave left to see.