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Their house is a ramshackle one, falling apart and uninhabitable and thus quite cheap.
When she saw it, Utena put her hands on her hips and pursed her lips and gave Anthy a sidelong look. She didn’t need to say anything, the look alone was enough, but she did anyway: “Himemiya, it’s a wreck.”
“An admirable one,” Anthy said agreeably.
Utena sighed and shook her head. “You are so weird,” she said. She pressed her ring into the pad of ink to stamp the paperwork, staining her knuckles the color of blood.
Anthy likes the house. There is an honesty in its splintered bones, its broken spine. It was a home once, and existing in this world grew to be more than it could bear. Its collapse rendered it ugly and worthless. If they didn’t buy it, it would be torn down and replaced. A new home would have been built in its place – perfect and disposable and just like the one that came before it, updated but still fundamentally the same.
ꕥ
Anthy sits on a blanket with a thermos and watches Utena haul wood across the yard. Sweat drips down the nape of her neck, soaks into the sleeveless white shirt she wears tucked into gym shorts, gleams on her biceps. She grunts with effort each time she lifts another unwieldy piece of house, digs her heels into the soft earth, sometimes staggering but never buckling under the burden.
A roof beam hits the pile and Utena bends at the waist, hands on her thighs, breathing hard. Anthy takes a small sip of tea.
“Are you going to help at all, Himemiya?” Utena asks peevishly.
Anthy gives her her sweetest brightest smile and she says, “No.”
Utena throws up her hands and rolls her eyes, but she cannot stop a small smile of her own tugging at the corner of her mouth.
ꕥ
There is one room still intact on the east side of the house. It is the shell of a combined living room and kitchen, the hollow outlines of cabinets and counters providing an impression of what it once looked like. The coarse wood leaves splinters in her hair and shirt when she lies on her back. The stars and moon shine through the hole in the ceiling, illuminating the duffel bag Utena shoved into a corner.
Splinters catch in Utena’s hair, too, when she lies there next to her with her gangly limbs splayed in all directions. Nighttime turns her quiet, almost gloomy. “Himemiya,” she starts, but she can’t find the words.
While she chews on a thought she struggles to articulate, she brushes her thumb over Anthy’s hand and laces their fingers together. When she turns her head to the side to look at her, to try and find something she understands in her face, Anthy is looking up at the hole in the ceiling and wondering what to call the moth that’s fluttering in and out.
“Don’t you want a nice place?” Utena asks her.
I made this for you, he said.
The high marble archways and lush gardens, the ornate stained glass windows. The ground beneath your feet and above you the ever-blue sky: all of these I made for you. Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it nice?
These walls. This room. This bed. This body.
Did you know? Eve was made from Adam’s rib. Her body is his body, and in her creation she made him imperfect. Incomplete. If she was never born, he would have remained perfect. Do you understand? She should have at least had the decency to be grateful, but look what she went and did instead. She had to go and ruin that perfectly nice garden, their flawless Paradise, all because she wasn’t satisfied with the gifts she’d already gotten.
Don’t you want a nice place?
“Guinevere,” Anthy says to the ceiling.
“What?”
She points one finger up at the tiny off-white triangle fluttering around. Utena squints at the ceiling, confused. “I think it’s a nice name for a moth.”
“Himemiya…”
“What makes a place nice?”
Guinevere lands on a bit of wood, a speck of off-white gleaming in the moonlight. Utena rubs at her face and exhales an aggravated breath. The noise startles Guinevere, who flutters away into the night. She is frustrated, Anthy observes. Utena, not the moth. “I don’t know. Walls. A roof. Plumbing. Normal stuff.”
“We have all of those.”
“Intact walls, Himemiya!”
“Ahh, I see. Interesting.”
Utena props herself up on an elbow and gives her a hard stare. It would look more serious if she wasn’t wearing stripey collared pajamas. (Chuchu has a matching set, and they both look rather dashing.) “Anthy,” she says seriously. Anthy is pinned in place, stared down and directly addressed. Isn’t it interesting that someone’s name can mean so many things? It can mean stop being like this if you say it just right. Utena’s gaze softens. “Please? You know what I mean.”
There is not just one explanation. Utena wants to understand, but where to begin? How much context does she need? What is intuitive? What needs explaining?
A nice house is a house people want to go inside of. They want to look at it and gather around it. They expect things from it. They feel ownership over a nice house. A nice house has to always be nice. It has to be clean and proper and appropriate. It can’t upset the neighbors. A nice house has walls you can’t take down. If you try to look into the guts of a nice house, it stops being nice. It becomes a dirty house, a bad house, and you must close those walls up as soon as possible. A nice house is always in danger of becoming a bad house; you must be vigilant in your maintenance of niceness, never relaxing.
Is that too revealing? Too opaque? Should she tell her a story instead? Once upon a time, a pair of long-fingered brown hands sprouted from the earth. They clasped together to make a shelter, to hold someone close and safe. But they faltered and were abandoned for it. It’s a sad story.
Words well up in her throat and none of them come out, because she doesn’t know what order to say them in. She does not know what Utena sees when she looks at this place. She has never known how to make other people understand what she means when she says things.
“I felt sorry for it,” she says. “It looked lonely.”
Utena collapses back onto the floor with a heavy sigh. “If you say so.”
The conversation ends in surrender.
ꕥ
Anthy spends hours upon hours outdoors, carefully inspecting every inch of the land for stray bits of plastic garbage. She carefully plucks each individual piece with her thumb and forefinger and she inspects it from every angle before placing it into the garbage bag Utena foisted upon her.
“Oh my. Hello,” she says to a small group of ants scurrying on the inside of what was once a candy wrapper. They are hunting for remnants of sugar. “I’m sorry to disturb you. This is not good for you. It’s going to be relocated. You have my sincere apologies for the inconvenience.” She replaces the wrapper precisely where she found it and waits for the ants to go home. It takes them quite some time to bustle off of the wrapper.
It is important not to disturb the neighbors while tidying.
When Anthy looks up, Utena is squatting on what once was and will be the floor of the foyer, gangly legs bent at unflattering angles. She has been watching Anthy work for a while with a towel draped over her broad shoulders and an ice pop in her mouth. When their eyes meet, Utena looks sheepishly away like she’s been caught doing something against the rules.
Once she would have said nothing; now she says, “Come here.”
Utena crosses the yard in a few long strides and crouches next to her, hair falling over one sweat-damp shoulder. “What’s up, Himemiya?”
“Nothing,” Anthy says airily. She smiles at Utena, who makes a face in return.
“Why’d you call me over, then?”
“Just to see if you would.”
She does not flinch when Utena slides her fingers into her hair, and she does not go limp when she presses a soft kiss to her lips.
ꕥ
The matter of plastic in the yard takes a backseat for a time, because Utena puts her foot down and says she is “sick of not having a roof, Himemiya! I’m getting sunburned indoors!”
Across the back of her neck and upper arms is indeed a telltale tint of red that makes her wince when anything brushes against it. Of course, they cannot start building until they’ve asked permission.
Anthy kneels next to the pile of broken lumber and rests her hand on the beams one at a time. “Would you like to be a house again?”
No one asked them the first time around, so it must be a pleasant surprise to be asked now.
They were trees once. Alive and growing in a place where they belonged. Then, one day, they were killed. They were cut down and taken somewhere else, somewhere different, to be carved beyond recognition. Stripped and cut and drained and milled until they became something useful, something that would fit.
There was nothing wrong with them; quite the opposite. They were selected for their quality. They were good trees, strong and capable. Being good at being trees meant they were best sent to slaughter to become something else somewhere else. Is a lumber mill a place to a tree? Surely it cannot be conceivable as anything other than a sort of hell.
“What do you want to be?” Anthy murmurs.
Some want to be a house. Others cannot bear the thought of it, for one reason or another. Some were crushed by their failure, terrified of breaking under the strain again, sure they have proven themselves inadequate; some have wanted all along to be a tree again.
Still others have more ideas: A lamppost to light the way. A traveller on the high seas. Something useful, something pretty, something educational.
Anthy takes notes and affixes them carefully to each piece, and she instructs Utena in shifting them into disparate piles. “These you can use for the walls and ceiling,” she informs her, “and these you must plant, and these set aside for other things.”
“I don’t see why I should care what a hunk of wood thinks,” Utena complains, shooting a ceiling beam a dirty look as she rolls up her sleeves. “Now we’ll need to get more wood to make up the difference.”
Still, she puts them where Anthy tells her to, and she digs holes for the trees, and she holds the beams upright while they’re planted. “Are they really going to turn into trees?” Utena asks. It is not entirely rhetorical, not entirely a mere expression of skepticism; it is also, in part, the same uncertainty of a child who asks if the tooth fairy is really coming tonight.
She rests her cheek on the beam and murmurs, “The power to revolutionize the world...”
It takes time to grow roots. It takes time learn to reach for the light. But it is still possible, isn’t it? It has to be possible. Otherwise there’s no point.
“Quite so,” Anthy says. Miracles exist only if you allow them to. She sinks her hands into the earth and closes her eyes. The power to turn the world, to mold it on your wheel into the shape you want to see, to create the magic that you believe should exist. They have it. They shouldn’t forget that they have it.
The beam remembers what it is to be a tree. She remembers what it is to be human.
ꕥ
Those that want to become trees do so. Those that want to become a house do so. They are all rooted in this place, growing towards completion, becoming a part of an ecosystem.
Utena blasts herself in the face with water connecting the pipes to create a bathroom. Anthy fills the living room with free chairs, each of them uglier than the last - threadbare and stained and desaturated by time, too vulnerable to rot and mold and damp to be left outside.
When she goes out she comes back, inevitably, with something she found by the side of the road, discarded in a ditch, or poking out of a dumpster. Utena rolls her eyes and sighs loudly and makes room, makes more shelves, nudges the armchairs out of the way with her legs to get where she’s going.
It is not an attractive house, the thing Utena cobbles together from plaster and paper and castoff wood. It is lumpy and lopsided and, a passing old gentleman scoffs, “It’s a miracle it’s upright.”
Utena is not, after all, a builder. She’s just confident and determined and never has been one to let her ugly mistakes discourage her. If it were anyone else, it wouldn’t stand. But the house is made with care, and it will stand as long as they both want it to.