In the Dream House

by Carmen Maria Machado

Where was she going? What was she walking away from?

You make a mistake early on, though you don’t know it at the time.

The problem is that denial sounds like confession to her, so the burden of proof is forced upon you.

I had a room to myself as a kid, but my mother was always quick to point out that it wasn’t my room, it was her room and I was merely permitted to occupy it. Her point, of course, was that my parents had earned everything and I was merely borrowing the space, and while this is technically true I cannot help but marvel at the singular damage of this dark idea: That my existence as a child was a kind of debt and nothing, no matter how small, was mine. That no space was truly private; anything of mine could be forfeited at someone else’s whim.

It was just a reminder: nothing, not even the four walls around my body, was mine.

How to read her coldness: She is preoccupied. She is unhappy. She is unhappy with you. You did something and now she’s unhappy, and you need to find out what it is so she will stop being unhappy. You talk to her. You are clear. You think you are clear. You say what you are thinking and you say it after thinking a lot, and yet when she repeats what you’ve said back to you nothing makes sense. Did you say that? Really? You can’t remember saying that or even thinking it, and yet she is letting you know that it was said, and you definitely meant it that way.

Her voice is controlled, measured, like a dog whose tail has gone rigid; nothing is happening, but something is wrong. Dread gathers between your shoulder blades.

You pass a religious billboard that asks you if you know where you’d go after death. In full daylight, this sort of manipulative propaganda would make you roll your eyes. But now, it tugs on an old childhood fear, and you whimper and then try, too late, to swallow the sound.

Sit with this, you think. Don’t forget this is happening. Tomorrow, you will probably push this away. But here, remember.

And though it would not be until the next summer solstice that you’d be free from her, though you would spend the season’s precipitous drop into darkness alongside her, on this morning, light seeps into the sky and you are present with your body and mind and you do not forget.

But that didn’t stifle the chill that accompanied the sound, the grievous and undeniable sound of fear.

And yet, there is an unmistakable air of enjoyment behind his manipulation. You can plainly see the microexpressions flit across his face as he improvises, torments, schemes. He enjoys it and it serves him, and he is twice satisfied.

This is all to say, his motivations are not unexplainable. They are, in fact, aggravatingly practical—driven by greed, augmented by a desire for control, shot through with a cat’s instinct for toying with its prey. A reminder, perhaps, that abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something, and not care how they get it.

But how strange, how weirdly on the nose. They didn’t just want to reimagine the film; they wanted to eliminate the evidence of the first, as though it had never existed at all.

You mention it once, but then she does that thing where she repeats what you’ve said a few times, each time getting a little more sarcastic until you apologize, though you never know what you are apologizing for.

“No,” she says. “No. That would be rude. We are taking care of people.” “Who is going to take care of us?” you say.

and a doctor says to you, direly, that you need to lose weight. You bawl your eyes out and miss the punch line entirely: the weight you need to lose is 105 pounds and blonde and sitting in the waiting room with an annoyed expression on her face.

The slipperiness of reality that comes along with the comedic device of misunderstanding when someone is not mistaken at all feels uncomfortable to me.

When I watched this episode, I could only see the way it eerily mirrored Gaslight’s domestic abuse: jealousy, raised voices, commands. “This is a private matter.” “You’re mine, mine, all mine.” All with a sheen of slapstick, of humorous distance. Isn’t this funny? This is funny! It’s so funny! It could be funny! One day this will be funny! Won’t it?

Then one day you learned that rapture could also mean “blissful happiness,” and you understood, fully: that it is important to live in unyielding fear with a smile on your face.

All of this fantasy is an act of supreme optimism, or, if you’re feeling less charitable, arrogance. Maybe this will change someday. Maybe, when queerness is so normal and accepted that finding it will feel less like entering paradise and more like the claiming of your own body: imperfect, but yours.

She makes you tell her what is wrong with you. This is a favorite activity; even better than her telling you what is wrong with you. Years later, it’s a habit that’s hard to break.

Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.

You will eventually lose track of the number of times she breaks up with you like this.

And because you are of a kind, the house knows you. When you cry out, the lights flicker, ghostly blue and ragged. When she says you are shut off, the light switches nod their white tiny heads. Tiles creak yes beneath her edicts—something bad must have happened to make you this way, the way where you don’t want her. But the windows rattle, disagree. In their honeyed, blindless light, they see it—something bad is happening. —Leah Horlick, “Ghost House”

One day, you picked her up, put her by the door, and opened it. “Greta,” you said, “go on! Be free! Run!” She just looked at you with the saddest, most mournful expression. She could have run. The door was open. But it was as if she didn’t even know what she was looking at.

You agree to go to the museum because art has always had a balancing effect on your mind; it is a reminder that you are more than a body and its accompanying grief.

You were all mind; anxiety was your lifeblood, your fuel. You were young. You didn’t know your mind could be a boon and a prison both; that someone could take its power and turn it against you.

When you move them a second time, you can feel her anger; you can’t see her but the smell of her changes, like a cheap dish towel left on a live electric burner.

And then it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, that you are this house’s ghost:32 you are the one wandering from room to room with no purpose, gaping at the moving boxes that are never unpacked, never certain what you’re supposed to do.

Inside you, something stumbles to the edge of a precipice, falls off.

You walk inside with her screaming at your back. You are calm now. You’ve learned from the last time. You’re already stronger.

“Why are you crying?” she asks in a voice so sweet your heart splits open like a peach.

And as the ground gets farther and farther away you swear to yourself that you’re going to tell someone how bad it is, you’re gonna stop pretending like none of these things are happening, but by the time the ground is coming toward you again you are already polishing your story.

That’s what you want. You want an explanation that clears her of responsibility, that permits your relationship to continue unabated. You want to be able to explain to others what she’s done without seeing horror on their faces.

Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.

The queer woman’s gender identity is tenuous and can be stripped away from her at any moment, should it suit some straight party or another.

But the nature of archival silence is that certain people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history; we see only what pokes through because it is sufficiently salacious for the majority to pay attention.

There is also the simple yet terrible fact that the legal system does not provide protection against most kinds of abuse—verbal, emotional, psychological—and even worse, it does not provide context. It does not allow certain kinds of victims in.

“By elevating physical violence over the other facets of a battered woman’s experience,” law professor Leigh Goodmark wrote in 2004, “the legal system sets the standard by which the stories of battered women are judged. If there is no [legally designated] assault, she is not a victim, regardless of how debilitating her experience has been, how complete her isolation, or how horrific the emotional abuse she has suffered. And by creating t...

Years later, I’d figured that part out. But then, I didn’t know what it meant to be afraid of another woman. Do you see now? Do you understand?

I could sit there on the floor and cry and say anything I liked because in that moment it was my own little space, even though after that it would never be mine again. For the rest of my time in the Dream House, my body would charge with alarm every time I stepped into that bathroom; but in that moment, I was the closest thing I could be to safe.

This is what I keep returning to: how people decide who is or is not an unreliable narrator. And after that decision has been made, what do we do with people who attempt to construct their own vision of justice?

I broke the stories down because I was breaking down and didn’t know what else to do.

Folks will know you for your wounds, your missing skin. Folks say nothing but Why didn’t you go / Why didn’t you run / Why didn’t you say? (Also: Why did you stay?) I try to say, but I fail and fail and fail. This is what I did not know until now: this constraint taints. It is poison. All day and night, until I ran, I was drinking poison.

It couldn’t have been easy to be married to her, but it couldn’t have been easy to be her, either.

“For your new year,” she says, and you want to believe she’s right—that even though your suffering feels eternal, unrelenting, the new year is full of promise, and it is coming fast.

But you are terrified—of the radical body modification that is pregnancy, the dangers of childbirth, the unforgiving nature of motherhood, and—most importantly—of what she’ll accuse you of. What she’ll do afterward.

You shouldn’t be here, but it’s okay. It’s a dream. She can’t find you here. In a minute you’re going to wake up, and everything is going to seem like it’s the same, but it’s not. There’s a way out. Are you listening to me? You can’t forget when you wake up. You can’t—

In the pit of it, you fantasize about dying. Tripping on a sidewalk and stumbling into the path of an oncoming car. A gas leak silently offing you in your sleep. A machete-wielding madman on public transit. Falling down the stairs, but drunk, so you flop limb over limb like a marionette and feel no pain. Anything to make it stop. You have forgotten that leaving is an option.