The Lay-Off House
An excerpt. I figure with a few new subscribers it would be good to chuck a excerpt of my novel The Lay-Off House on here. Available for sale pretty much everywhere.
A sonorous noise from upstairs informed the household that Polly played the violin.
Doug heard Tyler pause his game and say something into his headset. Doug, in his library, stared at the stairs he could see from the open door, stairs whose walls of dark wood paneling reverberated the music into a column of sound within the stairwell. It occurred to him that there was no real social strategy for a sudden playing of beautiful music in one’s house, unplanned. Did he go upstairs and knock on her door? That would make her stop, and he did not want that.
So, they all listened, the whole household. Rosalinda clattered about in the kitchen; Doug heard her humming along. The kids were still playing somewhere in the house; it was too cold to be outside today so they were probably in the greenhouse as usual by the sound of the echoes of their voices off the glass. But even they got a bit quieter as the music continued.
Malcolm was away at work.
Neither Doug nor Tyler knew anything about classical music; they had no idea what piece it was, or if Polly was just improvising. But the sound deepened the stillness in the rest of the house and the worn wood absorbed and carried the sound in its grain, conducting it through the frame and the paneling, walls and trim until it sounded as if the entire house was playing the violin. The sun came in and out from behind a reef of broken, swiftly moving clouds and the windows lit up, then dimmed again, and gradations of light played like chords across the glass as the music ran and pulsed in harmonies.
After a while the playing stopped, and as Polly’s feet could be heard on the stairs everyone tried to look busy suddenly, oddly embarrassed by their eavesdropping even though the music was inescapable in the house and was, as far as they knew, freely given. The kids started bouncing around the greenhouse again. Rosie’s humming stopped.
Polly also stopped as she walked into the main hall at the bottom of the stairs. All three rooms, the library, kitchen, and parlor, were visible from the hall. She looked from one room to the other and everyone avoided her gaze. It was obvious to her that everyone had been listening.
After the silence had become unbearably awkward Doug felt he had to say something. He was still seated in his library, but he could see her framed in the doorway, and he only had to raise his voice a bit to be heard. “That was really nice.”
“Thanks.”
“We had no idea you played,” Tyler said. He had un-paused his game and it bleeped away as he spoke out of the side of his mouth. Doug could not see Tyler from his library chair but from the tone, he guessed that for once Tyler was socially uncomfortable.
“Yeah, I had lessons as a kid. My mom insisted on it. I even did a few competitions.”
“Really? That’s awesome. Why didn’t you do it as a career then?” Tyler again. Doug stayed silent.
Polly sighed heavily. Before she answered she walked to the kitchen and got a beer. As she cut through the hall Doug moved from the library to Tyler’s parlor, walking in behind her and taking his usual wing-back chair. Polly sat on the couch with Tyler. He simply turned to her, looked at the beer, gave a nod, and turned back to the game. Polly mockingly threw up her arms and rolled her eyes, placed her beer on the end-table and went back to the kitchen to get two more for Doug and Tyler. While she was gone Doug silently snuck a coaster under her beer. She didn’t appear to notice when she got back.
“I wanted to go to school for music, but my mom was really against it,” she continued. “She insisted that they, mom and dad, would only pay for college if I got a ‘real major.’ I was always annoyed that my dad didn’t say anything to support going to school for music, since he introduced me to it.”
“What does he play?”
“Well, nothing. He just likes to listen. We used to go to classical concerts all the time when I was a kid, me and him and my brother.” She frowned. “We haven’t for a long while though.”
“You could have switched majors,” Doug suggested.
“No. If I did that, I would have been cut off immediately. Believe me, I asked, or hinted, really. Brought up the idea once or twice. The glares were…well that was the end of the conversation. It’s strange. My mom loved it when me and my brother would play music as kids. She said it was part of a well-rounded education. But as soon as I reached junior high school, and it was time to start thinking about careers, she turned against it.”
“You stopped playing?”
“No, I still played. Still play. I Joined the high school orchestra and all that. But it seemed like it was just something to put on the college applications. It wasn’t fun anymore.”
“What did your dad think?” Doug asked.
“He didn’t say anything at all but I think he was annoyed too, but didn’t want to say anything against my mom. Because she was right in a way, of course. It did help with getting into college.” She took another swing of her beer. “How about you? Why did you get into, whatever it was you did? I really have no idea, and I was HR.” She laughed.
“Same situation,” Doug said. “It was a safe thing. Business major. Can’t go wrong with that. My parents really didn’t have any other ideas. My dad worked in insurance, my mom did retail management. Certainly not musicians.”
“Not creative at all?” Polly asked.
Doug laughed. “Not in the least. We hardly had any books in the house. They’re cable TV people.”
“Siblings?”
“A sister. Younger.” Polly flicked an eyebrow at him but he made it clear he didn’t want to say anything more.
She turned to Tyler, nudged his shoulder with the bottom of her bottle. “What about you?”
Tyler grinned sheepishly. “You know everything about me.”
“No, all I know is that you couldn’t be on time to work if your life depended on it. What about your family?”
Tyler shrugged. “Just me and mom. She doesn’t care what I do, as long as I like it and I don’t have to move back home.”
“I have to admit, I’m a bit jealous,” Doug said.
“Yeah, me too,” sighed Polly.
“Why?”
“Well, no one made you stop doing what you really wanted to do. Assuming that coding is what you really wanted to do. Was it?”
“Yeah. What, if you had the chance, no limits, would you do with your life?” Doug asked.
Tyler paused the game, took off his headset, and tossed the controller down. “That question is bullshit. Total bullshit.”
“Why? What do you want to do with your life? Make computer games?”
“No, it’s bullshit.” Tyler was oddly calm. “Yeah, I wanted to code and make computers do the things I want them to do. And yeah, I would love to work on games. But that industry is so unstable it would be madness to work for a gaming company.”
“Ah! So you talked yourself out of it, yourself, by yourself, instead of your parents.” Polly leaned back triumphantly.
“Bull. Shit!” Tyler yelled this time. Doug heard Rosie tut from the kitchen. “I knew that what I wanted was just going to end badly, so I got a job doing the next best thing. Still coding but, until the lay-off, safe enough to survive without getting canned after each project.
“Look. Not all of us can be astronauts. But what if that’s what you wanted since you were a kid? And you can’t become an astronaut because your eyes are bad or whatever. Does that mean you are a failure? No. It was a small chance of success to begin with. So, you do the next best thing. You become an astronomer. Or an engineer and make the spacecraft instead of flying them. Or join the Planetary Society and promote the idea. You can’t be an astronaut but you can do something else in the same field. Saying ‘I dunno what to do with myself’ and giving up completely or whining about your parents is just bullshitting yourself.”
Tyler shook his head, picked up his headset and controller, and proceeded to ignore Polly and Doug, who looked at each other with a bit of shock and a bit of guilt.
Later, Polly and Doug talked about it in the greenhouse. Instead of the barren desert of dirty white tile and dusty windows it had been, Polly had brought in plants, winter rejects from big-box hardware stores that had no idea how to take care of the living things they sold. Polly bought them cheap and her and Rosie brought them back from the almost dead. The cheap plastic planters had been replaced with deeply colorful Mexican ceramics, painted leaves and vines that reflected brilliantly the life they carried within themselves. The floor had been covered with woven plastic outdoor rugs in bright abstract patterns. Molded plastic lawn furniture, loungers and Adirondacks and side tables provided places to set drinks. It was comfortable and the winter sun had been trapped nicely by the newly polished glass. The kids’ toys, a riotous mash of shapes that Doug was having trouble parsing, were here and there on floor or pushed away to the corners by adult feet that had gently kicked them aside for walking space. Visually, he picked out some dolls, technical looking blocks of some sort, and a remote-controlled car.
“I’ve never seen him fly off the handle like that,” Polly said.
“Me neither. Though I really didn’t know him before. How well did you know him before all this?”
“Not well. He was just a guy I had to deal with. Perennially late, I had to document it, talk to him, talk to his supervisor, on and on. It was annoying. Like being a high school hall monitor.”
“Yeah, I can imagine so. Not terribly adult. But you know him better now.”
“I guess I do. Roomies! Whoa, it’s like having another brother. Two brothers. And a new mom and dad? And a niece and nephew? What happened?”
Doug laughed. “Yeah, sometimes I don’t know what happened either. But Tyler, I’ve never seen him like that. He’s usually so chill. Guess we hit a nerve that we didn’t know was there.”
Polly frowned. “It was a good question though. Why didn’t I go into music? I mean, I know the practical reasons. They’re hard to ignore.”
“Look where practical got us. I mean,” he continued hastily, “I know the lay-off isn’t your fault. I don’t want to re-hash that. Really. It’s not—”
“Don’t worry about it, I wasn’t going to take that statement like that. Because Tyler does bring up a good question. Why do we do what we do?”
“I have no idea. I gave up trying to figure it out. Maybe I never bothered to figure it out. I just do what has to be done to keep going. Like Tyler, I suppose. So, I agree with him. But….”
Polly nodded. “Yeah. I feel it too. This is different. Well, it’s my first lay-off, so I don’t know what it’s like to hit the wall over and over.” Doug nodded at her appreciation of his history. “So maybe this is my chance to do something else. With the excuse that I have to because I lost my job.”
“Excuse to who? Yourself?”
Polly nodded in the negative but did not say anything else.