A Mad House

A woman who has lived in the outrageous, sky-scraping heights of New York, has only seen sun from behind the shadow of the towering towers wouldn’t know the briny scent of the sea, the soothing sound of the water hitting the shore gently and the morning birds twittering through the light dusty storm carrying pollens. When I permanently moved from New York to Rhode Island, the only thing I was looking for was a little time for myself, a little peace in a small town in the countryside. I bought a shabby and worn out looking house near the shore. Despite the condition of the house, it was still huge, even had a pool! I thought it was way more expensive than what I was asked to pay for. Perhaps, it is because it has been abandoned for so long and nobody was ready to buy the house. It was a bit suspicious but I had not cared when I was getting it all to myself at nearly affordable prices. I spent the first few days laying around, adjusting, moving in things from my old apartment. A week later, after settling in a bit, I started to explore and discover rather intriguing things. The first discovery was the back wall of the house; it was full of bold, colourful lines of foul remarks written with paint and chalks in childish handwriting. It was probably some teenagers and preteens messing around but a particular quote intrigued me. It said, “Men Eating Witch”. The second discovery was a photo frame in one of the drawers of the ancient-looking wooden almirah. There’s a beautiful young woman in the picture, face bright and a brilliant smile. I assume this house belonged to this woman at some point. All of these discoveries made me curious like I’m living in parts of someone’s life. So I started searching by myself too. It helped that I had the task to clean the house too. After a week I found a cardboard box. In it was a pile of letters. There were 50 letters, each written on the last day of every year. I read all of them in a day. The more I read the more it devastated it. I couldn’t stop reading. The woman in the picture was Rebecca and she indeed owned this house for precisely 50 years. She was married to a man called Bill who was “the love of my life”. She was happy to get married, she hated her “frigid life at home after divorce”. Her ex-husband was an oppressive man who “made me pay for every breath”. Bill was the man she had fallen in love with at a park she read at. Bill had divorced his then-wife to marry her. Their wedding was awkward with side glances from town people and their own relatives but they were happy, threw huge parties, “celebrated life like it was still young” at the house they bought and called “Holiday House”. Bill passed away seven years into marriage. It wasn’t sudden he had been ill for a while and Rebecca had taken intensive care of him but nobody saw her awake for three days straight because worry was gnawing off her sleep, but nobody saw her breaking her back managing housework and her husband’s work, but nobody saw her continuous tears for hours on his cold body. Town said, “She killed him!” after she refused to sign off the will of Bill’s house to his relatives or pregnant ex-wife. “How could I give away the last shred of autonomy I had?” She spent nights on shore, sitting there in tidal waves, hoping one huge tide could also wash away her grief along. She spent nights organising parties nobody came to because Bill loved parties. But she was an evil incarnate; the words on the back walls, the scornful looks on town’s face and the cruel whispers that were just low enough in volume to be heard by her. “They said I was evil so that’s what I became.” She threw parties dripping in champagne, spent her money with her high society friends from the city, spent all the money on entertaining boys and her interests but never once left the house alone. The town that doesn’t know loudness, doesn’t know incivility glared and fumed in silence but she had also retaliated in silence. “I indeed dyed her dog lime. But it’s only fair if she spat in my postal box, right?” When she was seventy-five, she died alone in her house after being sick for about a year. She had rotten away in death, the town still remembers her as the “mad woman”. In her will, she left the house to the town. “I had fun ruining everything, the town is all I know and I owe them a little for the madness, don’t I?”

I write a letter and put it into the cardboard box. It is addressed to Rebecca and I assure her the town will remember her and her legacy of madness since I own her house now. I told her that I had moved into the town after I lost my job because I didn’t let myself be bent as the men pleased because I had lashed out and screamed at my boss. I lost my job. I didn’t. I had quit. I am just as mad as every woman in the world who didn’t submit to the world.