The House with Only an Attic and a Basement Read online

  Kathryn Maris

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  THE HOUSE WITH ONLY AN ATTIC AND A BASEMENT

  Contents

  The Summer Day the Spike Went into My

  School Run

  The X Man

  ABC

  Good Day

  Case Study: Ms C

  The House with Only an Attic and a Basement

  Jesus with Cigarette

  It was Discovered that Gut Bacteria were Responsible

  Catherine and Her Wheel (I)

  What Women Want

  DAWN CHORUS in the style of the Medea, with Haiku

  The Adulteress

  Poem in which I Reside in a Female Prison with Two Male Guards and No Allies

  Scarlet Letter Couplets

  Ashley Madison Couplets

  It’s Not Her Story to Tell

  The H Man

  Catherine and Her Wheel (II)

  Dear Fellow Parents

  Report Card: Classics

  THE HOUSE OF ATREUS

  I am signing none of the emails with an ‘x’

  I’m obsessed with my health which I guess

  I bought flowers on the Clifton Road because

  Because I want to be around negativity

  At family dinner we talked politics

  Then we had the best meal of our stay

  She’s a pain in the arse but she’s nice to look at [variations]

  We had a big row yesterday

  The P Man

  Information from the Headmaster

  I’ve Had a Positional Headache for Two Months

  All the Signs were There

  Ladies’ Voices

  Here is the Official Line on Attire

  Break-up Letter

  Singles Cruise

  How to be a Dream Girl not a Doormat about the ‘Ex’

  The A Man

  Ooga-Booga Cento

  There was a Will but There was No Way

  Anyway Something Happened

  Never on a Sunday

  The Death of Empiricism

  Demon

  Object

  L’Enfer

  Catherine and Her Wheel (III)

  Notes and Attributions

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Kathryn Maris is originally from New York and has lived in London since 1999. Her previous collections are The Book of Jobs (Four Way Books, 2006) and God Loves You (Seren, 2013), and a selection of her poetry appeared alongside the work of Frederick Seidel and Sam Riviere in Penguin Modern Poets 5: Occasional Wild Parties (2017). Her poetry has been published widely, including in Granta, The Nation, The New Statesman, Poetry, The Best British Poetry 2015 (Salt) and The Forward Book of Poetry 2017 (Faber & Faber).

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE HOUSE WITH ONLY AN ATTIC AND A BASEMENT

  PRAISE FOR GOD LOVES YOU

  ‘There’s a delicious sense of both open-mindedness and devilry in Maris’s work. Her company is quirky, stimulating and sparklingly intelligent. You could say she’s like Sylvia Plath with added chutzpah. But, really, Kathryn Maris is like no-one but herself’ Carol Rumens

  ‘This has a Dorothy Parker air, metropolitan and crowded, intimate with other lives whose own limits may never be known’ George Szirtes, Poetry London

  ‘Maris can be disturbing; she can be plain funny … delighted me roundly from start to finish … She knows what she wants to do and she does it, without fear or favour’ Helena Nelson, Poetry Review

  PRAISE FOR THE BOOK OF JOBS

  ‘Kathryn Maris writes with wit, grace, and heart in a beautifully spare style capable of effects at once lush and harsh, sorrowful and satiric, passionately felt and contemplatively calm … a poet of highly original understanding … like Cavafy, she stands at a slight angle to the universe … the naturalness and subtle musicality of her idiom demonstrates this poet’s great formal accomplishment and uniquely powerful sensibility’ Tom Sleigh

  ‘With nimble intellect and a vision at once acerbic, compassionate, and ever-original, Kathryn Maris gives resonant voice to the faceless many who have been variously broken by loss and indifference in a world that justifies paranoia and acts as a catalyst for a wry, tragicomic wisdom … moving … persuasive’ Carl Phillips, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets

  ‘Identification is a highly important factor in the mechanism of hysterical symptoms; by this means patients are enabled in their symptoms to represent not merely their own experiences, but the experiences of a great number of other persons, and can suffer, as it were, for a whole mass of people, and fill all the parts of a drama by means of their own personalities alone.’

  – Sigmund Freud

  The Summer Day the Spike Went into My

  The summer day the spike went into my

  brother’s head, as such things happened

  in the twentieth century when the Freudian

  death drive was often accessed out of

  boredom, I learned from my doctor parents

  that scalps bleed profusely. Twenty years later,

  when Theodore and Cosima jumped on little

  Robert’s bed and Theodore fell off and his

  white-blond head turned red, I said, ‘Scalps bleed

  profusely’ and Rachel, his mum, thanked me

  for my composure. Robert’s mum, Emily,

  who had wanted to be a jazz singer or actress

  and who always introduced me as a poetess,

  said she knew a couple who had a second child

  because their friends’ child died in a freak accident.

  But back to the summer day the spike

  grazed my brother’s scalp: I slept beside him

  in his racing car bed and my father woke me

  and slapped my face, thinking, I assume, of sex,

  whereas I was already thinking about death.

  School Run

  I board the same bus I boarded this morning

  and see the same driver from the earlier journey.

  Our eyes meet; he remembers me too.

  When I exit, I feel abandoned by the driver

  I know from many early-morning journeys

  to my daughter’s school in northwest London.

  Why do I feel the driver has abandoned me?

  Has an imagined intimacy developed?

  At my daughter’s school in northwest London

  were the usual mums and dads I greet

  with an imagined sense of intimacy

  that has nothing to do with friendship.

  Among the many mums and dads I greeted

  with politeness, or something like fondness

  having nothing at all to do with friendship,

  were business people and psychoanalysts.

  Out of politeness or something like fondness,

  I do not ask the driver why he left me.

  He’s not in the business of psychoanalysis;

  it’s not his job to say I miss my daughter,

  that it was a loss when my daughter left

  my body, when I met her eyes after the birth.

  It’s not his place to say I’m losing my daughter.

  I exit the same bus I boarded this morning.

  The X Man

  His superpower was that his testicles manufactured sperm

  with exclusively X chromosomes & that was ironic because

  not only was he a beast to women but his 40 baby girls grew

  up seeking men like the father they barely saw unless they went

  to his studio to be painted which wasn’t OK with their mothers

  who were not only jea
lous but guilty of giving birth to girls

  who were products of an X chromosome-making monster

  & would soon suffer at the hands of other monsters with X-

  type sperm thereby assuring the continuation of suffering

  & meanwhile all the girls became writers who slouched

  from sitting at desks & being daughters & lovers of beasts.

  ABC

  Anne identified with Cate until it became a bona fide

  illness, for Boris had left Cate, resulting not only

  in psychic estrangement but an unconscious stream

  of hostility directed not at Boris, but at his new woman,

  Anne, whom Cate viewed as her rival. Cate remained

  excessively tender with Boris, though Cate, for him,

  had been a ‘totem animal’ from which he gained power

  by ‘eating’. Whereas Boris was the patriarch,

  Anne was the ego alien; and whereas Cate was Anne’s

  fixation, Anne was no one’s obsession, so she was

  admitted to a psychiatric ward with the unbidden

  associations she could not be induced to abandon.

  On the rare occasions she slept, the manifest and latent

  content of her dreams was the dance of abandonment

  between Boris and Cate, which Anne, in her waking hours,

  projected onto the walls, as though screening a silent film.

  She could not be induced to abandon this footage;

  she could not be induced to abandon her object love

  of Boris (whose own object choice was his

  ego-libido); or her identification with Cate, who felt

  no friendship towards Anne. Soon Anne drew a mental

  triangle on every surface she saw, be it phallic or

  concave, and sometimes this triangle was isosceles,

  sometimes it was equilateral, and often it was right.

  Good Day

  Do not be surprised

  Reading my letter does not take much of your time

  I understand you correctly

  Looking for a girl you would like on the Internet

  Looking for a woman for serious relationship

  My opinion is the same as yours

  I want to find a man perhaps even for marriage

  If you want to play with me and my feelings

  better not to respond to my letter

  I’d like to find a sincere and loving man

  I’m looking for a real man

  I say this now so that later it was easier to communicate

  A bit about me …

  Irina my name …

  I live in Russia …

  I have permanent job and permanent salary

  All is well in my life, with friends and parents

  but there is no man who would love me

  and it is hard for me to solitude

  A lot of information is not currently the best option

  I await your response and I’ll tell you more

  You can ask me any question

  And now I have to go

  Your letter and a story about yourself will please me if

  you are looking for a Woman for marriage and serious relationships

  Postscript: I will answer some of your questions

  I’m not looking for money or a sponsor for my life

  I do not need your money, I have my own money

  and even some savings

  I hope I can find a single man who will never let me not hurt

  Waiting for an answer

  Your Irina

  Case Study: Ms C

  Ms C, 32, attended counselling with her father after discovering he was romantically involved with a woman her own age who bore uncanny similarities to Ms C in that they shared a birthday (a fact that seemed of significance to the patient), they had both attended Wharton, and both had worked for Ms C’s father, a figure of international prominence in the hotel industry. Ms C described her reaction as ‘devastated’ when her father announced his intention to leave her mother, whom the patient described as ‘a devoted wife for over 35 years’.

  Ms C had no history of depression, and did not present with depressive symptoms. When asked if she believed herself to be depressed, she said she did not but that she believed that she had been ‘replaced by an immigrant who had all of her attributes’ and who would ‘inherit all the money’.

  Ms C was given further tests to rule out Capgras Syndrome and was advised to seek one-on-one therapy for future monitoring of her moods and delusions.

  The House with Only an Attic and a Basement

  ‘When two sane persons are together one expects that A will recognize B to be more or less the person B takes himself to be, and vice versa.’

  – RD Laing, The Divided Self

  The woman in the attic did not have visitors.

  The man in the basement gave parties that were popular.

  The woman in the attic had mononucleosis.

  The man in the basement had type 1 diabetes.

  The woman in the attic listened to audiobooks which the man in the basement held in disdain.

  The door to the attic swelled in some weathers; in order to shut, it had to be slammed.

  ‘There is a way in which’ was a way in which the man opened sentences,

  as in ‘There is a way in which to close a door so it doesn’t slam.’

  The woman in the attic took cautious walks to build her strength.

  The man in the basement pointedly said, ‘Some of us have ailments which are not manufactured.’

  The man in the basement wrote stories about heroin.

  The woman in the attic read stories with heroines.

  The woman in the attic noticed a bruise that ran from the top to the base of her thigh.

  The bruise looked like Europe.

  The man in the basement was in love with the sister of the secretive man who loved him more.

  He whooped at the woman, ‘You killed your student?’

  To himself he wept, ‘I killed my father.’

  The man in the basement, recently divorced, was left with literally two possessions.

  The woman in the attic purchased books on psychopathology.

  The man in the basement produced faecal matter

  that blocked the pipes in both attic and basement.

  The woman in the attic produced nothing at all.

  The woman in the attic was a waste of space.

  The man in the basement had sex almost daily.

  The woman in the attic had panic attacks.

  The man in the basement had only one rule:

  the woman in the attic was banned from his bedroom.

  But once she stole in and lay on his bed

  in his absence (or perhaps he was absent because she was there).

  The man in the basement moved to the West Coast;

  the woman in the attic crossed the Atlantic,

  whereas the house with the attic and basement saw states

  of fumigation, exorcism, detoxification, and rehabitation.

  Jesus with Cigarette

  Michael said there was a painting of Jesus

  smoking a cigarette, maybe by Giotto, in Rome.

  I had never been to Rome but there I was

  and it could have been Peckham, which has a garage

  sometimes used for installations. Nowhere

  could I find this old-master Jesus with cigarette. I rang

  Michael, a smoker, to say I could not find the Jesus.

  He laughed. Gabriel, a former smoker, was next to me

  and also laughed. Gabriel said, Michael was pulling

  your leg! Michael said, We are Jesus. You are the painter.

  It was Discovered that Gut Bacteria were Responsible

  It was discovered that gut bacteria were responsible

  for human dreams. Each bacterium was entitled to pay

  a fee in the form of mitochondrial energy to purchase


  a ‘dream token’ to be dropped into a Potential Well. These

  ‘tokens’ were converted to synaptic prompts and transported

  to the human brain in no particular order. So a ‘token’ for a

  ‘baseball dream’ deposited in the well when the human host

  was aged 8 might only be used by the brain when the host

  was 44, and this dream that might have been pleasant for an

  8-year-old could instead emerge as a nightmare for a woman

  on the brink of menopause who might worry about her

  appearance in a baseball uniform, or who no longer recalled

  how to hold a baseball glove and catch a ball in the field.

  Catherine and Her Wheel (I)

  Catherine, who was a saint, was inseparable from her wheel. She carried it everywhere, including on dog walks and visits to the old people’s home. She slept next to it in bed.

  Her boyfriend said, ‘Sometimes I feel that you and your wheel are the couple whereas I am a third wheel.’

  Catherine replied, ‘Do you know how long this wheel has been in my family? Since we were primates – that’s how long. One day it will belong to my children.’

  What Women Want

  After my best friend read a self-help book called Make Your Own Fairy Tale in which the author advises you to write your wish in a notebook and store it in the drawer of your bedside table, I did exactly that. One day my other half said, ‘For fuck’s sake I don’t understand what you want.’ When I suggested he look at the notebook in the bedside table, where my wish had been collecting dust for 3 years, he revealed he would never look at someone’s private notebook, he was above that, and that was the end of the conversation.

  DAWN CHORUS

  in the style of the Medea, with Haiku

  BIRD 1: Her husband is rich –