The House: Setting up the 2nd chapter description of 82 DePauw

They started playing bizarre 60s french music that sounds like Insane Clown Posse at Drum&Bell, otherwise the following would have actually maybe made sense. I'm rushed for time. More to come later tonight. Control + F for "Milk Dud."

Kind of thinking of how I can set up an insane EM forrester howard’s end length description of the mansion… Also how I can develop Jareth. Am thinking about giving him a male baby-sitter who he esteemed but father hated.

THE HOUSE

In the house where Jareth had grown up, toddling among brass doorknobs, there were rooms into which he had never gone. In the fourth grade, severe, dark Gloria—they called their teachers by their first names—had passed out sheets of blank paper. A twenty-something Midwest transplant, Gloria would get tired by the end of the day and would sit out of the light thrown by the Eastward facing windows in the early afternoon, kneading her temples. She had retired to the too-small, plastic chair behind her desk when Emily, a serious, twittering girl in pink spandex, had asked what they were to do with the sheets. Gloria, slouching, twiddling in the desk drawer looking for her cell, had paused a moment to think, and said, “Just draw a picture of your house, okay?”
Emily asked whether or not they were to include portraits of the family. Gloria assented—“Sure.” But Joey, whose parents were divorced and who could not be fairly asked to draw two separate families, protested. “You can,” Gloria said, “do whatever you want—but include the house.” A few minutes of quiet drawing elapsed before a second question from Emily: “How do you show a room that’s always in the dark?” Gloria asked for clarification. “I mean, what if you have a home theatre and you don’t know what color the walls are?”
It was maybe mid-project that Gloria found she had stumbled on what any other girl, drawn to the teaching position in Malibu of all places for the glory of those chalky mansions, biting into the California scrub-brush hillsides like a mouthful of loose teeth left in a corn-cob, should have long ago assigned. She took a meditative moment, checking the phone for calls—there were none—pushed back a bit from her desk, cleared her throat loudly, and explained to the class how what was “really important,” was to show the size of the thing, the schemas and space. She wanted the strange shapes of Malibu pools, the light thrown from the sliding glass doors that shut the home office off from the sunroom. Behind the blank doors students had squared-off to represent garages, she wanted to know about the cars—if you did not know the year, model, and make, you could just try to draw it.
Over the hulking, over-large frame of Maybelline, one desk to his right and already busy filling in flower boxes on a boxy, triangle-roofed cottage quite different from the nearby apartment he had seen her walk into—Emily began to sketch. The girl shied away from the crayons at the center of the table, took up a mechanical pencil, and eeked out a measured pseudo-blueprint of a typical Malibu mansion: a shell-shaped staircase swelled up to a second foyer, on which Emily had gone so far as to designate the space taken up by her mother’s Nordic track and a potted aloe vera, whose presence was noticed, heretofore, only by the Peruvian maid assigned to water it daily. What was labeled “Emily’s Room” was the shape of two-business cards, placed in an L, and took up airspace that walled the potted plant, between bedroom A and bathroom 4A. She inspected her drawing—the window-seat, how could she have forgotten!—and looked over, past Maybelline’s hog-wash fantasy, to her family friend Jareth’s, to see if she might have missed anything he had included. (Were pipes or wiring necessary? Did they really have to use jarring colors?) The boy lived right down the block, and she had seen his home, been mystified by the koi swimming loosely in the front pond.
On Jareth’s paper could be seen only a square box, containing twelve more boxes—six on each side of a slim hall, and nine of them unlabelled. These were rooms, it could be presumed, which must be entered via swinging, shell-shapes he had sketched to symbolize doors. The doors opened into nothing; Lids swinging into blank space. Eyes batting shut. Emily pointed to the empty rooms—her pointer finger walking down the hallway, turning right—as if moving a piece on a Clue gameboard, and said: “What’s in here?”
Jareth did not know. These were the rooms in the house into which he had simply never been. Brass knobs which he had never opened—they might be pantries, closets, the bedrooms of sisters not yet born.

Gloria herself had ended up in a flat overhanging a garage, sharing a living room with an older woman whose smoke clogged the drapes. The two bonded over squalor: Gloria was allowed to leave dishes in the sink if the other woman did, their magazines pooled around the overstuffed armchairs in the living room, the severed faces of starlets winking in the light splashing out of the TV during the older woman’s required evening viewing—Lives of the Rich and Famous coupled, sometimes, with Cribs. Gloria would drink diet cokes through a straw and think of how lame this was, all this was.


It was like a personalized version of Cribs, she thought, scanning the sheets. “And this room, what’s this?” she asked Emily, who said, “It’s for billiards. But I never go in there.” Gloria could have been a xxxxxxxx thief. Boyfriend would want to know hahahahahhahahaha he can break in steal all their shit.


So yes, all right, she wanted to see how the other half lived. In which case, the paper of the boy next to Emily—a nine-year-old Jareth Oswego—must have been the greatest disappointment. For some, the drapes will never be pulled aside, the smoke will never clear. It was this way for Gloria, a forgettable girl who was given nothing before she fought for it, and on whose fridge today hangs the drawing—blank as a tray of ice-cubes, cornrows of dead air.