Strange Highways

cheaper tract crackerboxes to those in the multimillion-dollar range - are built on concrete slabs. They have no basements. For decades this has been considered prudent design. The land is frequently sandy, with little bedrock near the surface. In country subject to earthquakes and mudslides, a basement with concrete-block walls can be a point of structural weakness into which all rooms above might collapse if the giants in the earth wake and stretch.
     Our new home was neither crackerbox nor mansion, but it had a cellar. The real-estate agent never mentioned it. Until now, we had never noticed it.
     Peering down the steps, I was at first curious - then uneasy. A wall switch was set just inside the doorway. I clicked it up, down, up again. No light came on below.
     Leaving the door open, I went looking for Carmen. She was in the master bathroom, hugging herself, grinning, admiring the handmade emerald-green ceramic tiles and the Sherle Wagner sinks with their gold-plated fixtures.
     "Oh, Jess, isn't it beautiful? Isn't it grand? When I was a little girl, I never dreamed I'd live in a house like this. My best hope was for one of those cute bungalows from the forties. But this is a palace, and I'm not sure I know how to act like a queen."
     "It's no palace," I said, putting an arm around her. "You've got to be a Rockefeller to afford a palace in Orange County. Anyway, so what if it was a palace - you've always had the style and bearing of a queen."
     She stopped hugging herself and hugged me. "We've come a long way, haven't we?"
     "And we're going even further, kid."
     "I'm a little scared, you know?"
     "Don't be silly."
     "Jess, honey, I'm just a cook, a dishwasher, a pot scrubber, only one generation removed from a shack on the outskirts of Mexico City. We worked hard for this, sure, and a lot of years ... but now that we're here, it seems to have happened overnight."
     "Trust me, kid - you could hold your own in any gathering of society ladies from Newport Beach. You have natural-born class."
     I thought: God, I love her. Seventeen years of marriage, and she is still a girl to me, still fresh and surprising and sweet.
     "Hey," I said, "almost forgot. You know we have a cellar?"
     She blinked at me.
     "It's true," I said.
     Smiling, waiting for the punch line, she said, "Yeah? And what's down there? The royal vaults with all the jewels? Maybe a dungeon?"
     "Come see."
     She followed me into the kitchen.
     The door was gone.
     Staring at the blank wall, I was for a moment icebound.
     "Well?" she said. "What's the joke?"
     I thawed enough to say, "No joke. There was ... a door."
     She pointed to the image of a kitchen window that was etched on the blank wall by the sun streaming through the glass. "You probably saw that. The square of sunlight coming through the window, falling on the wall. It's more or less in the shape of a door."
     "No. No ... there was ..." Shaking my head, I put one hand on the sun-warmed plaster and lightly traced its contours, as if the seams of the door would be more apparent to the touch than to the eye.
     Carmen frowned. "Jess, what's wrong?"
     I looked at her and realized what she was thinking. This lovely house seemed too good to be true, and she was superstitious enough to wonder if such a great blessing could be enjoyed for long without fate throwing us a heavy weight of tragedy to balance the scales. An overworked husband, suffering from stress - or perhaps afflicted by a small brain tumor - beginning to see things that were not there, talking excitedly of nonexistent cellars ... That was just the sort of nasty turn of events with which fate too frequently evened things out.
     "You're right," I said. I forced a laugh but made it sound natural. "I saw the rectangle of light on the wall and thought it was a door. Didn't even look close. Just came running for you. Now, has this new-house business got me about as crazy as a monkey or what?"
     She looked at me somberly, then matched my smile. "Crazy as a monkey. But then ... you always were."
     "Is that so?"
     "My monkey," she said.
     I said, "Ook, ook," and scratched under one arm.
     I was glad I had not told her that I'd opened the door. Or that I had seen the steps beyond.

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