At any rate, Greta would’ve taken a turn or two, but the only ones who showed interest were either too broken, not broken enough, geriatric, unemployable, or overly dependent on little blue pills, cocaine, their own feelings and biographies, or the words “toxic,” “binary,” “identity,” and “intersectionality.”
Several months ago, however, she’d developed an inappropriate crush on someone half her age. They’d met on her very first day in Hudson. She’d arrived on a Friday, along with a hundred other drips and hipsters visiting from the city. An impatient tour of Hudson ensued, with Sabine speeding up rather than slowing down as they approached intersections and pedestrians, and pointing out the prisons—there were three—and where all the saloons and brothels used to be. The brothels were long gone, of course, but Hudson was still crawling with drunks and sluts, and had been since 1785.
“What kind of sluts?” Greta asked.
“All stripes,” Sabine said. “Sluts for nature, sluts for antiques, sluts for astrology. River sluts, real estate sluts, regular sluts. In general, I’d say there’s not a lot of shame in this town.”
“Uh-oh,” said Greta.
“I’m not saying people don’t feel shame—they do,” said Sabine. “It’s more like people don’t shame each other. Unless you do something extremely fucked-up, of course, like rob an old lady or rape somebody. Otherwise, you can get away with a lot. I think that’s why people never leave. Although that’s changing now.”
Sabine drove up alleys with names like Prison and Rope. She preferred Hudson’s backside, she said, but toward the end of the hour she coasted down the main drag, Warren Street, so that Greta could get a look at Hudson’s face. A formerly fucked-up face, Sabine insisted, once abandoned and forgotten, now carefully made up and lined with shops selling objects nobody needed. In fact, Sabine’s car felt like a giant, moving display case, and Greta felt like a rare object pinned to the passenger seat.
“Why are they staring at us?” asked Greta.
“I know these people,” Sabine explained, and honked at a lady with a dog. “They’re just wondering who you are and why you’re in my car.”
As they approached the next intersection, an old man stepped into the street and tried hailing them like a taxi. He looked disheveled and near death, but he had a sharp whistle. Sabine ignored him completely and rolled through a stop sign.
“That man seemed desperate for your attention,” Greta said. “I think he’s waiting for you to pull over.”
“That’s my father,” Sabine said, and stepped on the gas. “He just wants a cigarette.”
She sped through a mostly empty parking lot diagonally, only taking her foot off the gas for a series of speed bumps, and then continued to drive as if the cops were chasing them all the way home. In the driveway, she turned off the engine and opened the door but didn’t get out.
“If you’re expecting Pottery Barn rustic,” she’d said, “you might be disappointed. This house was built in 1737. Just to give you some perspective, George Washington was in kindergarten.”
“Totally fine,” said Greta. “I hate Pottery Barn.”
One side of the house was tall and brick. The other side, short and wooden. It looked old, but not 280.
“Are you a horse person?” Sabine asked suddenly.
Greta shrugged. “Of course.”
Anyone could see that Greta was not a horse person. Her hair wasn’t long enough and neither were her teeth, and as a child, she hadn’t been mistreated by other children. She’d been mistreated by horses, though. When she was thirteen, a horse had stepped on her foot, breaking it in several places, ostensibly because she’d tried to mount it on an incline. She hadn’t been taken to the doctor, and her foot still looked fucked-up all these years later.
“I don’t have horses,” Sabine said. “I’m getting donkeys. Mini-donkeys. They come up to your waist.”
Greta looked toward the field, expecting to see a herd of mini-donkeys running in circles, bucking, braying, or whatever it was donkeys did, but all she saw was a few dead apple trees. A stiff breeze was blowing leaves around the yard, along with a large, crumpled paper bag.
“How many donkeys?”
“Two,” Sabine said. “I only wanted one, but it’s necessary to purchase them in pairs. Otherwise, they die of loneliness.” She brought a hand to her chest. “They were born yesterday—literally—on a farm up north, and need to be weaned. We’ll get them in a few months.”
The stairs that should have led to the front door were missing. They walked around to the back. As they crossed the yard, the crumpled paper bag rolled slowly toward them. Greta stopped and stared as it rolled right up to her feet. It was not a paper bag, she saw now, but a rooster. A uniformly brown rooster.
“That’s Walter,” Sabine said. “You never know which end is up because he has feathers on his legs.”
“Looks like he’s wearing UGG boots,” Greta said.
“He only shows up on weekends,” Sabine said. “He lives across the road, but he doesn’t have any hens.”
“Does he have eyeballs? He just walked into that wheelbarrow.”
“He’s a nightmare,” Sabine said. “Just ignore him.”
At the back of the house, Greta followed Sabine up a rotting staircase. The back door was unusually wide and beautiful and didn’t have a doorknob. Instead, you had to turn a huge rusty ring handle in the center.
“This door,” was all Greta could say.
“I know,” said Sabine. “It’s why I bought the house. This brick side is where you’ll be living. It was built slightly later, in 1755, after the Dutch got wealthy. You can tell they had money because the ceilings are high and the windows are twelve-over-twelve.”
“What?”
“Each window has twenty-four panes,” Sabine said. “That’s a lot of glass for back then, and it wasn’t cheap. The only bummer is, this place is uninsulated. Are you good with a woodstove?”
“Kind of.”
She’d never built a fire in her life. Until very recently, she’d assumed seasoned firewood contained actual seasoning, like paprika and chicory. She followed Sabine into the living room. All the furniture was covered in white sheets like you see in the movies. The walls had that distressed look people pay tens of thousands of dollars to reproduce. Although distressed was probably the wrong word. These walls were… tormented.
“What’s that noise?” asked Greta.
“Are you allergic to bees?”
“No,” said Greta.
“Good. There’s a hive under your feet,” said Sabine. “Downstairs, I mean. I’ll show you later. You want to know why this room’s so beautiful?”
Greta pointed at the ceiling, which was covered in cracks and had been painted with decorative, mostly worn-off designs.
“The ceiling’s great,” Sabine agreed. “But the main reason this room is beautiful is because it’s perfectly square. A perfectly square room is extremely rare. It does something to your brain chemistry.”