Secrets

Every Sunday her mother and grandmother meet at her aunt’s house, where Marion has been living for the past six months. They come to smoke cigarettes at the kitchen table and bicker over trivialities ten years dead, to size up the products advertised on TV and pick at one another’s shortcomings. Marion sits in the living room, still in sight and in earshot, but far enough away that she’s not expected to participate in the constant harangue. Instead, she rips pictures from her aunt’s back issues of Better Homes and Gardens, constructing piece by piece the home she’ll one day build or discover.

Marion came to live with her Aunt Cynthia six months earlier, when her mother lost her job at the gas station. Six months worth of these Sunday gatherings means Marion has seen her mother about two dozen times since New Year’s. Carol has been clear-eyed each one of those times. Affectionate, because she’s not exhausted from trying to stay sober all week. She has another job, but nothing has changed. The man who moved in last month stinks of cigarettes and gin, like Marion’s stepfather did, but he hasn't been around long enough to have caught on to her mother's secret.

Her grandmother is ninety-three years old, has been a widow for nearly ten years, and is dissolving into paranoid dementia. Her memory comes and goes, despite which she never forgets that she is a fierce, combative woman. She used to curse her daughters, screaming in a whisper, but her vocal chords have almost completely gone and aphasia has taken most of her words away, so she’s resorted to hitting, most recently when Cynthia tried to stop her from doing the dishes and got a pop in the eye for her trouble. Most of the time Ruth doesn’t seem to recognize her granddaughter, but she spends long, awkward minutes gazing at her skin over the dinner table. When Marion falls asleep on the couch on a Sunday, she invariably wakes up to icy eyes inches from her own, dancing and disconnected from a cracked smile.

Her Aunt Cynthia’s house is comfortable, located in what used to be a decent neighborhood which has since gone literally downhill. If you spill a glass of water on the floor, it runs to the other side of the room. Most of the better families have moved out, the poorer families moved in, and the crackheads come to squat behind the plywood windows of condemned Victorian houses. But in her aunt’s house Marion has her own bedroom, from which she can’t hear her mother watching TV, fucking or fighting with some man. The bedroom walls are yellow, recently painted and free of the water damage that encircled her old room. The furniture in the living room is hard and itchy, but it all matches, and the wood floors don’t still hold the stains of everything that’s been spilled there. Marion’s dreamhouse pastiches always have wood floors.

Marion’s father left before she was born. Carol was nineteen at the time, two years older than Marion is now, and Daniel was a drummer in a funk band. The singer died of an overdose, the band broke up, and Marion’s father hitchhiked down to Boston to join a new band. Sometimes Carol says she told him about the pregnancy weeks before, sometimes the night before. Once, when Marion was five, her mother told her a completely different story.

After she washes the dinner plates (stuffed peppers, cabbage), Marion tells them she’s heading out to buy eggs for the morning. Her Aunt Cynthia thanks her. Cynthia is always thanking her, and is genuinely grateful for her insignificant efforts to keep the house in order. She married late, to a Christian evangelist, and describes herself as being born again. She smokes a pack and a half a day, but believes that alcohol, drugs, and premarital sex are Satan’s tools. At seventeen, Marion would prefer a life of sin to a life lived on a hard sofa in a smoky room, ripping pictures from magazines.

Her mother knows Marion is lying. Her mother always knows, because her own life is based on a string of the same plausible excuses. But she doesn’t say anything except, “be careful,” gives Marion five bucks, and stays behind to take grief off of her own mother and sister. In a small way, one she won’t recognize until well after her mother’s funeral, Marion loves her for this. Loves her and hates her, for giving her too much freedom.

The sun has already fallen behind the rooftops. Over Deering Street there is a good slice of purpling sky, but no view of the ocean, except for the gulls picking at the garbage cans lining the curb. Marion stands in the mouth of an alley, smoking and watching the sky grow darker. A small girl in a large sweatshirt, her hair tied back to reveal cheeks still round and white as eggs, she nevertheless seems to be a part of the alley, to belong there, just behind the line between shadow and streetlight. The plump lips which also belong to her mother form an effortless O of marijuana smoke. Slowly her brown eyes water and fill with moon while streetlights flicker and hum.

She drifts away from her life. No matter, that if her aunt smells the smoke, she will kick Marion out of her house. No matter that her grandmother is dissolving into dementia, each day becoming a little more hostile and paranoid. No matter that there are fresh bruises in the crook of her mother’s elbow. A rat, relaxed by her motionlessness, skirts her sandaled feet, and Marion watches it stop to examine a McDonald’s wrapper lying on the pavement. She sees the individual hairs on its back, whiskers bristling like they’re electrified, watches the way its pink hands fumble with the wax paper, pink nose twitching, awakened by cheese. Marion stamps her foot, and the rat runs off.

She keeps smoking. No matter that this drifting dulls her, limits her in some vague way. The smoke she exhales each time is her soul. She watches it dissipate, slowly turning into nothing. This small, daily suicide makes it easier to sit on a hard and itchy sofa, flipping through magazines, surrounded by bitter voices and floral print wallpaper. Let the winter come again, and her mother’s mood turn sour. Marion will fall further behind in school, but that will only matter to the guidance counselor. She will swim in her giant sweatshirts, hand-me-downs from a father she’ll never meet. She will float on the warm tide of a mind gone slack as water.

At her feet, something remarkable is happening. There is a trickle running down the alley and flowing around an island of sandy gravel. On one side of this sandbar, bubbles are running downstream. Then, each time a bubble crawls around the end of the island, it hooks around and begins to climb the hill, a perfect line of bubbles gliding upstream. Bending down, Marion can see little slivers of black gravel likewise carried in the current, first downhill, then up, circling around the island like little lost tourists. She squats and squints, thinking that she must just be stoned. But no. Right in front of her, water is flowing uphill.

The flow of water grows, pulling the little island apart one granule at a time. Every so often one of these granules is caught in the upwards flowing stream, and every so often one of them sticks to the top of the island. In this way, Marion thinks, the whole mass could move itself uphill a grain at a time. The sky gets purpler and purpler, and Marion keeps watching, until one particular grain is pulled off and the island slumps, taking a concave shape that lets the water push through its center. In a second it is gone, nothing but isolated particles carried out of the alley and into the gutter, to the sewers and the sea.

She smells her hands. They reek, so she decides to take a bit of a walk to air out. How stupid, to risk getting kicked out of her aunt’s house. But no matter. The day before, her boss walked in on her smoking a one-hitter in the walk-in freezer, and Marion held her breath, fighting the paranoia, nodding at curt instructions until she could escape with a bag of shredded mozzarella. She isn’t addicted, she just likes being high when no one else is. During school, at church, while grocery shopping. It makes things a game where she has to convince everyone that she is as normal as they are. That she can act like them, feel like them, and all the while carry a secret self inside. Something that sets her apart. She has this in common with her mother.

The drifting away is the other important part. The calmness, and the fact that for all the things that stop mattering, new things begin. All of a sudden the purple slice of sky matters. The island in the stream. Water flowing uphill, against all reason, and the fact that she is the only one who has seen it. This opens up to her a night full of small, secret worlds, and she feels that if she squats down and looks closely enough, she will be permitted to see the face of God in the hairs on a rat’s back, the cheese in a McDonald’s wrapper, hidden in an island of gravel that lets water defy gravity. As long as there is no one else to see, the night will reveal its elemental magic.

It is spring. Springtime here comes for this one week in May, and then it is summer. The dogwoods the city planted are blooming now in pink and white. Window boxes are stuffed with colors, muted in the darkness but more fragrant for that. Marion stops to smell them as she passes by, following the stream out of the alley and up the sidewalk of the block behind her apartment building.

This is not a quiet neighborhood—drunk wives scream at their husbands loitering in the streets—but it is a safe one, except for a few things. One of these things happened to a girl at her school, a girl Marion used to know. Since she turned thirteen Marion has been in the habit of walking fast, keeping her eyes up, and crossing the street to avoid men on drinking on their stoops, calling at her from beneath the streetlights. She wears big sweatshirts and a scowl. Tonight, though, there is no one around, so she walks slowly, smiling to herself and looking for islands in the swelling flow. On the hill, people’s windows are at eye-level. Yellow kitchens, blue bedrooms. Old people, young people, laughing people, yelling people. People watching TV. Their slackened faces reflect the muted colors of high drama. Of comedy.

The water turns another corner, like a car. It takes a right at the end of the block and heads up the middle of the street where the pavement has collapsed on itself. The flow is coming from the other side of Congress Street, from a neighborhood called the West End, where people have lawns and fences. The stream is too broad and long to be someone washing a car, so she figures it’s an open hydrant, and not a bad place to wash her hands. She crosses Congress and heads left on Vaughan, then right on Brackett, up another alley between stone walls with white picket fences on top.

Five houses up, she finds what she was looking for: a surprisingly skinny hose is sticking out from under one of the fences. Water pouring into the alley, still in the shape of a tube, hits the pavement with the sound of somebody getting smacked. Someone is draining the spring overflow from their swimming pool. The hose looks like it’s peeing into the street.

Marion closes her eyes and listens. Beneath the water, bats are also looking around with their ears. An owl hoots once. A wind chime speaks once. Power lines moan electric Om. She opens her eyes, reaches into the flow of water to wash her hands. It is cold, much colder than the air. This water has not seen the sun all winter. Marion wonders if that makes it clean or dirty. How much darkness and how many chemicals can bacteria stand before it is all wiped out? She smells her hands again—completely neutral. This water is dead. Clean.

Her father is dead, as well. Marion, five years old, was in bed, asleep, when a sudden depression in the mattress rolled her into the familiar smell of stale Merlot. She could feel her mother shaking, silently laughing or crying, wearing nothing but her bra and underwear. She remembers how tall her mother seemed, her back muscular, with a long furrow down the middle like a gutter for rainwater. She climbed onto that back and started kneading the muscles, like she’d seen some men do when her mother complained of pain.

“Daniel,” her mother said, the name of Marion’s father. Then she rolled over, Marion climbing over her until she ended up on her mother’s stomach, looked into her eyes and saw two black pits, shadows endless as the holes in a skull. She screamed, but her mother didn’t move, as if the sound of screaming was normal. Marion had to calm herself by herself, staring until she found irises and whites hidden in the heart of the black. Then she laid down inside her mother’s warmth, and when she had nearly fallen asleep, Carol began to tell a story. A man named Daniel was taking a medicine to cure his sadness, and his girlfriend was trying to help him. The sadness was contagious, though, and soon his girlfriend needed to share his medicine. Then, once upon a time, she found Daniel taking his injection with someone else, another girlfriend. She offered to give him his medicine, but instead she filled the needle with air, and Daniel floated away. Clean, like a picture ripped out of a magazine, or red wine wiped off of a hardwood floor.

Marion has small pipe with her tonight. She knows the persistence of Sunday angst, and so smokes a little more, until her memories lose what edge they have left. It is fully dark out, now. There’s the grassy smell of spring, the breeze carries the scent of the ocean and Marion is high enough to convince herself that the springtime matters. That she’s passed another long winter, and that at the end of this month she will graduate, and be free. She has tentative plans to move to Boston or New York, if she can get the money together. Five years in a pizzeria has left her with enough to put down a month’s rent and a security deposit on an apartment in the less fashionable neighborhoods of Alston or Brooklyn. She plans on taking a job in another pizza joint until she’s old enough to start bartending.

When she imagines living in either of these cities, it’s the impression of being alone that strikes her first, with equal measures of longing and uncertainty. Uncertainty because, all things considered, her mother’s shortcomings don’t outweigh her love. For seventeen years she kept moving, holding down jobs, shopping, cooking, helping with homework, and only at night would she disappear into her room, leaving Marion to tuck herself in. It wasn’t until Marion started feeding herself and spending her afternoon hours at work that Carol began to slip, taking afternoons off, losing jobs. Then it seemed like every other day she would come home to find her mother lying on the floor or the sofa, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. So what will happen when Marion leaves for good?

Buying some eggs is her immediate concern. As she walks to the store, she works on managing her breathing, slowing her drumming heart. She forces herself to know that no one can see it jumping out of her chest, or tell that the skin of her face is crawling. That the bells tinkling overhead are not abnormally loud, and that the people who turn to look at her are not looking through her. The fluorescent lights haven’t actually blinded her by sucking the soul straight out of her eyes. This requires a good deal of logic and self-control, as Marion tells herself.
In the cooler where the eggs and dairy are kept, a cop is looking for the expiration date on a bottle of half and half. “Hello,” Marion smiles, turning to hunt up the eggs before he can meet her bloodshot eyes. Has the smell detached itself from her hair? Is the lump the pipe makes in her jeans covered by the hem of her hoodie? She methodically checks the carton for broken eggs and, finding none, browses the other aisles of the minimart until the cop has paid and left.

“Find everything you need?” the clerk asks, eying the drapes of a sweatshirt custom-made for stealing whole chickens.

“Yes, thank you.” She hopes her voice isn’t as loud as it seems, or as sarcastic, because what she’s thinking, so deeply that she only partially recognizes it, is that it will be a long, long time, if ever, before she’s found everything she needs.

She takes a few side roads home, staying off the streets where men huddle in circles or drape themselves from stoops with brown bags in their hands. Despite the risk, she heads into Deering Oaks to go sit by the lagoon. The ducks there sleep in a flock with their heads under their wings. She just sits for a minute, sucking up the park air, the cold sky, the sleeping ducks. Then she heads home to her own flock, where she’s not quite sure she belongs.

Outside the house, an ambulance. Marion’s first thought is for her mother, but partway up the front walk she realizes that if her mother was going to OD, it would be in her own apartment. The front door is standing open, and Marion follows the sound of male voices to the kitchen. Cynthia’s husband is there, watching as if amazed with his hands on the counter, and Carol has her arms around her sister, who is sobbing. Marion looks at her mother, who is looking at the sheet pulled over the body on the ground. Her eyes are dry and calm, her hand stroking Cynthia’s hair almost casually. Then she closes her eyes, and the faintest smile rises through her chapped lips. On the floor, an EMT is putting away his defibrillators, speaking to her awestruck uncle-in-law. When she sees Marion, Carol crosses the room and takes the eggs carefully from her hands, hugs her gently.

In her mother’s arms, time stops for Marion. Thoughts pass slowly and deliberately through her head, as if the smoke, rather than obscuring events, captures and amplifies the ambient light. First she realizes that her mother, not her aunt, the EMTs, her uncle or her uncle’s God, is the one holding the room together. Second, she sees that there is no desperation in her mother, none of the tautness that precedes a long disappearance into her bedroom. Then a volley of impressions: that her mother has shared a room with death before, that she must have taken the same calm, logical steps when she murdered Marion’s father, and, finally, that this shock could go one of two ways for Carol. Uphill or down. Like water running against gravity, bubbles driving a current against all law and reason, this equilibrium won’t last forever. This death could be the first grain displaced, the change in shape that comes just before Marion’s little island is wiped forever from the earth.

She rides with her mother to the hospital, two blocks from the source of her secret stream. The two EMTs ride with them, and beyond their condolences, no one says a word. At the hospital, Carol fills out paperwork, answers questions, identifies the body. The fluorescent lights offer no relief, and the antiseptic scent, or lack of a scent, seems more suited to the dead than to the living. Giving her mother’s full name, Carol cries softly, stops quickly, and asks if they are free to go. Marion still hasn’t spoken. Her mother is scratching red ridges into her forearms.

As they walk the few blocks back to Cynthia’s house, Carol tells her daughter about the house she grew up in, near Bangor, about how her own father was a trucker who was rarely at home, about how her mother made snow ice cream and knitted quilts to sell at seasonal fairs in the city. “She wasn’t what you would call a strong woman,” Carol explains, not for the first time. “She cried a lot, and she always complained about my dad, your grandfather, being gone all the time. But she brought me and your Aunt Cynthia up from nothing,” she says, “From when we were this big,” holding up a thumb and forefinger an atom’s length apart. “So if that’s not strong, I don’t know what is.” She keeps talking, talking about her mother walking her to the bus stop on the first day of school, seeing her golden hair through tears and sunlight, about the day her father came home, but only to say goodbye. “That was the only time he left that she didn’t cry. She went crazy, instead, screaming and chasing him out of the house with a butcher knife. She threw it at him before he could make it into his truck and it stuck in his leg for a second, right there, right in his calf. She stood in the street and kept screaming at him, not even in words, just screaming. I’ve never been so scared in my life.” Unaware, Carol is scratching at the soft flesh under her chin, and picking up her pace.

Marion stops on the sidewalk, looking at her mother. Thirty-seven years old, she is twenty years older than Marion, to the month. Their birthdays are both coming up, in June. Her mother has sandy hair, short, unpainted nails, is wearing a flannel shirt and jeans, is a half inch shorter than Marion. The feeling that these things matter is only very faint. In fact, they do not matter.

“Mom,” Marion says when they reach Cynthia’s block. “I’m going to stay with you tonight.”

“Sorry, hon,” says Carol. “Tonight’s a bad night.”

“Carol,” Marion says for the first time. “I’m going to stay with you tonight. And tomorrow night, too, and the night after.” The things she doesn’t say are said most clearly. She says ‘I love you’ and ‘I will keep our secrets.’ She says that she won’t be leaving for Boston or New York in June, that she will stay for their birthdays, and that at this time next year, she will sit beside her mother at her grandmother’s grave, to listen to the stories.

Her mother listens. “Maybe next week,” she says. She loves Marion, and knows she needs to get clean, but not tonight. It’s been a long and joyless winter. It’s been a lifetime of long and joyless winters, with so few chances for warmth and pleasure. ‘I have every excuse to be like this,’ she tells herself. ‘Next week,’ she tells herself. But while she’s making her excuses, Marion is taking off her flip flops. She puts them in her back pockets, takes one look at her mother, turns and begins to run.

If she’d taken off less deliberately, or at something less than a full-out sprint, like she expected to be chased, Carol might not have realized where she was going. But before Marion hits the end of the block, Carol is after her, with no time wasted on thought. Marion is young and fast, and gains a block, then two. She has her keys out as she hits the door, is up the stairs and into her mother’s apartment with the barest pause.

The apartment smells different—the fichus plant by the window is dead, the futon which used to be Marion’s bed is buried in laundry—the air is stuffed with human odor, like sheets left too long unwashed. The kitchen is spotless, except for pizza boxes piled in a corner, and the once-white carpet looks exactly the same, but only because it can’t get any dirtier. Marion sees these things in the few seconds it takes to close and bolt the front door, then cross into her mother’s room.

She takes the chestnut box from the niche in the wall behind the photo of her mother, aunt and grandmother at the shore. Cynthia is in diapers, Carol is topless and holding a plastic pail, two front teeth missing from her smile. In the hollow leg of the bed is another plastic baggie, and a third is taped to the inside of the toilet cistern. Marion dumps the brown powder into the toilet. The syringes, spoon, and length of rubber hose she sticks in the pocket of her hoodie, and the ethanol goes into the medicine cabinet. Has she missed any? She goes through the pockets of jeans and flannel shirts lying on the floor, shakes out the sheets balled up on the bed, checks the bedside drawers, the coffee table in the living room.

Her mother’s key turns in the deadbolt, then the doorknob, and the door crashes open, leaving all of their secrets bared, Carol’s fury and Marion’s fear.

“Give it back,” Carol says. She can hear her own voice shaking, and she can see that she’s scaring her daughter. Shame and need fill her in equal measures, so that even while she hates herself, she can think of only one way to recover her equilibrium, and to be a good mother again. She thinks she’ll make it up to Marion after she gets a fix. She’ll order a pizza and they’ll watch old Hitchcock films until they fall asleep together.

“No.” Marion digs her feet in to keep herself from running.

“Don’t make me hit you, Marion.”

“Go ahead and try.”

Carol sizes her daughter up, pushes past her into the bedroom. She checks the niche, the hollow leg, and from around the corner Marion hears porcelain scraping against porcelain, and then the cistern lid being smashed on the tile floor. That must have been all of them. Carol is in the doorway, red-faced and panting. “Give it to me,” she demands again. “I swear to God, Marion, I’ll kick the stuff next week, but right now I need it. Grandma just died, for Christ’s sake. Look at me!”

Marion looks. She sees that her mother’s pain and the red of the run make her look more alive than she has all winter. “I flushed it,” she says, watching her mother carefully.

Carol screams like a wounded animal. She is also watching herself, and she sees that she’s acting like a junkie, violent and pathetic at the same time, but she can’t do anything to stop it. Instead she slams the bedroom door, screams into her pillows. Marion listens for a while, unable to move. Then she goes to the futon, throws the clothes to the floor, and sits down to wait for the screaming to stop, and her mother to try to leave. On second thought, she takes the knife rack from the kitchen counter and hides it under the sink.

“Take some sleeping pills,” she tells her mother the first time she tries to leave. Her face is streaked mascara, eyes red and swollen, and her voice quivers and is full of phlegm as she curses her daughter. Marion doesn’t listen—the words don’t mean anything, no more than her grandmother’s ravings meant anything. Once Ruth told Cynthia that she’d tried to abort her. She described looking for a doctor and not being able to find one, how she’d tried to do it herself, but hadn’t been able to get up the courage. Ruth told both of her girls that life would have been much easier and better without them, and she said all of this in a tone of voice that said she meant it. Her mother had laughed, laughing until her younger sister joined in. “You sure did a lot to keep us alive,” Carol said at the time. Marion had been furious, but her mother had laughed. Now it is Marion’s turn to laugh.

The second time her mother comes out, it is with a lamp held over her head like a club. She swings at Marion, by now too desperate to be ashamed, or to hold back. Marion escapes out the front door, which her mother locks behind her. Marion sits on the steps to wait, with her phone in her hand. She is not hurt or ashamed, she doesn’t hate her mother, and she is definitely not afraid. ‘I can do this all night,’ she thinks. She is proud of herself, because sitting on the stairs to her mother’s apartment matters. It matters far more than the money she’s saved or the cities she could move to, more than college, more than seeing water flow uphill.

When the buzzer on the downstairs door sounds, she dials 911. “Someone is trying to break into my apartment,” she says loud enough for the man to hear her, then gives the address. He keeps coming, and she begins to describe him. “Black hair, leather jacket and jeans, short, ugly, he has tattoos on his hands.” Before she can mention the scar on his chin, he is gone. The cops come, Marion thanks them, and they go. She climbs the fire escape and lets herself back into the apartment through the living room window, finding her mother huddled on the futon.

Marion leads her to bed, gives her three sleeping pills, and tucks her in. Soon she is quiet, and Marion lies down to sleep. A pounding on the door wakes her up. Through the peephole she sees Bill, her mother’s boyfriend, bloody eyes and a greedy, expectant grin. “Go away!” she yells through the door.

“Fuck you!” Bill yells back. The door shakes as he kicks it, but the one kick is all he can muster. “Goddamn kid,” he mutters as he turns to leave.

Marion yanks the door open. “You got something to say to me? Go ahead and say it to my face, you pathetic drunk.”

Bill blinks at her a few times. “Carol?” he says.

“Get lost!” Marion screams, and slams the door again. She turns the bolt, but goes to get the butcher knife from under the sink anyways. The same kind of knife her grandmother once threw into her grandfather’s calf. Marion tells herself she’ll stick it in the gut of the next man to knock at the door, pizza guy included.

Early the next morning, before her mother wakes up, Marion goes out and buys two gallons of sky blue paint. It’s a Monday morning, but she’s not going to school this week. Instead, she’s going to paint the living room as wide as the sky. The paint, rollers and tray cost her fifty bucks, and she has to lug everything ten blocks home, the wire handles of the paint buckets carving grooves into the palms of her hands. She checks on her mother. Still sleeping, her blonde hair splayed out on the pillow, soaking up the sun, easy breathing lifting the comforter, and letting it drop. She is beautiful, sweaty smell and all.

Marion cracks the first can of paint, pours a sky-colored pool into the tray, and gives the wall a few rolls. It takes two or three rolls in the same place to get a decent coat, the thick paint sucking to the wall with a sound like tearing cloth, pulling off chunks of the old, rotten white paint. Marion works the roller with two hands, the backs of her arms and tops of her forearms burning, and after five minutes she stands back, looks at the broad vertical stripe hovering in the middle of the long and dirty wall. It hadn’t occurred to her that this would take all day.

She sits down on the futon and rolls a joint, figuring she can just smoke it by the kitchen window. Her mother isn’t exactly in the position to say anything. She lights it, takes a drag, and on an impulse tosses the whole thing out the window. As it twists and falls into the alley, Marion laughs. Then she gets the rest of her bag and dumps it into the sink, turns on the water and washes it down the drain.

With her mind clear, Marion realizes that she should bleach the mold off of the walls and strip the old paint before she gets started. It will take a while, but she’s got the time. So she goes back to the store, buys a scraper, and goes at the wall again. Flecks of once-white paint drop like wet snowflakes, sticking to her sky blue hands and her sweaty arms and covering the once-white carpet, which she plans on replacing with hardwood floors.