Home Making Read online

  Dedication

  To my mother

  Epigraph

  Question your teaspoons.

  —GEORGES PEREC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  War Child

  Chloe

  Ayumi

  Dining Room

  Kitchen

  Downstairs Hall Closet

  Guest Room

  Master Bath

  Beau

  Master Bedroom

  Guest Bathroom

  Garage

  Backyard

  Cybil

  The Other House

  Pat

  Beau

  Family Room

  Front Door

  New Addition

  Lullaby

  Beau

  Nursery

  New Builds

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  War Child

  Before, before—a young woman, in a modest but pristine apartment in Tokyo, paints a castle on paper, unlike any castle in Japan. Where is this castle? her mother, who secretly writes poetry on gum wrappers, whose ancestors created beauty with katana rather than pen, asks her daughter. She starts to answer, but her mother grabs the paper and flips it over. Your mind is a ship, she says. It will take you away from me and leave me here alone. Your hair is dirty. Why don’t you do something about that? So this young woman, her name lost to the wrinkles of history, washes her hair, and it is clean and black and straight and falls at the arch of her bony shoulders. She is all bones, lanky and bendy like a strip of Wrigley’s. We need . . . her mother says, and she probably said more tea or meriken-ko or toothpaste, and sent her daughter out into the noontime street, into the crowded Tokyo Saturday, where families are sitting in parks or visiting grave sites of their mothers and fathers and grandmothers, who were unlucky enough to live in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Though the events happened six years ago, these relatives still come here in order to remember, to show that they have not moved on entirely to rockabilly and Look and Hirohito’s beloved Superman, that they can still lay white chrysanthemums on their ancestors’ tombs and thank their new god they never had to see Uncle Ryu like that, like they say he was found, and she is walking right beside the monument and she stops.

  A man in uniform with white skin and blue eyes is kneeling in front of one of these tombs, and she may or may not have been angry at this intruder, at his intrusion, but more likely what she is feeling is her heart coming alive in her cotton shirt because he is different and beautiful but likely just different, beauty often being simply an aberration from the norm, a departure from her mother, from her own black hair, and because she is just as bold as her daughter will be, she will go up to this man and tap him on the shoulder and ask him if he would like to take a walk with her to Kinokuniya, where she is on the way to buy flour and toothpaste, where they also sell frozen Salisbury steak paired with carrots and peas, and his face is long and bony, and she identifies with this, and they walk off together down the cobblestone street.

  Things happen, including a conversation in a park (she speaks un peu Français) and a sneaking out to go to a club where other white men dance with brown girls, and they drink French aperitifs and Japanese whiskey and are drunk but not too drunk to recognize joy, and they go to his room and she leaves a kiss on his cheek in the dark of the morning—she has slept too long, but she knows her mother won’t wake for another three hours, and she is running down the street, back to the apartment, and inside, now, a problem is growing.

  That problem is Ayumi.

  Ayumi never knows her name is Ayumi because her mother, upon finding out she is pregnant, leaves home, prostrates herself at the door of a hospital, crying out in the midst of labor pains, and signs the baby over to the state. Which the state doesn’t want, because this baby is a baby with blue eyes and brown skin, and, to make matters worse, this baby is female. No one will want this baby. Some Franciscan nuns, some sisters, take this baby and place it in their orphanage, their brown faces peeking out from behind white habits, brown fingers reaching out of draping white sleeves to push the brown children with blue and green eyes on a merry-go-round painted with faded yellow ducks, and, months later, an American officer comes in with his wife and this child overhears one of the sisters say Loveland, the name like a line of poetry, the child who has poetry in her blood, and this toddler, right as the American officer is walking by, reaches out a tiny, two-year-old hand and touches the arm of his jacket, and he stops walking—he had his eyes on a baby boy on the other side of the room, a strong-haunched Japanese boy—but he stops and he swivels and he looks at her, this child with blue eyes and brown skin, a girl, but that doesn’t matter, this child is his.

  Back to America, back to the States with his big-boned, not-so-beautiful blond wife and his three blond-haired, blue-eyed, white-skinned natural-borns, of six and eight and ten years old, in a plane back over the Pacific, over California, the McDonald’s arches glowing in the sun, which this grown Hāfu will remember seeing from the plane, though her own daughter will disavow this, will say that there is no way anyone could possibly see the Golden Arches from up in a plane, much less a two-year-old, and they speed over the Mojave, with its yipping coyotes and endless dust, and they land in another desert, in Tucson, a place without castles but with chrysanthemums on graves, just for different, less atomic reasons.

  And let’s say that she is the only brown-skinned girl in any bassinet in that residential development in 1953, anno domini, the only brown-skinned, blue-eyed girl riding her bicycle down War Bonnet Lane, hair pigtailed in the way that makes everyone think she is Navajo. Whatever she is, they know she isn’t white, which means that she doesn’t fit into this world of McDonald’s arches and Cosmopolitan, though by her twelfth birthday the neighborhood recognizes that she is undeniably beautiful, a petite girl (yet, like her Wrigley-boned birth mother, all legs) with petite freckles, a petite nose, and a petite frame forged in bronze—bronze, a shade that has become culturally desirable, as long as the shade isn’t black, more alluring than the pasty skin of her adopted mother, her varicose veins hidden under tan nylons. She will learn that her beauty is a problem, that this is not something her mother can suffer, and her father will be oblivious—he now promoted to brigadier general, always off in a hushed room with a group of men in pressed suits, and her bigger brothers will protect her from these abuses, sometimes, and she sews the holes in their jeans for them, because she loves them and they are not a wealthy family, military, unlike but also like her family in Japan, who she will never know, they aren’t really her family either.

  Cybil and boys. She discovers boys, rides on the backs of their motorcycles, sneaks out and eats mole in Mexican dives on the South Side, and people still think she is Navajo but they don’t care, because she is foxy, and perhaps more importantly she has something to say. She devours Friedan and Rhys and Plath, and boys, at least, at first, cannot help but fall at her feet, especially in those bell-bottoms. And she gets out of the desert, because she has known since she was a Navajo on a trike that she wanted to be a doctor, which is what she does. She leaves the desert to get her bachelor’s at a liberal arts college in the icy Midwest, where, in the winter, the boys (always the boys) have garbage can races in the frozen parking lot, and she likes one or two of these boys, but she is very focused on her studies—not too focused, because she is smart, MENSA smart, and she doesn’t have to do much studying, just a little more than her roommate, who has a photographic memory, which she will always envy, as she will repeatedly tell her own daughter.

  And she meets a man there, a handsome man, one kind of like her father,
a man with a heroic inclination, and he can speak of subatomic particles and Gertrude Stein in the same breath, and this she finds irresistible, because she loves words but she also wants to deliver babies, and so she falls for this man, Neil, a type of man whose complexity she will warn her daughter about, even though he doesn’t go to her school and lives in Chicago, but he drives to her every other weekend, and in the summer they go to Yellowstone, where they take thirty-mile day hikes and camp out in the backwoods, always with a bear bell on her hip, and he takes photographs (of waterfalls, her breasts) and she draws pictures of the local flora, wildflowers mostly—her mother, too, could draw—and so they spend these undergraduate years like this, and when she receives the acceptance letter in the mail to a medical school back in the desert and one in Chicago that is private and celebrated but also much more expensive, she decides to return home, and he decides to return home with her.

  This is when she first realizes that she cannot rely on men. This is still when her baby is not yet a glimmer in her eye, when she’s still focused on her studies, when the smell of McDonald’s PlayPlaces make her nauseous, the sight of a child not instigating any biological response, and she is busy, busy, busy, mastering the body, attending lectures, dissecting cadavers, drawing blood, washing her hands, starting IVs, slicing into the abdomens of women she’s never spoken to, washing her hands, placing her hands into someone’s womb, not sleeping, not seeing Neil, learning the names of medicines, the words swirling in her dreams, giving epidurals, not sleeping, not seeing Neil, washing her hands. And when she comes home one day, she realizes he is not there, that he has not been there for a while.

  (What happened to Neil is what happens to all former loves: He left her but he never really left her.)

  The first man, but not the last to go. The second is to be the father of her child, a charmer, not a Renaissance man like the first one, but one she believes has good intentions, and their courtship is short and it is easy, and they both agree that they want to get out of this desert, to a place with trees that shed leaves and snowfall and good schools, because now she wants a baby. She loves the smell of babies, all babies, of their baby shampoo, their wisps of hair she likes to wind around her fingers in the aisles of supermarkets. This is the sign that she’s ready, and so they move across the country, to a place of soft hills, to Virginia, into a house with a green yard and big windows through which she can already see a child rolling, laughing in the green, and she’s a doctor now, and in this new place she starts her own practice, and she’s establishing herself, and she is ready to have this baby.

  And boy does this baby come, and the labor is nothing like she could have imagined, though she has helped hundreds of women go through this same process, and she knows the scientific names for everything, but nothing can prepare her for the moments of pushing and breathing and panting and crying and the feeling of her uterine walls contracting and the moment when she hears that first cry of the baby, her baby, as she enters the world, a fucked-up world, one with bad men and bad women and cruel fathers and cruel mothers, but nothing compares to this feeling of this baby, her baby, and this child falls into another doctor’s hands, and this mother is exhausted and overjoyed and all she can do is give the doctor a thumbs-up, and she lets her head fall back against the soaked paper pillow.

  And then the baby is placed in her arms, and it’s like the light of the room dims except for a halo around her and this baby. And whatever the men do—they come and go, lovers, boyfriends come and go—she will have this moment, and this life with this baby. And she will not be a perfect mother. She will give her daughter her eccentricities, a daughter who will feel that her mother is cold and removed sometimes. She is no Hallmark card of Motherhood. But this mother will do anything for her child, because she has a responsibility to show her the goodness in a world full of despair, to show her that she is loved when many babies out there are not loved, are given away, left in orphanages, in the hopes that some man and some woman, or some man and man or woman and woman, will walk by the right crib at the very moment that the baby extends a hand and grabs their coat.

  This baby, Chloe, will not suffer that. She will be loved, from hospital bed to home.

  Chloe

  I want to build a home. Or, rather, I want to take this existing house and turn it into something where happiness can bloom. I will start with one room, stripping the yellowed wallpaper, melting and scrubbing old glue in yellow gloves. Or do I start with the floors? Do I have to refinish the floors first, so that the shavings don’t scratch up the fresh paint? Maybe I have that backward. Maybe I should paint first, and then do the floors, so that the paint doesn’t drip onto the newly refinished wood.

  I built a home once, not so long ago, but I have forgotten the how-tos. How to re-grout shower tile. How to hang a picture on a stud. As if my brain has decided that recollecting was detrimental to my survival.

  Someone built this house for a family. I constantly feel like I’m intruding on someone else’s domestic life. Every time I forget to turn off the faucet when I’m boiling water, I think that a mother will run over and chastise me. When I play music late at night, I feel like a little boy will come down the stairs, onesied-feet padding on the hardwood, and say “I’m trying to sleep. Will you please turn that down?”

  This doesn’t feel like my home, I tell people. Part of me knows that this wasn’t built for me.

  This house’s architecture isn’t specific to one region. It doesn’t have terracotta tiles for its roof or adobe bricks for its form like those in Tucson or Santa Fe. It isn’t a shotgun house that runs long and narrow, the humidity seeping through the uninsulated walls, as they do deep in the American South. It’s a sturdy Foursquare, as Americana as you can get, older, but the bones are good. The structure of this house is sound.

  The neighborhood, too, is just right. Set on the outskirts of a small city, the nearest neighbor more than spitting distance, my house sits on two and a half acres in view of the rolling Blue Ridge Mountains. Large hills, really, but I don’t need more than that.

  In fact, when I would hear the word “house,” this is what I would think of. This is the Platonic form of a house. It’s everything I ever wanted.

  There are more rooms in this house than I know what to do with. I am responsible for a kitchen and a pantry and a mudroom and a garage and a living room and a dining room and a guest room and a guest bathroom and a master bedroom and a master bathroom and even an attic that I can access by pulling on a tattered red string.

  I have only been in the attic once, when the Realtor first showed me the house. I asked her to take me up there, so she pulled the red string and we walked up the creaky wooden stairs and ascended into a dark, dusty, empty space. No old trunks or rocking chairs left behind by the former owners. Just vacancy.

  But I have not been up there since. What would I do if I stepped on a rusty nail and couldn’t get back down? Would anyone find me up there?

  Living alone requires an extra level of pragmatism. Lock the doors. Check the carbon monoxide detector’s batteries. Read the labels on the pills before swallowing them in the haze of two in the morning, as there will be no one to find you.

  Peanut butter. Coffee. Bread. Toilet paper. I text Beau with a list. He is running my errands, performing the tasks of domesticity I am not yet ready to perform on my own.

  The peanut butter isn’t even for you, is it? he texts back. It’s for Tito, isn’t it?

  The truth is this: I am not worried about all of the space, so much space with not even a coffee table or couch or bed frame. This place does not feel empty.

  Beau, a sculptor of the delicate, of cotton and hair and tulle and leaves, often reassures me, As the great sculptor of pirouetting steel, Richard Serra, said, space is material.

  Perhaps all the possibility would make some people anxious. I know my mother and Beau worry about me feeling lonely in this house, about my being alone. They look at me with those eyes that squint and narrow, as if those e
yes could hug me in close and make me feel like I’m not surrounded by so much space, that I’m not so alone.

  But I’m fine here. That may be hard to believe, but I’m excited by this empty house, by the kitchen that needs renovating, the master bath that needs updating, by the possibilities.

  Would anyone worry about a man moving into a house alone? How about two adult women, unmatched romantically? No. Of course they wouldn’t. Only a woman alone in a house with a dog, me, in other words, would make someone worry. A woman with a cat even fits into some prefabricated notion, the safety of a stereotype, an innocuous pink rubber mold. But with a dog, with Tito, no. No one takes comfort in a single woman with only a dog for a companion.

  Beau’s caring manifests in a number of ways. On my porch and in my inbox, I find everything from philosophy tomes to DIY home renovation blogs to architectural manifestos. He crosses out the titles in Sharpie, adds his own. One Perspective and Some Kind of Inspiration and See?

  It took ten years for Herman Wallace to decide what he wanted his home to look like. After thirty years in solitary confinement (for a murder he did not commit), Wallace received a letter from an art student at a West Coast collegiate temple. She wanted to know, “What kind of house do you, a man who lives in a six-foot-by-nine-foot cell, dream of?”

  While living in a cell at Angola, that notorious modern plantation, he dreamt of tulips, Adirondacks perched on a second-floor balcony, portraits of Tubman, Turner, Brown, a bathtub as big as his cell of confinement, windows, windows, windows. For ten years, he contemplated what his concept of home looked like.

  “In front of the house,” he wrote to her, “I have three squares of gardens. The gardens are the easiest to imagine. I would like for guests to smile and walk through flowers all year long.”

  This is my duty: to realize the fullness of this task.

  “I’m going to send you some vitamins,” my mother says. She is a voice coming out of a speaker on the kitchen island. My hands are not busy but I’ve taken to using the speaker for all calls. The calm that comes from the way the house fills up with sound.