Home Making Read online

  “I appreciate that, Mom, but I can get my own.”

  “But you won’t. We both know you won’t do that right now.” In staccato form, she reprimands her mutt, not Ti-to, Ti-to! but Hen-ri! Hen-ri! “Are you sure you don’t want me to come and see you?”

  “I’m so busy right now. I wouldn’t know what to do with you. Soon though.”

  “You know you don’t have to entertain me. I can sit. I can read. I can even help do whatever you need help doing.” From the island, a cacophony of barking. From the floor, Tito tilts his head at me wondering, Will we have a visitor, finally?

  “Soon, Mom.” Soon, Tito.

  “I’ll send vitamins,” she says.

  I should be landscaping, caulking, painting, unpacking, organizing, but instead I’m going through my social media pages, looking for ghosts to haunt. There is a high school sweetheart who nearly burnt down his college apartment trying to make MDMA, a fling who I accompanied to his AA meetings. There is M., but there has always been M., a figure of longing who came into my life before Pat, when we were both students, he a graduate student and I an undergraduate. If never sated, some affections can live on for years, dormant yet capable of being awoken at the stroke of a key, the dispatch of a text message.

  Mostly though, I harass telemarketers.

  “I thought cell phones were a safe space,” I say. “But I suppose it was inevitable that you’d find a way.”

  “Well, no one has landlines nowadays,” the man selling home and garden magazines says. “We have to connect with you somehow.”

  “You know, I appreciate you connecting.”

  “We don’t hear that a lot. So thank you.”

  “I just mean, you seem like a nice person, despite your job’s tendency to irritate.”

  “I appreciate that, too. Could I interest you in a subscription to Good Housekeeping?”

  “Do you have anything else?”

  “House Beautiful. Country Living. Woman’s Day.”

  “What about Garden & Gun?”

  “Garden & Gun is not a part of the Hearst Group.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Perhaps you’d rather something for your husband? Esquire makes for a nice gift. Or is he more of the Car and Driver type?”

  “Good luck out there. I have to go.”

  “Tell me what you need. We can help.”

  “Good luck, I said.”

  “Well, you too.”

  From last week’s doorstep book from Beau: “It can be hard to walk into a freshly decorated house without feeling preemptively sad at the decay impatiently waiting to begin: how soon the walls will crack, the white cupboards will yellow, and the carpets stain.”

  After all my hard work, after all the walls are painted and the windows caulked and the tulips cut and placed in the kitchen table’s vase, time starts back at the house almost immediately. There’s a certain undeniable futility to this work of home building.

  HOUSE TO-DO: TO BEGIN

  Buy paint for guest bathroom (Honeymilk or Lily of the Valley?).

  Build raised garden beds—> Call Beau.

  Dust everything, again.

  Wash pillows. Buy pillow protectors. It may be too late for these pillows. Maybe order new pillows.

  Call exterminator. Sounds at night, scratching. Raccoons in walls, in attic? Bats on the beams?

  Consideration: Is a yoga room cheesy/over the top? Would an altar be gauche? Incense and candles and a gong? No gong. But maybe one of those little waterfall machines that you plug into the wall to create a tranquil white noise. Tell no one about this room.

  Objects contain parts of the people who own them. Though my mother’s adoptive mother died before I had a chance to know her, her emerald earrings still gleam with a hint of her cruelty. With Pat, what is left of our philosophical disagreements is contained in a coffee table book of dilapidated barns and wooden houses taken over by grasses and wildflowers.

  “That’s something I can’t settle with,” Pat, my sick husband, once said. “The fact that people are obsessed with decaying buildings and dying cities.”

  “You can’t deny that an old barn is beautiful,” I said.

  “But the fact that people find it beautiful says something. People find beauty in loss. At what point does that quest for death become a self-fulfilling prophecy?”

  When people go, the things they leave behind can feel haunted. A father can take your left ventricle and a husband can take your frontal lobe, leaving behind a tea kettle, a lamp shade from Bed Bath & Beyond. A wooden spoon can hold the existential weight of a family Bible while you turn into a shell.

  Once, my mother told me about visiting Bergen-Belsen as a child, ten years after the camps had been liberated. Even then, she said, you could smell the smoke.

  It is very possible that it can be too late for happiness.

  Le Corbusier believed that the function of a house was simple, to provide 1. A shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves, and the inquisitive. 2. A receptacle for light and sun. 3. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, and personal life.

  I do not want to live in a cell. I want rooms and warmth and inquisitive minds. I refuse to live in a receptacle.

  TITO: TO-DO

  Bathe Tito (hypoallergenic shampoo).

  Take to vet for annual vaccinations—> Ask if he needs kennel cough if he’s never at the dog park/around other dogs.

  Buy the good wet food, just this once. These are special circumstances.

  Look into getting companion. Dogs get lonely. Two dogs = easier than one. For me and him. Mutual entertainment/engagement. Large dog or another little dog? Large dog: Would s/he fit in my car? Would possibly need a different, roomier car. New (used) car: hatchback or sedan? Or maybe a pick-up would be more practical. I could use it for the garden, for moving dirt or paint cans or wood. In case I need to do any repairs to the shed, I may need to transport wood. How many miles do I have on my car right now? Check into this. Pushing 120, I think. Really time to get a new car, one big enough for two dogs, regardless of size. Not good for children either. I may want a Pyrenees. I will need a car I don’t care about littering with tufts of thick white hair. A truck, a big red truck with an extended cab for the dogs, with a metal floor. No carpet, no frills, for me and Tito and the Pyrenees. Brush Tito. Then dust. Dust everything.

  I’ve always fantasized about homes. I’ve drawn out versions of my fantasy-dwelling in sketchbooks and on notepads while sitting on a tattered mid-century couch in a bungalow I wished were mine. In my early twenties, pre-Pat, I traveled around the country in search of the perfect town where I could put down roots. Renting in some town in some other person’s house, I would have fantasies of ripping out the kitchen cabinets and placing open shelves where I could display my cookbooks and stack my white plates, where I could set a planter containing a single stem of purple orchids.

  In the Times, there is an article about people who get very attached to houses, as if loving a house were a peculiar thing. I click on the headline, but I do not read a word.

  I thought our home was a castle. I thought those walls could keep us safe.

  More from Le Corbusier, someone I think may very well have been a madman: “Home life today is being paralysed by the deplorable notion that we must have furniture.”

  But then again, it is easy to forget that a chair, a table, is a refinement, not a utility. Think of the Japanese eating on pads on the floor. They have thrived without the presence of a boudeuse or buffet in their homes.

  I should be honest with myself: I will have to stick a Womb Chair in the corner, a reproduction, anyway, something to embrace me.

  home base

  home life

  hometown

  home grown

  home body

  home sick

  home away from home

  no place like home

  E.T. phone home

  run away from home

  Can you be too old to run away from home? Can
a full-grown woman run away from home? Can she run away from a home that was forced upon her? She should be allowed to, if that’s what she wants.

  Just as President Kubitschek constructed Brasília in the hopes that its Niemeyers would usher in an age of Modern values, I can build this house in the shapes that will foster my own ideals. Niemeyer thought that the aerospacial curves of his buildings could bring progress to Brazil’s forests. The stark white concrete pillars could teach reason and order to the people of undeveloped Brazil (an interesting, if not disturbing idea, colonizing the mind through architecture).

  I can set the kitchen table for four. I can make sure the bed in the guest room is always made.

  nova mulher, Americana e moderna

  That’s all you need? Beau texts back.

  I copy and paste. Peanut butter. Coffee. Bread. Toilet paper.

  That can’t be all you need, he texts. Tell me what you need.

  I have been alone in this house for a month thinking about what color to paint the hall bathroom.

  Consider it building a watchtower, I tell people when they ask why I bought a house so close to where Pat and I once shared a home. If he will not let me be with him while he dies, then I can make sure that nothing or no one else can hurt him. From here, I can still feel like I am doing my duty, like I am being the wife.

  Mom and Beau keep telling me not to rush things. One room at a time, they tell me.

  But I’m not trying to build an entire city, I tell them. I’m just trying to rearrange these pieces of my life and turn them into something that resembles a home.

  One room, they reiterate. Start with the space with the smallest square footage and work up from there. Think of Rome, they say.

  I am unblackening my teeth, a white strip adhered to my smile. Beau stands in the doorframe of the bathroom, flipping through a celebrity rag, while I hover over the sink, the blue cardboard box with its disembodied mouth glaring up at me from the basin. Beau says that my teeth are big and beautiful and that when I feel like smiling again my smile should glisten. He does not say, smile, as some men do. He just says, when you feel like smiling again, you should glow, baby. He says, in that edifying way of his, that Japanese women, upon marriage, once painted their teeth black, a sign of their commitment. I say, actually, I told you that, Beau. Nice try.

  But I am no longer a wife, not quite anymore. I must paint my teeth white, though I still feel the black paint opaquing my incisors. I must go back to when they grew in ivory. I must go back to the beginning.

  Ayumi

  Haha Haha Haha. We are all crying this word though we do not know what it means. Some of the older boys and girls say it to us little ones. They run up to the windows, make binoculars of their eyes and say, Haha is coming. We are all getting Hahas. Haha Haha Haha. I like the sound of the word. My eighteen-month-old lips love this word. I push the “H” out of my mouth like I’m trying to make a halo of fog on the window that passes light above my crib.

  When we Haha-ed, the sisters would smile, pinch our cheeks, kiss our ears. They thought we were laughing. Or, they wanted to believe we were laughing. What those sisters went through, seeing babies dropped off day by day by day, blue eyes and mud hair, green eyes and soybean skin, soon to be motherless, fatherless, haha-less, chichi-less. They must have had so much sadness. They must have felt so guilty at what adults like them were incapable of.

  Sunflowers. Sister Mayu wears sunflower-yellow socks that pop out of her white habit and a headscarf like a bridal veil. One of the older girls asks, “Mayu, when are you getting married? May I come to your wedding? Will you have a daughter? Can you name her after me? I’m your sweetness, Mayu. I’m so sah-weeeet.”

  When the soldiers in the cardboard-starch suits visit, they always offer the bigger children candy. Hershey’s and Wrigley’s, things we children have never seen. Keiko, one of the other children, comes over to the edge of my crib, smacking her pretty pink mouth, her hair stringy and blond and bobbed and her eyes black gobstoppers. Want one, Ayumi? You can’t have one! Too young! Too young! One day though. I’ll share my candy with you. One day, when you’re my little sister and we go home, I will share my candy with you. But not the chocolate. The chocolate is all mine. Potty time, Ayumi? Do you need to go to the potty? We are all going to the potty. And she lifts me out of my crib, perching my little rotund body on her little hip, not even a hip, a little ledge of bone and skin. The nuns feed us little ones and feed us and feed us until we are round and happy-looking. The older kids, the ones who can handle themselves, who have begun to understand the choices adults have to make, have to go without, sometimes.

  My hair. Thick and black. All of us infants have the same haircut, as if the sisters overturned a rice bowl and shorn helmets around its porcelain rim.

  Potty time. A row of porcelain bowls topped with bare butts. What a vision! We alien children perched on bowls, our sweaters hanging over our hibu, dutifully sitting, waiting for others to go, and maybe we go while we’re waiting for the other children to go, because we are sitting and we are bored and what else is there to do but kuso.

  It is said that children cannot remember anything below the age of three, but I remember lying in that crib, waiting. I remember Sister Mayu’s sunflower socks and the boys who picked on the blond girls before the mud-headed girls. I was seeing the white men and women with hair that matched the skin that matched the eyes, bodies coordinated and coherent, seeing these men and women look around the room, scanning the heads and faces in cribs, the rug rats playing with blocks on the floor, the bigger girls and boys working on their lessons, the white men and women scanning for the ones that looked like them, mostly, not the ones that looked like us, the ones that looked like they didn’t belong anywhere, the ones whose only home was in this place, a place of funny white hats that looked like veils (but would never be veils) and yellow socks and sterile tile floors. This is what we had to call home, not the world of our hahas outside the window, or the world of our fathers that lay on the other edge of the sea. Here was home. How could we not remember what that was like?

  When you’re in an orphanage for the first two years of your life, you grow up knowing that motherhood is a choice, not a given state. You don’t just get pregnant, suffer the nine months, give birth, and become Mother. You choose this title. At the formative moment when the doctor takes the baby from your body, cuts the cord, checks vitals, you have some options. From that moment, the choices emerge.

  Option one: When the doctor puts the baby in your arms, you can cross them, shake your head, say, Not my baby, give the baby to the state, allow him to become the child of a devoted Mother, someone who has consciously decided she wants the title.

  Option two: When the doctor puts the baby in your arms, you can take the baby, sway the baby, take the baby home, put the baby to sleep, but you don’t like the time the baby takes, the time the baby takes away from you, from your independence, your romantic and sexual pleasures, so the baby becomes an afterthought, something that looks cute in pretty pink pants and dresses with a little ribbon snapped to the single wisp of hair but not something worth exchanging your vanity for, and the baby grows up, becomes a toddler, becomes a preteen, becomes a young adult, becomes an adult, knowing that this mother never really wanted to be a mother, that this was not the path she wanted, that she never committed to Motherhood.

  Option three: You can throw yourself into this endeavor of Motherhood. You can take that baby into your arms, stick her to your breast, give her a home, all that she wants (choices), all that she doesn’t want (discipline), and she will grow up knowing that Motherhood is a beautiful thing, a beautiful beautiful beautiful thing.

  Is it clear what I chose for Chloe?

  For those that didn’t have happy childhoods, there are two ways to parent, if you choose to enter into Motherhood: You can hammer into your own child the lessons you were forced to learn, spanking the way you were spanked, refusing to dote the way your parents refused to dote on you, to show t
he child that the world is cyclical and that you don’t deserve anything better than what you yourself got from your own mother and father. Or, you, the parent with the unhappy childhood, can say, I’m going to give this child everything I didn’t have. You can shower this child with love and affection, plastic toys that break after a few days of soft play or expensive, organic French toys made of wood that cost more than your week’s worth of groceries. You decide, This child will never not feel love, she will never have the opportunity to not feel loved, and you will commit entirely to this thing, you will give everything to this child, to this role of Mother, even at the expense of your own personal gratification and independence, because what matters is showing your child that not all people are hopeless, that things can be good. They can.

  You choose this second option because you understand you can never forget the childhood you were delivered.

  On your mother’s fiftieth birthday, after months of physical distance, you lean in to hug her, but then the smell of cigarettes in her hair triggers a certain memory you’ve done all you can to exorcise.

  Five years old, crinoline fanned around me. The tree’s popcorn illuminated red and green. Under and around the tree waited boxes and bags, all wrapped up by my mother. My father was not around to do the wrapping, but Christmas morning there he was, slippered and robed with a cup of coffee and a knee to share. I wrapped my little hands around his calf and watched my siblings open their gifts. A three-speed for my brother Terry; a denim jacket for my eldest, Russ; a robin’s-egg-blue dress hand-sewn by my mother, the fabric picked out by my sister, Jean, and style modeled after a photo she saw of Grace Kelly in Look. After opening the box, Jean rushed upstairs. For ten minutes she primped in the long mirror in her bedroom, fantasizing about some boy taking her out for a drive in the dry desert night. When she came downstairs, she was all seriousness. Against the hardness of her face, the baby blue of her dress registered steel.