by Lee Matalone
This is how I will make this home happen: Pat bought me out of the our-house and then gave me a lump sum, for the remodeling, the new furniture buying, the purchasing of spices, cleaning supplies, linens, to replace the ones from our life together. The lump sum was generous. Too generous. I wish he had left me standing in the driveway of this empty house, not even a Swiffer to wipe up my new, lonely messes.
But he didn’t. His contribution will keep me renovating the kitchen, the master bath. I could build a deck and still have something left over to refinish the hardwood floors. He left me in a position whereby I couldn’t harbor even a modicum of anger toward him. Accruing resentment like trying to climb a greased pole to the moon.
Some houses have names but the one Pat and I owned didn’t and this one doesn’t either. Beau says we no longer name our houses because we move around so much. If we were to name these places, we would have too much difficulty in letting them go.
Or, I suppose, you could just name every place of residence the same thing, like how someone would name all the dachshunds of their lives Eleanor. You disappear the loss under a facade of continuity. Eleanor and Eleanor and Eleanor.
“We should have registered,” my twenty-six-year-old self told Pat. “Then we would never have gotten these plates. These are an affront to the eye.”
Against the light coming in through the bay window, he held up the plate, examining its floral detailing. “It’s not so bad. We can’t really afford anything else right now.”
This was our starter-rental home. All containable, manageable spaces and corners.
Then, everything with us was justs. Just twenty-six, just married, just moved to a new town, which depleted our individual bank accounts, even with the assistance of his parents, just the two of us now, with an assortment of expensive plates and cutlery and vases and no cash for the pizza man. We felt lucky for what we had. But I still hated the plates. And the Formica table with the rusted legs that was trendy but made us a cliché of young married life. We were just like those young people who loved things that were falling apart because they didn’t know anything about what it actually meant, what it actually felt like, for things and people to fall apart.
“One day when we are settled and can afford it we will buy plates that you want,” my young husband said.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m being stupid. They are just plates.”
“Nothing is stupid about plates.”
In our new kitchen we fucked and talked of a puppy.
Part of building a house necessitates living in denial that it could ever fall apart.
On the hillside behind the house we laid a blanket, and I picked some flowers and placed them down between us. I had cooked eggs and apple sausage and he had pressed fresh orange juice. It was the first day of spring and it was just warm enough to be out in the morning air again.
He brought the plate to meet his knee, sending shards of porcelain across the grass.
“What are you doing?” I asked, rubbing my cheek with the heel of my hand, erasing a granule of bread into my skin.
“So we are committed to a future of new plates,” he said. “We will have the plates that we want.”
The thighs of his jeans were streaked with egg yolk. I took my empty glass and pitched it across the field of tall grasses and wildflowers that spread before us. He pulled the red blanket around us. The weight of his body pressed my nose into the earth and I could taste the sweetness of oranges.
While I eat, I listen to the police scanner. I discovered an app that you could download onto your cell phone, providing access to the feeds of police departments across the country, from Boise to Miami.
Over breakfast I sit cross-legged on the floor and set the phone down next to my plate. My go-to stations include the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, Detroit Police Dispatch, and Salt Lake City PD. Every now and then I will choose randomly, listening into a suburb of Kansas or a strip of desert highway outside of Reno. The officers’ voices are muffled. I chew quietly, so I can make out the words. I have to train my ear. I have to learn the codes.
He 401-ed into another car meaning the perp drove his car into another person’s vehicle, causing an accident. Pancake. Paper bitch. Pep rally alley. I like learning this jargon, which makes me feel close to these stranger-professionals in their pressed uniforms. Through this shared language, I feel a connection, however tenuous, to the female officer driving to a taco shop where a man has been reported throwing himself into the walls of a bathroom around nine in the morning.
As I spoon cereal into my mouth, a cop in Reno is already hours into his shift. I imagine him rising in the dark, buttoning his uniform, kissing his wife on the cheek (who is still fast asleep, whose alarm won’t go off for another three hours), and driving off into the dark morning. Maybe he stopped to get a coffee, but it’s likely he didn’t have time. Someone is having an allergic reaction to a medication on the other side of town. In so many ways, he is needed.
At the scene, he rolls down the squad car’s window, the air cold and stiff, which he cuts with cigarette smoke. He rolls up the window, pauses, smiles.
It is so much easier to keep a house clean without any furniture. The Shakers were also well aware of this fact. They hung their chairs upside down on their walls to prevent dust from accumulating on their seats, to more swiftly sweep their handcrafted wood floors. Maybe I’ll keep this room like this. Empty, with just the light through the window for shapeliness. That’s all I need for now.
At a later date, maybe I’ll feel the impulse to buy a solid wood chair that is overpriced but whose beautifully carved details I won’t be able to resist. I will put it in the corner by the window and listen to Reno, cereal bowl on my lap.
Fuck dining tables. I’ll eat on the floor, on a red blanket with white plates.
Kitchen
From a blog post on the application of color psychology to the home:
RED: Beware of red in the kitchen, especially if you are watching your waistline: red triggers the gut. Side effects of red kitchen walls: snacking and overeating. Save red for the workout room, as red increases your blood pressure and heart rate, kicking your ass into gear.
GREEN: Green is the color of focus. Save this hue for the rooms of the mind, the home office, for example. The mind thrives in Frosted Emerald.
BLUE: Lose weight with blue. It can curb your appetite. Or it can lower your heart rate and make you more productive. Blue. All the rooms of the world should be blue.
WHITE: Convey cleanliness with white. Beware of its sterilizing effects. Use white to sanitize the areas that need it most, the areas that need to be purged of demons—dust or mind-natured—the bathroom, the kitchen, maybe even the bedroom, the hall closet, the living room. White, for this time of my life. Not a sign of purity, but of mourning, as in Hindu culture. Save the reds for occasions of love and triumph, weddings and Holi.
On the five-year anniversary of my father’s leaving us, my mother and I did girl things. In a freshly steamed dress with horizontal stripes that maximized the width of her breasts and hips, she waited at the base of the steps of the school bus.
“I want my hair to look like yours.” I stopped at her feet, fingering the rubber band tied around the muddled ochre strands lying on my shoulder.
“You want to have more fun, is that it?” She turned her head, creating a portrait profile, gussying her perfect blond bob that no one would care too much about, not the other doctors and certainly not her patients with their legs spread before her. Maybe a nurse offered a kind word or two now and then, asking for a recommendation for a colorist in town. Surely they must have craved that perfect blond bob, which was in no way natural but nevertheless illuminated the gold in her muddy skin. “Hop in. We’re going to Sally’s.”
Two girls riding to the beauty store. This was our anniversary. No boys allowed.
As a child, I wrote the following on the cardboard interior of my school notebook’s back cover:
How many girls have cried into the soup
How many girls have cried into the spaghetti sauce
At least two, at least two
Cotton
China White
Honeymilk
Great White
Lily of the Valley
Decorator’s White
Paper White
White Whisp
Oyster
Winter Orchard
Swiss Coffee
Slipper Satin
White Dove
Chantilly Lace
Greek Villa
WL-05
Gypsum
White Chocolate
White Tie
Linen
Pointing
I’m imagining the conversations that will take place at the hypothetical dining room table when people come to visit. Like my mother, for instance, who lives a two-ish hour drive away, in a suburb outside of D.C. At some inevitable point, she will come and visit.
“There’s something wrong with that dog,” she will say.
“How do you mean?”
“He’s pacing all over the place. Doesn’t he lay down? Isn’t that what dogs are supposed to do?” she’ll ask. “Lay down?”
She forbid me to have a pet when I was growing up. Unsanitary was the word she used.
“He has anxiety and won’t eat,” I’ll say.
“Don’t we all.”
“He’s on Prozac.”
“And? Does that make him special?” Then she will bring a porcelain cup very delicately to her lips, because she won’t drink her coffee in anything else but this paper-thin china, and sip in a way that you can’t hear her swallow. It is rude, she used to say, to make noises when you eat. She is a preserver of silence, one of the last of the kind left in this country. I’ve come to appreciate this quality.
“I can’t remember what you told me, but what do they have Pat on for nausea? Zofran? Anzemet? Aloxi?”
“How the hell would I know,” I’ll say, pushing my chair away from her, and I will rant about how many times I’ve told her that I don’t know what kind of pills he’s on, that he isn’t speaking to me, that I know nothing, that he may not even need the pills anymore because he is better, or it’s too late.
The crystal rattling in the hypothetical cabinet, I’ll say, I know nothing.
$1.99 for a set of Snow White Matte Ceramic Subway Tile. A set includes forty pieces, total. The weight of the set is 33.37 pounds, precisely. A single tile is approximately four inches by twelve inches.
Marry the Snow White Matte Ceramic Subway Tile with the complementary Pure White Matte Hexagonal Porcelain Tile for a chic, unified look throughout your space. This unique Subway Tile will make you the envy of all your friends. Be careful with this tile—its sheen of perfection will be off-putting to some, who cannot financially or emotionally afford the Snow White Matte Ceramic Subway Tile. Be prepared to lose friends, who will find that the perfect kitchen you have created reflects on the shoddiness of their own kitchens, and by extrapolation, their lives. The Snow White Matte Subway Tile is an indispensable component to the perfect home. Don’t forego this exquisite detail. Your idyllic life will be disconcerting to others.
An anthropologist, for the purpose of a study on the union of couples’ routines, visited a recent widow in her home. Sitting at the kitchen table, the widow, the anthropologist noticed, had bruises on her forehead.
“He used to shut the cabinet doors,” the widow said, the impressions on her forehead the same shades of blue eyeshadow drag queens and preteens paint on their eyelids, as if she wanted to prove something to strangers. “I didn’t even know I left them open.”
The mailwoman has not arrived, though it is three thirty, her usual drop-off hour. I peek through the window, but I do not see her truck or her blues, which she fills out in all the right places, making the uniform look stylish, even kind of sexy, her jet-black hair falling in waves down the middle of her back.
I run to the driveway and get in the car. With my head out the window, I scan the mailboxes, looking for the naked, flaccid semaphore flags. I follow the trail of these particular mailboxes until I reach the vertical flag, erect and proud. I park the car, get out, standing in the middle of the street. I scan the landscape. Children shriek, in the good, fun-having register, a sound that washes over me as if I were underwater and everyone else were dry, looking down on me.
There.
I do not even lock the car door. I run-walk up behind her as she coasts down the sidewalk, earphones shutting her off from the outside world. I can hear her music, some pop-soul song that goes Baby baby baby. I put my hand on her shoulder.
She stumbles as she turns around to look at her assailant, tearing a single earphone from her right ear, the strand dangling inept at her breast.
It all made so much sense back at the house. I have scared this woman, all for a package of plates.
In A World of Too Many Options, Here Are Some More: The Countertop Issue
NATURALS
Marble: $50 to $150 per square foot, installed.
PROS: Glamour, color options, heat resistant. CONS: Coffee stains will kill the dream. Price makes fantasy.
Limestone: $50 to $100 per square foot, installed.
PROS: Beauty. CONS: Price. Upkeep. Sensitivity. Even tidy people leave stains.
Granite: $40 to $100 per square foot, installed.
PROS: Low-maintenance, scratch and stain resistant, high resale value. CONS: Oh, Mom.
Butcher Block: $40 to $100 per square foot, installed.
PROS: Instant cutting board. If you’re into the wabi-sabi aesthetic, the wear will be glorious. CONS: High maintenance. You can’t unsee my cuts.
ENGINEERED
Corian, Celador, Silestone, Caesarstone.
PROS: No sealant required, cost effective, low-maintenance, names like knights. CONS: Burns easily.
I thought I saw him. I think I did. That curly head of hair in the passenger seat and my mother driving. Pat and my mother had always been friendly, had shared a comfortable rapport, but. The head of hair and my mother were crossing the intersection. They looked glamorous in their black sunglasses and smiles.
Lost, I tapped the car in front of me. There was a small show. The other driver and I got out of our cars and looked at the bumper. The driver shook his head, endlessly. He never said a word. He just kept shaking his head until he got in his car and drove away.
It’s impossible, of course.
Once an Army brat, always an Army brat, my mother likes to say. As a child, due to the nature of my grandfather’s work, she and her siblings were picked up and moved around every few years, from Tucson to Stuttgart to Norfolk to Tucson again. This impermanence stunted her sense of home. Her desire to root was less like a dream or aspiration than a craving, a biological imperative. When she had me, she saw this other biological truth, me, as an opportunity to sate the itch for good.
To settle, she and my father chose a cul-de-sac situated on the edge of a pond in an upper-middle-class suburb outside of D.C., among other people who wanted a little peace and quiet to raise their own. It was her chance to finally know a home.
Even when he moved on from us, she stayed, kept the house for herself, for me. After two husbands, she had concluded that men only made home making more difficult. Alone, she could still preserve the fantasy of home.
I know she will die there, in my childhood home, nondescriptly, in a neighborhood where a new set of yearners, dreamers have taken root.
After years of moving around, of willful impermanence, I want to settle, too. I am only now realizing that I am just like her.
“Two of the small plates shattered and four of the large ones,” I tell the customer service woman over the phone. My toes poke out of the bathwater. I practice curling and uncurling them, one by one, a wave building, cresting, breaking, settling, and starting over again. “I will need those replaced.”
“How many total plates do you need?”
�
��I need two more of the small. Four of the large.”
“Can you tell me again what happened?” the customer service person asks.
“Like I said, the postal worker has no delicacy. She just drops the boxes on the doorstep like a caveman.”
“You mean cavewoman. Are you sure it’s her fault?”
“Is this standard protocol, to assume the customer is lying?”
“No, ma’am. However, there is some distress in your voice that makes me think that maybe you’re not telling me the whole truth.”
“Just because there’s distress in my voice doesn’t mean I’m lying. I could be under duress for a number of reasons.”
“What did you say?”
“I could be under duress for any number of reasons.”
“I don’t think you’re using that word correctly.”
“Oh. Well.”
“I’m sorry for making things worse. I will send you the six plates.”
“It’s okay. I understand. I bet people try to con the system all the time.”
“You wouldn’t believe.”
“People must be desperate or something.”
“Especially this time of year. The holidays always make people do crazy things.”
“I’m remodeling a kitchen that may cost as much as a low-end sedan.”
“You must have a good job, ma’am.”
“Well, the thing is, my husband, ex-husband, is giving me some money for the house. I’m a freelancer. He has the good job.”
“He sounds like a good man. A real good one.”
“I would never be able to afford these things on my own. If you only knew how much this fireclay farmhouse sink costs.”
“I’m telling you. People do crazy things. But what you’re saying is understandable.”
“Thank you for saying that. You know, it’s just me here. There’s not even anyone else in this house with whom I can eat pie on these new plates.”
“Someone will come over. Especially if it’s good pie.”
“Are you sure that’s not crazy?”
“Is what crazy?”
“Never mind.”