Home Making

by Lee Matalone

“It’s not the craziest thing I’ve heard today, ma’am. You can bet on that.”

  “You’re good at this. I will make sure to write you a positive review online.”

  “I appreciate that, ma’am. I will send you the six plates. Is there anything else I can help you with tonight?”

  “I’m just getting started but I’ll let you go.”

  “Sleep well, ma’am.”

  “And you too.”

  While slicing tomatoes, Pat told me he was sick. The fruits were firm and juicy, beautiful yellow things fresh from our garden. He felt that, though doctors were cautiously hopeful, he could not be. We had built the garden only a year before, our shared project, a place that could bear fruit for a future generation. He needed to wait his death out alone. Even their skins smelled fragrant. From his private island, our home, he would watch the disease come closer and closer, sitting solo on the shore as the ship puttered into port. The juice, it was so sweet.

  What am I supposed to do, I ask friends, strangers, the checkout clerk at the grocery store. I want to send the ship away. I want to destroy its electronic equipment so it cannot know which way it needs to go. I want the ship to disappear, for its captain and crew to never be heard from again.

  But I can’t do anything like that because I don’t know what the ship looks like. Is it a sailboat or an aircraft carrier? Maybe it’s not even a ship at all. The cancer is just a fog that has taken the shape of a destroyer.

  He told me, we can’t stay living here together anymore. We must remember this house in its complete happiness. This decision is for us.

  One day I stroke, and M. strokes back. It has been three or four years since we last spoke, since I was last in his bed, since Pat and I had our drifting moment. But the yearning, as always, is still there. We emerge from the cave again, hungry.

  I’ve already chipped two of the plates. I’m awaiting the first glass to break like the ball drop on New Year’s Eve. I’m trying to be more honest, so I’ve decided on the butcher block. Let the nicks of my knife proliferate.

  Downstairs Hall Closet

  You can’t forget the small spaces. Do not neglect the corner of the living room, the third shelf in the hall closet adjacent to the half bath. These require your attention as much as the master bed and the color of the walls in the baby’s room, if there is a baby.

  A plant. Put a plant in the corner. Something leafy and green that will remind you of the tropics, of somewhere not here. Drape a sheepskin imported from Reykjavik on the delicate chair by the foyer window. In those moments of despair, you can look at that plant or sheepskin and think of elsewhere, of a beach on an island that may or may not exist. Like God or the Resurrection, it doesn’t matter what part is real, what actually happened. You don’t need to believe in it for its powers to work. That plant will save you.

  Think of your corners. These places make a difference.

  This was my thinking when I was a child: toss all of Mom’s shoes into the closets, under the bed. Take her coats from off the arm of the sofa and from the backs of the chairs and shove them in there, too. Close all the cupboards that she has left ajar. Turn off the faucet she has left running, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, downstairs, and upstairs.

  I’d shove all of my mother’s messes into the closet. Whatever I could fit. If someone were to come over, which they never did—my mother never had visitors—they would think everything was perfect.

  “We are going for a drive,” Beau says over the phone. Beau, a sculptor and professor, a graduate school roommate, confidant, grocery gatherer. Now he teaches at a local university. He lives alone in an apartment above a hardware store that he will never let me see. “You need to get out of the house.”

  In his hulking white F-150, the bed and rear cab packed with bolts of tulle and polypropylene netting, he drives us around the green hills that distinguish the central terrain of the state. The air is warm maybe for the last time this year. Soon, it will be full-bore winter. The changing of the seasons now happens in an instant.

  He packs a picnic of stinky cheese and hard crackers and good bourbon. He is good at these things.

  “Doesn’t the air feel nice? Doesn’t it feel right out here?” He takes a cut of home-sliced cheese from a Pyrex container, places it on a cracker, and hands it to me.

  Around us, people with kids and dogs jump out of cars and scurry into a nondescript brick building. We are picnicking at a rest stop.

  “Virginia has the most beautiful rest stops of any state,” he says. “Except Mississippi. If only you could visit one of those rest stops. You’d never want to leave.”

  He tells me he fantasizes often about these travelers. He says you can look at them and consider what they are wearing, listen to the cadence of their voices and accents and wonder where they are going, under what circumstances, to a wedding or a funeral or back home for a holiday. He watches the woman in her twenties walking her dog along the designated area of grass just for pets. He admires the trucker stretched out on the soft hill, his cap tipped down over his eyes and the top of his shirt unbuttoned so that the sun can warm and rejuvenate him for another thousand miles.

  Beau likes to think about these people temporarily without homes. “Like fish out of a tank,” he says. “Some are awkward because they are learning what freedom really means.” Learn from them, he wants to say to me, though he doesn’t. Look at their faces.

  My husband chose this house. While we tended our garden, he said, “I found you a house you will love.”

  In the last month of our life together, we drove from our house to my new house for the inspection. Together, not together, we walked room by room, following the inspector, who had the habit of pulling up his too-loose jeans by the front of his belt. Pat brought along his friend, a builder of spec homes, to assess what improvements could be made.

  “These beams aren’t bearing,” Pat’s friend, Carl, said, pointing at a piece of wood hovering over the master bedroom. “So you can raise the ceiling here. You really don’t want these low ceilings.”

  Walking downstairs, he’d point at a wall along the banister and say, “Knock it out.” There were a few walls to knock out.

  Surveying the water filtration system, Pat pointed at a bright blue vessel.

  “That’s for soft water,” Carl said.

  “Meaning?” I said.

  “It converts hard water into soft water. Soft water’s easier on the pipes. And it doesn’t leave any splotchy shit on glasses. I have it in my house.”

  “What’s the downside?” I ask.

  “Sometimes you feel like you can’t get the soap off.”

  “That’s not good,” Pat said, talking to but not looking at me.

  “It’s not true,” Carl said. “It’s actually better at getting the soap off. It’s just most people are used to hard water and think that squeaky feeling means you’re clean. It’s bullshit. That’s a layer of soap scum on you.”

  “Interesting,” Pat said, looking at me.

  “We were never actually clean,” I said, clarifying things for us all.

  After the inspector left, we stood around the kitchen island, assessing.

  “I’d say this house is ninety percent there,” Carl said, hands resting atop the laminate, definitely-in-need-of-replacing countertop.

  “That’s good news, then?” I asked.

  “Great news,” Pat said. “So most of the renovations are fun, cosmetic, nothing structural, right?”

  “Mostly fun, yeah,” Carl affirmed.

  Fun.

  This closet is the only part of the house that doesn’t need updating, painting, refinishing, rewiring. Whoever lived here before had kept this closet in pristine condition. He, she, they, had painted the space an eggshell white that radiates. Its glossy finish emits an odor of chemical purity. The odor has yet to be tainted by the muskiness of dust motes. I fold the towels and extra set of linens and blankets and set them onto the shelves. I flick the switch and the bulb illuminates just as i
t should, providing the kind of light that’s warm and yellow and terrible for the environment.

  Look, Tito. Wonderful.

  Guest Room

  I am jumping from room to room. Downstairs and now upstairs. I am avoiding certain spaces. I am not ready for them yet.

  Le Corbusier would be upset with me. Without a plan, he would say, you have willfulness. You have no order.

  I have become a magnet for chaos.

  Aside from the au pairs, no one ever stayed in my mother’s guest room. The only people to filter in and out of our lives were the service people, those who came to deliver the mail, repair the kitchen sink, check the water heater.

  “Do you know what the ruelle is?” my mother said over breakfast the morning after she discovered me, for the first time, fast asleep in the crevice between the bed and the wall of the guest room, a blanket draped over my body, toes poking out from beneath.

  Ruelle. She liked to hear the word break from her lips. While raising me, in the few spare hours she had, she dug into her history, learning French, Japanese, the things her adoptive parents had never shared with her. Her learning, inevitably, meant that I, too, would learn. She wanted me to know that she, and by extension, me, did not belong to some Waspy vision of America. Our house could never be surrounded by a white picket fence, a nice and clean family of four tucked inside. That experience was not for us.

  “A ruelle,” she continued, “is what you were asleep in.” She sipped at the edge of her coffee cup, as if the liquid were still hot. We had already been sitting at the table for an hour, a ritual she set out for us every Saturday morning, learning our heritage. “De quoi as-tu peur?” she asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders, followed the cereal in my milk.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  I had an “A” and an “L” and an “O,” but I also had an “F” and a “U” and a “T.” I had a “B” and another “O” and a “Y.” I had many letters. I was just getting started.

  “If it makes you feel better, then you can sleep down there,” she said, standing from the table, our lesson over for the day. “Just don’t forget to bring a pillow. Make it cozy. Make it yours.”

  Beau loves men and women but he has never loved me, in that erotic way.

  “We both know you are untouchable,” he says when I ask him, for probably the tenth time in our lives, why he has never felt anything close to a sexual tinge around me, when he has seen my breasts and my eyes made up into those of cat’s and my lips rouged matte and intending. Though he has also (accidentally) run his fingers along unshaven armpits, (intentionally) rubbed his nose along the underarm of my T-shirt.

  “What does that mean?”

  “You have never been quite real to men.” He cuts the donut in half on the butcher block. He holds the sweetness to my mouth. “You’re very easy to turn into a concept.”

  “You think I’m a concept?”

  “Of course not. I’m just speaking about most men.”

  We are up late painting. Our wrists, our necks, our cheeks, are streaked with white. Primer. We are priming. After an evening of whiskey and painting, we both agree that it is best that he sleep here tonight. In the guest room, I make up a bed for him, which is really just a twin-sized air mattress lying on the floor. “Is this good enough?”

  He lies down on top of the mattress, his slacks and paint-speckled T-shirt and uniform Chuck Taylors still on. “When have I ever told you you’re not enough?” He removes a shoe and tosses it to me. I throw it back at him, harder than I meant, hitting him square in the chest with a soft thud.

  My body is hot. I remove my raggedy knit sweater and throw it at him. I have been dreaming of sex, waking in the morning with my legs knit together in longing, not for anyone in particular but for everyone. For Pat, but also for M. and the man at the coffee shop with the wife and baby at her nipple.

  Beau folds the sweater on his lap, tucking the arms so carefully, as if they held my own fragile limbs. We have never slept together and likely never will, and that, we both agree, is a good thing. But he understands what I’m going through, and he is considerate of my vain desiring.

  “Try to rest,” he says.

  I nod, backing out of the room in my thinning camisole, breasts sunken like cowering dogs. I shut out the light from the room.

  Rome Rome Rome Rome Rome

  I pinch the skin all up and down my arms. I pinch the skin of my eyelids. I pinch my kneecaps and my toes and pull the hairs on my ankles. I poke my ass and slap my stomach.

  A psychiatrist on the radio told an anecdote: A girl in his ward was always taking glass or whatever she could find and cutting herself with it. After many times of her doing this, he threatened her, “This time, I will not use anesthesia to sew you up!”

  She laughed. “Don’t you see that I do this because I am trying to feel, that I cannot feel anything at all?”

  I wake up the next morning with bruises, little knots of pain tied into my skin.

  Dreams. I’ve never remembered them, but suddenly I’m swimming in their remnants.

  I have been dreaming of a shack on a beach in a tropical spot of sea. The boards that make up its walls are bowed, providing small windows that peek out onto the interminable ocean. The roof is wood, too, I think, sturdy, leakless. It’s more like a cabin you’d see in the Yukon than in Lahaina. In my dreams, I am always there alone, sitting on the sand floor of the shack. But water never gets in. Whoever thought to build it knew how far back from the shoreline the shack had to be. This is supposed to be a safe place.

  Always, right before I wake up into the noise of real life, I am falling asleep to the sound of small waves rolling out onto the beach. At the moment of quiet that exists before the next wave, I open my eyes. Dream silence meets waking silence. This has become my favorite part of the day.

  In the old house, I am vomiting. We are having company—my mom is visiting—and I am vomiting. A stomach bug. A bad bite of chicken. Something is preventing me from being a good host. But Pat steps in.

  “You need to rest,” Pat says, ushering me up the stairs, away from the dinner table, from conversation, from life.

  “We will be okay,” my mother says. “We will save some wine for you.”

  “That’s not true at all.” My body is being led away from me. Pat’s hands are doing all the work. My own legs, arms, are weightless, worthless. On the way to our room, we pass the guest room. The door is open. My mother’s sweater is laid out across the bed, just in case. My body is hot, my skin insulating when it should be cooling. A cold bath, maybe. But no, he’s leading me to bed, to rest.

  “I will bring you some water and a cold washcloth for your forehead,” he says, tucking me in. I kick off the sheets like a child.

  “You need to rest.” He puts his hands on both sides of my head. He does not recoil against the heat of my skin. He moves his hand across the topography of my face, sensing, feeling for answers. He does not panic. “Listen to us. We know what’s best.”

  Off the lights go. Away he goes, the door closing behind him, shutting me into the room. The stairs creak as he leaves me. My mother’s laugh, jubilant when it comes, pushes up against the bedroom floor. Wine leaves the bottle, I know it. I feel it going.

  Le Corbusier offered this wisdom: “A house is a machine for living in.” But machines break, become defunct, outdated. Certain parts wear out from use. Sometimes, these machines stop working and you can never say why, what the cause is. To the non-mechanically minded, we will never know what’s wrong.

  Or sometimes machines break and we know exactly what happened. We can point to the exact knob or wire or leg of the chair that is in disrepair. But it is too late for the machine. Nothing can be done to elevate it to its original, functioning state. It no longer constitutes a chair, with its three legs. The machine has become something else entirely, something unrecognizable and foreign and cold. The machine must be abandoned.

  Our house was a machine for happiness.

&nb
sp; Kire-tsuzuki. Cut-continuance. In aesthetics, the idea of some element that at once halts events in space or time and bridges forward. A lily cut from the garden, now dying, becomes even more radiant in the vase, its true nature, its impermanence, revealed. The lily is, as Nishitani says, “like a person who has eradicated all attachments to life and abandoned all expectations fundamental to our mundane existence.” The cut flower “transcends the constructs of time and signifies a movement into new life as a moment.”

  In his sleep he is like a little boy, a streak of white paint on his cheek, his mouth ajar, hair ruffled. The air mattress’s slow leak of air doesn’t bother him. Beau sleeps like the dead, like the young. His sneakers lay adrift as if kicked off in sleep, the laces inching across the floor like caterpillars. They say it is easy to convert a guest room into a guest room/nursery. Simply use transitional fabrics that are appealing to adult and baby alike. Situate a day bed against one wall and a crib against the other. Paint the ceiling with vivid patterns for stimulation. Balance out any whimsical details with sleek, modern furniture. Design the room as a place of possibility.

  Master Bath

  My skin feels off. I am slick. If someone tried to rub their hand on my arm, they would slide right over me, over my skin and away from me. I rub and rub, scratch and scratch, trying to get the slickness off of me.

  I try to tell myself that I am cleaner now, that this is an improvement. I try to think of the soap scum around the shower drain in the other house. I tell myself, the water here is softer, less harsh, not as abrasive. But still, I itch. I itch.

  Who would have thought that a change in the texture of the skin, a smoothening, could be so maddening? I scrub and scrub.

  This morning, I hold the lipstick in my hand and apply it to my lips, but I keep drawing outside the lines, so unlike a child’s unconscious scribblings, with no joy in my mistakes. The red wanders off my upper lip like it’s got much better things to do, like it has no business living where society says the color should live.