Home Making

by Lee Matalone

  “Is it good at all? This is a new recipe.”

  “Aren’t they all new? And yes. It’s perfect.”

  “This is what we are supposed to do after dinner in this house, right?” I say.

  “What are you saying? I said the pie was great.”

  “I don’t know if I’m doing any of this right.”

  Her hands are on my face. Her fingers are sticky on my cheeks. She rubs her thumbs away from my nose, mixing the red juice with my dew, repeating this motion like she’s painting my face. Her thumbs sing, It’s right. It’s right. It’s right.

  Some women do this all their lives. Iron, rear, sweep, wash, fold, brush, wipe. For the entirety of their adult lives, they make homes. They make other people. They make families.

  This is just to say that what I’m doing is not so unusual. It’s the opposite. This act is completely mundane.

  But no one talks about how difficult it is. I don’t think it’s any easier for a woman with a pretty husband and a pretty six-year-old daughter. Beneath the prettiness, we are all a mess. We are all struggling. We do not know how to make a home.

  Let’s leave bleach stains on the darks together. Let’s put too much sugar in the cake and celebrate our efforts, our failures. Let’s commemorate the spoiled milk, the missed school bus, the unwashed faces at bedtime, the unmown yard.

  In the beginning, Pat and I would drive around looking at houses. We would park our car down the street, so as not to draw attention, watching for oncoming traffic as he grabbed my hand and led the way along the side of the road up to the facade of the house. We would take photos of these houses, many of which were not for sale at all. Not that it mattered—we were not in the market for a house. We barely knew one another. Unlike other young couples, we didn’t go to the movies, cradling a mutual silence in dark theaters between our fingers. We would look at houses, standing at the edges of their yards, of the lives inside, and imagine if we would have something as beautiful.

  Driving around the countryside, we discovered a particularly dreamy home, a shed house hidden behind a patch of pine. The house was all colliding geometry, modern in its willingness to jut out in uncompromising angles, but also traditional in the way its simple wood exterior harkened back to the farmhouses and barns that once populated this region. We fell in mutual love.

  That house . . . he sighed via text, his digital breath attesting to our harmony, our shared vision.

  In less than two years, not that house, but a different (rental) house, would be ours.

  Cybil

  Pat’s oncologist says, About a week. That’s how long someone can go without food and water, but that’s pushing it, really.

  “Why are you asking this?” Dr. Varma, Raj, says. “You’re not going to drag yourself into the woods and die, are you, Pat?”

  Raj could have been a stand-up comedian, but instead he chose to tell people they were dying, in two months, two years, a situation that offers its own form of humor, I suppose. As an oncologist, you have a captivated audience, which is half of the challenge.

  Pat tells him that is not his plan. It’s just a question.

  Like, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?

  Like, what is the square root of three hundred and ninety-six?

  Like, Doctor, what does the cancer look like? Under a microscope, does it look like an algae bloom? Does it look like rainfall on wet asphalt? Like a concerto of the skin? (Neither his questions nor mine, just questions.)

  We sit silently in Raj’s office, the walls covered with photos in mismatched frames of his children; his grandchildren; his wife, Neha, who in her teen years was some kind of model back in Bangalore. I would see her at hospital parties draped in chiffon of a bright hue. By his side, her elbow rested lightly on Raj’s shoulder, hip propped and displayed as only perpetually thin women can get away with.

  “So you will be going with him to these chemo appointments,” Raj says.

  Of course, I say.

  We are sparing her this.

  We are sparing her the phlebotomist and the tile floors and the hospital gowns and the patchy beard and the vomiting.

  We are sharing her house while she sits alone in a different, un-worn-in house, just twenty minutes down the road.

  We are doing this for her.

  “You are a good mother-in-law,” Raj says.

  I am not quite that anymore but I am still a mother. I am doing this for her.

  “It’s so quiet in this house,” I say to Pat in the foyer. I do not say, Without my daughter. “And there’s no dog hair anywhere. I suppose you must be enjoying that. Though I’ve ruined that with Henri.”

  “He’s welcome here, I’ve told you,” he says. “I need to lie down.” We are barely inside the house and he is walking up the stairs, to their bedroom.

  “You are not feeling lonely, are you?” I ask, but he is already up the stairs, ready to forget the afternoon, to exchange the faux leather chair and IV for plush pillows and a down comforter.

  On his bedside table, I set down two gallons of water and two thirty-two-ounce Gatorades. “In a few hours, I’ll come and check on you.”

  The stairs creak. This house is full of old wood and heartwarming details. Good bones, as they say. On finding this house, Chloe said Oh and Ah at every ceiling medallion, every art deco–era tile, every touch of ornamental plaster, the slide of the pocket doors between the foyer and the living room. She is not easily impressed, so this meant that this house was particularly special, that she had high hopes for this house.

  It is not yet four o’clock. I cannot call Chloe and say, Hi, dear, would you like to grab coffee? I just happen to be in town . . . It’s easiest not to complicate things, to make her wonder.

  The insides of his kitchen cabinets are empty as lungs. There is coffee in the freezer and a bag of pistachios in the cupboard by the fridge with the glasses, not even in the cabinet where the food should be. He would probably feel the emptiness of his new life more intensely if he put the one lonely bag of pistachios in the food cabinet. Sometimes all it takes is one small thing, a bag of pistachios, to reveal what you now lack.

  I cannot leave the house. If I wander off to the grocery store, I risk the chance of running into her. Maybe her store ran out of the bread she likes and she had to run to the one over here. It is a nicer grocery store. Everything is nicer over here.

  I am afraid I can’t help him get better. I am afraid that she will learn to know love as abandonment. I have never wanted her to be like me.

  The French word for caretaker, concierge, means fellow slave. Equals. He and I are shackled to the same suffering.

  “Alone? How can you leave her like that?” Her father is on the phone, reprimanding me.

  “She is not alone. Her friend Beau stays over there every few nights. I talk to her every day.”

  He has called to check on Chloe, but he will not call her directly. He is assessing the situation from afar, determining, through my commentary, when it is best for him to swoop in and be Dear Daddy. It is a familiar act.

  “So are you calling her or what?”

  In the drive Pat is waiting for me. My car is running and the exhaust is shooting out hot into the sub-freezing air. Through the window of his house and the driver’s window I can see his head tilted back at an angle of rest. He is not even halfway through his treatments and he is always tired, he is always sleeping. In some ways it is like having a newborn again. As a baby Chloe could practically sleep on command. Reclining on the couch, needing rest after a few nights on call, I’d lie her on top of me and she’d nod off against my chest, sleeping until I stirred. We harmonized in a way I didn’t think possible for two people.

  “I will,” Daniel says.

  “Soon?”

  “When I feel like it, Cybil.”

  We hang up the phone.

  When we first met, he wore a mustache and light-wash jeans. He had sort of a George Michael look without the jewelry but with all the
great hair, chest, head. He was proud of his butt, probably still is. The mustache, and the tight jeans, for that matter, were the style then, and I suppose they are the style now. That’s how things work. There is no new way to part one’s hair.

  He was always holding me to him in public, pulling me closer. I wanted him to be the father of the children I never knew I wanted.

  In the pre-marriage days, we would walk from car to grocery hand in hand, my belly flat still, his jacket on my shoulders against the heatless desert night. Then, we worshipped at the altar of Potential.

  There is no new way to part one’s hair, no new type of love. There is no husband and children, but there is Chloe. There is no new love, there is Chloe.

  I thread my gloves onto my fingers and get into the car.

  “Are you ready?” I ask, placing my hand on Pat’s forehead. His skin is cool enough.

  “Can’t wait.”

  I buckle my seatbelt, thinking of all of them.

  We did not celebrate Valentine’s Day. Neil was never the kind of man for that, and I was not the kind of woman for that, at that point in my life. But I had a brief, necessary break from my rotations and needed to get out into the heat and sun and move. Those days I was always under hospital lighting, the cold blue-white corridors my only walks, the luminescent gerbera daisies in vases and seascapes cheaply framed my only scenery. The day before we had decided to hike Ventana Canyon. We wanted to see the Window, an opening in a craggy formation of rock in the Santa Catalina Mountains. The night before we’d packed water and suntan lotion into backpacks and laid out caps and hiking shorts and hiking socks and hiking boots so we could leave early, without too much fuss. We planned to get out before the heat became too much.

  “Are you ready?” he asked, finding me on the patio.

  I stood on the slab of concrete that jutted out from the front-left side of our rented ranch house in my sports bra and shorts, barefooted. “Look,” I said.

  By the garage, a red, Chihuahua-sized combination of snout and hoof and fuzz scurried in circles. Red screeched a terrible screech. Nowhere in sight followed its javelina mother. Red was lost and alone and we could hear that.

  “We need to go,” he said. “It is getting late.”

  I slipped on sandals that had been bleached from sienna to wheat by the sun and went back into the house through the sliding glass doors, through our bedroom, a cave of unmade sheets (no hospital corners here) and a bureau top dusty with granola bar crumbs and lack of attention, out through the living room and shaded entranceway enclosed by a wrought-iron door, out into the morning air that was dense with dust and earth and smells like something primordial.

  I knelt down, within feet of Red, here kitty-kittying.

  Screech screech, the creature said, louder suddenly, maybe with relief. I must have smelled like Mama in my morning muskiness, sweat accrued in sleep, because Red came up to me, grazing my ankles, nestling in the space between my knees. I took the towel and picked Red up in it.

  “I’d still like to go,” he said, coming up behind me.

  “He needs to go to a refuge.” Red was peeping now, soft peeps. “Maybe the desert museum will take him.”

  “We’ve been wanting to do this hike,” he said.

  “What would you like me to do? Leave him here?”

  “He lives in this desert. He knows what to do here without you.”

  Maybe Red began screeching again, more loudly, more urgently, or maybe that was just my imagination.

  Red’s pink nose grazed my lips and I did not wipe away his wild smell. I was still standing in the drive when Neil went back into the house, picked up his backpack, returned to the drive, to our station wagon, got in, put a hand out the window, and waved goodbye. We were standing there, Red and I. He thought I was his mother and for a number of moments I did not tell him otherwise.

  “I have to have you know, at least, why I’m doing this,” Pat says, his head pillowed on the couch, his body horizontaled by exhaustion. “You have to know that I think this is how it has to happen.”

  Across from him, I am all put together, neat and presentable in red slacks and a heavy red cardigan with gold enamel buttons. He looks like shit. I tell him this and he laughs. He’s wearing a button-down shirt, though beneath the blanket I can see he’s wearing pants with an elastic waistband.

  “She knows this is real,” I say. “She doesn’t think you are lying.”

  “Yes. But.”

  “Explain why. Yes. Explain.”

  He sits up, adjusts the pillows behind his lower back. I reach behind him and plump the pillows. He pats, too. We plump together.

  “Whatever I say will sound like it’s not enough. I’ll sound like a fucking asshole no matter what.”

  “That’s possible,” I say. “Yes.”

  “If I say I’m doing this because she is too young to have to do this and she will likely have to do this again, at a more appropriate age, that I’m saving her the first time, you won’t believe me.”

  “You understand that,” I say, “just because you’re not physically together, that just because she’s not driving you to chemo and holding your hand in the chair, she’s still going through this, right?”

  “Or if I say, I’m doing this because I don’t want her to see me fall apart in that house, our house. That it should be a hopeful place, not a place of fucked-up memories.”

  I do not say, You know that, just because you aren’t sick there, vomiting into that toilet late at night, her house can still become haunted by your pain?

  “You won’t believe me,” he says, again. He buttons the top button of his shirt, and then unbuttons it again. He unbuttons all the buttons and tosses the shirt on the couch. In a T-shirt, worn through, he looks like a little boy.

  “Now you know what menopause feels like.”

  “You look very nice,” he says. “You put me to shame.”

  “At this age, you can’t leave a hair out of place.”

  I hand him the bottle of Gatorade, diluted, the other half of the liquid concoction in the fridge. In the fridge, I’ve assembled an army of new Gatorade bottles and old Gatorade bottles filled with the half-and-half mixture. When he drinks the dilution, we joke about pretending to be on a golf course in Miami, sipping Arnold Palmers. Neither of us has ever golfed or had any desire to, but this absurdity is part of the fantasy. Anything is better than the situation we’re in.

  I go to the other side of the room, to the table in the hallway where my purse has been sitting for the past three months while I’ve stayed in this house, tending to my daughter’s husband. “Your skin is dry, isn’t it? Your hands are cracking. Here.”

  “You keep everything in that bag. Lotion, crossword puzzles. What else?”

  He lets me squeeze a large dollop into his palms. He does the work of making a fire between his hands, in between his fingers.

  “Not a word to her, right, about all of this.” He looks at me, telling me, as if we haven’t had this same conversation a ship-full of times before.

  “Trust me,” I say. “Won’t you?”

  “You’re her mother.”

  Meaning, I have her best interest at heart.

  “I’m not asking for much from you,” I say, “but I do have one question.”

  “Am I doing this right?” he asks.

  “You’ve never applied lotion before, clearly.”

  “Never the right way,” he says.

  “Give me your hands.”

  He levitates his hands in front of me. I pull them to rest on my knees and knead the cream into one hand.

  “After all this, after you’re better,” I begin to say.

  “You’re wondering what I will do, if I will talk to her again.”

  “Not talk.”

  “I know what you are saying. Not talk. Start over again.”

  I push the lotioned hand off of my knee and take the other, pressing it against my knee.

  “I can’t answer that.”

  We
stare at his hands like we expect them to make the next move, to decide the future for us both. Since I’ve been staying here, he has avoided all talk of her. You cannot help but talk about the one you love. Her name cannot help but fall from your lips at any conversation, whether it be about Magic Erasers or marriage. With Pat, in her house, there has barely been a murmur about Chloe. I am a fool.

  After moments of nothing I set the bottle of lotion on the coffee table and point to it. “You’re soaked in it. Now go rest.”

  He goes up to bed in my daughter’s once-ago dream house. I wait around awhile before sleep.

  We are at a wine bar and it is happy hour, too early to be at a wine bar, but Raj likes this place. He loves wine. He and Neha traveled to Burgundy this past summer and sat around drinking for two weeks straight, or so he says. He is not a drunk, or maybe he is. Who can ever know until you are in bed and they do not come home?

  “How are you?”

  “As fine as one can be,” I say. We are outside on the small, roped-in patio, which is part of a larger bricked thoroughfare full of shops and small restaurants. It is not raining but it is cloudy and humid, like it could rain at any minute.

  “You haven’t told your daughter?”

  “No. She doesn’t need to know.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that.”

  The waiter comes over with a bottle. Raj sticks his nose into the empty heart of the glass, swirls the red liquid, pours the contents of the glass into his mouth, holds the liquid in his cheeks like an old cowboy holds dip. He swallows, finally, and nods his head at the waiter.

  “This seems like a bad idea,” he says, filling my glass.

  “That is not why I’m here, to be reprimanded.”

  “That is a nice jacket,” he notices. “I like the buttons.”

  College students file into the bar. They bring with them backpacks and laughter and youth. Some of them may be Raj’s students. Medical students have more time than they used to. There are stricter rules now. You can’t work students three days on call in a row. Of course, that means they don’t get the same experience as we did, working sleeplessly, needing to react to a crisis unprepared without the hand-holding of a supervising doctor. Things have changed, but maybe they are happier.