Home Making

by Lee Matalone

  Tyler: You had gone through a lot.

  Beau: I won’t let you out of my bed all week.

  Tyler: I’m happy. Are you happy?

  Beau: Happier than ever.

  Tyler: Safe travels on that long road to the airport.

  Beau: You too , in your own way.

  Daddy’s dead now. Mama, she moved back to Lake Charles after twenty-five years in Texas, happy as a lifetime smoker with a dead daughter and a penchant for Catholic asceticism can be. We talk now and then, though she doesn’t know much about me, and that’s really for the best. Weather and promotions and am I eating good (of course, Mama, the holy trinity is alive and well in me). My brothers and sister don’t know much either, though they know some things, and that’s why they don’t say much anymore.

  I have blood and bone, the same blood and bone as them, but sometimes that’s not enough.

  We want you to have a home. We want you to feel like you have a place to return to. Even if this home is not easy to categorize, it has its own shape, its own weight. Even if the yard’s a little overgrown and the house’s painted purple in a neighborhood of eggshell houses, it’s a place to come back to.

  “You needed to get out of L.A. How is this? Is this different enough?”

  There is not much to do where I live, much like where I grew up, so I am driving Ty around the country. A colleague of mine owns this land, around two thousand acres. Not farmland. Just land. Lots of it. His son tends to it. He plants fruit trees. He plants sunflowers and corn for the deer and rabbits and bears. My colleague says he never eats any of it, which I’ve found to be a generous but strange behavior, one of those idiosyncrasies that makes people truly interesting. In the winter field, corn lies in dried husks.

  “I didn’t necessarily need to get out of L.A.,” he says. “I came here to see you.”

  “Do you want to go up in the blind? It’s the nicest duck blind you ever did see.”

  “You still hunt?” He hands me the thermos full of wine. The road through Randall’s land is unpaved and we jostle up and down and around in my truck. I wait to drink until I stop at the base of the blind.

  “From time to time.” Sometimes I tell Randall that I’m going hunting, but all I do is sit up there with a thermos full of coffee and Baileys. He thinks I’m a bad shot because maybe once a season I come back with a deer or turkey but I don’t mind him thinking so. Sitting up there is the most peaceful thing in the world.

  Ty’s life has changed. Ty moved on to cities, New York, Portland, L.A. Mine, however, has stayed quiet. I prefer the same country stillness, the small-town life. So much of my life has changed that I prefer the same old cattle and quiet.

  “Get your gloves on,” he tells me, setting mine in my lap. He is buttoning up and pulling a beanie down over his ears. Getting out of the truck, he puts the two thermoses into his backpack and slides the straps over his shoulders. Hands on his lovely hips, he says, “Ready?”

  You first, I do not say, trying to avoid easy joking, in case you fall and I need to give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  “No ladder? Fancy setup he’s got here.”

  Randall has built a set of stairs up to the blind. He is an older gentleman. He likes his hunting refined.

  I watch his ass move up the ladder. I could make a joke, compliment him again, but I don’t. I stay quiet.

  Up in the blind, I pat the space next to me on the wooden bench, which has been cushioned with two pads adorned with flowers, the kind you’d see on Mawmaw’s kitchen chairs. He doesn’t speak either. We sit, watching the field. In a few months, birds will hatch and some will fall out of their nests, and soon mother birds will mourn and hatch more eggs. Soon, a black bear will crawl out of her cave and kill a rabbit, the juice on her jowls an elixir bringing her out of winter. Now, I want to tell Ty I love him, that I want to fuck him in this blind where no one can hear us, that I want to lick the wine from his lips and afterward open my truck door for him, kiss him on the cold cheek that was just pressed up against the cold air, to tuck him into my bed and cook him dinner, to move him here and ask for his hand, to care for him, to tend to him for the rest of our lives, to tend to one another in the way that we never could, to make red beans in the kitchen and talk about how we’d never have boudin as good as what his daddy would make in Lake Charles, to, in the spring, get married in a field just like this one, maybe even this one, where he can walk across the field with a bouquet of sunflowers in his hands, and I can touch those hands, take them in my own, kiss them, kiss them, hands as dear to me as my own.

  “It will snow tomorrow,” I say.

  “Maybe my flight will get delayed. Maybe I’ll be stuck here.” He kisses me, his tongue finding all of me. I am weak.

  “It is too cold. I can’t send you back there with a cold. Let’s go and I’ll make you dinner.”

  We pack up, go down the stairs, and get back in the truck. Driving, we pass a small graveyard set under an undisturbed gathering of oaks.

  “Can we get out and see?” he asks.

  I stop the car, leaving the engine running. We get out and walk around to the humble entrance. The wrought-iron fence has collapsed in places, tilting in where it was supposed to keep out. Little tombstones, many of the etchings washed away by years of rain and snow and wind, poke out of the earth. A few larger stones lay flat, the ground beneath them no longer positioned to carry their weight. We read still-visible names and dates. Father. 1822 to 1876, or something close to it. Mother. 1826–1888. There are no houses on this land anymore, but I tell him there once was one nearby, up on a hill not far from here. This is where this family lived and died, on this land where sunflowers now stand, their seeds eaten by deer and squirrels and rabbits, a place where humans only visit from time to time. Here, people are no longer troubled by the possibility of building houses. This land is no longer for them. They are free.

  “It’s getting late,” I tell him, pinching his cheek between my gloves. “You’re not properly dressed.”

  “It’s not so sad, is it,” he says, and I do not think he expects an answer.

  We drive through the field, up and down in the dark, back toward the lights of town.

  Nursery

  You can always come home, I tell Ru. We are sitting on Ru’s bed in the room that Beau and I had once painted blue like the sea, the room in which we had assembled a white crib over white wine and potato chips, the room that became a nursery that became a big boy’s bedroom. Ru’s toys and books are in boxes piled against the wall. The date for the move has been set. In a few weeks, I tell him, we will be moving to a new place, a place that is also home.

  “It all started right here.” I place my hand on my stomach. “You waited and waited in this warm bath, giving a kick every now and then to show me you were waiting for me, waiting to get out into the world. I’ve never told you this story before, have I?”

  Ru shakes his head. He is six years old now. I want him to understand why we’re moving South, to a place where heat envelops you, comforts you.

  “You came out screaming—eight pounds, six ounces. You were a chunky little thing with a big head. You were so healthy. We weren’t at the hospital long.”

  Ru is old enough to learn where he came from, where he is going. I explain who this man is who he calls Uncle—he is not really that, a blood and bone uncle, anyway. I explain that this man, Uncle Beau, is my best friend, my confidant, his confidant, his godfather. I explain that though he is not on the birth certificate as Father, Ru shares half of his DNA, making him part creator, making him a certain type of family that he’s known in his gut since he came out screaming.

  “So Uncle Beau will live here when we go?” Ru asks. He is fixated on the leaving, on the old house, on the past, and he is right, the past is part of this.

  “Beau will move out of the apartment and live here, yes. While I complete my graduate work, that is how it will be.”

  “He will not get rid of my bed?”

  “He will no
t get rid of your bed.”

  This has been a good house to us. This is where we picked worms out of the garden dirt and placed them in a terrarium by his bedside, the same room where I found him in the dark talking to the worms, assuring them the night would not be a dangerous one, that morning would surely come. This is where we spent July and August afternoons in the plastic pool inflated in the yard, where we read storybooks together in his little bed until we both fell asleep, this little bed where we watched movies on a little screen I held between us, the same screen on which I’m now showing him the street that he will one-soon-day run down. Though we will soon leave this house, I want to ensure Ru that the sandy-desert paint color of the bathroom, the smoky haze of the living room after I’d burn the piñon incense in the fall, the fainting couch in the window where he’d fall asleep, in my arms, at first, and then on his own, those things will always be here for him.

  “Beau will be here, whenever you want to see him. Whenever you want to see the house, you can visit.”

  He ducks his head beneath the covers and I wrestle him out, bring him up for air.

  “But there are other things out there to explore,” I tell him.

  “Why New Or-lee-ans?” he asks, pronouncing the name of the city like the radio announcer on WWOZ, who we’ve been listening to on the radio while we cook.

  “I’m going to school, like you.” I explain to him that no, I won’t be a doctor like Grandma, but another kind of doctor, the kind who cures illnesses of places, who studies neighborhoods without grocery stores, cities without recycling bins. All those books on the shelves? There will be even more books in our new home in Louisiana.

  We are going to New Orleans for reasons I can’t fully explain. Because I got into a graduate program there and because it is free. Because I want to show Ru one aspect of his history. Because I want to give him context for the boy he is, for the man he will be. Because I want Ru to grow up in a place where being mixed, being a mutt, is something to celebrate. These are verbalizations, rationalizations, but maybe this move is about something you can’t just put into words. Call it a mother’s instinct. This place is right for Ru, for me, for us.

  “Because Beau is from Louisiana, you are from Louisiana, too.” I point to the alligator mouthing a saxophone on his T-shirt, brush his hair with the palm of my hand, kiss the head that is still too big for his little body, the head that may always be a little too big for his body. This is the T-shirt Beau gave him when I first told Ru we would be moving to New Orleans. That day, Beau put on a record, and out of the living room speakers came trumpet music, brass music, feeling music, as Ru called it. That was the day I first asked Ru to sit down next to me and look at photos of our new home, purple and yellow houses draped with bougainvillea, corner stores with hand-painted signs, men masked in beads and feathers strutting down a street that looked nothing like the street he lived on, a new world with a little white castle on the edge of a bayou.

  Soon, we will hold on to those kisses from Beau and Grandma and drive down, all the way South until land meets water.

  “Grandma will come to visit. Beau, too,” I say. “This is not goodbye forever. Just goodbye for today.”

  When I told my mother about the move, she said, You’ll have a room for me. We are leaving this house, Beau, Mom, but we are leaving so we can grow. Today, we are looking forward, not backward. This is not goodbye forever. Just goodbye for today.

  New Builds

  Home making in the Deep South. Home making for a child who is not yet home in his body. It’s been barely a month in this new place when Ru says, I want to see the music, I want to see the people, so Chloe takes him out into the neighborhood on Lundi Gras, noonday, where costumed, boozed, happy people are standing around, unicorns and mermaids and mermen and robots and scarecrows and indescribable transformations that require no label; they are just fabulous. Fabulous, his mother whispers into his ear, pointing at someone like no one he has seen before up in that Southern North, in his first home. He has never been around such crowds, around so many people smiling and drinking and standing around in the street—his life has been so quiet, so remote from the noise of people. But this one person is the person he’s fixating on, a boy who is maybe eighteen, nineteen years old, a shadow of stubble masked across the bottom half of his face, and Ru recognizes himself in this man, who is not like any him he’s ever seen in Virginia, in his old home. And this boy has a beauty, has a something that rings true to him, something evident in his eyelashes dotted with rhinestones, the sequin-adorned triangles offering his chest modesty, the weave of black netting that stretches from ankle to hip. Ru pulls his long hair off of his face and ties it back with elastic, like his mom showed him, so he doesn’t miss this person, so he doesn’t lose him in the crowd. The crowd gets louder, begins cheering. They are ready for the parade. And this young man is standing on the corner, a drink in his hand, and he puts his arm around a woman, dressed like he is, exactly like he is, with the same rhinestone-lined eyes and sequin triangles, and he kisses her on the lips, right in the middle of the crowd.

  This is to say that Ru’s idea of the world splinters, like a spinning mirrored globe fractures light. Something in his chest releases, letting out built-up pressure. Relief he didn’t even know he needed.

  After that day, things are different for this family, again. Mom takes him home, and before you know it it’s his eleventh birthday. His chest is hardening, his thighs filling out, what to do with these thighs, this chest, he thinks, looking in the mirror at what God has given him and draping it in scarves, tying his hair back into a knot at the nape of his neck, and he walks out into the house’s small yard where his mother is typing, where she is working out on the patio, the banana trees backgrounding her sunlit frame, and the boy says, What am I, a statement, not a question, as if that is the answer, the question becoming a statement of identity. No, she corrects, What I am, and she beckons him to the arm of the aquamarine Adirondack, detangling the knots with humidity-soft fingers, twisting and twisting and folding the hair into a tight formation atop his head. Turning him around, she kisses him on the nose, takes out her phone, brings up the camera, and hands him the mirror to see what it now reflects.

  Mother and son hands reach into Zapps, crunchy Crawtator crumbles all over their fingertips. Ru strikes a pose, flashing red-seasoned peace fingers, and Mom takes a photo, captioned, “Your boy’s initiated,” and sends it to Uncle Beau, who returns a , a , , a . Ru sends his uncle, his father, his Family, a photo of Mom and himself, his head in profile, his new do framed by banana leaves, and Beau returns, simply, exactly, just what Ru needs, .

  Ruel, American Wakashu.

  And he goes to school like this, in his uniform, khaki pants and a polo, with the same mage that his samurai fathers once wore to keep their helmets in place. Do you do your hair like that, the girls say. Can you do my hair like that, and he obliges them this at recess, especially one girl, Miranda, in whose hair he weaves a special, secret braid, and one of the boys says, You look just like my mama, are you trying to be like her? And he does not have an answer. He does not have a word for what he is.

  In this new city, the parades march on, year by year. The brass bands play the same songs, with some variations, some new additions to the repertoire, but always Oh, When the Saints and Mardi Gras Mambo Mambo Mambo. Across the years, most of the dogs are named Saint or Roux, and all the children grow up knowing the difference between a sousaphone and a tuba. All the little boys and girls know how to twist off the tails and suck the heads, the crawfish meat worth the dirtying of fingernails, the stinging of cuts. All the boys and girls grow up knowing to avoid the potholes on their bikes, how to shake their asses. They know the symphony of gunshots as well as they know the radio Top 40. This is where Ru grows up, a place that shares his blood, the swamp juices composed of the same juices in his gut. This is home.

  In this home, he sucks the heads, he shakes his ass, too.

  This is home, isn’t it? his mothe
r asks him, she is always in the banana leaves, or, at least, that’s how he will remember her, banana leaves forming a nimbus around her head. He is eighteen now, and he will nod, kiss his mother on the top of her head, with the height and humor of Beau, and he will go out on the Fourth of July with glittered eyelids and red-painted hair. On a bedroom floor Miranda will break open a pen, dip a needle into its ink, and poke her name into the skin of his thigh. Don’t forget, motherfucker! And they give up their bodies to the other on the floor, seeing one another through two sets of glittered eyelids.

  What am I, what I am.

  Outside the house, bottle rockets flare down the street. Farther away over the river, bigger fireworks burn up on the city barge. Big booms, smaller pops. Beneath the flag flying over Miranda’s mother’s house, red white and blue, the red like his hair, they run toward the Mississippi. The pores of their skin flare open in the hot, wet night.

  Yes, I am home, he will remember feeling. Finally, for now.

  About the Author

  LEE MATALONE lives in South Carolina. Home Making is her first novel.

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  Praise for Home Making

  “An intricate exploration of family and home, of mother and child, of friends, of women, and written with both precision and style.”

  —Weike Wang, author of Chemistry

  “In this remarkable novel, Lee Matalone fashions a world of rich and nuanced characters. Matalone has created something original, almost kaleidoscopic, as she constructs the interwoven tales of the characters who each strive to form a home. She writes skillfully about relationships, living and dying, and love. Cleverly and beautifully rendered, this is the work of an author plunging beneath the surface, into the very heart of what fabricates our inner and outer lives. This is a smart, uncanny, and ambitious debut.”