Other houses, other lives
28 December 2010 11:57 AM Categories: Friends | Best of the blog
Offer me tea, kombucha, beer in a glass. I sink into your couch or perch uncomfortably on the edge of the easy chair. I cross my legs and lean against the wall as your cat rubs his chin against my fingertips. On the opposite wall, you've hung a still life, a single mottled pear resting on a wooden pedestal. I want to pluck the pear from the painting, cup its coolness in my warm palm before I take a bite. The juice coats my chin. It drips on my shirt. I apologize for my lack of control, the drips marring your futon, ask you to forgive me my destructive ways.
Will you reach for the core? Do you fetch me a warm wet cloth and dab it against my chin, press it against the fabric of my shirt?
For now, I smile behind my glass. I gesture awkwardly, sit on my hands when they threaten to take me somewhere I'm not yet prepared to go. I note the stacks of papers, the dishes sitting out on the table.
***
1975, Kindergarten. My mother drops me off early at my best friend's house (whose mother is also my after school babysitter). The contrast between outside, the grey winter morning, car exhaust trapped in the air, and inside, the house sweet, warm, and comforting, makes my heart ache. In the sunlit kitchen, her family sits around the breakfast table. I smell pancakes and butter, syrup and sausage, coffee and cream. It's as though I have stumbled onto an extra family, intact and loving. I am grateful when they invite me to the table, but also embarrassed, as though they think I don't have breakfast at home.
The warm house, the sunlight against the table, the bronze copy of the Kiss by Rodin in the living room, the older brother's mysterious attic sanctum. It was my introduction to other peoples' houses, their dinner tables, the pantry with the garlic salt I sprinkled on my palm, the stairs that led from the kitchen down to a dark cellar, the sleeping porch off the office where a lobster trap hung in the corner.
***
The damp living room in the Sugar Shack, J's brother's painting on the wall (keep this coupon/drop this coupon). The rattan furniture. The college apartment with the bed on the floor. D's family's house with his grandfather's artwork (The Fall of Icarus, the family portraits), his mother's loom in the corner of the dining room. Family dinners, blurry with Grolsch and toasts (proost!). We met at the tot lot my first week in Berkeley or we introduced by mutual friends on a street corner. We were an old item, a new item, had barely touched, had already kissed (in Metro tunnels, on the floor at my place, on the tan couch with the dog looking on). Now here we are, exchanging parenting stories. Making out on the couch while the movie Hairspray flickers across the room. Spending Christmas Eve in sleeping bags on the basement floor because your parent's house is full of family.
1998. My husband's old family home, empty of people. His mother was in the hospital and his father was by her side. He wanted to show me this place that was so much a part of him, more the landscape than the house, though the house was that, too. I admired the open floor plan, stood out on the deck and breathed in eucalyptus and sage from the canyon that he and his brother used to scramble down. That Christmas was my first with him, the only one where we stayed apart. In later visits, we slept in his old bedroom on crumbling foam mattresses, listened to the coyotes howl from the yard while his brother cocooned in a sleeping bag on the deck.
***
Maureen's house. The front porch swing on Canal Day, the two of us wielding 20-inch sparklers at the line of cars leaving town. The mysterious plumbing, with separate faucets for hot and cold. The couches, formal downstairs, soft velveteen upstairs. The walls with their Williamsburg colors.
Gayle's house, midcentury, clean-edged in a neighborhood of Colonials. Boxy furniture, teals and turquoise, black and white. The tiny room she shared with her little sister, the slumber parties downstairs, watching Fridays and laughing at her goofy dad.
Climbing through Peter's bedroom window to sit on the tin roof of his porch, talking about James Brown or Tama Janowitz or Washington, DC.
Mr. X's apartment in Champaign, forbidden territory at first, then a love den with its treetop views and Ikea furniture, a little kitchen for the hollandaise sauce, for the bacon, for the hot and sour soup, twelve Berghoff bocks stacked in the half-size refrigerator.
Resting my head on DT's couch the day of my divorce (the early morning flight to Columbus delayed so that I almost miss the court appearance, the awkward lunch with Mr. X at Rigsby's or was it at the brewpub we used to go to, a sad heavy pint between us?). Hot July day mitigated by cool air conditioning, the blinds closed, the feeling of sadness and happiness, of relief and comfort. One thing ends, another begins.
***
I don't know what your house will bring. I will remember the way the light slants through the blinds in the late afternoon, that painting opposite the couch, the conversations built around a core of curiosity and contrast, the moments before, before, before.
Image: Another person's house (my mother's house), mid-1980s, by me
This started with a photo prompt and went off from there. I'm not sure what to call this, a mix of fact and fiction, memoir and concealed wish.
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