We may never be able to “go home again,” to quote Tom Wolfe, but the flip side is just as true. We can’t not go home. The events, relationships and ties that are born and nurtured in our homes never go away in our memories. Several recently published books about the home buck the tide of decorating and architecture manuals. Instead of looking at home as a physical place, they look at it as a place in time, the memories that shape our lives and homes today. One of the more notable of these books is simply titled “HOME” (Pantheon Books, $22). Edited by Evanstonians Steve and Sharon Sloan Fiffer, the book is a compilation of memoirs written by 18 con-compilation of memoirs written by 18 contemporary American writers, each of whom focuses on a different room in their house. Jane Smiley writes about the bathroom, Lynda Barry about the teenage bedroom.
Several contributors write of the feelings and ties that are born and raised within those walls.
Following are excerpts from three of these–Tony Earley, author of the short story collection “Here We Are in Paradise” (Little Brown & Co., $19.95); Alex Kotlowitz, author of “There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America” (Doubleday, $21.95); and James Finn Garner, author of the recently published “Politically Correct Holiday Stories” (MacMillan, $9.95), as well as “Politically Correct Bedtime Stories” (MacMillan, $9.95) and “Once Upon a More Enlightened Time” (MacMillan, $9.95).
THE HALLWAY’
– By Tony Earley
My story goes like this: I jerked the front screen door open and ran as hard as I could. The house was Fenway Park in Boston, the hallway the first-base path. The door swinging shut behind me was a throw whizzing in from short. If I hit the back door before the front door slammed, I was safe. If the front door slammed first, I was out. I hit the back screen running and crossed the porch in a step and jumped off into the yard and kept going. I went for extra bases. The game then became problematic, a matter of judgment and honesty. The spring on the back door was pulling it closed. The clothesline pole was too close, too easy to reach in time, to be an acceptable base; the woodshed was too far away. There was no quantitative way to make the call of safe or out. I had to decide when the door slammed where I was on the field. Sometimes I slowed up with a single, disappointed skip and slapped my hands on my thighs and turned toward the dugout. I was out. Sometimes I clapped my hands once and reached out to accept the congratulatory handshake of an imaginary teammate. Earley scores. He has good speed. He’s having a heck of a year. In my mind’s eye, I was always on television. I interviewed myself in the woodshed, where no one could see me from the house. I took off my cap and wiped my brow with the back of my arm. I spoke into a piece of kindling. I said, “Thanks. I felt good today. I’m just glad I could help the team.”
– Tony Earley was raised in Rutherfordton, N.C., and now lives in Ambridge, Penn.
`THE BOYS’ ROOM’
– By Alex Kotlowitz
My brother, Dan, remembers our room as a great expanse of space, but in retrospect I think he simply confused space with time. “It just seems like most everything happened in there,” he wrote me recently.
He’s right. Our room did, indeed, seem cavernous. Big enough to house a makeshift basketball hoop made of wire hangers. Big enough to accommodate hamsters, gerbils and a family of turtle doves. Big enough to be converted, long after my brother and I had left for college, into a combination guest room and study.
But it is what happened there that stays with me. There was no singular event, no explosive episode. Instead, the slow, evolutionary forging of a relationship. It is a construct that over time has withstood geographical distance, my brother’s broken marriage, and the loss of our mother. The story of my bedroom is the story of filial fealty and friendship; it served, after all, as a place of comfort and security–and still does.
Three years into their marriage, my parents moved into a first-floor apartment of a high-rise on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Forty-two years later, my father still lives there.
The apartment was laid out in a fairly straight line. The two bedrooms, like afterthoughts, extended in opposite directions at the apartment’s far end. Our parents’ bedroom lay to the right. Ours was to the left.
The “boys’ room.” That’s how the adults referred to it. It was a sliver of the house they rarely ventured into. Understandably. It smelled at various points in time of pubescent perspiration, of month-old wood shavings used to line a hamster cage, and of turds deposited by our doves.
I remember our room as a bright, airy place, but I know better. Our two windows overlooked a courtyard, and, because the apartment sat on the first floor, we received, if we were lucky, ten minutes of sunlight each morning.
We slept in twin beds, which we regularly rearranged, probably because all other furniture in the house remained so static. They served as trampolines on which we’d perform death-defying flips. They served as battlefields on which we’d erect makeshift tents of sheets and blankets. They’d serve as fighting rings in which we’d wrestle and box, sometimes too earnestly.
We shared this room for eleven years, until I turned thirteen and in the throes of puberty and in my search for privacy chose to move to a closet-sized room off the kitchen. That is longer than I’ve lived with anyone else.
We shared much during that time. And fought even more. But that rivalry, intense as it was, never defined us as brothers.
Many years later, when I was in my early thirties, our room appeared in my dreams, placed out of context in a massive, intricately detailed Victorian house, and while I could not pinpoint what I was running from in those nightly torments, the familiarity of the room accorded me shelter from what was clearly an emotional storm.
Dan now lives in Vermont, newly married. I live outside Chicago. We talk almost weekly and see each other regularly. And together we kneeled by the side of our mother’s hospital bed as she lay dying, to listen to her last admonitions and advice. Weak from the chemotherapy and a bout with pneumonia, she managed a smile when Dan and I reassured her that we would watch after each other and our father; it comforted her, I’m sure, to know that, while we now lived half-a-country apart, we still shared a room.
– Alex Kotlowitz, a former staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, now lives in Oak Park.
`THE WORKROOM’
– By James Finn Garner
While our father was not in any way good or ambitious in the area of home improvement, he did enjoy the use of the workroom in our house as his sanctum sanctorum. Almost every man I’ve ever met has expressed the need and desire for a similar locale in his life, a place where he can work or not work at his own pace, somewhere to pursue doomed experiments and wrong ideas, someplace where his failures would not be on public display–indeed, where such efforts would not be failures at all. So utterly convinced of his ineptitude around the house, my father really didn’t spend an inordinate amount of time down in the workroom. That might have led to home repair ambitions, which in turn would have led to projects, which probably would have led to some failures, which I don’t think he would have allowed himself to have. He did, however, have his space.
Even with its lack of use, my memories of the workroom are as strong or stronger than for any other room in our home. A trip to the workroom was a mainly sensory experience; the sounds, the smells, and even the light seem so specific to that time and place. The activities I remember most in the room were my father soaking his paintbrushes in turpentine-filled orange-juice containers within arm’s length of our old furnace, and cleaning his nails with an ivory-handled steak knife of unknown origin. And always, always with a Winston in his mouth. It would be nice if I could describe the hours of worldly wisdom that passed from father to son in patient exchanges and Platonic dialogue–what our more dithery era has christened bonding. It would have been nice, had it ever happened. My father was almost pathologically tight-lipped, and my brothers and I had to absorb what lessons we could from example and, in the home repair realm, from non-example.
My family lived in a simple brick postwar Georgian, boasting nothing elaborate or eccentric in its layout. The workroom was merely the corner of the basement taken up partially by the water heater and the massive old furnace, set apart by an L-shaped wall of then-ubiquitous knotty pine paneling, heavily lacquered to a spotty orange-chestnut hue.
Although prone to strange and sometimes silly outbursts that were apropos of nothing (“Ya-ha, San Antone!” was not uncommon), my father was a taciturn man. One of the few aphorisms I can remember from him was “When you’re talking, you ain’t thinking,” a not-so-subtle hint that conversation was an annoyance unless and until someone had something important to say. His job, which he kept almost entirely apart from his home life except for the toll it took on his nerves and heart, was to borrow money on the commercial paper market, where a brief lapse in attention on competing interest rates can cost thousands. This mental intensity did not serve Dad well in the role of Mr. Fix-it. Tiny mistakes grew and nagged at his sense of order and his need for tranquillity.
The tool with which my father was most proficient (if I might be so generous as to use the word) was the hammer. This might reflect his pronounced tunnel vision and his ability to cut right to the main thrust of any problem. The hammer is a quintessential and versatile tool. Maybe any job that needed an implement more complicated was best left to specialists.
When I was very young, Dad put together a few projects for my brothers, which consisted mainly of large sheets of uncut plywood. Nail some two-by-fours around the perimeter of a piece of plywood, add a bit of green and brown paint, and the result was a landscape for a train set. Attach three tall sheets of plywood together with hinges like a triptych, cut out a medium-sized hole in the middle sheet, add a small curtain–ta-da, a puppet theater!
During my grade school years, my father did something that allowed him to expand his manual non-dexterity in new and untested areas: he invested in a boat, first an old, blunt-nosed Matthews cabin cruiser with much too much wood to varnish, and later a slightly bigger Egg Harbor. Their wooden hulls and teak decks were in need of constant work. At this time the smells that I will always associate with our workroom were introduced–varnish, hull paint, Mr. Thinzit, and Cuprinol. And cigarettes, always cigarettes.
After his second heart attack, Dad more or less was confined to home. With his time now his own, Dad channeled his energies in an entirely unexpected direction.
He began to work earnestly to turn our small back yard into an elaborate, even overstocked garden. At the same time, his workbench was retired too and transformed into a sort of makeshift greenhouse. Rows and rows of flower seedlings incubated there in the winter and spring under the grow lights, cozy next to the furnace in their little cups filled with peat. The smells of paint and solvent in the workroom began to fade, but never disappeared.
My father got to enjoy his new garden for only a couple of summers before his heart rebelled one last and irrevocable time.
The legacies my brothers and I received are so numerous and pervasive that my inadequacies in the workroom have never bothered me. Of course, these legacies become more apparent with age, as does my acceptance of them. My niece Hannah Rose now sleeps in the crib that my father assembled for his sons. It unmistakably belongs to our family. My mother only has to point to the side of the crib and explain, “That’s when your dad threw the little felt washers across the room and just tried to force the pieces to fit.”
There in the blond wood, you can clearly see the crescent marks left by the impatient hammer of my father.
– James Finn Garner grew up in Dearborn, Mich., and now lives in Chicago with his family.
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A portion of the proceeds from the sale of “HOME” will be donated to Habitat for Humanity, which brings volunteers together to build houses for those in need, and Common Cents, which collects pennies and distributes money to grass-roots charitable organizations.
