Memories |
© 2001 Carter Jefferson A House is Not Just a Home by Carter Jefferson I live in this hundred-and-thirty-year-old house, have for more than thirty years, and I guess that makes it a home, but it's certainly more than that. Or maybe all the other things it is are what make it a home. You'll need a quick dose of simple information. It's a four-story brick row house, what the new, upscale people around here call a town house, on a little dead-end street in the South End of Boston, a five-minute walk from Copley Place, the fanciest mall in town. When we moved here it was in a slum, but now the postman covers our front hall every day with catalogues from all the super-expensive stores in the country, because our zip code is just so trendy it makes your head ache. We are very proud that our recycle bins have more in them every time the truck comes by than do the ones on Beacon Hill, where the really rich people live. My wife and I, and our friend Helen two doors away, who has lived there since she was a baby, also are very proud to be surrounded by so many upscale Yuppie neighbors, most of whose incomes must be five times as high as ours. Actually, though, the area was a lot more fun when it was a slum, and nobody cared what your window boxes looked like. There was a time when we picked my mother-in-law up at the airport and brought her home, only to find a ragged man passed out n the steps. We stepped over him, but she became quite anxious to go back to Florida, for some reason. Then, one afternoon, my wife drove down toward the dead end looking for a place to park and we noticed a naked woman dancing on the steps of a house across the street and up a few doors from ours. We just looked, and went on hunting a parking space. Another time, at 5:30 a.m., I awoke to the sound of screams, ran downstairs, opened the door, and saw a half-dressed neighbor with an axe chopping at the oil-company hose that was poked into somebody's heating oil tank. The oil deliveryman was upset, but what did he expect when he showed up in his noisy truck at that hour? I just closed the door and left them to it. Something was always waking us at ungodly hours, but it was usually something interesting, like the time a man stood at the end of the street and put six pistol shots into an empty house fifty yards away. The guy went off somewhere before the cops got there. I didn't chase him; I picked up the brass (it was a .38) and waited for the police, who found the whole business quite puzzling. Now we only get waked up when the house full of students down the street ends a party at two a.m. So a house is not only a home; in the city, at least, it's a box seat for urban playlets. When we first moved here, our daughter was twelve, and I'm sure she remembers this house as the place where she got nagged all the time. She lived on the top floor, so when she came in from school, she always, without fail, left all her books and other detritus lying on the hall table. Back then my wife and I had the weird notion that a house was supposed to be neat. So it was always, "Laura! Get your books out of the hall!" Then, the next day, a cab would be outside to take her to school way out in Roxbury, and I'd be trying to get her together. She'd come barrelling down the stairs in her socks, and I'd yell, "Where the hell are your shoes?" Whereupon she'd sort of look around, bemused, and finally she'd find them downstairs in the kitchen, or maybe under the TV. Of course, she was always leaving things on the stairs, so you couldn't get by, and I was always hollering, "What's on the stairs is trash!" Then there was the time she forgot she'd turned on the water in her bath, so it leaked down into our bedroom below. I'll just let you imagine how we reacted to that. It wasn't pretty. A house is a battery, where you nurture little chicks. Our house also is the place we used to have parties, back when I was an academic. The bottom floor is rectangular, about fifteen by about forty feet, and that's where the action always was. That floor, open plan, is where the kitchen, dining room and TV are. The party high point was the time we invited sixty people to a three-hour open house, scheduled from five to eight, figuring some wouldn't come. They not only came, they all brought friends, and at one point I counted about eighty-five people in that room, all of them more or less drunk, including us, of course. Maybe I was seeing double, but I don't think so. A shrink we know was playing the piano, the stereo was going, and you couldn't hear much of anything. The rest of them were on the street floor using the backup TV to watch "Upstairs, Downstairs." That bunch may have been sober. The last guest left at two-thirty a.m. Not only had they eaten all the nice slices of ham and cheese and the chips and dips and cutesy bread, they'd opened all the cans in the kitchen cupboards, cooked themselves stuff like corned beef hash with peach halves on it, and drunk everything liquid on the premises. That wasn't as bad as the party in Ann Arbor when the guests ate my daughter's fancy soap, but that's another story. A house is a night club, unless you're damn careful. My wife makes books. Not betting books, though she does keep close tabs on all the big horse races they put on television. Now, making books can be a pretty messy enterprise. It's worth it, because her books are beautiful when she finally gets them out of the house. The trouble is, she works on the dining room table. That's because the TV is right there, and she's one of these people who likes noise while she works; besides, she's a Weather Channel freak, not that anybody ever successfully forecasts the weather for Boston--it's always a surprise, usually nasty. Anyhow, I'll come down one afternoon and her place at the table is covered with scraps of paper and cardboard, supply catalogues, glue sticks, other stuff. Fine. When suppertime comes she pushes it all out of the way so she'll have a place to eat. The next day there's more stuff, and the table is half covered. The mantelpiece is groaning, and the little brick platform in front of the fireplace is invisible. The tops of the island cabinets support a paper cutter and assorted photos and unbound pages. A couple of days later, we have to eat on small plates, because things are already falling off all around the edges. I live in fear that I'll spill a glass of water or a cup of tea. I'm not exactly clumsy, but everybody spills tea now and then, right? Then the pile begins to recede; a couple of days later teak appears between stacks of materials, and not long after that she shows me this absolutely lovely artifact, maybe eight by ten inches, and there's nothing on the table but a few leftover catalogues. Bliss. Until the next time. A house is also a factory. I could go on. I'm usually in this room she calls my study, which is always pristine, except for the paper I file on the floor, the big chair I dump things in that I plan to do something with pretty soon now, a coffee table holding piles of stuff we're going to take to the condo in Maine, maybe a couple of hundred books, mostly on shelves--six or eight dictionaries, an encyclopedia and probably thirty other reference books, numerous novels, an enormous old leather-covered Bible that I forget where we got it--my desk and my computer table, three computers right now and three printers, one of which is for my wife's digital photos, and some other things I can't find. A house is a place for a writer's eyrie. It's also a place you pour money into to keep it from falling down, a place to have spectacular fights over all sorts of things, and a place to eat really delicious meals when I'm in the mood to put some effort into my cooking (Lucy does the hard stuff--I just cook and do the heavy lifting, but I do all the cooking). It's a place for the grandkids to come on occasions special and ordinary--our daughter is still speaking to us, probably because we don't nag her much anymore. It's a place to sleep at night on a mattress better than the ones they have anywhere else. It's a place where a neighbor comes and sits around the table while we all trash City Hall and deplore our other neighbors' outrageous affairs. Finally, it's a place we come back to after going on trips and breathe a great big sigh of relief. No question: it's a home, but it's a lot more than that. |
Carter Jefferson |
