Housebound

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For reasons I didn’t understand at the time, it was clear to me early on that I needed to escape my home. At 24, I finally tunneled out. Despite growing up with plenty of space—my own room, a big yard beside a woods, indulgent parents, all the usual middle-class advantages—I felt a kind of panic. It all belonged to someone else, was someone else’s plan, someone else’s future. I finished school, got a job, saved some cash, lit out for a city apartment and didn’t look back.

I’ve always hated that house. After every visit, kept short with excuses of a busy urban life, I got the hell out. I rarely stayed the night. But now I am back. Now I am straddling two homes, two worlds, two headspaces. And somehow now it’s my name on the deed.

.  .  .

In my earliest memory, I am romping in the backyard on a summer day with Jake, the family dog. It's a big yard. And a small dog. The tall cedar hedges defining the property lines contain us.

.  .  .

A friend of mine says she wants nothing to do with the bother and responsibilities of home ownership. I felt the same way–at least I thought I did. I fancied myself an iconoclast, resisting societal norms. After all, in our culture, home ownership is accepted as an inevitability, along with marriage and offspring—the Holy Trinity of a Western existence.

My parents built this house, number 35, the seventh house on the right. There was no architect, no designer. My mother chose every finish, positioned every light switch, and drafted every inch. I tell people that her blood runs in the walls. It’s not a large or luxurious house; it’s a modest bungalow of about 1500 square feet. The right word, I think, would be “practical,” or “functional.” There are some distinctive features, which I have only recently come to appreciate, but their purpose does not seem to be to increase comfort, only usability.

They moved in five years after they married, saving every penny to afford the plans, the lot, and the contractor. They did not finish it all at once, and along the way they waited until they could afford the best fixtures and materials. The garage wasn’t added until decades later. I didn’t witness this exciting alteration; at the time I hadn’t spoken to my parents in years. One night around that time, I found a stoic phone message from my father telling me goodbye—just in case he didn’t make it through his hernia surgery the following morning.

.  .  .

My dad and I are sitting in the room adjoining the kitchen, a room most people would call the family room. My mother, in her usual warm and fuzzy way, calls it the auxiliary room. She is standing in the doorway. They are in the middle of a rare fight—I wish I could remember about what. She turns and shouts at him, "This is MY house!"

.  .  .

There is a clear demarcation between the public and private areas. In fact, a wall and two doors almost equally divide the house across the middle. The three of us rarely inhabit the public half (I still don’t) and there are clear "for family" and "for guests" delineations, even in the bathroom. There are actually two bathrooms, which my mother carefully distinguishes by name: the two-piece with the toilet is the “washroom” and the room with the tub and shower is the “bathroom.” I am so trained not to disturb the "guest sink" or towels in the washroom, or its careful vignette of glass jars, pink rose-shaped soaps, and seashells, that I still leave the washroom to wash my hands in the sink down the hall.

.  .  .

Guests of any stripe always take precedence. One December evening, terrified by Rudolph's toothy Abominable Snowman, I run to find my mother, who is chatting with a guest at the front door. Rudely interrupted by her weeping, saucer-eyed child, she turns and barks at me. I return to the TV to face the Snowman alone.

.  .  .

We rarely hosted childhood sleepovers. My room contained only my twin bed, so someone had to sleep on the floor, and we didn’t have a finished rec room or family room, only the auxiliary room. Once my best friend Sandra stayed over, and we camped on the hard tile floor of this room, our sleeping bags squeezed into the narrow gap between the washer and dryer and the kitchen table and chairs.

.  .  .

I am often banned from the kitchen and auxiliary room while my mother undertakes the laborious two-day process of waxing and polishing the grey two-tone floor tiles. I watch from the doorway as she struggles with a massive green-metal floor polisher that she just barely has under control.

.  .  .

I’m finding there are many rules around home ownership, especially home ownership in such an apparently desirable suburban location, SmartCentres notwithstanding. Some rules I learned early on; others I’m learning now. There is a tyranny in this place, a silent and unwritten proscription against uncut grass, empty recycling bins left at the curb, Christmas lights left up a tetch too long, foreigners. The suburbs are ruled by the Velour-Lawn Mafia, and I hear them in my head every time I turn in to my unplowed driveway.

.  .  .

My friend and I are playing in the back yard when I hear the front doorbell chime. Hoping for an interesting visitor or other diversion, we run to investigate. I am disappointed to see it is only the boring old garbage-collection contractor, there to pick up a payment from my mother. When I see him, I spin around and say to my friend, "Oh, it's just the garbage man." I do not understand my mother’s reaction or her shame; nor could I have predicted my own harsh punishment.

.  .  .

It must have crushed her to see me turn my back on her dream and escape, to know I hated my home and hometown. I didn’t know that at the time, of course. I only knew that in some essential way, I did not belong there, that I could not follow its rules, and if I didn’t flee, I would not survive.

.  .  .

I am lying in my little bed, in my little pink room. I am stiff with terror. Just down the hall, there is a series of soft booms. They sound like heavy footsteps, and I am sure I hear them coming closer. Clearly they indicate the approach of a monster of some kind. There is nothing to do but wait for it to appear. It is between my room and my parents’; besides, I know my fears will be dismissed even if I seek help. The monster is in no hurry. His footsteps continue until I succumb to my exhaustion.

.  .  .

She probably knew she was dying, but rather than share this information, she kept mum and continued to care for my increasingly addled and frail dad. She pretended to consider—and then politely rejected—all alternatives to staying at the house. She clung to her autonomy and control. I struggled to convince her to accept help. It was all just to humour me. I see that now.

Afterwards, the house stood empty, with new AlarmForce stickers on the doors. Somehow I could not move forward with the disemboweling and sale. My dad waited patiently in grim long-term-care facilities while I hunted for his new, final home.

Eventually I found that home, and we were both content for a time. But after his hospital stay last year, his new home could no longer cope, and he faced the prospect of long-term care once again. Luckily, there was another option. The seventh house on the right stood waiting for us.

It was a difficult and often stressful summer, but I have no regrets. Though it turned out that my dad had come unmoored from his memories of the house, I was grateful that we could enjoy the place together, sitting in companionable silence in the shady garage, supervising the street, or on the patio, watching the birds at the feeder or the bunnies munching on the lawn.

While I cared for him over those last months, I looked around me at what had become my mother’s shrine. I began to dare to make small changes that I thought might enhance the original. I installed some chic lights in the entry. I hired a landscaper to plant trees. I put up Hallowe’en decorations and dug a vegetable garden. I hope to make it greener and more environmentally efficient. I hope to find deserving new owners. There is no rush.

.  .  .

To my mother, this house must have been the culmination of a dream, an escape from a childhood made unstable by booze and war. It was a place where she could raise her favoured children and graciously host her gracious guests, where she could conjure, maintain, and control the illusion of a perfect suburban life with a generous yard and shining two-tone tiles. And thanks to that wall and two doors, her guests would be spared any glimpses of the private cost of that illusion.

I don’t hate this place anymore. I am stranded here for now, but not forever. For a time I toyed with the idea of coming back for good, of undergoing my initiation into the Velour-Lawn Brotherhood. After all, it is unlikely in these frenzied times that I will ever have such a property again. However, after three weeks back at my city apartment over Christmas, I knew eventually I would need to escape this house again. I’m not much of a homeowner. And it still isn’t really mine. The hard part will be letting it—letting her—go.

.  .  .

Last night, the remaining three residents—two felines, one human—huddled under the covers in that same narrow bed. The room is yellow now, a colour I have never particularly liked, but I can change that. I lay listening for the monster coming down the hall, but then remembered that I had lowered the thermostat at bedtime, silencing the soft booms of the slowly cooling furnace.