Years after I was an adult, my mother asked me what I thought my earliest memory was. When I told her, that she was part of the memory wasn’t a surprise; the situation I recounted could have been any time; but when I described the setting–the kitchen counter and cabinets–she was able to place it exactly and said I’d have been around the age of two.
When I look back at various friendships and romantic relationships, I often can’t remember conversations, arguments, events, but I can always remember the house or apartment where they took place. I remember the vintage tile of the bathroom floor, the crumbling stone fence, the scarred wood on a doorframe, the varnished floors, the peeling paint in the dining room, the sagging steps on the back porch.
They say in dreams, houses represent our selves, our souls. The rooms are different parts of us. The condition of the houses speaks to our fears or our hopes. Just so, houses are a powerful metaphor in writing. Paul Lisicky, who can convey more in fewer words than almost any fiction writer I know, writes the following passage in his short story “Nude Beach,” just after his character Matthias has an encounter with a stranger.
They walked side by side up the nude beach, voiceless, listening. The frondage crackled behind the dune line. On the other side of the trees someone was charcoaling meat. Matthias’s eyes teared, smarted. The face of his ex flashed in the sky ahead of him. Breakup: he still couldn’t even say the word aloud. Breakup! Say it. Sometimes he pictured himself as a house, his wiring, plumbing, plaster, siding and roof sold for crack. In the wake of the breakup, his ex had moved in with a new man on the other side of the bay. They’d set up one life together within days of the split, with no struggle apparent. They were seen at the local markets, talking about furniture and produce, hand in hand, faces serious. Meanwhile just the shell of Matthias remained, leaning to one side as the storms passed through the spaces where the windows used to be.
You can read the rest of Lisicky’s exquisitely crafted story in Foolish Hearts: New Gay Fiction, on sale January 14, 2014.
Excerpt reprinted with permission from Cleis Press. All rights reserved.
Wow.
I know.