Being Home: An Anthology

Sam Pickering

Words make homes, not bricks and mortar, not even furnishings and family. As words change so do homes. Nowadays I live in an old person’s home. It was a different place when I bought it forty years ago. Since then the stairs have gotten steeper. Liver spots have appeared on walls, and cracks wrinkle across ceilings. The living and dining rooms have aged into storerooms piled high with boxes. Once I knew their contents. Now I don’t know or care. Upstairs closets are thick with clothes worn by me’s that have disappeared. At first three children shared the home with Vicki and me. Time passed, and they grew up and left. Now three small rescue dogs are our family. All are over fifteen years old and two suffer from canine senility.

Years ago, I read to learn more than for entertainment. I still read for entertainment, but now more for recollection. As I turn pages, I discover who I was, where I have been, and sometimes where I am going, or not going. Memory is a wizard. It changes nonfiction into fiction, and fiction into nonfiction. As I read the pieces in this anthology not only fragments from the lives I led and might have led came to mind, but I also wandered the homes the authors described. I wasn’t comfortable in all the homes, but I experienced them. Like the Seven-league Boots of Little Poucet and the Magical Carpets of Isfahan, reading transformed my armchair and teacake existence, and I traveled to worlds simultaneously familiar and different, new and old.

Strangers ask contributors to this anthology where they are from, a question that no one can answer to his own satisfaction. Other contributors discover they are not from around here, no matter how long they’ve been in the neighborhood. A person lives in an Accident House. On the street outside cars crash, inside people bruise one another. Some contributors discover they cannot go home, but, of course, in their pieces they return to a home. How does a person fashion a home in a distant land, and when she leaves, does that home vanish into the mist of years? A woman is at home in the history of the Holocaust. A man researches his family. He fails to discover his ancestry, but in the process what he learns about others becomes his facts. For some narrators, and readers, books make a home. A man takes imaginary walks through Chicago to keep close to the boy he once was and to the family he came from. I accompanied him; it was my first visit to Chicago. After a fifty-two-year absence, a man visits the village once home to the small school in Connecticut he attended. I went with him part of the way, but then I drifted northeast to Maine and later south to Tennessee.

Place is the anchor; the rich soil in which we take root, a woman writes. For some writers the soil is rich; for others it’s barren till. For many readers, place mesmerizes. Several writers cultivate gardens, and their homes bloom. For a woman and her husband home is forty years of hiking. A woman who misses the open landscape of Montana looks out a window and studies the close hills of New Hampshire so that what might be can take root. A couple remembers housemates who left indelible prints on their lives. In their pieces, writers mark passings. As a boy, one narrator lived in many houses. Before leaving he helped his father paint the walls. In each wall, he left behind a single pin hole. What does anyone leave behind? Certainly, it is always a pinhole, but if it is accessible like the pieces in this anthology, readers can look through it and see richness in themselves and without and see it in poverty and unhappiness as well as pleasure and joy. For untold moments they will live both their lives and the lives of the narrators. Perhaps they’ll sit and wander Never-Never Lands, in the process creating homes with words. In the beginning and in the middle and at the end are words.

So, where are you from?

Bob Kunzinger

When someone asks the standard question, Where is home for you? at a conference, a ballgame, or an airport, or anywhere we go really and meet someone new, the answer for many is not so easy. Well, I live in Virginia, but I’m from New York, or some variation of those two realities—where we live and where we grew up—is typical. Rarely do we meet people anymore who have lived in one spot their entire lives. We have to go to Europe for that, the old country, where ancestry drills deep into centuries past, rarely wandering more than a few hundred kilometers from one spot.

But the concept of home is complicated in our transient, emigrating world. For my part, I usually say New York, though I suppose I could say Ireland, or Germany, or Italy if I had my DNA chart with me. I could even suggest my roots return to the Celtic nomads of five thousand years ago though it is hard for me to pinpoint where, to be certain. Instead I say New York. I have lived in Virginia for well more than half my life and my current house in a small village for twenty-four years, but I am a come lately here. And my native neighbors are correct; I will never be from Virginia. My son is, though, born and raised here.

The essays in this collection explore that fluid definition of home. These revealing works wander from the notion that home is where your stuff is, as George Carlin asserted, to home is where your family is, whether it be a Brooklyn brownstone, a 3B 2 ½ B suburban 2 car garage ranch, or an automobile. One motif is decidedly consistent herein: Where is home? is more often answered in reference to a person’s genetic code than a zip code.

Excellent writing reaches up and out of itself; it shows us our pain and often unearths treasured memories and tribulations we thought we had buried for good. With those guidelines, these works invite us not simply into the writers’ homes—ancestral and contemporary—but into our own as well.

Ignorance or Innocence

Johnnie Bernhard

I had to leave. It was not my home. It was my father’s home. He moved us from the suburbs of Houston to the flat coastal plains of South Texas in 1974. Forty years later, I remember the two extremes as visions: the Houston skyline shadowed by petrochemical plants with thermal flares lighting the night like shooting stars, and Ganado, tired and gray, with one road cutting through town and a blinking caution light swinging in the wind. Life was just like that then, one extreme to another.

The people I went to school with were mostly farmers’ children or the working poor, Whites, Blacks, and Mexicans, with too many children and too many bills. They rode bulls and quarter horses in rodeos, drove combines that harvested corn, worked for a local merchant for $1.75 an hour, or were migrant farm workers, who lived at a nondescript motel at the edge of town.

They were proud people, said what was on their mind, and moved without hesitation. They loved and hated the same way, unencumbered. With little restraint in their actions, they drank hard and they worked hard. It was either ignorance or innocence that motivated them. The farm to market roads of South Texas were littered with beer cans, punctured spleens, and twisted limbs every weekend as a testimony to their creed.

On Monday morning, we huddled in our desks in home room, anticipating the news of a classmate propelled through a windshield into a barbed wired fence. For years, a blonde, chocolate-eyed cheerleader, whose head was severed in a car accident, has haunted my middle-aged dreams. She never ages, forever sixteen and beautiful.

My best friend and her family lived in a two-bedroom house that hadn’t seen a coat of paint in thirty years. They were Bohemians, not in the artistic sense, but part of an ethnic group of Czechs who arrived in Texas in the late nineteenth century. In the pecking order of a small Texas town, they were slightly above Blacks and Mexicans. Poor, Catholic, and of eastern European descent, this family was handed a first-class ticket to the edge of town; a place where they rented from a prominent family until some miracle came along.

Five children slept in one bedroom and the parents in the other. There was no central air or heat. In the winter, a twenty-five-inch-wide gas heater provided heat for seven people. The trick was to sequentially move your front and back sides in the middle of those twenty-five inches of heat, ensuring even distribution of warmth. This was not easily done in a large family; arguments and shoving were part of the morning ritual.

Don’t stand so close to that damn thing! You’ll catch your night gown on fire! I did stand too close. And in return for my disobedience, I received second degree burns on the back of my calves resembling grill marks on a steak.

The only happy day I remember in that family’s life was the day the miracle arrived. They moved into their own home. The man who sold it to them had been their former landlord. The house needed a lot of work, but it had three bedrooms. The only son had a room of his own when he was sixteen. The four daughters shared a room.

My father helped sheet-rock and paint that house in exchange of my friend’s father pouring a concrete sidewalk in front of our house. The two men tried to forge a friendship with whiskey and labor, but it didn’t last.

The last time I saw my friend was a year after high school graduation. I received a small college scholarship and left town the morning after graduation. She stayed and got married. When I returned home for summer break, I went by her house, her home as a married woman. She showed me her photo album of the wedding shower and wedding. The highlight was the prenuptial shower where the hostesses presented the bride to be with a penis-shaped cake. The photograph showed women posing around the cake with their arms draped on each other’s shoulders. There was a comradery there I recognized immediately, as one who did not belong.

I never saw her again after that. I can’t remember why. The only news that came over the years was that her father tried to commit suicide in the only home he ever owned.

A lot of girls became pregnant during that four-year trial known as high school. Someone explained it to me as, Only the good girls get caught. At the time, I remember being confused by the word caught and what it had to do with being good.

During my sophomore year, a girl a year older than me went into labor in the high school bathroom. I didn’t know she was pregnant. I didn’t know if she was a good girl. The only thing I knew about her was she wore her father’s shirts to school, and she hated to read. Once in civics class the teacher asked her to read out loud. She immediately put her head on her desk and covered it with both arms, becoming invisible in the enormity of her father’s white shirt.

During that same time, I hosted a baby shower for a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl. Five girls came to the shower I gave in the living room. The mother of the pregnant teen refused to come. The one family member to attend was an older sister, who sat on the couch, unsmiling, clutching her purse in her lap, poised for flight at any minute.

By hosting the baby shower, I forever labeled myself as an outsider. I wasn’t from there. I never would be one of them. It was the same for my mother. She knew it at the time and didn’t care. It took me longer to figure it out, because I accepted their excuses. I can’t come to your party, because I’m sick. I can’t come to your party, because we’re going out of town. I can’t come to your party, because my mother thinks you’re white trash.

There was plenty of ostracizing to go around, but it was always worse for the girls who became pregnant in high school. The social norms of a small Texas town in the Seventies sent pregnant, unwed mothers to live with a distant relative or a church home with the simple, direct marquee, Texas Home for Unwed Mothers.

The irony of the town’s moral code was cruel: if you plan for sex, you’re a slut, but don’t get pregnant and embarrass us. No one knew that cruelty more than the pregnant, unwed mother. As soon as her belly swelled, she was gone, sent away with no forwarding address left behind. No one talked about it.

Sometimes the girl would return with her baby. But she was different. Her sadness pervaded the entire school building. She was no longer a schoolgirl, but a mother with a broken heart.

The guest of honor at the baby shower in my mother’s living room kept her baby and married the baby’s father. That violent boy became a violent man until he was killed on an offshore oil rig. The young widow with two children remained in the trailer house he bought for her.

My mother felt sorry for that girl, like she did for a lot of the disenfranchised of that little town. I suppose most of her life she felt the same way, but she refused to accept it as a life sentence. She was one of the town’s eccentrics—a black-headed, red-lipstick-wearing Catholic from South Louisiana. She was too much for that little town— too soulful, too emotional, too rice and gravy Cajun. The Protestant, gentry farmers of German descent in Ganado didn’t like her. A lot of people thought she was crazy.

There were a lot of stories about my mom in those days. One remains with me. When my eight-year-old sister refused to wear the new shoes my mother bought her, my mother was outraged. Without a word, she quickly packed my sister’s shoes and clothes and stuffed them into paper grocery bags. With the clothes in the trunk of her car and her four daughters in the back seat of the yellow 1976 Oldsmobile 98 Regency, my mother drove to the motel near Highway 59.

The motel was a cinder block building of once white drabness, plopped on a concrete pad without a single plant, tree, or weed in its wake. It was a stopping point for truck drivers traveling Highway 59, and the seasonal home of the migrant farm workers and their children.

My mother walked inside the motel office, only turning around once, silently forbidding us from getting out of the car. When she came out of the motel office a few minutes later, a man followed her. She handed him the paper bags of clothes with the pair of new shoes on top.

We didn’t say a word on the ride home. We stared straight ahead in the heat of the South Texas sun; our bare legs sweating, sticking to the vinyl covered car seats.

I never thought my mother was crazy. I thought she was courageous. She hosted a baby shower for a girl the town was ashamed of and gave clothes to migrant farm workers everyone called wet backs.

Forty years later, I cannot separate two images of her: the picture of the little girl in her First Communion photograph clutching a white lily with white-gloved hands, and an expressionless middle-aged woman with black hair and red lips drinking coffee on the side porch of our house in Ganado.

My first job was in that little town. The owner’s son rode his bicycle to the Dairy Mart every day. His dog Bobo rode in the wire basket near the handlebars. Society had many names for Rusty then: retard, mongoloid, idiot, and moron.

Our job was to close the restaurant. The first thing Rusty did after the last customer left was turn up the radio. He then stacked the dining room chairs, sometimes six chairs high. Together, we carried five-gallon buckets of hot water and vinegar for mopping the floor. We worked from the back to the entrance, pushing our mops across the linoleum floor of the dining room.

At the entrance door, we rested the mops outside the building. I reached back inside the dining room and turned off the light. Once the door was locked, Rusty would holler, Good night! and whistle for his dog sleeping near his bicycle. Off the two of them would ride, in the quiet, deserted streets of Ganado on a weekday night in the late Seventies.

I kept that job until I graduated from high school. I said goodbye to everyone beginning the morning of my graduation from school and Ganado.

I met my friends that morning on a farm outside of town, where we ceremoniously stripped to our bras and panties and swam in a rice canal. There, the irrigation pump bellowed clear, cold water into the lushness of early rice. It was the last time we were all together, laughing.

The next day I left the blinking caution light at the four way stop of Ganado, forever. What I brought with me was a realization that life was a chasm between ignorance and innocence. This made me a target, but also a runner. Every four way stop I came to in life, I encountered like I did that swinging caution light in Ganado. I plowed through it and never looked back. I ran and ran until my heart burst, and the small-town girl was completely lost somewhere along the way.

I returned to Ganado last summer to bury my father. My past came to the funeral service. It spoke to me as if everything were unchanged, despite the passing of thirty-three years. I was that girl who lived in the white house on the corner and worked at the Dairy Mart. I was still the girl not from here.

Celibacy and Ancestry

Rick Campbell

Belonging,

After all, is mostly a matter of belief.

—Leslie Norris

The search for Baby Schaeffer—it all but worked out, but I couldn’t let it be. I had him, but like Oedipus, I had to keep pushing, prying, asking one more question. I wanted to belong; I had to believe.

In the late 70s, as an undergrad, I began reading about American utopian societies and was surprised to see the Harmonists and Economy in my textbook. As a child I’d taken school field trips to Old Economy and though then I did not listen to a word that was said, when I came across it again, I read with fervor. The Harmonists lived under many names. George Rapp was the first and greatest leader. Rapp came from Germany, a radical, mystical Lutheran who was charismatic enough to have followers and dangerous enough to the powers that ruled Germany in 1800 to get him arrested and then to make his migration to the New World seem a good deal to him and his enemies. Rapp bought land in the hills of Western Pennsylvania and brought his followers there where they built a town called Harmony. A few years later they moved to Indiana and started New Harmony. But that turned out to be not to their liking and they sold it to Robert Owen and moved back to settle on prime Ohio riverfront land. A brochure written by the Harmony Society museum calls this land primeval forest. Maybe so, but as I grew up there nothing seemed primeval, unless it was the steel mill’s fire at night. This third, and last, settlement, they called Oekonomie (a place of orderly, managed affairs) which in English became Economy. These are the people I wanted to be descended from; these are who I wanted as family. Who would I be? A Rappite, A Harmonist? An Economite?

I wanted to belong to a group of people who had intentionally banded together for a good reason, even if it wasn’t my reason. When I believed in God it wasn’t their Protestant God. I’m also attracted to the contradiction in my title. Celibacy does not beget ancestry. They are, if everyone behaves by the rules, mutually exclusive terms. In every group, not everyone plays by the rules, and rumor had it that even George Rapp didn’t always embrace celibacy. There was at least one sweet young Harmonist that caught his eye, and maybe more than just his eye. But Rapp and the Harmonist elders were not, like others, like the Oneida Perfectionists, horny old men who believed that young women needed to be initiated into sexual intercourse by the grizzled veterans of the Love Boat. By and large the Harmonist elders seemed to keep their promises and keep their pants zipped, or tied, or whatever they did in the early 1800s to keep their privates housed and holstered.

So how could I have any hope of being descended from these guys? Schism, that’s how. The Harmony Society was cruising along in its third incarnation at Economy, a beautiful site downriver from Pittsburgh; they had over 500 members and were generally healthy, wealthy and wise. Then came the Lion of Judah. A French false prophet that Rapp and the other leaders embraced with open arms, the Lion claimed to be Count de Leon, but his real name was Bernhard (Mueller) Maximilian Proli, and what he was espousing more than anything else, was let’s get it on. His song caught on with almost a third of the Economy faithful. Soon, a large contingent of followers who couldn’t wait to resume connubial relations left the Society and headed a few more miles downriver to Phillipsburg. There, we might assume, they had lots of sex since they were willing to part ways with George Rapp, family