There’s nothing malevolent about it—it’s just a house—but I despise it the way you can when you know it stands for so much more. The boring stucco exterior’s the same as all the other houses on this street, although they each have some variation of color and accenting. Like everyone was allowed one special request during construction, and that’s how you know which one is yours. If you didn’t know what real customization looks like, and that it’s not ticking boxes to adjust only preapproved features on otherwise identical floor plans, it probably seemed like a very charming development, as far as tract housing goes.
Now, even with whatever variation the original owners chose as their signature, my parents’ place stands out from the very lived-in neighborhood because it looks vacant by comparison. There are no flower pots on either side of the door. There’s no flag mounted beside the electronic garage door that faces the street like it’s an attractive detail of its own, even though every single one is just a cheap-looking roll-up that is apparently impossible not to dent.
This is the first time I’m using the key my parents gave me, and I enter without announcing myself the way I always did at home. Even when I knew no one else was there, I’d fill the entryway with the sound of my voice, like I was greeting the house itself, welcomed in exchange by the familiar aroma. The perfume of home.
I guess there’s a smell when I come into my parents’ rented place, but it’s not one I recognize. It smells the same way it did a couple of weeks ago, the first and last time I was here, but it still doesn’t smell like us and I guess it’s because we don’t live here.
There weren’t any furnishings the first time I walked through this house. Now there are decorations and pictures in the great room, and the kitchen shows convincing signs of life. The coffee maker and the food processor and the scale are all on the counter and accessible, even though they look crowded here. Once I leave the front of the house, though, it’s like I’ve been on a sitcom set; it was designed to look lived in, despite the fact that no one really does.
The facade ends abruptly. The hall bathroom is totally sterile, aside from the fact that there’s toilet paper on the roll. They’ve been here for two weeks—and supposedly didn’t know what would happen next, or when—but Nichole Turner didn’t put out her ornate bowls. The two that hold lotion and soap are missing. She didn’t put out the heavy matching frame, either, the one that has a picture of me in it because for some reason she prefers that to giving restroom patrons reading material. My dad says she likes bathrooms that can double as little living rooms, that look pretty and smell pretty, and that make you forget what people go in there to do. I’m not sure anyone has ever done anything in here.
My parents’ bedroom is equally unadorned, but more upsetting.
There is no attempt at the lie in here.
In any of my childhood memories, as early as I can remember, there was always abundant color and light in my parents’ room. It was always a sanctuary, with a place for everything, and a sitting place for everyone. This room is a fraction of the necessary size and couldn’t have offered the feeling of retreat, but even the familiar sense of comfort is missing. It could never have compared, but it could have been less depressing.
They haven’t put up the bed properly. There’s a mattress and box spring on a metal frame with wheels, but there’s no headboard. There are two pillows instead of two dozen. There’s no full-length mirror, or bedside tables. My dad’s reading glasses are just folded on the carpet on his side of the bed, next to a book on which his earbuds rest.
Sweat sprouts above my lip, and a hot nausea blooms in the pit of my stomach.
How could they live like this? How dare they, when giving me back what I wanted was so much easier? It must have been. Nothing about the destitution before me seems preferable, unless the point was withholding from me, and being so willing that they’d sacrifice the basics themselves.
I don’t walk around to see what lies on the floor on my mother’s side. The satin-lined turban she wears over her hair every night is lying on her one pillow, because there’s no drawer within reaching distance to store it in.
If I didn’t know better, I’d be sick again with grief instead of rage. I’d be trying to make sense of everything they’ve given up, thinking they had to. I’d be reminding myself that they’re okay because they’re adults. Their whole world doesn’t feel upside down because they don’t have their things, I’d try to believe, when the space around me seemed to be screaming the opposite. I’d try to console myself that they know these weeks, this awful turn of events, are part of life, even if they were unexpected. I’d be struggling to hold on to the hope that even though my parents had clearly lacked the energy to make this place a home, they were all right.
Because what it looks like is that they’ve fallen apart, too. That if they aren’t like me—if it isn’t completely upending to have someone else assert control of their very surroundings—then at the very least, they couldn’t make sense of falling through the social stratosphere so suddenly.
But I know what they’ve been up to now. Instead of hard times, this room looks like my parents didn’t want me here so they wouldn’t have to suffer the pretense of constructing a temporary home when they had no intention of sticking around.
I haven’t looked in their closet, but I don’t bother; I don’t need to see that they’ve been living out of suitcases for weeks because they were that committed to leaving this town behind.
I don’t go into the bedroom I never moved into, just shuffle lethargically back down the hall to the great room. It’s only noon, but I feel like this rented collection of depressing rooms in an unspectacular neighborhood that isn’t close to being what I want is misleading. At first you think it’s impoverished, made harmless by everything it lacks. But it isn’t. This place is a vacuum, a black hole, and it’s been sucking the energy out of me, pulling me toward the edge ever since I stepped through the door.
My mother was right.
She isn’t exactly like me; she’s worse. Because there’s a room here, but there was never any place for me.
My parents knew I’d be coming today. How did she think this house, in this state, would make me feel? And why this obvious escalation when all we’ve ever done is spar? My mother and I have become accustomed to our innocent game of tug-of-war.
But this.
This is punishment. It is wholly punitive, with no expectation or framework for atonement or rehabilitation. She offered me no warning, no guidelines before subjecting me to this. She would have, if it were about the two of us. Which means her provocation must be my father.
Can’t you just . . . move a few things around for a while? I’d asked him.
What do you mean, Fair?
I’d intentionally asked when the two of them weren’t together, but the moment the question was out of my mouth, I saw my mother come casually around the corner. It was too late to take it back, and to try would’ve opened me up to an innocent interrogation of why I wanted to. It would prove I knew better, or at least I knew that I should. The damage was done.