by Margot Kahn
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters
Kate Lebo’s essay, “Here,” was originally published as part of “The Pie Lady’s Manifesto” in The Rumpus in 2014. It is reprinted here with permission.
“Freeing Thanksgiving from My Family,” copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Finney Boylan. Originally published in the New York Times. It is reprinted here with permission.
Dani Shapiro’s essay, “Plane Crash Theory,” was originally published in Ploughshares in 2001. It is reprinted here with permission.
“Keeping My Fossil Fuel in the Ground,” copyright © 2016 by Terry Tempest Williams. Originally published in the New York Times. Used by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc. All rights reserved.
Pam Houston’s essay, “The Sound of Horse Teeth on Hay in the Snow,” was originally published in High Desert Journal, Issue 24. It is reprinted here with permission.
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ISBNs: 978-1-58005-668-7 (paperback), 978-1-58005-758-5 (ebook)
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Kate Lebo—Here
Desiree Cooper—Away from Dangerous Things
Jane Wong—A Family Business
Jennifer Finney Boylan—Freeing Thanksgiving from My Family
Debra Gwartney—Broken Home
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum—On Moving Home
Naomi Jackson—Between My Teeth
Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas—Allá En La Fuente
Akiko Busch—Home in Four Acts
Dani Shapiro—Plane Crash Theory
Jennifer De Leon—Mother Tongue
Maya Jewell Zeller—The Privilege Button
Sarah Viren—Some Notes on Our Cyclical Nature
Naima Coster—Subjunctive
Miranda Weiss—Cold, Comfort
Leigh Newman—Vesica Piscis
Tara Conklin—The Explorer
Danielle Geller—Annotating the First Page of the First Navajo-English Dictionary
Claudia Castro Luna—The Stars Remain
Kelly McMasters—The Leaving Season
Margot Kahn—In the Kitchen
Hasanthika Sirisena—Of Pallu and Pottu
Amanda Petrusich—Nuclear Family
Terry Tempest Williams—Keeping My Fossil Fuel in the Ground
KaiLea Wallin—Sea Home
Sonya Chung—Size Matters
Pam Houston—The Sound of Horse Teeth on Hay in the Snow
Elissa Washuta—Undergraduate Admissions Essay Draft
Elisabeth Eaves—Inheritance
Catina Bacote—We Carried Ourselves Like Villagers
Acknowledgments
About the Editors
For my mother.
—MK
For my grandmothers,
Anita Brackett & Betty McMasters, and
for my sons, my forever home,
Emerson & Angus.
—KM
Introduction
As women coming of age in the modern era, moving out of our parents’ homes and into spaces of our own was exhilarating and terrifying. We looked to the past, to the homes our mothers and grandmothers had defined for us by example, and we looked forward into something new we were going to create. Our wishes and daydreams were defining not only the kinds of spaces our homes would be, but the kinds of women—wives, partners, mothers, and citizens—we could become.
As we got older, moving out of homes where we thought we’d be forever, or feeling stuck in places we didn’t mean to be for so long, we realized that home is a loaded word, a complex idea: it’s a place that is safe, sentimental, difficult, nourishing, war-torn, and political. There are so many ways to define it: we might have an ancestral home or homeland, and the place we’re living at the moment, and also the place we feel our soul belongs. Home can be a place whose memory remains trapped in our bones, a notion that may be passed down in our very DNA. Home can be where we learn to first understand our place in the world, and a place we return to, again and again, for answers about how to be. Home is a place constantly evolving alongside our concepts of work, family, gender roles, the economy, and the environment. It is a concept worthy of ongoing reflection and renegotiation.
In her essay “On Moving Home,” Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum says of the place she chooses to call home: “I am more myself here… than I could be anywhere else in the world.” This may be the home feeling we seek, most distilled. And yet, as we collected the essays that ultimately make up this book, we realized the work we were reading overwhelmingly contained an electric current of complicated beauty and love, as well as unease, dissatisfaction, and displacement. These are the stories at the core of our sense of being and belonging, and they are not all happily-ever-after.
The majority of these essays are original, written specifically for this anthology, from a collection of women writers who are diverse on many levels: geography, ethnicity, culture, religion, age, sexuality. What we found, despite our differences, were incredible commonalities in the ways we consider home. Indeed, though we did not suggest or expect it, mothers appear in nearly every essay in this book—in these pages, women remember the mothers, grandmothers, and maternal figures who made or unmade homes for them, while other mother-writers reflect on the homes they are making for their families and for themselves.
Other themes circulate, as well. “Home is the language you are loved in,” says Naomi Jackson in “Between My Teeth.” The language in which we are first loved, the language in which we dream, the accents, aphorisms, songs, and silences we associate with home never leave us, even if the actual language does: for instance, in “A Family Business,” Jane Wong remembers growing up in her parents’ Chinese American restaurant, saying “hello in Cantonese because you haven’t forgotten your language yet.” Danielle Geller’s “Annotating the First Page of the First Navajo-English Dictionary” takes on formalized language as a way to marshal facts and memory, using the rigidity of an institutionalized format to tell the story of her home in a new way.
Moving—moving out, moving in, moving across the country, moving across continents, and simply being on the move—was another constant source of storytelling. Sarah Viren contemplates the comfort and confusion of returning to a place she’s lived before in “Some Notes on Our Cyclical Nature;” and Tara Conklin’s “The Explorer” interrogates that space between the urge for adventure and the tension of staying still. Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas (“All
á En La Fuente”) confronts a flawed view of her homeland Colombia while in Iowa; as a little girl sitting in a church pew in North Carolina, Hasanthika Sirisena (“Of Pallu and Pottu”) imagines the ways her mother’s new life compares to her old in Sri Lanka. Desiree Cooper describes the ghosts that follow a tight military family through their many moves in “Away from Dangerous Things,” reminding us that ultimately, “Home is culture, tradition, and memory—not mortar.”
Jennifer Finney Boylan celebrates the freedom of choosing to return home or not for the holidays in “Freeing Thanksgiving from My Family,” while in “Subjunctive” Naima Coster explores the inevitability of certain patterns laid out by the family history that precedes us. In many instances, moving is not a choice, but a necessity: in her essay “The Stars Remain,” about her childhood in El Salvador, Claudia Castro Luna remembers, “On a windy afternoon Mami comes home and tells us that our petition for US Resident Status has been approved. To leave means survival.”
Landscape becomes story in many pieces, from Terry Tempest Williams’s political land purchases in “Keeping My Fossil Fuel in the Ground” to Miranda Weiss’s choice to raise her family in far-flung Alaska in “Cold, Comfort.” In Pam Houston’s essay “The Sound of Horse Teeth on Hay in the Snow,” a snowed-in ranch that seems like a dangerous setting to others offers only peace and insulation, while Leigh Newman’s Brooklyn garden becomes the unexpected center for intersecting lives in “Vesica Piscis.” Elissa Washuta, in “Undergraduate Admissions Essay Draft,” charts the experience of leaving home for college, illustrating the transition by the absence of the home landscape she’d taken for granted: “I didn’t know, then, that there were places without crickets, without mothers.”
In many ways, a home can be defined by the objects we choose to live alongside us, but sometimes those objects wind up defining home for us. In “The Inheritance,” Elisabeth Eaves describes the way an object can contain both person and place when losing a home is helixed with losing a loved one. Akiko Busch artfully links objects to the ways in which we build home and the ways objects remain even as home changes in “Home in Four Acts,” while in “The Privilege Button,” a simple garage-door opener triggers Maya Jewell Zeller’s conflicted emotions of her personal history moving from homeless to homeowner.
Home can also be a dangerous place, as we learn in Amanda Petrusich’s eerily comforting essay about growing up in the shadow of the Indian Point nuclear power plant and Dani Shapiro’s masterfully terrifying essay “Plane Crash Theory.” While the idea of home carries with it the notion of safety, or at least the hope of it, in reality home is also often the place where we were first afraid, as depicted in Catina Bacote’s “We Carried Ourselves Like Villagers.” Home can also be the place we were pushed past our limits, where we were betrayed, exposed, left in the cold, or, simply, left. As in Debra Gwartney’s searing essay “Broken Home,” home can also be mistaken for a safe harbor, until the day we realize that it is achingly impossible to keep any place truly safe, for ourselves, and sometimes, for those we love.
Like the rooms within a house, the essays in this collection inhabit the inner space: the thoughts, memories, emotions, questions, and meditations with which we envision and embody the idea of home. In this regard, it is not surprising that these essays connect to so many of the issues now at the forefront of our conversations: immigration, gender equality, sexual and family violence, homelessness, and poverty. It is no accident that we open the collection standing in the kitchen with Kate Lebo, “Here.” Imagining home, creating home, staying home, and leaving home—whether to go to work every day, or leaving a household or homeland for good—are all political acts for women. We rejoice in this; it makes us powerful. We hope you feel the same.
—Margot Kahn & Kelly McMasters
Here
Kate Lebo
My personal, artistic, and professional lives are tangled most stubbornly where the kitchen table meets the kitchen wall and window. From there I can walk 72 inches to the sink to wash a mug, 48 inches to the stove to heat the percolator. Swivel 180 degrees to retrieve milk from the fridge, go on tiptoe to reach the microwave that heats my milk. Then turn back around and walk 12 inches to the table, pour coffee into milk, tease a skin of scalded protein off the top with a fingernail, and walk 24 inches to my kitchen chair. There I will eat, drink, talk on the phone, look out the window, resist the urge to check Facebook—which requires a 72-inch walk into another room—and write and write.
I have made my life, quite literally and with onions, in this kitchen. If every time I walked the kitchen I left a trail of silk like a spider, I could fall asleep between the stove and the fridge in a homespun hammock.
My neighborhood has become the sort of place Sunset magazine writes articles about, a land where 50 percent rent hikes are mean, but not crazy. If my landlord and I have one thing in common it’s that we both need to make more money. That’s why in thirty days I must leave this kitchen.
After I lose my apartment my friend says, “This is what thirty looks like?” She just lost her job. She’s thinking about moving to New York.
When my mother was thirty, she moved for the fifth time in five years to follow my father to another job. She was pregnant. I was two. That was the year my friend’s mother would move from Mexico City to Miami, where she would divorce her husband and raise two children alone.
“Apparently.” I make a comparison to help us feel better: “Except for husbands and children, our mothers’ lives looked like this too.”
I have planted a garden. I have harvested rhubarb, herbs, and radishes. The rest of my seeds are start-sized, tender.
Here is where I stirred pots, moved pens, read poems, all without boyfriend or husband or children. I was lonely here, happy here, caught between cabin fever and deep peace. Here is where, as my neighbor once said, I was my own man.
Kate Lebo is the author of Pie School and A Commonplace Book of Pie, and co-editor (with Samuel Ligon) of Pie & Whiskey, an anthology of writers under the influence of butter and booze. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best New Poets, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, and Gastronomica, among other places. Her new book of nonfiction, The Book of Difficult Fruit, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She lives in Spokane, Washington.
Away from Dangerous Things
Desiree Cooper
One night in 1942, when my mother, Bobbie, was only nine years old, the walls of her family’s tiny, wood-frame house began to shudder. Her heart thrashing, she jumped up in the bed. Beside her on the bumpy, thin mattress lay her mother, deep under the spell of slumbered grief.
“Mommy?” Bobbie whispered. “Do you hear that?”
At first, the sound was like the rumble of the Norfolk Southern making its midnight run through Waverly, Virginia, a depot town of barely a thousand people. But then, it gathered into something more discrete—a furious pounding like a crew of carpenters at work. Hammer against nail. Saw against grain. Hinge against jamb. Anger against regret.
“Junious?” Her mother sat up in the bed, pulling Bobbie close. “What you doin’ in the kitchen?”
Neither mother nor daughter stopped to question that it was anybody but Junious, now four days dead. Nor did they question that he would be in the kitchen, in the thick of the night, raising holy hell.
Bobbie heard her father’s disembodied voice rasping from the back of the house. “Stay in the bed!” he commanded. Terrified, she whimpered as her mother held her tight.
This was not Junious’s first visitation. Since his death, he had come in the darkness and rocked their bed like a dinghy on the open sea. He had pulled fresh clothes off the line and strewn them across the backyard. He’d caused the naked light bulbs to blink off and on. Now he was in the kitchen, banging furiously on the back door.
Decades later, my mother would tell me this story like it was a testimony. By then, she was a long way from the little girl cowering in her mother’s bed, listening to her father’s gho
st rage through the night. But she never lost her belief that her kin could visit from the other side, bringing with them signs and omens, protection and advice. The night that her dead father hammered in the kitchen was no exception. Later that day, they heard from the neighbors that there had been a thief on the prowl on the Rural Route 40. He had stolen corn from bins, the Stokleys’ good ax, and hams from the Johnson’s smokehouse. But no one had bothered the widow and her little girl, Bobbie, even though they had fallen asleep with their kitchen door unlocked.
My mother believed her father had come to hammer their door shut and keep them safe. The neighbors called it a miracle.
When Bobbie was twenty-one, she married my dad, Willie, in a civil ceremony in Connecticut. They had been neighbors in Waverly since they were six years old. Despite their deep roots in the sawmill town tucked in the Virginia Piedmont, neither ever doubted that they would one day escape its clutches. My dad’s ticket came in the form of a football scholarship to North Carolina A & T in 1952. When he was cut from the team after his second year, he joined the air force to continue his education. My mom did what many women did back then—she went to college to find a husband. But after two years, she ended up marrying the boy next door.
They say that fleas, when captured in a jar, will eventually stop trying to escape even after the lid is removed. I often think of this in contrast to the human spirit, which can continue to push against what appears to be an airtight reality, against all odds. To this day, I marvel that two young people who grew up under the oppression of the Jim Crow South would even imagine that they had a right to be citizens of the world. But my parents did. Within four years of my dad enlisting, they found themselves a black couple in post-war Japan, expecting their first child, far away from the comforts and terrors of their native Virginia.
It’s not accurate to say that I was “homeless” most of my childhood, even though we lived in Japan (three different times), Texas, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, and Virginia, all before my fourteenth birthday. Not even the word “nomad” works, since nomads often carry their homes with them. Perhaps we were more like immigrants who leave everything behind but their most prized possessions and their roots.
