When it came to decorating her home, my mother was nothing if not practical. She learned early on that children will destroy whatever you put in front of them, so for most of my youth our furniture was chosen for its durability rather than for its beauty. The one exception was the dining-room set, which my parents bought shortly after they were married. Should a guest eye the buffet for longer than a second, my mother would notice and jump in to prompt a compliment. “You like it?” she’d ask. “It’s Scandinavian!” This, we learned, was the name of a region—a cold and forsaken place where people stayed indoors and plotted the death of knobs.
The buffet, like the table, was an exercise in elegant simplicity. The set was made of teak, and had been finished with tung oil. This brought out the character of the wood, allowing it, at certain times of day, to practically glow. Nothing was more beautiful than our dining room, especially after my father covered the walls with cork. It wasn’t the kind you use on bulletin boards but something coarse and dark, the color of damp pine mulch. Light the candles beneath the chafing dish, lay the table with the charcoal-textured dinnerware we hardly ever used, and you had yourself a real picture.
This dining room, I liked to think, was what my family was all about. Throughout my childhood, it brought me great pleasure, but then I turned sixteen and decided that I didn’t like it anymore. What happened was a television show, a weekly drama about a close-knit family in Depression-era Virginia. The family didn’t have a blender or a country-club membership, but they did have one another—that and a really great house, an old one, built in the twenties or something. All their bedrooms had slanted clapboard walls and oil lamps that bathed everything in fragile golden light. I wouldn’t have used the word “romantic,” but that’s how I thought of it.
“You think those prewar years were cozy?” my father once asked. “Try getting up at 5 A.M. to sell newspapers on the snow-covered streets. That’s what I did and it stunk to high heaven.”
“Well,” I told him, “I’m just sorry that you weren’t able to appreciate it.”
Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn’t live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at. Wasn’t it crushing to live in a house no older than our cat?
“No,” my father said. “Not at all.”
My mother felt the same: “Boxed in by neighbors, having to walk through my parents’ bedroom in order to reach the kitchen. If you think that was fun, you never saw your grandfather with his teeth out.”
They were more than willing to leave their pasts behind them, and reacted strongly when my sister Gretchen and I began dragging it home. “ The Andrews Sisters?” my father groaned. “What the hell do you want to listen to them for?”
When I started buying clothes from Goodwill, he really went off, and for good reason, probably. The suspenders and knickers were bad enough, but when I added a top hat he planted himself in the doorway and physically prevented me from leaving the house. “It doesn’t make sense,” I remember him saying. “That hat with those pants, worn with the damn platform shoes . . .” His speech temporarily left him, and he found himself waving his hands, no doubt wishing that they held magic wands. “You’re just . . . a mess is what you are.”
The way I saw it, the problem wasn’t my outfit but my context. Sure I looked out of place beside a Scandinavian buffet, but put me in the proper environment and I’d undoubtedly fit right in.
“The environment you’re looking for is called a psychiatric hospital,” my father said. “Now give me the damn hat before I burn it off.”
I longed for a home where history was respected—and, four years later, I finally found one. This was in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I’d gone there to visit an old friend from high school—and because I was between jobs, and had no real obligations, I decided to stay for a while and maybe look for some dishwashing work. The restaurant that hired me was a local institution, all dark wood and windowpanes the size of playing cards. The food was O.K., but what the place was really known for was the classical music that the man in charge, someone named Byron, pumped into the dining room. Anyone else might have thrown in a compilation tape, but he took his responsibilities very seriously, and planned each meal as if it were an evening at Tanglewood. I hoped that dishwashing might lead to a job in the dining room, busing tables, and, eventually, waiting on them, but I kept these aspirations to myself. Dressed as I was, in jodhpurs and a smoking jacket, I should have been grateful that I was hired at all.
After getting my first paycheck, I scouted out a place to live. My two requirements were that it be cheap and close to where I worked, and on both counts I succeeded. I couldn’t have dreamed that it would also be old and untouched, an actual boarding house. The owner was adjusting her “Room for Rent” sign as I passed, and our eyes locked in an expression that said, “Hark, stranger, you are one of me!” Both of us looked like figures from a scratchy newsreel: me the unemployed factory worker in tortoiseshell safety glasses and a tweed overcoat two sizes too large, and her, the feisty widow lady, taking in boarders in order to make ends meet. “Excuse me,” I called, “but is that hat from the forties?”
