A CERTAIN NUMBER OF BEDROOMS, A CERTAIN NUMBER OF BATHS
THE BOY CARRIES THE BLUEPRINT CATALOGS EVERYWHERE HE GOES. At school, he keeps them in his backpack, only occasionally looking inside to spy their colorful covers, comforted simply by their presence, their proximity. It is different at home. After school, he locks himself in the empty house and sits at the kitchen table, where he fans the catalogs out in front of him as he eats his snack. He compares the artist’s renditions on the left page with the floor plans on the right, then moves to the living room floor, where he watches television and turns the thin catalog pages. He mutes his cartoons so he can hear himself enunciating the names of the homes he hopes his father will build.
Ranches: Crestwood, Echo Hills, Nova.
Split Levels: Timber Ridge, Elk Ridge.
The Capes: Cod, Vincent, and Chelsey.
Two-story houses, like the one they live in, in ascending order by size: Walden, Westgate, Somerset, Carbondale.
The boy has not been reading long and wants to be sure that when the time comes he can spell the new house’s name, that he can say it. He pronounces slowly, then more confidently. He wants the new home to be built from the ground up, so it will not have anyone else’s history attached to it, so that he knows for sure that no one will have died in the garage. He often wonders if they would be better off without a garage at all.
Only after his father’s obsession with the catalogs passed did the boy take them to his own room. He thought he’d get in trouble for claiming them but never did, not even later when he started sneaking them to school in his backpack. The boy is years away from the time he steals his first porno magazine from beneath his father’s mattress, but when he does he will remember the catalogs, remember the feel of their crinkly, hand-worn pages. Once again, he will find himself too young to understand what he’s looking at or why he wants it, the magazines reminding him only obliquely of this time in his life, when so much hope is invested in so little paper.
At dinner, the boy tells his father about the houses he likes best this week, about how he is having trouble deciding between the Crestwood and the Cape Cod. The father glances at the pages as the boy presents them. A month ago he smiled at the boy’s enthusiasm, even joined in with comments of his own, but now he is less demonstrative with his opinions.
Dinner: A meal consisting of brand-name hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. The father is not frugal with his shopping as the mother was. He buys what he recognizes, assured by television that he is making a good choice.
The boy has been in so few other houses that actually picturing the interior of any other home means simply reconfiguring the rooms of their own house into his conception of the new one. The floor plans he likes best are ones he can most easily shoehorn his own into, using the homes of his grandmother and of the neighbor boy his mother once forced him to play with to fill in the bigger houses. The father does not say much in return, but the boy has become used to this. To make up for his father’s reticence, the boy talks more and more, more than he is comfortable with, not because he wants to but because he does not like the silence at the table, the reminder that there is something missing, that without her they are alone even when they are with each other.
Suicide: Car running, windows closed, parked in the garage. No one would ever drive it again and two months after her death it would be sold at a loss. The boy was not supposed to find her. She did not know that school had become a half day, that everyone had been sent home early because of the impending snowfall. The note taped to the outside of the driver’s window was addressed to his father, not to him. The boy could barely read then, but decided to try anyway. He pulled the note off the window, leaving the scotch tape behind.
Mother: Hidden underneath. Pressed against the window with her mouth open, the steam from her breath slowly disappearing from the cloudy glass. The last time he saw her.
9-1-1: The boy had learned the number in school, but he had not been taught that it was not failsafe, that it did not save everyone. For months he thought about raising his hand and telling his teacher about her error, but they had moved on from health and safety and would not speak of it again.
Extolling the virtues of the houses to the father, the boy lists the numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms. He wonders what half a bathroom is but does not ask. He explains that all the houses from American Homes have R-19 insulation, which he has been assured by the catalog is the very best kind. He shows his father the cross section of a wall and repeats from memory the phrase oriented strand board. The boy pronounces many of the words wrong. He does not realize that learning words by sounding them out alone has left him with false pronunciations, sounds that as an adult he will be constantly corrected for. No matter how hard he tries to hide it, he will not speak the same language others speak.
Father: Quiet. Sluggish. Often watches the news from his easy chair with his eyes closed. A tumbler of melting, browning ice dangles from his fingertips at all times. Has apparently forgotten how to play catch or even how to get to the park.
Father (previous): Fun. Loud. Told jokes the mother disapproved of but that the boy loved. Often rustled the boy’s hair, which the boy pretended to hate but secretly didn’t. Missing in action.
Father (future): Defined by the loss of his partner in a way he was never defined by her presence.
The boy reads the catalogs in the evening while his father naps in his recliner. His father rarely makes it to the bedroom anymore and so sometimes the boy sleeps on the couch to be near him. More often he goes to his own room, where he reads the catalogs until he is too tired to keep his eyes open. Each night, before he sleeps, he chooses the home he thinks they need, his decisions changing quickly, like moods or Michigan weather. Sometimes he falls asleep with the light on, and those nights are the ones he stays in his bed.
On other nights, the boy wakes up shaking, then walks into the living room where his father sleeps. Standing beside the recliner, the boy tries to will his father to wake up before starting to shake him. Neither tactic works. The father snores on, even when the boy begins at last to talk, begins to insist that his father talk back, that he take them away from this home which is no longer any such thing.
Eventually his teacher notices the black rings below his eyes and keeps him inside at recess. She asks him if there’s anything he wants to talk about, if maybe something is happening at home. He knows she knows, but if she will not say so, then neither will he. The boy does not show her the catalogs, hides their meaning from anyone who might accidentally see and ask. Curiosity is not the same as caring.
The new house will end up being an apartment, a word the boy doesn’t even know yet, and then later the new house will be his grandma’s basement. The boy will lose the catalogs on one moving day or another, but by then he won’t need their physical presence. He will have memorized them completely. They will be part of who he is. As he grows, he will make friends and then lose friends, realizing a year or two later that he is unable to remember their names or faces but can still recount the number of bedrooms in their houses, how many bathrooms and a half they had. When he thinks of his old house, the one he had been born in and his mother had died in, he will picture it as a spread in one of his catalogs, imaginary fingers tracing the picture of the remembered home, the hard blue lines of the floor plans.
Home: Three bedrooms. One bath. Storm windows and a thirty-five-year guarantee on the shingles.