I’ve been dreaming about the house I grew up in.
It’s not an easy house to write about. I haven’t lived there in fifteen years, and for most of them, I chose to remember the better parts. Eating suya sandwiches with my sister late at night after our father got home from the club, roasted meat and red onions between soft white bread. Every single mango season. The generations of skinny cats running through the rooms, the dogs one after another. Heidi, Rambo, then Rex. The long afternoons playing with Barbies on the rug, making an upside-down umbrella their ship. Magic, stories, and so many books. It could be such a pretty picture. If it was, maybe I wouldn’t mind seeing it again when I dream.
I hate that house. It’s the house where bad things first happened, the house our mother left us in, the house of our father’s temper and our brother’s cruelty, with the torn linoleum and the ugly walls and the lace curtains gone brown with dust. That house made me terrified of cockroaches—they flew in my face at night, crawled on my walls and once, while I slept, up my legs. They laid eggs in the fridge and hid in the corners. I have panic attacks when I see roaches now; it’s gotten better than when I used to just scream and scream, but I still spin out and cry, shaking and babbling to myself. I hate that house. I hate how dirty it is, the layers and layers of filth everywhere. My father doesn’t clean. He waits for a woman or child to do it. I still have actual nightmares about our toilet. We never had enough water. Once, my mother’s best friend took us aside to ask us why there was so much shit floating in the toilet. We were conserving water, waiting until it was absolutely necessary to flush by pouring a bucket of dirty laundry water down the bowl. I learned shame in that moment and I learned other things in that house: how to be cruel, how to hurt my sister when I was angry, how well she could learn, too. I learned I was fat and loud and that my anger could make me such a monster that even my own mother was too scared to punish me. I still dream about the open wounds on our dog’s ears, red and swollen, thick with black flies. We couldn’t heal them; we couldn’t stop the constant pain. In the dreams, the dog waits for me at the back door with trusting eyes.
Writing this is hard because I feel guilty about how much I hate that house when I’m not sure if my sister feels the same way. We used to tell stories as if our childhood memories were fused, and now this feels like it could be another way we’ve split apart. Like how she still loves our father.
I don’t feel ashamed about how we grew up. It was fine, and we didn’t know anything else. I used to say it was a wonderful childhood, and sometimes it was. Other times, it was fucking terrible. Both can sit next to each other. What I feel ashamed about is how viscerally I never want to go back. Not to the house, not to that past, that life, those memories. I hate that I keep dreaming about the house. The other night, I dreamed about needing to wash my hair and looking through the wardrobe I shared with my sister for the right shampoo. There were the same buckets of water in the bathroom next to the plastic storage drum and my sister was telling me to hurry up so she could take her turn. Sometimes the dream is set in our parlor, or our kitchen, or the corridor where we once played with mercury and, separately, accidentally set fire to the floor.
I want the dreams to stop. I tell myself that I’m grown up now. I don’t have to ever go back there if I don’t want to. I can let the house die in the past, entomb everything that’s in it.
This is not a letter about my father.
My mother’s house is in Albuquerque. She’s been there for more than a decade. Her little yard involves garden gnomes. She is a superhost on Airbnb. It is her house. We’re welcome to come whenever we want and stay as long as we need, but I’ve never thought of it as my home. My sister lived there; she went to high school and college in Albuquerque. She’s the only child who’s ever lived alone with our parents—first our father, then our mother. I think it complicates her relationships with them in a way my brother and I will never quite understand. I do notice that she is kinder to them. My mother keeps a fastidiously clean house. She is tidy and very, very particular; she likes everything in her house to be a certain way and gets stressed out when it deviates too much. It’s one of the things we have in common.
My mother has the same name as your mother. Katherine wondered if that was weird for you, and I suppose I do, too. You haven’t talked about your mother since the summer, and I try not to ask, even though I know she died in those hot months. Katherine told me. I wonder what the house you grew up in was like.
My house in New Orleans is called Shiny the Godhouse. It’s a bungalow with a large yard, which I’m cultivating into a garden. I bought it in March 2019, four months after I quietly started living between New Orleans and Brooklyn. I thought I was going to end up buying a different house, a duplex that I’d have to gut and remodel. I fixated on interior design, watching home renovations shows, spending hours and hours on the internet, sketching out rooms, ordering tile samples. Kathleen came down for Christmas and we compared tile combinations: emerald-green zellige tiles for the kitchen walls, terra-cotta hex tile for the floor, mother-of-pearl in the bathroom. I couldn’t actually buy a house until my taxes were done, because my income wasn’t real until then, no matter how much money sat in my bank accounts. I had to wait, and after all that waiting, I didn’t end up with the duplex. It would’ve cost too much to renovate it, to convert it into the five-bedroom house I was dreaming about.
Instead, my real estate agent started showing me other houses, trying to figure out what I wanted. The finishes were a big deal for me; I wanted beautiful tile and real hardwood floors, a house where I wouldn’t have to rip out the backsplash and change the countertops. We came close a few times, but there was always something wrong, something I would’ve had to compromise on. The ceilings were too low. The floor was too dark. The bathroom tile was ugly. The stove was electric, not gas. I didn’t want to settle.
We were looking over listings one evening when he spotted a house. “This one,” he said. “We have to go look at it right now.” It was already dark outside, but he called the selling agent and we drove over to the house, letting ourselves in with the key in the lockbox.
As soon as I stepped inside, I knew.
The house had enormous windows and high ceilings, a gorgeous hardwood floor, and a kitchen island that I hugged immediately. It had three bedrooms and all of them had walk-in closets. It had an office, a laundry room, and floor-to-ceiling marble in both the bathrooms. All the hinges and doorknobs were black. The ceiling fans in the living room and the master bedroom were carved wood, shaped like propellers. The backsplash in the kitchen was a glass subway tile in a delicate pastel I still can’t figure out. It might be seafoam, or pale mint, a blue-gray something. When I walked into the master suite, I think I actually lost my breath at the deep porcelain tub, the way the marble wrapped along the walls, the double vanity, all the glass. The whole house was perfect. I’d repaint it, change some fixtures, but everything else was exactly what I’d been looking for. The house had been on the market for months, difficult to sell because there were other houses the same size for much cheaper in the same neighborhood. What this house needed was someone who cared about shit like marble tiles and what color the hinges were. It had been waiting for me.
While the paperwork was being processed, I visited the house and named it: Shiny. The house for a god. It was a new construction, so no one had ever lived in it before, and it felt lonely. I would touch the walls and talk to it, walk through the rooms with my heart in my mouth, worrying that something would go wrong and we wouldn’t end up together, this godhouse and me. On the first day of March, we closed, and when I walked into the house that afternoon, it felt different—because the house was mine.
I started work on it almost immediately and didn’t stop for many weeks. We replaced light fixtures and wall plates, built garden boxes, carved glass inlays into the cabinet doors, and repainted all the walls with limewash, a specialty paint that has to be applied by hand with a brush, no rollers, no spraying. We went through gallons of it. We painted the tray ceilings gold and some of the bottom cabinets dark green. All of the furniture I ordered—the king bed, the massive dining table with marble feet, the velvet couches—had to be assembled on site. Everything was gold or brass, a deep green, a pale pink. I had never worked so hard to shape something into what I wanted it to look like. Sometimes, I curled up on the marble floor of my master closet and sobbed from exhaustion and sadness that I was doing this alone.
I couldn’t share it with my family. Money had made things complicated—they would have told me I was being irresponsible, careless. Do you ever feel how familiar old stories can be when they’re stitched onto you? When the people you loved are the ones doing the grafting? I wanted to see myself, not the version of me they store in their eyes. I wanted to settle into the house like a god, carve it the way I wanted, without human anxieties, fears, or limitations. I filled it with plants and art. It is more than a house, it’s an entire dimension; you can feel it when you walk in. I stopped sending photographs because the house couldn’t fit into them, just like it can’t fit into this letter. It feels like a miracle.
Sometimes, when I walk through Shiny, I’m in shock at how much work I put into it, how customized it feels, how particular. I’ve never had a home in this country before, a place I wouldn’t have to leave in a year or two. People keep talking about resale value, as if I’m going to sell it. I ignore them and grow a garden, full of chocolate habanero and purple bell peppers, red and orange and burgundy okro, deep violet sweet potatoes. The winter garden is coming along now, purple bok choy, dark nebula carrots, and ice-bred arugula.
I love this house so much, Marguerite. I love that I made it in my image, I love that it’s mine. I’m even learning to love being alone in it—not sharing, allowing myself to stretch out into all of it. It used to feel too big, but I think I’m starting to fit.
When you come visit, can we plant shadowbeni in the garden? I would love that.