Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [13]
Starting in the front room, he plastered over the ceiling, an ugly expanse that looked like the hardened frosting of a day-old birthday cake. He stripped the walls and painted them white. He bought a sander and refinished the floors, polishing them to a warm honey stain. Sometimes he made me help him; most of the work he did himself. The room has nothing in it now but the pieces of furniture my father has made over the course of the past two years: tables and bookcases and wooden chairs with straight backs and legs. The room is clean and simple and resembles a schoolroom, a look I think my father was unconsciously trying to achieve all along, as if he wished to return to the blank rooms of his childhood. He sometimes uses the space as a showroom when Mr. Sweetser down at the hardware store sends customers his way. The carpentry is a kind of career for my father, though careers were for his previous life, not this one.
In the room that was once a dining room, my father built floor-to-ceiling bookcases and filled them with his books. He put a leather chair, a sofa, two lamps, and a rug in it, and it’s the room we sometimes eat and read in. We call it the den. The transformation of rooms into something other than what they were—a parlor into a showroom; a dining room into a den; an old barn into a workshop—has given my father a kind of perverse pleasure. Just beyond the kitchen is a long hallway paneled in cream bead board with a row of sturdy hooks at shoulder height. Off another hallway is a small room that my father didn’t know what to do with. He cleaned it up and filled it with boxes that he didn’t want to open. As a result the room has become a kind of shrine. Neither of us ever goes inside.
Upstairs there are three bedrooms: one for me, one for my father, and one for my grandmother when she comes to visit.
The kitchen is the one other room my father hasn’t tackled. It has a red Formica counter and brown metal-framed sliders out to a redwood deck. Though it is the room that needs the most work, my father goes into the kitchen only to make a quick cup of coffee or a sandwich or a rudimentary dinner for the two of us. We never sit down to a meal there, but instead bring our food to the den when we eat together, or he to his workshop and me to my bedroom when we each eat alone.
We never eat a meal in the kitchen because the kitchen of our previous life was at the heart of our family in New York. The two rooms do not resemble each other much, but the memories of that former kitchen can unravel either one of us in an instant.
The table was always half-covered with magazines and mail. Neither my father nor mother was a fastidious housekeeper, and with Clara just a year old, a case of mild clutter was always turning into serious chaos. My mother made baby food in the Cuisinart on a counter usurped by appliances: a juicer, a blender, a microwave, and a coffee grinder that made a racket like a jackhammer and never failed to wake Clara. Between the table and a hutch was a baby swing, a contraption in which Clara, with drool sliding down her chin, would bounce happily and for long enough that my parents could get a meal on the table. During dinner my father sat with Clara in his lap, introducing her to foods she smashed into her mouth with a fat palm. When she fussed he jiggled her on his knee, and by the time dinner was over, his work shirt would be finger-painted with carrots and gravy and buttered peas.
In my album there’s a picture of my mother trying to eat her dinner at the counter while she holds Clara on her hip. Clara has a finger in her mouth and is drooling, and my mother is slightly out of focus, her back to me, as if she might be jouncing Clara up and down to keep her quiet. In the kitchen window just beyond my mother, there’s a blinding reflection of a flashbulb. Inside the halo I can just make out my father, beer in hand, his mouth open, about to take a sip. I have no idea why I felt it