My father had a love/hate relationship with our house. While our neighbors and extended family were taking out second mortgages and buying fully furnished summer homes & cabins, my father held tight to our abode. And when the housing bubble popped and our acquaintances were out in the cold, the door slammed in their face, we were safe and warm.
My father used to say our house came "pre-disastered." The night we moved in, a thief stole into our garage, drank all the wine, and then obliged us by returning it, at projectile speed, all over the back wall. After that, my father joked, nothing worse could happen.
Our house was very old, one of the first few built in our little town. In the twenty years I can recall living in it with him, my father spent his every weekend & vacation trying to escape our home's rustic aesthetic. I can't count the times I would come home to the smell of drying paint one month, only to arrive back another day and see the aged redwood scraped clean and surrounded by the bleached boneyard of smoldering paint chips. For my father, home improvement was a never-ending process. His dissatisfaction with the folkloric decor notwithstanding, the house itself seemed to resist change.
My father began his bloody campaign in the front bathroom, dank, dingy and dark. He blasted away the dust in the windows, bleached the tub, scoured the ceiling, tore up & tiled the floor, installed three new lights and a dehumidifier controlled by wall switches, and tightened the plumbing while he was at it.
The new bathroom was beautiful, modernized and bright. However, like a vampire, when exposed to sunlight it seemed to crumble. A weak spot underneath the boards bowed the tiles inward, until a hole had formed. It was just wide enough for a foot to accidentally step in after getting out of the shower.
The ceiling was soon spotted with black specks. Dust mites, gnats and other creepities, crawlities and long leggity beasties had made their way in through the hole to the room that was frequently warm & wet, only to be flash-fossilized by the blowtorch of the dehumidifier.
Undeterred, he built an entirely new wing on the back of the house, complete with his personal vision of how a restroom should look. A dreamlike corridor, tiled, white, lined with mirrors and three marble statues.
My old bedroom had a wall knocked down and became a second living room, and then a third to merge it with the kitchen. The first living room became the new dining room. As they got older, my siblings swapped rooms like peas beneath a trickster's cup. Beds were moved in and out. Bunks were in vogue, and then bowers. The cabinets in the kitchen were shuffled about like a deck of cards. A window that once looked onto the backyard now opened onto nothing save brick and plaster, a homey touch transformed into a subconscious symbol of abstract horror; entrapment; inevitability.
The house strained to accommodate the changes, cracking at the seams. We lived in a Winchester madhouse, painted in lurid greens, purples and yellows and overgrown with climbing roses. And changing, ever changing.
***
It was after midnight when I came back inside from my room in the garage. I'd forgotten to take my medicine and couldn't sleep.
I found him, awake, laying on the couch where my bed used to be, watching TV where my bookshelf used to be.
"Why aren't you in bed with mom?" I asked.
Silence.
"I don't get it," I said.
..."Don't get what?" he replied, finally.
"Where this huge inferiority complex comes from. You...You TOWER over us, all of us, intellectually, financially, philosophically...But whenever you talk to mom, you act like a martyr, like she's picking on you.
'She'd be LOST without you. We all would."
Silence.
"Good night, dad."
***
The following morning, I awoke to the scream of a table-saw. He had ripped up our white picket fence (the one he'd painted yellow). He was chopping it all up. I never found out what he did with it.













