I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

Contents Landing Page Title Page Dedication Contents Epigraphs I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home Acknowledgments A Note on the Type About the Author Also by Lorrie Moore Copyright I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME Lorrie Moore For my sister and my brothers Contents Title Page Dedication Epigraphs I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home Acknowledgments A Note on the Type About the Author Also by Lorrie Moore Copyright The buckwheat cake was in her mouth … stephen foster, “Oh! Susanna” The animal magnetism of a dead body makes the stress come slanting, so the seams and joints of a coffin are made on the bevel. william faulkner, As I Lay Dying We live in an age of some really great blow-job artists. Every era has its art form. The nineteenth century, I know, was tops for the novel. sheila heti, How Should a Person Be? I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home Dearest Sister, The moon has roved away in the sky and I don’t even know what the pleiades are but at last I can sit alone in the dark by this lamp, my truest self, day’s end toasted to the perfect moment and speak to you. Such peace to have the house quiet— outside I believe I hear the groaning deer. The wild- eyed varmints in the traps are past wailing, and the nightjars whistle their hillbilly tunes. I can momentarily stop pretending to tend to my accounts in the desk cartonnier. The gentleman lodger who is keen to relieve me of my spinsterhood has gone upstairs to bed, clacking his walking stick along the rails of the banister, just to create a bit of tension; now overhead his footfall to and from the basin squeaks the boards. I have a vague affection for him, which is not usable enough for marriage. I cannot see what he offers in that regard, despite some impressively memorized Shakespeare and Lord Byron and some queerly fine mimicry of the other lodgers: Priscilla the plump quakeress, tragically maddened by love. Miriam with her laryngitis and Confederate widow’s weeds (the town has run out of that slimming black silk and resorts to a confused dark Union blue). Or Mick, the old Chickasaw bachelor, who keeps a whole hawk wing pinned to his never- doffed cowboy hat. Dapper as a finch, the handsome lodger can also recite the bewildering poems of Felicia Hemans, one of which features a virtuous heroine torn from home by pirates— sweet Jesus take the reins. His mustache is black and thick as broom bristle and the words come flying out from beneath it like the lines of a play in a theater on fire. He has an intriguing trunk of costumes in his closet—cotton tights, wool tights, a spellbinding number of tights, some wigs he combs out and puts on for amusement, and even some stuffing for a hunchback which he portrays unnervingly and then lets the stuffing fall completely out. I don’t know how he could manage a vigorous sword fight wearing those wigs. If I don’t laugh he puts it all away. He says he suffers stage fright everywhere but the stage. He says he will help me build a platform on the side of the house, if I would like to get into wicked show business and put great joy into the hearts of simple men. “I will certainly think about that,” say I and go about my chores. “Why, Miss Libby, an Elizabeth should learn Elizabethan.” “Should she now.” “I do desire that we be better strangers.” He is bold. But he has his own straitened circumstances which I hardly need to take on as my own, though he appears always in fine fettle—handsome in the silvery variegated fashion of rabbits and foxes, a pair of pomaded muttonchops which he says hide a bite scar from his boyhood horse, Cola. The muttonchops fetchingly collect snow in January, though he limps— some might say imperceptibly but that has the lie built right in, so I don’t say that, not being a good liar. A cork foot from the secesh, he told me. Mounted the real foot and donated it to a Lost Cause Army Medical Museum, he said, and sometimes he goes and visits it just to say hello. Well, everyone got a little too dressed up for that cause, I do not reply, claret-capes and ostrich plumes, as if they were all in a play, when they should instead have noted that causes have reasons they get themselves lost. The smash comes soon enough, as others have declared, and a boy’s adventures know no pity. These dazed old seceshers are like whittlers who take small sticks and chop them away, making nothing but pixie pollen. I find people’s ideas are like their perfume—full of fading then dabbing on again—with no small hint of cidered urine. A good scalawag sticks to the late night cipher of her diary. Also? I myself have taken to whittling and am making your Eliza a doll from some spruce wood. Its body is like a star and I will sew it a dress out of an old Indian blanket and it will look exactly like some doddering namesake aunt made it for her. From time to time I detect some craftiness about this particular lodger and his less than gallant crumbs of bluster. But he can blow a whistle with his eye— no small matter. He sings, “I Used to Be Lucky but Now I’m Not.” Then does that whistle out his eye. Ha! He told me all of his people were actors, that a family of actors was not only the best strategy for the future of American drama but would eventually be its greatest subject! at which I scowled. Then he said not really, but some of his kin were in fact politicians who conducted themselves like actors, one of them once banished to a prison ship, though