A Tree or a Person or a Wall by Matt Bell

Author:Matt Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2016-06-26T20:29:29+00:00

IV

A Certain Number of Bedrooms

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. He 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. 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 he can know that no one will have died in the garage. He 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 has or why he wants it, the magazines reminding him only obliquely of this earlier time, when so much hope is invested in so little paper.

At dinner, the boy tells his father about the houses he likes best, about how he is having trouble deciding between the Crestwood and the Cape Cod. The father glances at the pages. A month ago he smiled at the boy’s enthusiasm, even joined in with his own comments, but now he is less demonstrative with his opinions.

The boy has been in so few other houses that 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. To make up for his father’s reticence, the boy talks more than he is comfortable with, not because he

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