Onion Songs

A VISIT HOME

The house is not as I’ve remembered it all these years. The style is more modern, the living room more spacious. There is no real wood—it is all imitation grain. My mother and father seem older, grayer than any human beings I have ever met.

I have brought three college friends to see this town I grew up in, this place where my dreams came from. My friends appear startled by the lush greenness of the vegetation, the humidity, the bright sunlight through blue skies striated by wispy cloud. I know they won’t want to stay long.

I realize it is the same lot, the same location as the house I spent my childhood in, but there is a new house here. What have my parents done? Torn the original down and rebuilt according to some hopeful plan for rejuvenation? But I am afraid to ask them what has happened. I am afraid of what they might tell me.

I spend my nights roaming the halls of this new house, stepping quietly so as not to awaken my three friends, somehow knowing that my parents won’t be aroused no matter what I do. I examine several pieces of furniture each night: my father’s new, barrel-shaped liquor cabinet with the carved eagle on its front, the new refrigerator with the automatic ice-maker, the matching pieces of the never-used guest room, the ornate rugs, the new pictures on the walls—photographs of people I don’t recognize.

Occasionally I find something belonging to the old house; a piece of bathroom tile, a door stop, an old worn footstool, and once an entire yellow-papered wall that materialized in the hallway without warning. When I blink it is gone.