My House as Allegory 22 comments

By Kelly Foster

Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”

Southerners have a sense of tragedy, and we know defeat is waiting for us.

—Shelby Foote

I think there probably are people who don’t interpret cracks in their bathroom ceilings as evidence either of cosmic doom or of personal inadequacy.

I am not one of those people.

My friend Amanda said as much to reassure me the other day, and then she laughed a bit at us both. I’d lain most of the previous night wide awake, unable to settle, fretting about my crumbling ceiling and my evaporating bank account and the circuitous trail of causality that had landed me there.

I bought my first house about a year ago. It’s a 1940’s bungalow in a hip little neighborhood of Jackson, and I love so much about it. But the first night I slept in the house, I killed forty-seven cockroaches. One roach even fell on my face as I turned over in bed, causing me to convulse, disgusted, all the way out of the bed. The second night, a huge rainstorm caused a steady stream of water to leak onto the carpeted floor of my master bedroom. Later, as winter crept in, I heard rodents scratching their way through the bathroom walls. But that’s not all. The master bath stands at a disconcerting left angle. The pipes in that same bathroom corroded and crumbled last November, leaving me to replace the entire bathroom plumbing system. The HVAC ducts need recovering. The hot water heater could go any day.

So it was with these real and imagined disasters in my mind that I initially noticed the ceiling crack. A friend from Atlanta had stopped over on her way to a wedding in Memphis, and I was showing her the guest bathroom.

Glancing casually up, I suddenly noticed that last year’s “cosmetic” crack had shifted over the humid summer into a full-blown fissure into which I could vertically slide at least two of my fingers. I think I exhaled a sound like “Uuunnnggghhh” or something equally inarticulate, and then beat my head against the wall in not-so-mock exasperation.

I had a lot of good reasons for buying a house. I have a stable job, a good income, and it was a buyer’s market. I got a fantastic tax credit that I don’t have to pay back. All the money I was putting into rent can now be kept as equity. Before I bought my house, I’d been living in an apartment with black mold in the vents and a broken refrigerator that maintenance refused to fix. It wasn’t a hard departure.

Besides, I’d dreamed of owning a house since I was very young.

When I was in college, I’d walk through the lovely neighborhood surrounding school and look in windows that bled orange light into the street—kids doing homework at kitchen tables, fathers washing dishes, TV lights flickering behind sheer curtains, women drinking wine on porch swings. They seemed to belong to the rooms they walked through in a way I never belonged to my own. They seemed to live slower lives, free from the questioned decisions and self-damning narratives that characterized my own.

My house is not a bad house. In fact, on the whole, it is a very good house. None of its problems, however perpetual they may at times appear, have been so terribly dire. Even the plaster ceiling crack can be easily mended.

Ultimately, my difficulty with home-ownership does not originate in the space itself, but inside my mind. I have an inability to believe that ceiling cracks, roaches, rats, slanting floors, and corroded pipes are not just ceiling cracks, roaches, rats, slanting floors, and corroded pipes. Instead, they serve as constant reminders that there are secrets to which I am supposed to be privy that I simply don’t know. They serve as evidence to the accusers in my own head who tell me I always do everything wrong.

And on the nights when fruitless anxiety over the house keeps me awake, I don’t think of practical ways to earn enough money to make any necessary changes, I think of all the mystical things I should have known in order to prevent cracks or corrosions from forming in the first place—a way of walking perhaps or of wearing my clothes, perhaps a certain prayer I forgot to pray, or penances I never performed.

I try to force my heaviest will onto the roiling red clay beneath me. Either that or I roll over, despairing and resigned, and attempt to accept with grace and dignity the defeat of my own house, my bank account, all the tenuous adult balls I am attempting to keep afloat at once.

I am shaped by what I do, and I am an English teacher from the American South. I make a living out of abstracting the concrete and vice-versa. I make a living out of reading symbols. But in the more reasonable light of morning, I realize I am tired of reading my house on its shifting red clay as a symbol of my inevitable defeat. I am tired of house as allegory. I want another narrative.

Lord knows when you come from Mississippi, you learn, and that quickly, how to live with what is broken. But soon my ceiling crack will be mended.

And so I am forced to ask myself, English teacher, what does a mended ceiling symbolize?

Perhaps a bit of hope?