“By the third week, the best thing about living at home, I’d decided, was the square footage. I don’t cherish the ranch house as an architectural form, but my parents’ house ran to so many rooms that, in daylight, I could fall into a stride and imagine myself aboard the Hispaniola. I came to think of the kitchen as a galley; and the living room as the main hold; and the long dark coffin of a dinning room in which I endured countless suffocating family dinners, I renamed the roundhouse, not knowing what that meant but liking the idea of its not having any corners. In this way the stale homestead became a vessel of fresh adventure, though once I made the mistake of picking up the phone when Aunt Boothie called and listened to her talk, quite brazenly, about what it meant that both my sister and I were living rent -free in our parents’ house.
“Quite frankly I don’t think of this as a house,” I said.
”
Notes
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