“Thirteen Rooms” by Kyle McCarthy
1
I have always spent a lot of time at home, thinking and pacing, and it sometimes seems to me—though it is hard to explain—that my house, my apartment walls, are analogous to my skull.
That is to say, I do so much thinking inside the house that I have started to confuse the apartment that holds my body and the head that holds my brain.
Confusion is another word for metaphor.
2
As a teenager I read, “In dreams the house is a common metaphor for the self.” The idea struck me. I copied the phrase into my journal, beside a pen-and-ink floorplan for a glossy condo I had cut out from a magazine.
3
Jane Hirshfield’s poem ‘My Life was the Size of My Life’ begins:
My life was the size of my life.
Its rooms were room-sized,
its soul was the size of a soul.
The paradoxical obviousness of these lines, their confusion of architecture and selfhood, pleases me immensely. Reading them, I am suffused with a sense of sufficiency.
4
When I began this essay I wrote about so many things. A man on fire. A Broadway show. Children, fertility, the New York Times. A poem. Climate change. One by one I took them out and put them in, trying to find what would fit. Where in the essay there was room.
That was December. In January we all stayed home. When I couldn’t anymore I rode the subway to see an Alexander Calder mobile fragile as falling snow, called Snow Flurry, slowly turning in a white room of gray shadows. Two days later I was sick.
5
Sick, in these days, means alone. Alone in the house. There is one room, for day, and the other room, for night. Between, rooms of transition, water and fire. (Poetic way to say kitchen.)
6
About the musical: it was Company, that Sondheim show about how awful marriage is and how you should do it anyway. Broadway! People popped out of pretend refrigerators, city blocks sailed in from the wings, houses emerged from the floor. Spectacle abounded in this play about loneliness. Spectacle abounded in this play that says, Marry, and you’ll regret it. Or live alone, and live a diminished life.
From it my brother and I stumbled into headache-bright Times Square. He is married; I am not. We were both laughing the hysterical laughter of the unhinged, the deranged giggles of the asylum patient who has confirmed the solidity of the bars that encase her.
7
In this production, the apartment of the perennially single protagonist, Bobbie, is rendered as a tiny neon box into which her affectionate, overbearing friends crowd. Give me space, her eyes plead; you’re squeezing me out.
Twice during the show, though, Bobbie quite literally no longer fits into her own apartment: she unlocks the door to find herself, like Carroll’s Alice, completely disproportionate. In one instance, door, table, birthday cake, and whiskey bottle have shrunk to doll size; in another, the table stretches across the stage while Bobbie frantically clutches a mylar birthday balloon ten feet tall.
My life was the size of my life. But what if it’s not? Don’t we all fear waking into a life that pinches us, a life that dwarfs us, a life as disappointing as a doll-sized cake?
8
In Hirshfield’s poem, each life’s particular dimensions are exactly right. But she also acknowledges:
Others, I know, had lives larger.
Others, I know, had lives shorter.
The depth of lives, too, is different.
Hirshfield is not asserting some trite equivalence among all human lives. Rather, she is asking us to subtly shift how we value and regard our own lives. Can we stop measuring?
9
I am afraid of having a small life.
10
Recently an old college friend started describing to me a recurring dream where she, back in the co-op where we lived as undergrads, must again pick a room during fabled “room draw,” the elaborate, hierarchical ritual in which seniority (in the co-op, and then in school) dictated the order in which the various bedrooms in the two giant Victorians were bestowed. “It’s always like, I deserve a big room, but I’m going to end up with a small one,” she told me.
“I know, I know,” I interrupted her. “I have the exact same dream.”
“Really? And you’re going all through the house, looking at the various rooms, trying to figure out which one to pick, or you get to your room and someone’s already living there—?”
“Yes, yes,” I said, laughing. “There’s always this anxiety, like: do people not understand that I deserve a really big room?”
11
Hirshfield’s poem concludes:
Once, I grew moody and distant.
I told my life I would like some time,
I would like to try seeing others.
In a week, my empty suitcase and I returned.
I was hungry, then, and my life,
my life, too, was hungry, we could not keep
our hands off our clothes on our tongues from
Life is not a room, but a marriage. What matters is not the size of your life, but your relationship to it. As with any other partnership, there are times when you grow “moody and distant,” when you may want to “try seeing others”—for who hasn’t envied another’s life, wished to step into someone else’s shoes?
But eventually you have to return. You return not to a house that you expand, not to a mylar balloon you blow up, but to your lover.
12
When Sandy hit, I had lived in my apartment just sixty-four days. I remember, acutely, feeling we were embarking on an important early date. As I stockpiled canned soup and bottled water, I hoped we would get along.
Now—ten years later, approaching day ten of my Covid isolation—my home and I, we’re not so new to each other. I know well the buckling lead paint, the soaring archway, the nook behind the stove where the mice build their nest. Maybe this is what it means to grow into your life. Grow comfortable in knowingness.
13
In one of the ‘Twelve Pebbles,’ entitled Still Life, Hirshfield writes:
Loyalty of a book
to its place on the shelf
in a still life.Like that,
the old loves continue.
Kyle McCarthy is the author of the novel Everyone Knows How Much I Love You. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Selected Shorts, American Short Fiction, the Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
