HOMELESS

by Melodie Johnson Howe

I walked into the kitchen to get my morning cup of coffee and my husband looked me up and down and said, “You’re dressed like a homeless person.” This coming from a man wearing his favorite sweatshirt that is frayed to shreds around the cuffs and neck.

“I’m going to write.”

He frowned.

“I want to be comfortable.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Yes you did. You said I look like a homeless person.”

“I said you were dressed like one.”

I looked down at myself. I had on baggy black tights, stripped blue and beige socks, black clogs and a long sweater that hung around my body like an old limp coat.

“It wasn’t meant as a personal attack,” he continued. “It was an amusing observation.”

Notice how “It” had replaced “I.”

“I didn’t take it as an attack,” I snapped defensively. I took my coffee and shuffled into my office.

But of course I had taken his comment personally. Why? My husband loves me. He loves how I look.

The homeless comment unintentionally tapped into something I feel. I love the bourgeois life because it gives me structure to write. But when you put word to paper you have to abandon all the rules of society, the comforts, and the boundaries. The writer, like the homeless person, is under the freeway bridge, holding tight to her cart, watching the cars speed by. She has to be comfortable, even safe inside her own head, her own imagination. She has to be homeless.

I was sent to my room a lot when I was a child. Angry and resentful of always being unjustly accused, I still found solace in my punishment.

While the other kids were outside throwing dirt clods at one another, I was alone with my stuffed animals. I never had dolls. I hated them. I loved my stuffed animals because they didn’t pretend to be real or spookily, say, “mommy, mommy,” when held. I didn’t want to be anybody’s mommy. I wanted to lecture my toys, line them up, teach them, and tell them stories. I wanted to create a world for them, not a home. A world. In my bedroom I learned to be alone and safe in my imagination.

It is said that John Cheever, when he first started writing, got tired of seeing other men go to work, dressed in suits and carrying brief cases, while he sat in his bathrobe in his Greenwich Village apartment. So he made a deal with the landlord and put his office in the basement. Then in the morning he would get dressed in a suit, put his pages in a brief case, and leave with the other men except he would go down to the basement and enter the world of his imagination.

And then there is the famous picture of Dalton Trombo writing in his bathtub. I’m sure this became the idea to have Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker in the bath in the movie Laura. (By the way, in Vera Caspary’s novel, Waldo Lydecker was a fat antique dealer, not a slim acerbic writer.) I doubt that any author writes in a bathtub for very long.

Edith Wharton wrote in bed because it was the only place she didn’t have to wear her whalebone corset. Unlike Cheever, she needed to shed the confining clothes of her time to be free to write.

The jacket photos of authors are mostly the same. The writers have cleaned themselves up to pose for the camera. The men look serious and intellectual, or tough and defiant. The women smile just enough to retain a certain amount of depth to them. But I know what we really look like when we write; homeless.

I just heard that one in four young Britons think Winston Churchill was a made-up figure and that Sherlock Holmes was a real detective.

Oh, dear.