The House at Natomas

The Wallaces’ first house in Santa Clara was smaller on the inside than it looked on the outside. A big living room, yes, and many bedrooms, but they were all made into a tense and stuffy warren for rodents and moths by endless piles of books, board games, unused furniture, empty aquariums, and broken electronics. Everything blended into a gray background that was both obtrusive and blurred at the edges. A specific and different smell emanated from each little tower of objects, such that I was assailed by the condensed aroma of unaddressed memories with every visit.

Mr. and Mrs. Wallace were the human avatars of their house. Gray, aged before their time, resigned to a life of shuffling the junk around their house with an intense sobriety of purpose. Their eldest son Jon was my friend, and carried no trace of his upbringing with him to school. When seen in his home, a slight aftertaste of bitterness in his gestures was the only indication that he was bothered by its undignified presentation. Jon was a radiant and passionate person–all four of the Wallace children were radiant and passionate persons, each one confidently unlike their three siblings, each one set with a flame of life that their parents had lost somewhere in the clutter decades ago. Sherry was the eldest, stood the tallest at over six feet, and was working towards fashion school in Los Angeles. James used an open dislike of Jon, and everyone else, to declare a sovereign space of his own in the house. Lulu, the youngest, was yet only a small bundle of exuberance. 

Jon’s parents got a new house in Natomas once everyone but Lulu had moved out, and I got lost in the maze of carbon copy suburbs trying to find it. Rows upon rows of tan, nondescript houses required a full seven minutes of 20 mph driving to find the specific two-story box which belonged to the Wallaces. I was fully detached from the normal world, playing the role of an astronaut visiting an alien colony, by the time Jon and I stepped over the threshold.

The piles of clutter had already begun their inevitable growth, but had not yet wholly conquered the pristine, new-built spaciousness of the suburban home. There were no decorations–nothing on the walls, only the piles slowly climbing to the ceiling in every room. The Wallaces were not at home here, but busily living nonetheless. 

Jon and I were here to take Lulu with us to a festival in the forest, but Mr. and Mrs. Wallace were holding us here for reasons at once unspecified and too important to ignore. Jon and his parents settled into a droning, irritated conversation about nothing in particular. The whole house was a blank non-sequitur: my mind saw no purpose in thinking there, and it settled instead into the white buzz of a doctor’s waiting room. A framed print of a sunrise over the beach sat precariously on the top of one growing tower: colored in garish neons appropriate for the 80s that faded a little more every minute.

I ascended to Lulu's bedroom, the last Wallace still living with the parents, the only room of the house’s second floor, and the largest. Lulu wasn’t there. It too was filled with clutter, but in a teenage girl’s rendition that sparkled with life and activity. Before, she was only the smallest toddler, breathlessly tearing the clothes off her every Barbie doll before rushing to the next adventure. I saw textbooks now, high heels, paint brushes. A standing mirror leaned beside the bedroom door. She had thoughts now, and passions, and style, and they all framed the same rush of life she took with her from the first house. My mind recognized something human up there, and began to wake up again: I remembered a piece of the conversation downstairs: the Wallaces were living here specifically to take their daughter to the best charter school they knew of.

This was the moment I understood the Wallaces; this was the secret of their home, and the source of the passionate strength in their children. They were not living in Natomas, just as they had not lived in Chico: they were not living in any physical house. They were gathered around a hearth of the heart, where burned an abiding love for their daughter Lulu. She was a sparkling flame, and the patron saint of the household. With light feet she stepped from pile to pile, singing to herself, climbing the discards of her parents’ old quests to the second floor. She flashed me a quick smile. “I’m ready! Let’s go.”

Alex Light is editor and producer of The Mandarin.