Domicile

Frederick Busch’s short story Domicile was published in 2000. It is written in first person and simple past tense; the tone (as in much of Busch’s writing) is comic and sarcastic. The word domicile has a legal meaning referring to a person’s permanent home, as opposed to residence which may be more temporary. Domicile (a Latin word) also may mean, simply, a dwelling place. Both meanings are relevant to this story.

But why, you say, is it important to mention that the word has a Latin origin? Is this not pretentious?

I guess if you want to look at it that way, my bro. But I think the word Domicile conveys something important in the story, something about the protagonist believing his meager existence is romantic and means more than mere self-neglect and laziness. Let’s think about the story and return to this. We’re going to leave out an extremely important aspect of things till next time, which I hope will make sense.

I hope so too.

A protagonist narrator, David, is in his early twenties, and after graduating from college (an arts major) lives in a primitive trailer located on the property of an old motel—somewhere on the East Coast. The trailer has no heat, no plumbing, and primitive food preparation equipment. He wears dirty clothes, bathes infrequently, doesn’t trim his hair and beard. In short, he is living a marginal existence. Despite his father’s exhortations (or maybe because of them) he resists the idea of longer-term life planning and focuses on building a rock wall on the property for his landlady, Mrs. Peete. He is, as they say, “spinning his wheels.”

There is no explanation of how he arrived there or knows Mrs. Peete, with whom he has an antagonistic relationship—in contrast to her daughter Rebecca, with whom David has sex—not exactly antagonistic sex. Her character creates change in the story and confronts David with his wheel-spinning.

A critical nuance to Domicile is that it shows the protagonist looking back from a future time. Please note the use of “that year” and “as I remember it” in the passage below. This usage tells the reader that the protagonist survives the situation shown in the story. It injects some hope for a character whom one would worry about. The reader is assured that, despite the narrator’s desperate life, he survives.

“I was in a good deal of trouble that year, and I knew it, though I didn’t worry. I think that I did not…I had decided, as I remember it, to think a couple of hours ahead—the next few pages of a book I tried to read, the next few lines of a sketch I tried to make, the next meal of the day.”

Is this lassitude due to some trauma?

As mentioned, the thing that occupies the narrator, David, is building a rock wall. He makes the connection that he built a play fortress when he was a child. “My mother reported on it when she and my father came to see me…she had just told me about how my fort still stood when she began to cry…I sat back at the little fold-up table and let her pretend not to cry while she, down at the refrigerator, pretended not to know that I observed her weeping. Giving that kind of privacy to each other can be almost as good as a set of walls, or a door you can close behind you.”

There’s a sense here, not only that his mother is unhappy, but that David (and his parents) pretend not to notice each other’s pain. And there’s a nice metaphor of building walls and a fortress to protect oneself. Something about building a stone wall pleases David; it sets boundaries and isolates things that on the other side.

David works on the wall, has sex with Rebecca, and generally mopes around in a darkly humorous and ironic way. Things bump up on a climax when Rebecca, who’s been living with her mother, announces she can’t handle her life there any longer and will be moving out. She’s rented an apartment and invites David to come with her and live a more civilized existence. “’Look,’ she said, and her face was full of sorrow for me, ‘nobody’s forcing you to live inside that terrible trailer. Or my apartment. Or anyplace else.’ Her voice was thick with feeling. ‘It’s pretty much you, David. Whatever place you’re inside of, you’re the one who turned the lock.’”

Please note how Rebecca’s voice is described as being “thick with feeling,” an un-ironic state that is something new in the story thus far and is not ridiculed. Previously, Rebecca has been archly ironic and playful, as has David. Here, Rebecca, a lost soul herself, shows she is transforming into adulthood. She encourages David to make an adult decision and move to a new home.

There is a strong sense here of David’s “domicile” still being his troubled childhood home, a home he hasn’t been able to let go of up to now. After a transitional period in college, he had failed to launch himself into adulthood, remaining in a marginal and unsustainable situation. He builds s a somewhat arbitrary and poetic outdoor structure just as he did as a child. The story may well be about his transition from life at Mrs. Peete’s to Rebecca giving him a way to leave, while pointing out that he himself has the key to move into his own more permanent domicile. The story ends with Rebecca’s mother, Mrs. Peete, being honest with him, after she provides him with a loan that will allow him to leave the motel, a loan he requested. She says that Rebecca predicted that he would do this, and he expresses surprise.

“Oh,” she said. “David. You are not as much of a mystery as you would like to think.”

Kay, next time, I will reveal a crucial piece so far left out, a piece that supports my thinking.

Ooh!

Till then.

#Domicile #FrederickBusch #AlanBray