Beginnings · The house you grew up in
Date: 23 October 2026
List them. The drawer, the bottle, the photographs, the thing on the high shelf. Say who they belonged to if you know.
At my grandmother’s house on South Padre Island, everything she gave to her younger lover was taboo to touch: his cologne, watches, shaving cream, office, desk, VHS, stetson, portrait and cars. Everything that was his was forbidden. Nothing of hers was forbidden to touch, and in effect it all belonged to her.
He shall remain Nameless. Not because we detested him, which we did, but because naming him would make him recognizable. We never asked about the extent of their relationship. He would leave his toiletries in my grandmother’s bathroom. We were never allowed to touch them. My brother loved to apply generous amounts of his expensive shaving foam. One day he was forced to use soap to shave.
“No one touches my shaving cream, claro?!”
We hated him for making such a big deal out of it.
Not long afterwards my brother happily perfumed himself with an oversized bottle of lover boy’s cologne, which was shaped like the chiseled torso of a man. My contribution to the rebellion was to move the bookmark of my grandmother’s romance novel and see if she noticed. She never did.
“I behoove you to stay out of my office!”
One day when the house was empty, I sat at his desk and searched for contraband. His portrait in a giant stetson kept watch on the room. When he sat at his desk he would admire himself.
At the back of a drawer I found a VHS of Scarface. No contraband. He was a man who wanted to be Tony Montana, not one who was.
The stetson never gathered dust on the high shelf in his closet; the maid made sure of that. It was felt, smooth and sensitive to the elements, a hat that had never been out in any. My grandfather’s hat had been out in all of them. His father gave it to him, and the Dust Bowl scoured it matte. It smelled of my grandfather. Prairie and Competence. It protected his head on the ranch and at the bank, and at both places it hung from a nail driven into a wooden beam.
Nameless’s vintage Porsche 911 would leak oil in my grandmother’s garage, next to his 1976 red-striped Gran Torino. He preferred to drive a Lincoln. All of them were “noli me tangere.” It means “no touchey.” Grandmother liked to teach us good words.
We sneered at him. We did not think he belonged in Grandfather’s chair. Nor did we believe he belonged in Grandmother’s house, on the bayside of South Padre Island, amidst the tasteful decor. His plastic-covered couches were endless conversational fodder.
After Grandfather died and before Nameless, my brother and I found, in a dusty drawer at Grandfather’s ranch in Oklahoma, a World War II canteen and a compass from his Marine Raider days in the Pacific. We claimed his old leather chair too. We marched across the ranch on 100-degree summer days with the compass that pointed nowhere in particular.
I sneer less now, but I still resent him. He was excellent at helping her spend money, and she became penniless. I could have used some of that money to go to university.
“I never regretted a moment with him!” she told me shortly before she died.
He kept the cars, the portrait, the stetson, and the watches. She retired to Mexico on her Social Security checks. The chair went to South Padre Island. If I could sit in it, I would wear it smooth.
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Things in the House You Were Not Allowed to Touch
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