On the Garage

Fathers, Sons, & Brothers
by Bret Lott

Exploring three generations of the men in his family — his father and his two uncles, his own two brothers, and his two sons — Bret Lott spins a sweeping true saga of the ties that bind. With quiet grace and his trademark talent for finding powerful revelations in the most unlikely places, master novelist Lott delivers a bracingly personal and honest memoir that confronts the often inexpressible complexities of contemporary maleness. Fathers, Sons, and Brothers describes not only the ways men and boys relate to one another but also how their lives evolve over decades, endlessly imitative yet varied. In the end, these essays constitute a celebration of humanity, regardless of gender — of joy and sorrow, of intimacy and distance, of lingering secrets and universal truths.

Chapter 1

This is the last room: the garage.

We've been in the new house more than a month already, each day thus far filled with putting away all we own, each day filled with trying to find order in chaos. This is our dream house, after all, the one for which we bought the lot, the one we helped design, the one we plan to see filled with our lives and our children's lives here in South Carolina, so putting things in their just and proper places once and for all seems only right.

We — Melanie, my wife, and our two boys, Zeb, age ten, and Jacob, age seven — live a five-minute walk from the tidal marsh along the Wando River, where these spring evenings we can stand and watch the sun set behind Daniel Island, the sky above us reflected on the river to form a wide and shimmering band of blue and red and magenta, and where we can watch slender stalks of yellowgrass and saw grass and salt-marsh hay sway with the movement of the tide. A ten-minute bike ride takes us to the clubhouse, perched on the edge of the Wando, and the swimming pool there, and the marina, where on a quiet morning you can hear the breeze off Charleston Harbor gently rattle the halyards on the sailboats, the rhythmic metal tap on the masts like some impatient dream of open seas, full sails billowing.

Already there are three forts in the surrounding woods to which the boys can retreat; already there is talk of signing them up for the club's swim team. At breakfast we've seen out the bay window everything from pileated woodpeckers to Carolina wrens; yesterday morning, when I took the dog out to get the paper, there stood a doe in the empty lot next door, only to dart, at the sight of our Lab, for the woods at the end of the street.

We're home.

But the garage. No matter how crisp and ordered the inside of the house, no matter how many empty and flattened boxes piled up outside the kitchen door, a house is not a home, at least in my mind, until the garage has been put together. It's only a rudderless ship set for sail, a freshly waxed and gleaming car up on blocks, a perfectly detailed map with no true North. That's what I dunk, anyway, though I know that if I were to tell this to my wife, she'd only shake her head, let out an exasperated sigh.

"Men," she'd say.

I sit on the bottom step of the stairs down into the garage and survey it all, this endless mass of material goods we've accrued: a two-car garage piled haphazardly with boxes, yard tools, Zeb and Jake's outside toys and sports equipment; and the camping equipment, recycling bins, bicycles, lawn mower, more boxes. A thousand items, all ready and waiting for me, and though I have no clue as to where to start, still my heart shines at the prospect of the job before me, as though by putting it all away I will become a better husband, a better father, a better man.

My father, I know, would have thrown as much of it out as he could. His garage was always a lean, pristine place, and it seems now, on this Friday I've cleared for the express mission of setting up the garage, that throwing things out is the way to begin. Separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

I stand, go to the mounds of our belongings on the left side of the garage, and pick up the first victim: an old and holey garden hose I've been meaning to repair for the last year or two. But now the truth rises in me, ugly and incriminating: I'd rather just buy a new one than seek out the pinhole leaks and replace the hardware at either end, and so I toss the hose out the side door, the one that leads off into the backyard. So begins, if in a heartless way, my association with my garage.

My father was a man of few words, and even fewer tools. What I remember of the first garage I ever knew was that it was a dark and windowless place: tar paper and bare studs, open rafters above. This was back in Buena Park, California, in a tiny stucco tract house where we lived from the time I was two until I was nine, and I can remember, too, the small Peg-Board above the workbench at the back of the garage. On it hung one hammer, one hand saw, and two screwdrivers, a Phillips-head and a flathead. That was it.

Sure, there must have been other stuff somewhere in there, but back then garage paraphernalia wasn't important to me. What was important was that after Saturday yard work, we three boys finally done pulling weeds along the fence in the backyard, my dad would hose out the entire garage, giving the concrete floor a slick sheen, a temptation too great for us. Brad, Tim, and I had no choice but to take turns running as fast as we could along the asphalt driveway, then jumping flatfooted onto that cement, blasting from pure California Saturday morning sunfight into the black garage to slide barefooted as far as we could, arms out like surfers' for balance.

And of course my mother forbade our doing this, hollering from the front porch each Saturday about broken arms and concussions. But my father only shook his head at us, gave what we supposed was a smile, then set about sweeping out the water, his garage once more pristine, every item in its place, we boys sliding and laughing and falling and laughing again.

But when I was nine, my father was transferred, and we moved from Buena Park to Phoenix, a place so strange and alien it might have been another planet: saguaro, cactus as decorative landscaping, snakes sunning themselves on warm driveways at daybreak, coyotes rooting through the garbage cans.

And nobody had garages.

Instead, we all had carports, open-air structures under which you simply parked your car. Gone overnight was the sense of mystery about the garage, the dark and cool of it, the bare studs and tar paper replaced with eight painted wooden posts holding up a roof.

Though there were still weeds to be pulled, there was no grass to be mowed; instead people had gravel yards, and my father had us out there every Saturday morning raking the gravel into careful, thin lines while he swept the driveway. Gone were the days of slick and wet concrete, the hose replaced by a push broom. This was the desert; hosing down the carport was a frivolous waste of water.

We lived there until I was sixteen, seven years that saw momentous changes in the life of our family: We three brothers entered our teen years and splintered up, Tim, the youngest, following in my dad's footprints, raking the gravel in a manner that would, later in my life, remind me of Japanese rock gardens; me, the middle boy, burrowing into books and band; and Brad, the oldest, falling in with the wrong crowd, turning rebel, finally dropping out of high school his senior year to join the navy.

I can't help but think that, somehow, this loss of a garage had something to do with it. Back in California, we three boys used the garage as a haven from Mom and Dad, built extravagant forts of blankets and chairs and the grille of our '62 Dodge once Dad got home, the engine warm and ticking beside us. In that garage we rode our bikes in endless figure eights all summer long, passed time in the cool dark; in that garage we gave each other practice swats with the Ping-Pong paddle, the three of us having put on two pairs of pants and three pairs of underwear apiece, all in anticipation of what was to come once Dad got home and Mom told him of how we'd raided the garage refrigerator, had eaten every Kool-Pop and Fudgsicle and even the watermelon that afternoon.

It was in that garage that we became, it only occurs to me now, brothers.

Copyright © 2000 by Bret Lott

About the Author

Bret Lott is a native of Los Angeles. Jewel, his internationally celebrated novel of love and loss in 1940s Mississippi, was a national bestseller and a popular Oprah's Book Club™ selection. The author of four other highly acclaimed novels — The Man Who Owned Vermont, A Stranger's House, Reed's Beach, and The Hunt Club — Lott has also written two collections of widely anthologized short stories, A Dream of Old Leaves and How to Get Home. He lives with his wife and two sons near Charleston, South Carolina, and teaches writing at the College of Charleston and Vermont College.