Before and After

As I write this piece on home decoration, plumbers, licensed and unlicensed, in trucks marked and unmarked, are parked on both sides of my street. They are here to repair pipes that burst in last week’s winter storm. Decoration is probably the last thing on my neighbors’ minds: the goal, for the foreseeable future, is emergency repair. Our home decisions will be about PVC vs Pex pipes, and our home budgets will be drained by sometimes impossibly high electricity bills. Last week, I interrupted a set of mostly literary posts on the relation between homes and their owners to write a mid-disaster response to the Texas freeze, “Power Outage.” I will be returning to this third disaster next week, but in the meantime, I want to talk about how the home/owner metonymy I outlined two weeks ago works for home decoration and renovation and how that process contributes to over-identification and to shame. Perhaps more relevant in this most recent crisis is a longing I discuss for a “before” and an “after” in both home makeovers and disasters.

I can’t resist clicking on “Before and After” decorating articles on Facebook, and because I can’t resist, they appear on my feed more and more frequently. I seem to be caught in an algorithm that offers me stories about small apartments in glamorous cities, and also tiny houses. Although my house is not tiny, and Houston is growing less and less glamorous with every disaster, I love to read the articles. Perhaps it is because they cater to my love of miniatures: the concentration of effort and energy, the objects always on the verge of preciousness but often resisting that final collapse, the promise of order and control of a manageable space. I don’t always like the “After” better than the “Before”; sometimes it is hard to tell which its which. Often it seems that “after” is sometimes a literal form of whitewashing: color disappears in a blizzard of non-color, to be introduced only, perhaps as a “pop”—a violently orange pillow on a pale beige coach, a backsplash that gingerly introduces a splash of red or blue.

But I am not really reading for decorating ideas. The renovations and redecoration, whether they cost $150 or $10,000, are a point of entry and perhaps of exit (note to self: buy more orange pillows) but not what keeps me reading. I think what pulls me in during this endless undifferentiated time of COVID is the idea of “before and after” itself. Like the bodily makeover (I admit also to clicking on videos that are endless loops of older women applying supposedly minimal makeup to achieve a natural glow) the “before and after” of home renovation promises that there will be, that we are actually imaginatively inhabiting, an “after.” On this near anniversary of the first COVID lockdowns, I see more and more FB posts that refer to the “before time,” more and more expressions of desire for a “post” time, an “after” to COVID. In the hurry-up temporality that we are now occupying as the world “races” against time and variants to be vaccinated, it is soothing to see “before” and “after” collapsed into juxtaposed images only a click away from each other in time.

 It is both improbable and strangely logical that, all around us, those who are homed and can afford it are improving their living spaces from quarantine, from lockdown, from self-imposed withdrawal. Dissatisfied with the spaces in which they spend their days, they are buying and returning furniture and knickknacks from Amazon and Wayfair, using the virtual vectors of commerce and communication to make concrete change. Home improvers spend perhaps hours a day on Instagram, whose lack of text underscores and indeed ensures a sense of immediacy. Perhaps they add pictures of their own spaces to our culture’s visual catalogue of home. While I have not myself undertaken major home improvement projects, I spent several months in the summer decorating the back porch where I have been meeting and eating with a few friends. This necessitated—I use the word advisedly— buying an “indoor/outdoor” rug whose very name helpfully suggested an ease of movement and a continuity denied to my guests. I learned. Over time, I began to use my cart as a catalogue of “favorites.”   Perhaps it was lockdown brain fog that caused me to click on that cart and to buy all the items I was browsing at once and resulting in the staggered--and staggering—arrival of ten blue and green water repellent rugs that sat in my hall for weeks while I struggled to return them without leaving the house.

My own mistakes aside, there is of course a benign side to redecoration, whether in the before, the after, or the middle of a pandemic. Especially in the long middle, redecoration can produce a sense of agency and control and can serve as an expression of desire when so many desires have been put on hold. But, home decoration is also about desperation and shame. The home/owner metonymy, of which I wrote last week, is very powerful: many DIY-ers, many pandemic redecorators, wake up each day to a by-no-means-new but newly formidable sense that their home defines them. Ironically—or not—when visitors to homes are, at least in theory, rare, we worry even more than we did used to about how our homes might appear to others, and what they might say about our characters. 

Take for example, a before and after from my FB feed.  While I can’t tell if the renovation itself happened before or during the pandemic, the story appeared two weeks ago, in between those classics of pandemic times, posts about slow vaccination rollouts and the Capital insurrection. The short article features home owner and designer Anita Yokota, who recently renovated her “late ’90s cook space.” Although the article explains that “At first glance, there was nothing glaringly wrong with her open plan kitchen;” Yokota is dissatisfied, even after a cosmetic renovation featuring contact paper and wallpaper. The real issues, it seems, went deeper, as we see in Yokota’s own words: “There were so many dead corner spaces with deep recesses of nothing, so when we stored things there, everything got pushed to the back and lost or wasted,” says Yokota. “The dysfunctional flow of the kitchen, blocked by a narrow island, also kept me from being my best self or mom or partner in there.”

I know nothing about Yokota beyond what she says on the website to her business, but it is hard to resist thinking that there might be a story here behind the “things” she stores in “dead corners” in the “deep recesses of nothing.” This is home improvement as gothic tale.  But the story is not only Yokota’s. When she tells us that the “dysfunctional” layout of her kitchen prevents her from being “her best self” Yokota is accessing—or perhaps more accurately being accessed by-- the home/owner metonymy at its most powerful and its most frightening. The metonymy is so efficient that we may not notice all that it does, all that it collapses along its chain of ruthless substitution: home/kitchen/woman/partner/mother/ self. As we read deeper and deeper into the recesses of kitchen and self, we might notice (or simply feel) shame doing its predictable. A messy kitchen--or even a kitchen that is sub-optimally laid out-- exposes the person (usually a woman) who works in it and who is somehow responsible for it. It is no wonder that during the pandemic there has been a backlash against open-plan kitchens, where the mess of multiple daily meals is laid bare not only to the members of the household but to an internalized gaze: those ghosts of visitors who never visit and who are somehow even more judgmental than those who do; the Instagrammers and Facebookers who post their own impeccable images. 

I am no stranger to the burden of being what my mother called “houseproud” and that I would call “houseshamed.” The pandemic exaggerates this shame as it exaggerates so many of the unspoken structures of daily life. Zoom puts our homes on display to a set of people that in “before” times would not likely enter them. In my own field I have read competing arguments about whether the appearance of household clutter, even your (literal) dirty laundry puts students at ease in a new and useful way, or declares your lack of professionalism. We are (usefully) reminded that our students who appear only as black boxes on screen may be doing it because they don’t want classmates and teachers seeing their homes, if indeed they have them. There is no Zoom “touch up appearance” button for kitchens, living rooms, hallways, or closets, though there are, but only if your computer is compatible with them, virtual backgrounds. If I could use them on my laptop, I might forgo images of sunsets or space ships, flower gardens, or movie stills for a clean kitchen without recesses or dirty plates.