Householders
Kate Cayley
Biblioasis, 2021
Review by Katie Zdybel
In the closing story of Householders, Trout—a woman who was born into a commune which her mother, Naomi, eventually smuggled her out of—returns to that commune with the now aging, dementia-stricken Naomi. The heart of the commune is a decaying farmhouse, “dead vines suckered to the windows, some of the broken panes patched with cardboard.” And yet, it’s effectively unclear whether this act of depositing her mother among the dwindled, dying number of commune members in a fading house where Trout, as a child, knew hunger and extreme cold, is an act of treason against her mother, or compassion.
Close attention is paid to houses in this collection—old farmhouses, a trailer, Toronto apartments, European flats, underground bunkers, university dormitories—and in all of them, Kate Cayley’s controlled sense of ambiguity breathes complexity and authenticity into their rooms. The glossy, urban apartment of a professor of Women’s Studies is furnished with “canapes, the clink of ice in murder-weapon glasses.” Naomi as her younger self, having just left the commune, runs into an old friend named Carol and is invited to her home for dinner, where Carol promptly launches into a verbal denouncement of all notions separatist, tearing down any possibility for the other dinner guests to view Naomi’s recent time spent in the commune as romantic or noble. Naomi does not defend herself, but understands as she looks around Carol’s apartment that
she was untethered to anything Carol could recognize as a life; her life must be a judgement on Carol herself. She knew it was. But the room was also a declaration of allegiance, a separation. The pictures, the dusty rows of books on the dark wood shelves. This chosen group of people, their assumed agreement, their like-mindedness. She was not, in particular, guilty of shutting out the world.
Each story in Householders considers what it means to be connected to the world and disconnected from others, examined through the prism of rooms in which we chose to dwell. Neighbourhoods are small universes—homes become planets, the rooms within them microcosms—and families become miniature replicas of humanity at large. In each room a different kind of world is explored. Characters sink into these rooms, weighted down by their objects and furniture, or abandon them, closing doors behind them that may be (surprisingly) opened later in another story—as the stories in this collection are all either tightly or loosely knitted together.
In the dinner party mentioned above, there’s a moment where Robert, a friend of Carol’s, reveals that he was once curious about Naomi’s abandoned commune, and in fact spied on her and her companions through the windows of the old farmhouse. For a moment, we are situated in the woods with him, peering through the warped glass of the dining room, watching as the commune inhabitants gather. The scene we observe through Robert can be viewed as either eerie and unsettling, or warm, enticing, tempting. In the end, Robert walks away from the commune. Naomi, hearing his story years later, is “moved to think of him among the trees, watching them sitting at the table with their heads bowed, listening to words he couldn’t catch, wrapped in a life he was not troubled enough to truly want.”
In the breathtaking opening story “The Crooked Man,” we see the themes of characters watching and being watched by others explored through Martha, an overwhelmed mother living in a gentrifying neighborhood. Here Cayley creates a whole, vulnerable, fragile character so swiftly and deftly, we’re all in from the first paragraph:
Martha regarded herself skeptically and assumed skepticism from the other mothers at the table. She had too many children (four), and not for a discernible reason (religion, twins), she was too young (twenty-eight), she was disordered and apologetic. She made stuffed baby toys out of felt and organic wool, her breasts leaked through old tank tops. She was blond but not seductively so: freckled and angular, snub-nosed. A child, pinkish, pedalling a bike home from a violin lesson, earnest and a little sad.” By the time we get to that last sentence, our hearts have been built and broken for her.
Martha’s acute attention to her four children—particularly sad, sly Noah, who experiences existence in this world as painful, bewildering, and lonely—welds her own existence so tightly to the small world of her family that she feels alienated from all others. She ends up being politely excluded from a neighbourhood festival, all because she stands up for another neighbour she mistakenly believes is being ignored. Later, Martha attends the festival as an observer and has a fleeting moment of feeling connected during an ethereal dance performance. But when the magic wears off, she anticipates being shunned and expects the other mothers in the neighbourhood to cut her off from the group—partly because of her troubled son, partly because of her own delicate troubledness.
In “A Beautiful, Bare Room,” our attention is drawn again to the complex functions of a room. After a virus spreads through the world, a group of ultra-rich bazillionaires build a kind of underground commune, into which Liza, the protagonist (a barista and definitely not a bazillionaire), is invited—though she doesn’t know why. In the bunker, the rooms are shiny, immaculately designed, a “warren of rooms at her disposal, this munificence of…brilliant planning, unthinkable money.” Unlike the other rooms described in the collection, which are teeming with life, layered with decay and new growth, full of good intentions or discarded old values, the rooms of the bunker are opulent and sterile. We read into them a sense of death or lifelessness, and understand that rooms, in Cayley’s book, can signify a world which encloses a character, or suffocates them, just as easily as they can embrace or protect.
Within the room of each story in this collection there are yet smaller rooms—ones that lead to dark corners, trap doors, and curious artifacts. Characters walk down city streets, glancing into lit rooms from the outside, watching life as a voyeur, only to enter into their own rooms and learn they’ve been watched and assessed from the outside in as well. The constant shift between encapsulating characters in their own small worlds, and breaking down those worlds, creates a vibrant tension in this collection which compels the reader to race through, eager to peek into every window for a glimpse at yet another confounding, darkly lovely, ominous, or complicated, tender life. We don’t always know, as the reader, if we want to enter a room or dwell safely outside of it—but in each story we are riveted, consumed with wondering what it might be like to live inside any one of these weird and beautiful rooms. As Robert exclaims at the dinner party, after admitting he’d watched Naomi through the farmhouse window, “You lived there. You lived there.” Cayley’s writing is so precise, so clear and masterful, that for a moment, we get a chance to live there too.
Katie Zdybel‘s first book, a collection of short stories titled Equipoise (Exile Editions, Oct. 2021), was shortlisted for the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction. Stories within the collection have been awarded the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Award for Emerging Writers, the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, and have been nominated for both a Journey Prize and National Magazine Award. Katie is represented by the CookeMcDermid agency and is currently at work on her first novel with generous support from the Canada Council for the Arts.