If the Raneys had showed up, would the parents still have split?: "The Bed & Breakfast" by Molly Dektar (BASS 2024)

My mother enjoys watching a show on Discovery called Homestead Rescue. A grumpy old man in a dumb cowboy hat named Marty Raney goes off with his two kids to rescue people who idealistically tried to establish some kind of independent/off-grid/subsistence homestead and failed at it. I am sympathetic to the desire to set up on one's own. Mrs. Heretic and I almost did this once. We put an offer in on a four-acre property in Pennsylvania. I was going to commute down to my job, Mrs. Heretic was going to stay home with our son and our dog, and we were going to--I don't know, do something with chickens and apple trees, maybe. 

We won the offer, but I got cold feet, and because the owners had taken more time to respond than we'd given them in our offer, I was able to back away. Given that this was pre-Raneys, I think those cold feet saved us. I don't even like to mow the lawn. The spirit was willing, and living a different kind of life was very attractive, but the flesh and our know-how were both weak. I can't fix shit. How was I going to build a chicken coop?  

The father in Molly Dektar's "The Bed & Breakfast" has been bitten by a similar bug to set up on his own, and he eventually prevails on the narrator's mother, sells the family home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, and moves his wife and three children to Italy. There, instead of building a self-sufficient homestead, they occupy a dilapidated old farm house and try to renovate it so it can become a Bed & Breakfast. (There is probably a reality show for this situation that fits better, but I only know the one show. I can almost guarantee Karen Carlson will know the right show.) Like the families in Homestead Rescue, the father is in a bit over his head. He isn't able to make good on his promises to get the roof and plumbing and stove going before winter hits. Eventually, he wears out the patience of his wife, Sara, and she takes off for a few days, leaving the father to both try to fix the house and tend to the children.

On one level, then, the story operates as a kind of anti-Under the Tuscan Sun, and the anti-every-story-about-deciding-on-a-whim-to-move-somewhere-to-change-your-life. "The Bed & Breakfast" begins sounding like a familiar family-overcomes-hardships-to-accomplish-its-dreams story; in fact, if I had been reading this in the personal essays section of a news outlet, that's probably the direction this story would have taken. The family would have finished its remodel, become financially successful, and made its own relational foundations as strong as the house. But this is fiction, and it's got elements undermining that trajectory--the trajectory the father dreams of making come true--from the very beginning.

My mom loves this show, but it feels a little staged to me. 

 

Houses as metaphors, homes as metonyms 

Let's start by acknowledging that this story does what countless others have done before and uses the physical structure of the house as a metaphor for the family that lives within it. Maybe the simplest and most well known example is Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," in which the crumbling house dies at the same moment the ancestral family living in it comes to an end. 

"House" and "home" are sometimes synonyms and sometimes not quite. "House" always refers to a physical structure of bricks, wood, and drywall, but "home" can sometimes mean the physical structure and sometimes means the family living inside of it. When used to mean the family inside the home, the word is operating as a metonym, rather than a metaphor. 

Metaphor draws a comparison between two different things by pointing out their likeness. "This family is as broken as the walls of the house it lives in" would be a metaphor. Metonymy, meanwhile, brings together two different things more by contiguity. So when an article on parenting strategies recommends certain approaches in order to "make for a happy home," it is using the building in which the family lives to mean the family itself.  

In one branch of literary theory connected to structuralism, metaphor and metonymy are seen as working against each other, both narratively and also psycho-linguistically. Metaphor seeks to bring things together. It is a unifying force. Metonymy, meanwhile, tends to destroy unity by making one thing continually grow out of another. 

In "B & B," the home operates both metonymically and metaphorically, meaning it is both unifying and dividing. That is because the people in it have opposing desires for both unity and individuality, none more than the narrator, pre-teen Louise. (Or rather, adult Louise recalling her pre-teen self.)  

Father Metaphor and Mother Metonym

"The house has a good foundation," Louise's father Peter declares after he's had a chance to do a little work. "Doesn't matter that it's out of level. It's a good foundation." To Peter, if the house has a good foundation, the rest will come in time. He then invents a metaphor to explain his approach to renovations: "We're making a house sandwich!...Foundation and roof first. They are the bread of the sandwich. And the rest--the walls, the windows, plumbing, another stove, furniture--is the delicious ingredients. And the foundation is all good!"

Given Peter's metaphorical bent, it's hard not to think that he applied his belief in the strong foundations of the house to extend to the family as well. He probably thought something metaphorical like, "My family's foundation is as strong as the foundations of this house." 

For Peter, taking the renovations one step at a time, it was logical to think in terms of foundation above all. Humans very often proceed from a very metaphorical line of thinking in which if the foundation is good, then the whole project is likely to be good. One of Jesus' most famous parables, the man who build his house on sand and the man who built his house on rock, argues for this very line of thinking. It's tempting to end up thinking that foundations are really all that matters. In fact, the father's name, Peter, seems to be playing with this whole idea. Peter the apostle used to be called Simon, but Jesus gave him his new name, a name which means "rock," because Jesus wanted to make Peter the rock upon which his church would be built.  

In Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, although there are foundational human needs, such as safety, food, and water, if humans do not continue moving forward with achieving their desires--if they do not, to use the father's metaphor, keep adding to the inside of their sandwich--they become psychologically unfulfilled and are unhappy. 

This is where mother Sara is. She isn't impressed by the father's continued insistence in the solidity of the foundation. She's concerned about the inside of the sandwich. She wants beds for her children to sleep in, rather than hay. She wants curtains and flowers to adorn the insides. She wants a second stove so her children don't freeze. 

If we want to play games with the meaning of her name from the Bible, too, we can see that as the namesake of the mother of a great nation, she represents not things coming together and becoming one, but rather an offspring that multiplies and spreads throughout the Earth. 

The father thinks that if the children get cold, they can just come share the parents' room and its stove. He thinks the family is all one unit, so it's fine to all huddle together. The closer they get, the better, at least in his mind. His thinking is metaphorical, and therefore unifying, seeing the family as a whole rather than a grouping of individuals. The mother, however, realizes that they cannot ask their now sexually mature older son to share a bedroom with them, because it will drive him out of the house. She respects the individuality of the members of the household. Metonymical thinking allows greater freedom, more room for play and for individual development. 

Ultimately, Sara will exercise her own individuality to such an extent she will leave the family, at least temporarily. When she does, she still respects the children's individuality, saying her leaving was because she couldn't make the children into bargaining chips, but only herself. 

There is one exchange that is particularly telling of the different assumed family vs. individual assumptions between Sara and Peter. Sara is speculating on how long it will take to have the place made into a B & B, and she thinks it will take two years. In an aside to Peter, she adds "if you don't get it done first" (emphasis mine). Peter responds with, "We'll get it done" (emphasis mine). 

Louise as a union of metaphorical and metonymic thinking 

Louise's age isn't given, but she's between her thirteen-year-old brother Lewis and her nine-year-old brother Lindsay. So she's a pre-teen, an age when the budding desire to mark oneself off as an individual coexists with a lingering, childish desire to remain safe within the family. 

It seems that for the most part, it's the binding, metaphorical thinking that is holding strong. Although part of her knows that things are about to change and that her desire to remain a non-individuated part of a whole may be a last stand, that's the primary impulse in her. At the ages the children are in the story, the breakup of the essential unity is likely to come anyway, but it also seems that the move to Italy may be helping to speed it up. 

In North Carolina, the three children all slept together in one big bed in the attic. As Louise saw it, "The three of us were essentially one person. I was the holy ghost." Louise equates the essential oneness of her and her siblings with the divine. Even their names, all beginning with "L," seem to suggest that they are all part of the same whole. 

Many coming-of-age stories focus on children wanting to be seen as individuals, to come out from the stifling hold of the family, but Louise mostly wants the opposite. At least three times in the story, Louise stresses that what she most wants is to remain as an assimilated part of the hive-life of the family, not to stand out on her own. When her father takes her on a supply run, he asks her if she likes Italy, and she thinks, "The truth was I didn’t like being singled out and asked like this." At another point, she confesses that she "didn't like to be alone this way." 

When Claudio tries to show her favoritism by letting her win the chocolate gelato her brothers also coveted, Louse has her most extended meditation on what she wants: 

"I didn’t like walking alone, so I made my brothers come with me. I liked to feel like we were all one person. I had decided that I didn’t like winning the chocolate gelato, or Claudio’s good favor; I didn’t want attention that pulled me away from them. And, equally, I didn’t want the house to become a bed and breakfast, and all this dirt and strangeness to wash away."

That all sounds like she's her father's daughter, who thinks of the family more corporately than as individuals, but think about the end of that last passage. Her greatest wish is that the B & B will never come to be, because that would mean the end of the last-stand togetherness of her and her brothers. In her heart, she wants her father to fail. She cannot have her desire unless her father fails, but if he fails, then what she wants will fall apart, anyway. 

Louise's own duplicity complicates her understanding of what she wants

Louise's inner ambivalence is made more acute by her own lack of authenticity. The narrator, who has an adult's voice looking back on the younger Louise, judges younger Louise somewhat harshly in places. When the family arrives in Italy, the father gives the two brothers bowl cuts. He then tries to convince Louise to get her own hair cut short. This is the one time she tries to resist being made one with her siblings. "Holy Trinity" Louise would have wanted a haircut to match them, but here, for the first time, Louise wants to keep her hair long. 

When her father then forces her to get a haircut anyway, the neighbor Claudio shows up. He looks at her and asks if she is okay, and she starts to cry. We might think as readers that she is torn up about having to get her hair cut short and ugly, but the narrator insists that the younger Louise wasn't really all that sad. Instead, she was manipulating Claudio. In the older narrator's assessment, the younger Louise's tears were "partly from true emotion, and partly from conceit." (Conceit, in this case, meaning "an artistic device" rather than "excessive pride.") She pities Claudio for not being able to decipher young Louise's duplicity, her manipulativeness. Later, when the father has a spider near his ear, Louise screams, and Claudio knocks it off, more because of how it scared Louise than because it was a real threat. Again, the older narrator pities Claudio for being a rube, who "didn't know how it worked, how I could be scared and not scared at once."  

Young Louise is already torn between wanting to remain within her family and not seen as an individual on the one hand and wanting to be her own person on the other, as seen in her momentary reluctance to get her hair cut like her brothers. Her interior life is further complicated by her own duplicity. If she is being dishonest with others, is she not likely being dishonest with herself? She wants family unity like her father, but she also doesn't want him to achieve his dream of a B & B, which--because Sara had made finishing the rehab a condition of her continued presence in the family--would mean the breakup of the family's unity. She's of two minds, although her heart seems to be with holding onto her brothers as long as she can, and her inability to be honest about her division is making it harder for her to know where she herself stands.

Claudio

On the one hand, Claudio is a helpful neighbor, brining tomato plants and chickens, giving the children treats, and offering advice to Peter. On the other hand, he's the central force that destroys the unity of the family Louise wants so badly to preserve as long as she can. When Claudio--whom we are told, significantly, pronounces his name "Cloudy-O," like a cloud--shows up, he tells the children to pray that the drought lasts, because their roof will not be able to handle a storm. So the "cloud" is telling the children to beware of the rain, which is to say to beware of the cloud himself. Claudio is announcing himself as a threat. 

Louise and her brothers share one another's dirt when taking baths. She thinks of this dirt as part of what unites them. She doesn't want "all this dirt and strangeness to wash away." But the onset of clouds and rain will do exactly that. 

Claudio, we find at one point, is actually a bit of a racist, concerned about the people from "dirty" countries coming to Italy and not being Italian. He doesn't like the very dirt that Louise wants to hold onto. 

When the rain finally comes and we find that Peter's roof wasn't solid enough to keep the water out, Sara runs to Claudio's house. So the clouds really did bring about the breakup of the family.

Clouds and spiders

Clouds and spiders are two central images in the story, both lurking as threats to the family's unity. They appear together more than once. When the spider lands on Peter's head, it is "Cloudy-O" who knocks it off. Lewis goes to find the spider, and finds it is "gray-green like the storm clouds in the valley, which we had prayed against." When the storm finally breaks and drenches all the beds and curtains, all the middle of the family's house sandwich, it comes with "spider green clouds that meant the end of the drought." The two central images in the story are threatening ones, and their threats work in tandem. 

The catharsis is the victory of metonymy 

In a happy family story, there would have been some eventual Hegelian synthesis between the metaphorical, categorical, unifying thinking of the father and the metonymic, individualizing, diffuse view of the mother. This isn't a happy family story, though. In the end, the metonymy will win. The family's unity will not hold. The older narrator will have her reminiscences about the beauty of that unity's last stand, among the threatening but beautiful "red, silver, and gold...stars and webs" of Italy. But the dirt Louise saw as holding the family together ultimately "filled my nose and mouth," choking her. 

We never really get Peter's motivation for wanting to take the family to Italy. He doesn't say, "I want our family to stay together," or "I want to give up the rat race" or some other explanation of why he upends the whole family's existence in North Carolina. Without any explicit motivation, we have to guess based on what access we do have to Peter's interior life. Given his obsession with foundations, I think we can possibly guess that he viewed the B & B as a way to guarantee his family's continued unity.

In the end, though, families don't stay together forever, because they're made of of individuals who want their own, independent existence. Even Louise feels this pull, as much as she wants to hide it from herself and others. Eventually, water gets into the middle of the sandwich, and members of the family feel their cannot progress psychologically and emotionally within the home. The end of "Bed & Breakfast" recognizes this unavoidable fracturing of unity while still eulogizing its loss.