A. Homes - Safety of Objects: Stories

Sharp, funny, and playful Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting details right. A fully engaged imagination [is] at work and play.

Amy Hempel, The Los Angeles Times

Set in a world filled with edges to topple from, [The Safety of Objects] is permeated by the bizarre. The unexpected emerges from the story itself, startling and unexpectedly right.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

A. M. Homes finds mystery without special effects or exotic underbellies. We get a tour through the action adventure of everyday fantasies. Many of Homess characters lead two lives, one on Gods most conventional little acre, one in some alternate universe.

Mirabella

A collection of deft, off-center stories about bizarre situations and the people unwittingly thrust into them The Safety of Objects takes us on a Twilight Zone tour of everyday life. After its over, the reader may have lost some sense of boundaries, but thats all to the good. Thats what keeps life, and literature, fresh.

Detroit Free Press

Homess surprises proceed out of a stranger, surrealistic fictional world. One way or another, theres no place like Homes and her stories.

San Francisco Examiner

Homess vision may be relentlessly grim, but its undeniably vivid and uncomfortingly familiar. [H]er singular voice has deftly chronicled a suburban collage of marriage, mortgages and, lurking just beneath the veneer, madness.

Rocky Mountain News

A. M. Homess provocative and funny and sometimes very sad takes on contemporary suburban life impressed me enormously. The more bizarre things get, the more impressed one is by A. M. Homess skills as a realist, a portraitist of contemporary life at its more perverse.

David Leavitt

These stories are remarkable. They are awesomely well written. In the sense of arousing fear and wonder in the reader they entertain, but what they principally bring us is a sense of recognition. Here are all the things that even today, even in our frank outspoken times, we dont talk about. We think of them punishingly in sleepless nights.

Ruth Rendell

An unnerving glimpse through the windows of other peoples lives. A. M. Homes is a provocative and eloquent writer, and her vision of the way we live now is anything but safe.

Meg Wolitzer

A. M. Homess fresh and determined young voice emerges with vigor in this engaging collection of stories. You know the world will hear more of her.

Thomas Keneally

A. M. Homes has a real gift for using a single, sharp tool to make (or suggest, perhaps) an astute general observation. With little she makes much, a trait I much admire in these days of profuse and prolix novels.

Doris Grumbach

Elaine takes the boys to Florida and drops them off like theyre dry cleaning.

See you in ten days, she says as they wave good-bye in the American terminal. Be nice!

She kisses her mother-in-laws cheek and, feeling the rough skin against her own, thinks of this woman literally as her husbands genetic map, down to the beard.

Go, her mother-in-law says, pushing her toward the gate.

It is the first time shes left her children like that. She gets back onto the plane thinking theres something wrong with her, that she should have a better reason or a better vacation plan, Europe not Westchester.

Paul is waiting at the airport. Hes been there all day. After dropping them off this morning, he took over the west end of the lounge and spent the day there working. She knows because he paged her at Miami International to remind her to bring oranges home.

He seems younger than she remembers. His eyes are glowing and he looks a little bit like Charlie Manson did before he let himself go. Elaine is sure hes been smoking dope again. She imagines Paul locking himself in an airport bathroom stall with his smokeless pipe and some guy who got bumped off a flight to L.A.

She wonders why he doesnt find it strange, pressing himself into a tiny metal cabinet with a total stranger. He once told her that whenever he got stoned in a bathroom with another guy it gave him a hard-on, and he was never sure if it was the dope or the other man.

She cant believe that in all these years hes never been busted. She used to wish it would happen; she thought it would straighten him out.

Lets go home, Elaine says.

We dont have to go home, we can go anywhere. We can He winks at her.

Im tired, Elaine says.

They drive home silently. The car is so new that it doesnt make any noises. Paul pulls carefully into the driveway. Branches from trees surrounding the house scrape across the car. Elaine thinks of campfire horror stories about men with hooks for arms and women buried alive with long fingernails poking through the dirt.

Got to cut those branches back, Paul says and then they are silent.

Paul follows her up the steps, talking about the steps. If were going to paint them, we should go ahead and do it before it snows.

Maybe tomorrow, she says, but honestly she doesnt want to do anything else to the house. Shes given up on it. Its too much work.

She feels like shes been having an extramarital relationship with their home. It isnt even an affair, an affair sounds too nice, too good. As far as shes concerned a house should be like a self-cleaning oven; it should take care of itself.

The last time she was happy with the house was the day before they moved in, when the floors had just been done, when it was big and empty, and they hadnt paid for it yet.

Elaine pushes open the front door.

I wish youd remember to lock the door, she says. In the city you never forgot to lock the door.

It is dark inside. Elaine stands in the front hall, trying to remember where the light switch is. In the six months theyve lived there, she and Paul have never been alone in the house. Its nice, she thinks, still feeling the wall for the switch. She turns on all the lights and begins picking up things, Daniels clothing, Sammys toys. She straightens the pillows on the sofa and goes upstairs to take a bath. The phone rings and Paul answers it. She falls asleep hearing the sound of voices softly talking, thinking Paul is a good father; he is down the hall, reading a story to Sammy.

As usual they both wake between six-thirty and seven, listening for the children. They are alone together, trapped in their bed. They dont have to get up. They dont have to go anywhere. They are on vacation.

Eventually, between seven-thirty and quarter-to-eight, when there is no more getting around it, she looks at him. He is balding. She thinks she can actually see his hairline receding, follicle by follicle. He has told her that he can feel it. He says his whole head feels different; it tingles, it gets chilled easily, it just isnt the way it used to be. She thinks about herself. Her face is caving in. She has circles and bags and all kinds of things around her eyes. Last week she spent forty dollars on lotion to cover it all up.

When she comes downstairs, he has already eaten breakfast and lunch.

Maybe we should go to a movie later? he says.

Paul doesnt really mean they should go to a movie; he means they should make a time to be together, in some way or another. Usually they have to get a sitter for this.

Pick you up around four, he says.

Does that mean youre taking the car? I have things to do.

We can go together, he says.

In his fantasy about suburban life the whole family is always in the car together, going places, singing songs, eating McDonalds. He loves it when they pull up in front of a store and he goes in while she waits in the car for as long as it takes.