Hil at home

I’m on my way home from a business trip to Germany, during which I was able to visit two friends at home.

 

The purpose of the trip was to attend a workshop for all the people in my division who do the kind of work I do. (You remember I work for a big company.) Hil put on the workshop, which means she was mostly pretty busy during the whole week. But Thursday night she invited six of us to her house for dinner. “The last years we worked together very often and very close and for me our relation changed from ‘just’ colleagues to friends. It is great to have you here in ---- this week and I thought it might be a great chance to invite you to my home, sitting together and enjoying the time.

For this reason I would like to invite you for Thursday evening – after we finished the workshop - for a small dinner at my house.”

 

You remember that my friendship with Hil has never been romantic, and clearly there couldn’t be anything romantic about an invitation to six people. But it was kind and personal. Everybody says invitations like this don’t come easily in Germany. So naturally I was happy to accept.

 

Is a home a self-portrait? In some ways yes. Unless you live alone, your home won’t reflect you exactly; but surely it reflects the collective personality of your family or housemates, of the corporate entity that lives there. My apartment, for example, is very spare: there’s a dining table and a bed but no other furniture; bookshelves and art, but no other artifacts. And this somehow fits with my living so much in my head rather than in the tangible world – except for food and sleep, food and sex. On the other hand the house I shared with Wife was chronically cluttered and usually dirty: dominated by Wife’s obsessive need to hold onto things (heirlooms, artifacts, memories, grudges), by her depression and indolence, and by my resentment of her expectation that the rest of us lived to serve her.

 

Hil’s house is very cluttered. She explained that “In Germany we don’t have family rooms, so we put those things in the living room instead”: this would explain, I suppose, the exercise machine and large television in the living room. And she has two little girls, aged seven and nice. (She is divorced from their father; and while she has a boyfriend, he has his own house down the street.) Does all this explain that there were no empty level surfaces except the dining table? Maybe that’s just the clutter that comes of single motherhood, plus Hil’s busy worldwide travel schedule. There were bookshelves but not a lot of books – not real books, anyway, except for a huge number of glossy coffee-table books about ancient Egypt and the secrets of the Pharaohs. Somebody in the family really loves this one subject, but nobody in the family is an all-around intellectual. There were a lot of Disney princesses, and a lot of family photographs. Hil clearly dotes on her two girls. I already knew this from the way she talks about them every time we work together, so I wasn’t surprised to find it in her house.

 

How often does Hil entertain? Maybe not a lot. She sat us all down at the dining room table, and offered us drinks: apple juice, water, or non-alcoholic beer. It sounded like she keeps no alcohol in the house. Then she left us to go work in the kitchen making pizzas, until the time she could put them in the oven and join us: this meant we were on our own for – what was it? – half an hour? More? I remember when my father used to make pizza at home for guests, and he always invited everyone into the kitchen to talk and socialize as he worked. Not Hil. To be fair, her kitchen isn’t large so there’s not much space for company. But it felt a little awkward to be left to our own devices for so long, especially as we didn’t all know each other. We’re all in the same line of work, but what we have in common is Hil. And we didn’t even have any alcohol as a social lubricant ….

 

Even when the pizzas were ready it felt a little awkward at first: she made three pizzas but they were done at different times, so we each took a slice of each pizza in turn, a little self-consciously, rather as if we were following a schedule. By this time Hil was with us, though, and the conversation picked up somewhat. But then, somewhere between the second and third pizzas, it all began to click into place. The magic of sharing food began to do its work; we told stories, we laughed, we melted together as a single party rather than just a group of people who all know Hil. By the time we were done and going back to our hotels it was late and nobody was ready to leave. It was fun. In the end, it was fun.

 

I continue this story in the post “Elly at home”.