A Working Definition of Home

The seal of the New Jersey Office of Weights, Measures, and Terminology showed a brass balance suspended above an open dictionary. On one side of the balance sat a one-kilogram weight. On the other sat the word approximately.

The weight was winning.

This was, according to Theodore Bell, as it should be.

For thirty-eight years Theodore had worked in a beige building behind the old motor-vehicle inspection station in Netcong, where he and eleven other civil servants protected the public from short gallons, light cords of firewood, misleading produce scales, and words that had wandered dangerously far from their intended meanings.

The scales were easier.

A pound either contained sixteen ounces or it did not. But the office had once spent fourteen months determining whether a roadside farm stand could describe tomatoes grown in Pennsylvania as local. Its provisional definition of family had survived three governors, two lawsuits, and one employee who retired midway through a sentence and refused to return to finish it.

Theodore specialized in ordinary words. The more ordinary the word, the more treacherous it was. People rarely went to court over syzygy. They went to court over reasonable, safe, natural, temporary, and mine.

On a wet Monday in March, his supervisor placed a blue folder on his desk.

“We have twenty-nine definitions,” said Elena Velez.

“Of what?”

“Home.”

Theodore removed his glasses. “Twenty-nine is not an unusual number for a word of that age.”

“It is when all twenty-nine belong to the State of New Jersey.”

The Department of Community Affairs defined a home one way, Taxation another, Children and Families a third. Corrections required an approved home address before release. Emergency Management required residents to leave their homes when those same homes had ceased to be habitable. Fish and Wildlife maintained a separate definition of home range for black bears, which Elena said was currently more generous than the housing code’s definition for human beings.

“The governor wants consistency,” she said.

“Governors often do.”

“One definition. Plain language. Broad enough for every department.”

“By when?”

“Friday.”

Theodore looked at the rain tracing separate paths down the window before joining on the sill.

“Try not to define the state out of existence,” Elena said.

“No promises.”

He began where he always began: with the oldest definitions he could find. Home was a village. Home was an estate. Home was the place where one lay down. It was a dwelling, a refuge, a native land, a destination in baseball, a key on a keyboard, and a page on the internet from which one was encouraged to depart immediately for other pages.

By Tuesday he had written a person’s principal place of residence and crossed out principal. By Wednesday he had removed place. On Thursday afternoon, after staring at the surviving words a person’s, he crossed those out too.

That evening he returned to the small house above Lake Hopatcong where he had lived for thirty-one years. He placed his keys in the blue ceramic bowl by the door. Ellen’s keys were still there.

There were other things he had not moved: her raincoat on the second hook, her garden clogs beneath the basement stairs, the grocery list held to the refrigerator by a magnet from Wildwood. MILK, she had written. PEARS. SOMETHING NICE.

Ellen had been dead for eleven months.

Their son Daniel had not entered the house for thirteen.

Near the end, when the cancer had moved from Ellen’s lungs into the places doctors described only by pointing, she had begun asking to go home. She asked from her bed in the room with the lake-facing window. She asked beneath the quilt she had sewn, within twenty feet of the kitchen she had painted yellow, in the house where she had raised Daniel and outlived three dogs.

“You are home,” Theodore would tell her.

Daniel believed she meant something else.

He wanted to move her to a hospice near his apartment in Jersey City, where nurses could manage the pain and he could visit every day. Theodore said she had made her wishes clear. Daniel said words spoken by a frightened woman were not property lines. Theodore accused him of wanting convenience. Daniel accused Theodore of hiding inside the literal meaning of a word because the real meaning required him to change.

Their final argument occurred in the driveway while Ellen slept upstairs.

“Home isn’t automatically the house, Dad.”

“Then what is it?”

“That is exactly the problem,” Daniel said. “You think everything has one answer.”

Ellen entered hospice six days later, after a fall made the decision for all of them. She died there with Theodore on one side of the bed and an empty chair on the other. Daniel had been caught in traffic outside Newark. Theodore knew this. At the funeral, he told Daniel that his mother had waited for him anyway.

It was the cruelest sentence Theodore had ever constructed. Its grammar was impeccable.

On Thursday night he sat at the kitchen table with the blue folder open before him. After a while he pushed the official form aside and took out a sheet of personal stationery Ellen had bought him years ago in the belief that owning it might make him write to someone.

He wrote until shortly after midnight. Then he folded the sheet around his unfinished definition and placed both in an envelope.

On the front he wrote:

DANIEL BELL

88 MONTGOMERY STREET

JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY

PLEASE PLACE IN HIS HAND

He did not add a stamp.

In the morning, he put the envelope inside his coat and walked down to the Lake Hopatcong station to carry it east himself.

I. Person

Person, noun: A human being considered as an individual.

Celia Torres saw Theodore fall at 7:12 in the morning.

She was leaning from the open door of the train, watching three passengers hurry across the platform, when the tall older man in the dark coat stopped walking. He touched the center of his chest with two fingers, not dramatically but almost politely, as if asking his heart to repeat itself. Then he sat down without a bench beneath him.

Celia stepped onto the platform and radioed the engineer to hold.

There were rules about when a conductor could delay a train. There were target numbers displayed every month in the crew room, and explanations requested for every lost minute. Celia had worked the line for nineteen years. She knew how quickly a person on a platform could become an obstruction, then an incident, then a delay of twelve to fifteen minutes.

She also knew his name.

“Mr. Bell,” she said, kneeling beside him. “Theodore. Look at me.”

She knew him because he took the same train twice a month to meetings in Trenton and always asked whether a seat was available when he plainly meant empty. Three years earlier he had written the transit authority a two-page letter explaining the difference. Celia had kept it in her locker because it made her laugh.

Theodore opened his eyes.

“East,” he said.

“The train is going east.”

His hand moved inside his coat, then fell away.

The ambulance arrived in nine minutes. The train departed in eleven. Only after the doors closed did Celia see the envelope on the floor near the cab, damp at one corner where the rain had reached it.

She read the address and the instruction beneath it.

At Dover, Celia’s shift ended. She could have left the envelope with Lost and Found, where it would have been sealed in a plastic pouch, assigned a number, transported west to a central facility, and kept for ninety days before being destroyed. Every step of that process would have been documented.

Instead, she approached a boy waiting beneath the departure board.

“How far east are you going?” she asked.

The boy looked suspiciously at her uniform. “Morristown.”

She held out the envelope. “That’s farther than here.”

II. Light

Light, noun: The portion of electromagnetic radiation that can be perceived by the human eye.

Simon Cho was seventeen and, on alternating Fridays, homeless for approximately forty-three minutes.

That was the interval between leaving his father’s townhouse in Randolph and arriving at his mother’s apartment in Morristown. Both houses contained a room called Simon’s room. Both contained clothing he had forgotten he owned. Each parent insisted he was not a guest. Nevertheless, during those forty-three minutes, everything he possessed that mattered traveled in the backpack between his shoes.

He accepted the envelope because the conductor spoke as though taking it were the obvious next event in his day.

“Do I mail it?”

“No stamp,” Celia said. “He meant to carry it.”

“Who is he?”

But the doors had begun to close.

Simon sat by the window and placed the envelope on his knees. Outside, the backs of buildings gave way to bare trees, wet parking lots, and the dark faces of rock cut open for the tracks. His physics teacher had recently explained that visible light occupied only a narrow band of the spectrum. Vast energies passed through and around human beings without announcing themselves as brightness. Simon had found this reassuring. It suggested that the world might contain more than what it had so far chosen to show him.

Halfway to Morristown, the train lost power.

The overhead lights went out. Phones appeared throughout the car, small blue-white squares illuminating hands and chins. People immediately began asking questions no one could answer.

Simon turned on his flashlight and saw an elderly woman across the aisle searching the floor.

“My ring,” she said. “It slipped.”

He knelt and moved the beam beneath the seats. Twenty people had brighter phones. Two complained about the delay. One continued a conversation on speaker. Simon found the ring against the leg of a man who had not noticed it touch his shoe.

The old woman closed her fist around it.

“You should keep that light,” she told him.

At Morristown, Simon’s mother was waiting beside the station, waving with both arms though he had seen her already. Near the signal cabinet, a utility worker in an orange jacket was packing tools into a white truck.

“How far east are you going?” Simon called.

The worker considered the question.

“Summit.”

Simon held out the envelope. “That’s farther than here.”

III. Power

Power, noun: The capacity to produce an effect.

Adisa Mensah restored electricity to things for a living. Traffic signals, switching boxes, platform lights, once an entire refrigerated warehouse containing sixteen thousand pounds of yogurt. People thanked him most enthusiastically for elevators.

The broken signal outside Morristown required only a reset and a replacement relay. Adisa knew this before the diagnostics finished because he had repaired the same unit in December and again in January. The state had denied the request to replace it permanently. Repairs came from one budget, replacements from another, and the second budget apparently belonged to a poorer government.

Adisa placed Simon’s envelope on the dashboard. He did not understand why he had agreed to take it. The address was nowhere near his scheduled calls. But Summit was east, and the boy had looked relieved when the envelope left his hand.

Adisa had been building his mother a house outside Accra for nine years. He had paid first for the foundation, then walls, then a roof that a storm removed before she ever slept beneath it. Each month he transferred money. Each year she sent photographs of the progress: windows without glass, rooms without doors, electrical conduits awaiting wire. Behind the unfinished house she stood in a bright dress, smiling as if completion were merely one more material that could be purchased.

Adisa lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Parsippany with his wife, their two daughters, and a dining table that became a bed at night. His daughters called the unfinished house in Ghana Grandma’s home. They called the apartment home too. The duplication did not trouble them.

At Summit station, Adisa restored power to a bank of platform lights. When they came on, everyone looked briefly transformed: commuters, wet pavement, pigeons, the silver rails drawing themselves eastward.

His dispatcher sent him west for the yogurt warehouse.

On the platform stood a woman in a purple coat holding a ticket to Newark Broad Street. She was studying the route map with great concentration.

“Excuse me,” Adisa said. “How far east are you going?”

IV. Pattern

Pattern, noun: A repeated or regular arrangement from which other things may be made.

Ruth Geller had spent forty-six years making patterns for other people’s clothing. She understood that a pattern was not a dress. It had no color, warmth, movement, or occasion. It was brown paper marked with lines, notches, arrows, and instructions. Cut two. Place on fold. Allow for ease.

And yet, before there could be a dress, someone had to imagine its pieces lying flat.

The doctors said Ruth was in the early stages. She disliked this phrase. At seventy-eight, she was in the early stages of almost nothing.

She still lived in the same apartment in Millburn where she and her husband had raised two daughters. Her daughters had placed labels inside the kitchen cabinets and programmed their phone numbers into buttons beside the landline. A home-health aide came in the mornings. Ruth knew all this was evidence being assembled against her.

That day she was traveling to Newark to meet her older daughter for lunch. She accepted the envelope from Adisa because she liked assignments. Assignments were shapes cut from time.

On the train she traced the handwriting on the front without touching it. The capital letters were exact, but the final line slanted downward. The writer had begun with confidence and ended in need.

At Newark Broad Street, Ruth stepped onto the platform and forgot why.

She remembered the purple coat because she was wearing it. She remembered that someone was waiting for her, though not whether the person was living or dead. She remembered the envelope.

A man seated on a bench watched her read the same sign three times.

“You looking for something?” he asked.

“Everyone is,” Ruth said.

He smiled. “That’s true. But I meant right now.”

His name was Marcus Vale. He called Ruth’s daughter using the number sewn into the lining of her handbag. Then he waited with Ruth for twenty-six minutes, although he looked at the clock nine times.

While they waited, Ruth showed him the envelope.

“This has to go east.”

Marcus read the address. “Jersey City.”

“Do you know it?”

“I know where it is.”

“That is not what I asked.”

Marcus looked again. “No,” he said. “I don’t know it.”

Ruth nodded, satisfied by the correction.

When her daughter arrived, angry first and frightened beneath it, Ruth handed the envelope to Marcus.

“How far are you going?”

“Newark Penn.”

“That’s farther than here.”

V. Mercy

Mercy, noun: Compassion shown toward a person whom it is possible to punish.

Marcus lived at St. Vincent’s Transitional Residence on Central Avenue, where the doors locked at ten and the word transitional was not permitted to exceed eighteen months.

He had been out of Northern State Prison for seventy-three days. He kept count because his parole officer did. At first Marcus had counted freedom by hours, then meals, then nights. He had not yet reached the point where time could pass without reporting itself.

The envelope bothered him.

It was thick enough to contain money. Not much, probably, but old people sometimes put cash in letters because they did not trust payment apps. Marcus had seven dollars in his wallet and no reason to travel to Jersey City. His curfew gave him less than two hours.

He held the envelope up to the platform light. The paper within remained dark.

For twelve years people had described Marcus according to the worst thing he had done in less than twelve minutes. He did not dispute the facts. He disputed the scale.

At Newark Penn, he sat beneath the great arched windows and considered opening the envelope. He could take whatever was inside, throw the rest away, and arrive at St. Vincent’s before dinner. No one knew he had it. No one except a confused old woman who might already have forgotten him.

But Ruth had not asked whether he was good. She had asked how far he was going.

Marcus carried the envelope to the taxi line.

The first driver quoted forty-eight dollars to Montgomery Street. The second said fifty-two. The third, an older man with silver hair and a wooden rosary looped around the gearshift, studied Marcus for several seconds.

“I have seven,” Marcus said. “And I’m not going. This is.”

He passed the envelope through the window.

The driver read the instruction.

“What’s in it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t look?”

“I looked at the outside.”

The driver turned the envelope over, then looked back at Marcus.

“How do I know this isn’t something bad?”

Marcus laughed once. “You don’t.”

For reasons he could not have explained, the driver accepted this as sufficient.

Marcus arrived at St. Vincent’s with nine minutes remaining. Ruth’s envelope went east without him.

VI. Father

Father, noun: A male parent.

Joseph Alvarez had driven strangers home for twenty-two years.

He knew which passengers wanted conversation, which wanted silence, and which said they wanted silence but would begin speaking before the first traffic light. He had driven sleeping children, quarreling couples, women leaving hospitals with infants, men leaving bars without coats, and once a bride who gave him two hundred dollars to circle the Pulaski Skyway until she could decide whether to return to her wedding.

Joseph’s daughter lived in Virginia. They spoke on Christmas and on his birthday if she remembered that his birthday was not Christmas. He had not seen his grandson in three years.

There had been no single argument, only a long accumulation of advice Joseph had given after being asked not to, judgments offered as observations, and apologies that explained why he had been right. When his daughter stopped calling, he described her as stubborn. It was a hereditary diagnosis.

At a red light on Raymond Boulevard, Joseph glanced at the envelope beside him.

He imagined the young man at the station opening it. He imagined himself, at that age, opening it. He did not know what conclusion to draw from the difference.

Traffic stalled near the river. Joseph took the truck route, then the covered roadway, emerging into Jersey City beneath a sky the color of unpolished steel. By the time he reached Montgomery Street, the office towers had begun turning on their lights.

Number 88 was a converted bank building with apartments above the old marble lobby. The outer doors were locked. Joseph pressed the button beside Daniel Bell’s name. No one answered.

He pressed again.

A woman pushing a yellow cleaning cart appeared behind the glass. Joseph held up the envelope. She shook her head and pointed toward the mailboxes.

“No,” Joseph called through the door. “In his hand.”

The woman opened the door two inches, keeping one foot behind it.

Joseph explained the journey as far as he knew it: an old woman had given the letter to a man who could not leave Newark, and the man had seven dollars.

“And before the old woman?” the cleaner asked.

“I don’t know.”

She looked at the address.

“Mr. Bell is not home.”

“Do you know him?”

“I know who lives here.”

Joseph placed the envelope into the narrow space between them.

“How far are you going?” he asked.

She glanced over her shoulder at the elevators.

“Upstairs.”

“That’s farther than here.”

Before driving away, Joseph opened his phone and looked at his daughter’s name. He did not call. He had called before. Instead he typed a sentence without a reason attached to it.

I am sorry I made loving me so much work.

The light changed twice before the car behind him sounded its horn.

Then he pressed send.

VII. Home

Home, noun: ________________________________.

Lidia Santos cleaned homes in which she did not live.

She knew their private arrangements: which couples slept in separate rooms, which children hid food beneath their beds, which tenants killed every plant they bought and kept buying them. She knew that Daniel Bell came home late on Fridays and stood for several seconds in the lobby before entering the elevator, as though preparing to become the person his apartment required.

Lidia put the envelope on top of her cart.

At eleven thirty, Daniel had not returned. At midnight, her shift ended. She considered leaving the envelope with the night doorman, but the instruction on the front seemed to have survived too much interpretation already.

So she took it home.

Home, for the time being, was a basement apartment in the Heights shared with her sister, her sister’s husband, two nephews, and a white cat named Copo who belonged to no one and slept wherever the heat was strongest. Lidia placed the envelope inside the family Bible, not because she believed it was sacred but because nothing placed there was ever thrown away.

The next afternoon she brought it back to work.

Daniel entered the lobby at 6:17 carrying a paper bag of groceries. Lidia recognized him by the careful way he balanced the bag against his hip.

“Mr. Bell.”

He stopped.

She removed the envelope from her cart and placed it into his free hand.

By then it was soft at the edges. A brown water stain marked one corner. Across the back were seven different traces of its passage: Celia’s employee number, Simon’s small drawing of the train line, Adisa’s black thumbprint, the faint arc of Ruth’s red lipstick where she had held it against her mouth while searching her bag, the address of St. Vincent’s in Marcus’s handwriting, Joseph’s taxi receipt, and one white hair from Copo secured beneath the flap.

Daniel recognized his father’s lettering immediately.

He took the envelope upstairs and set it on the kitchen counter. For several minutes he did not open it. He unpacked the groceries instead. Milk. Coffee. Pears. A frozen dinner he had not wanted but had purchased because it was on sale.

Finally he tore the envelope along the top.

The first page contained dozens of crossed-out definitions.

A permanent dwelling.

The word permanent had been struck through.

The place in which a person principally resides.

Principally was gone. So was resides.

One’s place of origin.

Beneath it his father had written: Then no one could ever find a new one.

The second page was a letter.

Daniel—

The State of New Jersey has asked me to define home. It has discovered twenty-nine definitions and would like one. This is the kind of mistake governments make.

I have spent my life believing that confusion could be corrected if people used the right words. Sometimes it can. But I used your mother’s words as though only I were permitted to understand them. When she asked to go home, I kept carrying her back to the house. You understood that she was asking for something the house could no longer give her.

I would rather call you cruel than admit you were right. Then, when you arrived too late, I gave you a sentence I knew would hurt you for the rest of your life. I cannot take it back by defining it differently.

I am sorry I made absence the only safe distance from me.

The definition is still unfinished. If you are willing, I would like your help.

Dad

Daniel read the letter twice. On the third reading he stopped after the sentence about his mother and sat on the kitchen floor.

Theodore had included no explanation for how the envelope reached him. There was no return address because his father assumed his son remembered the house.

Daniel called the house first. The telephone rang beside the blue ceramic bowl until the answering machine spoke in Ellen’s voice. He hung up before the tone.

Then he called hospitals.

He found Theodore at St. Clare’s in Denville, where a nurse described his condition as stable and asked Daniel his relationship to the patient.

Daniel looked at the unfinished definition on the counter.

“I’m his son,” he said.

Theodore was awake when Daniel entered the room. He looked smaller in the hospital bed, diminished by the machinery around him. Wires crossed his chest. Clear fluid descended through a tube. Green light moved across a monitor in peaks and valleys, translating his heart into a language the machine could understand.

For a moment neither man spoke.

Then Theodore looked at the envelope in Daniel’s hand.

“You came,” he said.

“I got your letter.”

“I hadn’t finished it.”

“I noticed.”

Daniel pulled the visitor’s chair closer and sat.

“How did it get to you?” Theodore asked.

“People carried it.”

“Which people?”

“I don’t know. Seven, maybe. More.”

Theodore turned the envelope over in his hands. He studied the numbers, marks, stains, and accidental evidence as if they belonged to a language older than the one he had spent his life regulating.

“Why would they do that?” he asked.

“Because somebody asked them to.”

Theodore nodded. His eyes filled, though Daniel pretended not to see.

“I should thank them.”

“You probably can’t find all of them.”

“No.” Theodore ran his thumb over the black print Adisa had left. “Then we owe the world seven favors.”

Daniel looked at him for a long time.

“We can start with one,” he said.

He placed his hand on the bed between them, palm upward. Theodore looked at it as though uncertain what the gesture meant. Then, without requiring a definition, he took it.

Three weeks later, Theodore returned to the office on reduced hours. The blue folder remained where he had left it. Elena had extended the deadline without informing the governor.

“Any progress?” she asked.

“Some.”

Theodore sat at his desk and opened the state terminology database. The twenty-nine existing definitions waited in adjoining windows, each correct within its borders, each inadequate beyond them.

He did not delete them.

In the field marked WORKING DEFINITION, he typed:

HOME, noun: The place toward which a person is carried when he can no longer reach it alone.

The software underlined the sentence in red. Place required clarification. Person linked to six disputed statutes. The passive construction obscured the responsible party.

Theodore clicked SUBMIT anyway.

A warning appeared:

DEFINITION INCOMPLETE. SAVE AS PROVISIONAL?

He thought of seven people moving east, none of them knowing where the others had begun or ended. He thought of Ellen asking for home from inside her own house. He thought of Daniel’s open hand.

Theodore selected YES.

For STATUS, he entered:

PENDING FURTHER EXPERIENCE.