“Her Smell Spoke Another Language”: On Tice Cin’s “Keeping the House”

By Piper FrenchDecember 16, 2021

“Her Smell Spoke Another Language”: On Tice Cin’s “Keeping the House”

Keeping the House by Tice Cin

TICE CIN’S DEBUT NOVEL, Keeping the House, opens with a dramatis personae, and much of the novel’s wit, precision, and vivid detail is prefigured by that somewhat archaic convention. The lines Cin chooses to sum up her characters are amusingly varied: some receive boring biographical details (ages, professions, sibling relationships), while others are described in terms of their preferences and tendencies. Ayla, who holds on to glamour wherever she can grasp it, “washes up in high heels.” Her mother, who goes searching for the past in her evening meals (literally), is described as “green-fingered.” A long-suffering shopkeeper “always gets pickle juice in his moustache.” One personage, in a wink to the fourth wall, is summarized thus: “Crucial side character.”

Then there are shadows of the bonds and misunderstandings that will animate the novel. One character is a “lover of the wrong man’s daughter.” A young girl’s naïveté, and the lies that suffuse her family, come into focus via a misapprehension: “Thinks her dad Ufuk sells fruit on Lordship Lane as a job.” These scraps of information gesture at the central narrative, such as it is, of Keeping the House. Ayla, a Turkish Cypriot woman living in London, starts importing heroin — the common trade of nearly all the men in her community — while her children’s dad is locked up and unable to provide. But the universe the novel conjures is far richer than the story at its center. Ayla and her daughter Damla’s world is one of exodus and return, experiences that permeate their everyday lives of cooking and cleaning and waiting for the bus, going to the nightclub, gossiping around the kitchen table, just scraping by.

The novel is divided into three parts. The first jumps back and forth between, loosely, the new millennium and a span of time seven years later; the middle (and longest) section homes in on 1999, when Damla is still a young girl; and the third follows Damla into her early 20s, as she cycles through unsteady jobs and boyfriends and finally returns to her family’s native Cyprus. You could be forgiven for thinking this a chaotic way to structure a book; Cin’s choice to order it this way doubles down on the novel’s prioritization of atmosphere over plot. The raucous, heterodox narration of Keeping the House is mostly a great strength (though it occasionally falters, especially when Cin lapses into verse). Her evocation of childhood, through Damla’s eyes, is jumbled: wondrous, painful, and mundane. Terrors and pleasures alike loom just out of frame, not yet understood.

Damla and Ayla’s community exists across multiple cultures and languages, and translation is dealt with in an unusual way. Certain words or phrases are rendered in the original Turkish (or Turkish Cypriot, Greek Cypriot, or even Kurmanji), accompanied by tiny, italicized English translations that appear in the book’s margins or in the spaces between lines — or, sometimes, in the middle of the page, displacing other words. Rather than forcing an English translation into the flow of the text, as though characters who function in several languages speak with an eye toward their invisible monolingual observers, or else eschewing translation entirely, Cin’s method preserves the novel’s polyglot chorus without closing off the meaning to an Anglophone reader. As one of the drug smugglers tells his friends: “Without your language you own nothing; everything is just toilet paper if you can’t read it.”

The brutishness of the novel’s men is set to a steady simmer: though it never quite boils over, it is the troubled water in which their wives, daughters, and lovers all swim. Men flirt with their hired dates by asking: “How would you feel if I didn’t pay you?” A father ties his daughter up as punishment, then tells his business associate: “If you had a daughter she’d be a car wash.” Boys issue crude, imaginative rape threats: a few British lads, seen only once, tell an old woman she’ll be “standing up on an empty bus” after they have their way with her.

The female characters, being well adjusted (i.e., desensitized) to this behavior, respond matter-of-factly to the situation. Describing a robbery on the night of her grandmother’s funeral, and the slap one of the men gives her when she calls out for her mother, Damla muses: “[I]t’s the first time I have ever been hit by a man.” She is 10 here. Later, we learn that she was molested by a creepy neighbor when she was eight. “I don’t know how this is nothing, but it is,” she recalls dully. “A few minutes of nothing.” Still later, her boyfriend assaults her in his kitchen, first knocking a glass out of her hand. This time, though, she gets her revenge.

These abuses are held to the light alongside occasional displays of tenderness, which makes the cruel treatment hurt all the more. As Ayla considers the neighbor who hurt Damla, “too long ago for me to know exactly what to do,” she remembers her second pregnancy, when he “bought me a bar of English chocolate so large that I could use it as a lid for my biscuit tin.”

In this environment, women, even deranged ones, don’t register as a threat. No one would expect a local mother to use her gardening skills to plant heroin inside Turkish cabbage, for example. Sometimes this dynamic is handled a bit heavily: Ayla, taking her children to visit their dad in prison, sees an Irish woman smashing windshields in the parking lot, and “thinks to herself that she is safe because it is a woman and not a man.”

And yet it is women who have the most power over each other — not the kind that leaves bruises for a week and makes people look askance in the market, but the kind that lasts. Ayla’s mother, Makbule, the old woman lost in the past and longing for her dead husband, calls Ayla “her miracle child, something given in old age to show her life could still be precious when everything else is taken away.”

That’s a heavy burden to put on a kid. In adulthood, Ayla dotes on her, unable to soothe her: she can’t reverse her mother’s aging, nor bring her husband — Ayla’s father — back to life.

Damla longs for her best friend, Cemile — a slow unfurling I didn’t detect until it became obvious, and then shook my head for being so obtuse. But the line between girlhood friendship and romantic love can be razor thin. “Her smell spoke another language,” Damla thinks: “She lent me a cardigan once and I wore it home, cocooned in her. When I got home my mum saw me, took it off me, washed it and hung it over the balcony, clean cotton smell drowning her out.”

Long after it’s happened, the novel reveals a moment of intimacy the two shared at 16, just before Cemile returned to Cyprus and cut off contact with Damla. Amid her father’s perpetual violence toward her wayward older sister, who flaunted a romance with a neighborhood drug dealer, Cemile always flew under the radar. When she loses her virginity at age 12 to an older family friend or cousin, she learns that her body is “made for secrets.” (The experience doesn’t register as rape.) So too the aborted romance between her and Damla. There’s so much that men don’t notice, Cin suggests, noticing it all.

In the novel’s final chapter, Damla, back in her ancestral home for the first time, cadges a ride to Cemile’s village to pay her a visit. She finds her old friend heavy with motherhood and small-town living, and so distant from her it’s like a “fog that drops between us.” They try to talk, then watch TV together. As Cemile laughs uproariously, Damla can’t keep up with the rapid-fire dialogue, delivered in a language she rarely speaks anymore.

¤


Piper French is a writer living in Los Angeles.

LARB Contributor

Piper French is a writer living in Los Angeles. She has done refugee solidarity work in France and Greece and worked with migrant farmworkers in her home state of Vermont. Her writing has been published by The New Republic, Roads & Kingdoms, and Asymptote Journal. Follow her on twitter at @pipersfrench.

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