We were lucky to buy a house at all, considering the state of our credit, but that didn't keep this beggar from being choosy. Our first house came with a long list of to-do's that rolled over into a perpetual list of make-do's, and I'd be damned if we were moving into another fixer-upper. We were downsizing from a large house in a fashionable neighborhood to a smaller house in an up-and-coming one, and the differential not only afforded us the down payment we needed to leverage a new mortgage, it gave us a small fund for renovations and furnishings. As far as I was concerned, it had to be fait accompli before we moved in. We packed our belongings, Tetris-like, into a portable storage pod and set up housekeeping in a tiny condominium nearby, while I played general contractor.
A renovation project is the suburban vision quest. As a test of endurance and character, it's hard to beat. Through ours, I made some surprising self-discoveries: I have an excellent eye for color, a preference for modern design, and a minimum personal space requirement that exceeds an eight-hundred-square-foot apartment with one bathroom. I have seen into my own soul, and it is thoroughly bourgeois.
This contradicts my personal mythology. Everyone has stories they tell themselves about themselves, and one of mine is that I am a gypsy at heart. Like most myths, mine has distant, historical origins. I lost two homes before I let the last one go, one to fire, and one to divorce. I understand very well that the essential things are always replaceable, and the irreplaceable things are never essential. But after being settled in one place for ten years, it wasn't easy to be rootless again. It turns out I was more of a stray than a rover. When I find shelter, I cling to it. I dig in deep.
We were only moving a few miles, but it felt like we had set sail for the Antipodes. Leaving home is leaving home, no matter the mileage. Whether your front door opens to rolling fields or concrete and asphalt, over the course of a decade, you become intimate with the land you live on. It's the kind of physical familiarity you develop with your mate and your children, the cellular knowledge of their scent, their hair, the body's topography, the way your hand wanders absently along the beloved's vertebrae, your fingertips like small hounds on a knobby trail, stopping at the tailbone, muzzles pressed to the base of a tree.
This place. I know this place.
I had that intimacy with our quarter acre on Spruce Street. After ten years of gardening, raking, picking up toys, bringing out trash, letting out dogs, calling in kids, I knew every root and leaf, every shadow and season. It was weedy, as untidy as a little boy's unbrushed hair, but I loved it in detail and in particular. The scarlet of the Japanese maple at a certain hour, on a certain day in November, when the sun hit at a certain angle. The golden green of a patch of moss behind the spirea hedge in winter when the canes were laid bare. The exact weight of the back garden gate, laden under tentacled ivy.
I knew that place. It was home.
We thought we'd be in transit for a month. It stretched to two. It was hardest on the kids, who had been so caught up in packing and picking colors for their new rooms, the reality of leaving their nest was slow to hit them. Each one had to come around to it in his own way, in his own time. One night, my preschooler suddenly got busy rounding up shoes and toys.
“It's time to go!” he announced jubilantly.
“Go where, sweetie?” I asked with considerably less energy. It was nearly ten o'clockâour bedtime routines were as disrupted as everything else.
“To our old house!”
He said it with such joy and eagerness, it killed me to break it to him that, no, we couldn't go back to the old house. He fell to pieces.
“But I want my old room,” he wept.
Me too, I thought. We hadn't shared such close quarters since the oldest boys were babies. Everybody's last nerve was underfoot, waiting to be stepped on. A few nights later, I sent my eldest son to his room after being contradicted one too many times. He silently fumed at me with a rage I had nearly forgotten a child could feel for a parent. I gave him a minute or two to himself and then went up to talk to him. He kept his back turned and his arms crossed over his chest, palms grasping opposite shoulders, like he always does when he is hurting. I talked to his back for a few minutes about parental respect, and cultivating a positive attitude, and the place of civil disobedience in a benign dictatorship such as our own. He was impenetrable.
I turned the lecture off. “C'mere,” I said, and managed to coax his armadillo-rolled body next to mine. “Look, I know it's hard right now to be living in between. I know you are probably missing home . . .”
At the word “home,” he began to cry, the heaving, rushing sobs that come from grief that's been gathering deep in the gut. I gathered him up into my arms and told him the things I missed about our house: watching him and his brothers climb the Japanese maple, the hidden places in the yard where they dug and played. I promised him that he would soon be climbing the trees in our new yard, digging new holes. I halfheartedly began the speech that “home is where the heart is,” then abandoned it, because it's bullshit. I've been uprooted enough myself to know that sometimes home is a physical place you need desperately to get back to. Tell a banked fish that home is where the heart is. So I shut up, and held him and stroked his sandy brown hair until it was over. Then I told him to fill the tub and take a nice long bubble bath, bedtime be damned.
A few weeks later, finally, the last coat of varnish on the floors was dry enough for sock feet. We flung open the door, threw our sleeping bags down on the bedroom carpet, and ordered pizza, five happy campers. We were home.
Heightening our sensation of having left the known world behind us was the fact that we brought hardly any of our old furniture along. Most of it had been handed down to us or bought at yard sales and thrift markets, and was crappy and cheap even when it was brand-new. The week before we moved out, we hauled it by batches to the corner of the yard, posting notices on the Internet for freecyclers. I'd lie in bed at night, listening to the cars pull up and the whispers of people picking over the junk pile. In the morning, it was all magically gone. I felt like a kid who comes downstairs Christmas morning and sees that Santa has eaten the cookies.
Letting go is always hard, but starting over is something I do well. Only things we felt good about were allowed in our new space. If it wasn't loved or useful, it couldn't come over the threshold. We met that criteria with sale and outlet items, with the exception of one true luxury: a coveted set of designer chairs. I'd seen them in a magazine, and predicated our entire paint scheme on their red-orange color, but at the last minute, I didn't know if I could go through with the splurge. We were working with a modest budget by middle-class standards, but I was fighting a rising tide of anxiety. After living on the edge for so long, anything above the lowest tier of the survival pyramid felt like wild extravagance. Scarcity does what its root implies: it scars. I considered substituting some cheaper chairs, just for now. We'd get the good ones someday. But the thought depressed me. How many years had we spent living in “just for now”? When would someday ever arrive?
Then Linda stopped by with a housewarming gift. By then, she was our dear friend as well as financial adviser, but I showed her around as if it were an audit, justifying every new furnishing, each improvement, describing how awful the old sofa wasâso bad even the freecyclers wouldn't take it. When we got to Patrick's office, she admired his new desk.
“What were you using before?” she asked. Sheepishly, we pointed to a tiny pine table that had been repurposed as a stand for the kids' computer. It wasn't even practical for that, and was destined for the curb as soon as a real desk could be delivered.
Linda let loose with one of her wonderful Yankee guffaws. “And you've paid the mortgage and the bills working from THAT for two years??? Jesus Christ!”
Jesus Christ, he really did.
I grinned and gestured to my battered laptop on a nearby table. The keyboard letters had worn off, and several of the keys were stuck. “Would you believe I've been writing all this time without a q, a, z, numeral one, or exclamation point?”
Linda, not for the first or last time, looked at me with that look that said thank God there's still a chance I can help you, and asked, “How is that possible?”
I showed how I'd learned to copy and paste the missing keystrokes from a clipboard application. “I don't use q and z much, and I don't even like exclamation points,” I explained. “But not having an âa'
is
kind of a pain in the ass.”
Laughter must be the soul's chiropractor. It has a way of realigning all the pinched and twisted parts inside. I ordered the chairs I wanted, arranging them around our glass dining room table beneath Pernod-yellow walls, and every morning when I drink my first cup of coffee in one of them, I feel like I'm sitting at Someday.
It's almost impossible to extract meaning from hardship without employing hackneyed clichés. There was a point that year where if I heard another variation on “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” I was going to scream. Sometimes, that which does not kill us can beat us up and leave us in a ditch. So I hesitate to bring up gratitude, because I know there is someone reading this who is in that ditch today, who'd like to tell me what to do with my gratitude. But there's no way around it. There is nothing like fear for distorting perspective, and nothing like gratitude for restoring it. I'm not talking about the false gratitude that denies that you or anyone else is suffering. Nor the shadowy kind that depends on the truism that somebody, somewhere, is always worse off than you, nor the timid thankfulness that doesn't dare ask more from life than basic survival. I mean really appreciating what is in front of you right now, even if you don't know if you can count on it tomorrow.
“I have everything I need today” became the mantra that brought us through that hard year. Even when we couldn't quite believe it, it never failed to be true. Gratitude still brings us through the rough spots today, when a job is slow to pay or an unexpected expense depletes our modest emergency savings. In the middle of some anxious weeks last year, I walked into my husband's office and peered at him over his computer screen. “Hey,” I said.
His eyes looked tired. He'd been working double-time to get us over the hump. I could see his shoulders hunched visibly higher than usual. But he smiled.
“Hey,” he said. “How are you doing?” I knew he meant, “How are we doing?” I had just come from the mailbox. Nothing yet. Our big monthly debt-reduction payment had just come out of our checking account. It was down to the three-figure mark, and our mortgage payment was coming due next week.
I reached over the screen and ran my finger along the worry line in my true love's forehead, as if I could smooth it over. It was so much deeper now than it was over a decade ago when we traded all those blithe promises. I had no clue then how poor, how sick, how awful we could sometimes be. Nor any idea how rich, how strong, and how good. For that matter, I still didn't.
Life can get better, it can get worse. It will probably do both. “I have everything I need today,” I told him.
I could see in his sleepy eyes that we both did. We still do.
10.
The Rearview
E
ver since I've had kids of my own, I've been subjecting my mother to random fact-checks over the telephone.
“Did you steal the good stuff out of our trick-or-treat bags?”
“Yes.”
“Did you pretend to be listening when you weren't?”
“Yes.”
“Did you feel like you knew what you were doing most of the time?”
“No,”
It's like conducting an exit interview with God. I know there are other ways, besides having children, that people come to terms with their parents' fallibility, but most involve steep hourly fees. I just have long-distance charges.
Parenthood comes with a rearview mirror. At every new turn, you glance into it and line up what you know now, as a parent, with what you believed then, as a child. You hear your father's words coming out of your mouth, or you flash back to your mother at your exact age, and it hits you all over again that
you
are the grown-up, the person in charge. You're the one who is supposed to know things. You remember how safe you felt in the backseat of the family car at night when you were a kid, watching the raindrops shiver and roll down the side window. Now it's you in the driver's seat, white-knuckled at the wheel, praying that all four tires stay on the road. You don't know shit. And neither, you realize, did your parents.
Mercifully, enlightenment comes in stages. Most of us start down the moccasin mile with minor failures of omniscience and build up to the bigger misses gradually. In the early years, you even get magical fall guys to take the blame. Our tooth fairy, for example, is notoriously unreliable.
“What,
again
??” I exclaim on mornings I am presented with an unredeemed tooth on an open palm. “It's the second night in a row! What is
wrong
with that freaking tooth fairy?”
As far as my kids know, the tooth fairy is a drunk, whose operating funds are either tied to a wildly variable interest rate or the racetrack. I can live with that. The magical beings I grew up with also tended to deviate from the official script. I was twenty years old before I discovered that most other children weren't leaving rum for Santa on Christmas Eve, which went a long way toward explaining some of his more memorable lapses in wish fulfillment.
Everyone's childhood disappointments run the gamut between trivial and traumatic, but it's especially vivid when Santa lets you down. I was nine the year I asked him to bring me a Ken doll. Malibu Ken, Hawaiian Ken, Superstar KenâI didn't care. Just a Ken, to go with my Barbies, which in my home fell under the same classification as junk food and television: empty pursuits to be indulged sparingly. I only had two, Ballerina and Superstar. You couldn't really count the Bionic Woman, a big-boned and flat-footed gal who towered awkwardly over them by a full inch. They shunned her, and she lived out her days as a recluse under the bed.