One night after we moved back to the States, Brady went to sleep a carefree man of 28 and woke up with the icy hand of 30 on his neck. “We need to buy a house,” he said.
“For what?” I surveyed the small but well-appointed two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment we’d lived in for the past year. The carpets were clean and the furniture new. We’d spent a week painting the walls of its thousand square feet.
“I want a yard,” he said.
“Why do we need a yard?”
“Where will we put the puppy?”
“What puppy?”
In the years I’d known Brady he’d never struck me as much of a dog person. There were, if I recall, stories about a cocker spaniel from his childhood named Daisy, who was remembered only for her stupidity. “Brady,” I asked. “What is this really about?”
He didn’t have to say it; I could tell his clock was ticking. He’d spent the better half of his twenties kicking around Japan, and now that we’d moved someplace we could put down roots, he was upset we had nothing to call our own, no place to put the babies he’d already secretly named, no garden in which to grow raspberries like his father does. “We’re married,” he said. “Married people buy houses; it’s what they do.”
This didn’t seem like a particularly good reason to do anything, but the real estate market was down and the government was offering cash to first-time homebuyers. So I said, “Fine. But if we buy a house it has to be easy-to-clean and within walking distance of bars.”
“And big,” added Brady. “It has to be big.”
Since then, I don’t know how many houses we have looked into buying, only that absolutely none of them will work for us. Not the shabby-chic shotgun with the landscaped backyard. Not the four-bedroom Tudor with the finished basement. I think I’m in love with a crumbling bungalow on one of Louisville’s more prestigious streets, but Brady will have none of it. “It’s a money pit,” he frowns when we go to see it. It’s true that whoever owned this house has not been keeping it up; there are cracks snaking through the walls like veins up a nun’s habit.
“But what about the wainscoting in the bathroom?” I protest, leading him out of the dank basement with a five o’clock shadow upon the walls. “And the crown molding and the formal dining room? And the address, Brady: think of the resale!”
I’ve picked up this vocabulary from TV. Since we’ve started looking for a house, I’ve been watching the kinds of shows that make it seem that under the tutelage of some handsome carpenters and with enough plucky newlywed determination, you can transform a crack den into a palace of vast worth in under two days. Cue the fantasies of Brady and me engaging in a playful grout fight as we install a back-splash, laughing. In reality such an exercise would probably end in death threats and the cops being called to break up an honest-to-god trowel duel, but when we’re looking at houses I am nothing but a doe-eyed optimist—the happy hausfrau. I’m using phrases like, “But it has a lot of character,” and, “There’s so much potential!”
“Think of the potential, Brady!” I beg, as he removes a fistful of moldy dry wall from the area above the bathroom sink without any effort whatsoever.
The staunch belief in “potential” is also something I picked up from TV. I mean, I wouldn’t marry a man based solely on the fact that “I might be pleasantly surprised,” so logically I don’t understand why I should be buying a house along the same principle. Then again, many people have rightly compared buying a house to falling in love: sometimes passion overrides reason, and there’s not much you can do about it. You can either begrudgingly commit yourself to a sensible, newly-constructed four bedroom accountant in the boring part of town, or you can pour your soul recklessly into this, this Bad Boy of real estate: a dilapidated shack with a million dollar address, a foundation made of matzos and asbestos in the fridge.
I take another walk through the front parlors and upstairs into the master bedroom, which is the hugest bedroom I’ve ever seen. There is enough space for two king beds and a few fainting couches for added glamour. I cannot resist this bedroom; I am drawn into it, almost against my will. (“It’s because the floors slope!” Brady sighs. “You could ski in here!”) I look through the bay window jutting out of the wall like a pregnant belly and think how the natural light makes this a fine place for a vanity and a makeup mirror. It’s true I never wear makeup except to weddings and coronations, but in a house like this I could.
“You! In makeup?” Brady scoffs. “I’d like to see that.”
He’s said this in every house we’ve been in. You! Painting? he said in the camelback with the artist’s studio over the garage. You, tanning! he said in the ranch with the extra-tall private fences. Please! is the general consensus I get every time I see someplace where I could possibly be a different person. Brady is looking at houses, but I’m looking to purchase the lifestyle that goes with the building. I think I can negotiate this into the deed as easily as I might the custom curtains in the dining room, but Brady knows me well enough to understand I’m almost pathologically incapable of change. “I’m not going to buy this house because you think you might wear makeup,” he says, and it sounds needlessly silly when he puts it that way.
Still, I take a moment to wander through my dream house one last time and picture the kind of life I might lead in the posh triangle of town: I’d wake up every morning and shower with expensive soaps in my wainscoted bathroom. I’d apply lipstick in the daylight even though I’d have nowhere particular to be. The mortgage on this house is enough to get us two in another neighborhood, but still I couldn’t possibly have a job when living in a house like this. Rather I’d sit on my fainting couches reading magazines all day. Or tan. Or paint. At night, Brady would come home from his imaginary job as the president of a bank, and we’d throw fine dinner parties with expensive china. We’d entertain, which is a word I’ve always cracked up upon hearing people say on TV in earnest—but really, you can’t just “hang out” in a house like this. We’d drink mint juleps from silver cups on the big white porch and walk this dog on which Brady has fixated to the park next door. In a house like this we’d have an Afghan, or a Weimaraner, or both: stately dogs with fabulous posture and brows high enough to live here.
Brady finds me in the backyard, mentally playing fetch with Carlsbad and Malcolm, scolding them playfully for trampling my tulip beds. “I love this house,” I pout, even going so far as to stick my bottom lip out. Since Brady’s so tall every time I look up to talk to him it automatically looks like I’m on my knees pleading. “Please?” I beg. “Pretty please?”
Brady shakes his head, “No.”
Besides, he says, the house doesn’t have a garage or double ovens or a solarium or a mahogany-paneled library attached to the master suite, or any of the thousand ridiculous things we’ve put on our list of “must-haves” in our first home. No fireplace in the bathroom, no rain shower, no circular driveway with a white-columned portico at the top. “Really, darling,” he tells me. “How can we possibly live without these things?”
It was Brady who picked out the studio apartment we first shared as a married couple in Osaka. Leopalace, a real estate conglomerate specializing in temporary housing for foreigners, visiting businessmen and other transitory populations, owned the building. “A palace!” I said when he called to tell me he’d signed the lease. “Fancy.”
But due to the nomadic nature of its tenants, it was assumed renters probably wouldn’t stay longer than three months. Therefore, Leopalaces weren’t exactly luxurious but served as the real estate equivalent of a stranger’s sofa crashed upon when you’ve had too much to drink. “You’ll love it,” Brady said, unlocking the door when I arrived. “It’s really new and clean.”
In his defense, those were my only specifications. New and clean. No roaches or mold or dinginess—just a clean, well-lighted place. I thought that’s all anyone needed, but now I know better. For one thing, our new house has to be new and clean and bigger than a hundred and twenty square feet, which was the size of our entire furniture-free apartment. The living- dining- bedroom was smaller than a standard American prison cell—so narrow that Brady could lie across the floor and touch both walls at once. This was his room, as we called it. We could not fit our two futons side-by-side and still have room to walk, so Brady slept in his room and I slept in what Leopalace called “the loft.” Accessible by ladder, the loft was a recess in the wall, three feet high, three feet wide, nine feet long, like a drawer in which you’d keep bodies in a morgue. Sleeping in separate areas wasn’t the most ideal situation for newlyweds, but the continued “Your place or mine?” debate made the transition from single to married life less jarring.
The “kitchen” was no more than a niche in the wall, a half sink next to two burners that doubled as counter-space when the elements were turned off. There was a waist-high refrigerator, but it was so close to the toilet that you could sit on the john and make a sandwich at the same time. There was air conditioning, but it was on a timer that we had to reset every three hours. This doesn’t sound so bad until you consider waking up in the middle of the night in August being water boarded in your sweaty sheets.
The Leopalace was a weird, small place but it was functional and clean: laminate floors, a washing machine and a keycard entry system like those found in the finest hotels. But it was the little details that killed me: the little TV monitor in the main room that revealed the person ringing our doorbell when it would have only taken two steps to reach the front door. The latch on the bathroom door that showed when someone had locked it from the inside, signifying the toilet’s occupied status. Really, these are neat features, but if you have trouble keeping track of people in an apartment only slightly larger than an elephant’s ribcage, you’ve got serious issues.
Our year-and-a-half stint in the Leopalace left no physical marks but the psychological damage is permanent: never will you meet two people who feel more deserving of a mansion than we do. Friends in larger, busier cities complain unceasingly about their shoebox apartments, but Brady and I are unable to listen sympathetically. Instead we are those people who turn conversations into competitions, rolling our eyes and elbowing each other in the ribs. “Get a load of Ole’ Crybaby,” we’ll say, mocking what someone erroneously considers to be unfortunate. “Poor guy only has one bedroom. Can you believe how hard it must be for him in five hundred square feet? Can you imagine what it must be like to have two entirely separate spaces? Or chairs? Jeez, man: that must be tough.”
Brady and I deserve a bigger place, with actual cathedral ceilings and bowling alleys and a dining room so vast you have to shout through a megaphone to be heard at the other end of the table. It’s the fear of enclosed spaces and a thirst for retribution that has left us with the ugly sense of entitlement that’s driving our realtor bonkers. “You can’t have a spa tub in The Highlands,” she says, The Highlands being one of Louisville’s oldest, richest, and most desired neighborhoods—and the only place we’ll even consider living. “You can’t get a three-car garage here, or floors that don’t slope. These houses are a hundred years old; they didn’t make master suites back then!”
“Lady, I lived without furniture on the floor of a hundred-twenty-square-foot apartment,” I say, like that changes things, like she’s been holding out on me and hording the good properties somewhere in the back room. “Now find me my dream house.”
The Highlands run like tenderloins along the spine of Bardstown Road, a self consciously “hip” street of ethnic restaurants, independent cafes and “thrift” stores where the used clothing costs more than it did new. If one never saw the elderly mansions and stately Victorian behemoths that lined The Highlands’ shady streets, one might think that the Bardstown Road area was a legitimate community of starving artists and pauper poets. But the “well-to-do” meets “ne’er-do-well” style is merely the product of guilt-ridden professionals who feel the need to compensate the fact that they can afford a Highlands house by appearing like they can’t. It’s a paradoxical mishmash of skateboards and Saabs, cheap wine, fine beer, one-dollar T-shirts, five-dollar coffee, and a host of other incongruous things that makes living in The Highlands feel like you’re passing a bong around Martha Stewart’s living room.
The realtor, Brady, and I trudge up the porch stairs of Prospective Highlands Home #18, a blue Cape Cod on a busy street. The massive, decrepit, energy-inefficient wedding cake of a house across the road has a hybrid car parked out front, and the irony isn’t lost on us. It is appropriate that Brady and I move into a neighborhood so mired in identity crisis, as it has come to my attention that our exhaustive list of impossible “First Home Must-haves” belies the sadder truth that we have no idea what we want. “Pick a house that suits your needs,” our realtor has told us, but the problem with this is that we know the hard way that all we really need is a hundred and twenty square feet and an air conditioner that stays on all the time. Sure, we’d like more, but we have no idea what that entails.
“This house has three bedrooms,” the realtor says, unlocking the front door. “Is that enough?”
“I guess so,” I reply, which is the same thing I’d say to a scientist if he said, “Bromine is flame retardant, right?” I have no idea how many bedrooms we need. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say we need somewhere between none and ten.
“How about this kitchen?” the realtor asks, leading us further into the house through a well-appointed dining room. At first it looks like any old standard kitchen, one of eighteen we’ve visited recently with old appliances and little storage. But then I see the window above the sink. I’d have to measure, but I’m pretty sure it has a ledge wide enough to support a homemade pie set to cool on a Sunday afternoon. I only know one dessert recipe and it involves store-bought crust, but still I stand before someone else’s oven and let that homebuyer’s schizophrenia set in. The fantasies I entertained of spending my days strewn across a fainting couch are replaced by visions of myself in an apron—not the kind with the bib that goes over your neck, but the a little chiffon thing that ties around the waist, with heart-shaped pockets that slope down the front of my crinoline skirt. In my high heels I can just reach the top cabinet and pull down a pitcher to fill with lemonade that I squeezed myself. “I would look adorable in this kitchen,” I say out loud.
“And here is the deck,” the realtor says, opening the back kitchen door. What used to be a small back yard has been planked over like a pirate ship, but that can be taken up, and I can visualize Brady playing fetch with his dog—not Carlsbad or Malcolm but a beagle, or a cocker spaniel, or Jack Russell terrier in a little red sweater: something loyal and old fashioned and all-American. Brady’s pupils are dilated and I can see the two of us are on the same drugs: we’re taking the same trip. In his mind he pictures having raspberry bushes and a vegetable patch like his father’s, and even though he’s accidentally killed every plant we’ve ever had, still he seizes my hand as we stand in my kitchen stare out at the promised land of two-by-fours and says, “I’ve always wanted my own garden.”
In the distance I can hear the turning of cosmic wheels as somewhere beyond the great blue sky stars align: Brady and I are in accordance. We mutually adore this place like a potential son-in-law because it’s a humble, cozy option with a good foundation and fine curb appeal. We skip through the first floor like lovers through a meadow. “Oh, look at this fireplace!” I coo as we waltz back into the living room. Our current apartment has a fireplace which we have never once lit, but suddenly it feels like we would in this house. We’d build fires and drink cocoa and hang Christmas stockings on the mantle. We’d throw parties for friends we don’t have and drink wine we can’t afford. There would be turkeys upon the table and guest towels I would embroider by hand in the half-bath, and at night we’d watch TV and scratch the ears of our beagle, Bob.
“Well, do you love it?” asks the realtor breathlessly, but as the words leave her mouth they stir the air that slams the door to my heart shut—bang. Truthfully the answer is no, no I don’t love it; the stairs are too steep and we’d have to put the yard in. “Seriously?” she asks, collapsing into the owner’s sofa. “You are killing me.”
Now that it’s come down to the nitty-gritty act of purchasing, I see that the lifestyle I have pictured for myself in this house is, in fact, sold separately: this building will not come with pie crusts and cute aprons. I will actually have to furnish these things myself, and because of this I’m not sure I’m ready to own a home. I’m ready to buy a home, that’s no problem: financially I’ve come to terms with the mortgage and the taxes and the insurance, but spiritually I’m afraid I’ll be unable to make a home, to be more than a signature on a deed. A homeowner is merely a house-owner, a primitive man squatting on the floors of a cave in his name. A homemaker, on the other hand, is the person who makes the place habitable, who makes sure the baseboards are clean and the plants don’t die. The fact that my sole reason for buying a house consists of wanting to be closer to bars suggests I’m not ready to keep the ferns alive.
Really, to own a home without being willing to care for it is a travesty akin to drinking Grey Goose with Red Bull, or putting ketchup on Kobe beef: it’s obtaining something you are not mature enough to appreciate and ruining it with your own delusions of grandeur. And it’s difficult to buy this house now and hope I’ll grow into a person worthy, because it’s hard to tell what people we’ll be in the future. Will I ever become a person who wears anything besides T-shirts and jeans? And when I do, will these closets be big enough? Will the dog we don’t even have like the yard that doesn’t even exist? And when I finally reach an age when the thought of having children doesn’t make me want a cocktail, will I ever want to schlep babies up and down the stairs of this two-story home? Or will this minor inconvenience be offset by the close off-street parking? Just how many sharp edges are in this place?
I look to Brady for direction, but he has his palms smashed flat against the glass panes of the front door. “Squirrels!” he says. “This house has squirrels!” Few things excite Brady like squirrels since they don’t exist in Australia. He loses his mind every time he sees one in my brother’s backyard; it’s thrilling if it’s standing still, but if it’s running across the grass or balancing on a telephone wire, Brady goes bananas. I try to tell him that all houses here will have squirrels, but all houses also will have bedrooms and closets and kitchens and yards; all houses are kind of the same like that, so what does it matter which one we pick?
“Let’s take it,” I say, and Brady nods vigorously.
Even after all that, we didn’t end up buying the Cape Cod. Upon inspection it seemed that it would need twenty-thousand dollars worth of new roof, which got us into a feud with the sellers so heated that my realtor was getting embarrassed to be relaying messages. “They said,” she’d begin on the phone. “Ah, they said… um… Well, they’ve told you to go fuck yourselves.”
“Yeah, well, you tell them they can go fuck themselves,” I’d retort, awesomely. This went on for weeks until finally I told the realtor to show us more houses. We bought the next one we saw, which is a sweet little thing with two bedrooms and an attached garage and even floors and a sunroom and a modest backyard on a quiet street. It’s a small, adorable puppy of a house, and as if this isn’t perfect enough, there’s a bar on our street corner a mere stumble away. And while I like it much better than the other one, still a part of me wonders if this is a rebound house—if, after calling off the wedding with the Cape Cod, we went ahead and married the first home we saw because the timing was right and I’d already bought the dress.
Now that we’ve moved in I see that the bedrooms are far too small to contain a six-foot-five man and our bureau. Sans furniture it might be fine, but now with the American trappings of marriage—bed, mattress, nightstands, dressers, lamps—this room does not function nearly as well as the Leopalace. And while the Leopalace had only one bathroom, after having two in the old apartment I’m spoiled for life: there’s no going back to a single one with peace of mind. Every time we go out to eat I make sure Brady and I order different dishes; I live in constant fear that we both might get food poisoning at the same time. These flaws in an otherwise charming house have ensured that Brady and I will have to move out again in a few years.
I thought buying a house would give us more permanence in the world, but the temporary nature of our new home makes it essentially just another Leopalace. We have purchased ourselves one more layover on the way to somewhere else—a larger abode, a different city, another face to put on the Christmas photo. Of all the happy, tan people I could have been I’ve chosen to remain a shifty nomad who can’t make a decision to save my life. It’s a cop-out, and part of me is disappointed to find that I played this so poorly. But as far as purgatories go this is a good one: there is room not only to grow, but evolve. Soon I’ll train myself to cook something besides ramen and remember to use coasters on the dining room table. From there I might graduate to folding the laundry less than three weeks after it’s dried, and by then it’s only a matter of baby steps before I’m canning Brady’s heirloom tomatoes and making my own curtains.
And when like hermit crabs we inevitably outgrow this shell, newlyweds in their twenties will drag their old sneakers upon the refinished floors of our open house. Their jaws will drop quietly onto plush wool rugs as they behold our fireplace, our china, our his-and-hers towels—our world like our décor, flawless and matched. Brady and I, sipping wine on the porch, will chuckle to remember a time when we, too, stood inside a stranger’s well-appointed home, wishing with eyes shut tight for someone to grant us, one day, a life just like this.
