My Time Among the Whites

by Jennine Capó Crucet

Everyone who came to work on the house had a story about it. One contractor told me that when the previous owners had put up the FOR SALE sign (something they did without consulting the givers of this wedding present of a house), the seller’s mother came over with a Sharpie and defaced it, scrawling AT THE COST OF OUR LOVE or some such pronouncement across it. The seller’s father would occasionally knock on my door and ask after the baby, forgetting over and over again that I did not have children. He would look past me into the living room with a scowl on his face that read, Then why do you need all this space?

  And he was right; with that house came expectations. There was a room that the real estate agent said had been a nursery and boom, now it was the nursery forever. The first year we lived there, we left it mostly unfurnished, not really acknowledging why. The room seemed to be waiting for someone else. When the marriage ended and the house was sold, with it went everything the house was supposed to become. I’d written a novel in a bright office in that house, but it’s the empty never-our-nursery that haunted me when I moved to Lincoln, single and singing the praises of renting forever.

  That is, until Carol intervened. A financial planner, she’d been recommended to me by my accountant, who sensed from my shoebox of receipts and my tendency to bring every official-looking paper I got in the mail to our meetings that I needed some financial guidance.

  Carol was in her late fifties and about a foot taller than me. She had a wide smile and a big office that suggested she likely ran the place. (I’d later learn that, yes, she did.) On her desk sat monogrammed coasters that probably weighed a couple of pounds each. She was originally from Mitchell, South Dakota. I’d once been to Mitchell’s famed Corn Palace. We hit it off instantly.

  “First things first,” Carol said after reviewing the financials of my life, “you need to buy some property. In Lincoln, that probably means a house.”

  I did what anyone under thirty-five does in a moment like that, I pulled out my phone and tweeted, “Someone tell me if I should buy a house?” Among the immediate responses was a direct message from my former husband, who I hadn’t heard from in months: “no you should not buy a house. condo, though, maybe. just my 2€” [sic].

  For the first time in my life, I had a stable income, no debt, and no financial dependents. (Despite my former husband valuing his own opinion highly enough to convert his proverbial two cents into euros, I’d been the primary earner in the marriage for the last six of its eight years, and we’d lived solely off my salary its final four.) I’d just sold my first house. I knew I was very lucky and that I was supposed to do something responsible with this privilege. I looked up from the incoming responses on my phone and said, “I’m not the homeowner type. Can I buy a Tesla instead?”

  She nudged me away from the Tesla more gently than I deserved by saying I should wait on that “at least until Nebraska does a little better with the charging stations.” I asked if I could buy a condo or a loft, or maybe a warehouse and live in that instead. I said I wanted to be able to roller-skate inside of whatever property I owned. I was an artist-type, I explained, and I had no problem with, say, a toilet out in the open. I had very cool poet friends out in Los Angeles doing exactly this, so yes, a warehouse would be perfect.

  Carol was writing all of this down—the first of many indications that she was taking me seriously in a way I had not yet learned to do for myself. She looked up from her notepad and said, “Yeah, I see all this, but it’s just not going to work in Lincoln. I’d say we’ve got another twenty or thirty years before we’re a funky enough city to support warehouse living.”

  I joked that I’d likely be dead by then and showed her the Twitter replies on my phone, including the DM. We’d become fast friends. “From everything I’m putting together about you,” she said, “it sounds like your number one priority with a property is actually what I’d call ease of exit. You want to be able to get out of something quickly if you need to. In Lincoln, that’s a single-family home, close in town, one with some history to it, some charm. Condos in Lincoln don’t move nearly as fast as houses,” she said, more to my phone than to my face. “You really should consider a house.”

  “But that’s not for me,” I argued. Homes are for families. Homes are destiny. Homes determine everything from where your kids might go to college to how long your marriage will last. I was sitting in her office half-worrying I’d forgotten to brush my teeth that morning, wearing floral pajama pants and a cropped T-shirt that said TEAM GG and had sketches of all four Golden Girls across my boobs. I was single and a woman and had been told by my own father that I was a condo person. I did not, in my estimation, radiate house-worthiness.

  She fanned the pages of a file with my name on it out in front of her and said, “Jennine, houses are for people who can afford houses.”

  It took almost a year for Carol to help me rewrite the narrative that had been keeping me from buying a home. It’s a pervasive narrative, one that recasts home ownership not as a stable, smart investment, but as a symbol of a kind of commitment, or the epitome of the American Dream—one you’re only entitled to once you’re legally married and/or en route to growing a family. In the house I would eventually buy, I stood next to my real estate agent in its bathroom and freaked out at the sight of an oversized custom tub from 1939, which, with its built-in seats, looked perfect for bathing a couple of toddlers. I shook my head no and said, “I can’t buy this house. A family deserves this place. I see kids in this tub!”

  She shrugged. “That’s weird. I see a great tub.”

  And later, when we sat down in the kitchen’s breakfast nook to write out the offer and I stopped cold after picturing not myself but a faceless family sitting there with their bowls of cereal, she said, “Think of this as a bank you can live in.”

  Both my real estate agent and Carol were teaching me to see and think of owning property differently, not as a symbol but as an investment, one that everything about my financial life said I’d earned. They were teaching me how to see a house as equity, a word that, like escrow, I’d misunderstood for too long. (I still don’t know what escrow is; I like to imagine it’s what my grandmother would say in Spanglish were she trying to call my attention to a large black bird.) And while I could fall in love with a space, I was also learning that every corner need not be imbued with meaning. A house is, ultimately, just a house—a building. The one I bought happens to have four bedrooms. When I moved in and an older woman living across the street asked me, after learning I didn’t have children, what I was doing with all the space, I said, “Pretty much whatever I want.”

  I met with Carol again post-closing to update her on the purchase. I brought many papers she did not need to see. She said the next thing I needed to do was get a will. I said, “No thanks!” Then she very calmly, and with her typical wisdom, explained why I was being ridiculous. She was teaching me again, this time to accept the life I’d built, to recognize it as stable and worth protecting. She sent me a follow-up email with links.

  That email is still marked as unread in my inbox, because a week later, I got another email stating that Carol had passed away unexpectedly. It was impersonal, bcc’d to me from someone I’d never met at Carol’s firm. The email’s third sentence stated that “the firm is prepared to partner with you and to continue serving your wealth management needs.”

  I wrote back asking about a memorial service, but it was Carol I wanted to reply to—after learning not from that email but from her obituary about the myriad boards she sat on and the millions of dollars she raised for various Lincoln causes: the Nebraska Humanities Council, the YMCA, the Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center. Her obituary says that she was a Tab addict who perhaps single-handedly “kept the company in business … buying dozens of twelve-packs at a time.” I had so many new questions for her, about what really mattered, about what versions of wealth really needed managing. I wanted to know how she’d gotten hooked on Tab. I wanted to know what it was like to grow up in Mitchell, if she actuall
y hated how the Corn Palace was the most famous thing about her hometown. I wanted desperately to know who else had loved her, if anyone had been by her side when she’d died, if there was someone I could call to say I was sorry she was gone. I wanted to know her address.

  * * *

  When my email asking about a memorial service went unanswered, I again did what anyone under thirty-five does: I googled her, gathering every fact I could about her life like a bird building a nest. This act led to even more questions not just about her and her life, but about another, stranger element to our relationship: Why was she so set on helping me map out my financial life when, for the vast majority of our relationship, I wasn’t technically her client? In the eighteen months we worked together, as our scheduled hour-long meetings turned into three-hour-long conversations over coffee—conversations that I admittedly used as a kind of free therapy—I’d opened no accounts with her firm. Carol made exactly zero dollars off of me. It’s a truth I’ve been avoiding because I still can’t make sense of it. Someone who knew so much about maximizing returns on investments wasted a lot of time listening to my stories about everything from the lackluster Lincoln dating scene to the epic journey of how my family became an American one. Even more bizarrely, exactly three weeks before she died, I finally did open an account, with a check for the whopping amount of two hundred dollars. “Go crazy,” I’d joked as I’d pushed the check across her lacquered desk. I’d written it out right in front of her, had wanted to start the account with more, but she advised me against that. She said she had a feeling, based on the time of year it was, that we should hold off on any bigger moves. Small as the amount was, I was relieved to have finally opened an account because it made me feel less guilty. She’d spent so much time advising me for no financial return whatsoever, and the opening of an account meant maybe that would change, would give her a return on her investment in me.

  I eventually learned from the internet that there would be a memorial service. Like white American weddings, I’d only been to two white American funerals that I remember. One was when I was in ninth grade, for a teacher who’d died of a heart attack while I was her student. The other was for my mother-in-law. Like the white American weddings, at both funerals a program was given out. I’ve been to maybe a dozen Cuban funerals and have never been handed a program or sat through any eulogies. We do things differently in Miami: Within hours of someone dying, we head to Vista Memorial Gardens, where there’s an open casket (containing the relative we more than likely watched die) at one end of a room filled with couches and flowers. The viewing lasts about twenty-four hours, with people coming and going and coming again, usually leaving to grab Cuban sandwiches or croquetas, always returning with greasy white bags, leftovers for those of us who stayed behind to greet newcomers. The sobbing and laughter ebb and flow like waves. Kids run around playing and everyone is grateful for the distraction. People show up, and at the other end of the room, sinking into a couch, other people hiss, What is he even doing here? Sometimes there’s an argument that everyone’s been expecting for decades. You stay as long as you want or need, and so sometimes that means you sleep on one of those couches, because you know this is the last time you’ll see the deceased’s physical body, and that knowledge compels you—especially if it’s your mother or father who died—to stay put until the casket gets shut. I’ve gone home to get pillows for my parents when their parents died. I’ve seen coolers filled with beers in the shadows of open trunks of Buicks parked in the funeral home’s lot. I’ve had friends from high school who’d been out of touch for years show up straight from work—new kids in tow and still in their daycare uniforms—because they’d seen my grandma’s Facebook page turn into a memorial. I’ve seen ex-boyfriends looking for an excuse to say hi, asking why my husband wasn’t there. I’ve seen half the men under fifty leave the room to go look at someone’s new car. There is no official start time to our funerals; the only official time comes when the viewing period ends, which is when the casket gets moved from the room you’ve called home to a wall (because being buried in the ground is much more expensive, so no one in my family has opted for that yet). The experience of a Cuban funeral in Miami is chaotic and cathartic and nothing like the two American funerals I’ve attended.

  I was initially hesitant to go to Carol’s memorial service until one of her best friends reached out to me, telling me Carol had my first two books “ready to take along for reading on her upcoming trip to Maine, which was scheduled for the weekend after her accident.” Because I imagined the kind of understandably somber event I’d been to in the past, I worried it would be intimate enough that my presence would be a disruption. A Cuban funeral is, in some ways, all disruption; if a stranger were to walk in and hang out in the room, we’d probably never realize it.

  Even though the announcement online had called it “A Celebration of Life,” I still hadn’t anticipated it to be festive. So I was confused when her husband, stationing himself at the entrance’s double doors, greeted everyone with a warm smile while sporting khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. I was in black slacks and a loose-fitting dark-gray blouse. He shook my hand and thanked me for coming, and that’s when I realized that dance music was playing in the banquet hall behind him, and that many of the people there—the ones who’d likely known Carol much better than I had—were similarly dressed as if for a backyard barbeque.

  The room was a bigger and higher-ceilinged version of Las Delicias Banquet Hall in Hialeah. There was a cash bar, which meant drinking while grieving was not considered shameful or weak here; no one was hiding their booze in the parking lot. No couches or rows of seats; instead, there were dozens of round tables set up just like for a quinceañera. There was no casket anchoring the room, either. Carol’s ashes were in a lovely polished wooden box, her name engraved on a gold plate affixed to its lid, the box surrounded by pictures of her posed with those who loved her most, the box and pictures set up on a table off to the side of a dance floor. Oh my god, would there be dancing? Were these white people going to defy my every preconceived notion about how white people grieve and spend the evening dancing in front of Carol’s ashes? Dancing at a funeral seemed even too Cuban for Cubans.

  “I am really uncomfortable,” my date said. (Yes, I’d brought a date to the service, don’t judge me. I’d asked my boyfriend to come with me because I fully expected to be the only person of color there—and we were, aside from myself, my boyfriend, a mixed-race child, and a Southeast Asian man, despite there being maybe three hundred people in attendance.) I grabbed his hand and walked us over to the main table. The biggest photo on it was Carol’s wedding photo. She’s standing alone, bouquet held with both hands at her waist, a large white hat like an oversized halo on her head. It was more elegant than a quinces photo (no long fake nails, no pearl-and-crystal-bedazzled crown, no tacky fan splayed open across layers of tulle hiding a hoop skirt—I am, of course, describing my own quinces photo here; though I didn’t have the party, my parents did have me pose for formal quinces portraits) and it hit me that Carol had just turned sixty, an age that, should I ever reach it, I plan on celebrating with the formal quinces party I never had, but times four—my Quadruple Quinceañera.

  Near the bar sat a long table loaded with food. I’d later learn that everything on it was something Carol was famous for making or that she’d loved eating. Carol and her husband were big on entertaining and threw epic parties with amazing food. People kept talking about her pinwheels.

  Eventually, there were eulogies—all but one of them given by men she’d worked with, men who all mentioned, repeatedly, that even though Carol was never a mother, she was like a mom to them—and there was a slide show. Every ten or so photos were of Tab: cases of Tab, Carol double fisting Tab, pickup beds full of Tab. She’d been hooked since she was fourteen. The service ended with a Tab toast in Carol’s honor, with everyone getting a small cup of this soda Carol had loved that I’d never even tried. They planned for two hundred people. They ran out
of cups.

  * * *

  At the memorial service, a male coworker had given a eulogy where he said Carol was the only Democrat in the office. Everyone sort of laughed, like this was some inside joke. He announced he was a Republican and for a few moments hijacked the funeral with stories that I’m sure in his mind were about Carol, but were really about him. A week later I learned that he was the person to whom my account had been reassigned.

  Over email, I wrote a long message carefully detailing my objections, which included an all caps line of I WILL NEVER AGAIN LET ANY MAN TELL ME WHAT TO DO WITH MY LIVELIHOOD. Then I deleted all that and said simply that I’d prefer to work with a woman.

  The company’s response informed me that there wasn’t a single other female financial advisor in their office. Carol had been the only one. This was shameful, and when I next met with someone in person, I asked when they would be hiring a woman, or better yet, several women. I was told they had no plans to do so, and that they could maybe find a woman in Omaha. I thought about how every man who Carol had worked with who’d spoken at her service had felt the need to define her by what she hadn’t done, which was reproduce—how limited it revealed their imaginations to be when it came to a woman’s potential; how the qualities Carol demonstrated that I most benefitted from—her easy confidence, her humor and grace, her earnestness and generosity—weren’t necessarily ones that seemed to count on paper.

  I closed my account there within the month. I am still looking for a woman’s help. And I still live in the house Carol told me to buy.

  Like Carol in that office, my house stands out almost comically, a historic two-story Tudor in a sea of midcentury ranch houses all built two decades later and over the same handful of years. Everyone who comes to work on the house has a story about it: Back in the day, it was the only house for miles, and all the land surrounding it—where everyone else’s homes now stand—was a ranch owned by the people who built it. “Well, well, this was a Taylor family home,” the inspector said, referring to some Lincoln royalty for which I had no context as he shined a flashlight on some piece of metal in the attic. Someone had, in 1938 or so, scrawled the words Taylor Project on it before installing it. A carpenter informed me that based on the year the house was built and on something he saw happening structurally underneath a staircase, the basement was likely dug out by hand. Architecturally, the house makes no sense in the neighborhood; without this house, there wouldn’t be a neighborhood. My real estate agent assures me I could sell it in a heartbeat.