As the retail landscape of Los Corderos scrolled by us, my eyes welled with tears at the sight of a road sign letting us know we were 98 miles from San Francisco. Moments later, another sign informed us that this stretch of El Camino Real was kept tidy by Dolce and Gabbana. I imagined the store’s well-heeled staff strutting down the sidewalk disdainfully jabbing candy wrappers with sterling litter sticks. No doubt they’d do something kicky with the trash bags.
I know our culture has become more consumer-oriented and that this trend is nationwide, but Los Corderos seemed Bed Bath and way Beyond the norm. Silently I assured myself that there had to be more to the community than the commercial strip with its army of SUVs and late-model tanks. I inhaled deeply and reminded myself to give Los Corderos a chance. Who was I to be so judgmental anyway? I was just another failed artist exiled from the city because her career couldn’t pay the mortgage. If Jason had the opportunity to serve as the first African-American fire captain in Los Corderos, the least I could do was go in with a decent attitude.
My feeling of optimism lasted all of thirty seconds. It quickly deflated when I saw one of the new boutiques inspired by the mega bestseller, The Answer. In these orange-blossom scented Answer shops, youthful bindi-wearing salesgirls languished on bamboo counters, providing their expert opinion on healing elixirs, body oils and inspirational tea. They wore organic cotton tank tops with the word “Bliss” in Hindi. Answer stores sold these in several colors, with various spiritual aspirations like Forgiveness, Truth and Balance. Inner peace didn’t come cheap either. The rhinestone encrusted “Namaste” ribbed tank was $98 on the clearance rack.
“Almost home, kids,” Jason said through the rear view mirror, his chest slightly puffed. My husband agreed that he would have liked to buy a place with more individuality than what the 600-home Utopia luxury housing development offered, but long held a philosophy that environment was internal. Home was where we made it, he said. At least one of us was centered. Maybe I needed a t-shirt that said “Bitter” in a different language, preferably Hebrew so no one around here could read it.
When we were house-hunting earlier this summer, we asked the realtor where the Black-Jewish neighborhood was. She smiled sweetly and told us, “Wherever you two buy a home.” Jason laughed, but a nervous giggle escaped my lips. Sensing my discomfort, the realtor gave us a warm honey smile and assured me that Utopia was a veritable United Nations. There was a Pakistani anesthesiologist, a Japanese-American landscape architect, and “one of those strict Jewish families.” I later learned that the only reason Anna Stein wore a wig was that she was undergoing chemo.
When we signed the papers to purchase our home the month before, Jason placed his arm around my waist and said that he couldn’t wait till his parents saw our new place. I nodded, and a tear fell on the papers, smudging my signature.
As much as I loved our life in San Francisco, I loved my husband more, and could never deny him this opportunity. Jason rose quickly through the ranks of the fire department, but there was no way he’d become a captain for at least another ten years. We needed to move to a small, growing community where there weren’t a dozen senior firefighters standing in line ahead of him. Plus, Jason had already made so many sacrifices for me that I couldn’t say no to the move. Loving him more than my home didn’t make leaving San Francisco any easier, though. I’d convinced myself that it would ease the pain, but as we pulled into Los Corderos that first day, I realized I was sadly mistaken.
“Welcome to Utopia,” Logan said as we approached the gates of our new home.
“We can all read the sign,” Maya told him. “Are those gates real gold?”
Jason pointed to the gate posts. “Check out the angels up top there.”
“Maybe we’re in one of those freaky movies where the family’s actually dead, but they don’t know it yet, and we’re really driving into heaven,” Logan suggested.
Or hell, I thought but did not say.
“The gates of heaven are pearly, duh,” Maya corrected her brother.
He snorted. “Yeah, sorry to get my facts wrong on the oh-so-realistic scenario of us driving into the great beyond, Glamour Don’t.” Logan then pointed to the guard at the booth. “Oh, look! St. Peter’s got a stun gun.” He shook his wavy hair in a brief, unconscious gesture that he always did when he’d beaten his sister in the battle of wits.
I suppose all kids are a blend of their parents, not quite a copy of one or the other. But it is strikingly so with mixed race kids. Their mocha skin is neither like Jason’s chocolate brown hue nor my pale tone. Twins, Logan and Maya both have my build and their dad’s intense brown eyes, which are so dark they can swallow you whole. By the grace of God, they have Jason’s full lips and not the measly licorice shoelaces that frame my mouth. Everyone says that the kids look Latino, though their preschool teacher insisted they looked Korean. This only made sense when one considered that she was Korean and adored my children.
As we drove through the gates, Jason wanted feedback from the kids on every square inch of Utopia. He’d already gotten mine, and he was eager to hear something positive about our new residence. “These are some fancy houses,” Maya commented. “Pretty fresh grass,” she said of the lawns that bore a suspicious resemblance to Astroturf. The labyrinthine streets of Utopia were rimmed with uniformly manicured square bushes, and the sky looked as if someone had stirred in a bit of blue food coloring. At one point, I swore I saw a formation of doves circling a bicycling child the way they might accompany Snow White at the wishing well.
“Were these houses all done by the same architect or something?” Logan asked.
“Yeah, they all totally match,” Maya noted.
It was bad enough that there were only three models of brick McMansion behind the gates of Utopia, but the Homeowners Association had a book of Codes, Covenants and Restrictions so oppressive, it not only dictated the accent paint colors we could use on the outside of our home, it actually had a short list of shades we could use on the inside. We were informed that there was a CC&R Enforcement Committee that restricted the number and type of flowers we were allowed to plant in our front and back yards.
Jason and I bought a home in Utopia because it was the only place to live in Los Corderos except for a mobile home park or a few houses that looked like dilapidated red barns or mint green shoe boxes. Our little Victorian three-bedroom in the city sold for more than twice what we needed for a ridiculously large Model-A sitting on a full acre in Utopia. We made enough from the sale of the place in San Francisco to retire our debt to Jason’s parents and buy the place in Utopia outright. For the first time in my life I had a decorating budget.
When money got tight for us last year, I suggested we sell the house and rent an apartment, but we’d been priced out of that market too. Moving to Los Corderos made too much sense.
Jason wanted the promotion more than the move, but he wasn’t heartbroken about leaving the city either. He had lived in Baltimore for most of his childhood, then the Bay Area for his adult life, and said that some time in the country might be a nice change. The reality was twofold. First and foremost, my husband was eager to finally put to rest the lingering assumption that dropping out of medical school meant he would never have real earning power, as his father predicted. Second, Jason was a more adventurous person than I. San Francisco was our home, so I saw no reason to ever live anywhere else. My childhood was transient, with an artist mother who moved us from city to city whenever the moon was in the seventh house or Jupiter aligned with Mars. My father vanished for months, sometimes years, at a time. I was only in three schools long enough to ever see how the class photo turned out. While this upbringing might make some people adaptable and free-spirited, it made me crave stability and community. The life Jason and I had created in San Francisco was the happily-ever-after I’d been waiting for since I was Logan and Maya’s age.
It wasn’t just Jason and I who would miss the city. The kids’ school took field trips to opera dress rehears
als, fringe theatre and the Exploratorium. Maya studied karate with two-time kata champion Rob Kanazawa, whose father brought Shotokan to the United States in the seventies. Logan’s best friend Josh went trick-or-treating dressed as René Magritte’s headless man in a bowler with a green apple. After a cursory search for a fencing academy for Logan, I came up with nothing in Los Corderos. Maya would continue her karate lessons with a guy named Dave Anderson, who ran a martial arts studio called Chop Kix.
As we rounded our street, Jason turned to me. “I got an email from the Los Corderos police chief.”
“Let me guess, you fit the profile of a suspect they’re hunting,” I said.
“You are a funny one, baby. Listen, he’s got a kid around Logan’s age and they’re having a birthday party this weekend. He’s invited. They thought it would be a good way to meet some of the guys before school starts up next week.” Glancing in the rear view mirror again, Jason added, “It’s a sword fighting party. What d’ya think of that, bud?”
“A sword fighting party?” I asked, incredulous. “For thirteen-year-old boys?”
“Not real swords, I’m sure,” Jason said, squinting his eyes to read the road sign. The need for reading glasses was his only sign of aging so far, something I simultaneously loved and envied. Gravity had not taken its toll on his body as it had mine. Driving into Los Corderos, he wore a gray cotton t-shirt with our alma mater stretching across his broad chest. Gripping the steering wheel showed off his defined arms and protective hands.
“What are they going to do, have plastic swords?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Jason replied with a shrug. “I didn’t quiz him. He said his wife was gonna drop off an invite at the house and there’d be kids from Los Corderos Middle. Said they were gonna do some sort of sword fighting theme. Knights of the Round Table or something.”
“Isn’t thirteen a little old for a theme party?” I whispered.
“Whatever,” Jason dismissed. Looking back at Logan through the rearview mirror, he said. “You wanna go meet some of the guys from school?”
“Nah,” Logan said, shrugging.
“What do you mean, ‘nah’?” Jason asked.
Logan corrected himself. “I’m sorry, I mean, no thank you.”
“Am I talking to the youth champion of the City by the Blade tournament?” Jason asked. “Come on, it’ll be a good chance for you to meet some of the guys from school.”
This seemed to push Logan further in the opposite direction. “I thought I’d help Mom with the—”
“Your mother will be fine,” Jason interrupted. “Tell him, Lisa.”
“Your father’s right,” I said. “Meet some of the boys from school so it’s not all new faces when you start classes.”
“It’ll be new faces at the party,” Logan said.
“If he’s not going, I will,” Maya chimed in.
“It’ll be all boys,” I explained.
“Awesome.”
“Not happening, Maya,” said Jason.
“Home sweet home,” Jason burst out proudly as our car pulled into the driveway. He placed his hand on my leg and looked at me tentatively. “It’ll be good, I promise.” Turning around to the kids, his volume grew. “So what do you guys think?”
“Oh. My. God,” Maya said, dragging out each word to properly express her shock. She really knew how to play her father. There was no way that Maya could possibly be so stunned by the exterior of our home. She had just driven by a few hundred exact duplicates. “We’re like Real Housewives of the Sticks!”
“What do you think, Logan?” I asked.
“Nice,” he shrugged. Then Logan flashed the charming crooked smile he inherited from his father and assured us that he liked the new house. “I love colonials.”
“That’s the spirit,” Jason said, not absorbing the fact that, until that moment, even he hadn’t known our home was colonial style. When we were house-hunting, Jason told the realtor he liked these “old school” designs.
Logan smiled. “I guess I can go to that stupid party, too.”
“It sounds pretty gay, but go, suck it up and be polite, and you’ll get the lay of the land. You got nothin’ to lose, buddy,” said Jason. He took the key out of the ignition and opened the door to get out.
Pretty gay?! I mouthed.
Jason shrugged and gave me a look as if to say what he’d told me the last time we had this conversation: “The word has different meanings. I mean ‘dorky,’ not ‘homosexual.’ Don’t make a big deal of it.”
The kids were already running up the brick path to our home. “Just say ‘dorky’ next time, okay?”
It wasn’t a bad house. In fact, it would be nice to have so much open space and ceilings that rivaled a planetarium. There were certainly worse places to live than Utopia. We could live in the hood and face gang violence. We could live in an area where the Klan is alive and well. We could live in a country where we weren’t allowed to vote or educate our kids. There were far worse places for our family to live, I thought as I stared at the white lacquered banister that looked as though it was made from a Home Depot kit. I looked up at the equally generic lighting fixture and down at the plush beige carpet and sighed deeply.
Yes, there were worse places to live, but there were better ones too. One of them was the sweet little gingerbread Victorian on the hilly street where we knew our neighbors, I walked to work at the Four Circles Gallery blocks away, and the barista at Tea and Sympathy knew exactly how much milk to put in my chai latte.
After we closed escrow a few weeks earlier, Jason and I drove up for an orientation for new parents at the middle school and met a few of our new neighbors. One of the dads patted Jason on the back and asked if he was “jacked about his sweet new crib.” Jason gave the guy a perfunctory smile, then shot me a look I’d seen before. It wasn’t every white guy who tried to cram as much MTV lingo into one sentence as possible. In fact, it wasn’t even very many. Still, it was enough to remind Jason that there were some people who would see his skin and write his life story in a moment. It was always the same history, too. Poor, black Jason was the first in his family to graduate from college and leave behind his gangsta life thanks to a killer jump shot and affirmative action. They never drew the conclusion that was Jason’s true story: that his choice to pursue firefighting was a huge disappointment to his father, a surgeon at the Johns Hopkins Burn Center. Jason’s family paid full freight at his boarding school and college, and used the same affirmative action program that the rich white kids did, a father who golfed. I was always the one who wanted to set the record straight, and it was always Jason who told me not to bother.
At the school orientation, the Utopian fathers exchanged a round of thinly veiled self-congratulations about living in an upscale community. Their blowup-doll wives agreed dutifully.
Jorge, my Puerto Rican Yoda, once told me that we were most critical of other people’s shortcomings when we saw them in ourselves. In the privacy of my own thoughts, I had to confess that he was right. I might have had an air of self-satisfaction too. Back when I had high hopes for my career, things like chain restaurants and Prada backpacks didn’t bother me in the least. It was only when I realized I’d failed at my own artistic dream that I began rolling my eyes at other people’s lifestyles.
As we crossed the threshold of our new home for the first time as a family, I tried to take my eyes off the assembly-line construction of the house and focus on how much this meant to Jason. Ten years ago, when I was miserable in my job in advertising, Jason suggested I pursue sculpting full time. “This ain’t a dress rehearsal, baby,” he told me. “Chase the dream ’cause it’s not coming after you.” Now it was my turn.
I looked around the empty foyer. Positive, positive, I can do positive. “There are four bathrooms so we can all poop at the same time.”
Jason smiled and put his hand across my waist. “I appreciate that, baby.”
When I looked back at him, I silently promised myself I’d really giv
e this place a chance.
Maya shouted hello to see if she could get an echo in the empty foyer. “Where’s my room?”
“Top of the staircase, turn right,” Jason answered, giving my butt a light swat the way he always did when the kids were about to leave us alone. He started doing that at Berkeley when his roommates were on their way out of the house. It still makes me smile. “Yours is up there too, buddy.” Logan and Maya trotted up the stairs to inspect their new digs. I felt a smidge guilty that their first time seeing the new place was the day we moved in, but everything happened so fast. The kids were in San Diego with my mother while we were house-hunting, then flew to Baltimore to visit Jason’s family while we were closing escrow. This didn’t seem to bother them in the least. We heard both kids hoot with satisfaction and high-five each other over the size of their rooms.
“You’ll like it, baby,” Jason said. He kept repeating this promise so many times, I wondered who he was trying to convince.
“I know,” I said, forcing a smile as we walked into the kitchen. I noticed a toy trumpet resting on the unblemished granite countertop. “What’s this?” I picked up a small brass horn with a scroll stuffed inside. Unrolling the parchment, I read aloud, “Hear ye, hear ye! Your presence is requested for games and feasting to celebrate Sir Max’s birthday.”
“Sir Max?”
“Must be the police chief’s boy.”
“Oh right, the sword fighting thing,” Jason said as he leaned against the granite countertop, amused.
“He lucked out with that invitation, right?” I asked. “With all of the years he’s been fencing, I’ll bet he’ll really impress the kids.”
“Who said he was too young to start lessons at six?” Jason asked, moving closer so we could drink in our new surroundings together.
I laughed. “Uh, I believe it was the fencing school.”
“And look how wrong they were,” Jason said. “They thought a little boy and a sword would equal trouble, but he proved them wrong.”
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