Tenemental

by Vikki Warner

  Later, Colin came upstairs to apologize again, and we had something resembling a fruitful conversation. He told me he’d “come from a pretty unconventional living situation” (something about a big, rambling, falling-down house), and as such, he was unfamiliar with the required niceties of living at PennHenge. He mentioned that the baby grand had actually been left outside for the past couple of years, so it was really beat up and warped anyway, and “sounded crazy.” He’d told the movers to “just throw it away.” Of course, he still had to pay hundreds of dollars to the moving company, despite the fact that the object of his affection was on its way to the landfill.

  In those first few months after his arrival, I cynically decided that Colin was slumming—just gathering some street cred on his way to bigger and better things. He was only twenty-two, and it was the first time he’d lived on his own. But over the summer, perhaps six months after he moved in, Colin started on a home improvement tear. Not a Neil-style episode involving sledgehammer-based destruction, but a set of positive, well-executed changes that made the place look better and feel more comfortable. First, he painted his own room. It had been a rather awful shade of flat electric blue, sloppily painted by the illustrious Neil and then left that color by several subsequent occupants. Colin could not abide. So he bought some paint in a very dignified old-hotel sort of gray, and he went for it. He didn’t let me know in advance; I was coming home one night and looked up and saw that the room was suddenly a different color. I thought, if I can just impress upon this guy that someone other than him owns this place, and that he needs to inform that person of any changes he wants to make, we are going to work together just fine. A few weeks later, Eric offhandedly mentioned in an email that Colin was “turning his space into a fancy hotel room.” I began to relish my evening walks back to the house, so I could creep around and look up to spy on the latest embellishments surreptitiously being made to my own home. One night, it was a chandelier with a multitude of tiny lampshades on it; another time, a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. I had to admit that the place was looking pretty baller; there’s nothing wrong with milk crates and lumpy Ikea sofas, but Colin’s tastes and resources well exceeded that level. The next time I stopped into the apartment, he had done the kitchen as well, painting the room in multiple shades of a very modern soft purple-gray that somehow also completely fit the look of the house. He’d installed track lighting and it shone on nice pieces of framed art. For a moment I thought, Why would anyone do all this work to a rental? He’s going to extort money from me now, in payment for these interior design services.

  But actually, it’s been the opposite. I made the rare move of speaking directly to Colin’s invariable face in order to clearly remind him that I need to approve any changes he wants to make, before they’re in process, and that I, the owner, should be paying for said changes. “What if you fall off a ladder or crush your finger?” I asked him.

  He seemed to understand for a few weeks, during which time he put in a dimmer switch for the chandelier, installed more track lighting, and beautifully painted yet another room, all with my prior knowledge. I congratulated myself for facing the problem and Colin for responding in kind. But now the conversation has again slowed. I rarely see him, but I can hear him—hammering, sawing, drilling; working away on something. He has taken the doors off the kitchen cabinets, and though my recon access is limited in that part of the house, I believe he is testing several paint colors to redo them. My nighttime creeper moments (he really should get some curtains) now reveal that he’s created a huge mosaic-like collage of colored plastic or paper squares that covers the entire wall above the mantel. He’s putting in new (supposedly removable?) flooring on top of the old painted wood planks in his room. I shit you not: he has built a squirrel lounge in his window frame, a wood panel with a squirrel-sized round hole on one side and a glass panel on the interior for observing, ant-farm style. Inside the box he has placed batting for the squirrels’ comfort; so far the animals are a no-show.

  At this point the room is about 55 percent old hotel, 40 percent tech startup, 5 percent squirrel residence, if you’re keeping score.

  The guy’s got a good eye; I admit it. That doesn’t alter the fact that this apartment is home to two young men, with their attendant piles of clothes and dirty dishes and some less-than-appealing smells. But it’s sunny, well-decorated, and feels cared for. I still don’t feel totally recognized by Colin as the actual owner of the house, but I would rather have a tenant who cares about improving his surroundings than one who lives among his own refuse.

  Colin is awkward; he is a leisurely, sporadically employed enigma. He is candid about dealing with mental illness. I like Colin, although I cannot claim to know what makes him tick. He’s smart and appears older than he is. He’s curious and introspective and slightly problematic. He has surprised me by turning over a rather outgoing new leaf. We carry on actual conversations now, voluntary ones, good ones, about Trump and the strange, terrible state of America and the brilliance of Samantha Bee. He has adopted a highly sociable black cat he named Joe Biden, but whom everyone else calls Buster. Under Colin’s care, Buster has gone from skinny and sniffling to large and glossy. He greets me in the driveway when I come home, and he visits me in my apartment, napping on the couch like he owns the place.

  If I am to present a well-rounded portrait of Colin, though, I must discuss his car, for Colin is the car; the car is Colin. The car is a hulking, green, 2000-era Volvo wagon with various mechanical problems. The car’s metamorphosis began when Colin discovered a way to print custom bumper stickers one at a time, with stark white letters on a black background. His car soon became a tribute to his favorite comedians, authors, and thinkers, whose names reverently graced the bumper: Patrice O’Neal, Bill Hicks, Dave Chappelle, James Baldwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Leo Tolstoy. Later, perhaps having received some flak for his all-male pantheon, he threw a bone to the ladies and added Tina Fey. He topped it off with a Bernie 2016 and a Black Lives Matter. At this point, the car got him some notice around town (I mean, a Leo Tolstoy bumper sticker?), with people leaving him notes and giving him hand salutes of one kind or another. An acquaintance in town spotted his car parked somewhere and found it so ludicrous she posted a photo of it on Instagram. One of the commenters noted that they “saw this narc wagon parked outside the police station.”

  So a few months pass, and Colin gets to thinking that this level of ornamentation was a good first step, but the #narcwagon is not confrontational enough. He begins to reimagine the car as a sort of performance art piece, a way to start a conversation that he is not self-possessed enough to have face-to-face. The previous stickers are removed and replaced with a single Black Lives Matter sticker (banner, really) the width of the bumper and twice as tall. Then the same sticker appears on the side of the car; this one is maybe four feet long. And so on and so forth, until no matter from which angle you look at the car, a huge Black Lives Matter banner is visible.

  So Colin—who is white, should you need confirmation—begins driving this car around Providence and Rhode Island. He gets plenty of thumbs-up and words of encouragement. But he also gets into angry scrapes with some jacked-up, hate-filled white guys. A couple of dudes in trucks casually try to run him off the road. And, of course, he regularly gets the bird.

  A technophile with spare time, Colin has now installed cameras all over his car so that he can park it in various locations and observe people’s reactions. He has put a solar panel on the roof to power the cameras. (He is often to be spotted in the driveway drilling holes in the roof of his car.) He’s installed the least threatening-sounding car alarm ever made—it makes a cute, bumbling blooooop, blooooop sound. Colin is trying to decide what to do with the cam footage. He’s kicking around a few ideas for extending the car-as-political-conversation-starter concept, including—and he admits this needs some work—another banner reading “A Vehicle for Social Change.”

  I don’t know how to feel about all of this. On one
hand, I can appreciate Colin stepping out of his socially-awkward-white-guy comfort zone to publicly support a crucially important movement. But the very fact that he is able to do this so boldly and ostentatiously, using his suburbanesque Volvo for Christ’s sake, is an effect of his tremendous privilege. I think he knows it and feels he’s pushing boundaries.

  I feel uncomfortable just backing this car out of the driveway to park it on the street, and not just because it smells like old burritos and Play-Doh; being inside this moving statement makes a person extremely visible, as if you are representing the movement itself; let me tell you, neither I nor Colin have any business doing that. I’m just not sure that black people, the people in full charge of the movement, really want to see the galvanizing civil rights statement of this decade writ large on some white guy’s car. Does it help anything at all, in even the most miniscule way? Or is he co-opting Black Lives Matter for the hell of it, experimenting with something that doesn’t belong to him?

  Colin lives with a fair amount of luxury—enough that he can do pretty much whatever he wants, whenever he wants. He doesn’t need to police his expression, because in our society he is unlikely to be victimized or incriminated for any of what he says. His ongoing comfort is not at issue. But he does try, and he does care. He could sit back, deflect pangs of anger and helplessness, and “avoid politics” like the many similarly privileged people who wait quietly for our societal unrest to blow over. It’s necessary to accept that hate and conflict are, in a sense, America’s default condition. Colin’s method of publicly confronting that may need serious refinement, but at least he’s out there.

  Economies of Scale

  Our childhood homes set off a lifetime of comparisons. They confine us in loaded symbolism, becoming the first places we know down to the cracks in the walls and the faded spots in the carpet. We mark every new address against our previous homes, based on the ease or difficulty of living there, the tenderness and toil of our home-based relationships, the memories we later seek to duplicate or to avoid. I came to PennHenge with a variety of comparative impressions intact and each one of my tenants over the years has brought his or her own.

  For roughly the first half of my life, “home” meant a small town, a small house, and a small family. It was an insular life, and I was both thrilled and afraid to break out of it as soon as I made it to adulthood.

  In buying PennHenge, I wanted to preserve the stability of my childhood, the sense that all was well, that we as a family had it mostly together. I thought that buying a big house and living in it with a big crew would keep me ultrasocial, keep me from retreating into progressively tinier spheres as my parents had, while settling me into a self-sufficient routine as I, the Lady in Charge, happily managed the house’s needs. Only later did it occur to me that the path I’d picked led away from reliable routine and toward constant upheaval. And that sometimes, being social in my home would have to mean living with erratic people.

  My parents are the most practical people I have ever known. They have been ruthless savers for their entire lives, working hard at ill-paying, depressing jobs and being so strenuously frugal that they were able to retire earlier than they had planned, to a Florida-snowbird-condo situation no less. Back in their days of financial uncertainty and anxiety, though, when life stretched out ahead of them—a minefield of potential expenses to be evaded with deft penny-pinching moves—they did something that would befuddle most modern thirty-year-olds. They knew they couldn’t afford a classic suburban single-family house, but they didn’t want to be renters when I came into the world, so they bought a two-bedroom mobile home, which sat on rented land in a park of some 125 prefab aluminum-sided castles on wheels. Thusly, I spent my childhood in a trailer park.

  SOUTH DRIVE

  Rows of multicolored trailers, parked vertically to maximize space, lined up dutifully along each of Sunny Acres’s six streets. Some trailers were decorated and landscaped to the nines; others stood starkly on brown grass as if they’d dropped out of the sky. Some had sunrooms and patios and swing sets. The place was clean and orderly enough, and there was a big grassy field at the top of the hill by a busy road for the kids to run around in. There was a hierarchy to the layout: North Drive, which was just a single street connecting to the main road, was exclusively for old folks. South Drive was a mix of families and retirees. There were four side streets. You guessed it: First St., Second St., Third St., Fourth St., all of which spilled out from one side of South Drive. These side streets had smaller, cheaper lots and a few spindly trees and shrubs. We had a delicate little dogwood that my mom loved.

  Halloween was the best time to be a kid at Sunny Acres. Besides the clear delight many of its residents took in decorating—lights, sound effects, animatronics, dry ice, apple-bobbing barrels—it was the bang-per-buck candy-hoarding capital of the county. In two hours, you could hit up every trailer and end your night with a full garbage bag (or three pillowcases, if you were the wimpy type who had to go home and unload periodically so as to carry it all).

  Sunny Acres—which my parents nicknamed “Belly Achers”—was a microcosm of society. There was a little of everything, humanity-wise, tightly crammed within its bounds. There were upstanding folks stuck in the relentless daily grind and struggling mightily to pay the bills; there were sourpuss retirees who bickered and drank their dwindling days away; there were sweet grandmas who offered me fun-size Snickers and root beer on my walk home from the bus stop; there were quiet, defeated people for whom divorce, illness, loss, and other personal calamities had limited their ambitions; there were big-fish narcissists who spontaneously combusted into spectacular displays of drama, exploiting the insular nature of the park by creating their own fiefdoms within it. There was one thing just about everyone under seventy-five had in common at Sunny Acres, though: a desire to get out. Although it wasn’t a slum by any means, it felt like a place from which very little good could come. It was a place of resignation. If you had any life left in you at all, you didn’t want to live it there.

  The trailer itself was built at a kid-friendly scale and had a kind of zany 1970s color scheme and style. It was covered in brown wall-to-wall carpeting and yellow linoleum, with Formica countertops and faux stone and wood paneling on the walls. I thought it was cool that I lived in a technically portable metallic capsule. I liked sprawling on my white pleather beanbag chair in front of the TV or cozily chatting with my parents. I liked sleeping in my twin bed with the streetlight shining down through the window. Still, there was no covering up the fact that our dwelling wasn’t fancy: all of the surfaces had a paper-thinness to them. We were jammed in close enough to hear the neighbors’ TVs. And we were the first in town to be evacuated when there was a big storm or hurricane bearing down, lest our little free-floating palaces drift out to sea.

  My flower-wallpapered bedroom was in front, next to the street, and contained my bed (complete with railings, because I used to tumble out of it), a dresser my grandfather had made, a school desk, a bookshelf for my precious Little Miss and Little Golden Books, and my very favorite place, a triangle-shaped closet that I would hang out in so frequently that my parents installed a light to help me read in comfort. Then there was the living room, with its little TV cart, flowered couch, and wood stove; then the kitchen and a diminutive dining room that had been built later as part of a fancy addition. The bathroom (more flowered wallpaper) was next; and in the back, my parents’ tiny bedroom. It was a place ideally built for compactness, for small, efficient people like the Warner family.

  My family specialized in minding our own business, and gregariousness wasn’t an attribute to be especially valued. Being an only child, too, I learned early how to properly be alone. I played at adult occupations: I was a doctor, a shopkeeper, a secretary, a writer, an artist, setting up elaborate “offices” and answering “phones” authoritatively. I never felt lonely; I never wished for a sibling (though it might be nice to have one now). Instead, those long and uninterrupted afternoons of
play—dinner simmering away in the slow cooker and my parents keeping an ear toward me but letting me do my thing—felt quietly joyful. I observed the chaos at my friends’ houses—siblings tearing each other apart on the regular—and I only felt sorry for them.

  When I did have to be around other kids, though, they usually took my calmness for weakness, and I was roundly pushed around. My arm still cracks from the time the monstrous Jenny F. wrestled me off the top bar of the swing set. Despite my shyness and the occasional mistreatment I received at the hands of the bigger, older, cooler, tougher girls on the street, I made a few friends at the trailer park—kids whose families always seemed to be splintered, dysfunctional, disheveled, overpopulated, broke, or some combination thereof. When I started going to school, I was surprised and a little seduced by the air of virtuosity and wealth wafting from my classmates’ parents.

  My hometown of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, is an island burg of just under twenty thousand people (93 percent of whom are white), where in 2012 the median household income was around $75,000 and the median home value was over $345,000. If there’s one place dragging down that average, friends, it’s Sunny Acres and the other trailer park in town, where, as my mom would say, the folks “don’t have two nickels to rub together.” Being a kid from the trailer park in a town of rich kids perfecting late-twentieth-century entitlement—in close proximity to rich and hallowed Newport—let me know where I stood, and it wasn’t at the top, or even the middle. Forever hopping back and forth between observing the rarified lives of my schoolmates (BMWs, sprawling houses, equestrian lessons, ski vacations) and returning to my own reality (Datsuns, dog houses, episodes of Welcome Back, Kotter, trips to Kmart), I was aware of status as soon as I hit public school. I never believed I’d own anything, much less that I deserved to. I worried about my future: who would give me a job, someday? How would I navigate life, when everybody I knew already seemed to have more than us? Adulthood looked treacherous, fraught with drudgery like paying taxes, working late, getting the car fixed, and cleaning the toilet, and if you did any of it wrong, you would be arrested and thrown in the slammer.