by Vikki Warner
A few weeks later, at a show, I met James. Our first date was on my twenty-first birthday. He was off-the-charts intelligent, he was funny, he was moody and sarcastic, he was in a band. We got close quickly, and he was justifiably incensed that Other Dude was still bothering me. James came to the house, playing it cool, and when Other Dude showed up, James utterly dismantled him with words. I never saw Other Dude again.
James’s rather valiant move made us an official united front and cemented us into coupledom. It also drew me away from my housemates, because the “guy side” of the house thought James had overstepped. My loyalties had changed. The next spring, both of us still dreamy-eyed and writing poetry about the other, we planned to get an apartment in Providence. I was ready. I was done with this little incestuous pocket of small-town living. I was finally going to quit my dumb dining hall job and be an adult, in an adult relationship, with an adult job and a city apartment.
SHELDON STREET
In June, as a promising new summer unfolded, James and I loaded up his van full of my stuff, and we rolled slowly away from Bristol, coming up a half hour later on the east side of Providence. The air in June in this part of Providence has a characteristic odd but not unpleasant smell that is something like low tide plus melted tires plus freshly unfurled leaves. I sniffed it greedily as I stepped down from the van. As mentioned, the previous art-school ten-ants were still sleeping in the apartment when we arrived—fresh-faced and ready for our new lives, please—so we had to wait it out a day or so as they dragged themselves up and out. When they’d finally vacated, a trail of their stuff was left behind.
My favorite thing about this fusty apartment was the red, curved entry door at street level. It was exquisite, although it encouraged higher expectations of the interior than the place could fulfill. Our apartment was on the second and third floors, and the entrance was in the living room, which we sloppily painted a confrontational shade of red, accentuated by a blue-green area rug that James brought. The couch—an awful peachy color and rigidly shaped—was found on the street. A fourteen-inch TV sat on a wooden cube, with an ornate seventies-style lamp on a green table. An old Indian tapestry—a coveted object purchased by James’s recently deceased, much-missed dad—hung framed on the wall. There was no space in the kitchen for a table, so we put one near the back wall, at least near the kitchen. The room was dark, strange, and had a patchwork quality to it. Somehow it worked for us—although apparently not for anyone else: later, when potential renters came to look at the apartment, they gasped audibly, and someone said breathlessly, “We’d be able to paint this, right?!”
The kitchen was a sort of hallway with a window at the end, and it had all of the necessities jammed in. I’ve heard this phrase uttered about many Providence apartments, and it was absolutely true of Sheldon Street: “No matter how much you scrub, it never gets clean.” A fine grit was ground into every surface: the sink, the ancient wood flooring, the black tile countertop. There was a tiny closet of a bathroom just off the kitchen, with a water-hogging old toilet and a shower stall.
Up the stairs was our bedroom, a large room with a wood floor so chipped and decayed that we once lost our pet ferret for a few hours as she wriggled into a hole and crawled around under it, trailing dust bunnies on her whiskers when she returned. The windows were drafty, but the heat worked. Our mattress went directly on the floor. James’s computer went into the next room, which was sort of an office/guest room hybrid. That room looked out over the landlord’s very attractive landscaped grounds below, which James definitely puked on once.
The landlord was cool, if a bit hands-off. He was absolutely overwhelmed—and I can relate—by owning this big house and dealing with us and his first-floor tenant. Or I should say he was overwhelmed by his tenants, plus the maintenance of his own gorgeous section of the house, which contained two smart and high-achieving kids under twelve. He and his wife were lovely, and they cared enough to listen to James and me opine on various topics. I was jazzed to be in this apartment; I was also worried, because the rent was $800 per month. This was almost two and a half times what I paid at the last place, which to be fair had been an utter steal, even for twenty years ago. I had to cross the threshold to a full-time job.
I bought myself an Interview Dress and made the rounds. It wasn’t long before I rounded up a job writing resumes for a career counseling outfit, at ten dollars an hour, full time. Strangely, I was the only employee other than my boss, the owner of the company. The office consisted of the front two rooms of my boss’s condo. If he was around, I was forced to listen to the local light-rock station (a special kind of torture reserved for the already-demeaned office worker). If he left for an appointment or errand, it was just me and Tootsie, an enormous white cockatoo that was the light of his life. Tootsie stared at me from her cage—unyieldingly, all day, every day. Once, when my boss was away, she somehow got out of her cage, climbed up to the top of it, and sat there squawking, moving rhythmically and talking at me while I, frozen, weighed whether to make a run for it, get under my desk earthquake-style, or do nothing at all. Was she jealous of me? I wondered. Angry? And could her beak snap my forearm in half? Finally, my boss ambled in, tsk’d her, and put her back in her cage. I smiled weakly, my hands shaking. I hated my job.
Though my boss was a fair guy who gave me little raises and bonuses whenever he could, I knew my days there were numbered. Other than observing the machinations of Tootsie, there was no action at this job. I would receive summaries of people’s work experience on a written form or by email; sometimes I would meet them and have a short conversation. Then I would write their resumes and several variations on the same formulaic cover letter. My mornings were spent hating on “Black Velvet” by Alannah Myles while daydreaming about lunch and a car nap; my afternoons were spent hating on Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” while daydreaming about watching TV with our elderly coon cat, Elvis, eating a cheap vegan dinner, and sending James off to his grinding third-shift job as a graphic designer for an auto classifieds magazine. On Sunday nights, I would cry just thinking about starting another week at my job. It was no way to live.
We made it work for exactly one year.
COMMONWEALTH AVENUE
All I remember about the two guys who rented me and James our first apartment in Boston was that one of them was named Donald, and he chain-smoked and looked like a wizened old-school detective. They worked out of a thickly nicotine-stained, fake wood-paneled office above a pizza parlor on the Boston University campus. Like their office, the apartment they rented to us was of another time; at $850 a month, it was literally the cheapest above-ground non-rent-controlled one-bedroom within the city proper. It was on the first floor of a sagging, red stucco-fronted building of perhaps twelve apartments in the ugly epicenter of student housing in Boston, equidistant between Boston University and Boston College.
The living room was big enough to have a TV watching zone and an office zone, which was novel. It also had bizarre built-in white wooden cabinetry along the entire length of the interior wall—rows of huge cabinets with doors, which were great for stashing anything we didn’t want to look at. In the center of these cabinets, there was a large mirror with 1940s-style cut-out woodwork all around it, almost like a vanity setup for an old-time lady to do her rollers or her makeup. It was so large and ornate that it made no sense in this little railroad apartment, and I think it’s the only reason the place wasn’t snapped up well before we got there. No self-respecting frat boy could look at this every day, and it was way out of style, decor-wise, for a design fetishist to live with.
The bathroom was a sea green tiled job, again with an overabundance of cabinets. Everything in it was original to the building when we moved in, until the toilet broke and was replaced and the old sea green one sat morosely behind the building for months. The bedroom was a basic white cube, but the floors were nice, and it was very cozy due to the landlord-controlled heat, which was cranked so high we had to open the windows in January.
The kitchen, well, the kitchen was a bit of a bummer. It had more of that white cut-out woodwork and a gruesome brown linoleum floor. Moving in, we opened the gigantic 1960s Frigidaire, which had been left unplugged, to find a desiccated, moldy ice cream cake in the freezer. Elvis’s litter box seemed awkward no matter where we put it, so it ended up in a corner of the kitchen. Only problem was, Elvis was so old that he couldn’t poop in the box anymore; he’d get in, hang his butt off the side, and poop on the floor instead. Returning from work often meant encountering the noxious remnants in the kitchen, mere feet away from human food. This kitchen was also interesting because every once in a while, someone we didn’t know would literally stumble in through the poorly secured back door to the building; James would usher these drunk people out, mostly kindly.
This was my first time living in a building whose landlord I would never meet—couldn’t meet, in fact, even if I wanted to. He had hired a management company, as these guys did, and spoke his veiled communications through them only. When Donald from the agency would call us, he’d refer to the landlord, in his hushed Boston accent, as “Mistah Kantos.” What was this, a James Bond code name? Anyway, mostly we just wrote checks to Mr. Kantos, rarely requiring his assistance. Only when raw sewage bubbled up into our bathroom sink, or when water started coming through our kitchen ceiling because the tenants upstairs had forgotten to shut off their faucet—only then did we deign to disturb Donald and, by extension, Mistah Kantos.
I had my adult-ish life and my biggish-city apartment, but felt restless. I was struggling to do well at my first editorial job; James started art school and within a few weeks decided it was a stupid waste of money for someone like him. He instead got a job at a web/video/graphic design startup, which sounded like an enormously lucky break, but they could barely pay the bills, payroll included. We had almost no one to hang out with, and the shine was just beginning to come off of our relationship, the love poetry phase having long since ended. I applied to grad school, planning to keep working full-time to keep my loans at a minimum, if I got in. I was stacking the deck against myself, pushing to work ever harder and put aside all of the rest.
MORAINE STREET
This was the last apartment we lived in before I bought the house, the place with the five male roommates and all their many wayward pubes; the place that launched the whole discussion of going back to Providence and buying PennHenge. These landlords, too, were elsewhere—they were rumored to be in New York—and Ted, the friendly but ineffectual property manager, kept things more or less in working condition.
Our place was in a sweet two-family house in the middle of what has since become the wildly gentrified neighborhood of Jamaica Plain in Boston. Moraine Street was friendly, with a communal, hippie vibe, and was just beginning to be the kind of place where every house had a Prius in the driveway and a double-wide stroller parked in the mudroom. We had a big tree in front of the house, and a few more behind, so it always felt shady and languid, protected from the worst of summer’s heat and noise. The wood door frames and trim had never been painted; they were stained darkly and made the interior feel serious, library-like. There was a white tiled kitchen and two porches—one just outside the kitchen and another small one off the third floor that was my personal “do not talk to me” zone. There were three bedrooms on the second floor and three on the third. My own room was on the upper level; it was long and narrow and had a slanted ceiling, so I could only stand up fully within a slim slice of the room. I jammed a hand-me-down midcentury desk in a corner, and put my bed in the center, rigged up a box fan to fit into the skylight above the bed, put my little TV at the end of the bed, and threw some clothes into a bureau. James and I slept in this room, but he had his own room downstairs, where he drew, and where he’d sit until 3:00 a.m. at his huge desktop Power Mac G4.
The separation had already begun. We just didn’t know it yet.
I started grad school the same year we moved into Moraine Street, and I was still working full time. I was gunning it—for exactly what, I couldn’t have told you, but I knew I could and would work harder than the next lady or guy. In a parody of collegiate exhaustion, I fell asleep on a book almost every night. My celiac symptoms were kicking into high gear, though I was years from seeking any kind of treatment. I read on the bus, on the subway, during my lunch breaks at work. I nodded off on the bus coming home from night classes. I loved it; I hated it. I felt alive; I felt hollow. James was irritable; he rightly complained about my packed schedule and the fact that we rarely did anything together. I pretty much said, “Tough shit. This is something I need to do. I know it sucks. It’ll be over in a year.” Delayed gratification was my modus operandi, and I forced him to live with it, too.
This was the state of affairs when, upon my finishing grad school, James and I nearly immediately began talking about moving, and then quickly about buying a house. None of the introspection that should have accompanied such a decision came close to happening. Instead, we stuffed down our uncertainties and burgeoning unhappiness and we decided to do the next thing, and do it now.
PENN STREET
I don’t blame Mistah Kantos and the Boston landlords for hiring professionals to handle their tenants; there’s a big difference between living in and managing my three-family house, and running a twelve-unit building or multiple properties in another state. It would be unfair of me to expect other landlords to oversee everything in their buildings, the way I’m able to. But I will say this: I take a personal interest because it’s my home, not my profession. I don’t want to build a characterless aspirin-tablet empire. I don’t care about maximizing my dollars, about raising rents and getting off without doing much.
Someday, when I leave PennHenge—and who knows when that will be—I hope that whomever ends up with it can see that however weird it is, however kaleidoscopic the paint job, however out of control the decor, however overgrown the backyard, I loved this absurd house and made it part of me.
Even looking back at my circuitous route, the dots do somehow connect between the trailer park, all those apartments, and PennHenge. I’ve lived in unconventional homes and have been well-suited to them since I was a kid. I liked the social component of living with friends and didn’t want to give that up just to find the stability of having my own home. I like self-reliance; I feel at ease counting on myself to get things done. Financially, I never signed on for more than I could handle, a lesson that came directly from my parents and was instilled from birth. I always pushed for cheap and livable rather than pricey and posh. I know I can’t actually afford my own taste, so I don’t even try.
In structure and in spirit, though, PennHenge could not be more different from the house my parents live in. That is partially by my design and partially subconscious, an effect of my yearning for a less restricted life. In over a decade of my owning and living in this house, my parents have never visited. Not one time. They live forty minutes away.
When I talk about the house with them, I have no idea what they picture. They must have Google street-viewed it, checked the particulars on the real estate sites, but other than that they have no basis upon which to visualize my stories.
When I bought the house, I knew they were worried about me. Though they kept their displeasure well contained, it was clear they thought I paid too much, that the level of upkeep would be insurmountable and the neighborhood threatening. At the beginning, I asked them to visit, but told them I needed some time to settle in first. When I brought it up again, maybe six months later, they seemed to have gone cold on it. They hated Providence—as they hate any and all cities—and didn’t seem to be in a hurry to drive “all the way” here. I was flustered, and felt mildly rejected, but I was also quietly relieved by their apathetic reaction. If they never visited, I would never have to explain why this stair tread was loose or why that screen was ripped. I wouldn’t have to cop to being the dawdling and imperfect homeowner that I am. Their home is so tidy, so stable. Nothing is in disrepai
r. I didn’t think I was capable of unapologetically presenting them with my messy reality and just letting them call it as they saw it. I felt a need to protect them from knowing just how much of a heap PennHenge was; the other side of that coin was a comfortable insulation from their judgment. This place would never be a model of efficiency, cleanliness, or economy. I couldn’t take what I was pretty sure would be their unintentionally obvious hatred of my new home, because it might feel like an indictment of the life I had chosen.
They didn’t come over that year, or the next, and we slid into a groove of just not talking about a visit as an earthly possibility. I’ve always told them the tales of PennHenge, though I usually offer up an ever-so-slightly shinier and less weed-laden version than the real one. They know about my struggles and my successes. They know about my tenants and their relative oddities. They await the strawberries from my garden every year, and they give me gifts for the house. They’ve watched me fashion a pretty happy life from this initially questionable base of operations; they’ve watched me grow less anxious and more capable as a result.
I love my tiny family and want them to know the truth of my life. I want to stand up in front of them and say, “This is not what you would choose, but it’s my constancy. This is not what you would choose, but it’s mine and I have to love it and I actually do love it.” And I would not apologize for the things that are dirty or broken or improperly aligned—either within the house or within myself—but instead I would say, “Come take a look. I think I’ve finally settled in.”
Flip of Fools
I know something is wrong, deep down, before I do anything to actualize the thought. The usual springtime rhythms of our little side-by-side plots aren’t picking up the way I’ve grown accustomed to. Normally at this time of year, mid-April, Angelo and Fiorella and I are on either side of our splintered wooden fence, readying our gardens for the growing season. We pick and snip last season’s roots from the dirt, dried as they are from months of snow cover and cold. We break off hardened stalks from the perennials scattered throughout our beds, prepping for the pliable buds that are beginning to part the soil. We patch our hoses and scatter our compost. I’ve been intermittently at work in this manner for a couple of weeks, when it’s warm enough, relishing the sun and the birdsong. I haven’t seen Angelo or Fiorella, and I feel myself refiexively glancing at their house every few minutes. It looks shut down, still in winter mode. Their aging Ford is in the driveway. Over several days my concern intensifies, until I’m looking up at every sound, hoping to hear their banter, hoping to see them loping around, their goofy, yipping dog close behind.