The Last Beach Bungalow

by Jennie Nash

  Rick smiled and took my hand. He was, in fact, something of a genius when it came to designing and building houses for our particular microclimate. He used copious amounts of glass, designing whole walls that could swing open to let in the light, but those same walls shut tight as a drum against the sea breeze and the fog. He liked sandblasted wood that tied the interior to the textures and colors of the beach and granite in warm red and orange tones.

  He presented me with the design for our new house on the first day of the new millennium, which was just three weeks after my mastectomy. I was still bandaged and sore, still fragile and sad. I was afraid to get off the couch. He came out of his office on that day and called Jackie out to sit with us. She was only ten. He was holding a roll of paper tied with a red bow.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Do you remember what you said to me the night you were diagnosed?”

  I could, in fact, remember everything I said with excruciating detail. That day was like a shiny coin that I could pull out of my pocket and twirl in my fingers. There, etched into one side, were the exact expressions on people’s faces, the precise tone of the doctor’s declaration, the words I uttered to Rick when I called, hysterical, to tell him the astounding news. On the other side was the way I begged Rick to call my mother because I couldn’t bear to hear her shock or receive her sympathy, the way it appeared as if everyone walking down the street was suddenly so fragile, and Jackie’s endless questions—where did the cancer come from; how will the doctors get it out; will I get it, too; are you going to die?—and the way I patiently answered each one as if I knew what I was talking about.

  “I said a lot of things that night,” I said.

  Jackie piped in: “She said you should find a new wife and that I shouldn’t be afraid to let someone else be my mom.”

  Rick squeezed Jackie’s hand and smiled at her—a smile full of obvious sorrow that a ten-year-old would have a memory like that in her head—then turned back toward me. “You said that it would be a shame to have to die in such a shabby house.”

  I nodded. “I do remember saying that.”

  “You said that we’d waited too long to build our dream house.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said, “because we had such big plans when we moved in here.”

  “And I’ve spent far too much time building other people’s dream houses,” he said. “Now it’s our turn.” He handed me the paper.

  I slipped off the bow, knowing exactly what I would find inside. Blue lines crisscrossing blue paper, outlining a big, open kitchen, an office with built-in everything and a huge master bath oriented perfectly to capture the morning sun. Glass would be called out for the entire wall facing the ocean and sandblasted beams for the entryway. There would be bamboo floors, granite counters, tumbled marble tile in a kitchen with hand-rubbed oversized cabinets. He had done all this work while I was in the hospital, while I was waiting for toxic chemicals to drip into my veins, while I was throwing up, while I was asleep.

  “Are you serious?” I asked quietly.

  Rick nodded. He leaned down, buried his face in my neck and held on to the arm on my good side. “I love you so much,” he said. When he lifted his face it was wet, and the look on Jackie’s face was one of absolute terror. Her dad hadn’t said one word about building a house before it was too late. He hadn’t said one single thing about building a house as a fortress against an uncertain future. But her dad had cried. He didn’t have to speak.

  When I was done with chemo, many months later, Rick submitted the plans to the city. We lived in an area that requires you to flag all additions and remodels for six months to give the neighbors time to complain if you’re blocking their views. We sailed through that trial, but turned up an engineering problem on the back property line and had to build a retaining wall before we could proceed with the house itself. Grief delayed us next. Rick’s parents were sideswiped by a semitruck on their way home from a Dodger game. Their car flipped, it rolled, and they were dead by the time the paramedics came.

  It was one of those accidents you hear about on rush-hour radio with numbing regularity, but you never think that someone’s parents died; you always just think of how jammed the freeway’s going to be. Rick’s older brother, Dennis, got the call from the California Highway Patrol, but Dennis lived five hundred miles away. It was Rick who went to identify the bodies, and Rick who sat down with the minister to pick the hymns and prayers for the memorial service and Rick who ushered his parents’ wills through a year of probate. By the time we were whole enough again to think about working on the house, it was nearly four years from the day when Rick gave me the plans. And now here it was, a week until we moved back in, just a week before the Christmas of Jackie’s junior year in high school, the week I was five-years free of cancer, and we were sitting in a hospital waiting room just like we had before.

  “Thank you,” Rick said, dismissing my praise about his smoothness with clients and my fears about the house. “And don’t worry. You’re going to adore this house.” He kissed my hand, and then leaned over to pick up Car and Driver off the waiting room coffee table.

  A minute later, I said, “I think Jackie has a boyfriend,” but Rick didn’t hear me. He was so engrossed in a three-year -old article about Toyota’s plans for world domination that I could have started belting out the National Anthem and he wouldn’t have heard me. “I think they’re pretty serious,” I continued, “or at least physical. I think that’s it. I think they’re physical.” I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. When I glanced over, I saw the fat lady staring at me.

  “You talkin’ to me?” she demanded.

  “No.” I shrugged, waving my arm in the air toward Rick. “My husband.”

  “Good,” she said. “ ’Cause I don’t want to be knowin’ nothin’ about nobody’s boyfriend.”

  FRIDAY

  In the early years of parenting, you’ll give anything for twenty minutes free and clear of your kids. You pray for nighttime, when the noise will stop, the hunger will stop, the accidents will stop, the incessant questions about the moon, the sky, the ocean, the cat next door, the cow on TV, the telephone and toy in the bottom of the cereal box—will stop. But in the teen years, you’ll give anything for twenty minutes in the same room with your kids. You’ll pay a ransom for a conversation, a bribe for just a little time. I imagined that Jackie would stay home to nurse her broken finger, which meant I could have a whole day with her. My work could wait. We’d go get smoothies, do some Christmas shopping. I still didn’t know what to get her. There was nothing she didn’t have, nothing she seemed to need. A few hours walking through the shops in Redondo Village might give me a clue.

  When she was little, I used to love Christmas. I saved every single one of the letters she carefully wrote out to Santa, about wanting a real wooden train with a tunnel, or the red patent leather shoes for her American Girl doll, because they were requests I could so easily meet. For just a few hundred dollars, I could make her world complete. After church on Christmas Eve, Rick and I would stay up late wrapping all the presents we’d amassed and constructing some tangible proof that Santa had actually come to our house. We scattered ashes from the fireplace, kicked oatmeal around the front yard as if the reindeers had gotten their snouts into the food we’d laid out. We’d eat the sugar cookies, drink the milk, fill the stockings and wait to be awakened by Jackie’s squeals of delight.

  Christmas began to change when Jackie turned six. That was the year she decided she wanted a dog. It was no longer enough to talk to all the dogs we passed when we rode bikes through our neighborhood, or to play with the dogs whose owners snuck them down to the beach to play in the surf. It was no longer enough that other people’s dogs would immediately come to her and lick her hand or bring her a ball to toss. She wanted a dog of her own—one who would sleep at the foot of her bed and wait for her when she came home from school and sit with her while she read. She asked Santa for a dog, but this was one thing I coul
dn’t deliver.

  I can’t stand dogs. I can’t stand the way they jump all over you and lick you and never swerve from their high-demand status. I hate the way people treat their dogs like children, with hand-fixed meals and veterinarians who make house calls. I once read a Billy Collins poem about a dog—how the dog trots out the door every morning with only a brown coat and blue collar and how this is such a fine example of a life without encumbrance and how the dog would be a paragon of earthly detachment if it weren’t for the fact that the poet is the dog’s god. That was the last line: “If only I were not her god.” I remember thinking, That’s it. That’s exactly it. I couldn’t get Jackie a dog for Christmas because I would have to be the dog’s god, and that was something I couldn’t be.

  So Santa brought soft stuffed Huskies and pug-nosed mutts, a whole veterinarian set with fifteen kinds of plastic dogs, and one year, a life-sized Saint Bernard posed in a sitting position with his tongue hanging out, but it was never enough. Jackie began to get angry at Santa. She began to wonder why he didn’t listen, why he was so mean, why he brought Julia Bertucci a King Charles Cavalier cocker spaniel puppy on Christmas morning when he only brought Jackie a calendar that featured a picture of the same thing.

  What, after a certain point, can you say? You tell the truth and then Christmas becomes something else entirely.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked, when Jackie came out of her room the morning after the incident with the broken finger. It was 7:00 A.M. and she was dressed for school: jeans, flip-flops, two layered T-shirts, eyeliner, lipgloss.

  “Fine,” she said, giving me a wiggly-fingered wave.

  “You’re OK to go to school?”

  She shrugged her shoulders—why not?—then said, “We’re finishing our card sale today,” as if this fact made it obvious why she had to go. The cards were part of her midterm project in history. She and three other girls had been conducting a lunchtime fund-raiser. For three dollars, students and teachers could purchase a holiday card, an envelope, postage and the address of a soldier in Iraq. There was a big bucket of pens at the table, and right there, without having to even think about it, they could send a holiday greeting to a soldier overseas. With the money they made from the cards, the girls were going to buy chocolate bars to send with each box of greetings. So far, they’d collected 250 pieces of mail.

  “I can come pick you up before practice,” I said.

  “I’m staying for practice.”

  “Jackie, don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I can run, I can do sit-ups. The doctor said that if it doesn’t hurt in a week, I can hit, so I’ll probably be able to play the Holiday Classic.”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. It’s hard to argue with a child who is a patriotic, vegetarian, straight-A student who exercises every day and cares about the working poor. It’s hard to argue when you feel as if your child has her life more together than you do. “Fine,” I said, “but promise me you’ll call if it starts to hurt.”

  “I promise,” she said, in a sing-song voice. She gave me a quick hug and then waltzed out the door.

  After Jackie left, I pulled the stack of pilfered papers out of my purse. I slipped the Town & Country piece into a folder marked “Ideas” and spread the newspaper ad out on my desk. Who would sell a house like that in a contest? And what did it mean, Bring your stories? I did a Google search on “house contests, Los Angeles, beach cities,” and came up with a list of organizations that had raffled off million-dollar homes as fund-raising stunts. For the price of a raffle ticket— $150—you could gain the chance to win a home in Palos Verdes, Santa Barbara or Malibu. Farther down the Google list, there was a series of entries about a contest for a Manhattan Beach house that had ended in a lawsuit when it was revealed that the winner was the husband of the owner’s niece. On page three, there was an entry about a guy in Venice Beach who was going to raze a nine-hundred-square-foot bungalow built in 1906 and was offering it free to anyone who would move it, serious inquiries only.

  I remembered driving North to the Boundary Waters one summer when I was a kid, living in Minnesota. We had a station wagon that year, and I liked to count the other station wagons we passed along the way. As I watched from the backseat we rolled by a flatbed truck whose cargo was half a house. The house had been sliced completely in half, like a cake, and I could see inside the walls and the floor, under the skin of that house. I held my breath until we were completely past, and then I turned around and craned my neck to watch it behind us.

  “Did you see that?” I asked. “There was a house on a truck. They cut it in half.”

  “You’re such a doofus,” my brother said, shoving me in the stomach with his elbow. He was blessed with the ability to read in the car and had his head buried in a comic book.

  “They unbolt it from the foundation,” my dad explained, “and lift it right off for transportation.” He was a manager at a company that manufactured furniture. The year before that, he had been a manager at a company that made china plates and cups. In a few years, he would be a manager for something else and we would be moving again, leaving our house and whatever friends I’d managed to make when I finally figured out what kind of jeans the kids wore to school in that town.

  “You can take your house with you when you move?” I asked. My heart was pounding in my chest, my throat, my ears. We had left a house with an attic playroom and another with a three-car garage. My room in the house in Minnesota had two small windows that looked out over a steeply pitched roof. The windows were like two eyes that looked out onto the world. I loved to sit at those windows and read late into the night—stories about other girls in other houses in other places in other times. There were little houses on prairies and big houses in cities, houses with servants and houses with curtains that could be made into dresses. Sometimes I drew sketches of the houses so that I could get a better idea how far away the kitchen was from the dining room, or where, exactly, a big hallway led. Moving to the next place where Dad had a job—a better job! more responsibility!—wouldn’t be half as bad if I could take that room with me.

  “I suppose you could take a house with you,” my mother chimed in, “though it’s just wallboard and wood. I don’t know why anyone would want to.”

  I was around thirteen years old, and it was the first instance where I knew without a shadow of a doubt that my mother was wrong. The possibility of her flawed nature had occurred to me before that moment, of course—sometimes around the topic of blue jeans and hairstyles, but most often around the topic of my dad. He watched a lot of hockey. He took frequent business trips that seemed to center around his secretary. No matter what job he took, there invariably materialized an unfair boss, a boss who was a jerk, a boss my dad couldn’t tolerate. I wouldn’t understand until I was much older that my dad was a philandering flake, but at thirteen, I understood that my mom was putting up with a lot for what she seemed to be getting out of her marriage. The moment she said that a house was nothing more than wallboard and wood—a shelter, a lean-to that was easy to leave behind—was the moment when I started to hate her for it.

  I left my Google search and picked up the phone and called Vanessa. “Have you heard about that beach bungalow they’re selling in a contest?”

  “I understand that the owner’s lived there for forty-nine years,” Vanessa said. “Her husband just died and the daughter is moving her up to San Francisco. She agreed to go so long as she could find the right owner for her house.”

  “There’s something very cool about it.”

  “She picked the wrong year though,” Vanessa said. “The market’s too hot.”

  “Why should that matter?”

  “Did you ever hear of the Dutch Tulip craze?”

  “I can’t say that I have.”

  “The richest men in Holland fought over these dirty little root balls that could produce a flower that was just the right red or yellow. Huge fortunes were made and lost, but the thing is that those men couldn’t ha
ve cared less about the actual flowers. They weren’t gardeners. They just liked the art of the deal and the promise of making huge amounts of money in ridiculously short periods of time. We’ve got the same thing here with houses. People will do anything for the right house.”

  “Maybe that’s exactly why she’s doing this right now. To rise above all that.”

  “How is she going to tell who’s just spinning a yarn about loving her house? There’s no way to know. Someone told me the other day about this couple who won a bidding war on a house because they convinced the sellers how much they loved the kitchen—how they’d use the two ovens to bake their special holiday cookies and how they’d have other couples over for gourmet dinner parties in which the guests would slice and season the fresh ahi steaks at the big central island right before they were seared. Three weeks after escrow closed, they bulldozed the lot.”

  “Maybe the bungalow owner has a special bullshit detector,” I said.

  “You know what I like about you, April? You don’t have a cynical bone in your body.”

  As if to prove Vanessa’s point, I immediately called an editor at Metropolitan Home. Without even developing a story pitch, I just picked up the phone and dialed. “There’s a house in L.A. being sold by a widow in a contest,” I said. “It’s an old beach bungalow worth several million dollars. All she wants is three hundred thousand dollars from the right buyer. A buyer with the right soul. It’s a great feature story.”

  “Californians are seriously strange about their real estate,” she said.

  “Quirky was the word I was thinking of.”

  “Too quirky for us.”

  “It’s got great visuals,” I said. “It’s a perfectly preserved early Craftsman bungalow standing all alone on a street of McMansions. There are fruit trees all over the yard.”

  “Try This Old House. Or Sunset.”

  “Sunset will probably want to scout my house. They’d love the glass wall concept. They’re not going to do an old beach bungalow.”