by Lisa Tognola
It happened the summer I turned eight. We were at a beach in Boca Raton, Florida. The wind was kicking up, and people were folding chairs and umbrellas and gathering their belongings.
“Kids, let’s pack it up, it’s getting windy,” Mom said.
I nodded, barely looking up from the arched double door I was carving into the sand.
“Janie, honey,” she said. “Let’s go.”
I looked up from the sand. “But it’s not done.” I was building a fortress with a turret and four protective walls.
“We need to get cleaned up for dinner.” She picked up the last beach towel, shook out the sand, and tucked it under her arm.
“Can I stay a little longer?” I sat there, waiting to see if she’d say yes.
She paused. She looked toward the hotel, and then back at me. I could tell she was considering it.
“Please, Mom?”
“All right, you can stay ten more minutes. But then come straight back to the room.”
“Okay.” I smiled; I couldn’t believe she’d said yes! “I will.”
My castle needed one last accessory. A mother-of-pearl sea-shell caught my eye. It would make a perfect door. I picked up the mollusk and filled in the missing piece.
Not wanting to watch my carefully crafted castle succumb to the tide, I stood up to leave—and, with a sudden, sickening drop of my heart, realized that I didn’t know our room number.
I frantically scanned the beach, searching for my parents, though I knew they were back at the hotel. As I looked around I saw only strangers—kids carrying plastic buckets and dragging their towels behind them, their parents prodding them along. How will I find them?
The concierge found me wandering through the hotel lobby, red-faced and sobbing. He took me to the front desk and wrote some numbers down, and together we rode the elevators and proceeded to visit every Wolf registered at the hotel. There were four. It seemed odd to me that each time a guest opened the door, he said, “Is this your child?” instead of asking me, “Is this your parent?”
My parents’ room was the last door he knocked on.
I never discussed this incident with Dr. Sosa.
With each move forward with my mouse, I worked on learning coping skills. After weeks of taking baby steps toward independence and accomplishing such goals as visiting friends for longer and longer periods of time (for a reward: a new toy each week and the promise of a kitten at the very end), I started to feel better. When my mother said, “I will always come back,” I started to believe her.
Eventually, I stopped going to Dr. Sosa. The only thing I missed was the Hershey’s bars.
CHAPTER 6: FINDING LEXINGTON
Raymond Ave, Rye – October 2005
Ihanded our real estate agent, Betsy, a list of criteria that eliminated any homes situated near power lines, double-yellow-lined streets, or public buildings. “Just to warn you, Wim and I are kind of finicky,” I’d told her the first time we met.
“I’ve been in the real estate business for thirty-five years,” she answered. “Don’t worry, I’ve seen it all.”
Betsy wore her brown hair in a pageboy style, only instead of the bangs being blunt they were lightly feathered away from her face—practical, professional. Although a born-and-raised New Yorker, she seemed to have a Midwest sensibility: proud, hardworking, the kind of woman who went about her business without much fanfare or drama. She wore sensible shoes and called soda “pop.” I imagined her living in a house with a wide porch decorated with potted geraniums, situated amid endless fields of corn.
We weren’t looking for a Rockefeller estate. All we wanted was a slightly larger home with modern amenities like a two-car garage, a kitchen island, and a mudroom. We wanted an easy commute to Manhattan and good schools. Okay, maybe we did want it all. But no more so than anyone else did.
A few days after our initial meeting, she called us. “I’ve got one I think you’ll really like.” She read the listing to me out loud: “Magnificent four-bedroom, three full baths, newly renovated kitchen, beautifully landscaped property, and more.”
There’s gotta be a catch, I told myself. How can a house in our price range be that perfect?
The next day, I found myself moving, sleuth-like, through the newly renovated colonial, waiting, wondering when the major defect would rear its ugly head. I made it through the house pleasantly surprised. Then I stepped out to the backyard. A five-hundred-foot tall industrial water tank, painted green, towered over the backyard like the Jolly Green Giant, dwarfing the house that had looked mansion-like just minutes before.
Some version of this happened at house after house. Everything would look good until, bam, we’d discover a problem with location or layout—problems that could not be fixed with a hammer and nails.
We decided to focus on streets instead of houses, figuring we couldn’t change geography but we could always alter a house. Country lanes with rambling homes charmed me. Wim preferred prim-looking streets with more conservative colonial homes. We scanned every neighborhood in our zip code. We surveyed territory on foot, by car, and via satellite. Wim had become obsessed with Google Earth and the spy superpower its sophisticated technology lent him. With the click of a mouse he could observe properties from fifty thousand feet above sea level. An aerial view of what looked like a shoebox from the sky enabled him to assess the property in relation to its surroundings: its proximity to other homes, schools, and Ruby’s, which was our favorite eatery. Sizing up our neighbors’ lots became a full-fledged spectator sport.
“What kind of real estate espionage are you up to now?” I asked one evening, glancing over Wim’s shoulder.
“See for yourself,” he said.
“What?” I leaned in closer to the screen. My eyes widened at the words Wim had just typed. “Spying on my wife and enjoying the view …”
He laughed and drew me onto his lap. We exchanged a warm kiss, and then I placed my hands on the keyboard and typed, “The view’s better in the bedroom …”
If our criteria weren’t already strict enough, the more we scrutinized every street, road, lane, and alley in Rye, the more our differing personal preferences became apparent. Ultimately, a Green Acres dilemma ensued, where I was the pitchfork-bearer who longed for a bucolic setting and Wim was the slicker, pining for the city. Nothing fit the bill: it’s too rural; it’s too crowded; it’s too close to town; it’s far too remote. How could we ever find a house if we couldn’t even agree on a street?
Then Lexington Avenue emerged. I had driven up Lexington Avenue many times over the past ten years and dreamt of owning a home somewhere along its long, gently winding, oak tree–lined road. On my fantasy drives, I would cruise its hilly surroundings, reminiscent of the neighborhood where I grew up, envisioning a life there.
Lexington Avenue offered a glimmer of city, with its pedestrian hustle and bustle and proximity to town, and also the wooded flavor of the countryside. Its Cape Cods, colonials, and Tudors were varied and unique, and widely spaced but close enough to borrow a cup of sugar. It was a wider street than most; many of the houses were on park-like quarter- to half-acre lots, immense by Borough standards. And larger properties meant larger setbacks, so the houses of Lexington Avenue stood gracefully behind expansive green lawns that lent a sophisticated air to the street. The houses were big—many in the three thousand to four thousand square foot range—but they weren’t forbiddingly grand. They were simple, classic, and refined.
All of these features made the street special. They also made it sought after. “We couldn’t afford a tree house on Lexington Avenue,” Wim told me early in our search. For many, the street was untouchable, which is why we had eliminated it from our house hunt to begin with. “Homes rarely come on the market on that street. Many families root in and stay for a lifetime,” Betsy had said during our first meeting, prompting a sudden flashback of me as a young girl, standing inside my little yellow playhouse and telling my friends, “You can’t come in.” Now I was the one bein
g shut out.
Perhaps simply because houses on Lexington Avenue were out of our reach, we wanted more than ever to live on that street.
Betsy was driving me up Lexington Avenue in her gray Honda CR-V and supplying me with background information on two homes that had just come on the market. Still marveling at our stroke of good luck, I struggled to turn off my mind’s chatter: What did Betsy say? A divorce? A relocation? I wonder where the owners are moving. Is there someplace better that I don’t know about? I tried to capture every last detail to share with Wim when he returned home from work. I leaned in, straining to hear Betsy’s every word, as if this were a military mission and my life depended on it.
“The street is unique in that, like the town, it’s divided,” Betsy was saying as she dropped her visor to shield her eyes against the bright October sun streaming through the trees. “There’s lower Lexington and then upper Lexington, where the street becomes one-way.”
And, I noted to myself, where the houses become much larger.
Betsy continued up Lexington at a frustratingly casual pace; I had to suppress the urge to thrust my body forward in an effort to gain momentum, to accelerate the car beyond snail speed. Just about the time I was considering opening the door and running to the first house I saw with a FOR SALE sign, she pulled up to a pretty colonial.
Within minutes, I could see that it wasn’t for us. It was old. It was cramped. We could get that by staying in our current house.
We moved on to the next house, but there too I only needed one glimpse. It was old. It was cramped. And for what they were asking, we could buy a fantasy island in the New Zealand Marlborough Sounds, complete with house, two beaches, and our own private ecosystem.
“Do you think we’re being unreasonable?” I asked Wim a few months later as we got ready for bed. We’d just seen and rejected yet another cramped house that had come on the market on Lexington Avenue. “We went from considering the entire Eastern seaboard and Japan to obsessing over a single street. What if the right house never comes on the market? There are only so many houses on one street. We could wait forever.”
“It won’t be forever.”
“Should we branch out a little?”
“I’m not living in the Township.”
“Well, what about Elmhurst? That’s in the Borough.”
“We’re going to live on Lexington Avenue,” was all he said.
I smiled inside, moved by his sudden resolve to pursue our dream location. But as I thought about the odds stacked against us, my smile faded.
I’d just come off a Costco run and was standing in my kitchen, contemplating where to store the giant packages of Bounty piled on the countertop, when I noticed the blinking red light on our answering machine. I pressed the button.
“Betsy here. There’s a house that’s come available on Lexington Avenue. It’s just what you’ve been waiting for.”
We’d been house-hunting for eight months.
The distance from our current home on Raymond Avenue to the house on Lexington Avenue was only two miles, but my eagerness to get there made it feel like light years passed before Betsy stopped the car in front of a white Cape Cod.
“Here we are,” she said.
I let out a wistful sigh. It sat like an old shelved book, waiting to be taken down and blown free of dust.
I was smitten with the house immediately, but what impressed me even more was the location. It was close enough to the street to feel connected, yet far enough back to feel protected. The house sat partially hidden behind an ornamental tree wider than it was tall, its low, spreading branches offering a spectacular display of creamy white, star-shaped flowers. My mind drifted back to memories of the dogwood trees my dad used to point out on our walks.
This time I didn’t bound out of the car and sprint to the door. I remained seated for a moment, taking it all in, imagining myself pulling into the driveway each day, coming home to all this.
Betsy punched in the code on the lock box, and I thought about how many times I had stood in this same position, waiting, hoping for the right house. All the places I’d seen suddenly blended together into a single generic house, like the green plastic buildings I’d collected playing Monopoly as a child. I bounced impatiently on my toes as Betsy turned the key and led me in the front door.
My heart dropped a little when we entered a dark foyer with a ceiling so low my ten-year-old could have touched it. The six-foot ceiling carried as far as I could see.
Keep an open mind, I reminded myself. But the farther in I got, the further my mind squeezed shut. Outdated dark wood paneling lined the den walls. The kitchen had been frozen in time since the 1970s. I cringed at the dull laminate cabinets and old Formica countertops.
“The kitchen could use some updating,” Betsy was saying, “but the house has good bones.”
The house was literally skeletal, void of furniture, as the owners had already moved out of state for a new job. Vacant and soulless, it was nothing but a shell, reminding me of my children’s hermit crabs, who shed and abandoned their too-small casings before moving into new, larger ones.
Upstairs the only sign of life were pigs, litters of them, on wallpapers, shower curtains, and cabinet knobs. “Looks like the owner had a penchant for pigs,” Betsy said—but beyond that, there was little more she could offer. It was a standard four-bedroom house with outdated bathrooms and no architectural interest.
Except … “Oh, wow,” I said, looking out the window of the master bedroom. There was a magnificently tall, high-branching beech tree—stout trunk and smooth, silver-gray bark that glistened in the sun—just outside. But it was what was behind the beech that really made me gasp. Stretching in both directions was a wooded hollow—layers of trees, giant oaks that looked like they’d been there since Adam, stretching as far as the eye could see. The landscape was lush and green and fertile and gave the impression of being wild.
Betsy walked up and stopped next to me. “There’s a dell back there that runs down the entire length of the street.”
As I stood, gazing at the vista, I couldn’t wait to bring Wim to see it. “I think Wim is going to love it,” I said.
The next morning, a Saturday, Wim and I lay in bed, already discussing the house. While we had mulled over the idea of moving for months, it hadn’t seemed real until now. Here was a home for sale in an ideal location. One we could remodel and customize to suit our lives.
I got up and looked out at the big oak that shaded our bedroom, wanting to open the windows to let in the breeze. The noise from the Department of Public Works, located just behind our house, made me keep it shut.
“Think about all the features we’ve dreamed of having—a Jacuzzi tub, a huge shower, a master bedroom fireplace, a big walk-in closet,” I said. “It would be like being in a vacation home all the time. Can’t you picture yourself putting your suit on in the morning in a spacious area instead of the tiny space you have outside your closet now?” More space would be good for our kids, our minds, our marriage.
He nodded. “It would be nice to have a closet deep enough that I don’t have to smash my dress shirts to close the door.”
“Yeah, one of those big dressing areas like the ones you see in magazines, with closets that look like furniture. And built-in shoe racks.”
“We could have a big ottoman in the center where I could sit down and put on my shoes,” he said.
“I can just picture you sitting on a leather ottoman under a sparkling chandelier, surrounded by mahogany closets, putting on your fancy Italian shoes,” I said, relishing our shared fantasy. “You deserve it, you know.” And I meant it. I gave him a look of admiration and appreciation. A look that, I knew, I didn’t give him often enough.
“Can we really afford this house?” I asked later that day, attempting to be practical.
“The price is ridiculously high. And we’ll have to do a huge remodel.” He frowned.
I braced myself for disappointment and waited for him to hand ov
er the bad news.
“But I think it’s worth the investment,” he said.
My heart danced a little jig. “Are you sure?”
“If anything happens to my job, we could manage here without any dramatic changes to our lifestyle. We’re giving up that security by moving.”
It was an honest answer, but not the one I’d hoped for.
“We don’t have to do this,” I said. But deep down, I knew we did. Never mind that he’d expressed reluctance from the beginning, that he prioritized financial security over spacious living. I’d convinced myself that this move was necessary for all our sakes.
CHAPTER 7: READY FOR TAKEOFF
Rosemead, CA – December 1994
Wim told me his news over steaks at Clearman’s North Woods Inn, our special-occasion restaurant, though he hadn’t yet revealed the occasion. The steakhouse was a favorite of ours, built in log-cabin style with dark wood reminiscent of the Swiss Alps. There was even fake snow covering the roof.
“I was waiting for the right time to tell you,” he said.
I scooted my chair in closer. “Tell me what?” “Morgan Stanley’s closing the LA office. They’ve offered me a job in New York.”
New York? My mind started racing. I pictured throngs of people fighting their way down littered sidewalks, taxi drivers honking their horns relentlessly.
“Are you really considering taking this job?”
“I am taking the job.”
I didn’t even know where to begin. Other than New York, I had only a vague notion of the East Coast. It was a seventh-grade civics lesson on Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock. It was a bunch of old states with a few that happened to begin with “New.” It was where the ocean was Atlantic, not Pacific. It was home of the Boston Massacre and witch trials. I felt suddenly out of breath.