The Mighty Queens of Freeville

by Amy Dickinson

  Nasir proffered a ten-dollar bill out the window. “He gave me too much,” he said.

  “Oh no. Keep it,” I told him. “You’ve definitely earned it.”

  I reached into the cab, grabbed one more tissue for the road, and went inside.

  When I got upstairs to our apartment, its emptiness hit me like a wave. The phone rang. It was my ex. “I just want you to know that everything is fine; we’re about to board now. Emily—hey; do you want to say hi? Let me lift her up.” I heard the airport announcements blaring and the sound of the pay phone’s receiver fumbling as he passed it to Emily. I had never heard my daughter’s voice on the phone before—I had only experienced her as I thought I should—in person.

  “Hi, Mommy!” she said.

  “Hi, honey. Are you ready to go? Are you going to have fun?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when will I come get you?”

  “In three days.”

  “That’s right; in three days.”

  FOUR

  Nothing’s Too Much Trouble

  ON EASTER SUNDAY when Emily was in first grade, Rachel and I walked through Freeville, talking, as we frequently do, about what should happen next. We are schemers, she and I, and have spent a lifetime trading ideas. There was a time during our childhood when our discussions focused on how to leave home, but it turns out we were no match for our hometown’s pull. After graduate school, Rachel had never managed to live more than ten miles away from Freeville—and now we talked about how I could come at least partway back too.

  Rachel and I stopped in the middle of Union Street, right about in the spot where a painted yellow line would run down the street if it had a lane divider, which it does not. A few local house cats were lounging in the middle of the street, lying on the warm blacktop and switching their tails. The street was quiet and without traffic, as usual.

  “How about that one?” Rachel asked. She was pointing straight across the intersection with Main Street at a small house fronted by a for sale sign. The sign had popped one of its fasteners and was dangling and swinging in the sharp spring breeze like a man in trouble.

  “Eeeew,” I blurted out.

  The house was tall and narrow. A cinder block chimney ran up its front. Two small casement windows poked through the upper floor like bloodshot eyes; a bowfronted and crookedly placed faux bay window stretched across part of the bottom floor. The house looked like a child’s drawing of a house if the child had no talent and was in a hurry. It was the house equivalent of a guy who had gone on a bender and been kicked out of rehab. If this house had parents, they would have disowned it and moved to Buffalo, leaving no forwarding address. Homely in the extreme, it had languished for two years in the dregs of the perennially pillow soft local housing market.

  The little house stood next to the far more handsome home where my Aunt Millie now lived, which was built by my great-grandfather in 1886 and had been occupied by family members ever since. A generation ago, the homely house that was now for sale had also been in our family for a time. When I was a very young child, my great aunt Jane had lived there, but after her death it had passed through several neglectful and abusive owners, like an unlucky character in an Edith Wharton novel.

  Not only was this house not the house of my dreams, but I’d also ridden past it on my bike forty-seven times a day during the entirety of my childhood and had never even really looked at it.

  However, this house cost $58,000, so I decided to buy it.

  FOR MUCH OF my life I have been afflicted with material and personal desires that some members of my family might decry as “fancy pants.” Owning a second home fit into the version of myself I’d created during childhood, when my fantasy life involved going to the barn and placing hay bales in a depressingly Hee Haw approximation of Johnny Carson’s set and pretending that I was both the host and the most fascinating guest of the legendary late-night talk show. With no specific notion about how I would get there, I knew that I was destined to live in New York City (a place I had seen only in the movies), with a second home in a compatible setting. For part of the year, I would live in a place like Kycuit.

  When I was a kid and Nelson Rocke feller was the flamboyant, bell-bottomed governor of New York State, I read about Kycuit in Life magazine. Kycuit was where Governor Rocke feller went when he needed to clear his head. Situated on two hundred acres in the Hudson Valley, the grand estate of the Rocke feller family featured art galleries, fireplaces big enough to walk into, sculpture gardens, terraced flower beds, Hudson River views, a coach house filled with classic automobiles, guest quarters, and a structure delightfully called the Temple of Aphrodite.

  In my imaginings, I would marry a distant Rocke feller cousin, preferably one who wasn’t too messed up and who looked somewhat like Donny Osmond, and we would have use of the Rocke feller estate as a second home. We wouldn’t even need to stay in the main house; we’d be perfectly happy in one of the guest cottages. My vision of life as a grown-up was very specific on this score. I would live at Kycuit.

  I left Freeville at seventeen, but my leave-taking didn’t seem to take. I always seemed to travel in the same direction, even when I didn’t specifically intend to—my personal compass was permanently set toward home.

  During college in Washington, I could force my homesickness into long remissions, but then it would surface and I’d board a Greyhound bus and make it halfway home from DC to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where my mother would drive three hours to fetch me. My mother is the person for whom the phrase “nothing is too much trouble” was coined. A homebody herself who likes to travel but hates to be away, I never had to explain my impulses to her.

  “So, what’s going on this weekend in Freeville?” I’d ask excitedly as I got into her brown Dodge Duster.

  “Nothing. Not a damn thing,” she’d say.

  “Well, it’s a good thing I came home because I’d hate to miss that.”

  In college, I became friendly with people who came from places like Greenwich, Winnetka, and Shaker Heights—hometowns that, unlike mine, needed no further introduction. Their childhoods, like their houses, sounded expansive, complicated, and dreamy. They lost their virginity in their pool cabanas and were given cars for their sixteenth birthdays.

  My college friend John was rumored to come from a Connecticut branch of the Kennedy family tree, though I tried not to hold his wealth and connections against him as I marveled at his Ultra Brite smile and carefully placed neck-knotted sweater. Just before my first spring break from college, John asked if I’d like to “go in on” a sailboat trip he was putting together with other friends. The group would sail in the Ca rib be an over the break. The eventual destination would be a vacation place his family had in Barbados.

  While I assumed that the contrast between our upbringings was obvious, and while I didn’t want to put too fine a point on it, the whole time that John was talking to me about the trip, I was thinking about the time my father killed a rabbit and we ate it. (We didn’t eat it because we had to, but more because we could.) “Oh, I don’t think I could afford the sailing thing,” I said, and then John winked knowingly at me and replied, “Why don’t you just get the ’rents to pay for it?”

  I was still learning the preppy vernacular but quickly figured out that ’rents were PArents. And as I hadn’t seen my own pa in five years and didn’t quite know where he was currently located, I didn’t think there was much likelihood that he’d spring for a sailing trip.

  My new circle of college friends had many things to envy. They were good-looking, smart, and had shiny hair. They could make jokes using their high school Latin. They wore sherbet-colored corduroys printed with ducks, whales, and anchors and knew how to turn up the collars on their polo shirts so they were stiff in the back and winglike in the front.

  The lives of most of my colleagues seemed stocked with options. When it was time to go home for a visit, they had a choice. This home or that? Beach or mountains, Florida or Maine? My eventual college b
oyfriend who became my eventual husband grew up in New York City with a second family home in the Hamptons, which he referred to, quaintly, as “the country.” As in, “Let’s go out to the country to see the ’rents.” This country life, located off of a boutique-crowded street and complete with membership to an exclusive beach club and another even more restrictive tennis club, seemed less “country” and more an extension of Madison Avenue.

  Unfortunately for me, the more I was exposed to the lifestyle to which I had aspired for most of my life, the less I seemed to want it. When my husband and I visited his family in their beautiful Hamptons home, I was hyperaware of my many deficits. I wasn’t tall enough, well dressed enough, or pretty in ways that are noticeable to people who notice these things. I talked too much, and I didn’t know how to talk about the things they talked about: real estate, unsolved high society murders, movie star sightings, and sailing. I played the wrong sports (softball instead of tennis). I put my feet up on the coffee table and got accidentally drunk and laughed too loudly during the cocktail hour. Also, I sweat. And it’s not the dewy kind of sweat, but the “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” underarm-stains-the-size-of-the-Bronx kind. When my marriage ended, my only comfort was in knowing that I’d likely never have to brave life in “the country” again.

  IN RETROSPECT, I realize that I didn’t exactly inspect my little house in Freeville carefully before buying it, though Emily and I went through it together and noticed that certain house like elements, such as doors, a staircase, toilet, and sinks, were in fact present. The official building inspector said that the house was surprisingly “solid” for a structure of its age (it was built in 1900) and that, aside from the fact that the porch seemed to be listing toward the driveway and threatened to detach from the rest of the house, the house itself was basically sound. The structure, which measured roughly nine hundred square feet upstairs and down, consisted of one main room with a galley kitchen and bathroom downstairs; and three small bedrooms and a half-bathroom upstairs. The current owners, two guys who bought the place when they were students at the local community college, had gutted the house and reassembled it in the 1980s.

  Their handiwork reflected what I imagined to be the taste and abilities of two twenty-year-olds who had taken but not necessarily passed shop class in high school.

  The house’s “negatives” were mainly cosmetic. The student/owners had done all of the work themselves, using materials that I surmised may have fallen off of a truck headed through town on its way to Atlantic City. Flesh-colored, nylon shag carpeting two inches deep blanketed almost every floor surface except for the kitchen and bathroom—including the staircase leading to the (fully carpeted) bedrooms and half-bath upstairs. Unfortunately the relatively shallow depth of the hundred-year-old stair risers covered with the thick shag reduced the actual surface area of each individual step by four inches or so. This meant that the steps were no longer secure resting places for one’s foot but had become slippery toeholds, turning the staircase itself into a steep toboggan run of fear. During our first walk-through, the real estate agent, Emily, and I each lost our footing in turn, sliding down the entire length of the staircase—thumping onto each successive step and picking up speed while sparking code-red levels of static electricity until landing with a thud onto the hard pink ceramic tile that had been glued to the floor at the base of the stairs.

  “I think those stairs are oak!” the agent said, rubbing his backside.

  The owners had tried to class up the place by installing Victorian-esque ceiling fans on as many ceilings as would hold them. In the main downstairs room, this resulted in a mere case of bordello ugliness, but upstairs—where the ceilings were several inches lower and the rooms several feet smaller than even a normal-size house—the ceiling fans seemed less cooling devices than instruments of torture. Turning a fan on in an eight-by-ten-foot bedroom, I felt myself flinching, ducking, and hankering to confess to crimes I hadn’t committed with each pass of a plastic blade as it skimmed, menacingly, inches over my head. “Of course, when you’re lying down in bed, you’re not going to notice that. That’s a nice little breeze when you think about it,” the agent said. I tried not to think about it.

  The kitchen of the house shared its floor space with a bathroom across the back of the structure. There was pink tile on the floor, and dark oaklike laminate cupboards lined the walls, supplemented by a beige Formica countertop. Even though the kitchen was already tiny, the owners had evidently decided to emphasize its coziness by dropping the ceiling and hiding their plumbing and electrical handiwork behind a deep soffit, which they had fashioned from nailed-together wall-board. Here the student/builders had breached the dangerous nexus of water + electricity; I shuddered to think of what was behind the flimsy false wall space. The walls and ceiling were painted. “What do you call that color?” I asked the real estate agent. “Tan. Or brown. No, tan,” he said.

  “Everything is, as far as I know, built to code,” he added, helpfully.

  Glancing out of the kitchen window, I could see the small shady backyard blanketed with patches of weeds. The yard ended abruptly where it fell off in a steep bank leading down to Fall Creek, which flowed just beyond. I couldn’t see the creek from the window, but I could feel it.

  I would own waterfront property.

  My Kycuit.

  I said good-bye to the real estate agent, and after he locked the house and drove away, Emily and I sat together on the porch step, looking out onto the traffic on Main Street. I explained to Emily that if we bought the house, we would have a place of our own to stay in when we visited, but that we’d still live in Washington most of the time.

  “So, kid, do you think we should get this house?” I asked her.

  She looked around, thinking. “Could I paint my room blue?” she asked.

  I said that she could.

  “Would we get furniture?”

  “We’ll find some somewhere,” I said.

  My aunt Millie, our new next-door neighbor, drove by and waved. “Hel-l-o-o-o!”

  The day of the closing my mother, aunts Millie, Lena, Uncle Harvey, and cousins Nancy and Lorraine wandered by the house. Because of its position on Main Street, each family member could legitimately claim to have been accidentally passing by when she saw Emily and me standing with the real estate agent on the front lawn. My family members decided to hang out on the front porch until we had finished our business with the agent. Everybody offered an opinion on what I should do with the place: it could stand a new paint job and wouldn’t it be great to paint it “peach” or “shrimp”? The porch railing was very strange, didn’t I think? Hopefully I would choose to cut down that hideous birch tree in front because everybody knows that birch trees belong in shopping malls and industrial parks. Maple is the way to go. There is a “rabbit problem” on Main Street—did anyone think to tell me?

  My family members clumped themselves together on the front porch, and I took a picture of them. Then they formed a little cluster in front of the front door and waited patiently to be let in. With some ceremony, the agent handed over the keys to the place. I excused my way through the small crowd and opened the screen door to unlock the front door to my new home—and the screen door promptly came off its hinges and clattered onto the porch. I was left holding the doorknob.

  “You can fix that; a couple of screws and you can pop that right back in!” the agent said and quickly got into his car.

  Emily and I didn’t get to spend our first night in our new home until two months after its purchase. Halloween fell on a weekend that year, so we left Washington very early on Halloween morning and drove north, arriving in Freeville just as dusk was starting to envelop the village. The first hints of the deep cold of the winter to come had pulled most of the leaves off of the trees; they swirled in cyclones along Main Street. Freeville has a sort of Sleepy Hollow quality in the fall as the corn in the surrounding fields goes golden and then breaks off in brittle bonelike stalks and the trees graduall
y go bare, exposing their skeletons to the night sky. The residents treat Halloween like a major holiday and go a little haywire, decorating their houses with paper skeletons, jack-o’-lanterns and colored lights strung from the trees.

  Down Main Street, I could see that my neighbor Bill had, as usual, prepared for the night by digging a fresh grave in his front yard; it was topped with a crooked R.I.P headstone. Every year on Halloween night when trick-or-treaters knocked on his door, they were greeted with the loud and ghastly howling of Bill’s Hounds of Hell CD emanating from deep within the house. Once that had sunk in, Bill would whip open the door, looking like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. His costume was a checked flannel shirt with suspenders holding up his jeans—he made up his face with deep black circles under his eyes and traces of fake blood. He was carrying an axe.

  “Has anybody seen my wife?” he would ask, menacingly, while gesturing with his axe toward the headstone in his yard. Bill’s act, with its subtle movie allusions and outright fright factor, may have been intended for a more mature audience; it scared the living daylights out of the average five-year-old trick-or-treater. They had a tendency to scream, drop their candy, and run to the next house while Bill chased after them, apologizing.