by Margot Kahn
Fairwood Park II HOA, Article II—Protective Covenants, Section 2.06—Minimum Dwelling Specifications: The ground floor area of the main structure, exclusive of open porches, and garages, shall not be less than one thousand (1,000) square feet for a one-story dwelling, no less than eight hundred (800) square feet for the ground floor area of a dwelling of more than one story.…
All dwellings shall have enclosed garages of at least 20 feet by 22 feet, with completely sealed interior, walls and ceilings, and with fully paved driveways to the street.
My husband and I discussed. Should we move from one perfectly acceptable home to another? To say I was torn would be understatement. Wallace Stevens would say I was “of two minds”: part of me still hated money, hated to think of myself as the person who had it. The other part of me dreamed of quiet, the illusion of safety, a yard where my children could roam, naked. Was that too much to ask? Should any one person have that when everyone else cannot? I spent nights agonizing; I had metaphoric narrative nightmares; I woke sure I was a sellout. I thought of how, just a few years ago, I’d applied for unemployment. Though we were homeowners, we lived in an area of town where everyone struggled; I realized that struggle was part of my identity; poverty was part of my identity, and moving would mean admitting finally that I’d shifted in social class.
E. D. Hirsch, conservative educational theorist who influenced national policies during the Reagan Administration, writes in his book Cultural Literacy about “combating the social determinism that… condemns [children] to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents.” I’d mastered a good degree of cultural literacy; my membership had shifted, leaving behind the identity of my “disadvantaged” and “at risk” youth. I realized this with a degree of bitterness: many of the most positive aspects of my childhood, the things that had shaped me, were due to those less-than-acculturated circumstances. Days of unsupervised play, roaming the fields and forests; a dependent reliance on the public library (which afforded me a range of literary tastes, and, admittedly, some degree of American culture awareness); the ability to create a meal from scratch using limited ingredients; knowing what wild plants were edible (surely not in Hirsch’s Dictionary of Cultural Literacy?); a sense of empathy for others who had less; and a realization that you have to work hard for what you have, and take care of it. I wondered: could a person sustain a working-class sensibility of the world, and—more importantly—instill it not as theory but as practice in her children, if they lived in a social bubble?
Plus there was the commute factor. The move would change my commute from two miles to twelve; that was just for my work, not to mention my husband’s job, and our involvement as literary and athletic citizens in the downtown community. Moving would increase our carbon footprint, decrease our leisure time.
And the house was unnecessarily large—four bedrooms, a third bathroom (laughable to me, still, how unnecessary it is, how convenient). And a sprinkler system! And a doorbell! Two ovens! A two-car garage, with automatic opener! Some of the common areas between houses even had their own pools. All of these frivolities!
Still, I wanted it. We wanted it. We were tired of the city. My husband had grown up in the suburbs; I in rural places. The neighborhood of the new home was close to Fish & Wildlife land, with bald eagles and moose and a river. Our children could have nature—access to the kinds of places my siblings and I spent our formative years.
In town, we’d kept an urban garden, but now I imagined our long walks through the crumbled homestead and defunct dairy farm that made up part of the valley adjacent to the neighborhood. We might find an old apple tree, a field full of edible plants. When I was a child, I sometimes roamed all day, eating what was edible when I was hungry, coming home only when I was tired, my clothes stained with plums or salmonberry, my pockets full of fossils from the riverbeds, of petrified chunks of wood from the clay banks in the forest beyond. My siblings and I had memorized the maps to treasures only a rural roaming child can find: not Barbies but blackberries, not piano lessons but the steady beat of rain on a tin shed roof, the glinting rhythm of salmon fins fighting their way upstream.
My husband, ever practical, saw moving as the next step in our forward progress. He grew up middle class, to parents with a working-class upbringing, who are generous and kind, and whose expression of security sometimes means acquiring new material possessions. So after the fantasizing and the agonizing and the measured discussions, we agreed to move from one dream to another, and we promised each other that we would remain frugal, not fall into materialism, not take comfort for granted. We promised each other we’d remain grateful for our privilege. It was like another kind of marriage: admitting the merge we’d become, his youth-group-president with an eye for justice upbringing with my feral youth.
In January 2014, we moved into our 1970s house in a well-planned suburb with an HOA (Home Owner’s Association). The HOA has a list of rules that govern how we interact with our neighbors, how we live in our homes.
At the annual HOA meeting, we introduced ourselves: I teach at one university, my husband coaches for another university, we moved to the neighborhood for the access to nature and for the “good schools”—the same district where my husband attended fourth through twelfth grade.
People were warm, welcoming. But some were furious about the Smiths, converting their home into a shared living space for their parents and elderly friends (“Three families in one house? Who heard of such a thing? There’ll be cars coming and going all hours of the day!”). And they also talked about the apartments down the street, just beyond our HOA boundary, transitioning to low-income, government-supplemented housing. It’s the beginning of this conversation, and an undertone I picked up: do not, under any circumstances, tell us you grew up in poverty. This breaks Section 2.08, Exterior Maintenance, which stipulates, among other things, all neighbors must keep a clean curb.
Where I teach part-time is a private liberal arts institution, a school known for its basketball teams and its Jesuit tradition. A school known for its students’ nearly consistently uniform privilege. (There are students on full scholarship, though, from apple country, from urban areas, from small Montana towns, who I’m sure are navigating a sense of culture shock and socioeconomic gap even wider than the one I charted at a state school.) In my first year, I approached the topic by teaching a section of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, the one in which she works as a Merry Maid. When some of my students found themselves appalled at the working conditions, of the meager American Dream offered to someone who worked full-time, or when some made statements about how a person could pull themselves out of it if they “just get a degree,” I asked my students how many of their families employed maids growing up; half the class raised their hands. There were some awkward glances and equivocations, and then I told them how I worked as a custodian every summer during college, changing sheets and cleaning dorm showers of high school football campers somewhat oblivious to who picked up and replaced their towels (but who, sometimes, as a prank, would shit in the shower or behind the beds). Often I spend time in my classes talking about how we each need to clean up after ourselves, about individual responsibility; we’re a university with a social justice mission, so this is naturally a part of our curriculum. But sometimes it’s difficult to help these sweet young people, many of whom owned their own cars at sixteen (a car they did not live in), understand how hard work does not necessarily equal a fair shot.
I feel an inexplicable deep measure of guilt writing about my new social class, something I no longer have to worry about in the same way I once did, in the same way many of my readers do or will. I don’t admit this guilt to my students. I also don’t tell my students that Barbara Ehrenreich makes me angry, pretending at poverty as some sort of social experiment. The entire time she was undercover as a journalist, she had a bank account on which she could fall back, health insurance she could access. She did not have to make any hard choices; there was a clear en
d for her. I understand what she was doing, though: passing. Playing a role.
Fairwood Park II HOA, Article II—Protective Covenants Section 2.15—Animals: No animal, livestock or poultry of any kind may be raised, bred, or kept on any lot.
In Spokane, as in many cities across the nation, urban chickens are a large part of the neighborhood experience. Within the last several years, our city passed an ordinance that increased fowl allotment from three hens to five (no roosters). But in Fairwood Park II, the covenants forbid this use of your land.
We want chickens, but we’ve decided to wait it out.
This year, there was an opening on the HOA board and my husband became default president. He and another at-large member (whose wife is an artist; she grew up on twenty acres, unschooled) talk about infiltrating the ranks and working toward modifying that covenant to allow people to keep birds.
We all know we’re mostly joking, though. It would take a quorum of 75 percent to change a covenant, and those opposed have been here since the beginning; they’ve built their little suburban utopia, and nothing is going to take it from them. Frankly, we’re not even sure how to begin this conversation, among the talk of blocking off the end of our neighborhood so “those low-income apartments don’t have access” and the big to-do over one woman’s “garden art” that other residents find offensive.
Fairwood Park II HOA, Article II—Protective Covenants, Section 2.11—Fences: Fences shall be well constructed of suitable fencing materials and shall be artistic in design and shall not detract from the appearance of the dwelling house located upon the adjacent lots or building sites or be offensive to the owners or occupants thereof.
My navigation of this world is still tenuous, and probably always will be. I’m trying not to project, but I make a lot of generalizations based on my social class growing up. Sometimes, it’s unkind. But people who grow up with money don’t understand they have money. (My children will be these people, no matter how much I ask them to reflect, to exist in gratitude.)
During my undergrad experience, I had a kind of poverty complex. After getting over some of my initial shyness about my upbringing, I sometimes made snarky statements to people about their swimming pools, piano lessons. I judged my housemate James by the fact that once he told me he had “1K extra dollars” and that he “wondered what to do with it.” I grew red and fumed, “you should put it in the bank!” (and I thought, you should shut up!). I was living, at the time, on $250 a month. He was living on $1,000. As college renters, we shared a house. His father was a doctor. Mine sold tires.
Now, I drive home from work in my car, a twelve-year-old Subaru with kayak racks, turn into my quiet street, drive past the deer grazing in my neighbors’ yards, and push the automatic garage door opener I keep on my sun visor, above my head. Like magic, the garage door glides up; I drive in. I call the garage door opener “the privilege button,” and every time I push it, I have a private giggle with myself.
Living in a neighborhood where people all push buttons to enter their attached garages, where the outdoor plants will be watered by a preset sprinkler system, where there are signs that say “No Soliciting” at each neighborhood entrance, is still strange for me. I know I still need to work on my daily actions, work through my hypocrisies—we all do. But I want to believe that if we try to communicate across our intersectional ad- and dis-advantages, we might bridge some of these boundaries—those we can control, and those we cannot.
Driving down Fairwood Drive, one has to look out for deer. I go slowly, my eyes darting to the sides of the road. I turn right onto my street, and when I’m close enough, I lift my hand above my head, push the button. The door glides up to reveal the mess: our kayaks stacked on cement blocks, bicycles and scooters piled on a lawn mower, tires still in their bags, an unplugged refrigerator, a workbench with a few files scattered across it, some crates of books that never found a shelf.
My children open the door from the garage to the house, their faces sticky with melon juice. They’ve been practicing piano, or building worlds that lead to Narnia. They don’t know yet what code switching means, but when they’re old enough, I’ll teach them, and I’ll teach them too that they must practice kindness, they must always be mindful when they push the privilege buttons. They’ll have more confidence, I think, and their roads will be roads I never drove. For now they can just be a bit feral, I think, as they run, grinning and barefoot, out to meet me.
Maya Jewell Zeller has received grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. She is author of the books Rust Fish, Yesterday, the Bees, and the forthcoming collaboration, with visual artist Carrie DeBacker, Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts. Maya teaches for Central Washington University’s Professional and Creative Writing Programs and lives in the Inland Northwest with her family.
Some Notes on Our Cyclical Nature
Sarah Viren
Returning to Iowa everything is the same, but also everything isn’t. It’s still summer and the car is still packed. There is still that “Fields of Opportunity” billboard along with the Iowa border on Highway 218. There is still the sense of having made the right decision. We left the rain behind in Missouri. Now Marta is driving while I sit in the back seat beside our daughter trying to entertain her on the final stretch of this three-day road trip from Texas, where we live now, to Iowa, where we’ll live again, if only for the summer.
“This is where you were born,” I tell our daughter. “This is your real home.”
But she’s three so instead of responding she asks, “What’s that?” A bowling alley beside an open field. And, “What’s that?” The Iowa River streaming past a power plant. And, “Are we in Lubbock?”
When I first drove here, I was alone—alone with my dog Finn. In those days—before having a wife, then a child, and another child growing inside me—I talked to Finn. There is a certain confidence you develop with those who can never respond.
That day it was late summer and I also saw that billboard about Iowa’s fields of opportunity, which made me laugh.
“Maybe it’s a sign,” I told Finn.
I had left behind a lot on that trip north: a well-paying job in Houston, a steady relationship with a kind woman I could nonetheless never seem to love, and, also, all my furniture and most of my belongings, save some rugs and blankets wrapped around framed pictures and maps of other places I’d lived and left.
I was moving to Iowa because I thought I needed a change—and in Houston I felt stuck. Finn was in the front seat beside me, his sleek black head reaching out the window to pant as we reached the last stop sign before our new home: a blue two-story house I had found on Craigslist, a house I would share with three roommates I had also found on Craigslist: a musician, a playwright, and a sculptor.
My plan was to rebuild a life just like that: via the Internet and thrift stores. I would build myself a bed out of foam core doors I found at a construction resale shop. I would buy a new bike at a garage sale and find new pots and pans at the auction. I would move my online dating profile from Texas to Iowa and mark myself single, add that I listen to a lot of Tom Waits and have an unusually long neck.
When we pulled up that day and I opened the door, Finn dashed out in a streak of black and bounded up on to the front porch, sniffing the corners and doorstop with the dutiful confidence of the newly arrived. After declaring it satisfactory, he looked back, still panting, and waited for me to climb the steps and join him.
The house we’re staying in this summer belongs to one of those Craigslist roommates, the sculptor, a woman named Erica who just got married, who is now one of my best friends. She and her boyfriend, now husband, bought this house when it was condemned. They spent four years rebuilding it: carpeting the rooms upstairs, rewiring cables, planting a garden, hanging a front porch.
And when they were done, they got married and went on a honeymoon road trip. While they’re gone, they’re letting us stay here. And while we’re here in Iowa City,
where Marta and I met and fell in love and had our daughter, we’re going to pretend we actually live in this town again, where we both still feel at home.
In the mornings, after I drop our daughter off at a farm daycare, Marta and I work at our respective desks, writing and reading. In the afternoons, we go to the farmers’ market or the pool or the public library. At night we invite over old friends for dinner. We’ve started playing Memory at the kitchen table, and usually Marta wins. When the sun goes down, we read our daughter books until she falls asleep and, if we have the energy, Marta and I watch something together on Netflix or, even more rarely, we might make love.
We know this is not like it used to be, even though we are back where we were before. Because neither of us is who we were before. But we’re still happy to be here. And within a few weeks it begins to feel like this house and this life we’re inhabiting for the summer are ours for keeps. Except that our daughter keeps asking from the backseat when we drive around, “Are we in Lubbock?” Or less often, “Is this Iowa City?”
My first time in Iowa City, I spent my mornings alone, drinking coffee and reading through the postings from a listserve called Freecycle, an online group made up of people giving stuff away and others willing—or hoping—to take things for free.
I was searching for offers of furniture, of winter clothes, of a desk. But I only ever found things I didn’t need: a stamp collection kit, a Tupperware Jell-O mold, three red-eyed tetra fish, a pearly pink conch shell listed beside the query: “Feeling the need to call Poseidon?”