Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

by Meghan Daum

  I was quite a treat to be around during this period. Not only was I unable to carry on a conversation about anything other than brokers’ fees and pocket listings, but I had inadvertently entered something of a second latency period. This is not to be confused with my mini-latency period of a few years earlier, when I’d literally been moving around too much to think about dating. This time, I had opportunities to date but no interest in taking advantage of them. I didn’t even want to have sex. The reasons for this were probably manifold and best left to a psychiatrist, but as far as I was concerned, I was saving myself for home ownership. I mean that quite literally. I did not want to get into a relationship or even go on a date until I owned property. I did not want a man crossing my threshold, drinking my tap water, or even parking at my curb until that threshold, tap water, and curb were in some way legally registered in my name. I did not even want to meet a potential romantic partner until I could look him in the eye from my bar stool and say, without apology or drama, “I own a house.”

  In honor of this vow of delayed gratification, I kept myself looking and feeling about as sexy as your average meter maid. My hair, though always short, was entirely too short and, thanks to a misguided effort to come across as “feisty,” an unfortunate shade of red (make that shades, since the red had a way of quickly turning pinkish and then orange). There was a bloated, phlegmatic quality to my physical being. I was doughy and epicene and also strangely hyper. Anyone who encountered me during this period found himself face-to-face with a sort of asexual monomaniac. Though I could stumble through polite, non-housing-related conversation for twenty to thirty minutes, any opportunity I sensed to change the subject to down payments and appraisal fees would be seized like the second-to-last piece of shrimp on a cocktail platter. To anyone who would listen, I nattered on about the houses for sale that I hated, the houses not for sale that I coveted, the envy aroused by those who bought ten years earlier during the slump, the smugness of sellers, the desperation of buyers, the calamity of it all.

  This is embarrassing but not exactly mortifying. Mostly because everyone was talking like this at the time. My conversation may have been tiresome, but it was hardly aberrant. At parties, cliques would form in corners around topics like these—comprised mostly of women but including plenty of men, too—and the discussion would become so animated and loud that eventually the hostess would come over and say, “What’s going on here?” only to find herself helplessly drawn in. A woman I’d befriended the previous year, a writer named Carina, happened also to be house hunting during this time, and the two of us soon found ourselves bonded together as if real estate obsession secreted some kind of hallucination-inducing superglue. Like pregnant women who share and dissect every aspect of gestation with painstaking detail and outsized enthusiasm, we spent hours visiting open houses and driving around strange neighborhoods one of us (usually me) was convinced was the next hot place. We spent several times that many hours talking to each other on the phone about Carina’s latest conversation about mortgages with her financial whiz brother or my latest theory about why buying a house that came with a rental unit and therefore required me to be a landlord “might actually make me a better writer” (this theory totally escapes me now and, mercifully, was never tested).

  If there’s any one experience that encapsulates the inflated home values and near surrealism of that time period, it was the afternoon Carina and I went to an open house in the neighborhood of Mount Washington. Neither of us, her especially, particularly wanted to live in Mount Washington, but it had a reputation for slightly lower-priced houses than much of what was available in Silver Lake and Echo Park, and I’d suggested we give the neighborhood a gander. After failing to find the first two houses on our list because the streets depicted on my MapQuest printout appeared to have no relationship to the actual streets of Mount Washington, we found the third property, a small, cabinlike house on a wooded hillside.

  Between the used-car-lot-style flags and the “Another fine property from Blah Blah realty” sign in the yard, a line of about a dozen people had formed by the doorway. Despite the shabbiness of the house—the paint was chipped, and the roof appeared to be sliding off like a loose toupee—I took that as a sign that the place was so much in demand that it simply could not contain all the people who wanted to look at it. This turned out to be true, although not in a good way. In fact, it was true in the most depressing way possible, which is to say that only six people were allowed inside at once because the foundation wasn’t guaranteed to hold any more than that. Notices posted on the front door and on the walls stated disclosures about electricity (there was none in the kitchen and study), plumbing (apparently there were sewage “issues”), and rodents (rats and mice definitely; opossums maybe).

  A large deck of at least two hundred square feet, which may have been larger than the living room, jutted out from the hillside, offering a sweeping view of pine trees and palm trees and the distant decks of neighbors. It was easily the best thing about the house. Unfortunately, it was barricaded with caution tape because, as the agent explained, it was “unsafe for walking on.” It would, in fact, need to be torn down. And while she was on the subject, the agent said (and not at all sheepishly, which should have been astonishing but was commonplace in 2004) the deck wasn’t the only thing that needed to be torn down. Given the condition of the roof, the foundation, and the walls, potential buyers were to take it under advisement that the entire house should probably be torn down. If we had any questions, she said, we could talk to the owners, who, contrary to custom, were actually on the premises. She then gestured to a stained orange couch on which three elderly people of questionable hygiene were staring into space smoking cigarettes, their ashes cascading around a glazed ceramic ashtray on the floor, sometimes landing in it, sometimes not.

  The asking price on this house was $425,000. I’m pretty sure it ultimately sold in the mid-$500,000 range.

  When Carina and I went back to the car (I remember that we were wedged between a new BMW and an Audi; people who drove cars like that were looking at houses like this), one of us said she felt like throwing up, and the other said she felt like crying. I can’t remember which of us said what, but I do remember that this trip was the beginning of the end of our house-hunting phase. We were no longer excited pregnant ladies as much as we were mutual enablers of a mounting addiction.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” Carina said to me as I made the first of several wrong turns on the way home. “There’s something very, very wrong in all of this.”

  “I know,” I said. “If only I’d been ready to buy a few years ago. Why do I come so late to everything? Why do I miss the boat every time?”

  “Because we’re Gen X,” she said. “We were born both too late and too early. The economic forces conspired against us, and now we’re fucked and the boomers live in mansions they bought for $67 back in the early 1980s and we’re destined to live our lives paying rent to guys who wear tinted eyeglasses and Members Only jackets.”

  She didn’t say exactly that, but she came close and might as well have. It’s one of the reasons we’d hit it off before our entire friendship got strung out on real estate. She quit looking for a house shortly after that. She was in a relationship that was at that awkward, one-year point at which thinking about the future feels both necessary and premature. Though she was willing to buy a house by herself, part of her was shopping not just for her house but for something that could potentially accommodate another person, a place for a couple and maybe even a family. That’s why when she saw the house on Escalada Terrace, a short, breathtakingly steep Echo Park street lined with bougainvillea and oversized, flowering succulents, she called me from the car.

  “I just saw a supercute place,” she said. “It’s too small for me, but you might like it. It’s $475,000, but it’s been on the market for like a month, so maybe they’d go down.”

  “There has to be something wrong with it,” I said.

  “There’
s something weird going on with the garage in back,” Carina said. “But who cares about that? It has awesome views from the kitchen. And fruit trees.”

  Fruit trees, I thought. Awesome views. Possibly less than $475,000. By now it was the beginning of June. Summer was sliding into view like one of those expensive cars rolling off an assembly line. I was convinced I was approximately seventeen minutes from being priced out of the market.

  Reader, I bought it.

  *I say “east sider” for lack of a better term and with full awareness that, according to many Angelenos, Silver Lake and its adjacent neighborhoods do not technically constitute the east side. To many, the east side and the west side are divided by the L.A. River. This is despite the fact that many west siders (that is, those living west of the 405 freeway in places like Santa Monica) consider anything east of the Beverly Center to be on the east side. They’re wrong about that, but it’s ultimately too tiresome to get into.

  FIVE

  I remember next to nothing about the first time I walked into the house on Escalada Terrace. I recall that I liked the street, a steep, sidewalkless road of only a dozen houses or so that dead-ended at the mouth of a voluptuous ten-acre hill. I recall that the front yard was attractively landscaped with cactus trees and blooming bougainvillea. As for the house itself, it was a stucco box, a stout, unremarkable Spanish-style bungalow, built in 1928, with an arch-shaped front door and a flat roof lined with red clay tiles. There were two bedrooms, though one was so tiny it seemed unlikely to fit anything larger than a twin bed. The entire place was about nine hundred square feet, considerably smaller than the Silver Lake house. The majority of those nine hundred square feet was covered with dirty white carpet. Unoccupied for at least the last few months, the place was devoid of furniture. This made the carpet—and the discolored indentations where furniture had once rested on it—an unfortunate main attraction.

  Still, my chief reaction to the place was that I didn’t hate it. Yes, there was carpet, which was anathema to all members of the Daum family, but I was assured there was wood underneath. This was not my dream house; that was for sure. It was not the Craftsman I longed for or, better yet, a small, shabby Victorian like the one my mother coveted for me in car bomb land. Nothing about it made me tingle, and in no way did I feel as if I’d die if I didn’t get it. But it had one very big thing going in its favor: it had been sitting on the market for thirty days.

  What that meant was that I was able to make an offer of $432,000 and to eventually accept the seller’s counteroffer of $450,000. Because it was 2004 and because Michael prided himself on being a “buyer’s agent,” meaning he had a whole bag of tricks for making an offer seem as attractive as possible (case in point, his belief that nonround numbers like $432,000 made it seem like you were “serious”), I was encouraged to write a personal letter to the seller imploring him to accept my offer. My letter, which I wrote in barely legible handwriting on one of a box full of Van Gogh water lilies note cards that Michael kept in his desk for such purposes, went like this:

  Dear Seller,

  I absolutely love your house and I hope very, very, very much that you will seriously consider my offer. As soon as I stepped through the front door I knew it was the place for me. I just know that if I’m lucky enough to live there my dog and I will be happy forever.

  Sincerely,

  Meghan Daum

  I then wrote a check for $13,500 in earnest money, which represented 3 percent of the purchase price. We weren’t in Nebraska anymore. I realize that some readers, despite all the housing prices I’ve heretofore mentioned in these pages, might see such a figure and either (a) shoot oatmeal through their noses or (b) lose all sympathy for a narrator (a single, semi-unemployed one at that) who could or would pay such a sum. But please understand that in Los Angeles then, any property with four walls and a roof that cost under half a million dollars was considered a steal. Never mind that the house on Escalada Terrace was smaller than a lot of Midwestern garages. Never mind that the garage, about which Carina had only been able to say “there’s something weird going on,” bore a close resemblance to the ruins of Pompeii. During this period in real estate history, house hunting was akin to a form of speed dating in which you have three minutes to decide whether or not you want to marry someone. And even though my house didn’t necessarily make me swoon, it didn’t make me gag either. So, like a girl who cares more about being married than about whom she’s married to, I swallowed my pride and signed the first set of papers.

  Then I left town. For nearly the entire escrow period of my home purchase, I was on tour for the paperback edition of the novel about the girl who moves to a fictional Midwestern town (what was left of the advance for which was now being poured into the down payment). In a way, this was a good thing. As I had learned the previous year during the hardcover tour, traveling around the country promoting your book is kind of like having sex with a celebrity. You spend much of your life thinking it must be among the greatest experiences you can have, only to find, if you actually do it (and I’m not saying I have), that it’s no different from sex with a nonfamous person and, moreover, has no bearing on the metric of your own fame or lack thereof. In other words, as a person who had dreamed of going on a book tour ever since I’d heard the term (most likely while holed up in one of my many Vassar residences reading Vanity Fair—the magazine, not the novel), I had, a year earlier—and predictably—been humbled to learn firsthand just how humiliating the experience can be.

  And it was again this year, at least after the first stop, which was just downright strange. The first stop was Austin. Weeks earlier, I’d been offered a magazine assignment that involved going back to a childhood home and seeing how much it had or hadn’t changed. Given my obsession with all things with a roof and four walls, this was a no-brainer. Since I was going to be in Austin for the book tour anyway, arrangements were made for me to visit the yellow brick bungalow. And since this trip also happened to correspond to my mother’s sixty-second birthday, she decided to fly down and join me. We hadn’t visited since 1985, when I’d been in ninth grade. When I walked out to the curb at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, the air was so humid it felt nearly liquid. My mother, driven by one of her old friends from the days of marching on the capitol steps in support of the ERA, picked me up in a shiny SUV.

  “I’m in escrow!” I told her. I’d been waiting to tell her in person, and I said it in the same tone another kind of daughter might have said “I’m engaged” or “I’m pregnant.”

  “Oh, really?” my mother said. Suddenly she seemed worried, as though the reality were less exciting than the concept. Why did this surprise me? The reality was frightening. It was shopping she loved.

  Her friend, on the other hand, couldn’t get enough. She’d once been a hippie, but she worked in real estate now.

  Austin embraced us like some sort of many-armed creature. Hot as ever and draped in the wisteria and honeysuckle vines I remembered from my youth, the city felt both larger and smaller than I remembered it. The skyline, with the ziggurat of One Congress Plaza and shiny office buildings and condos along the Colorado River, had been jacked up since we’d last been there, but the streets of my old neighborhood, thick with bamboo shoots and pecan trees, seemed narrower. The surrogate grandparents who’d encouraged us to move to Ridgewood were lost to us now—the man had died some years earlier; the woman was buried under years of Alzheimer’s—but their kids, now middle-aged with kids of their own, took us back as though we’d never left. My mother had kept in touch with them intermittently over the years, but even so, the ease with which they slid us into their days astounded me. We celebrated my mother’s birthday in a Mexican restaurant, a garrulous party of ten or so shouting across the table and telling the kinds of rambling, homespun stories—tales of do-it-yourself car repairs gone awry and bats caught in attic eaves—that my mother had spent the last twenty-five years being visibly unamused by. Not that she was amused now, but I could tell she was ha
ving a good time, or at least some kind of time. I couldn’t be sure, of course, but maybe she was even feeling what I was feeling. Maybe she was seeing the wind blow through the cedar trees outside the Mexican restaurant and thinking about how things might have gone differently if she hadn’t held her rigid definitions of ambition so dear. Maybe she was beholding this table of mirthful, mortal, ordinary souls and wondering why our family had so rarely found itself at tables like this. Or maybe she wasn’t thinking anything. I couldn’t presume to know. And I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

  I did a reading at a bookstore. The mother of one of my old playmates had heard about my appearance and showed up with her daughters—both married, one pregnant—and a handful of others from the neighborhood.

  “We know you moved away a long time ago, but we’re still claiming you as one of ours,” she said.

  This seemed like a stretch, but it nearly choked me up anyway.

  The next day, my mother and I went to visit the yellow brick bungalow, which was owned by a bachelor herpetologist who’d bought it several years earlier. Filing cabinets lined the rooms, and photographs of frogs and salamanders covered the walls. In the kitchen, the tile my mother had laid down in 1977—shiny red squares designed to look like bricks—was still on the floor, though the brick shapes had worn away almost completely.

  And then we saw the mural. It was still there, faded but unmistakable—the chocolate brown circles and squares still floating in a sea of beige, the yellow globules washed out from years of sunlight yet soiled with kitchen grease.