by Meghan Daum
“I have a leak,” I said. This was technically a lie, but it sounded better than the multifaceted and therefore rather farcical truth.
“Do you need help?” he asked.
“Oh, no. No, no, no, no. I can totally fix it. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I just might be a little late.”
“Why don’t I stop by?” he asked.
“Oh, no!” I said passive aggressively. “No, no, no, no. That’s too much to ask.”
“What’s your address?” he asked.
“It’s okay, no!”
“No, really.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
As it happened, I found the water shutoff before he arrived, though not before I ransacked the clothes hamper—suddenly there was nothing in the closet, not a stitch of acceptable clothing—and wedged my perspiring body into a sundress, a cardigan, and flip-flops (the official uniform of brunch in L.A. in March—or all the other months, for that matter), and rubbed concealer on a blooming forehead zit. Then I made one last survey of the side of the house, spotted an iron handle connected to a copper pipe, and yanked it to one side. The whisper of running water groaned into silence. Success. I then looked up and saw a Volvo station wagon turning around on the hill and sliding to a stop against the curb. Alan got out of the car. He was wearing torn jeans and a sweatshirt with a stain on it.
“I fixed it!” I yelped in a manner that I hoped would convey self-sufficiency without mannishness. “Totally fixed. Sorry to make you come all the way out here. Totally fixed. Wasn’t that big a deal, actually.”
“That’s too bad,” he said, small starbursts of crow’s-feet emerging from his eyes as he smiled. “I like to fix things. Maybe you could break it again.”
Don’t worry, this book is not about to careen headlong into Sandra Bullock–movie territory. I’m not about to write, “And then I met a real man who knew how to swing a hammer, and he rescued me from the money-hemorrhaging pathos of my lonely, helpless existence and, along the way, showed me that a house isn’t a home until you share it with someone or at least have decent insulation.” I’m not going there, at least not totally. Alan may have been a guy who liked to fix things (also evidently a guy who wore stained sweatshirts on first dates), but he was also a journalist, a dedicated endurance athlete, and an inveterate outdoorsman (unlike those of most drivers in Los Angeles, the racks on top of his car had actually been used). He had too many interests to really shape up to be the kind of guy who rescues a single, home-owning woman from the burdens of her solitude and broken faucets. And that was okay, since I didn’t want to be saved.
If anything, something about him invited a return to the old obsessions. During that first brunch, I had become possessed of a need to look at hardware for kitchen cabinets. The restaurant happened to be down the street from the architectural salvage store—a cavernous, chaotic warehouse where massive stone fireplaces and entire entryways from now-demolished Victorians were packed together like refugees in a camp—and I now entreated him to accompany me there so I could look at drawer and cabinet pulls. Alan seemed confused by this errand, particularly the urgency with which I appeared to need these seemingly junklike items.
“What do you think?” I asked him, holding two nearly identical tarnished-brass drawer pulls in my hand. “This one or that one? This one kind of looks like something that should be on a mailbox, but the other one looks like it got caught in a tornado.”
“Are these really better than the ones you have now?” Alan asked.
Silly man. Of course they weren’t! But no matter. What mattered was that in the time it had taken us to eat brunch and talk about various people we knew and books we’d read and National Public Radio shows we secretly found annoying, the vague interest I’d lately been harboring in making some improvements to my kitchen had transformed into an exigency. Though it had been nearly a year since I’d undertaken a domestic project more involved than rearranging the coat closet (which also housed the washer and dryer, hot water heater, and five shelves of office supplies and music CDs), my yen to replace the linoleum in the kitchen with wood floors and redo the early-1980s fiberboard cabinets so they looked—alas—like worn-down original cabinets in an early-twentieth-century farmhouse was no longer a yen. It was an itch I had to scratch right then and there.
This idea for the floor and cabinets had come to me while flipping through a catalog. Not the Restoration Hardware catalog, not the Sundance catalog (which is nothing if not a paean to early-twentieth-century farmhouses with their original, worn-down cabinets), not even Architectural Digest or Elle Decor or Dwell. No, the periodical from whose pages this bolt of design-on-a-much-more-than-a-dime inspiration struck was not a home-furnishing catalog at all but rather a clothing catalog for a company called Soft Surroundings. Specializing in long jackets and tunics and flowing pants in exotic, Asian-inspired prints, Soft Surroundings caters to that particular category of women who are well into middle age but whose sartorial predilections remain so rooted in early-1970s earth-mother-esque bohemia (peasant blouses, ankle-length batik dresses, knit ponchos) that they are all but incapable of wearing solid colors or anything with a zipper.
Soft Surroundings takes this aesthetic and makes it a little more age appropriate for forty- to sixty-something women and also blander in a sort of glazed-over, Midwestern way (there’s a single, flagship store in St. Louis). In other words, even though the models are young and smooth-skinned and have the same jutting collarbones of all catalog models, it’s pretty clearly a catalog for women of a certain age. And while I didn’t at that point consider myself a woman of any age other than the one I was (I was thirty-six), I do admit being drawn into the Soft Surroundings catalog in a rather embarrassing and even perplexing way. There was one particular ballet top that I liked so much I purchased it in six different colors. I also ordered a long, embroidered jacket with a Japanese-style collar that was entirely too big for me even in extra small (one of the seductions of the catalog is self-delusion engendered by its enormous sizes) and, I later realized, made me look like the “artsy grandma” on a Lipitor commercial. The fact that I was wearing this jacket when I met Alan and the fact that he asked me out anyway still strikes me as something close to a presidential pardon.
The most money I ever spent thanks to Soft Surroundings, however, was the result of an image on a single page of the spring 2006 catalog. On this page, a woman in the ballet top, a long flowered skirt, and sandals stands in a kitchen. You can’t see much of the kitchen, but you can see that the floors are a blond wood and the walls are yellow and the cabinets are an off-white with a sort of distressed, peeling-paint quality. The handles appear to be tarnished brass. The model is of course very pretty and thin and collarbony. Were she a real person, she’d undoubtedly be the kind of person who was loved deeply by whomever she shared that kitchen with.
After the date with Alan, I called the floor guy with the missing finger. I called the painters. I called a neighbor around the corner who was a carpenter and detail painter who—wouldn’t you know—specialized in making new stuff look old. I showed him the page from the Soft Surroundings catalog and said, “Do this; just like this.” The floor installers (overseen by the missing-finger guy, who, unlike a few years earlier, when he would have done the work himself, now apparently had bigger fish to fry than my little house) didn’t show up the first few times and then showed up late. They tracked mud into the house and left Mountain Dew bottles in the yard. They said it would take one week; then they said it would take three. Missing-finger guy had originally said the cost would be $2,500. Then it was likely going to be $3,000, maybe $3,200.
All the while, I told Alan, who’d asked me out again and then a third time, not to come over. Not just yet. Not for a week or so. Better to hang out at his place, which was more convenient to restaurants and the movie theater and the gelato shop and all the places that couples go when they’ve just met and something as prosaic as gelato can make you think the world is singi
ng to you. Better to hang out at his place, though, admittedly, it was a bit of a shit hole. Not that it didn’t show good instincts on his part. In the lower-level apartment of a dark, drafty sixty-year-old wood-sided house, he’d thrown Persian and Mexican rugs over the dark pine floors and picked up a round, mission-style oak dining table at a flea market that now sat, entirely covered in papers, in a cobwebby corner. The living room and an adjacent office were home to not only hundreds of books, newspapers, and outdated issues of The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist, and The New York Review of Books but also a bicycle, two surfboards, countless pairs of running shoes, two pairs of skis, a pair of swim fins, a box of rock-climbing gear, and a coatrack choked with wetsuits, rain apparel, snow apparel, wind apparel, and a Medusan tangle of bungee cords. Against the wall by the front door, a pile of newspapers rose to nearly five feet. In addition to that, the sofa, the floor, the bed, and the area surrounding the bed were festooned with at least three months’ worth of The New York Times Magazine, the cover folded over the back and the crossword puzzles in various stages of completion.
Lacking a dishwasher or even a decent sponge, Alan often left his dirty plates, sticky with spaghetti and stir-fried vegetables and ice cream, in the sink and walked away with seemingly no further plans for them. He did this even though the house had a tremendous moth problem; they’d periodically invade the cupboards and bore through the rice and flour bags like termites.
“Shouldn’t we do the dishes?” I asked once.
“Nah, the cleaning lady’s coming,” he said.
“Oh! Tomorrow?”
“Next week.”
Back at home, three weeks of work on the kitchen turned into four and a half weeks. This was due not to the extent of the job, which was minimal, but to the lack of regularity with which anyone showed up to do it. On days when someone came, I’d rejoice. I’d provide coffee. On other days, I’d seethe. I’d call them one by one: the floor guy, the painters, my carpenter neighbor, who, to be fair, had a much better-paying gig going in Malibu and was trying his best to squeeze my cabinets in on the side.
“When will you be finished?” I asked them all like a child whining “Are we there yet?” in the car. “Please, please finish!” Here I was with a new boyfriend—at least he seemed to be going in the direction of boyfriend; he’d called after the third date and also the fourth and the sixth—and I couldn’t show him my house, which, to my mind, amounted to not showing him half of my face. Meanwhile, I wrote my newspaper column amid hideous banging and drilling and ranchero music. “Please finish! What can I do to move this along?” I implored a worker who was prying up the last shards of what turned out to be four layers of linoleum on the kitchen floor. He spoke no English. I, shamefully, spoke no Spanish. I might as well have been asking, “What can I do to make it rain?”
Eventually they finished. They always finish. Barring some kind of force majeure in the manner of an entire construction crew developing internal bleeding or, of course, running out of money or credit, these things really do come to an end. It’s just that when it comes to home improvement—even, maybe especially, for noncommittal renovators like myself—the finale is often strangely anticlimactic. There’s always one tiny thing left to do. There’s always one irregularly sized screw or washer or piece of pipe that needs to be special ordered and that Pete or Sal or José will return with and install just as soon as it comes in. Maybe because once it’s finished you’re faced with the dull tasks of moving the furniture back, returning the food to the cupboards, making dinner and cleaning it up, and then making it again the next night. Maybe that’s because the process of home improvement is so punishing that even the most magnificent outcome, even a kitchen or yard or addition that makes your friends smolder with envy, was probably such a hell ride to actually get done that the final unveiling can only be underwhelming. All that mess and noise and money for this? Three permits and two inspections and some really pissed-off neighbors for this?
I knew, of course, that this kitchen work was a shining exemplar of my neither-here-nor-there renovation style. Granted, the floor was unquestionably improved, but there were no new appliances or counters, no reconfiguring of the cupboards, just some yellow paint on the wall, some rusty antique hardware, and some cabinets made to look weathered. If I’d been a set decorator—or, indeed, a production designer for backdrops in the Soft Surroundings catalog—I’d have done my job to perfection. In real-life terms, however, the endeavor ultimately seemed lacking. Perhaps that’s why I’d suddenly set my sights on the guest room as well, issuing a last-minute directive to the workers to remove the dark, Victorian dollhouse wallpaper and replace it with a coat of white paint. The goal was to make the room look slightly less like a chamber in which a depressed poet might try to kill herself with arsenic. But somehow instead the white walls made the place look even more foreboding. A minuscule six by eight feet, the room had a single window that looked out onto a cement retaining wall. The only views of anything came from the television set, which, since I’d moved in, I’d watched in that room while sitting on a stack of blankets on the floor. A disproportionately large ceiling fan with a tinted pink globe over the light had hung from the ceiling for the first year until one day I’d reached over my head to take off my sweater and knocked it to the floor, where it shattered. Since then, a bare bulb had hung from the filthy fan like something from an interrogation chamber.
How was my new boyfriend—or my potential new boyfriend, or my future boyfriend, or whatever he was—supposed to come over and watch TV in a room like this?
This solution, I feared, meant only one thing: getting reacquainted with that old trope from my Vassar days, a futon. This time with a frame.
Sure, I could have upgraded to a sofa bed, but I’m not sure that constitutes an upgrade. Something about sofa beds seemed corroded somehow, even crime scene–ish, as though at any given time you could unfold that sorry little mattress and find a dead body, or at the very least an ancient and rotting sandwich. Futons, on the other hand, had a crispness that almost made up for their uniform ugliness. Futons signified youth and exuberance. Futons, as loath as I was to be resorting to one at the age of thirty-six, brought me back to the days of hoping their promise of sex and roomy slumber would result in the acquisition of a boyfriend and, barring that, at least knowing I was strong and spry enough to move one up and down a flight of stairs without assistance.
This futon, naturally, would be different. It would be different because I was fifteen years older than I’d been back in those days and the ramifications of the thing were entirely different. How did I know this? For one thing, I found one that barely even looked like a futon. Far removed from those faux-Scandinavian, mass-produced, slatted pine benches you see in a million advertisements in The Village Voice, this futon actually sort of looked like an antique. In fact, with its wrought-iron frame and dark purple velvet-covered cushion it looked vaguely Moroccan, a Moroccan antique! It would match the mosaic coffee table and bed stands (not that any of those things fit in the guest room). It would do the job of a futon without reducing the house to Dani-caliber shoddiness. No scented candles would be casting a sorry glow on this futon. Hell, no one would even know it was a futon. People would think I’d bought it for $10,000 in one of the furniture showrooms on La Brea Avenue.
At least this was my assumption as I drove to get it. The place I was driving to was not a furniture showroom or even an antiques store but rather the Hollywood apartment of someone named Margaret who was selling it on Craigslist. Based on the photos, I’d assumed it was such a coveted piece that it might be snatched up before I could complete the seven-mile drive from Escalada Terrace. “Don’t sell it to anyone else!” I’d spastically typed to Margaret in an e-mail. “I’m coming over immediately. Leaving right now! This futon was made for me to lie on.”
The futon, it turned out, was made for a large bag of granite to lie on. Six feet long, two and a half feet deep with arms and legs like pylons, it was a mighty
, if not exactly Moroccan, piece. Margaret, who had to be out of her apartment the next day because she’d broken up with her live-in boyfriend and couldn’t pay the rent, didn’t exactly remember how to open it into a bed but promised it was possible and that there were no sandwiches inside. Though I wasn’t as in love with the real thing as I’d been with the pictures, it still seemed well above average as far as futons were concerned, so I wrote her a check for $250. Then I went home and got back on Craigslist to find a man with a van who’d pick it up at Margaret’s and deliver it to me for an additional $100. The transaction seemed costly and cumbersome, especially for a piece of used furniture, but as a frequent Craigslist shopper I was used to this, and, besides, I was so eager to finally invite my new maybe-boyfriend into my newly improved house that I didn’t care if there was a sandwich in the mattress. I just wanted to open the front door for Alan and show him something that might make him feel like staying awhile.
The delivery guys came right on time. Like all man-with-van guys on Craigslist, they both looked like a cross between a homeless meth addict and a wildebeest. They banged and scraped the thing up the walkway through the front door and into the living room, where they paused and mopped their brows and stunk like Drum tobacco and, like anyone who’d ever delivered anything to Escalada Terrace, cursed about the steepness of the street. Then they picked it up again, inched it into the kitchen door, and turned toward the guest room door.
“Right in there will be fine,” I said. I was wearing one of the ballet tops from Soft Surroundings—the taupe one—and sandals and a long skirt and standing next to my distressed wood cabinets drinking a glass of lemonade. In just a matter of minutes, my tableau would be complete.
“It ain’t gonna fit in there,” said one wildebeest. “The door is too narrow. It won’t make the corner.”