In Spite of Everything

by Susan Gregory Thomas

  We took weekend trips to the New Jersey suburbs, where an exodus from Park Slope had been steadily headed for the past several years. We were driven around by pleasant real estate agents, sitting in the backs of their station wagons with Zanny patiently babbling in her car seat, watching the rows of 1920s Cape Cod, colonial, and ranch-style houses undulate by. We were led into many of these places, climbed their carpeted staircases, circled their kitchen islands, witnessed the sports trophies in the children’s rooms. All I could envision was our children as teenagers in a suburban wasteland, driving around drunkenly to the next party where the parents weren’t home: my own adolescence. For Cal, it was the ultimate knock to his first-generation immigrant ego: settling for second best because he couldn’t hack it in the big leagues. I said: “I hate it, too, but this could be a great move for the children—do we really have a good reason for putting the kibosh on Jersey?” Cal accelerated toward the Goethals Bridge. “Yes,” he said. “I don’t want to.”

  But something else was afoot for Cal and me, too. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly; mostly, it seemed exciting and strangely grown up. Having our babies had not made me feel grown up in this kind of capacity. Having the babies brought about an intimate, profound transformation: I’d been instantly forged into a real human with a soul. But this home-buying gauntlet was a categorically different rite of passage. There were documents requiring signatures in a hundred different places, binding us to a hundred different legal stipulations; there were banks investigating our financial histories and making long-term projections about our future as employable taxpayers; lawyers, notaries, agents, secretaries were all summoned and working to vet and authorize the legitimacy of our role in the transaction. If having children had inducted us into the deeply sweet and complex realm of humanity, buying property was indoctrinating us into incontrovertible adulthood. We were grown-ups now: an actual married couple, doing what actual married couples did. It was kind of awesome. But there was also something disquieting about it.

  As the momentum generated by our compulsive scouring of interest rates and mortgage packages grew more and more giddy and frenzied, something in our center of gravity began tilting. Certainly, we were both obsessed, discussing nothing but percentage points, paint colors. But Cal had never been so on fire about anything. He was hounding real estate agents, tracking down the perfect loan, calculating closing costs. And he was determined to find the kind of place he wanted. Each time we’d allowed ourselves to look at a property that he loved but was out of reach for us financially, he was genuinely defeated. I floated the idea of moving to another Brooklyn area, where prices were cheaper. “I don’t want to live in some crappy place in a shit-bag neighborhood!” he’d rail. I knew how he felt, but what could we do? This was our first place, a starter home; it was supposed to be modest. We shouldn’t feel bad about that. “I just can’t do it,” he said. “I want a nice place.” He was anxious, sleepless. It ate at his ego. It would make him “feel like shit” to see those other “smug” parents in the neighborhood with their “sweet places” while we had “nothing.” He knew he was being hyperbolic. But he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t rest.

  The place Cal and I liked most was nice—it was perfect. It was out of our price range. He had taken his parents to see it. “It is beautiful—it has ‘old world charm,’ ” said his mother. “But you cannot afford it.” Cal was furious. He should have gone to medical school, at least law school, his mother snipped. Oof. But she had a point. We weren’t doctors, lawyers, or bond traders; we were a writer and an independent consultant. Maybe we just had to come to terms with the blunt truth that we had been priced out of our neighborhood; a lot of other people in our position had moved into other spots in Brooklyn and were making it work. Plus, if this area was becoming so yuppie and rich, did we really want to be here, anyway? Fuck them! We should concentrate less on the real estate end of this and more on making a genuine home. Cal went into a funk. So he was just going to have to raise his kids in a dump? That’s how it was going to go for him? He wasn’t going to get the nice place—that’s all there was to that. He watched TV late into the night, was detached and grumpy during the day. His swagger faded.

  I couldn’t figure it out. I wanted a nice place, a homey home, too—definitely wanted it. But the status element, while it had its devilish appeal, didn’t seem like such a big deal. It was shattering for Cal. I’d never seen this in him. But when I thought about it more, I realized that perhaps it had always been there, just in a slightly different form. That Cal had always enjoyed incontestable authority among his friends, and certainly inspired a great deal of it in his business dealings, was a given. That I had always relied on his sense of confidence was also a given. But the more I contemplated his struggle with this whole real estate brouhaha, it began to dawn on me that perhaps his sense of authority and confidence was more tenuous than I had imagined. Perhaps, in some way, it hinged on the very appearance of authority and confidence. That is, he needed a nice place in order to uphold his sense of competence, and that without it as bolstering context, he would feel exposed to others, to himself. The system would disintegrate. I panicked. I might want a home, but he needed that place.

  I convinced Cal to help me lobby each set of parents (except my father) to lend us some money to make a good-sized down payment, and with a five-year ARM, we would be able to afford the monthly payments. We threw caution to the wind, bid, and won the place we wanted: a gorgeous three-bedroom co-op in a prewar limestone building in the best school district in Brooklyn. I remember the loan officer at WAMU telling Cal and me that although we were cash poor now, he could tell we were the kind of people who would make money in the future. We were the kind of people, he said, that the bank wanted to “invest in.”

  We didn’t question the banks’ pretzel logic any more than we did our own, and neither, apparently, did the majority of Xers. We trusted ourselves, the banks trusted us, we trusted the banks. Again, so say the numbers. According to research, members of Generation X in 2000 had more faith in the financial industry than previous generations at the same age. Evidently, we were so collectively sure of our own against-all-odds capabilities that it didn’t strike us as odd that the banks should be, too—even though we had provided them with no actual proof that they should.

  And, as usual, in a Psychology 101 way, it makes some sense. One of the notorious legacies of Generation X’s home-alone childhood is an abiding suspicion of authority. All this has been well documented, e.g., we hate ass-kissing the boss, so just let us do our thing because we rock as self-starters. But when the whole housing bubble started to swell, the dynamic shifted: Enter the banks, as approving parents. At last! They gave us a home! It was as though we were finally getting the apology and consolation prize we’d always secretly hoped for: You didn’t get a real home as a kid, but you worked hard, succeeded on your own steam, and now we’re going to give it to you and your children. Welcome home. You earned it.

  In a few months, we moved into our new apartment: a little perfectly cut jewel. It was on the top floor of a lovely 1910 limestone building on quite possibly the prettiest block in Park Slope. It was small, but the layout was ideal for us to build a family in, and I was soon pregnant with our second baby. And it was a homey home; you could feel the historical happiness embedded in its details. The bedrooms were nests, barely big enough for the beds they contained, but that was fine, because they were soft and cozy, with no room for the kind of clutter that can distract one from the important conduct of quiet and slumber. Our lives were lived in the living spaces, which were large and lovely. The entrance hallway was ample and welcoming and led directly to a massive Edwardian dining room, complete with a nonfunctioning but pretty maroon-tile-lined gas fireplace. Lumbering old wooden pocket doors separated it from the also massive living room, complete with functioning wood-burning, wood-manteled fireplace. The ceilings were grand, punctuated at the center with period chandeliers and festively bordered with egg-and-dart crown
molding. These rooms, though originally designed to be pretentious, were made warm with our kooky mishmash of stuff—all laden with familial meaning. I should say, laden for me.

  By his own admission, Cal’s decorating preferences had, when we were living separately, tended to the 1980s single-guy variety: black furniture and media consoles. The décor of his own childhood home was decidedly not to his taste: reproductions of French Impressionist paintings, fussy Victorian settees, the white baby grand. I felt strongly, perhaps hysterically, that our home should look and feel like home. Cal shrugged. I could steer the decorating; he didn’t care. In my ideal, home should reflect our current and past family history. With that in mind, the dining room served as a mixed-use space: eating center and art studio for our children. Since meals with very young children meant getting food shrapnel all over the floor, I figured it was okay to get art-related shrapnel all over the place, too. They had an easel with actual tempera paints, clay, and tons of crafts supplies. I framed their pictures and paintings and hung them on the most expansive wall in the dining room in a rotating exhibition. The apartment’s long hallway was the perfect venue for curating family photographs.

  Populating our home’s remaining territory were things I had grown up with in my childhood home before it split apart. One of the things that had been so devastating following my parents’ divorce was seeing all of our things in separate houses. Over the years, both parents had pruned back a good deal; a lot of the stuff that had been so important to me was no longer important to them. So whenever they were getting rid of things, I appeared in a car with an open trunk. Now, everything was here, it was all together. My children and I would share the same sort of attachment to these odd things, not valuable in the Antiques Roadshow sense, but so deeply imbued with importance and place that each was like a talisman.

  Virtually everyone on my dad’s side of the family was a painter, and we had nearly all their extant pictures on our walls, just as they had been in my childhood home in Berkeley. There were my grandmother Thomas’s still lifes with fruits and flowers above the sideboard; there were my great-grandfather Harvey’s landscapes encircling the dining room table. My aunt Hannah’s pen-and-ink portrait of Virginia Woolf hung over the comfy leather armchair in the living room, and the chef d’oeuvre—my dad’s oil painting of four abstract apples suspended against a mossy green backdrop—crowned the mantelpiece.

  From my mother’s side, there were other things: the silver-plated Victorian lamp from my nana’s farm in Virginia; the cigar box that Batista had given my great-grandfather Dawson (who had been the first ambassador to the Organization of American States), as well as a pair of drawings of gauchos presented to him by the ambassador of Argentina; silk Japanese kimonos collected by my great-great-aunt Emma-Jane, who, as a young widow, had taken a trip to “the Orient” in 1909. In a world where clean lines and contemporary furnishings ruled, our home was higgledy-piggledy, but it made me feel unreasonably happy, peaceful. “Where did you get all this?” an amazed friend once asked. To which, of course, I could only respond in Carlinese: “This is my stuff, man.” By which to say, it was home.

  But after living there for a few months, I realized that one major thing that I did not know about a home was how to care for one. Indeed, thanks to my matrilineal pedigree of nondomesticity, I knew dead nothing about it. When I came into my own household, at thirty-four, I realized that this was a big deal. It was a little like discovering one day that you have an unseemly tic that you never knew you had—like nervously scratching your armpits when you don’t know what to say or farting when you’re asleep—but that everyone else thinks of as being one of your distinguishing attributes. You feel like (a) How could I have gone so far in life without knowing about this? (b) Why didn’t anyone close to me tell me I had this, knowing that I’m the kind of person who would definitely want to know about it? and (c) What am I going to do about it now, as in right this second?

  My first response was to buy Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House. People talk about War and Peace being a tome. Home Comforts is a tome. Its nearly thousand pages on setting up and maintaining a clean, well-ordered home begin with one of the most perfect lines of postfeminist nonfiction writing I’ve ever read: “I am a working woman with a secret life: I keep house.” Mendelson, a Ph.D. in philosophy and a lawyer, grew up under the tutelage of her two grandmothers—one Appalachian, the other Italian—who raised her to be a rural housewife, not only instructing her on every last aspect and aim of housekeeping, but also teaching her that the work itself was essential and gratifying. To be clear, it is not a memoir of “my life with two housekeeping grandmas” but a forthright and exhaustive guide to washing, laundering, mending, marketing, list making, cleaning, sewing, repairing, cooking, baking, food label reading, tending, dusting, sorting, tidying, ironing, folding, system making, everything.

  I devoured this book. I devoured it as if it were every “just like Mom used to make!” cookie I’d ever seen advertised but on whose inspiration I’d never snacked. With its vivid, earnest descriptions of chores, it was a small, magical world, like Little House on the Prairie. Schedules for household tasks! One for each day of the week! Washing on Monday, marketing on Tuesday, minicleaning on Wednesday, odd jobs on Thursday, housecleaning on Saturday morning! Guidelines: Proceed from higher to lower; dry to wet; inside the house to outside; begin with the chores that require waiting times! To learn about those things that make a home ineffably homey—sweet, laundered sheets; ordered, airy rooms; clean bathtubs and fixtures; good meals; books, mended; socks, darned—was like randomly flipping to a psalm for the heck of it and unexpectedly actually finding comfort in it. Order in Homes—it did exist! My children would know it, even if I hadn’t.

  One of the other things I liked about Cheryl Mendelson was her husband. Edward Mendelson was a professor at my alma mater and academia’s preeminent Auden scholar, not to mention the executor of Auden’s estate. Ed was also a contributing editor at PC Magazine because he loved computers and writing about them. The idea that Auden, technology, Cheryl, and Ed were all somehow mixed up in a Laura Ingalls Wilder milieu of old-fashioned housekeeping appealed to me on every possible level.

  Her invocations of Auden’s About the House—a collection of poems that map the architecture of a home and its correlates in the mind, body, and spirit—were especially poignant. My sophomoric reading of About the House had been predicated on the idea that the whole thing was symbolic, home included. Indeed, even my understanding of the required undergraduate study of architecture in general—Gothic cathedrals, say, modeled on the body of Christ—had been grounded in my assumption that the purpose of all construction was symbolic. Jesus, I really was a WASP.

  Reading this book, I realized that I honestly had had no real awareness that one could actually find a sense of soul, even transcendence, at home, in a church—in an indoor place. I was positively blown away when in her section on caring for the kitchen—a chapter rife with notes on glasses, flatware, utensils, bakeware, pots, pans, and the materials used in cookware and their properties—she invoked the Auden poem “Thanksgiving for a Habitat,” which describes the kitchen as “the centre of a dwelling,” a “numinous” place in which “ghosts would feel uneasy.” That is precisely what I wanted to do in our home—no bad ghosts from childhoods past.

  But to do it, Mendelson seemed to suggest, would require a certain degree of yielding, of relinquishing unhelpful ideas about division of labor, power, men and women. As in: It’s okay to be a housewife. She mused on what some of the more rigid thinking attending the women’s movement had done to bulldoze the home and the womanly art of caring for it, as well as media’s role in underscoring “degraded images of household work and workers.” Mendelson argued that what had been razed, along with all manner of yellow-wallpapered prisons, was love, comfort, and the sweet sense of belonging. “Unfortunately, what a traditional woman did that made her home warm and alive was not dusting and the
laundry,” she wrote. “Her real secret was that she identified herself with her home.”

  Holy shit. Could I be that mom, that woman, that wife—that home for my family? Suddenly, that idea was, for me, downright countercultural. I was in. Like all recent converts to orthodoxy, I went a little nuts. Part of going nuts was based on a frank acknowledgment that if I didn’t go overboard on the discipline, I’d never get going on it at all. I figured that once the routine was set and became deeply ingrained, it would become a part of me and our home, the way the altar of the church is actually the heart of Jesus, in Catholic churches anyway. But part of it was also that I was just psyched. Ever since I was little, I’ve loved messing around with lotions and potions, so the fetishistic, chemical aspects of housecleaning fit perfectly with that penchant. I concocted counter cleaners from distilled white vinegar and lemon oil, wood floor cleaners from apple cider vinegar and lavender, toilet and tub cleaners from baking soda and peppermint, furniture polish from mineral and nut oils and sandalwood. I made hand and body soaps and laundry detergent. I saved worn-out boxer shorts and crummy T-shirts and ripped them into rags. I created systems for organizing clothes, books, toys. I even made some headway with mail. Mostly, I loved cleaning and scrubbing and washing. Eight months pregnant with our second child, I did not hesitate to get down on my hands and knees with a scrub brush. I loved our little home.

  One night, Cal was observing my born-again housekeeping with detached amusement. What was I doing? I plopped my pregnant tenement of a self down on the sofa while he watched TV from the armchair nearby. And I thought: Look at us, Cal and me. We are sitting in our home. Here he is, feet up in a wife-beater undershirt. Here I am, with swelling breasts and massively pregnant, for the second time. It’s August. I have just been on the floor, cleaning. It struck me that there could be something outrageously delicious about this whole turn of events. I knew it was odd, but after moving into our own home, something primal and sexist shifted in me. Could we be becoming man and wife?