In Spite of Everything

by Susan Gregory Thomas

  But I also had another, dissonant feeling: I didn’t know anything about the contents of Cal’s interior. It hit me that since Zanny’s birth, we had been in parallel mode, like toddlers on a marathon playdate. Each of us was engrossed in handling, inspecting, and shepherding the moment at hand and then scuttling on to the next, aware of the other’s presence but not interacting. We had made no provision to appreciate the resonance created by this relentless pageant of activity. Aside from our cursory Everything is different now exchange, we hadn’t talked. Period. We had planned, we had executed. We had not ruminated, we had not conjoined. It was surreal. I had been absorbed in a conjugal fantasy, a psychosexual renovation, and Cal was not actually involved in it. There was a good chance that he hadn’t noticed anything except that I was inexplicably cleaning with vinegar. This is exactly what Cal had been worried about that day in the park, just before I got pregnant the first time. But that could be changed. It could be made into a real moment. Cal always saw the extraordinary.

  So I spoke. I told him how much it meant to me to actually care for our home, and, a little shyly, that in so doing I really wanted to try to be an actual wife and mother. I wanted our kids to be nourished by good food that had been made not just for them but for the whole family. I didn’t want there to be “the children’s table,” with the kids quarantined in their own feral territory. I wanted that home to be one where my children’s friends wanted to come, where they themselves felt wanted. I wanted our family to be friends with neighborhood families who came to that home so that everyone’s children would feel swaddled by their community. I want for you to be able to be the guy and for me to be the woman. That kind of thing. If you want. “Susie, I think if it makes you feel good about yourself, then go for it,” he said. “You gots to do what you gots to do.”

  As he sat there in the living room watching CSI with his back to me in the comfy leather armchair, the anchor ran out of rope. “Well, what about cooking?” I ventured hesitantly. “Do you think I should do some cooking, too—so it’s not all on you?” He scratched and yawned. “I don’t,” he said. “A lot of the thing with cooking is technique, and it’s not worth the time it would take you to get the hang of it—stick with what you’re good at. But do you have to use vinegar?”

  I could have pushed it. I could have grabbed the fucking clicker out of his hand, tossed it on the floor, and kissed him. I could have forced the moment to its crisis. But I didn’t. I nodded. I lay back. I watched television. On the screen, the CSI team had just uncovered the secret lair of a fetishist. It was furnished with a giant mobile, a stack of enormous diapers, and a crib made for an adult.

  Not long after that, I went into labor during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. I moaned in the dark: the heat, impenetrable. Mama mammal instincts must have sensed danger because the labor stopped for twenty-four hours. But then it kicked in again, and after ten hours of wild banshee bellowing, I gave birth to our second daughter, Pru. My merry-eyed little Pru! When I’d first laid eyes on Zanny, I had known that she was the person I’d waited my whole life to meet. When the doctor laid my Pru at my breast, I knew that I’d already known her all my life—she was just here now. We nestled into each other on the hospital bed, and I felt strong and happy, even in my sleep. My new baby bunny.

  As delighted as I was, I was also profoundly pooped, and I flinched every time movement forced me to summon a limb. I had delivered Pru with nary a drug, and I had gotten pretty ripped up during pushing. I just wanted to sleep. Cal wanted me to come home. Zanny, though she had come to the hospital to meet her new sister just hours after birth, missed me; plus, family wanted to come over and meet the baby. The hospital wouldn’t discharge me for at least twenty-four hours, so he went to petition the nurses. They were firm: We need to keep an eye on the baby, they said, and the mother needs to rest. We should really wait the standard forty-eight hours. “That’s ridiculous,” Cal said. “She can rest at home.”

  Almost twenty-four hours to the minute, I went home. The next day, Cal said that family was coming over. I begged him to put it off for at least a few more days. “But I’ve already told them that I’m cooking!” he said. Pru and I lay in bed while Cal cooked for his family on our roof deck.

  It was via Cal’s reign over the kitchen that our life expanded into the kind of life that I had always hoped for. Laundry is laundry, and clean floors are expected, but food is food. Cal was an excellent cook. He loved to cook for big groups, had grown up cooking for a houseful of approving relatives, had cooked for his fraternity in college for the fun of it. People always loved his food, and he took genuine pleasure in their pleasure. Because cooking was his métier, and I was a chatty Cathy, our home became a magnet for get-togethers. We shared meals with families: the children tumbling and bumping into one another like puppies, the adults having the kind of iterative conversations one has with young children, stopping every few moments to broker peace negotiations or address a sweet concern. Because he preferred to stay in the kitchen or working the grill—the kind of cook who wants meal-making to be a focused, solitary meditation, not a group activity—my job became that of the gabby, self-deprecating hostess, making guests feel welcome and not guilty for shooting the breeze and allowing a sumptuous meal simply to appear before them.

  So, even as Cal’s and my foundation began rotting, our exterior became ever more polished and put-together. The more he cooked, the more I talked, and the more I talked, the more I felt my sense of manic kinesis returning. Keep moving. Inertial force. Talk, talk, talk.

  Cal also insisted on doing the cleanup, arguing that he was so devoted to his system in the kitchen that he’d freak if anyone else “monkeyed” with it. No problem, everyone said, giggling at the ridiculous luxury that his obsessive drive afforded them. Talk, talk, talk. One of the children’s favorite playthings was a wooden kitchen—a stove, an oven, a sink, and a cupboard containing miniature pots, pans, and dishes. Whenever they played kitchen, whoever was the “cooker” played the role of Cal; everyone else just talked. Once, when we were all eating dinner on our roof deck, the preschool-aged son of one of our closest family friends asked his father, “What’s your favorite restaurant in our neighborhood, Daddy?” (All the little kids in Park Slope are boulevardiers before they’re out of diapers.) Our friend said: “This is my favorite restaurant, man—the food is amazing, you guys get to horse around with your friends, and I get to hang out with my friends.” It was a compliment. I laughed, loudly. A restaurant—where you go to get away from home.

  I became known as the luckiest mother in the neighborhood. My God, you guys don’t just have mac-and-cheese and broccoli—you’re eating lambburgers with artisanal feta and homemade roasted peppers! You have chopped cucumber, parsley, and Greek yogurt salad every night! And he works from home, so he can pick up the children from school! And he’s so calm! He’s the only father you can trust completely—he’s an honorary mother! We’re having a conversation about our useless husbands now, Susie, so please just shut up and get us some coffee. An English mom friend once pinned me with a very British look and snapped pointedly: “Look, darling, you’ve basically married the perfect man—you don’t have to do anything.” She was right. Couldn’t I do anything? One morning, Cal was running late. I said, “Go ahead, take a shower—I’ll make breakfast.” Breakfast was whole-wheat toast with organic almond butter and honey. I heard the shower start. I heard the shower stop. I heard footsteps padding down the hallway. Cal appeared at the kitchen door, skin not yet damp, in a towel. “Don’t forget,” he said nervously, “to take the toast out when it’s browned.” With my back to the kids, I flipped him the finger. He chuckled. I smiled thinly.

  The centre of a dwelling. All of a sudden, our kitchen felt too small. It was definitely too small. And ugly. The floor was covered in 1980s-era black tile that had acquired an oily patina that all my scouring could not slough off. The counters were of black plastic laminate, also oily. The table was from Ikea, as was the bookcase where we stored t
he pots and pans. The appliances were embarrassing. No serious cook could get anything done in here. Practically everyone else we knew had a serious kitchen, but few were the cook Cal was. It didn’t seem fair. Even though we’d already sunk all our retirement savings into the down payment, we should really take out a home equity line of credit and renovate.

  Tear out the old stuff, throw it away.

  Many, many people were doing it—not just in our neighborhood, though I have no doubt that the numbers could successfully demonstrate that Park Slope circa 2005–2006 was ground zero for expensive kitchen renovations nationwide. It was true in general for people our age across the country. The Harvard home modeling report’s analysis was that Generation X’s unprecedented confidence in its own grit, coupled with its equally high trust of banks, would translate into “higher likelihood of investment and consumption,” and further, that “members of Generation X may be more likely to use banks for refinancing activity, leveraging home equity, and generally sustaining high levels of consumption.” They’re so smart at Harvard. During the housing bubble, Generation X did indeed spend more on home remodeling than Baby Boomers spent when they were the same age. We started taking out HELOCs to pay for that remodeling, and the banks let us because the housing market was so screaming. In 2005, home equity had more than doubled in a decade. We banked on it; everybody who owned a house banked on it. Indeed, the Harvard study reported that home equity alone was homeowners’ most important asset, that two-thirds had more home equity than stock wealth.

  But one of the chief reasons that Generation Xers spent more than other homeowners on remodeling was that we bought charming fixer-uppers—those vitally important homey homes. According to the Joint Center 2005 research, 31 percent of Generation Xers lived in homes that were at least forty-five years old, compared with 22 percent of Baby Boomers when they were in their thirties. New housing developments? No, thanks—we already saw Poltergeist, E.T., and Suburbia. Dude, we lived it.

  And the fixer-upper nesting phenomenon wasn’t just limited to the coasts, either. In the spring of 2007, Professional Remodeler featured the growth industry in Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. The town’s leading construction firm, Riggs Construction, estimated that 80 percent of its business came from Generation X buying up the bigger, older homes in town. We also spent more because we wanted to be involved in the renovation, invested; unlike previous generations, who typically just deferred to the expertise of a contractor or decorator, Generation X wanted to be architect, decorator, HVAC engineer—or at least dabble in those roles. “Generation Xers want to have a remodeler help them buy rather than sell them,” David Alpert, president of Continuum Marketing Group of Great Falls, Virginia, a firm that works with remodelers around the country, told Professional Remodeler. “They want to make a selection from a series of choices, but they want the remodeler to help them make the choice more intelligently.”

  Not only that, but according to professional home remodeling firm research, Xers depend more on the advice of their peers than earlier generations. Tell me about it. In our neighborhood, sitting down in a friend’s kitchen for a cup of coffee while the kids had a playdate basically involved passing your orals in some kind of Restoration Hardware version of dialectical materialism. “How did you guys seal your poured concrete counters without getting that icky ‘satin’ look?” and “Is it dumb to go with Carrara marble because it’s so porous, or do you think stains just make it more homey?” and “Now, did you have to go somewhere upstate to get your claw-foot reenameled?” Useful footnotes were “Those Franke faucets are crazy expensive, but don’t ruin your whole kitchen just because you wanted to save three hundred bucks at the time”and “Go with the Bosch dishwasher, definitely—it’s so much quieter.” By the time you walked out, you’d have the names of at least two really good, somewhat reliable general contractors (the best anyone can hope for); the most amazing (but pricey) wood-stripping guy in town; the best outlet for Wolf and Viking ranges; and the truth about Sub-Zero refrigerators.

  That was in 2006. We took out a HELOC and cashed the fifty-thousand-dollar check I’d received from the estate of a wealthy family friend. We hired an architect friend and embarked on the yuppie odyssey that our neighborhood friends had undertaken. Cal was over the moon. A thorough and compulsive researcher, he read every review and product comparison of stoves, refrigerators, venting hoods, sinks, faucets, kitchen cabinets, and storage systems that could be found. We spent so many hours at the Brooklyn fancy appliance emporium of choice that we became friends with our designated salesman, Ira. We tweaked and retweaked the designs that our architect produced. We selected tile, tin ceiling panels, lighting fixtures, and marble countertop slabs from literally hundreds of choices. Our kitchen was enameled in paint chips. It was exciting. I love pretty things, I loved our home. It was adrenalizing to imagine a beautiful, reconfigured kitchen that expanded into our living spaces so that it would physically occupy the center of the dwelling, not just symbolically. But it also felt disquieting and counterfeit. Was this becoming Cal’s and my real estate crisis, part deux?

  I pretended that I just wanted to have a literate conversation with him about the principle of the thing, an aerial-view discussion. After all, I was in the middle of writing my book and was spending a great deal of my conscious time thinking about what compelled X parents to spend egregious sums of money on stuff for their children. You’d have to have been dead not to appreciate that there was something preternaturally bourgeois afoot in the zeitgeist. It was one thing to sit in the margins watching everyone else write their chapter of the home makeover narrative, lingering over the nuances of grout colors and bullnose tile. But it was another thing to be writing our own entry in this sociomaterialist history, and now that we were doing it, there was something unsettling about this undertaking. How could everything be so expensive? Didn’t it seem bizarre that we were actually sitting here discussing the finer points of the fifteen-hundred-dollar refrigerator versus the five-thousand-dollar refrigerator? Didn’t people just used to go to Sears when they needed a new fridge? Were we just doing this because everyone else was—were we Generation Jones people?

  But even as all this came tripping off my tongue, I already knew what he was going to say. And that he would be furious. Cal was now the neighborhood cook; people depended on him to be that. He needed nice equipment. Why shouldn’t he have it? The difference, Cal argued, was that, unlike many people, he would really use this equipment. Our restaurant-quality stove would not be used to heat sauces from jars; it would be used to cook. Furthermore, the kitchen was getting too crowded. He couldn’t concentrate on making meals for all these people when they were up in his face constantly. I was the one who wanted to have people over all the time. If we wanted to do that, we had to have a place for them to sit! Plus, the girls deserved it. This was their home. Why wouldn’t I want them to have a nice home, like all their friends?

  Now I felt Cal’s axis wobbling in a dangerously elliptical formation. I had a bad feeling. It occurred to me that maybe his center of gravity had depended on my not having one. Perhaps it was not coincidental that my efforts to generate one, or to merge my incipient one with his, had caused his to shift. Was Cal’s center of gravity, of dwelling, shifting to the nice place, and this new kitchen? And in an odd, Greek-addled way, was this Cal’s own reprise on the Carlin Room? Could it be that in the final analysis, he just wanted people to keep their grubby mitts off of his literal and metaphysical stuff? Did he just want to be alone? I couldn’t even consider it.

  So we went ahead with it. While the contractors bashed down our old kitchen and replaced it with a numinous one, we spent the summer living at my parents-in-law’s house on Staten Island, and by the time the renovation was complete, we had spent more than a hundred thousand dollars. And the kitchen really was beautiful. It was right about this time that Pru, now three, developed not an imaginary friend but a place. She called it “my magical world.” Her magical world included a ho
use that was made entirely from roses. Its bedrooms were swathed in fairy bowers; the kitchen issued ice creams. She could describe this world in luscious detail, every time elaborating in a slightly different way. At the end of her exposition, she would always end with the sweet question: “Would you like to go to my magical world?” Yes, we would answer. Yes, we would.

  One night, thinking about Pru’s magical world, I read Auden’s “The Common Life.” I absorbed the lines about how in making a home, we build a fortress of privacy and protection from “the Dark Lord and his hungry / amimivorous chimaeras.” But in the end, the poem warned, our attempts are futile. Auden invoked a quotation from James Joyce: The ogre will come in any case.

  Two years after the renovation was complete, we were driving on the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway. It was early summer, and the weather was perfect, like a sunny day in Los Angeles (extra perfect because it wasn’t Los Angeles but New York). Cal, whose customary response to temperatures above 75 degrees was to seal the car hermetically and blast the air-conditioning, was inexplicably agreeable. Without an argument, or even a comment, he had allowed me to leave the windows down. The breeze was warm and riotous; the girls were giggling at the festivity of having it flip and whip their hair up and around. We were on our way to my in-laws’ vacation house, a new construction in a complex by a golf course in the mountains of northern New Jersey. Years ago, I would have dreaded this whole scenario. Since then, Cal’s mother and I had gone through tough periods twice—first when Cal and I were a new couple, then after Zanny’s birth—but we had stayed the course and were now as close as I had ever been to any parental figure. I felt a sense of deep contentment because of that.