After several months of Saturdays spent wandering through other people’s houses, my four-year-old begins to say disturbing things. He says, “One and a quarter baths.” He says, “Good closet space.” He says, “That could be your office.” Mostly he says, “Can I wait in the car?”
I am a reluctant participant, still not convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that we have left our life on the East Coast behind. Who can take this relentless sunshine seriously? While my husband counts off square feet in a stranger’s living room, I sit on the front stoop and spot a family taking a walk, licking ice-cream cones. Another time I notice a teenage girl skateboard past a house, her navel ring flashing. A dog sleeps on a nearby lawn, his legs in the air, twitching. It is 1995, and we have just moved across the country to LA County. I can’t remember what I used to do on Saturdays.
After three months of touring open houses on our own, we finally meet the couple who will become our first real estate agents. They are feeding my son warm cookies in what he now knows is called an “open-concept kitchen,” and they look like retired ballroom dance instructors. She has a tiny waist and bright bow lips. He wears a dark pressed suit, even though my husband and every other man in sight has, by mid-July, resorted to an old concert tee and shorts. In my third trimester of pregnancy, I am wearing something approaching a muumuu. The real estate agents are like the aunt and uncle I never had, and they promise to show us what we’ve been missing. “Open houses,” they scoff, even as they preside over one. They talk of lockboxes, multiple listings, downzoning, school districts, walking distance, third bedrooms, hardwood floors, Berber carpets, Corian countertops, bonus rooms. They can’t wait to show us what’s been hiding out there.
But first there is the credit check.
When we meet the agents at their office the next day, the husband, unsmiling, ushers us in from the reception area. The wife isn’t there. At an appointment, he says when I ask, but I already know we’ve been downgraded, not worthy of them both. If we’re only getting one, he would not be my choice. In my mind I’ve named her Aunt Grace and him Uncle Phil. I want Aunt Grace, I think. In less than twenty-four hours I’ve constructed elaborate fantasies around my future friendship with her: She is there in the delivery room, pressing a cool washcloth to my forehead. On Thursday afternoons we meet for tea on her bougainvillea-covered patio.
“Let’s see what we have to work with here,” Uncle Phil says, laying our tarnished credit history out in front of us.
For days after that meeting, my husband writes letters of complaint, retraction, denial, and explanation to our creditors. Sometimes he includes small checks, promising more payments to come. Meanwhile, the grown sons of our landlords, who live below us in the duplex we rent, have moved back home. One sleeps on an army cot in the detached garage. My husband’s bicycle disappears. Another moves in below our son’s bedroom, which begins to smell like cigarette smoke even though I close all the vents.
I pull out the old baby monitor to see if it still works and pick up cordless-phone conversations. I hear the words kilo, ounce, uncut, and meet me out back. Skinny girls hang around the backyard pool, blowing smoke rings at each other and dropping their silver gum wrappers in the shallow end. For the first time I think, Maybe we really should move.
I’m beginning to suspect the real estate agents we have chosen are the problem, even Aunt Grace, who sometimes substitutes for Uncle Phil when a house pops up and he’s too busy to show it to us. They know we’re from out of town, that other coast. They’ve seen our soiled credit. They must think we’re fools, showing us such defective places. Can they not hear the high-pitched wail of power lines over the patio? How can they allow our son, already thrown off balance by our move, to be knocked down by a homeowner’s tiny barking dogs when he opens a bathroom door?
I come home from the grocery store one night, planning to tell my husband it’s time to fire them. As I climb the increasingly difficult-for-me-to-climb stairs and open our front door, I hear him talking in a hushed voice on the phone in the kitchen. “I’m sure it’s hormones,” he says. “She’s usually much more decisive.” I drop my bags of groceries on the living room floor, apples and a bottle of antacid tablets rolling out across the stained carpet, and he hangs up on Uncle Phil and rushes to help me, our son hiding behind him. “Where do I sign?” I ask. “Let’s buy something.”
We begin to make a string of offers on houses we don’t even want and which the bank will qualify us to buy only with what Uncle Phil calls “creative financing.” I latch on to the word creative. I think of freewriting, finger painting. I think, Stream of consciousness. I imagine signing forms on tree bark using ink made from berries ground with a mortar and pestle. I imagine scrounging change for the down payment from car seats, the couch, the drain in the backyard pool, my son’s piggy bank.
We manage to back out of all of the offers that are not rejected. The inspection report always turns up flaws we couldn’t possibly live with: too few outlets, a hot water heater that needs to be replaced within the year, a bonus room that was clearly built out of code with no inspections.
“You agree with me, right?” I ask my husband each time we drive away from another flawed property. Before he can answer, I’ve turned around in my seat, my belly large and pulsing, to hand our son a juice box.
On alternate Saturdays, we begin cheating on Aunt Grace and Uncle Phil, exploring neighborhoods we know are outside their territory. We tell ourselves they have had it with us, too, that they want us to move on. Why else would they be so slow to return our phone calls? At an open house in a neighborhood so sought after we probably couldn’t qualify to rent a studio apartment in it, we meet Aunt Emily. She wears the same sensible espadrilles I can still squeeze my pregnant feet into and a dress that looks as if it has an apron attached. As soon as I see her smiling at our son, I realize what a fraud Aunt Grace is, with her little bow mouth. Aunt Emily is clearly the one we have been waiting for all this time.
She takes our word for it that we’re qualified (Aunt Emily!) and drives us through neighborhoods where children ride bicycles down the middle of the street, multicolored streamers blowing from their handlebars. “Let’s live here,” our son says, and it’s as if he’s come out of a deep, dark coma. I smile nervously at him. Aunt Emily, I think, we need to talk.
Our sordid credit history seems to sadden more than shock her. Such nice people, she must be thinking. How do these things happen?
“Of course, we’ve made a fresh start with the move and everything,” I tell her.
“Of course,” she says and pats my hand. We are sitting at Russell’s, in a booth I can barely squeeze into, surrounded by the smells of hamburgers and strawberry milkshakes. For the first time in this pregnancy, I believe I will throw up. I excuse myself and wobble to the bathroom.
The next day Aunt Emily calls to say she is retiring, and it’s been a true pleasure working with us. She is referring us to an agent named John. But I don’t want a new real estate agent. I remember my seventh-grade math teacher, who never came back after spring break, leaving us with a string of substitutes who listlessly handed out worksheets. A knowing eighth grader said the math teacher had cloistered herself in a convent because we were so awful. I am a bad person disguised as a good person, I think, looking at my swollen feet poking out of my espadrilles.
My son, my husband, and I each enter private mourning periods. My son demands we set up the camping tent in the living room, then fills it with his stuffed animals and refuses to eat anything but cheese toast, which we must deliver to him in the tent. My husband spreads out voided contracts, street maps, and credit reports on the dining room table and circles lines periodically with a light-bulb-going-off urgency, as if he were a detective hunting down a serial killer. I sit in the dent I’ve made in the couch and flip through the stack of flyers collected over the past few months, imagining the lives we might have led in the houses we didn’t buy:
HOME SWEET HOME This large, spacious home will take your breath away! A huge family room is the heart of the home, lined by a magnificent stone fireplace.
A SMALL TREASURE is located in a prime residential neighborhood lovingly referred to as Belmont Heights, an enchanting world within reach of fresh ocean air and Belmont Shore’s fashionable business district. Come explore this home and make it your most treasured possession!
THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS This bungalow has been lovingly maintained over the years, and features a designer tile fireplace, refinished hardwood floors, original sconces, and refurbished furnace.
Although I’m not quite sure what sconces are, I think they might have made me happy. My husband too. Even that sad little boy in the tent who vaguely resembles our son.
One day I come home to find Betty, our landlady, crying in the front yard. Feeling vaguely hopeful, I look up and down the street for the police car that has taken away one or both of her sons. But there is no police car, just Betty pointing to the pomegranate trees whose branches used to scrape our kitchen windows. I say “used to” because overzealous trimmers have hacked off the tops, demolishing the last good thing about our duplex apartment. “I used to reach out the window and pull in a pomegranate,” I say to Betty. We hug each other there in the front yard, both of us frumpy and thick with emotion. What next?
When John, the new agent, calls, I am grateful but cautious. “Have you seen our credit history?” I ask, and my husband pokes his head out of the living room tent where he, too, has taken to disappearing.
“I think I found a lender willing to work with you,” John tells me.
John is a family man and sometimes brings one of his animated blond children with him when he shows us houses. Although the plan seems to be for his kid and ours to play together while the three of us do business, our son is squirrelly and shy. Sensing a setup, he clings tightly to my leg. I walk around the houses with him attached as John points out features. “The old ball and chain,” I joke to John, who does not look amused.
“This is the bottom of the real estate market,” he says. “It’s not going to get any more affordable than this.”
My water breaks on a Monday night at the Soup Exchange, and for the next twenty-four hours our daughter does her best to avoid being born. While I’m in labor, our four-year-old is staying downstairs with Betty and her criminal sons—the second officially moved in from the garage after Betty found three teenage girls had set up house in it, complete with a mini fridge full of Bud Light and boxes of Hostess cupcakes.
My husband alternates between holding my hand and pacing the delivery room, and I try not to worry about the education my son is likely getting. We don’t talk about real estate.
After we bring home our new baby, she cries incessantly for two hours in the middle of each night, waking the sons below us. As I walk the floor with her, they make angry middle-of-the-night sounds followed by what could very well be the noise of someone cleaning out a rifle.
Two weeks after our daughter is born, John knocks tentatively on our door. He hands me pink carnations and hands my husband a new listing. “Open house this afternoon,” John says.
We follow him in our car, our son still in his pajamas at 1 pm, the baby screaming in her car seat. It’s the weekend before Thanksgiving, and we are the only ones at this open house. There are no cookies baking in the oven. The house smells sealed and musty. The seller’s agent is watching football on television and looks irritated to be interrupted. We make an offer that afternoon.
It could have been almost any house on almost any street, and I still would have signed the contract, paid the padded interest rate, and not even read the inspection report. Lucky for us, it’s a good house on a good street, if not quite the kind where children ride bicycles with streamers flowing from the handlebars. Our new backyard is filled with fruit trees that I swear never to trim: lemons, limes, persimmons, guavas. We pull out brown carpet to find hardwood floors, peel back three layers of wallpaper and repaint. At a certain time of afternoon, when the sun angles through the living room windows and our children nap upstairs and the schoolteacher across the street is listening to soaring Italian opera, I think, OK. We bought a house. Finally. I guess we really live here. Now, if I could only remember what it was I used to do on Saturday afternoons.
