I bought my first house all on my own, without a man or a friend or even much money to speak of. I bought it on a salary of $25,000 a year, in 1993, in a rundown section of Boston, where there were murderers and car thieves and kids smoking pot on porch stoops in the smog-filled summers. Everyone told me not to do it. The house was wrapped in vinyl siding with a gorgeous old slate roof and radon in the basement, and had peeling lead paint and windows so drafty the weather came through. My first winter in my brand-new house, I would wake up and find my counters and computer covered in small snow drifts, and my breath was visible, sterling silver Os in the air, if I pursed my lips just right, each O rising up towards the buckled ceiling like a little exclamation of pleasure or surprise. I wrapped myself in an afghan, bought a crock-pot, and made myself some stew.
I have always, always wanted to own my own home. This may have something to do with the fact that I had left my family for a foster home, and what I got in place of my own abode was a foster family I knew would never really be mine. I became aware, at a very young age, of DNA’s sweeping spirals and how those spirals were like ropes binding you to your people, whom you could never replace. My foster family was good and kind, but in the nights I dreamt of houses, of finding a house in a cove or on a dark, dead-end street and going inside and there seeing butter-yellow walls and stacks of colorful quilts and white rabbits on tiled tables and rooms. The dreams always featured me, lone and lost, entering what looked like a normal or even suspicious-looking house to find that it unfolded endlessly, room upon room, garden upon garden, terraces unseen from the street, a horse with his head hanging in the kitchen window, a bowl of bright cherries in every cupboard.
I eventually left my foster family and went to college and lived in a dorm my first year, which I despised, with its cinderblock walls and stained couches and cold, iron beds. Then I rented a house off-campus with three friends, which I liked somewhat better, but the house wasn’t mine. I wanted, more than a man, a best friend, a child, or talent, I wanted to own my own home because I knew that as soon as it became mine, it would become magical, the “mine” and “magical” conflated here, ownership as fairytale.
I was thirty and working as a literacy instructor when I decided it was time to buy. I’d just gotten my first book deal and it had left me with some extra cash. I wanted a huge house with at least seven rooms so I could paint each in one of the seven spectrum colors and thus have a rainbow on my hands. I found a two-thousand-square-foot dump, my neighbor on one side an old lady with orange hair, and on the other side a convicted murderer with a bracelet on his ankle. In the nights, police-car lights swished by on my walls. The crime rate was high. My father, whom I’d reconnected with, told me not to do it, a waste of money, and what did I, a single woman, need with so much space? My boyfriend of the time was miffed. I knew I wouldn’t marry him, and even if he were “the one,” why should I wait, and who, really, could accompany me in the pursuit of this deeply private dream? I didn’t buy a house in which to start a marriage or a family; I bought a house to right old wrongs, to fix my past—not to form my future; I bought a house so I could, once and for all, prove to myself that the roof over my head was of my own making, and if wind or weather or sheer bad luck tore it away, I’d find it again. I could afford it, in every sense of that word.
I moved into my new house in early summer. Within ten minutes of getting the keys, I had torn off the drop ceilings to find the old pressed tin beneath. Within three days I had the floors painted. I didn’t want wood; I wanted white, and turquoise, sea and sand, and blue, so it would be like walking on a hard enamel sky. In the attic closet I found three old, curved canes with the word Noam carved into the wood: Noam, like gnome.
My enthusiasm for rehabilitation that summer knew no bounds. I started work on the exterior of the house by tearing off the tilted, rotting porch and ripping up the floorboards and replacing them with fir. I was a one hundred percent u-do-it gal, working on my own with little plan or skill. Call it confidence, or ecstasy, or beginner’s luck: all my projects went well. Nails sunk swiftly into wood. Paint painted itself onto freshly spackled walls. Then something happened.
I was working on the porch in the hot summer sun. I was digging four-foot holes in which I planned to place new posts to hold up the new floor. I swung my pick and from deep in the earth I heard the sound of something moan and clang. I stopped. The moan was like a person, buried alive, while the clang had the mournful echo of a hollow pipe. I swung again. Again this echoing moan, and then a geyser of water sprang up from the ground, a fountain with all the force of someone’s rage; I had hit a waterline. Water spread across the ground, under the powdery foundation of my home, and, when I ran inside, I saw it seep up between the kitchen floorboards. It just kept coming. I was in it up to my ankles, this wellspring, this never-ending source of what I was not sure. And in an instant all my ecstasy and confidence was replaced with total bone-freezing fear: I couldn’t do it, I was fundamentally alone, I would drown, or get electrocuted, or simply float forever in some unclaimed and unnamed space. By the time the plumbers came I was crying. By the time the leak, to put it mildly, was fixed, the ground outside my home had eroded and my first floor smelled like wet dog.
Soon after that, men came with what they called a French drain and suctioned the water out of my house, but it took days and days to dry, and the wood warped. I calmed down. What was wrong with a little warp and wobble here and there? I had dreamt of houses, old suspicious-looking houses with many wonders in them; this could be one. A long time ago, I recalled, when I left my first home, never to return, I had taken with me a tiny floor tile, pried it loose, held it close in my palm as the car drove me away forever. I had the floor tile with me then, and I still do now. Two nights after the furious fountain burst, I found the tile in a box left unpacked. It was blue-and-white striped. I held it up to the light and it gleamed like an old eye. I redid the ruined floor with tile this time. I found beautiful green-floral tiles in a steep sale, and I laid square by square. I laid it all down. With the flat of my putty knife, I creamed in the white grout. In the center of my brand-new floor I placed the small blue piece from my past, where for years it had stared at me, it now affirmed me, saying (and still saying), “You last.”