But I have only four months left until I’m done with my master’s degree! This thought scrolled on repeat through my overtaxed brain.
I’d taken a risk in forgoing the dress-code nylons. If I’d known I’d find myself here—in the office of the vice president of development (the boss of my boss) at American University—I most definitely would’ve worn the nylons. The backs of my legs were so sweaty that I couldn’t shift my weight in the overstuffed brown leather armchair I was now glued to, because it would make that squelch that’s indistinguishable from a fart and makes you wonder if you need to say, “Oh that’s just the chair,” which then makes everyone absolutely certain it’s not the chair. So I sat perfectly still, ramrod straight, my wedding rings digging into my clenched fingers because I’d accidentally folded my hands the wrong way and couldn’t correct the error because the middle finger on my right hand was now bleeding thanks to the corner of my grandmother’s art deco diamond, and I didn’t want to introduce another bodily fluid into the situation.
The vice president of development had called me in here forty-five minutes ago with no prior warning and zero indication of his intentions. The moment his assistant’s extension showed up on the phone in my cubicle, I was certain I was getting fired, this being how the brain of an underconfident perfectionist works. And so here I sat in a growing pool of my own sweat and blood, racking my brain for which infraction they’d gotten me on. The only two reasons I’d kept this job were the tuition remission and the excellent two-to-one matching 403(b) retirement program. I was trying to puzzle out if these were fireable offenses. It crossed my mind to act pregnant since I’d gained all that weight (never mind that thanks to hiking I’d lost most of it), so I sort of puffed out my belly and wondered how pregnant you had to be in order to qualify as a protected class.
Striding around his many-windowed corner office, gesturing in the air, and adjusting his bow tie, the vice president of development was casually asking me what I considered to be an increasingly nosy line of questions for someone about to be fired. “Do you enjoy DC?” “How’s your husband’s job here?” “How’s your degree program going?” I rattled off “Yes,” “Fine,” and “Fine,” trying for the sake of professional women everywhere not to burst into tears. After twenty-five minutes of this one-sided interrogation masquerading as building rapport between colleagues, he sat down behind his expansive desk, smiled, and said, “I’m sure you know why you’re here.” I then experienced a rare moment of finesse and simply said, “I’m sorry, I don’t, actually.” It was an act of divine mercy that I mustered such restraint because, as it turned out, he was offering me a job. Not a job that was a mere step above my current role, but a whole other echelon of job: a director-level job. I’d have my own office, several people reporting to me, a salary more than double what I currently made, and required attendance at director-level meetings (at which I’d heard scones were served). I sincerely have no idea what exactly I said in order to extract myself from that conversation, but I managed a noncommittal response and promised to get back to him soon. I was so relieved I wasn’t getting fired that I forgot about the bloody finger situation, which was unfortunate since I decided to use my skirt to surreptitiously mop the leg sweat off the chair before standing up. I now had a bloodstained skirt, an offer for a job I didn’t want, and another job that I also didn’t want but was using expressly for the benefits. In an act of maturity, I called in sick the next day.
The problem with this job offer was that Nate and I had made the decision, while on a hike a few months before, that we were done with the grubby slickness of DC. But not yet. I needed to keep working at AU until August in order to finish my master’s degree. I thought it would be poor form to take this promotion knowing I’d be there only another four months. How was I going to decline a raise but not quit?! I was so insecure about my work that it never occurred to me I’d be tapped for such a big promotion. I have no perspective whatsoever when it comes to the quality of the work I do. To say I’m my own worst enemy would be like saying that a fox is a reddish-furred mammal with a bushy tail. I really should’ve taken a hint here that I was good at what I did, because this wasn’t even the only job offer I had at the time. Ellen, my former boss from WGBH, was in the process of creating a new position and had jokingly emailed to say I’d be the perfect candidate except for the fact that I lived in the wrong state. It was kismet that earlier that week Nate and I had agreed we wanted to go back to Cambridge the minute my classes were over.
It didn’t occur to me at the time that maybe, just maybe, springing from city to city and fund-raising job to fund-raising job with Pollyanna certainty I’d find happiness this time was a tad—just a tad—like the definition of insanity: repeating the same behavior over and over again and expecting different results.
I was blindered by a compulsion to achieve and the job Ellen offered me was a jump up, with people to manage, and a fine salary. Although no office, which did irk me. Going back to that gray, windowless cubicle wasn’t exactly the blaze of glory I had hoped for, but it would do. I turned in my final paper for grad school on Friday, August 10, 2012, and started at WGBH as the manager of donor relations and communications on Monday, August 13. I don’t let moss grow, which is also how Nate and I bought our first home in a single weekend.
One of the reasons we wanted to move back to Cambridge was the fact that we knew the real estate market there really well on account of having visited roughly 270 of its open houses over the years. Is that an outrageous number of open houses to visit? Oh most certainly, but we’re nerds obsessed with making ourselves quasi-experts in whatever we do. Nate and I have a belief that the only people with our best interests at heart are us. It’s not that real estate agents would intentionally steer us wrong, it’s just that we wanted our own base of knowledge to rely on. Plus, the more money you spend on a house, the more money your real estate agent makes; thus, your incentives and theirs are not entirely aligned. Back in our basement-dwelling days, going to open houses on the weekends was one of our chief sources of entertainment. It was free, it involved strolling around the city, and best of all, snooping on other people’s lives via a method that was much more gratifying than Facebook, but far less illegal than, say, stalking. Real estate became a hobby of ours, perhaps a less conventional hobby than hiking or the Russian language classes we took, but also more instructive (especially considering that neither of us ever progressed beyond “hello,” “very good,” and “I love to travel”). On Friday nights, Nate would map out a route that’d enable us to hit the maximum number of houses that weekend. Since the same places were often open on both Saturday and Sunday, he’d scout different itineraries for each day. Realtors started to recognize us.
Going to a multitude of open houses was a way to educate ourselves on what we wanted in a home, what to expect in the Cambridge market (not much and for a lot of money), and how to look at a house for its long-term value, not just the superficial, HGTV-promoted practice of “I really like this backsplash.” Buying a house is about facts, not feelings, because—ultimately—a home is an investment. Yes, it’s a very large investment and one in which you will live and perhaps raise your children, but all these factors aside, it shouldn’t be an entirely emotional decision. Nate and I were interested in price per square foot, whether or not it was in a condo association and, if so, the association’s rule on nonowner-occupied units and the dollar amount of their reserve. We grilled real estate agents and took home their glossy, full-color info packets for condos that started at $450,000 and ascended steeply from there. It was immaterial to us that we didn’t have enough in the bank to cover even the closing costs (let alone the down payment) because we were gathering data that we’d later mine.
Plus, it was fun. After each open house jaunt, we’d walk over to a coffee shop, usually the Atomic Bean on Massachusetts Avenue because they had a divine hummus and veggie plate, and have an earnest conversation about which of the properties we’d buy (you know, if we actually had the money to buy it). From the intensity of our debates, I’m sure everyone around us thought we were some really indecisive people who unsuccessfully tried every weekend for five years to buy a house. These exercises honed our combined real estate prowess. Nate and I could walk into a house and know within five minutes whether or not it was a good deal, what the other person would think of it, what the real estate agent had done right/wrong with the staging, and whether or not it would sell for over asking price (nothing in Cambridge ever sold for under).
Since Nate monitored what houses actually sold for, he quickly learned that if an asking price seemed like a steal, it was destined for a rash, fisticuffs bidding war where buyers would forgo contingencies and inspections and might even offer all cash. Desperation was the undercurrent of the white-hot Cambridge market. We watched the spectacle as unrepentant voyeurs. I’d dialed back our open house hobby while in DC (because: school, work, and then hiking), but we’d frequented them often enough to stay fresh. Additionally, Nate found he couldn’t give up tracking the Cambridge market from afar, so he studiously maintained his spreadsheets detailing asking and closing prices for single and multifamily homes in desirable neighborhoods.
Thanks to our five years of mono-goal saving, by the time we were financially ready to buy in late spring 2012 we were classically overprepared. Our real estate agent kept asking if we were real estate agents. I think he finally resigned himself to the idea that we were nutso nerd yuppies fixated on finding a good deal. When Nate and I want to do something, we throw ourselves into researching like a dog devouring a partially eaten hamburger you brought home from a restaurant and accidentally left in its takeout box on the floor overnight. Having done that once, I can tell you it’s pretty intense.
Although we assumed we wanted to buy in Cambridge proper, in deference to my tendency to overresearch, I decided we should explore the closest-in, least-suburby suburbs. The nearest Boston suburbs are not much cheaper than the city; it’s just that you get to add a postage stamp of grass to your annual Christmas card photo on your front porch as opposed to wall-to-wall concrete and attached neighbors. To simulate life as suburbanites, we performed the ultimate real estate test (in my mind, anyway): the sample commute. At 5 p.m. on a Friday evening, we left from the parking lot of my once and future employer (WGBH) and wended our way to Nate’s office in Somerville, pretended to pick him up, then joined the 87,972 other cars whose owners had decamped to the suburbs. We bailed an hour into sitting immobilized on Massachusetts Avenue, trying to inch our rental car’s nose across the city line to suburban Arlington. The thought of driving another three miles to our prospective house was inconceivable. And there ended the possibility that Nate or I would ever live in the suburbs, because there was no way we were going to lose hours of our lives to commuting in exchange for a backyard and a garage. I mused: What’s the point of buying more house and more yard if we’re never there to enjoy it? If all our time is spent driving to and working jobs we probably don’t even like in order to pay for a house we never get to go to when the sun’s out . . . how is that an improvement?
Bigger houses are one of the more insidious elements of lifestyle inflation. They lure us into thinking we’ll solve our problems and reach bliss if only we spend just a little bit more money for a little bit more square footage. And so we stretch our budgets in order to eke out an extra bedroom in a desirable school district. Then, we’re so heavily mortgaged that we’ve ensured we need to keep working that job we don’t like for a very, very long time. Our culture indoctrinates the idea that we should continually upgrade ourselves to nicer houses, fancier cars, and all-around better stuff. There are few champions for simple, sustainable living that doesn’t involve aggressive commutes and bills we can barely cover and reliance on our employers for each and every dime of our paychecks. Nate and I mulled this over, peaced out, and U-turned the car while our once-potential future selves slogged their way, an inch at a time, one person to a car, zoned out to radio stations that reminded them of when they were seventeen and driving was the ultimate freedom, toward mortgages in the apocryphal promised land of suburbia.
Nate and I found our home the next morning during our specialty: an open house. Our real estate agent offered to set up a private showing, but we do our best work alone; I like the incognito state of an open house. Before I’d even climbed the stairs to the second floor, I knew we’d be putting in an offer primarily based on the fact that this was a single-family home: a proverbial hen’s tooth in Cambridge. Most homes in Cambridge are condos, since space and housing stock are limited in light of historical regulations that largely prevent high-rise apartments. Another factor tightening the housing market is Cambridge’s booming population, girded by the presence of not only Harvard and MIT, but the burgeoning number of biotech firms now headquartered there. Artisanal pickle shops, doughnut bakeries that sell out by 9 a.m., and more yoga studios than banks add to Cambridge’s hipster urban appeal. People want to live there and there aren’t many housing units available, so the places that are available are typically quite small and quite expensive. In our self-guided real estate education process, Nate and I learned a number of not-so-great things about condo associations: they charge fees and assessments, they can tell you what to do with your property, and their rules can restrict (or prevent) your ability to rent out your unit. Rent it out? I imagine you’re wondering. I thought you freaks were just now buying it? True. However. Nate and I, above all else, crave options. We do not like to be hemmed in, so the ability to rent out a house we’d buy, and generate revenue from it, would grant us some serious flexibility. I’d be lying if I said we knew what we wanted those options to be at that point in time, but the desire to build alternatives into such a mammoth purchase was important to us. We subscribe to the theory that you never know what’s going to happen, you never know when you might want out of a situation, and liquid cash and assets are what grease opportunity. Money doesn’t make you happy, but money provides the freedom to find out what does make you happy.
Based on the facts that, at the time, over 65 percent of units in Cambridge were rented and rental prices in the area were high and climbing higher, we’d hatched a plan to someday flip whatever we bought into a rental property. And this house, located in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Inman Square, was ideal because it was a rare exception: a single-family home with two stories and a basement, four bedrooms, two baths, and over 1,600 square feet. It was, by Cambridge standards, a McMansion. It was also ugly, had negative curb appeal, was located behind what had formerly been a crack den (not in a hyperbolic sense), and it showed like something out of a ’70s sitcom that never made it past the pilot episode. I’m talking lace doilies on every surface, enough bleeding crucifixes to scare the former Catholic in me, and family photos covering so much wall space I could barely tell what the living room paint color was (probably for the best, as it turned out).
All that aside, this house was walking distance to Harvard, MIT, a T station, numerous bus lines, and a burgeoning corridor of restaurants, coffee shops, and yes, one artisanal pickle shop. Our real estate agent disclosed to us that if we didn’t buy it, he was going to. Best of all, this house didn’t need a gut renovation because the previous owners had done the yeoman’s work of putting in hardwood floors, stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, and knocking the 1880s straight out of the floor plan by opening up the kitchen, living room, and dining room. Even the bathrooms were of this decade. Thanks to its erstwhile crack den neighbor (which had been purchased by a developer and was being transformed into high-end condos) and its abominable interior décor (did I mention there were ferns everywhere?), this house sat on the market for an unheard-of fifty days in a city where most properties are snapped up in their first weekend. The next morning, sitting in the terminal at Boston’s Logan Airport waiting to board our flight back to DC, we signed the offer letter on my phone, using our fingers to scrawl elementary-school-worthy signatures. Our years of research were vindicated. We bought the house for the lowest purchase price per square foot that entire buying season in all of Cambridge, which of course we knew because Nate never stopped tracking the market (I’m pretty sure he still does it to this day).
I wrote my final grad school paper using our washing machine as my desk while Nate and our movers loaded the truck in DC. We drove up in our minivan—eating at Arby’s along the way to touch base with our midwestern childhoods, since Arby’s doesn’t exist in cities—and pulled into Cambridge on a steamy August night. We were twenty-eight years old, in a house we owned, sitting side by side on the twin-size air mattress we were using as a couch, with our backs propped against the living room wall, our bare feet planted on the cool, hardwood floor to keep the mattress from sliding out from underneath us. We’d been living large in our furnished townhouse the past few years, and now we owned our own huge (by our standards) and empty (by anyone’s standards) home. We had about six pieces of furniture, one of which was a card table and four others of which were folding chairs.
We decided right there on our air mattress couch that it was time to adopt a dog. In DC, we used to walk five blocks to a dog park and sit on a bench watching the dogs romp. Dogs, being dogs, would rush up and jump in our laps. Dog owners, assuming we were one of them, would smile knowingly and ask us our dog’s name, at which point we had to awkwardly explain that although we were in a dog park, we didn’t actually own a dog. We were merely doing firsthand research. Much like our open-house sojourns, every time we saw a dog out in public we’d make subtle commentary to each other (“appears to be a mutt”; “following leash instructions well”; “a bit nippy”). I’d longed to have a dog for years, but held off because I knew we didn’t have the space, time, or money to care for one. Finding an apartment to rent with a dog in tow is nearly impossible; we didn’t have the money for a dog when we’d lived in our basement apartment; and while I was in grad school, we didn’t have the time to devote to dog rearing. We’d researched breeds exhaustively as a way to close the gap between the years we’d have to wait before our lives could support another being. And the time was now.
I saw dog ownership as another indicator of adulthood. Since I’d checked off “finish grad school” and “buy a house” this month, I figured we might as well check off “adopt a dog” too. Adulthood was all going to happen for me during the month of August 2012. We’d settled on adopting a greyhound several years before, since our research (both in the field and through compulsively taking “What’s My Dream Pup?” quizzes online) indicated this was the ideal breed for us because they don’t need a lot of space or exercise, they typically don’t bark, drool, or shed much, and they’re content to laze around the house all day. Plus, they’re equal parts frugal and humanitarian since they’re rescues from the racetrack—no expensive breeder to pay, and they’re adult dogs so no need to enroll them in doggie daycare, which in Cambridge are as prevalent (and probably as expensive) as human child daycare. We’d even picked out a name, Gracie, and on August 16, a dainty, copper-colored greyhound, who looked more like a small deer than a dog, joined our family. This was it. After years of waiting and planning, of mistakenly thinking I’d made it, my adulthood was finally coming into focus. Happiness unlocked, or so I hoped.