Our childhood homes set off a lifetime of comparisons. They confine us in loaded symbolism, becoming the first places we know down to the cracks in the walls and the faded spots in the carpet. We mark every new address against our previous homes, based on the ease or difficulty of living there, the tenderness and toil of our home-based relationships, the memories we later seek to duplicate or to avoid. I came to PennHenge with a variety of comparative impressions intact and each one of my tenants over the years has brought his or her own.
For roughly the first half of my life, “home” meant a small town, a small house, and a small family. It was an insular life, and I was both thrilled and afraid to break out of it as soon as I made it to adulthood.
In buying PennHenge, I wanted to preserve the stability of my childhood, the sense that all was well, that we as a family had it mostly together. I thought that buying a big house and living in it with a big crew would keep me ultrasocial, keep me from retreating into progressively tinier spheres as my parents had, while settling me into a self-sufficient routine as I, the Lady in Charge, happily managed the house’s needs. Only later did it occur to me that the path I’d picked led away from reliable routine and toward constant upheaval. And that sometimes, being social in my home would have to mean living with erratic people.
My parents are the most practical people I have ever known. They have been ruthless savers for their entire lives, working hard at ill-paying, depressing jobs and being so strenuously frugal that they were able to retire earlier than they had planned, to a Florida-snowbird-condo situation no less. Back in their days of financial uncertainty and anxiety, though, when life stretched out ahead of them—a minefield of potential expenses to be evaded with deft penny-pinching moves—they did something that would befuddle most modern thirty-year-olds. They knew they couldn’t afford a classic suburban single-family house, but they didn’t want to be renters when I came into the world, so they bought a two-bedroom mobile home, which sat on rented land in a park of some 125 prefab aluminum-sided castles on wheels. Thusly, I spent my childhood in a trailer park.
SOUTH DRIVE
Rows of multicolored trailers, parked vertically to maximize space, lined up dutifully along each of Sunny Acres’s six streets. Some trailers were decorated and landscaped to the nines; others stood starkly on brown grass as if they’d dropped out of the sky. Some had sunrooms and patios and swing sets. The place was clean and orderly enough, and there was a big grassy field at the top of the hill by a busy road for the kids to run around in. There was a hierarchy to the layout: North Drive, which was just a single street connecting to the main road, was exclusively for old folks. South Drive was a mix of families and retirees. There were four side streets. You guessed it: First St., Second St., Third St., Fourth St., all of which spilled out from one side of South Drive. These side streets had smaller, cheaper lots and a few spindly trees and shrubs. We had a delicate little dogwood that my mom loved.
Halloween was the best time to be a kid at Sunny Acres. Besides the clear delight many of its residents took in decorating—lights, sound effects, animatronics, dry ice, apple-bobbing barrels—it was the bang-per-buck candy-hoarding capital of the county. In two hours, you could hit up every trailer and end your night with a full garbage bag (or three pillowcases, if you were the wimpy type who had to go home and unload periodically so as to carry it all).
Sunny Acres—which my parents nicknamed “Belly Achers”—was a microcosm of society. There was a little of everything, humanity-wise, tightly crammed within its bounds. There were upstanding folks stuck in the relentless daily grind and struggling mightily to pay the bills; there were sourpuss retirees who bickered and drank their dwindling days away; there were sweet grandmas who offered me fun-size Snickers and root beer on my walk home from the bus stop; there were quiet, defeated people for whom divorce, illness, loss, and other personal calamities had limited their ambitions; there were big-fish narcissists who spontaneously combusted into spectacular displays of drama, exploiting the insular nature of the park by creating their own fiefdoms within it. There was one thing just about everyone under seventy-five had in common at Sunny Acres, though: a desire to get out. Although it wasn’t a slum by any means, it felt like a place from which very little good could come. It was a place of resignation. If you had any life left in you at all, you didn’t want to live it there.
The trailer itself was built at a kid-friendly scale and had a kind of zany 1970s color scheme and style. It was covered in brown wall-to-wall carpeting and yellow linoleum, with Formica countertops and faux stone and wood paneling on the walls. I thought it was cool that I lived in a technically portable metallic capsule. I liked sprawling on my white pleather beanbag chair in front of the TV or cozily chatting with my parents. I liked sleeping in my twin bed with the streetlight shining down through the window. Still, there was no covering up the fact that our dwelling wasn’t fancy: all of the surfaces had a paper-thinness to them. We were jammed in close enough to hear the neighbors’ TVs. And we were the first in town to be evacuated when there was a big storm or hurricane bearing down, lest our little free-floating palaces drift out to sea.
My flower-wallpapered bedroom was in front, next to the street, and contained my bed (complete with railings, because I used to tumble out of it), a dresser my grandfather had made, a school desk, a bookshelf for my precious Little Miss and Little Golden Books, and my very favorite place, a triangle-shaped closet that I would hang out in so frequently that my parents installed a light to help me read in comfort. Then there was the living room, with its little TV cart, flowered couch, and wood stove; then the kitchen and a diminutive dining room that had been built later as part of a fancy addition. The bathroom (more flowered wallpaper) was next; and in the back, my parents’ tiny bedroom. It was a place ideally built for compactness, for small, efficient people like the Warner family.
My family specialized in minding our own business, and gregariousness wasn’t an attribute to be especially valued. Being an only child, too, I learned early how to properly be alone. I played at adult occupations: I was a doctor, a shopkeeper, a secretary, a writer, an artist, setting up elaborate “offices” and answering “phones” authoritatively. I never felt lonely; I never wished for a sibling (though it might be nice to have one now). Instead, those long and uninterrupted afternoons of play—dinner simmering away in the slow cooker and my parents keeping an ear toward me but letting me do my thing—felt quietly joyful. I observed the chaos at my friends’ houses—siblings tearing each other apart on the regular—and I only felt sorry for them.
When I did have to be around other kids, though, they usually took my calmness for weakness, and I was roundly pushed around. My arm still cracks from the time the monstrous Jenny F. wrestled me off the top bar of the swing set. Despite my shyness and the occasional mistreatment I received at the hands of the bigger, older, cooler, tougher girls on the street, I made a few friends at the trailer park—kids whose families always seemed to be splintered, dysfunctional, disheveled, overpopulated, broke, or some combination thereof. When I started going to school, I was surprised and a little seduced by the air of virtuosity and wealth wafting from my classmates’ parents.
My hometown of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, is an island burg of just under twenty thousand people (93 percent of whom are white), where in 2012 the median household income was around $75,000 and the median home value was over $345,000. If there’s one place dragging down that average, friends, it’s Sunny Acres and the other trailer park in town, where, as my mom would say, the folks “don’t have two nickels to rub together.” Being a kid from the trailer park in a town of rich kids perfecting late-twentieth-century entitlement—in close proximity to rich and hallowed Newport—let me know where I stood, and it wasn’t at the top, or even the middle. Forever hopping back and forth between observing the rarified lives of my schoolmates (BMWs, sprawling houses, equestrian lessons, ski vacations) and returning to my own reality (Datsuns, dog houses, episodes of Welcome Back, Kotter, trips to Kmart), I was aware of status as soon as I hit public school. I never believed I’d own anything, much less that I deserved to. I worried about my future: who would give me a job, someday? How would I navigate life, when everybody I knew already seemed to have more than us? Adulthood looked treacherous, fraught with drudgery like paying taxes, working late, getting the car fixed, and cleaning the toilet, and if you did any of it wrong, you would be arrested and thrown in the slammer.
SILVA AVENUE
As a result of their relentless economizing, my parents got us out of Sunny Acres when I was ten. They bought a small, lifeless three-bedroom ranch house a few miles down the road, in a quiet neighborhood of simple suburban houses just off one of the two main roads in town. I remember their relief upon moving in, despite the fact that the house needed work. There must have been a saturation point for them with the trailer park, as there may someday be with me and my house—a point at which the annoyances and the little indignities become too much, and you clutch your tiny nest egg and say screw it, peace out.
Bland and ordinary as the place was, it was our house, a place where our little triad could prosper. The house was shabby, but not falling apart. Over our first few years living there, my parents got right to work painting, putting in new floors and carpeting, staining cabinets and doors, replacing the old windows. My mom painted every room a utilitarian, dispassionate white, which my dad said was like “living in an aspirin tablet.” The house feels close—there are a lot of walls that a more adventurous homeowner might alter or tear down. The overall interior effect is of a series of small, white boxes—none of the six rooms is much larger than any of the others.
It makes some sense that I didn’t love the house, at first, as much as I’d loved the trailer—I missed the unconventional layout of the trailer and the snug-ness of my closet lair. I missed the trailer’s crank windows and how they swung open from the bottom. I missed the few friends I’d had back at Sunny Acres. There were only a couple of kids in the new neighborhood, which abutted a loud, traffic-clogged road. I was bordering on my teenage years and prone to the attendant aloofness and snobbery. But I started to come around. This house did have something that the trailer didn’t: a basement. I cranked my boom box, laced up my roller skates (white leather with fat orange wheels), and cruised that smooth-ass concrete for all it was worth. Sometimes I invited my new friend Andrea, who lived across the street, to join me. Upstairs, another perk: blessedly free access to MTV in its late-eighties glory days, a gift from the basic cable gods. I wore a spot into the carpet in front of the TV, finally getting the pop culture education I desperately wanted, and just in time to prep me for high school.
My bedroom was one of the aforementioned white cubes; it had a ceiling fan and two small windows in the corner that faced the road at the back of the house. The closet was too small to inhabit, and I guess by the time I was twelve, I was over that. I had a plywood desk in the corner with a frustrating pre-internet ultra-low-memory Smith-Corona word processor perched upon it, and a couple of bookshelves to house my radio, favorite paperbacks, and a small collection of CDs. As I got a bit older, I commandeered my dad’s old Zenith turntable, with its cool cone-shaped speakers, and started buying records at yard sales for a dime or a quarter each. I was a religious listener of American Top 40 with Casey Kasem, and I loved the pop music of the time: Madonna and Prince and Roxette and Neneh Cherry. But I was also in love with sixties and seventies rock and topped off my room decor with posters of Jim Morrison: An American Poet, as well as my ultimate obsession, my homeboys Led Zeppelin. Weekends, I’d sleep over at my friend Lisa’s; we’d watch our worn VHS copy of Led Zeppelin: The Song Remains the Same that we’d split the cost of, and she’d fall asleep while I’d stay gloriously awake and fantasize about being born twenty years earlier so I could see this overwrought spectacle in the flesh, so I could sway and bathe in the languid ink-blue light of 1973 at Madison Square Garden. The boys at school were so dumb. Give me Jimmy Page! Lisa and I read in Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga by Stephen Davis that Page dated a fourteen-year-old in the early 1970s; far from being horrified, in our cluelessness we figured it meant we had a chance.
But I don’t think I was Jimmy’s type. Until adolescence, when my mom took pity on me and bought me a single pair of contact lenses—which I wore until they were ripped and infectiously dirty, fearing the parental rebuff associated with asking for a replacement pair—I sported grandma glasses that obstructed half of my face. My clothes were bought off the clearance rack at the Sears outlet or TJ Maxx. I was short and thin, with brown hair and brown eyes. I blended into the crowd, staying fairly neutral other than my baggy, black classic rock T-shirts. As the girls around me started to get curvy, grow boobs, and face the sexual scrutiny of their peers, I hunkered down in my pseudo pupal stage, inhabiting a gawky middle ground of having dire crushes on boys, acting tough and uninterested anyway, and then going home to play with my Barbies.
The summer I turned fifteen, my best friend called to ask if I wanted to work a catering job at the exclusive prep school where her dad had the very official title of Business Manager. The pay was fifty dollars—half a year’s worth of my abysmal two-dollar allowance. As soon as I saw that check with my name on it, I was hooked. The type of work was beside the point—I would have done any job with equal enthusiasm—I just wanted to bust out and make my own money.
Shortly after that first one-off work day, I was offered a regular spot on the schedule, working in the dining hall after school and on weekends. I was going to be a lunch lady. (The official job title was “server,” but tellingly, the only people who had that title were women. Let’s just go with “lunch lady.”)
The lunch lady is not a particularly admired or well-loved archetype. She is an object of pity and ridicule, tasked with slinging food of questionable provenance at little punks for whom sassing her is a competitive sport. Her greatest skill is portion control, whereby she can save the institution a few pennies by making her ice cream scoops of mashed potatoes a smidge less plentiful.
It wasn’t sexy, but it was my new job; it paid $5.50 an hour (the minimum wage in Rhode Island at the time was $4.45), and I was going to embrace it. I was in the strange position of being the same age as the crowd I was serving; depending on which kid was next in line, this could be fun or it could be embarrassing and dehumanizing. These kids made my public-school friends look budget. They were the children of famous artists, of liquor barons, of corporate CEOs, and they smelled like a whole other echelon of wealth I didn’t even know existed. One kid ever so helpfully let me know that I should give him as much food as he wanted, because “my parents pay your salary.” Harsh them-and-us differences were in high relief. Luckily, though, it was the dawn of the age of grunge, and my work style—typically a thrifted flannel shirt over my company-issue polo shirt, stretchy black skirt, striped knee socks, and china doll Mary Janes—was quite au courant, other than the lame polo. Designer labels were out, tatters and rips were in, so we all looked about the same.
I wrapped up my last two years of high school with waning enthusiasm. My classes were not the problem—it was the people around me. My class was full of overachievers with an annoyingly high level of school spirit—people who simultaneously got stellar grades, showed up for everything, ran track, killed it in academic decathlon, and drank and smoked all weekend. I just could not hang. I judged them all, unkindly, hating their perkiness beyond any reason. I found the pockets of freaks—theater, chorus, literary magazine—and I uneasily stuck myself in with them. I did well in school, but I was nowhere near the top of the class. I got a scholarship to the state university and committed to go there, if only to avoid student loans.
School sucked; my real friends were at work. The work itself may have been mindless, but my two best girlfriends worked there with me, and we made everything into a joke. We stuck maxi pads on the wall in the ladies’ bathroom; we snuck out bottles of nasty white wine in our backpacks; we put hot sauce in each other’s cups of Coke; we dabbed sour cream on the earpiece of the phone, and then yelled, “Phone’s for you!” to whichever cook was on duty. There was a troop of slightly older skater guys who worked there as dishwashers and who we were always falling all over ourselves to impress. They listened to punk cassettes in their food-scrap-covered work area and skated on the loading dock during break time. They flung hot dishrags at us and openly ogled our knee-sock-clad legs when we sauntered by, trying to look as fetching as possible while carrying thirty-pound boxes of cream cheese. Some making out took place among the juice machines and in the back of the storeroom. It was a disgusting, charged, slightly abusive, often unsupervised workplace, the kind of job that sounded perfectly fine to Mom, but was actually a haven for indulging all the bad bits of our budding personalities.
As we finished high school, both of my best friends left for college and new adventures. Kurt Cobain and Jerry Garcia died, Bill Clinton may have had sex with that woman in the Oval Office, and it felt like a listless new era. I was officially enrolled at the University of Rhode Island, which had recently been voted the number one party school in the country. A born commuter, I lived at home and appeared on campus in my parentally funded Honda ten minutes before my first class, promptly zipping back toward the exit ten minutes after my last class. The campus was filled with obnoxious, white-hatted frat boys who were just getting into Dave Matthews Band and the local hell-on-earth jam band, Foxtrot Zulu. In my giant Minor Threat T-shirt, ripped jeans, and skate shoes, and with a calculated perma-scowl on my face, I let them know that I did not want to party, did not want to get to know them, did not want their sexual attention.
After a year of commuting from my parents’ house, I took my eighty-two-dollar-a-week lunch lady paycheck, teamed up with three friends (two of whom worked with me), and rounded up an apartment. In a sign of how much I adored college life, the apartment was fifteen minutes further away from school than my parents’ home, meaning I had a commute of over an hour each way. But the apartment was $500 a month, and split four ways that meant all I had to do was swing a very quaint $125 a month. My parents let me know in no uncertain terms that I wouldn’t be getting their help with groceries, books, or gas, but they’d still pay the insurance on my car. I was not permitted to bring my laundry home or store any stuff in the basement. Once I moved out, I wouldn’t be coming back. Although they were probably just being tough with me, and would have helped had I fallen way behind, I wanted to show them that I was independent and could shoulder all of the work and school and financial responsibility by myself. I never asked them for a thing. Still haven’t.
ROMA STREET
The new apartment I shared with my besties—Heather, Erin, and Samantha—was a third-floor three-bedroom (we made the living room into one more), not dissimilar to the one I live in now, in a triple-decker probably built in the 1930s. The kitchen was in the center, the three bedrooms in a row on one side. There was a pantry with big, old cupboards and a small tiled bathroom. A wooden porch ran across the front of the house. The sole source of warmth was a clunky gas heater in the kitchen, and with all the bedroom doors closed, in the winter the temperature differential was fierce enough that I wore multiple layers and a hat to bed.
We decorated with whatever we all brought from home, plus found trash-night furniture and the occasional thrift or yard sale score. Heather’s dad, an artist and class-A scavenger, unearthed trinkets and old signs for us to decorate with. All four of us were in school, and we all had jobs, so the apartment was a beehive of women rushing in and out, casting off outfits and wiggling into new ones, gulping down bowls of cereal and checking the answering machine. When we could scrounge a little down time, we would make crafts, watch 90210, go dancing, discuss our love for Deee-Lite and Björk, and stage impromptu photo shoots in which we’d dress in our favorite seventies-era clothes and fall into our best sweet/hot nineties poses on a secondhand futon.
Despite the multitudes of college boys seemingly at our disposal, only Samantha dated men from school. The rest of us chose from the same extremely limited pool of skater/musician/ne’er-do-well dudes we’d known and/or worked with for years, who to their credit were exponentially more fun and adventurous than the featureless human lumps at school.
Bristol, Rhode Island, the little town we lived in, has since been condo-ized and made upscale, but it was a classic New England fishing village then: a picturesque place characterized by stunning old houses, factories on the waterfront, and boats clanging on the docks. It was beautiful and scrappy; I loved its high-end/low-end duality. I was enamored with having everything I needed—the bank, the post office, the library, the bakery, the liquor store—within ten minutes’ walk. Our house was in the most crowded section of town, a jumble of skinny one-way streets with tenement houses packed in about as closely as they are in Federal Hill. Most of the neighbors were of Portuguese or Italian extraction; accordingly, you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a church, bakery, or butcher shop. Although I was only fifteen minutes from my parents’ house, Bristol felt infinitely more present, more alive to me.
After a year or so in that first apartment, Heather came home one night and said, “There’s an apartment for rent in the boys’ building.” The “boys” were four of the dudes from our little crowd—all of whom we had some sort of history with—and their building was a cute duplex right in “downtown” Bristol. Her current boyfriend lived there, and so did Erin’s, so needless to say, they were on board. I was worried about the huge rent increase—this place was $650 per month, meaning I would be on the hook for $162 every month. That forty-dollar difference was eight hours of work and half a paycheck. But the apartment was adorable, the location was perfect, and we’d be a united front of coolness in the building. It was intolerably cute: boys on one side, girls on the other. We gave notice to our sweet, elderly landlady and packed up.
HOPE STREET
We four felt very adult upon moving into our new, slightly tonier apartment; we wouldn’t need to re-purpose any rooms to make bedrooms, and it had a big kitchen and living room. Our new landlord was an elderly lawyer everyone called the Judge; his building management style was sufficiently hands-off that he allowed us to paint the kitchen a tremendous shade of salmon that I can recall today with extreme clarity. The apartment was on two levels: Erin and Samantha’s bedrooms were downstairs, off the kitchen, and Heather and I were on the upper level, at the top of a squeaky, narrow set of stairs; we shared a huge walk-in closet that was centered between our two linoleum-floored, attic-style rooms. My room was narrow and its sloping ceiling contained a single skylight window, under which I put up a shelf and installed a few spindly plants. My desk and the Smith-Corona word processing torture device went into a dark, vortex-like corner, from which I wrote the million-and-one papers that stood between me and finishing college at last; my bed went directly under the skylight, with a dresser and TV at its foot. My trusty bookshelf, loaded down by now, was by the door. I tacked up a poster of Björk and my favorite yard sale art, arranged my CDs and records, and settled in.
Though we all spent plenty of time cloistered in our rooms, upon flinging open our doors there was a ready-made party just outside. The liquor store was next door. We often climbed out the kitchen window and sat on the little patch of roof overlooking the street, yelling at passersby, smoking, clutching beers, listening to Black Flag or Misfits. Our house was a stop for the local high school kids who walked around aimlessly in the afternoons; they’d stop by with their skateboards and sit on our stoop or come inside and bug us. It was a welcoming place, and a good-natured one, not nearly as depraved as it could have been.
After a couple of years of idyllic young adult fun there, though, suddenly I couldn’t muster up much excitement for the place. I was in a relationship with a brooding small-town guy who was friends with the whole crowd at the house, and it had become miserable. He was bitter about my going to (and imminently graduating from) college, more annoyed than supportive of any limited successes I had, and he seemed to want to keep me closer and closer to home. I had a visceral reaction to that; although I was rather passive as a girlfriend then, I knew when something was the wrong thing.
I broke up with him, dragging it out because I didn’t know how to do it, and his insecurities flared. First, he threatened to jump off the bridge, then he threatened to hang himself. Once he realized he wouldn’t be able to stop me from leaving with intimations of self-harm, he started coming after me. He grinningly held me down on the bed and choked me. He stole my keys to keep me immobile, and then mentally tortured me, begging me to come back and using rote abusive man-speak like, “If I can’t have you, no one will.” I once caught him trying to get onto the roof to peer into my room through the skylight.
Everyone in the house knew what was going on, though they probably didn’t know the extent of it. I wanted to keep it private, out of a childish embarrassment and pride. When it would spill out into the open, friends would ask him to leave, tell him he was out of line, vaguely take my side. Heather told him off pretty effectively a few times. I don’t think my housemates knew day-to-day whether we were patching things up, or whether I was frantically trying to get away from him. Though I knew it was the latter, I didn’t ask for help.
A few weeks later, at a show, I met James. Our first date was on my twenty-first birthday. He was off-the-charts intelligent, he was funny, he was moody and sarcastic, he was in a band. We got close quickly, and he was justifiably incensed that Other Dude was still bothering me. James came to the house, playing it cool, and when Other Dude showed up, James utterly dismantled him with words. I never saw Other Dude again.
James’s rather valiant move made us an official united front and cemented us into coupledom. It also drew me away from my housemates, because the “guy side” of the house thought James had overstepped. My loyalties had changed. The next spring, both of us still dreamy-eyed and writing poetry about the other, we planned to get an apartment in Providence. I was ready. I was done with this little incestuous pocket of small-town living. I was finally going to quit my dumb dining hall job and be an adult, in an adult relationship, with an adult job and a city apartment.
SHELDON STREET
In June, as a promising new summer unfolded, James and I loaded up his van full of my stuff, and we rolled slowly away from Bristol, coming up a half hour later on the east side of Providence. The air in June in this part of Providence has a characteristic odd but not unpleasant smell that is something like low tide plus melted tires plus freshly unfurled leaves. I sniffed it greedily as I stepped down from the van. As mentioned, the previous art-school ten-ants were still sleeping in the apartment when we arrived—fresh-faced and ready for our new lives, please—so we had to wait it out a day or so as they dragged themselves up and out. When they’d finally vacated, a trail of their stuff was left behind.
My favorite thing about this fusty apartment was the red, curved entry door at street level. It was exquisite, although it encouraged higher expectations of the interior than the place could fulfill. Our apartment was on the second and third floors, and the entrance was in the living room, which we sloppily painted a confrontational shade of red, accentuated by a blue-green area rug that James brought. The couch—an awful peachy color and rigidly shaped—was found on the street. A fourteen-inch TV sat on a wooden cube, with an ornate seventies-style lamp on a green table. An old Indian tapestry—a coveted object purchased by James’s recently deceased, much-missed dad—hung framed on the wall. There was no space in the kitchen for a table, so we put one near the back wall, at least near the kitchen. The room was dark, strange, and had a patchwork quality to it. Somehow it worked for us—although apparently not for anyone else: later, when potential renters came to look at the apartment, they gasped audibly, and someone said breathlessly, “We’d be able to paint this, right?!”
The kitchen was a sort of hallway with a window at the end, and it had all of the necessities jammed in. I’ve heard this phrase uttered about many Providence apartments, and it was absolutely true of Sheldon Street: “No matter how much you scrub, it never gets clean.” A fine grit was ground into every surface: the sink, the ancient wood flooring, the black tile countertop. There was a tiny closet of a bathroom just off the kitchen, with a water-hogging old toilet and a shower stall.
Up the stairs was our bedroom, a large room with a wood floor so chipped and decayed that we once lost our pet ferret for a few hours as she wriggled into a hole and crawled around under it, trailing dust bunnies on her whiskers when she returned. The windows were drafty, but the heat worked. Our mattress went directly on the floor. James’s computer went into the next room, which was sort of an office/guest room hybrid. That room looked out over the landlord’s very attractive landscaped grounds below, which James definitely puked on once.
The landlord was cool, if a bit hands-off. He was absolutely overwhelmed—and I can relate—by owning this big house and dealing with us and his first-floor tenant. Or I should say he was overwhelmed by his tenants, plus the maintenance of his own gorgeous section of the house, which contained two smart and high-achieving kids under twelve. He and his wife were lovely, and they cared enough to listen to James and me opine on various topics. I was jazzed to be in this apartment; I was also worried, because the rent was $800 per month. This was almost two and a half times what I paid at the last place, which to be fair had been an utter steal, even for twenty years ago. I had to cross the threshold to a full-time job.
I bought myself an Interview Dress and made the rounds. It wasn’t long before I rounded up a job writing resumes for a career counseling outfit, at ten dollars an hour, full time. Strangely, I was the only employee other than my boss, the owner of the company. The office consisted of the front two rooms of my boss’s condo. If he was around, I was forced to listen to the local light-rock station (a special kind of torture reserved for the already-demeaned office worker). If he left for an appointment or errand, it was just me and Tootsie, an enormous white cockatoo that was the light of his life. Tootsie stared at me from her cage—unyieldingly, all day, every day. Once, when my boss was away, she somehow got out of her cage, climbed up to the top of it, and sat there squawking, moving rhythmically and talking at me while I, frozen, weighed whether to make a run for it, get under my desk earthquake-style, or do nothing at all. Was she jealous of me? I wondered. Angry? And could her beak snap my forearm in half? Finally, my boss ambled in, tsk’d her, and put her back in her cage. I smiled weakly, my hands shaking. I hated my job.
Though my boss was a fair guy who gave me little raises and bonuses whenever he could, I knew my days there were numbered. Other than observing the machinations of Tootsie, there was no action at this job. I would receive summaries of people’s work experience on a written form or by email; sometimes I would meet them and have a short conversation. Then I would write their resumes and several variations on the same formulaic cover letter. My mornings were spent hating on “Black Velvet” by Alannah Myles while daydreaming about lunch and a car nap; my afternoons were spent hating on Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” while daydreaming about watching TV with our elderly coon cat, Elvis, eating a cheap vegan dinner, and sending James off to his grinding third-shift job as a graphic designer for an auto classifieds magazine. On Sunday nights, I would cry just thinking about starting another week at my job. It was no way to live.
We made it work for exactly one year.
COMMONWEALTH AVENUE
All I remember about the two guys who rented me and James our first apartment in Boston was that one of them was named Donald, and he chain-smoked and looked like a wizened old-school detective. They worked out of a thickly nicotine-stained, fake wood-paneled office above a pizza parlor on the Boston University campus. Like their office, the apartment they rented to us was of another time; at $850 a month, it was literally the cheapest above-ground non-rent-controlled one-bedroom within the city proper. It was on the first floor of a sagging, red stucco-fronted building of perhaps twelve apartments in the ugly epicenter of student housing in Boston, equidistant between Boston University and Boston College.
The living room was big enough to have a TV watching zone and an office zone, which was novel. It also had bizarre built-in white wooden cabinetry along the entire length of the interior wall—rows of huge cabinets with doors, which were great for stashing anything we didn’t want to look at. In the center of these cabinets, there was a large mirror with 1940s-style cut-out woodwork all around it, almost like a vanity setup for an old-time lady to do her rollers or her makeup. It was so large and ornate that it made no sense in this little railroad apartment, and I think it’s the only reason the place wasn’t snapped up well before we got there. No self-respecting frat boy could look at this every day, and it was way out of style, decor-wise, for a design fetishist to live with.
The bathroom was a sea green tiled job, again with an overabundance of cabinets. Everything in it was original to the building when we moved in, until the toilet broke and was replaced and the old sea green one sat morosely behind the building for months. The bedroom was a basic white cube, but the floors were nice, and it was very cozy due to the landlord-controlled heat, which was cranked so high we had to open the windows in January.
The kitchen, well, the kitchen was a bit of a bummer. It had more of that white cut-out woodwork and a gruesome brown linoleum floor. Moving in, we opened the gigantic 1960s Frigidaire, which had been left unplugged, to find a desiccated, moldy ice cream cake in the freezer. Elvis’s litter box seemed awkward no matter where we put it, so it ended up in a corner of the kitchen. Only problem was, Elvis was so old that he couldn’t poop in the box anymore; he’d get in, hang his butt off the side, and poop on the floor instead. Returning from work often meant encountering the noxious remnants in the kitchen, mere feet away from human food. This kitchen was also interesting because every once in a while, someone we didn’t know would literally stumble in through the poorly secured back door to the building; James would usher these drunk people out, mostly kindly.
This was my first time living in a building whose landlord I would never meet—couldn’t meet, in fact, even if I wanted to. He had hired a management company, as these guys did, and spoke his veiled communications through them only. When Donald from the agency would call us, he’d refer to the landlord, in his hushed Boston accent, as “Mistah Kantos.” What was this, a James Bond code name? Anyway, mostly we just wrote checks to Mr. Kantos, rarely requiring his assistance. Only when raw sewage bubbled up into our bathroom sink, or when water started coming through our kitchen ceiling because the tenants upstairs had forgotten to shut off their faucet—only then did we deign to disturb Donald and, by extension, Mistah Kantos.
I had my adult-ish life and my biggish-city apartment, but felt restless. I was struggling to do well at my first editorial job; James started art school and within a few weeks decided it was a stupid waste of money for someone like him. He instead got a job at a web/video/graphic design startup, which sounded like an enormously lucky break, but they could barely pay the bills, payroll included. We had almost no one to hang out with, and the shine was just beginning to come off of our relationship, the love poetry phase having long since ended. I applied to grad school, planning to keep working full-time to keep my loans at a minimum, if I got in. I was stacking the deck against myself, pushing to work ever harder and put aside all of the rest.
MORAINE STREET
This was the last apartment we lived in before I bought the house, the place with the five male roommates and all their many wayward pubes; the place that launched the whole discussion of going back to Providence and buying PennHenge. These landlords, too, were elsewhere—they were rumored to be in New York—and Ted, the friendly but ineffectual property manager, kept things more or less in working condition.
Our place was in a sweet two-family house in the middle of what has since become the wildly gentrified neighborhood of Jamaica Plain in Boston. Moraine Street was friendly, with a communal, hippie vibe, and was just beginning to be the kind of place where every house had a Prius in the driveway and a double-wide stroller parked in the mudroom. We had a big tree in front of the house, and a few more behind, so it always felt shady and languid, protected from the worst of summer’s heat and noise. The wood door frames and trim had never been painted; they were stained darkly and made the interior feel serious, library-like. There was a white tiled kitchen and two porches—one just outside the kitchen and another small one off the third floor that was my personal “do not talk to me” zone. There were three bedrooms on the second floor and three on the third. My own room was on the upper level; it was long and narrow and had a slanted ceiling, so I could only stand up fully within a slim slice of the room. I jammed a hand-me-down midcentury desk in a corner, and put my bed in the center, rigged up a box fan to fit into the skylight above the bed, put my little TV at the end of the bed, and threw some clothes into a bureau. James and I slept in this room, but he had his own room downstairs, where he drew, and where he’d sit until 3:00 a.m. at his huge desktop Power Mac G4.
The separation had already begun. We just didn’t know it yet.
I started grad school the same year we moved into Moraine Street, and I was still working full time. I was gunning it—for exactly what, I couldn’t have told you, but I knew I could and would work harder than the next lady or guy. In a parody of collegiate exhaustion, I fell asleep on a book almost every night. My celiac symptoms were kicking into high gear, though I was years from seeking any kind of treatment. I read on the bus, on the subway, during my lunch breaks at work. I nodded off on the bus coming home from night classes. I loved it; I hated it. I felt alive; I felt hollow. James was irritable; he rightly complained about my packed schedule and the fact that we rarely did anything together. I pretty much said, “Tough shit. This is something I need to do. I know it sucks. It’ll be over in a year.” Delayed gratification was my modus operandi, and I forced him to live with it, too.
This was the state of affairs when, upon my finishing grad school, James and I nearly immediately began talking about moving, and then quickly about buying a house. None of the introspection that should have accompanied such a decision came close to happening. Instead, we stuffed down our uncertainties and burgeoning unhappiness and we decided to do the next thing, and do it now.
PENN STREET
I don’t blame Mistah Kantos and the Boston landlords for hiring professionals to handle their tenants; there’s a big difference between living in and managing my three-family house, and running a twelve-unit building or multiple properties in another state. It would be unfair of me to expect other landlords to oversee everything in their buildings, the way I’m able to. But I will say this: I take a personal interest because it’s my home, not my profession. I don’t want to build a characterless aspirin-tablet empire. I don’t care about maximizing my dollars, about raising rents and getting off without doing much.
Someday, when I leave PennHenge—and who knows when that will be—I hope that whomever ends up with it can see that however weird it is, however kaleidoscopic the paint job, however out of control the decor, however overgrown the backyard, I loved this absurd house and made it part of me.
Even looking back at my circuitous route, the dots do somehow connect between the trailer park, all those apartments, and PennHenge. I’ve lived in unconventional homes and have been well-suited to them since I was a kid. I liked the social component of living with friends and didn’t want to give that up just to find the stability of having my own home. I like self-reliance; I feel at ease counting on myself to get things done. Financially, I never signed on for more than I could handle, a lesson that came directly from my parents and was instilled from birth. I always pushed for cheap and livable rather than pricey and posh. I know I can’t actually afford my own taste, so I don’t even try.
In structure and in spirit, though, PennHenge could not be more different from the house my parents live in. That is partially by my design and partially subconscious, an effect of my yearning for a less restricted life. In over a decade of my owning and living in this house, my parents have never visited. Not one time. They live forty minutes away.
When I talk about the house with them, I have no idea what they picture. They must have Google street-viewed it, checked the particulars on the real estate sites, but other than that they have no basis upon which to visualize my stories.
When I bought the house, I knew they were worried about me. Though they kept their displeasure well contained, it was clear they thought I paid too much, that the level of upkeep would be insurmountable and the neighborhood threatening. At the beginning, I asked them to visit, but told them I needed some time to settle in first. When I brought it up again, maybe six months later, they seemed to have gone cold on it. They hated Providence—as they hate any and all cities—and didn’t seem to be in a hurry to drive “all the way” here. I was flustered, and felt mildly rejected, but I was also quietly relieved by their apathetic reaction. If they never visited, I would never have to explain why this stair tread was loose or why that screen was ripped. I wouldn’t have to cop to being the dawdling and imperfect homeowner that I am. Their home is so tidy, so stable. Nothing is in disrepair. I didn’t think I was capable of unapologetically presenting them with my messy reality and just letting them call it as they saw it. I felt a need to protect them from knowing just how much of a heap PennHenge was; the other side of that coin was a comfortable insulation from their judgment. This place would never be a model of efficiency, cleanliness, or economy. I couldn’t take what I was pretty sure would be their unintentionally obvious hatred of my new home, because it might feel like an indictment of the life I had chosen.
They didn’t come over that year, or the next, and we slid into a groove of just not talking about a visit as an earthly possibility. I’ve always told them the tales of PennHenge, though I usually offer up an ever-so-slightly shinier and less weed-laden version than the real one. They know about my struggles and my successes. They know about my tenants and their relative oddities. They await the strawberries from my garden every year, and they give me gifts for the house. They’ve watched me fashion a pretty happy life from this initially questionable base of operations; they’ve watched me grow less anxious and more capable as a result.
I love my tiny family and want them to know the truth of my life. I want to stand up in front of them and say, “This is not what you would choose, but it’s my constancy. This is not what you would choose, but it’s mine and I have to love it and I actually do love it.” And I would not apologize for the things that are dirty or broken or improperly aligned—either within the house or within myself—but instead I would say, “Come take a look. I think I’ve finally settled in.”