My family has always been three. Being the sole child of two people together for life is a pretty intense thing—you get the intimacy of being one-third of the whole deal, but you also get the intimacy of being one-third of the whole deal. You’re a lynchpin of sorts, a barometer of the relationship and the focus of much parental energy. Dave’s an only child too; when we learned that about one another, it became obvious why we get along so well. (We have dibs on the name Only Child for our forthcoming sappy/mystical space jam band.) Dave’s parents married in 1969; mine in 1971. Both couples are still together, still doing most things in tandem.
Their marriages, though, were built in a different time than the one Dave and I have just embarked on. It is unfathomable to Dave and I that any relationship begun in one’s twenties could hold up for fifty years, but they’ve done it. I know it was difficult for our parents to watch us both make some wayward love choices, starting up and then breaking up over and over, while they thought of that process as the dominion of teenagers, wondered when we would get over that already. But there is value in having one’s heart trampled once or twice or fifty times. There is a degree of pleasure in flailing and being lovelorn at various moments in life.
Dave entered my life without hesitation, made his aims known. For the first time I was able to unabashedly let my parents observe the goodness of my relationship. Dave’s positive energy, newly added to the family, forces fresh air between me and my parents. I knew I had never fully transformed my role from child to adult; where once I found that reassuring, as if nothing would change and no one would get old if I kept playing the part of the freckle-faced kid, I saw it now as holding us back. I’d long obscured the full truth of my life in hopes of avoiding difficult conversations, being judged, or causing worry.
Does it take only children a little longer to grow up? Maybe so. The cultural slogan is that we’re selfish, sheltered, bad at empathy, introverted. That must be a conspiracy started by the multi-baby-family lobby, because in my travels it’s not true. If there’s a quality that I can say runs through every only child I know, to some degree, it’s the tendency to be a late bloomer: to take a lot of time to figure out our place in the world. We don’t have siblings to band with, who might prod us into having adult opinions or conversations as we get older. The family dynamic stays fairly static. We don’t have an equal in the family, whether ally or enemy: all input is parental. Our households are generally quiet, meditative affairs, begetting careful, purposeful children. We have significant private time in which to ruminate, pick our way through the thorns of childhood existence, and come up with some real doozies that we believe until age and experience tells us otherwise.*
I’m twentysomething years past the point of getting by on innocence and my own nutball brand of logic, thank the goddess. I’ve staked out a good life. My parents seem to grasp that I am content to make decisions that fall a little outside the norm, and put no pressure on me to do anything differently. Without one critical piece, though, I know we can’t move on from the pleasant but restrained communication style we’ve adopted.
They have to see PennHenge.
So I make the required overtures.
Dave and I are visiting my parents, perhaps a month after the wedding. We’re in the post-dinner phase, all four of us occupying our own chair in their small living room in front of their enormous TV, a baseball game on mute. The conversation goes quiet for a minute, and then another minute, and I think, Go for it, dude. It’s never going to be easier than it is right now. I should have warned Dave, but it’s too late for that.
I employ a conversational tactic that helps me to broach challenging topics: I imagine I’m acting in a movie and these are my lines. I take myself out of it, just for the first couple of sentences, until I’m barreling through, reluctance forgotten.
Dave’s face, eyebrows up, displays his intrigued surprise as I get started. My tongue trips once or twice, but I finally succeed in requesting their presence at a tour of PennHenge. Why did I wait so long? You’d think it’s an invitation to Buckingham Palace the way I’m formalizing it. My mom is initially defensive, as if by mentioning the extraordinary amount of time that has passed without a visit (or even a mention of one) I’m accusing her of not caring. But I know that’s not the case, and I tell her: the real culprit is something less concrete than that, something to do with keeping the peace, even at the expense of inhabiting our relationship in full. It takes some assurances, but they agree to the visit.
As the day of their arrival approaches, I hold myself back from cleaning every crevice of the house. It’s my instinct to do just that—to scrub the place into respectability—but I want them to see our actual state of being. I need to be honest about the way we live. So I do the basics—make the bed, do the dishes, a quick lap with the vacuum cleaner—and I leave it at that.
Of course, the event itself is without incident, a molehill that I’d long since mountainized. They arrive ten minutes late due to directional challenges. I go out to meet them as they pull up out front; we saunter around the house while I rapid-fire talk them through. They check out the late-season garden and the legendary grapevines. After ten minutes, we go inside and they slowly climb the stairs to our third floor. They politely avoid comment on the cache of records that lives on the landing outside the apartment, though I can’t resist commenting on them just to say they’re “slowly but surely” going to the store to be sold. (It’s true, sort of, but Shut up already, I think, remember your mantra about them just seeing the place how it is.) They do the barest inspection possible, not focusing 100 percent on any given area, clearly not wanting to pry or appear too critical. I run around showing them things, speaking maybe a little louder than is necessary. We don’t run into any tenants; the street is quiet; the weed and cat poop bouquet in the hallway is mercifully subdued that day.
For all my fear and avoidance of this moment, they don’t seem to judge. They are respectful; they ask questions, we laugh; all the stories they’ve heard gain concreteness. They don’t go around peering into cupboards or checking for dust. They enjoy their fifteen-minute tour, and then we all go out for a nice lunch, because why not reward ourselves for defeating inertia and closing this gap? All through the meal, I’m giddy: the intention of the day is realized. They now know the physical reality of my life; they know not only whom I’ve chosen to live with, but where and what. The why may never be clear.
I doubt these two suburbanites will be hankering for weekly visits to PennHenge. But it doesn’t matter: I know the limits of such things, and I’m proud of all of us. This isn’t to be a bombshell dropped on our relationship; none of us is looking for radical change. But I hope it makes them see that I’m trying to bring them closer.
When it comes to the house, I still tend to speak of the future as “I” and not “we.” I bought this place, I’ve kept the lights on and the roof 95 percent free from caving in for almost a decade and a half, and I alone own both the hardships and the benefits of this daft experiment. When Dave first moved in, I felt a defensive need to keep all of that to myself, to block him from paying bills, fixing stuff, and being tough with customer service reps on my behalf. I’d gotten used to it being my thing, no help needed, thanks. But now I have this excellent human being in my life who wants to help—and who should be free to help—because he is my partner, emotionally, legally, financially, in all things. He has a stake in PennHenge, and a say in its future, just as he is affording me with his business.
Governing this house is the only tangible power I’ve ever believed I had; as reluctant as I was to take that power at first, now I’m reluctant to give a little of it away. But I’m starting an alliance with Dave, sharing that power with someone who responds with reason and understanding. It is freeing; no crisis comes when he takes on new responsibilities! Other adults in the world are capable of good decision-making! I’m getting over myself!
Now that we’re married, confronting a life spent at PennHenge and considering what that might require of us, it’s time for a reckoning with this place. At the least, we have to examine where we are, if we want to stay and/or could afford to leave. We think about this often, but the conversation is usually circular. Some days we’re convinced that aging any further in this apartment might sap us of our good humor, our motivation. Then we step outside and have a great conversation with a neighbor, the birds singing in the trees above our heads, and leaving the neighborhood becomes unthinkable. Maybe we should be enacting a plan to start anew, but PennHenge is at its core a complicated home, and it’s not letting us go easily.
Taking stock of my earthly property doesn’t simplify the matter: Okay, let’s see, we’ve got one trashed, darkened hovel that smells like stale pee and cigarettes (first floor); one fully restyled, millennial-friendly tech dome complete with multicolored iPhone-controlled LED lights and chandeliers (second floor); and one charming but outdated apartment heated by a single gas stove and painted in all the colors of a basket of Easter eggs (third floor). Plus a basement that looks like it has hosted several criminal enterprises. We’re spanning several eras, and not gracefully. Who’s going to buy this? These parts do not look at all like they belong to the same whole (or hole). For all my fixing and maintaining, I may only have made the place less desirable, unless I can find some freak like me to buy it.
Dave and I talk about renting out our third-floor apartment, moving down to the first floor, gutting that apartment, and bringing it back to basic livability as a long-term stopover on a distant journey to moving out of PennHenge. But that means we’d have to boot Elvin and Kenny (and Elvin’s new ladyfriend, who has recently moved in with them). Elvin and Kenny haven’t exactly treated the place with the utmost care over the years, but I don’t relish the idea of laying this news on them, of giving them a deadline to GTFO after all this time. They are dug in; they’ll never leave if I don’t tell them they have to. But enacting such a deadline brings up other questions: I don’t know if they could afford to get another apartment in the neighborhood, and as someone who complains about the gentrification and prettifying of these streets, that idea distresses me. What are my obligations to them after more than a decade? What are their obligations to me? There’s no lease. Conversations are scarce. They slip their rent checks under my door in the middle of the night. It’s amazing that we can live in the same little building and so rarely see one another.
Maybe they’d yell at me if I asked them to leave. Maybe they’d be sad. Or maybe they’d be relieved to end what they see as an obligation to me. Maybe they’d be happy to be forced to start fresh.
Had they kept the space about as nice as they’d found it—admittedly, even then, not that nice—I’d accept them staying on indefinitely. But their standards have slipped pretty far. I’m sure they no longer see the dirt and smell the nicotine, the same way I overlook the paint cans and stacks of books upstairs.
It’s not like I’ve never tried to make rules—I have definitely laid down some kind of law regarding chain-smoking in the house; breaking stuff and silently hoping it will fix itself; turning the driveway into a junkyard; bad parking etiquette. But I’ve failed to adequately internalize that I have to repeat them over and over, even if I’m talking to the same old tenants I reminded last time. There’s no institutional memory in this joint. The longer I do this job, the less enthused I am about reciting and repeating the policies of PennHenge. The guys on the first floor are slowly annihilating their apartment, while Colin, unchecked, creates his showplace, unearthing his drill and hammer every night just as Dave and I are settling in to watch Stephen Colbert on The Late Show.
When the day of the first-floor exodus does come, it’s going to be supremely expensive to rip out the kitchen and bathroom, in some places down to the studs and the subfloor, rebuild it, and replace the sinks, toilet, tub, and appliances, but that and other costly repairs is what it needs. Another reason I’ve stalled out where I am.
I shiver at the thought of Dave and I living in that apartment. It’s not just the dirt, the mold, and the garbage. Over the decade and change since the first floor has turned over, and especially since Caroline’s departure, I’ve grown to feel like there’s some bad juju tied up in there, and I don’t want to be the one to rattle it loose. As if that wouldn’t be trying enough for our fledgling marriage, the idea of living in a renovation environment of horrible daily discoveries does not appeal, either. I’ve been down this road before, and I know how these things go: “Well, we can’t put in the toilet until we have the flooring down, and we can’t put the flooring down until we have the tub plumbing in.” Friends, I’ve gone through too much digestive distress not to have access to a working toilet. Just no.
So a sort of stasis has taken hold. Everyone on the first floor stays where they are, none of us particularly delighted with that fact; I would like things to change, but I haven’t yet devised a realistic path for that change to take.
Instead of wallowing in the catch-22 that is the actual state of this all-too-real house, I soothe myself with a variety of dreamy thoughts of other houses. My fantasy house road forks in two directions: one goes to a simple, solid, small house either in the density of the city or out in the old, gray New England woods; the other goes to an off-the-grid, solar-powered homestead that is the antidote to the bloat of America’s big, empty cardboard cul-de-sac monstrosities. The former is a fairly logical, sound next step if you think not terribly much will change over the next couple of decades; the latter is a total life modification that may sound insane and overreactive right now, but could put us in a pretty plum spot should our rocketing little planet encounter any extreme environmental turbulence.
I’d like to keep right on living the way I’m living now, in a “regular” house that draws on utilities and water from public sources. It’s comfortable and known and it’s how we’ve set up our neighborhoods, the setting from which we view our culture. I am truthfully not all that excited to learn the difference between gray water and black water. But the more I learn about climate change, the less sure I am that our current options are always going to be there for us. Especially considering the rate at which we’re currently withdrawing from the Bank of Earth. Do not mistake me for a prepper or survivalist—I don’t delight in the idea of outliving the rest of humanity in a darkened bunker, eating cans of beans and shooting anything that moves outside. I’m simply saying that it seems like a not-terrible idea to at least contemplate the radically changed world that might confront us in our lifetimes. We should all be learning how to grow at least a few types of vegetables, even if we’re planting them in old buckets or coffee cans and placing them on our fire escapes.
There’s a heating and air conditioning company with the motto, “Live in a World of Total Comfort.” Such coddling bullshit; we live in an uncomfortable world! We should be learning now to live without luxuries like a constantly regulated seventy-degree interior environment, hamburgers, Cheetos, big, gas-devouring vehicles, leaving the lights and the giant TV on in an empty room, throwing everything “away.” Instead we’re sponging up as much of everything as we can, buying more on Amazon, somehow thinking it’s patriotic to do so.
A couple of months before we got married, Dave and I watched a documentary about radically sustainable green buildings called earthships, and started fantasizing about the idea of running off to Taos to take up with the off-the-grid freaks. Earth-ships, built with earthen and recycled materials, include systems that provide thermal/solar heating and cooling, solar and wind electricity, self-contained sewage treatment, water harvest and reuse, and food production. Comfy in a desert setting, they’re these curvy, colorful, one-of-a-kind, ultra-whimsical buildings that often look like a cross between a mosque and something from the cover of a Yes album. They’re practical yet dreamy, and possibly capable of holding back the effects of nightmare climate change.
Dave and I have also given a lot of thought to buying or building an off-the-grid house in Vermont or Maine, or in Canada. Something insulated to within an inch of its life, with solar panels, battery packs, and a trusty wood stove. But we’re staring down a very deep divide between our current reality and this possible new one. Why not be adventurers? we say, fully aware that we are not necessarily possessed of a trailblazing spirit. We like the idea, but frankly, we have no clue how our everyday existence would look. We’re not quite adventurous enough to log that point in the plus column. And then the conversation veers: we both have jobs we love, and oh yeah, there is a record store and tens of thousands of vinyl slabs to consider. We’re left with the frustrating notion that these two worlds don’t meet, or at least that we’d have to give up every physical thing we value to make the switch to sustainability. And then it begins to feel insurmountable. I’m not saying that the conversation ends there, just that we have a lot of reality checks to kick around.
Seeking some middle ground, I look into energy-conserving updates for the house and learn that blown-in and attic insulation alone would cost me five grand. With all my thoughts of environmental maximizing, PennHenge just looks even more like an inefficient beast, a relic of America’s inflexible homebuilding tradition, which was and is based on untenable standards of uniformity and largesse. The cosmetic concerns often outweigh the practical ones, and the priorities for builders (and buyers) still ignore sustainable practices like situating buildings for the best use of sunlight or wind. Change is tough to come by when somebody already got here and fucked it all up, literally cast their mistakes in bricks and mortar. Those who do want to push things along have to tear down or build around what’s already here.
* Mortifying example: As a child, I believed that all babies had penises, which fell off at maybe three years of age, after which point everyone had a vagina. This thinking resulted from my careful consideration of my two younger male cousins’ diaper changes. I’d never seen a naked baby, I guess, so I let them stand in for all of humanity’s infants. I saw a really odd little appendage—I don’t know whether I’d yet learned the word penis—and I stored the image away, vowing in this time of pre-internet bewilderment to figure it out later. My eventual conclusion was that I, too, once had the weird thing, but because I was no longer a baby, I’d lost mine, like a tooth.