Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development

by Jen Lancaster

  What’s interesting to note is the alarm contractor was very familiar with Dick’s name, due to over ten thousand dollars’ worth of unpaid invoices. And that’s when we decide that buying this house might result in too many more unpleasant surprises. At some point, someone’s going to send some guys (if you know what I mean) and I’d like to not be here when it happens.

  A few years ago our plan was to buy a house in the North Shore suburbs but we never quite got there. We couldn’t decide which town we might like best and then, once we made a decision, a mold infestation forced us out of our old rental house and completely changed our buying timeline. Now that it looks like we don’t want this house, we revisit the decision to move to Lake County, largely because of Maisy.

  My beautiful pit bull Maisy is pretty much the light of my life. She’s a huge reason I tried so hard to establish a writing career; I couldn’t bear the idea of having to leave her every day to work an office job. Whenever I’d go out without her, she’d mournfully gaze at me with these soulful brown eyes, made almond shaped because of her kohl eyeliner–type markings, and I’d be overcome with guilt because I hated having her miss me. Whenever I’d leave the house, she’d be perched on the back of the couch, right by the door, waiting for me. The second she’d spot me on the sidewalk, her whole body would wag, like my coming back was the greatest thing to ever happen in her life. So now when people ask me why I became a writer, I tell them it’s because my dog was a nudge.

  Anyway, every few weeks, she and I travel thirty miles up the expressway to the Veterinary Specialty Clinic in Buffalo Grove so she can undergo chemotherapy for mast cell tumors. Fortunately, we caught it early enough for treatment. She’s been in remission for a while and the majority of time she does very well, but when she gets sick, it’s very serious and very scary. If she didn’t have cancer, I’d be comfortable taking her to local emergency vets, but because she does, we go directly to her clinic. Over the past year, she and I have taken many snowy, white-knuckled, midnight rides.

  Fletch and I find a map and draw a big circle around a ten-mile radius of the clinic and decide we’re living somewhere within those boundaries. We’re torn between two communities I know to be green and lovely, but what clinches our decision is Highland Park’s stance on pit bulls. In short, they don’t want them. In 2009 the mayor proposed bans on this breed, so even though it would be legal to have my dog there, [At least for now.] she wouldn’t be welcome. You don’t want my dog? Then you don’t get my tax dollar.

  Ultimately we choose to search for homes in Lake Forest because I like lakes and I like forests and that place has both in abundance.

  Of course, before anything can happen, we need a mortgage approval. With the way the lending market has been collapsing in on itself like a dying star, we’re not quite sure how this is going to work.

  We had our own financial meltdown in the not so distant past, so we’re not ideal mortgage candidates, at least not on paper. For a bank to agree to lend us money, we’ve got to make a case for why we’re not the deadbeats our slow-to-improve FICO scores claim. [I’m not one to advocate anarchy, but sometimes I think Tyler Durden had it right.] Our friend introduces us to a broker and we meet him for lunch at a sushi place to discuss our situation.

  Here’s the thing: I like sushi. I like it a lot and not just boring stuff like California rolls. Maybe I’m not at the Jeremy-Piven-human-thermometer-level of sushi lover, but I dig it. Raw halibut, flounder, trout, salmon, and tuna… if you roll it up in tobiko and dip it in eel sauce, I’m game. But anyone who’s ever been to a sushi joint knows that there’s one small, scary portion of the menu consisting of the superweird stuff that blurs the line between “fish,” “insect,” and “sci-fi movie mutant.” Yet when the mortgage broker suggests we order from the dark side, I’m all for it and I eat every bizarre bite that’s set in front of me, until we receive a big wad of raw quail egg–topped sea urchin.

  “You might not like it,” cautions Ryan, our potential mortgage broker.

  When the platter of what appears to be small tongues wrapped in seaweed and topped in ectoplasm arrived at the table a minute ago, I kind of gathered that I wouldn’t.

  Yet if eating sea urchin is what determines whether or not I spend another year paying Dick rent, then sea urchin is suddenly my favorite dish. (Of course, Fletch is a culinary coward and sits out this round.)

  I pick up the small, vaguely orange, tongue-shaped [With what appear to be taste buds and everything!] sea slug in front of me and I steel myself for what’s about to happen next. I approach the piece with an open mind, knowing that some of my favorite foods—foie gras, escargot, and caviar—gave me nightmares until I actually tasted them.

  I stuff the sea urchin in my mouth and I have trouble chewing it because I’m unsure where my tongue ends and the sea urchin begins, not unlike when I’ve eaten dinner before all the Novocain wears off after a trip to the dentist. As the sea urchin lolls around my mouth, I feel like I’m being French-kissed by a Japanese fishing boat.

  And the slimy raw quail egg? The texture does this bite no favors, either.

  I do not love sea urchin.

  I do not like sea urchin.

  I do not want to put sea urchin anywhere near any of my orifices ever again.

  Yet in downing it, I prove to myself that I can handle any food challenge were I ever to make it onto Survivor.

  Also? I get us a mortgage.

  Our friend is a Realtor here in the city and we ping her to help us find our new home. We want to buy a place so we can move before I leave for my book tour.

  Not happening. [If you enjoy stories about idiots buying their first home and all the things that can go wrong, I humbly suggest you check out my first novel, If You Were Here.]

  Since February, we’ve made three offers and each has imploded due to poor inspections [Chris Rock is wrong; I do not want a nice, moist house.] or issues with the seller doing a short sale. Our buying process has morphed into a high-stakes game of Card Sharks wherein all parties involved shout “Higher!” and “Lower!” willy-nilly and the potential sale inches along until someone draws a seven card, the action freezes, and we have to write Dick yet another rent check.

  We table our hunt until I finish my book tour in May. In the interim, our friend has to deal with some family business, so she helps us select a local Realtor named Nancy.

  Nancy asks what kind of house we’d like and I send her a seven-page manifesto on what my ideal home might be. Attached to that are dozens and dozens of houses from the MLS with notes on what I like and dislike about each of them. (Two enthusiastic thumbs up on pools, fenced yards, and brick, and two down for Dryvit, lack of basements, and anything mauve.)

  I anticipate that our search will be endless because when we were looking in late winter/early spring, we saw so many places and the few that were right didn’t work out. I figure the process will take a few months and that we’re going to have to make tons of trips so we can see everything on the market. And that’s totally cool because I love seeing how other people live. For someone as snoopy as I, the notion of opening refrigerators and peeking in closets with impunity as part of a decision-making process is a dream come true. What kind of soap do they use? How many shoes do they have? This is the kind of stuff I need to know.

  The thing is, Nancy is not only the spitting image of Jane Lynch’s character in Best in Show, [Less butch, though. She wore pretty shoes, lipstick, and had a shell pink mani/pedi.] she has the same no-nonsense personality, too. Out of the forty places I’m dying to see, she immediately dismisses almost all of them for a variety of reasons (e.g., you don’t want to deal with a foreclosure, the place is overpriced and underwater, the seller isn’t serious, etc.) and my dream of learning the Secret Lives of North Shore Wives dies immediately.

  Nancy takes us to exactly four houses.

  But I’ll be damned if each of them isn’t exactly what we want.

  She is the Real Estate Whisperer. [Or a consummate pr
ofessional who knows a dawdler when she sees one.]

  We narrow our choices down to two homes—a neighborhood-y Tudor style where the interior is move-in ready without a fence or pool, and a tree-surrounded Colonial that needs a face-lift in the decorating department but the yard boasts lots of rosebushes and an in-ground pool.

  I bring Stacey to see both of them and despite its being filled with window treatments she refers to as “Satan’s Golf Pantaloons” she believes we’ll be happier in the Colonial. She says you can’t deny the place’s good bones, notwithstanding the owners’ deep and abiding love of monkey-covered wallpaper. [As it turns out, the monkey wallpaper is bank. And it stays.]

  The time elapsed from making an offer to moving in is a little over a month, which isn’t nearly enough time to pack everything and yet affords me ample opportunity to freak the hell out.

  Until this moment, the most expensive thing I’ve ever purchased is a handbag and here I am, saddling myself with thirty years of debt. THIRTY YEARS. And you know what? Handbags never need new roofs. Handbags don’t flood or catch on fire. Handbags don’t get termites. Handbags have never made me eat sea urchin. When I get bored with a handbag, which, coincidentally occurs every 1.38 years, I’m not obligated to keep carrying it. I can just get something new without involving Realtors and banks and mortgage brokers and attorneys. Yes, I’ve complained about living in eighteen places, but just about every time we moved, I’ve been ready to go.

  But now, like it or not, I’m going to have some real roots in this new place. And that terrifies me.

  What are we going to do in a home where we’re responsible for everything? As of now, every time something breaks in our place we giggle and say, “That sounds expensive!” and then we call Dick. Generally he does nothing until we withhold our rent, but at least it gets done eventually and not on our dime.

  During a particularly panicky moment, Fletch sits down next to me on the deck and says, “If you want to grow up, this is your chance. Being an adult isn’t just paying taxes and investing in a Roth IRA; it’s about making decisions that scare you and following through with them anyway. However, if for any reason you feel we’re not ready, we can stay here.”

  I’m generally not one who believes in signs, but when I hear a gunshot in the distance after he says this, I pay attention. We close on our house two weeks later.

  The best day of my life isn’t when we’re handed the keys to our new place. Rather it’s today, the day after we close. Fletch left early this morning to run some items up to our new place. I head north, too, only I have to take Maisy to chemotherapy first. (Loki always comes with us because what dog doesn’t enjoy a road trip?)

  Maisy receives her treatment and is in excellent spirits as we spend the next twelve minutes driving from the clinic to the house. When we pull into the garage, the dogs are confused and as I let them loose in the new, empty house, they go crazy Vegas-style. They might not understand the details, but they grasp the concept that this is somehow now theirs.

  Fletch is out back replacing lightbulbs but when I let everyone fly into the yard, they don’t even notice him—or all the grass and trees and roses—because they’re so distracted by the big, blue pool.

  And that’s when my sweet little girl, back leg bandaged from the blood draw and wobbly from receiving a dose of toxic chemicals, dives right in.

  It is awesome.

  Loki splashes in after her and starts swimming laps and biting at the water. As we watch them paddle around the pool, my heart bubbles over with joy and I’m overcome by the sense of having made the right decision.

  This would be a lovely place to end this missive with the reluctant adult lesson that even if you’re scared, you should do it anyway.

  Of course, this is us we’re talking about.

  We move out of Dick’s place a week later and for the first time, we don’t scour the stove or wipe cabinets ourselves. Instead, we hire a crew to do so. We also have the carpets professionally cleaned and we leave the house in better shape than when we moved in. Because we’ve learned not to trust Dick, we have the photos to prove it, too. We even paid for a home inspection in case we ever had to go to court and needed an impartial third party’s report.

  Of course Dick keeps our entire security deposit, claiming he had to replace all the carpeting and repair all the imaginary holes we knocked in the walls.

  Of course he does.

  He even sends us receipts for alleged damage… from the construction company he just so happens to own. The thing is, once a Dick, always a Dick. So I send Gina and her boyfriend Lee in for a covert operation posing as potential tenants. They schedule an appointment with an apartment broker and they go over the place with a fine-tooth comb. They return with photographic evidence that he did none of the work for which he submitted receipts. Gina even has the broker send her e-mail confirmation that the landlord states the carpet is just fine and there’s no need to replace it.

  I not only want to go all HULK SMASH and bash in Dick’s face with my good whacking shovel but I’d also like to engage in a war of social media.

  Our real estate attorney advises against both courses of action.

  Instead, she sends him what she calls a “liar, liar, pants on fire” letter but ultimately nothing happens because (if my Google stalking is to be trusted, and I think it is) he’s in a world of financial trouble and his last priority is writing us a check. She says we could sue, but it would cost far more in terms of dollars spent and aggravation and that our best revenge is living well here in our nineteenth, permanent home.

  But for me?

  I think the best revenge is writing a shaming essay about the situation that will live on in the Library of Congress forever.

  Reluctant Adult Lesson Learned:

  Don’t be a Dick… because you never know who might be documenting your bad behavior.

  C·H·A·P·T·E·R F·I·V·E

  The Queen of Kings

  I’m holed up in my office when I hear their rising voices.

  I don’t speak Polish, but I do speak panic, and from the tone of what they’re saying, there’s trouble afoot.

  As I hear the slap of flip-flops barreling down the hallway, I think to myself, This can’t be good.

  To backtrack, I spend every Friday from eleven to two hiding in my office when our cleaning ladies come. Mind you, this is the new maid service, as we fired the old team for pinching a bunch of stuff, including a video camera. I don’t know if they thought we were famous because of all my framed posters from Barnes & Noble book signing appearances, but if they were looking to cash in on a celebrity sex tape, I’m afraid they were going to be sorely disappointed with all the kitten footage. [How many times do I have to say this, people? The Internet is FOREVER.]

  Yes, cleaning ladies are an extravagance, but Fletch and I made a deal—as long as I’m working on a project, I’m allowed to outsource our housekeeping. At the moment, my “project” is watching TiVoed episodes of The Real Housewives of New York, but that’s on a need-to-know basis.

  One of the ladies is calling, “Excuse! Excuse!” which generally means they’re finished, but it’s only eleven fifteen and the house is disgusting. At this point, it occurs to me that neither of the ladies has ever actually said anything to me except for “excuse,” no matter how much I try to engage them in conversation. Fletch told me that once when he was here alone with them, one of the gals held a cell phone to his head and demanded he, “Ask boss,” when he inquired if they could fold a couple of baskets of laundry.

  I hate that I missed it because I’m crazy in love with an Eastern European accent. Some people dig the melodious tones of French or Italian, but me, I’m all about a language that comes out somewhere between spitting and barking. There’s something so refreshingly direct about the Slavic way of speaking; it’s all “it MUST” and “you WILL,” as opposed to our very American “if it’s not too much trouble” and “as long as that’s okay.” When no one’s around, I make Maisy t
alk in an East German accent. Maisy need. Maisy need NOW.

  I open my office door and find one of the ladies in what can best be described as a state. “Is something wrong? Can I help?” I ask. Whatever the problem is, I can fix it. If someone hurt herself, I can grab our first aid kit, call 911, or do an ER run. If something broke, I can glue it back together. If they simply want to express their disgust at how dirty the floors got while I was away at SxSW and Fletch was in charge of the house, I can invite them to join the club.

  Seriously, WTF? Was he hosting a rodeo in here?

  The cleaning lady replies to my offer of assistance by saying the one thing without a readily apparent solution.

  “The shit is small.”

  Beg your pardon?

  I repeat to her, “The shit is small?” I say it a couple of times while I try to work it all out in my head.

  She nods emphatically and points in the direction of the master bedroom at the end of the hallway and enunciates every word. “The shit is small.”

  As we both rush down the hall, my head races with grim possibilities.

  Where did the small shit come from?

  Where is the small shit now?

  Is the small shit on the duvet? That’s no real biggie because it’s machine washable.

  Is the small shit on a linen chair cushion? Um, more problematic because I’m not sure how to launder it. Scrub brush? Dry cleaning?

  Oh, God, please tell me there’s no small shit on my prized Persian rug with the delicate swirls of celery and cerulean blue woven through the magenta wool. [Fletch ruined our old jute rug after I asked him to clean it. My assumption was that he’d use a Rug Doctor. In all the lousy places we’ve lived and with all the ridiculous neighbors we’ve ever had, nothing has ever been more white trash than when I spotted him standing in the front yard like Cousin “Shitter’s Full” Eddie, squirting the rug with a garden hose.]