by Vikki Warner
Three of Everything
We returned to the Boston apartment to pack up the rest of our stuff, including our two plump male cats, Kernel and Rocky, and then piled everything into a U-Haul. We slowly trundled the fifty or so miles south to Providence, jumping down from the truck to gaze at the largesse of this thing that was now mine: the two-toned aluminum siding a faded, sagey green on the ground floor, and white on the top two. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I wished out loud that whoever had owned this house in the fifties had never been visited by a siding salesman. James said, “I’m telling you, the wood’s still under there. They usually just covered it up.” Before I could object, he ripped a chunk of siding off the back corner of the house to prove his theory, and there it was: a tantalizing swatch of gray clapboard. It was pretty, not rotten; even the old (lead?) paint was intact.
I had no money to have the siding taken down and the old toxic paint removed—it was a fool’s errand anyway, the costs likely to balloon into the tens of thousands, and for what tangible benefit? Meanwhile, my boyfriend had begun ripping pieces off the house we had yet to move a single box into.
James flung the aluminum off to the side, and we started dragging our stuff over the threshold, a moment during which reality (we live here now) sent a momentary chill through the steamy August air. The house was in the barest state possible for our habitation. There was no gas or electric service; the walls, chalky plaster or bare drywall, were scratched; and we had twenty rooms, plus two sizeable stairwells, to prime and paint. It dawned on me, a little late, that there were three of everything—boilers, water heaters, toilets, sinks, stoves, fridges—and that any of those things could break now, in twenty minutes, in a week. Nothing looked finished; Al’s guys had left jagged edges, chunks of plaster, and sawdust. The yard was filled with trash and weeds. It was hot and the air was dank; rats skittered outside; weird smells crept in.
We slept in the front room on the first floor for a while, too exhausted to move anything upstairs to the third floor, where we planned to live once we settled in. A reddish streetlight glow landed on me each night, and I’d lie in its pool feeling helpless—helpless in the house, with its unconquerable problems now becoming clear; helpless in my relationship, newly guided toward a distracting common goal that I worried would overcome us; helpless in this weird neighborhood that didn’t feel at all like home. In the morning, that doomy perspective vaporized, but it left a haze of doubt.
My life’s foundation was slipping out from under me, but I sought to steady it by decorating like nobody’s business. After years of apartments painted entirely in Clinical White, or its skanky cousin Dirty White, I wanted to paint every room a different highly saturated color. Luxuriating in paint chips, I could envision greatness. “You want to live in a goddamn roll of LifeSavers,” James said, which sounded good to me.
Getting underway, we proclaimed our ignorance loudly and proudly by buying two giant barrels of oil-based primer, which adheres instantly to any surface it touches. Rather than wiping up easily, as with water-based primer, a mistake is simply smeared around ad nauseam. When applied via our signature slapdash painting technique, gobs of it splattered on the floor and were tracked around on our shoes or cats’ paws, drying there into an indelible mess. We snipped at one another, our primer-laden rollers dripping on our shoes, already frustrated. He thought I was too slow; I thought he was too sloppy. I felt a shaky anger welling up whenever we tried to collaborate; why were we so inadequate at working together? Several couples I knew had bought and worked on their houses together; though they confessed that the process was hard, and things got heated from time to time, they didn’t mention soul-crushing alienation and resentment. The admittedly too-perfect renovating couples who starred in their own half-hour look-how-well-that-worked-out shows on HGTV didn’t allude to questioning the very structure of their own philosophies of self in the midst of a project. I felt it necessary to keep a lid on my feelings, knowing that airing them would cause a fight, which would then cause us to stop working, probably for days. We could not afford to clash on every decision. I would rather be doing anything else, I would think self-pityingly, and before long I added, with anyone else. I was taken aback by how quickly our enthusiasm threatened to tap out, and how close to the surface the tension felt.
From the street, PennHenge looks like a freakishly large tooth in a grinning mouth. It’s crammed in between two smaller houses, and it’s less than ten feet from the street, so it looms large, as if perpetually sneaking up on passersby. There’s a length of electric-green chain-link fence at the property line, with a gate that straddles the concrete steps to the front door. The fence serves no purpose that I can ascertain, and can easily be skirted, but even as a largely mental barrier it seems to have kept the taggers from hitting the house; the buildings on either side are not so lucky.
The house’s front entry is one of its best attributes—one of the surviving Victorian vestiges of its prettier past. French doors with dainty, white curtains open wide and provide a breezy gateway to a graceful winding stairwell. An ornate overhang, skillfully carved and painted white, crests the doors. It is lovely, but it’s not functional. This is merely an ornamental doorway, not one used to actually enter and exit the building: the lock is sticky, the door is tricky, and because the key is long gone, we can only lock it from a bent antique latch on the inside. The doors’ exteriors, too, are painted a thick green—someone in this house’s past really loved all the sickliest options in the green universe—and the wood’s pitted remnants imply decades of Providence rain, snow, and heat. Someone shot a BB through one of the panes of glass, and a diminutive hole remains.
We’re going in. We’ve got to do it eventually.
The key turns in the lock; the back door squeaks open. In contrast to the rather grand front entry, this one is purely utilitarian. The floor, having just been stripped of its 1950s linoleum, is now rough, worn wood stained by years of humidity and salty winter boots. The heavy wood door to the first-floor apartment is just inside.
From the back door, one enters into the kitchen, which is dwarfed by boxy 1980s-era almond-colored appliances that wheeze and whirr and have already exceeded their life expectancy by several years. The floor is bowed in multiple directions, lending it a wavy quality that makes it difficult to decide where to stand. It is covered in fake terra cotta tile installed by Al’s amateur contractors, so cheap and brittle that a few of the tiles have already cracked in half. Through a jaunty little arched doorway, there’s a skinny pantry, with huge, old farmhouse-style cabinets, more cut-rate tile (this time used as countertop), and a dingy metal sink like the one in my second-grade art classroom that had tempera paint residue dumped in it year upon year.
Al’s penny-pinching ways had pushed him to get creative, and now that we were in the house I saw how often he’d used materials for contraindicated purposes. Like a doctor who prescribes drugs for off-label usages a little too liberally, Al put tiles that were not meant to bear weight on the floors; he put sheets of vinyl flooring on the walls as back-splashes (I caught that one early and made him take them down); he made “doors” for utility closets out of sheets of thin beaded plywood, leaving nails poking clear through to the other side. I got the feeling he had a stockpile of low-quality building materials that had to be used—somehow, any way they could be manhandled into place—before he would buy anything new. None of it would function for more than a year, but his objective had been to get the house sold and off his docket, and not to make a lasting home for anybody.
The first-floor bathroom is not exempt from this key tenet of Al’s decorating bible. Kitchen flooring masquerades as bathroom tile; the light fixture belongs in a hallway, is not moisture-safe, and has the distinct look of being purchased in an economy twelve-pack. There’s also a bleak peachy-colored one-piece shower/tub insert, like something you might find in a bummer motel. The toilet Al provided started leaking soon after move-in, so I had it replaced with a new one, a point of pride
because—in the plumber’s exact words—“you can flush a dozen golf balls down this thing.”
The living room is in the middle of the apartment, with three bedrooms branching off from there. There’s a tall bay window with four skinny panels; it looks out over the driveway, with the next house a confining ten feet away. The flooring might be nice, but it’s tough to tell its true condition because it’s been painted in many layers over the years.
The frontmost room in the apartment was intended to be a second living room—or “parlor,” as they called it around here in the old days—used in quainter economic times for entertaining or family gatherings. But because the parlor is much larger than either of the two dinky original bedrooms, it makes more sense to use it as a bedroom. These two rooms are the grandest in the house, with their Victorian bay windows, pretty, white marble fireplaces, and crown moldings. The other two bedrooms on the first floor are fairly nondescript: boxy little ten-by-tens, each with a single window and a shallow closet.
Up the back stairs, which are so worn as to provide convenient hollows for one’s feet to neatly fall into, and we’re at the entrance to the second-floor apartment. The layout here is identical to that of the first floor, perhaps a bit less beat-up, but feeling equally empty and unfinished. The cumulative feel of these two apartments is that they are adequate for human habitation, but not at all shiny or sleek. The swankiest things on site are the old marble fireplaces, which no longer function as originally intended but would one day serve as pretty dope spots for my tenants’ candles, animal skulls, and DVDs. There are no dishwashers, no garbage disposals, no exhaust fans in the kitchens or bathrooms. There is a comical dearth of electrical outlets; already we’re running ten different power strips and extension cords.
James and I begin haphazardly arranging our things in the third-floor apartment, which consists of an adorable, if diminutive, five rooms: two small bedrooms, a living room at the small end of average, a large kitchen with a pantry, and a tiny bathroom. There’s charming wainscoting in the kitchen; simple, timeworn shelving in the pantry; the bedroom ceiling is made up of angled eaves; and the apartment’s got a general “cabin in the woods” feel, perched up above the urban fray. We liked the look of it at first sight.
As with many third-floor apartments in Providence and elsewhere, the kitchen is in the center, and the other rooms fan out from it. The flooring consists of commercial black-and-white vinyl tiles, the kind you’d see in a pizzeria or taco shop. There’s a clunky white refrigerator and a 1950s Glenwood enameled metal stove that still works handily as a stove and an oven. It’s a gas-on-gas stove, meaning it also contains a heater—the only heating “system” in the apartment. On one hand, it’s charming and simple; on the other, we’ll soon trust this antiquated technology to keep our toes from freezing.
Just off the kitchen, a small pantry with kitchen sink will be our storage spot for food, dry goods, dishes, tools, cookbooks. Thickly painted shelves are situated just above the sink and extend to the slanted ceiling, and another high shelf runs the length of the opposite wall. It’s crowded and sort of falling apart, but I love this little glorified closet.
The bathroom, though, is distinctly unlovable. When friends come over to see the house, they go in to take a pee and come out shaking their heads. “I know,” I say, “it’s awful. Don’t make fun of it.” This room is a comedy of errors done up in porcelain and plastic. The black-and-white checkered restaurant floor is the same as that used in the kitchen, but is even less appropriate in a bathroom. The leaky plastic shower stall recalls summer camp nightmares; a mysterious door opens onto the back of the shower from the next room. The door to the bathroom doesn’t quite line up with its frame, so it doesn’t close all the way: a truly inhospitable feature to discover in one’s new bathroom. Then again, the gap between the door and its frame is the only ventilation in the room, seeing as the single skylight window does not open. It becomes so hot in this room that taking a shit begets psychedelic visions. Sitting there in cathartic sweat, I’d think, Am I being punished? Have I been a terrible human being?
I’d been dreaming of the graceful surroundings of my new house, but for now I’d appreciably downgraded my living situation.
Sitting up at night, lonely, cracking a few beers, James drawing in the next room, I’d watch HGTV and reruns of This Old House. “It’s all so easy, isn’t it?” I’d mutter at the television. “You fuckers have no idea.” This, of course, was untrue. Those fuckers had a TV budget, plus more skills and knowledge than I could ever glean from watching TV. They were professionals at this gig, and I was just playing at it, hanging on to the illusion that I was qualified to do so. I’d hungrily watch project after project line up perfectly on the first try, look beautiful, cause no stress, and cost more than my yearly salary. Nauseous, I’d click the TV off and curse the seemingly endless list of tasks ahead of me, along with my own ineptitude at getting them done.
It was during these first few weeks that I realized how little I knew about my new neighborhood. Federal Hill is a historically Italian American enclave, with a visitor-friendly main drag lined with restaurants, bars, very drunk people, very rude people, and shopping. But the instant you leave this little low-rent adult Disneyland, the neighborhood goes Wild West. I soon learned that social niceties were not valued in the Hill. Passersby parked facing the wrong way; blocked driveways; discarded food, trash, furniture, and mattresses in the street; laid on the horn; listened to thudding jams at ear-destroying volumes; rooted around in trash cans and cars. From the third floor, I had a great upper-deck seat for a few neighborhood-wide street brawls. People yelled for their friends instead of knocking on the door or ringing the bell, barking in the style of a kid looking for his mother’s attention.
I come from a stoic New England family in which shouting is only to be employed in extreme emergencies. Even in a desperate crisis, many of my family members would only widen their eyes and murmur quietly. I had a laissez-faire attitude about the commotion; I didn’t love it, but I wasn’t overly upset about it. Then I began to consider who would want to pay good money to live here with me. Who would possibly volunteer to come along on this misguided fantasy ride? Could I be trusted with anyone’s well-being? What if everything broke, right away? Until now, this whole “tenants” concept had been abstract. It was just how I planned to (eventually) pay the bills. Now, it was becoming clear that the strategy involved actual people. I was going to be the provider of basic shelter and conveniences for adults, kids, animals, potted ferns, and whatever else turned up. And I was going to have to find tenants before the first mortgage payment was due in a few short weeks.
I posted ads around town and on Craigslist for the two apartments, and fired up my loud mouth to start recruiting person-to-person. My friend Tamara, who’d occupied my room in the Boston apartment before I lived there, had also moved back to Providence and was very shortly to be married to her boyfriend, Jack. They wanted to move out of their place and start fresh in a new one. Considering there was no paint on the walls and there was still construction dust and debris everywhere, “fresh” was one way to say it. They saw past the apartment’s very apparent shortcomings, and said they’d take the first floor for my asking price of $800 per month. They even offered to paint it themselves for a modest discount on the first month’s rent. Feeling good, we settled on a move-in date in October. One down.
Since we’d left Boston, James had spoken with his friend Ben, a screenprinter and artist, and asked him to move into the house with his girlfriend Daria. Ben and Daria lived in a cramped space on the then-industrial Boston waterfront, which also housed Ben’s printshop. Technically, they were not supposed to be living there at all—the space was designated as a studio only. Ben and Daria decided to escape the high-rent/low-opportunity vortex of Boston and move an hour south to much-cheaper Providence. James and Ben could rent a bargain studio space and join forces to start up a new print shop. They plotted for days and weeks, and convinced Daria, a graphic de
signer, it would be a good move for her as well, though her lack of enthusiasm was palpable. With James and I promising prosperous times ahead, they agreed to leap with us, and to paint and do limited, small repairs on their place. Because they were doing us a favor of sorts, they rented the entire second floor at the absurd rate of $600 per month. This left me on the hook for about $600 a month on the total mortgage payment of about $2,000. Not quite “living for free,” as James had assured, but at least the house would be full and the bills would be covered.
That autumn, as everyone moved in, routines emerged. The personalities meshed fairly well; my new tenants’ complaints about each other were few, and mostly related to the sounds of late-night furniture arrangement. I was still commuting to my job as an editor just outside of Boston, so my life was composed of three tasks: getting to work, being at work, and coming home and not working on the house. All weekend, as I scraped off old paint, drilled holes in the wrong places, and swore at the cats—who inevitably made paw prints on everything with the ill-fated oil-based primer—I dreaded going to work on Monday. All week, as I dozed off at my desk, I dreaded having to return to rediscover the wonders of home repair.
I had become vaguely aware that I wasn’t feeling totally up to it all—my stomach hurt all the time and I was always in the bathroom. Wagon trains of pink rashes roved my skin, camping for a few days on one patch, a few days on another. I was drained of energy. My guts sputtered loudly all day long. I abandoned any semblance of a professional appearance at work by napping on the lawn directly faced by the company’s office windows. My digestive issues were too gross to think about, so I decided they were a temporary stress response. I worried about the house, and money, and keeping it all together; my inner distress seemed a fitting result. I treated myself unforgivingly; because I had signed up for this lifestyle, I had to make it work. I would not let it fail. I just felt tired—more tired than I had ever been before.
