by Vikki Warner
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.
This Must Be the Place
I’m not always in disaster mode, although I am often frustrated by our country’s extreme lack of environmental leadership. I try to ignore the grim possibility that humanity may soon shrink away like a waning moon. Hoping to counteract our dismal moods and do something positive in reaction to election results and the general awfulness of our country’s political outlook, at the end of 2016 Dave and I adopt a rescue dog, a black-and-tan Shiba Inu with a stoic face, an authoritative personality, and a little blocky body. She’s our dream doggie. Her previous owners named her Foxy; we rename her Runi. She and I go for lengthy walks around the neighborhood in the winter. We usually take the side streets; the main thoroughfare in the neighborhood makes her anxious. As she pees on her forty-fifth snowbank, I get contemplative, thinking about how great she is, how much I love Providence, how shitty and how nice our neighborhoods are. We look into lovely spaces I never would have noticed had she not pooped on them. One day, as we meander, I look up and see it: the house of my Providence dreams. It’s a small, two-story single-family house of an unremarkable architectural type. Real estate reconnaissance later tells me it’s 1,300 square feet and was built in 1850. It’s been redone, now a monochrome dark gray with black shutters and a sweet slatted door painted . . . what is that? Chartreuse? It’s only five or six blocks from PennHenge, on a street that looks like a slightly le
ss beat-up version of my own: mostly tenements with a few older single-family homes sandwiched in. The house is so solid-looking, so tidy, so well-kept, and yet it seems to have a good sense of humor, like it’s winking in my direction. I don’t even need to see the inside, I recount to Dave breathlessly, because the outside is so beautifully done, I know it must be simple, tasteful, and warm, with a really organized kitchen and two cozy little bedrooms upstairs.
I love this house so hard, I’m surprised my smoldering eyeballs haven’t set it on fire yet. This little confection embodies every guilty house fantasy I’ve had during my years of holing up on the third floor waiting for the walls to stop shaking. It’s small and forthright, no tenants, no graffiti, simple, clean and linear: everything I wish for when PennHenge derails.
I can tell that whoever lives in this house isn’t leaving anytime soon. This beauty is so lovingly restored, so well taken care of, no detail skipped over, that I’ve guessed this is someone’s life project. Nonetheless, I’ve set up a “house alert” on some soul-crushing real estate app that will tell me immediately if the house goes up for sale.
One day I see a moving truck parked right in front of my house crush, and I’m dopily hopeful. My heart skips a beat, and my little dog and I practically run over to eavesdrop on the details. Her urinary needs provide a convenient cover as we stand just off to the side and loiter next to the truck. A guy comes out of the house across the street, toting a cardboard box. “Damn,” I say to Runi, “it’s not gonna happen, girl,” as if she cares. She’s perfectly happy at PennHenge, and why shouldn’t Dave and I be, too? All of our needs are covered: food, water, warmth, love, music.
I’m exhausted by my human aspirations. We spend our lives working up to something, and when we finally get it, we start finding its faults. I’m never going to own that house, and if I did, I would find something therein to be unhappy about. So there is nothing to do but harness every bit of joy we can muster right here in our cramped apartment in our big, unruly house with our little dog. In our insane world. While we do that, we discuss the future and the feasibility of leaving here someday, but I refuse to let my ego do the buying next time, to mortgage my life just to get another mortgage. For now, we stick around and let our plans be fluid. We try not to feel as if we’re waiting for something, because now is pretty good.
Our homes are wrapped up with our inconsistencies, our faults, our virtues, and our victories in one anarchic package. The mess is not always to be swept away, because we are in there somewhere.
In college, when I moved with my lady crew into our first apartment, I used to go for long walks by myself in all seasons. I’d shove a few bucks in my pocket for a coffee or a slice of pizza and set off to observe the goings on in Bristol, our small town on Narragansett Bay. I craned my neck to make note of swaying trees, birds on their swooping way to the water. Wood and brick buildings, gable roofs and storefronts, old schoolhouses, glowing white mansions with glossy lawns. I listened to the banter outside the diner or at the post office, the old Rhode Islanders getting their stamps, talking politics and weather. Portuguese, Yankee, Italian, English, Irish. Undertones of histories bumping up against one another; bending, blending, resigned to just being America. Blue collar and white collar. Fishermen and professors.
This town has a terrifically well-preserved collection of historic houses built in the 1700s and 1800s. Most are stunning buildings with regal features—peaks and cornices, columns and arches—all polished up in a manner befitting the showplace of the neighborhood. On those walks I often found myself slipping into a covetous reverie over the grand homes of Bristol. The same happened when I moved to Providence and began to pick my way around the opulent old houses of the East Side. I worshipped their good looks, their symmetry, their visual oddities, the unattainable wealth and rarity they signified. But like those of many beautiful old American places, the roots from which these houses sprung are hideously corrupted. It’s an uncomfortable fact that a significant measure of both towns’ early wealth was generated by the slave trade. The ports of Newport, Bristol, and Providence, Rhode Island, were extremely valuable stops within the triangular trade pattern between the slave markets of the African coast, the sugar-growing slave plantations of the Caribbean, and the rum-manufacturing ports of New England.
And we wonder why so many old houses around here are said to be haunted. The haunting need not be a literal spirit on patrol; perhaps it is just an unsettledness, a shiver. Our modern towns cannot help but remain tethered to these ghoulish days of the commodification and theft of human lives. I imagine that there is a heavy and eternal psychic toll on the places that harbored the people responsible for such acts, places that were active or complicit in America’s early movement toward enshrining systematic white repression of black people and the other in all things.
Imagine each of these stately houses claimed by black families, rather than being passed around by white people to other white people for a million dollars a pop. Could be the sole cure for the haunting.
Our homes are not what we think they are. If we knew their secrets, we’d not find them so precious. History is inscribed therein; our history is glorious and hateful and squared upon the single-minded pursuit of money, and every grand old house testifies to it.
In avoidance of supporting New England’s eerie patrician history, I now seek out the less distinctive, the less valued, the less traditionally adored houses. The ones that did (and continue to do) the tough work of sheltering regular people who sometimes didn’t have the money to keep them pristinely preserved. The utilitarian places that encompass a quieter beauty and confess to the messiness of life.
PennHenge, I’m looking at you.
After all these years of upmarket dreams, am I back at your splintered, faded door, hat in hand, flowers behind my back?
Considering another home—which in a way amounts to considering another life—has always carried with it a sense of relief, as if PennHenge is a problem to be solved. There has been plenty of dumb shit to complain about, for sure. But owning this place, in itself an advantage, has afforded freedoms that I’ve chosen, at times, to ignore in favor of feeling put-upon. Freedoms like not worrying too much about where the mortgage payment is coming from; like having a little left over to travel, eat good food, drink nice wine, take care of myself; like the luxury of growing my own food, which should not be a luxury; like having my own permanent place to live, a place I can count on as long as I need it. And—most importantly—like being the landlady instead of getting played by some scammer landlord.
When I squint through the keyhole into a possible future life, just Dave and Runi and me in our own diminutive house, I conjure up a sense of ease. It might be a less demanding life. It might be peaceful: a fireplace, another dog, Miles Davis on the stereo, banana bread in the oven and soup on the stove. Just as brightly, though, I get a flash of it—shit, I would miss Penn Street! I would miss the noise, the 24/7 racket of people going out, coming in, swapping parking spots. I would miss the weirdos who live with me. I would miss being available at all hours, being the one in charge of the solution when there is a problem. I would miss hearing parties going on below my feet. I would miss saying hello to a variety of cats in the hallway. I would miss my garden, my refuge, which I could imitate but never duplicate elsewhere. I would miss the hoppy sweetness of weed smoke filtering through my floorboards. I would miss the bits of outside conversations that drift up to my apartment on the wind. I would miss the dingy, warped floors, the misaligned corners, the myriad of half-busted things competing for my money and attention. I would miss the adversity.
Having been moderately lucky in the parts of life that really matter, I’ve had to manufacture my own adversity, my own losing battle; PennHenge is the inexhaustible well of hardship of my subconscious desires. I don’t believe that taking it easy is a place of comfort for me.
From the beginning, the endeavor of my home-ownership has been based in blind determination, a sense that if I
keep rushing forward, someday I’ll not feel like an amateur. But why wouldn’t I feel like one? The notion has been reinforced over these last twelve years by realtors, electricians, plumbers, tax collectors, tenants, cops—male and female—who treated me like I had no shot in this game by dint of my being a young, physically unimposing woman. As if an atypical player could never find a way to win the game. I used to resent such assumptions, but now my experience speaks for itself. I don’t need to justify what I’ve done here to anyone. Besides, how would “winning” be defined in my case? I would say it’s keeping the house in decent repair, being a good neighbor, and providing a modest but safe place to live for six to ten people at a time. Others would judge it financially and tell me I should be exacting the maximum number of dollars from the house, no matter how shady the required deeds might seem. I’ve had contractors suggest I finish part of the basement and illegally rent it out, for example; other landlords tell me I should be raising the rent every year, no matter what, just to keep my tenants on their toes.
I’ve not taken the most direct route toward success in landladyhood—by any definition—but I can say that I’ve been an honest, extremely fallible human woman: a wimp, a badass, a fool, a queen, and a dipshit. And I hereby claim my right to keep occupying all of those roles.
How else could I do this thing?
I never wanted a dream home. I wanted a struggle, and I got one. All these years on, I still have trouble imagining a household that doesn’t max out my mental and financial resources. I’ve proven to myself and anyone else who’s expressed doubt that I can endure it all, and do it with a smile and a shrug.
