The $64 Tomato

by William Alexander

  The most memorable advice came from a car. One night a Pontiac parked in the street woke us, warning, “Please step away from the vehicle,” in a spooky Orwellian voice for hours on end, freaking out Zach, waking Anne and Katie, and very nearly inciting me to violence.

  Once Anne completed her residency in internal medicine at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, we were free—and more than ready—to go. After a year of scouring a hundred-mile radius of New York City, we had found a wonderful small town nestled in the hills along the Hudson River, a place I nicknamed the Town That Time Forgot. Originally a farming and mill town, later a summer retreat for city dwellers, who would arrive by steamboat to be ferried to their summer homes by horse and buggy, it was a town that still took pride in its Fourth of July celebration and Memorial Day parade and had not one but two cozy libraries, a charming tavern/restaurant, and a working farm. Most important, it satisfied the two prerequisites we had set for any prospective town: a Main Street and a local newspaper, both of which we felt were essential for a sense of community, and not as easy to find as one might think. More often we found only a strip mall with a post office, a supermarket, and a pizzeria where the town center should have been. But after searching for months, we still hadn’t been able to find the right house and hadn’t sold our current house.

  We cherished our Yonkers house, a 1910 foursquare with chestnut paneling, crown molding, and hand-cut parquet floors, and knew we wouldn’t be happy in a 1960s split-level or an ’80s raised ranch. Houses speak, and we had learned to listen. From our foursquare we heard the pride of the immigrant skilled laborers who had painstakingly trimmed mahogany and oak to create the decorative corners of the parquet floors, and the gaslight fixtures whispered to us of distant winter nights, inviting us to imagine the house suffused with the warm glow of gaslight. When I cleaned eighty years of cigarette smoke and grime off the chestnut paneling in the dining room, alchemically transforming it from grimy black to a warm, vibrant brown, I felt I was touching history, bringing forth new life from a species of tree now all but extinct.

  In contrast, the houses we were being shown in the Town That Time Forgot were mute, without character or soul, cold modern ranches or cramped 1940s homes with neighbors within snoring distance. There were some fine older homes in town, to be sure, but they hardly ever seemed to go on the market, and the ones that did were out of our price range. It seemed hopeless.

  Until we saw the Big Brown House.

  We had hired a babysitter and excitedly driven up from Yonkers to see what the real estate agent had described as the perfect house for us. In the car I reminded Anne of the warning our Yonkers agent, the one trying to sell our current house, had given us. “Don’t fall in love with a house before you own it. You will either be heartbroken or pay too much.”

  It looked as though there would be no chance of that today. The real estate agent’s “perfect house” was a fiveyear-old prefab with all the character of a shoebox. But within sight of the shoebox, looming on the hill above, was an old, abandoned, boarded-up cedar and stone house boasting broken windows and an overgrown lawn.

  “Stop here for a second,” I asked the broker as we drove past on the way back to the office. “What’s the deal with this place?”

  She laughed at my joke and then with embarrassment realized I wasn’t joking one bit and stopped the car. “It’s not on the market,” she said, then paused ominously. “You don’t want that house.” So of course we immediately did.

  Anne and I went back to explore it on our own afterward, peering through gaps in the plywood that covered the windows. We could make out a fireplace, wood floors, and a wide staircase. What was the story with this abandoned house? We knocked on the door of the house next door, hoping to find out.

  “You’re about the fiftieth person to ask about this place,” said the smiling but clearly exasperated woman who answered, understandably not happy with her role as surrogate realty agent.

  “But we’re actually going to buy it,” I joked, trying to lighten the mood.

  “Larry and I would love to see someone buy it,” she said. “It’s such an eyesore.”

  She didn’t know much about the status of the house, other than that it had not been lived in for some time. After a little detective work, I found out the house had been foreclosed on by the bank and, after years of legal proceedings, was about to go on the market “as is.” We tracked down the bank’s real estate agent and were the very first ones to see it.

  It was a disaster. I was prepared for an abandoned house, but not for a complete dump. The previous owners had defaulted in the midst of “renovating” (a euphemism for destroying historic property). The deconstruction stage had gotten pretty far along, but the bank had lost its patience and thrown them out before they could start the re construction stage. We wandered around the maze of rooms on the first floor for a bit.

  “Where’s the kitchen?” Anne wondered after a while. We hadn’t seen any rooms with, say, a stove or a sink.

  Judging by the two stubby pipes sticking up out of the floor, we were standing in it. Something inspired me to tug on one of them, and it easily came free in my hand. I offered it to Anne.

  “Here’s the hot water. Or maybe it’s the cold water.”

  She was not amused. She wanted this house. I could see it in her eyes; I could sense her quickening pulse. Never mind the sheets of paint peeling from the walls in every room, the floors left half-sanded when the power company literally pulled the plug on the delinquent owners. Or the rooms that had no floors at all, just bare plywood. Never mind the lack of a heating system because vandals had stolen everything they could cut or twist off the old steam boiler. Not to mention the three acres of overgrown grass, weeds, vines, and scrub trees that made it hazardous to walk in what was presumably once a yard. The listing said there was a small barn on the property; we couldn’t even find it, although it would later reveal itself only one hundred feet from the house, obscured under wild grape and poison ivy, two wrecked cars rusting inside.

  To Anne, these were not barriers to ownership; these were merely flaws of the house she had prematurely fallen in love with.

  I could see why. It clearly had been a grand old house at one time, before falling into neglect. It was truly one of a kind—a large, rambling place (we momentarily lost each other on the first visit) with a butler’s pantry and a maid’s staircase, floors built of heart pine (most likely from local forests), large windows and French doors everywhere, located on a ridge with views of the Hudson River and on a clear day the Catskill Mountains. And you could walk to town, which was important to Anne.

  This house desperately needed a loving owner with handyman skills and tons of free time. Anne smiled sweetly, hope and love flashing in her eyes, nominating me. “I can’t do it,” I said later that night, breaking her heart. I had just spent years renovating our Yonkers home, scrubbing, painting, and wallpapering, moving a load-bearing wall to make room for our newborn, Katie, building a bathroom, renovating a kitchen, and installing countless light switches and fixtures. And I had done it without help, because with Anne carrying a huge medical school debt and working in the medical profession’s slave-labor pool known as residency, we were more or less broke. And to make things more difficult, it was all on-the-job learning, as I had barely touched a hammer before we bought the house. I was doing all of these fix-it jobs for the first time, studying how-to books at night, learning from mistakes during the day.

  The thought of doing it again, on a scale that dwarfed the Yonkers project, was daunting. I was tired, we had a baby and a four-year-old, and we were still broke. The bank was asking a lot of money for a wreck, when you figured in the expense of adding a new roof, a heating system, plumbing, and a kitchen. I didn’t think we could swing it, financially or emotionally. So for the next year we continued looking at houses, mainly ranches and colonials (whatever they are—no two seemed to have anything in common, but they were all called colonials). Anne cried on the way home o
ne day when I became enthusiastic about a house on a secluded mountain road, because she couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to walk to town. The prospect of living in that house loomed like a prison sentence to her. Soon after, she stopped seeing houses with me altogether.

  “Let me know when you find something,” she said flatly. “I can’t do this anymore.” She was really saying, “I’ve found the house I want. If you want something else, you go ahead, but leave me out of it.”

  Anne has a tough, even unyielding, side that she rarely reveals. She saves it for big occasions, such as getting the house she wants. Or the man. I had a flashback to the day she lay down a similar gauntlet about our relationship. We had been dating exclusively for close to two years when she asked if we were going to get married. I was noncommittal.

  “I’m done courting,” she responded. “I’m not getting any younger.” We were both thirty-one. She gave me three months to make up my mind. If I wasn’t ready for marriage by then, she was moving on.

  I was stunned, although I shouldn’t have been. The subject of marriage had come up once before, as we were walking down Manhattan’s Ninth Avenue.

  “You know what tomorrow is, don’t you?” Anne asked, tugging on my arm.

  My mind raced. Had I forgotten her birthday? Some kind of obscure anniversary that only women remember, like our first date? I came up empty.

  “Saturday?”

  “Sadie Hawkins Day.”

  I vaguely remembered Sadie Hawkins Day from Li’l Abner comics, but it didn’t hold any significance for me. “We’re going to a square dance?”

  “It’s the one day a year when a woman can propose to a man,” she said, studying my reaction.

  And what a reaction. She got to watch the blood drain out of my face and my knees buckle slightly. She held tightly to my arm to keep me from wobbling to the pavement.

  “I don’t know that that would be a good idea right now,” I gasped when I found my voice. “We hardly know each other.” Anne erupted with something between a guffaw and a shriek. We knew each other quite well, and what’s more, we were one of those oddball perfect matches, although I was too dense to realize it. Anne was fairly gregarious; I was a loner. Anne was a sunny optimist; I was a worrying pragmatist. I wanted to live in the country; she, in the city. Surely a match this poor couldn’t help but succeed.

  She teased me all the next day and even flirted with popping the question but did not propose. She was having too much fun watching me squirm to spoil the game with a marriage proposal.

  But this time she was serious. Three months. I let the clock tick down to the last month before coming to my senses. I invited her to dinner at my apartment to propose. I can still remember the menu: duck with lime glaze, wild rice, baby carrots, and strawberries for dessert.

  “I’ve been thinking about things,” I said when she arrived. She knew what that meant.

  “Can we have dinner first?” she asked, her voice tight, her face tense. She was sure this was to be our final date and wanted to enjoy one last meal with me. It made me wonder for a moment about her motivations for marriage: Was she looking for a good husband or a good meal?

  In the end, of course, her hardball strategy won her the husband she wanted (and I hope the one she expected) and me the wife I needed. And—another example of her discipline—two remarkably timed children: Zach between medical school and residency, and Katie between residency and employment. Now, as we approached another milestone in our lives—choosing the home where we would raise our family and live our lives for the foreseeable future, maybe forever—Anne was playing tough again. But this was no mere husband we were talking about—this was a house.

  I continued solo, seeing more raised ranches, houses built in other house’s backyards, houses being rented by college kids lounging in their underwear at four in the afternoon; but every house was wrong, wrong, wrong. I found myself after each disappointing trip driving back to the old wreck on the ridge, which was still awaiting a buyer to restore it to its former glory. I’d sit in the driveway, looking at the house, the three acres, the potential for building gardens and orchards, visualizing the old barn as a future woodshop, looking for a vibe, wondering if I could muster the energy to restore this fine, neglected house. Anne had already taken a job in a city clinic outside what we were already thinking of as “our town” and was feeling the strain of commuting three hours a day. Kindergarten was fast approaching for Zach. I knew we couldn’t do this much longer. And trip after trip, little by little, the house was pulling me in; it was starting to speak to me. So one day I called Anne at work and said in as casual a voice as I could muster, “What the hell, let’s buy the Big Brown House.” I think she cried.

  I called the real estate agent. Bad news. The house had been sold just the previous week. One week. I had missed our dump-cum-dream-home by one lousy week. We moped around for a couple of days until I got a call at work.

  “You still interested in the house?” our agent asked. My heart started pounding. “The buyers got cold feet and backed out. They’re first-time owners, she’s pregnant, and he has no handyman experience at all.” What were they thinking? Of course we were interested. But there was a catch: Because the bank had slashed the price to unload it, five buyers already had backup bids in. If we wanted to add ours, it had to be in by five o’clock. It was now four.

  “I’ll get right back to you,” I told her, and called Anne, who took the news with surprising sangfroid. She was not going to allow herself to be hurt again.

  “We’ll never beat out those other bidders,” she said with a sigh.

  I had a nutty idea. “Let’s bid a dollar more than the asking price.” This was in the midst of a real estate collapse in the Northeast, when buyers were expected to offer tens of thousands of dollars less than the asking price and usually got away with it. “No one would be crazy enough to bid the asking price for this dump,” I told her. No one except us, that is, for we had defied the oracle and allowed this dump to become the House We Had to Have.

  The bid strategy almost backfired because the bank figured our offer wasn’t serious. They of course didn’t know this wreck had become the House We Had to Have and actually tried to reject our bid, until a call from our lawyer took care of that. I’ll never know for sure how much less we could have gotten the place for, but I got an idea not six months after moving in. Zach was in the local emergency room having his shoulder treated after a sledding accident. The orthopedist on call, just making conversation, asked where we lived. Anne started to describe the place.

  “Not the Big Brown House!” he exclaimed. “So you’re the ones who outbid me.” Unsolicited, he told us his bid. Let’s just say it was comforting to be in the ER at that moment.

  Whether we overpaid or not, the important thing was, we owned the house, with all its possibilities for living and gardening. The twisted route by which we’d come to possess it left us with a funny feeling. It did seem just a little like fate, as if we were meant to own this house and this land.

  BEFORE WE HAD EVEN moved in, it seemed that half the town knew that “a doctor and her husband” had bought the old wreck on the ridge. That is how I would come to be known—“the doctor’s husband,” which sounded disturbingly like an Ibsen play. Furthermore, it seemed as though everyone we met had owned, lived in, partied at, worked on, bid on, or thought of buying the Big Brown House.

  Not long after moving, we went down to the firehouse to buy our Christmas tree. This is a wonderful way to buy a tree. You often run into neighbors, the firemen are very helpful and patient, you’re contributing to a good cause, and they deliver free of charge without wrapping the tree in that horrible plastic netting. I’ll bet they would even bring the tree inside and set it up if you asked them.

  After paying for the tree, I gave the fireman our name and street address and started to give directions for delivery. He held up a hand, stopping me in midsentence.

  “We know where you live,” he said, looking me
in the eye. “We’re the fire department.”

  Because nearly everyone in town knew the house, I began to become more closely associated with it than I would have liked. When I met people socially, the first thing they would invariably ask was, “How’s the house coming along?” and we’d have a conversation about the pine floor I was rescuing, or the carpenter bees drilling holes in the porch, or the termites eating away at the basement joists, or how I was getting up at five o’clock every morning to build kitchen cabinets before going to work.

  Even going to work didn’t provide an escape. My colleagues, too, wanted to talk about the house. The fact that I had taken five weeks of accumulated vacation time before moving in just to make the place livable had sparked a good deal of interest in itself. That “vacation” culminated with a good old-fashioned beam raising, when a half dozen of my male colleagues, whom I jokingly predicted were about to become “six of my ex–best friends,” met at the house on a Saturday morning to raise a heavy beam that was to replace a load-bearing wall. It was their first look at the notorious house. I will never forget the first words my technical support director, a man whom I had hired and who reported directly to me, blurted out upon stepping into the house.

  “Have you lost your @#&*! mind?”

  Most of the people we were meeting in town probably thought so, even if they were too polite to say, and I had to give a progress report to everyone I met. This drove me crazy after a while.

  “What on earth would people have to talk to me about if we didn’t have this house?” I once complained to Anne. “I am not the house.”

  “Well,” she said hesitantly. “In a sense …” She didn’t need to finish the sentence. “And besides, you’re not much of a conversationalist, you know. You don’t let people into your life. The house is all they know about you. You are defined by the house.” She let that sink in, then added, “You should really go out more.”