Looking back, I feel apologetic toward Ed and Sandy, who lived next door. We routinely ate dinner out on the enclosed front porch at midnight, even later if Michael had had a gig; we rarely got to bed before four a.m. We must have been noisy, laughing and chattering over a bottle of wine, cranking up the stereo when Jennifer Warnes’ marvelous cover of Leonard Cohen got to “Famous Blue Raincoat,” our favorite track.
That said, we didn’t make nearly as big a racket as the bird. What we called “the Crazy Bird.” Later a neighbor explained that the bird perched in the big pin oak across the street every night was a mockingbird, known for its ability to imitate the calls of other species, but I almost didn’t want to know this. I liked our bird just being a little nuts. We developed a whole bio for this bird: how it was too socially inept to grasp that birds weren’t supposed to sing their hearts out at three in the morning, and that’s why it didn’t have any friends. Since it couldn’t settle on one song but broadcast the avian equivalent of the iTunes Party Shuffle, it was obviously schizophrenic. Having compared the Crazy Bird’s sophisticated melodic lines to the riffs of Yusef Lateef, Michael vowed to record its after-hours concerts; he could see doing a whole CD inspired by those long minor-key medleys. Later I’d be sorry that he never got around to it.
One night, an untended car alarm was getting so irritating that I asked Michael whether we should report it to the police, until he walked outside and realized that the sound was coming from the upper branches of the opposite tree. It was the Crazy Bird, doing the whole sequence: aaaaah-WOOO, aaaaah-WOOO, aaaaah-WOOO! YOW-ah-YOW-ah-YOW-ah! BEEEEEE-baaaah-BEEEEEE-baaaaah-BEEEEE-baaaaah … More dysfunction: the mockingbird had mastered the mating call of a Toyota Corolla.
Yet the very finest entertainment during those raucous wee-smalls was the raccoons. Trevanion Close was blocked at the dead end with a brick retaining wall that ran right alongside our house. Out the porch windows we’d follow these stout, hunched creatures big as bulldogs as they lumbered across the top of that wall, obsidian eyes catching the light of the streetlamp, long, conical snouts snuffling the brick. Wearing concentric circles of black and white fur like oversize spectacles, they looked intelligent. (In due course, no amateur naturalist from across the street would need to assure us that raccoons are very smart, since we’d get altogether too up to speed on this North American “procyonid” through the internet.) Michael liked to peer out the front door and meet the animals’ gaze square on. He believed that he could communicate with animals, really connect on their wavelength, and I indulged this little vanity since it was harmless. Anyway, everything about Michael beguiled me then, and I found the conceit endearing. Me, I got pretty good at imitating the creatures’ throaty trill—trrrrrr, trrrrr—halfway between a growl and a purr.
Oh, I knew raccoons could be aggressive, and we were careful not to scare or tease them. I also knew they were notorious for getting into garbage cans and strewing trash all over the street. But maybe because they were so well fed by our next-door neighbor’s exposed backyard compost pile, none of our nocturnal visitors ever pried the tops off our cans to scrounge, despite the fact that their paws have five long, prehensile fingers. Given what I read later, those animals could have assembled flat-pack furniture.
At some point during our first summer, one of the raccoons got really fat, and we made jokes about how it should become an inspirational “weight diversity” speaker until one night it—she, apparently—waddled down the wall having slimmed down quite a bit, five babies in tow. Real heartbreakers, too. The whole family took to foraging in our grapevine. Whenever I heard that telltale rustle on the trellis, I’d shush Michael and we’d both creep to the back window screen, not wanting to startle them away. Again, we were careful—a mother was bound to be defensive of her litter—so when Michael met the eyes of the mother through the screen he made sure to keep his gaze reassuring. Other nights the family would cavort at the end of the street, the kits scrabbling one at a time up the metal lamppost—we were astonished they could get any traction—then leaping to the wall: raccoon Olympic trials.
They also had a knack for disappearing. More than once we watched the mother lead all five kits across the top of that wall, until they’d pattered out of view alongside the house. So we’d skitter to the back window, expecting them to come out the other side and maybe jump down to forage on the trellis. But no raccoons. They simply vanished. It was a twenty-foot sheer drop to the parking lot on the other side of the wall, so it beat me where they went.
I’m sure there’s an element here of you-had-to-be-there. A raccoon isn’t an exotic creature for most Americans, but they were our raccoons, and they were exotic to us. Along with the Crazy Bird, a sudden rustle and trill in the grapevine, or another spotting of a lone male prowling down the retaining wall, contributed to a sensation that where we lived was special, that we were special. We inhabited a secret world at the end of a private little street where the night was alive. The raccoons were wildlife. They encouraged us to believe that we were leading wild lives, too.
It would’ve been early in our second summer on Trevanion Close that we got married—larkishly, in a quick civil ceremony in the Municipal Building in Lower Manhattan, acting with the impulsiveness with which most couples would go for ice cream. Meanwhile, we’d still bought hardly any furniture. We were surely the only couple on the block that kept a whole room without a stick in it: the dining room, a.k.a. “the ballroom,” where Michael and I would dance to Counting Crows with a candle in the middle of the floor. I liked the place underfurnished—open, uncluttered, and preserving that just-moved-in feel that also reinforced the impression that any time we wanted we could just move out. We lived there lightly.
True, a number of things about the house were annoying, if you were going to be that way—to take the place seriously, that is, as the Little Dump naturally discouraged one from doing. Unanchored, the toilet rattled every time you sat down, and I was haunted by a vision of the bowl cracking off and sending a geyser of raw sewage pluming to the ceiling like an oil strike. The closets had those hideous louvered doors from the 1970s that were always slipping off their tracks. The kitchen linoleum was prehistoric and disastrously white, its protective surface degraded. By the time either of us got around to mopping, the floor would be practically black. But we grew accustomed to walking around the bucket on the porch, where the drips from the ceiling after a rainstorm syncopated Michael’s latest recording, and none of these shortcomings bugged us much. I tried to keep the crumbs swept so we wouldn’t attract roaches—some forms of wildlife were less than welcome—but otherwise, hell, Michael was a musician, and you know how blasé those guys are about domestic stuff. Me, I was raised in a slick, soulless suburban household in Scarsdale full of bagel slicers and electric bread makers that no one ever used; the toilets were unnervingly silent, and everything worked too well. So the kooky, jury-rigged nature of Trevanion Close was liberating.
Yet apparently this notion that we could just move out anytime was merely an idea of ourselves that we were attached to. See, one afternoon later that summer an impatient rap rattled our screen door. I recognized the bossy, busty woman who was subletting the house across from ours while the Carters were on an extended vacation in Crete. Though no older than I was, she had a matronly air. She’d attracted my attention before because she was forever barking admonitory or morally improving directions to her four-year-old daughter at a volume that carried to every house on the street—the showy parenthood less for the kid, I thought, than for the benefit of other adults. She seemed one of those modern mothers who are sanctimonious about having made the gallant sacrifice of reproduction, and always wanted credit for it.
“Ya think the owner of this house might want to sell?” she began in a piercing skirl, without introducing herself. “’Cause this dead end’s real good for kids, you know? Like, with no traffic and everything?”
I kept the screen door closed between us. “I don’t know,” I said warily.
I made noncommittal noises and got rid of the bitch, but privately I began to panic. Ours was a rare New York enclave where people talked to one another. A neighbor must have shared that Bob was always hard up, and might part with the house for a price. Which was surely the case. That’s when I realized that I loved this house, loved our late nights with the rustling grapevine and the raccoon Olympics and the Crazy Bird, and I wasn’t about to let some blow in, ostentatiously Mommyish Mom buy these creaky parquet floors out from under me.
I’ll cut to the chase. We bought the Little Dump. Although not, obviously, without making some changes. I confess that we got help from both our parents on the down payment. Still, no bank was going to give a mortgage to a self-employed mural painter and a blues guitarist who on a good night raked in forty bucks and a few free drinks. I hustled because I was good and motivated, and I don’t think in the end it’s turned out to be a bad career move to work at a commercial design firm—although while concocting a corporate logo or the cover of a computer probe catalog I sometimes miss painting Rousseau-like shelions beside a six-year-old’s bunk bed. Faux beach-pebble motifs didn’t sit me in front of a screen all day, either, and I regret no longer coming home with streaks of cadmium yellow in my hair. Nevertheless, I get a kick when I spot a habanero sauce bottle whose label I designed, and a real job sure pays better. I grant that Michael’s managing Slide, a little jazz club up in Fort Greene, didn’t work out quite as well. While it had seemed a good fit on the face of it, when you’re managing you’re not playing, and the job was more about kegs than frets. But I’m convinced that our marriage would have weathered the transition to proper employment well enough if it weren’t for the house.
The odd alarm bell should have rung before we closed the deal. Michael’s demeanor had always been casual, stylishly so. He walked with a slow, syrupy saunter. He’d often insert a languorous pause between a question and his answer, just the length of a yawn, as if debating whether to bother to respond at all. Before we put in our fateful call to Bob, Michael had been impossible to rattle, convinced that over time most problems solved themselves. When I’d despaired during our rental search that we’d never find an affordable place that wasn’t disgusting, he’d murmured that something was sure to come along that was perfect, and he’d been right. Yet while we were still haggling with our landlord over his outrageous asking price, Michael ruined an entire evening anguishing about how we’d never get homeowner’s insurance for a house so clearly dilapidated, especially with ancient wiring that couldn’t be up to code. At a midpoint in this mind-numbing hair-tear, I did a double take. Back when we first met at CBGB, I couldn’t have imagined the words homeowner’s insurance coming out of his mouth.
He’d never seemed especially concerned with housekeeping, either, strewing his dirty jeans around the bedroom. But even before we’d signed the contract, he suddenly became neurotically neat—jerking the bedspread for minutes until the piping aligned with the edge of the mattress and chiding me to hang my kimono on its nail.
Then when at the bank’s insistence we had an engineer around to certify that the house wasn’t about to collapse, we led the prissy, officious little man out the musty basement to the backyard. The engineer surveyed our grapevine, by then crawling deliciously to the second story and curling around our phone lines, and tsked. “Not desirable,” he announced, making a rigid tick on his pad.
“The grapevine?” I said. “Why not?”
“Not desirable,” he repeated like a robot. But here’s the thing: I turned to roll my eyes at Michael, and instead of grinning along with me at this loser who was dissing our fantastic grapevine, my new husband was nodding along sternly, his forehead creased. From then on, too, I never stopped hearing about how the grapes attracted squirrels, and squirrels ruined our window screens. About how, when the fruit rotted, it drew insects. When I defended the vine as providing the kitchen and dining room—we’d already stopped calling it a ballroom—the luxuriant botanical tint of a greenhouse, he repeated with no detectable irony and in the same robotic drone, “It’s not desirable.”
I guess for some people who’ve always been free and easy, taking on responsibility makes them more solid and more grounded; that’s what people say about becoming a parent. But there may be such a thing as becoming too responsible.
For my part, after the closing I was mostly excited about fixing a few of those annoyances I mentioned, neglecting to note the fact that before we bought the Little Dump I hadn’t been that bothered by the kitchen floor. Which we replaced, and the bright red Forbo Marmoleum would have been fab, except that the moment it was installed Michael started Swiffering it, like, every day, and he’d lean down to scrape a little piece of squashed onion with his fingernail while I was trying to cook. I’d have been happy enough about replacing the sink unit in the bathroom, too, save that its apparently being called a vanity made buying one humiliating. Taking the term to heart, Michael sure enough swabbed the actually-not-plastic marble with Bon Ami every time he finished brushing his teeth, picking at any hardened drip of Colgate just as he did at the orts of onion on the Forbo downstairs. Meantime, I swear his walk was getting stiffer and faster, the strides shorter and a little edgy.
I was game for finally hanging a few prints, like posters from Michael’s old gigs. Yet even after we fixed the leaky porch roof, Michael remained solely concerned with “structural issues.” I’d sometimes come home and find him in the middle of the living room, worrying up at a pinprick brown mottle on the ceiling, and he gave the impression that he’d been craning his neck like that for quite some time. Saturdays he’d spend a good half hour stalking both floors, scowling into closets, searching out cracks. He wanted to get the points done on the front brick, a fissure filled in the stoop stairs, the fractured slab of concrete abutting our overgrown rat’s nest of a backyard broken up and replaced. I had to observe that none of these dreary gray “improvements” would make living in the house the slightest bit more enjoyable. Michael explained with paternalistic patience that it was all very well to “prettify the place,” but a house had to be maintained. I couldn’t believe he used that word, prettify. He left me feeling girly and frivolous.
Well, all those therapists on the radio emphasize the importance of marital compromise. So when during our first summer as homeowners Michael grew concerned that the ten-inch gap between the Little Dump and the retaining wall collected rain (the enemy in my husband’s life used to be trite riffs or computerized drum tracks; now it was moisture), I didn’t say “Who gives a shit?” Instead, being a good wife—a word I still wasn’t all that comfortable with—I agreed that, especially since the cavity was bricked up on both ends, it probably did collect a lot of rain. That side of our beloved front porch was clapboard, and for once Michael was right. The wood could rot and draw termites. So I acceded to bringing in a contractor to somehow seal off the gap. Nevertheless, this meant we’d probably squander hundreds if not thousands of dollars on what was surely the dullest square footage of the entire property.
Or so I thought.
“What you think is that?” We’d invited a contractor for a price quote, and all three of us had clambered out the dining room window onto the trellis. As the contractor pointed his flashlight down into the dark recess between the brick wall and our house, Michael and I leaned forward to follow the beam. Something moved in the shadows, and I jumped. “Is cat?” He was Bangladeshi or something.
“I don’t know, maybe.” Gingerly, I peered back in.
“Look, is more than one!”
Just then the flashlight caught the whip of a furred tail, ringed in black and white.
When I registered that
our delightful family of raccoons, the kits nearly grown old enough to have babies of their own, was actually nesting in that deep, narrow gap between our house and the retaining wall, even I experienced something of a change of heart. So they weren’t nocturnal visitors. They were tenants.
I tend to blame Michael, but to be fair this territory thing is pretty primitive, and there’s a huge emotional difference between hosting guests and invaders. These animals weren’t quite living in the house itself, but close to it, and sizable shitting, peeing, rutting mammals bearing whole litters on the other side of our living room wall made me, too, a little queasy. Be that as it may, Michael did not experience merely “something” of a change of heart.
“They’re vermin,” he declared over his computer that very night, loading Web page after Web page. “That’s how they’re classified in New York, but the city refuses to take any responsibility for them. They bite. They get rabies. Their feces can carry roundworm.”
“Oh, big deal,” I said distractedly, trying to fit a bowl of pasta on the table where he was working.
“It is a big deal,” he said in the officious daddy voice that apparently accompanies homeownership. “This last year, two kids got infected with roundworm, and in Brooklyn, too. From raccoons! Some little baby’s brain damaged, and a teenager went partially blind!”
“So they’re not desirable,” I said, deadpan.
“Better believe it they’re not desirable,” he said, failing to pick up on my allusion. “And guess, just guess, what’s their favorite food?”
I took a stab. “Human eyeballs.”
“Grapes.”
My stomach sank. That was it for the vine.
That very weekend Michael went at the main trunk of the grapevine—six inches thick, big as a tree. With only a handsaw, the job took half an hour, and he got blisters. Once the cut was all the way through, the vine’s many tributaries didn’t even tremble, looking vibrant and perky and oblivious, still dangling picked-over clusters of tough-skinned green grapes as if nothing had changed. It was like watching a chicken run around a farmyard with its head chopped off. Soon the cut began to bleed sap, as the stump would continue to do for many weeks thereafter, like an undressed amputation.
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