by Meghan Daum
“Oh my God,” my mother said. “It’s still there.”
“You did that?” said the herpetologist. “I always wondered.”
“No one painted over it,” my mother said. “That’s incredible.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to,” the herpetologist said. “It was just too weird.”
The rest of the book tour was dominated less by my efforts to sell my book than—for real this time—to buy a house. This was actually a healthy combination of activities in that I was too busy thinking about the house to notice just how few people were buying my book but also too distracted with the book to truly understand what I was getting into with the house. To this day, I believe that if I’d been around during the inspection period, there is a good chance I would have backed out. As it was, I was often thousands of miles away, ordering cheeseburgers from room service and errantly reading faxed inspection reports that I often couldn’t make sense of due to bad transmissions, sheer fatigue, or plain inertia. In all cases, I signed them anyway and faxed them back.
As a result of this tele-escrowing, most of the information I received about the house on Escalada Terrace—its precarious retaining walls, its unconventional wiring, the plumbing that dated back to the Coolidge administration, the total disrepair of the garage—was delivered to me on my cell phone by Michael, usually while I was in an airport, walking through a hotel lobby, or riding a shuttle van to or from one of these places. To the seller, I must have been the perfect buyer, a semiconscious first-timer who not only wanted the property but also was desperate just to get home, to any home. Within a few weeks, news such as “the garage is uninsurable” sounded like a minor inconvenience compared with the thought of another night at the Sheraton.
Of course, I had a home. I was not a vagrant by any means. The rented house in Silver Lake, with the paint job I’d commissioned not even a year earlier, would have been perfectly fine—and quite a bit larger—to come home to. But it’s the temptation of so many suburban-raised children to invent tales of adversity, to create hardscrabble mythologies out of life histories marked by little more than field hockey games and orthodontist appointments. I think of a man I’d once known in New York who lost his student housing and dramatically (in an effort to freeload off various comely women) proclaimed himself “homeless.” I think of my own low-rent posturing during those years in New York when I should have been at college: the late nights walking the crumbling streets of Alphabet City, the time I watched a knife fight outside the window of the studio in Greenwich Village, the time I got an HIV test at a Department of Health free clinic in order to prove some kind of point to myself (other than that I didn’t have HIV, which I already knew). I think of some of the perverse rural working-class fantasies I acted out in Nebraska—cooking from cans, fretting over the cost of a house call from a large-animal veterinarian, opening the back door and hollering “dinner’s ready” to a guy working under the hood of a pickup with very large tires—and I know that despite physically being in Nebraska in those moments, I was really back in Ridgewood or at Vassar trying to prove to myself I was anything but a person from Ridgewood or Vassar. It was as if all the moving around were less about finding a place to live than about covering the perceived blankness of wherever I was actually “from” with the more colorful wallpaper of wherever I wished I was from.
And so it went with the house on Escalada Terrace. Not only had it taken on the imaginative qualities of a potentially adoptable orphan from a developing country (in other words, not only did I need it; it needed me), but I actually found that I almost delighted in hearing about its flaws. Every ominous inspection report elicited half-guilty/half-exhilarating fantasies of rescue. Every bit of bad or weird or inconclusive news (“they’re not sure where the property lines are,” “the retaining wall is as secure as an anthill,” “it seems there was a small electrical fire in 2003”) only increased my longing to save it from its ugly-wallpapered, shag-carpeted, fire-hazardous self.
Now that I look back on it, I was also being kind of macho. In the same way that I believed having a house rather than a condo would announce to the world that I was not your average scented-candle-burning, oversized-furniture-owning, husband-seeking single woman (in other words, not Dani) but, rather, someone with a small TV and a big dog who was in absolutely no need of rescue, I believed buying a falling-apart house was sexier than buying a turnkey one. No ordinary house for me! An intrepid, sporting girl such as myself demanded (which is to say “could handle”) someplace rustic, maybe even someplace on the verge of decay. Such an obvious defiance of convention, I believed, would ensure that I was downright fabulous. The more my house resembled a cabin, a desert adobe, or an abandoned factory stuck in the middle of a landfill, the more desirable and therefore the less lonely I’d be. “Holy shit, look at her!” the world would say. “She’s no Ally McBeal in a twee Boston apartment with her roommate and hallucinations of maternal longing; she’s Jennifer Beals living alone with her pit bull in her loft in Flashdance. She’s not Mary Richards sleeping on a fold-out sofa in an attic apartment; she’s Major Houlihan with her own tent in the MASH unit and more balls than all the doctors combined. She may not have a farm, but she’s still got a little Willa Cather in her. Someone buy this woman a drink! Make it a double; she can take it! By the way, did we mention she’s hot?”
And even though the house, though not by any means in perfect condition, was entirely inhabitable, I told myself—and anyone else who would listen—that the place was a wreck. The small electrical fire, the uninsurable garage, the shaky retaining wall: I upgraded them to full-scale emergencies. I told the folks in Austin that the house I was buying was a “major fixer.” I told an entire bookstore audience in Milwaukee that “my next project is not literary but rather a study in retaining-wall repair.” I told the guy sitting next to me on the flight back to L.A. that coyotes were currently living in the backyard.
“You’re buying this house all by yourself?” most people asked me. The question delighted me; their shock delighted me; the phony cavalierism of my answer delighted me despite my knowing full well how phony it was.
“Of course,” I said. “It’s about time my dog and I settle down.”
So there I was in the escrow office, signing my name on about three hundred pieces of paper. About half the time the printed name next to the signature line was, simply, “Meghan Daum.” The other half of the time it was “Meghan Daum, an unmarried woman.” I can only assume this terminology arose out of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which made it illegal for home sellers and lenders to discriminate based on gender. Before that, any woman signing escrow papers was presumed to be doing so with her husband. Even then, several real estate brokers have told me, she often had to get a “pill letter” from her doctor verifying that she was on birth control and therefore wouldn’t get pregnant, quit her job, and lose the income on which the granting of the loan was based.
Recognizing my good fortune in not having to provide a letter saying I hadn’t had sex in several months and wasn’t planning to until the house was refurbished and decorated to my exact specifications, which might take years, I signed the documents. It took about forty-five minutes. I remember that it was very hot outside—it was July 8, a Thursday, 3:00 p.m.—and the air conditioner was on full blast in the office and the perspiration I’d brought in from the street was now beading on my arms and forehead. My hand was shaking, and I can still see the pictures on the escrow officer’s desk: wedding portraits and birthday party photos and a gauzy silhouette from a little girl’s first Communion. I remember signing the first document and turning to my left as though there were someone sitting next to me, which of course there wasn’t (the seller lived out of town and had signed his paperwork elsewhere; meanwhile, I’d somehow assumed throughout the whole process that Michael would be there for the closing, but of course there was no need for that). For a moment I wondered if I was dreaming the whole event. I’d just made the biggest commitment of my life in the pres
ence of no one but a woman named Irene Diaz. (Was that her name exactly? I can no longer remember, though I’m pretty sure I could recognize those desk photos even today.) I’d just signed away more money and, for all intents and purposes, taken the solemnest vow I’d ever uttered, with a complete stranger as my sole witness.
I needed a companion immediately. I needed the kind of companion to whom you can talk nonsensically, repeat yourself ad nauseam, list the reasons you might have just made a huge mistake, and receive back a corresponding list of reasons that you did the right thing. Alison would have qualified, but she lived on the west side and rarely made the trip east without at least a week’s notice. Carina was out of town. No one else sprang immediately to mind. Taking the new house keys in my sweating palm, I jumped in the car, swung by the Silver Lake house, and grabbed the portable stereo from the counter (I’d been assured the electricity in the new place was still on) and a bottle of wine from the fridge, a glass, and a corkscrew (always thinking ahead). I put Rex in the car and drove to the house on Escalada Terrace. If I couldn’t be in a dim lounge eating tapas and clinking glasses with a reassuring friend, the very least I could do was go to the house and just sit there, taking it in, receiving the vibrations of my momentous, possibly idiotic decision. If I couldn’t drink to it, at least I’d drink in it.
The Sold sign, hanging from a wooden post jammed into the ground like a stern teacher’s note (“see me,” “let’s discuss,” “needs improvement”), was the only hint of life on the property. Blank and forlorn from months of nonoccupancy, its window box bereft of flowers, its mail slot jammed with dozens of flyers, in English and in Spanish, advertising lawn care service or pizza delivery or salvation through the teachings of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the house was an anemic body crying out for nourishment, a withered plant for whom even a single drop of water might make all the difference. Once I was inside, the carpet hit me like a wave. Without taking a step farther into the house, I tore off a corner and began pulling it up. I did this as if my life depended upon finding an intact wood floor underneath. I didn’t care what kind of condition the wood was in, just that it was there and that you could walk on it without falling into the extremely scary crawl space beneath the house. I did this until I’d ripped such a large swath from the tacks—the wood was decent, if splintered and scarred—that the carpet was bunched up in the center of the room like jeans thrown on the floor. Deeming it too heavy to move, I opened the wine—it was now 7:00 p.m., an acceptable cocktail hour—poured it into the glass, plugged the stereo in, and called Rex to come sit on the pile of carpet with me. Having forgotten to bring a CD, I realized that the stereo still had a Cat Stevens’s Greatest Hits cassette in the tape deck, which had probably been in there since Vassar days. The song that came on, naturally, was “Wild World,” official anthem of all striking-out-on-their-own girls everywhere. By the time it got to “Hard Headed Woman,” I was already on my third glass of wine and weepily singing along to the lyrics—“and if I find my hard headed woman, I know the rest of my life will be blessed, yes yes yes”—while burying my face in Rex’s fur.
In other words, I had arrived! Whereas other single thirty-four-year-old females were getting drunk and crying in rental apartments with the requisite wicker furniture, Moroccan-style throw pillows, and pear-scented candles from Pier 1 Imports, I had the dignity, privilege, and, let’s face it, cojones to do so in my own house. Moreover, once moved in, I would have not wicker furniture but actual antiques. I would have not scented candles but regular candles that went in pewter holders, and even though I’d been caught red-handed with a Cat Stevens tape, I felt my preference for “Hard Headed Woman” and not the simpering, treacly “Moonshadow” exempted me from cliché.
The evening did not end on that pile of carpet. In fact, it was barely evening. The sun was now setting over the hills in the west; sprinklers were sputtering to life as the air cooled; the macabre melody of an ice cream truck was fading into the distance. I was two sheets to the wind, though not yet three. I decided to go for a walk. The best feature of this house was its location, and as I sat in the dark living room that now smelled like carpet glue, I felt I needed to remind myself of that. Not only was the neighborhood lush and bohemian and as imbued with quiet families as it was animated by occasional gun violence, but the street itself was an oasis. Across the road and maybe thirty steps up from the house was that wide, ten-acre slope, an expanse of grasslands upon which, wondrously, no houses had been built. A path had been cleared through the field, and as I approached, my fourth glass of wine in one hand, the dog leash in the other (Rex, for his part, had already ambled off into the distance), I began to experience that particular form of exuberant abandon that comes from walking around drunk in the darkness.
It was a feeling I remembered from New York, when, instead of hailing a cab or taking the subway, I’d often walk thirty or forty blocks home at 1:00 a.m. In the aftertaste of the evening, in the sallow nondarkness of the city night, I’d walk until my feet bloomed with blisters. Passing the panhandlers and the bar crawlers, the bundled-up bus waiters and the uniformed doormen, the lit-up all-night grocery marts and the locked and gated everything else, I could feel the city grazing my cheeks as though a thousand acquaintances were air kissing me at a party. My mood on these walks was always tainted with either vague disappointment or cautious, potentially foolish hope. Maybe I’d have met someone who seemed in possession of some inkling of romantic or sexual possibility, more likely not. Maybe I’d have plunged into deep, revelatory conversation with someone fascinating, more likely not. Still, in the brisk, odorous clutches of the avenues and streets such things mattered less than the physical fact of the city and my ongoing amazement that I’d actually managed to carve out a tiny nook for myself in Manhattan—however dank and costly and echoing with the laughter of richer, happier neighbors. Despite Ridgewood being only twenty miles from Manhattan, the distance between the two places—I’d said it so many times, yet somehow it was never enough—had seemed like an ocean.
And had I now crossed yet another ocean? Was the journey to California equal to or greater than the journey out of Ridgewood, away from Vassar, out of my parents’ unending flight from their own pasts? No, not really. Not at all. Sipping my wine, whistling for Rex, I stepped onto the path, where static of all varieties—the scratchy warbles of the first crickets, the rustle of the dog in the grass, the din of distant car alarms and police helicopters and those mysterious pops that are either firecrackers or gunshots—put a hot surge in the fading summer day. Climbing the hill, I experienced a brief moment of Nebraska. For a few seconds, there was nothing before me but grass and sky. I had to catch my breath. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to test for awakeness. One step more, though, and the prairie effect was gone. Rising into view from the crest of the hill were the San Gabriel Mountains to the north, the Hollywood Hills to the west, and the low-slung skyline of Mid-Wilshire to the south-southwest. I sat down on a rock. I called Rex to me and held him close as though he were a teenage boy who’d let me wear his letterman jacket. In the fading light I spotted the Hollywood sign, surreal and cheesy and sublime. Closer in, I saw the undulating, roller-coaster streets of the neighborhood, the haphazard terraces and retaining walls of the properties, my own little house—square and flat roofed and, from certain angles, seemingly befitting of an elf—nestled in its place on my little road.
I saw all this, and it was at once a place I’d never been and a place I’d been all my life. I remember once at college having a dream wherein I was sitting on a log or a rock or some kind of beach staring into blankness, a viewless view. Having suddenly found myself holding a postcard depicting some breathtaking yet nonspecific Arcadian scene, I held it out in front of me, only to have it fuse with my real-life surroundings. It was as if art had been liberated into three-dimensional life, as if some divine force had commanded the worldly and the unworldly to become one. In an instant, by virtue of a single image I’d held in my fingers, I’d made real lif
e join hands with idealized life.
“So what it means,” I’d told a friend the next day, “is that my reality answers to my fantasies. I mean, I totally got the feeling from this dream that my life is going to turn out exactly the way I want it. It’s like it was saying to me, ‘If you picture it, you can get it.’ It was like this incredible peace came over me. I could see the road ahead, and it was everything I want.”
To which my friend, who was one of those guys who always accuses others of needing to plan everything out and wanting to settle down rather than have adventures said: “If that’s what you want, fine. I guess I’d just rather see where life takes me.”
This guy, having once asked me what I wanted from life (no doubt while sitting on his Indian rug listening to Yaz), declared my answer of “contentment” to be “a pity” and “a waste” and “not at all what I want,” which, apparently, was a life of “passion, excitement, and rich, fully realized moments that would add up to authentic happiness.”
(One of the many tragedies of college life is that it’s almost developmentally impossible to have the wisdom to understand that contentment, which implies some sort of sustenance over time, can be an infinitely taller order than happiness, which is often inherently fleeting. It’s also unfortunate that your average college student lacks the presence of mind to tell someone to fuck off when he spouts such bong-hit-fueled twaddle about the meaning of “passion.”)
I was drunk on the hill. I was not thinking about the conversation about contentment or even the postcard dream. I wasn’t thinking about much, since I’d now consumed almost an entire bottle of wine and was instead watching Rex sliver through the grass like a jungle animal, a vision that made me slaphappy until, minutes later, I was suddenly melancholy to the point of tears. It was my first day—my first hours, in fact—as a homeowner, as an evolved human, as a woman who lived not in a sublet or in a condo with wicker and candles but in a real house. And here I was, with a bank loan of $333,701 and an equity line of credit for $71,000 sitting inebriated in an overgrown field trying to hold my imaginary postcard up to the vista before me and see if they fused. Was this the right stop on the road that would give me everything? Was there contentment to be found in these hills, on this street, in that house? Ah yes, I said nearly out loud. This is it! I have it all, I have it all, I have it all!
