“If you’re getting extradited, I’ll visit,” I offered. “So sure, move to Chicago.”
“I got into grad school,” he said plainly.
I paused for a minute and tried to catch the little nugget he had just thrown at me. Did he just say he got into grad school? He got into grad school. Now, it wasn’t like we had never known any grad students, or that I didn’t think my husband had it in him, but he had applied to some good schools. Really good schools. Schools that were a little hard to get into.
“You got into grad school?” I asked, just to make sure that he hadn’t said “bad school” or “sad school.”
He nodded.
My head started spinning, and then it started spinning faster, and faster and faster. “You got into grad school?” I asked again, only this time a little more loudly, and a little more excited. “You got into grad school?”
“YES!” he said with a big smile.
His smile, however, was nowhere near as big as mine.
“Do you know what this means?” I asked, a second away from hopping up and down. “Do you?”
“I don’t know, what?” my husband said, his eyes lighting up.
“I dated a retarded person, you know!” I laughed as exhilaration washed over me in big waves and my hands flailed. “Actually, I’m pretty sure I dated two, but I didn’t mention one because he said he didn’t have a driver’s license and was only sort of illiterate, so I just count the one. And now you’ve gotten into grad school! Which is incredible! This is so fantastic! This is awesome! I’m so happy!”
The joy on my husband’s face was diluted only slightly by confusion. “So…this means we’re…moving to Chicago?”
“It means that by getting into grad school you canceled them out!” I said, now fully jumping up and down. “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it! My record has been cleared! It’s been restored! Atonement! I have achieved atonement! I never thought I’d live to see the day!”
“I will still never understand how you didn’t know he—now they—weren’t special-needs people,” my husband said, shaking his head.
“His mouth was gripped around that bong 95 percent of the time,” I answered. “How could anyone even tell the difference? Goofy grin, never a full sentence, always laughing. And they all watch cartoons. Trickier than you think, my friend.”
“All right, all right,” my husband said impatiently. “Back to grad school. And Chicago.”
“Unless there’s another Chicago fire, I doubt we could ever afford a house there,” I said reluctantly, but I promised to look into the real estate market of the Windy City to see if there was anything we could swing.
And there was: I found a basement apartment in a section of the city that had the highest gun rate per capita and crime rates to match.
“I’m all for you being smart,” I informed Mr. I Got In. “But we already live in Crack Village. I don’t know how excited I am about downgrading from the ’hood to a ghetto, to be perfectly honest. I like my tweakers, rapists, and arsonists from the desert, a little dehydrated, weak, and experiencing mirages. They’re easier to manage and distract with a bottle of Gatorade or the wave of a garden hose.”
“I just really wanted to go to grad school,” he replied with eyes so sad they belonged on a seventh-grade girl who didn’t make first-round cuts for the pom squad.
“I don’t want to die because you’re not retarded,” I explained softly.
Then a big envelope from Indiana came.
“We could buy the governor’s house, and the governor’s mother’s house,” I said. “But as soon as I uttered the words ‘separation of church and state,’ we’d be chased all the way to Chicago by people carrying torches and riding John Deere equipment.”
Then another big envelope came, this one from Arizona State, from which my husband had just graduated.
“All right,” he conceded. “I can go back to ASU, I got in there. At least I know where all of the best public bathrooms are on campus. At a new university, I’d have to scout them out all over again, and that could take years. I have a month to make up my mind, and if no one else accepts me, then I guess we have a plan.”
I nodded. It sounded good to me. And he waited and waited. Checked the mail every day, called me at home if he was gone for the afternoon to see if the mail had brought another big envelope, and always, without fail, the answer was “no.” No one else had accepted him, that was clear, so the day before ASU’s deadline, he made an appointment to see an advisor to say that he’d accept their invitation for grad school.
And that’s exactly where he was, walking up the steps of the English department building, when Hugo, my mailman, came and delivered another big envelope.
From Oregon.
“Don’t go in, don’t go into his office,” I said in a fit of panic when my husband answered his cell phone. “Oregon is here. Oregon sent you something big.”
And with the sound of tearing paper, we were pretty sure we were moving to Eugene, Oregon.
I booked two plane tickets to the small college town, and we made the trip up, not exactly knowing what we would find. And really, I didn’t even know what to look for. I hadn’t moved since 1972, when my parents decided that Brooklyn was a crappy place to raise three little girls and hauled us to the desert of the then quiet and unassuming town of Phoenix. I didn’t even go away to college. I didn’t know what to look for when scouting a potential homeland. So after three days of driving around in our rental car through the streets of Eugene, we found ourselves back at the tiny airport that had one security metal detector and a plug-in digital alarm clock that sat on the floor. The guy who checked me in at the ticket counter ran past me on the escalator and was the same one to take the ticket back before I got on the plane.
“It’s a small place,” my husband said to me as we waited for takeoff, which involved, I was sure, the ticket giver/taker running at full speed toward the small jet and then push-starting it until the engine turned over.
“It’s really green here,” I replied.
“There isn’t a gray cloud of pollution sitting on the city like a hat,” he added. “I can’t believe how many stars we saw last night.”
“When we passed that community garden, I swear I could smell the onions,” I offered.
“I’m pretty sure that was the BO wafting from the stinky hippie who was checking his pot plants,” he informed me. “You should have lived here in your twenties. You could have dated a different retarded boy every night.”
“Trees line every street,” I realized aloud. “It’s like a movie set. I think I might like it here.”
“Are you sure you can do this?” my husband asked. “It’s a big thing.”
“My body hasn’t emitted a single drop of unsolicited perspiration in three days, and in the same amount of time, we drove around and never got flipped off once,” I concluded. “There’s no decision to be made.”
Over the next couple of months, I hired electricians, carpenters, roofers, painters, and plumbers to finish up every project I had started during the eight years we had lived in the house so it would be perfect when we put it on the market. I figured out which days the nearby Starbucks and Einstein Bagels got their deliveries and fished their perfect-sized boxes out of the dumpster in the blistering heat of summer. Every week, I packed ten of those boxes and sent them with my husband to the storage unit we had rented. We had it down to a science.
We were really moving.
I couldn’t wait to get out of the heat. That last summer was the worst one I could remember. Things like taking a simple trip up to Safeway required monumental proportions of stamina, a will to live, and at least one bottle of water, lest you got stuck at a red light during the four-block ride. You’ve never wanted to get out and literally rip the skin off the head of someone so bad as you did the asshole in front of you who stopped on the yellow. People say it’s a dry heat, like that erases the fact that it’s entirely within the realm of possibilities of de
sert life that a body can become mummified without even dying first and if you go on a lunchtime hike in the middle of the city and only bring one bottle of water, you’ll be coming back down that mountain in a metal basket at the end of a rope attached to a medivac helicopter. I myself was once teetering on the precipice of spending eternity as a grimacing, angry piece of limbed leather before I spotted a Sonic and the treasure of cherry limeade just in the nick of time. I now have a yellow, desiccated pinkie with an excessively long fingernail as a result of my jeopardy, but I live to tell the tale. You don’t understand 114 degrees, day in and day out, until you live in it and feel the life being roasted out of you, droplet by droplet. To me, walking outside in July, even at 7 A.M., is like getting slapped in the face with the hot hand of my mother the first time she caught me smoking one of her cigarettes.
Once all of the projects were completed in the house and I had filled up the storage unit with things my husband said I didn’t need but I decided to keep out of spite, I set out to conquer the biggest project of all: Creating the Ultimate Fantasy. Now, for some people, the Ultimate Fantasy might consist of water-balloon boobs on a faux blonde who has a mouth that opens but never says anything, or a diamond ring so big it can fry ants with a glint of its reflection, but for me, the Ultimate Fantasy meant something altogether different. It came to life in a thirty-six-dollar bottle of olive oil packaged in a stoneware crock with an olive tree, a scroll, and an address in France printed in dark green and was sealed with a bubble of red wax I spotted on a shelf in Williams-Sonoma.
And in an eighteen-dollar aluminum-and-pine box of gourmet salt tied with rustic twine; in a large, squat glass jar of strawberry-rhubarb preserves; and in a French blue-and-yellow canister of crêpe mix that bore a delightful flat pancake wearing a beret and a devilish little red neckerchief on the label.
I went home with a Williams-Sonoma bag filled with Ultimate Fantasy components and systematically threw away every box of anything that could have been bought at Safeway and was visible, including Aunt Jemima pancake mix, Bertolli olive oil, Welch’s grape jelly, and Morton’s iodized salt.
Peasant food.
The people who live here, I told myself, do not ingest grape jelly on toast. They politely spread strawberry-rhubarb preserves on their croissants in the morning as they read The New York Times and admire the sunflowers fresh from the farmer’s market that sit in an antique pitcher in the middle of a table dressed with a crisp, white linen tablecloth. They do not read mass-market paperbacks with dog-eared puffy covers and Junior Mints melted over the spine; rather they enjoy hardback works of literature, both classic and modern. Needless to say, my husband was delighted to house his collection of Emily Dickinson, Mina Loy, Herman Melville, and Edna St. Vincent Millay in the bookcases that flanked the fireplace as if they were all illegitimate children he was finally encouraged to acknowledge.
And so it was.
It did not matter that the person who really lived there often ate frosting from the can with her finger as an after-dinner treat, owned Death to Smoochy on DVD, or had once fought a fire in her backyard, set by (a) a vagrant, (b) a Crip or Blood, (c) a prostitute, or (d) an itchy-fingered tweaker, in her underwear with a garden hose at three o’clock in the morning. Or that she wore that pair of underwear for so long it was returned to its primal state as a loincloth, with an inch of fabric attached to the waistband in the front and another piece in the back, and she found it one day, garishly displayed on her dresser with a note that said, “I have served you well. Please release me,” scrawled in her husband’s hand. It didn’t matter that while the person who lived there was packing, she moved an antique bench in her husband’s office and found an old issue of Premiere magazine stuffed behind it with Kate Winslet on it, her bosoms appearing to be heaving so heavily they were on the brink of explosion. It did not matter, because when prospective buyers came to this house, that person was not going to be there. The lady who made crêpes on Sunday morning and who cooked with thirty-six-dollar olive oil would be.
The Fantasy Lady.
I called her Veronica.
Veronica was tall and slender, had beautiful, perfectly toned silver hair that she parted in the middle and tucked behind one ear. She wore sweater sets with the cardigan draped across her shoulders, and it never fell off. She had nicely defined upper arms and tapped a tiny silver spoon against the rim of her teacup when she was done stirring. She favored pale lipstick, and there was never dirt or traces of staph infections under her nails.
In short, basically, Veronica was not me. She didn’t drink her tea out of a Bigfoot mug, eat dinner every night on the couch, or laugh when food fell out of her mouth. No one wanted to buy a house from a dirty pudgy girl.
But everyone wanted Veronica’s house.
And even though Veronica’s house was perfect in every way, from the matching white dishes that shone through the glass-fronted cabinet doors I had just finished putting up to the brand-new Roman shades I had installed in all bedrooms to the fresh sunflowers in an antique pitcher sitting on the dining room table, when the real estate agent saw it and agreed to put the house on the market the following Monday, I was still not prepared for what I saw on the front lawn the day the sign went up.
Oh my God, I thought. My house. My house.
In an instant, everything went blurry, my face got hot, and my throat closed up.
What was I doing? Was I out of my mind? “This is crazy,” I said out loud. This is completely insane. I’m not moving. This is my house. My HUD house, my 1927 blond-brick bungalow that took almost a decade and every penny I had to make into Veronica’s house. And in a move fed by emotion, I ran to the nearest doorway and put my arms on either side of the wall and my head against the inside of the doorjamb.
“What are you doing?” my husband said when he came home.
“Shut up!”
“Are you…” He lowered his tone. “Honey, are you hugging the house?”
“You’re an asshole,” I said, choking. “So what if I’m hugging the house!”
“I—” he started.
“It’s my house! I can hug it if I want to!” I bellowed.
“You’re crying,” he replied gently. “What happened?”
“When I found this house it was brown on a dirt lot,” I spewed. “And bums had been living in it and the kitchen counter had that awful brown tile and the floor had that asbestos flooring that I’m sure we both got cancer from when we took it up and there was no air-conditioning and it was so hot. It was so hot. And then I took eight layers of paint off the fireplace mantel and realized that was the only thing holding it together and I rebuilt it. And one night when you were late coming home I took a screwdriver and a hammer and chiseled away that brown tile in the kitchen and found soapstone. And under the asbestos was that tar-covered wood floor that you sanded for a month until it turned a honey color and it was just beautiful. And I found the swinging kitchen door in the barn and took eight layers of paint off that, too, but it took me six years to find the right piece of hardware for us to put it up with; I found it in that salvage place in Seattle. And I wrote three hundred product reviews about spatulas for Amazon to buy our air conditioner, and I was so sick of salad spinners and vegetable peelers and slotted spoons that I wanted to die, but we finally got air-conditioning and it was cool in the house for the first time ever, remember?”
As the tears rolled down my face, my husband looked at me, took my hand off the wall, and gave me a hug.
“I do remember,” he said. “I remember when we thought it would be a good idea to sandblast the fireplace and within two seconds, the living room looked like a playground and the corner brick looked like it had a bullet hole in it.”
I smiled. I nodded. “You’re supposed to move the sandblaster around and not hold it in one place like you’re peeing,” I reminded him.
“I remember when you thought it would be a good idea to hire a homeless man to remove the dead trees in the front yard,” he continued. “A
nd I came home to a delusional, scabby schizophrenic running across my yard and then kung fu kicking the tree, like he was some sort of zombie Bruce Lee.”
“I got in trouble for that.”
“Yes, you did,” he agreed. “And I remember a girl who wanted to save her house so bad she went out and fought a fire in her underwear, the ones that looked like a hula skirt. You could have and should have been arrested for indecent exposure, but that’s how much you love this house. You risked being naked, outside, to protect it. I was in my underwear, too, so I just watched you from the bedroom window.”
A laugh burst out of my throat.
“I knew I saw you in there,” I said, breaking the hug. “I have to go out and look at the sign. I need to get this over with.”
My husband followed me outside, and we stood together for a long time, just looking at the Realty Executives sign spiked in the middle of our front yard.
“I just can’t believe we’re doing this,” I admitted. “I can’t believe we’re moving. I love this house.”
“I love this house, too,” my husband replied. “We’ll get a great house in Oregon, I promise, but this will always be our first house. It will always be a special place for both of us.”
“I forgot to tell you!” I suddenly said, remembering the police helicopter that had swooped in over my house at lunchtime. “A ghetto bird flew the lowest I’ve ever seen it today and shook the windows so hard I thought they were going to break! They must have been after someone good!”
“Well, I know it can’t be anyone who has broken into our house, because they are invisible to law enforcement agents,” my husband said.