Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (2 page)

I also happened to have an almost alarming fixation on
Little House on the Prairie
(first the TV show and, as soon as I could read, the books). I wore a sunbonnet passed down from my maternal great-grandmother, kept my hair in braids like Laura Ingalls, and occasionally called my parents Ma and Pa. When the bonnet wore down to a rag, my mother got out her sewing machine, which she often used to make our clothes, and whipped up a new one. At my request, she also helped me put my mattress on top of two box springs and leaned a stepladder against it, thereby mimicking the loft-bed setup of the Ingalls girls. In the yellow brick bungalow, where my mother built an elevated wooden play structure among the pecan trees in the backyard, I wore my bonnet along with an odd, scratchy calico skirt (a garment that could only have existed in the mid-1970s) and reenacted all manner of scenes from the books and TV episodes: the barn burning down, the dog getting lost, the whole family nearly dying from scarlet fever.

One day, my mother came to me and said that we would be moving away to New Jersey. I remember sobbing in her arms but also taking comfort in her promise that there would be snow in the new place. Since there was snow in the
Little House on the Prairie
books, I figured we were moving closer to the frontier. When she told me there’d be a real wood-burning
fireplace in the new house, I imagined us using it for cooking corn bread.

Ridgewood, New Jersey, was no frontier, just a leafy village of perfectly clipped lawns abutting perfectly maintained houses. Mothers there did not sew clothes, much less build backyard play structures. In fact, they appeared not to do much of anything except play tennis, a discovery that seemed to turn my mother, who’d spent her Austin days attending Equal Rights Amendment rallies in peasant skirts, into an unhappy person almost overnight. Ironically, it was she who’d spearheaded the plan to move to Ridgewood. When my father, who’d been teaching music at the University of Texas, decided he wanted to live the life not of an academic but, rather, of a freelance composer (for commercial jingles, then hopefully for film and television) in New York, my mother had repeated the thing she’d apparently said shortly before they wed: “This marriage is about your career.” She then sought relocation advice from our neighbors/surrogate grandparents, who, as it happened, had lived much of their lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey.

“It’s a little pricier,” they’d said. “But it’s the best.”

“I like it here,” I said.

“Of course you do,” my mother told me. “But if we stayed here, we wouldn’t get to live in a new house!”

As I said, this book is about houses: ones I’ve lived in and ones I haven’t, ones I’ve lusted for, ones I’ve reviled, ones I’ve left too soon, and ones where I’ve found myself stuck, chained to my own radiator by the tethers of my own stupid decisions. But if there’s anything I’ve learned over the many years and many moves, it’s this: a house is not the same as a home. Despite certain Muzak-sounding catchphrases of the real
estate world—“home buyer,” “home sales,” “home loans”—the words “house” and “home” are not interchangeable. You buy a house, but you make a home. You do not shop for a “home” any more than you’d shop for a life. And by way of explaining how easy it can be to lose track of these distinctions, I need to lay out a few things about the home I grew up in and the homes my parents came from before that.

I need first of all to say that we weren’t unhappy. Not acutely and not most of the time. Instead, what characterized our little unit—my parents, my brother, and me—was a chronic, lulling sensation of being aboard a train that was perpetually two stops away from the destination we had in mind for ourselves. And while I have to emphasize that the reasons for that aren’t ultimately related to moving—or even to the fact that we tended to talk about moving in the same salivating, should-we-or-shouldn’t-we tones in which some families talk about far-flung ski trips—I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that our lack of enthusiasm for ourselves had a lot to do with our perpetual curiosity about what possibilities for happiness might lie at the destination point of a moving van. We weren’t much for card games or sports, but we knew how to escape from places.

And if you’re looking for examples of people who escaped their humble beginnings, my parents qualify. My mother was born in 1942 in Carbondale, Illinois, a coal-mining town that also happened to be a university town. Carbondale is near the southern tip of the state, a hundred miles southeast of St. Louis and two hundred miles north of Memphis. And due to a constellation of factors, not least of all having a difficult, childlike mother who was threatened to the point of hysterics by anything that hinted of intellectual ambition (my grandmother forced my mother to twirl a baton and forbade her to attend
the university lab high school because it was “uppity”), my mother loathed anything associated with her hometown and its environs. While I was growing up, she invoked Carbondale as though offering an excuse. It was both a form of self-flagellation and a rationale for any perceived shortcoming. “Well, when you’re from southern Illinois, you ____ (can’t use chopsticks/have never been to Europe/aren’t sure what Passover is/can’t really get behind psychotherapy).” In a family that specialized in judgment and criticism, that quickly grew bored with all that was innocuous or inoffensive or even pleasant but loved to chew on grievances as though they were slabs of meat on the bone, southern Illinois was the original sin. All that my mother saw of it—at least all I ever perceived her to have seen—appeared to be stewing in its own backwater. And whether or not these were the actual truths of the place, whether or not this was really all there was, she cringed at and reviled it all: the hillbilly intonations of the regional accent, the limited cultural offerings of the community (dinner theater, Elks’ Club polka), the deep-fried cuisine, the ubiquitous polyester clothing, the knee-jerk political leanings, the xenophobia, the poverty, the heat, the humidity, the tangy efflux of the hickory and crab apple trees themselves.

As a result, her life became devoted almost exclusively to the cause of being the opposite of these things, to being educated, well-spoken, with-it, and, above all, sophisticated—or at least the version of sophistication she imagined when she surveyed her home life and conjured a view 180 degrees in the other direction. Lacking the financial or familial support to leave town, my mother enrolled in the local university and began assembling the tools necessary for her eventual escape. She became an accomplished pianist. She learned how to speak with clarity and confidence. Perhaps most important
(she’s explained this herself; it’s not just my conjecture), she dated a guy whose parents seemingly knew a thing or two about the world. Sure, they were from Carbondale, but their house had books and records. It also had
The New Yorker
magazine. On visits to their place, my mother would flip through the mysterious pages as though she were glimpsing a distant, dazzling land. And even though she turned down her suitor’s marriage proposal because he was “ultimately dull,” she never forgot the portal those magazine pages provided into a befuddling but obviously superior world. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to live in New York—that would come later and with a vengeance—as that she wanted to live in a place that resembled the kind of place that a person who read
The New Yorker
would live.

Her primary means of expression for this ambition: houses. She wasn’t blessed with a willowy body type that might otherwise have made fashion her canvas, nor did she have an aptitude for foreign languages or interest in travel that could have made her genuinely cosmopolitan (her younger brother, for his part, escaped the muck of their household by growing up to be an inveterate globetrotter). But she did know what to do with paint colors, with curtains, with furniture. In fact, she had more than a few shades of brilliance on that front. Despite having grown up in a nondescript one-story brick house with no art on the walls and no books on the shelves, she had her share of opinions, however vague, about the kind of art (not from Sears) and books (not dime-store paperbacks) that would line the perimeters of the homes of her future. And, like a musician who could play by ear, she had the ability to conjure a room in her head and re-create it in three dimensions.

Given her generation and resources and station in life, my mother believed the best context for such a lifestyle was affiliation
with a university. Not that she wanted to be an academic herself; she wanted to be an academic wife. Though she’s never really explained to me how this aim came into being, I can only presume she’d run into a few of these types while growing up and they’d made a positive impression on her. After all, Carbondale, though it wasn’t Cambridge or even Lincoln, Nebraska (where, decades later, I would eventually flee when the ripple effect of my mother’s dreams began to feel like a choke hold), was a university town. Despite the not insignificant poverty rate, it was also a place where, every night, someone in some house (maybe even a few people in a few houses) sat down to dinner with a glass of red wine and a Mozart sonata. And having glimpsed some version of this scene on one or two occasions (perhaps as a babysitter, perhaps for ten seconds while dropping off a paper at a professor’s house), my mother decided she wanted nothing more but would settle for nothing less. Thus she kept her eyes peeled for someone whose cautious, noncommittal bohemianism would mesh with her own and, with any luck, help supply her with the ultimate proof that she had transcended her origins: an elegant yet understated house with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the perfunctory hardwood-floor/Oriental-rug combo, and a kitchen stocked with hanging copper pots and a copy of
The Moosewood Cookbook
.

This was my mother’s vision in the mid-1960s (minus the
Moosewood
, which didn’t pub until 1977 but, even in the days before Woodstock, surely was a twinkle in the eyes of an entire generation of women). This was what she believed she wanted: not a career, not even the life of a genuine intellectual, but the trappings of that kind of life. She wanted the house, the rugs, the shelves. So was it blind faith my mother brought to the table the day she decided—and I have no doubt
she was decisive in the matter; it’s a skill I’ve always admired in her but didn’t fully inherit—that my father was the train to which she was hitching her almost violent need to transform herself? Did she simply love him for the sake of loving him? Or did she look at him and catch some vision of an educated, well-spoken, and sophisticated life? Did she see in him some iteration of a
New Yorker
cartoon character (not beyond the realm of possibility, given his prominent nose and the mad-professor-style tufts of hair that flanked his already bald pate) and conclude via a series of unconscious calculations that of all the grad students in the music department of Southern Illinois University, he was the one most likely to help her succeed?

Two years her senior, my father was well-known to be a virtuosic composer and musical arranger and destined for a life of some variety of creative greatness. Still, if ever there was a case of raw, uncultivated, and by-all-appearances limitless musical gifts unsullied (that is, unassisted) by careerism of any kind, it was the case of my father, a man who would eventually leave academia to pursue a freelance career that was sometimes so fraught with paranoia and resentment that his own children would be forbidden to watch certain television programs because he’d been considered but not ultimately hired for the job of composing music for them. (Hint: I had not seen a complete episode of
The Simpsons
until my junior year of college.)

But in 1965 in Carbondale, concerns of this caliber were unimaginable. This was a world in which St. Louis was considered a glittering, faraway metropolis and wedding receptions took place in church basements over Hawaiian Punch. My mother says her wedding cost $200, and she likes to emphasize that at twenty-three, she was considered an old
bride. She also tells me this: upon their engagement, my father’s mother came to my mother and warned her against marrying her indolent, no-account son. Whereas my father’s mother could see that her future daughter-in-law was ambitious and possessed (thanks undoubtedly to her efforts to define herself in opposition to her mother) of a keen sense of social protocol, she saw her son as aimless and uncensored, a beatnik who shot his mouth off without apology, a musical savant whose anachronistic tastes (Glenn Miller, Sarah Vaughan, no interest in Elvis Presley whatsoever) threatened to lend a freakish taint to what otherwise might have been an aura of cool. Whereas my mother was organized and a self-starter, my father was a weird dreamer. Whereas my mother was from a respectable family (her parents might have been lackluster, but her uncle was an ophthalmologist who lived in a two-story redbrick Colonial straight out of a Currier and Ives painting), my father’s background, at least as far as I understood it, was a slightly milder version of Faulkner.

Not that my paternal grandmother, by then a holy-rolling evangelical who eschewed rock and roll and wouldn’t have approved of Elvis anyway, put her son’s deficits in quite these terms. But for all her whacked-out self-loathing, you can see where she was coming from. The poverty surrounding my father’s upbringing has, at least to my coddled, suburban sensibilities, always stunned me to the point of nearly voyeuristic fascination. When I was a child, the salient detail of my father’s upbringing, to me, involved the absence of indoor plumbing. His family had had an outhouse until he was twelve. Most mind-blowing of all, this wasn’t a country outhouse in the nineteenth century like on
Little House on the Prairie
but an outhouse for a house in town. In the 1950s.

But wouldn’t you know it: my father was also seduced by
The New Yorker
. As a high-school student, he would visit the library of his hometown of Centralia, Illinois, and read the jazz reviews of Whitney Balliett. He would learn about who was playing at the Village Vanguard. He would read descriptions of musicians, such as Bill Evans, he’d never heard but would later come to revere, and try to imagine what New York would be like in real life. Shortly after my parents married, my father did a brief stint as a fellow at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, after which he and my mother drove down to New York City. They stayed in the Tudor Hotel on Forty-second Street and Second Avenue and went one night to the Village Vanguard. A friend of a friend from Eastman met them and then took my father to a bar where jazz musicians were known to hang out. There, my father saw many famous players, including some he’d read about in
The New Yorker
. Until then, he hadn’t ever entirely comprehended the idea that people actually lived in New York. As spellbound as he was, he didn’t consider staying. He was married, after all, and he and my mother both had teaching jobs waiting in Indiana.