Real Estate

“Draw a house,” I tell my students. This prompt to college undergraduates and aspiring Ph.Ds can feel—must feel—infantilizing. If a given student is not an artist or an architect, they will likely, however, draw something very like what they must have produced as children. My students come from all over the world and live in many different kinds of homes: a skinny canal house in the Netherlands; an extended family compound in India; a New York apartment building; a suburban Texas ranch house. Some of my students live in homes that are falling apart around them; a few have been homeless for long periods of time. This how most of them respond to the prompt:

 A rectangle with a steeply sloping roof. Four windows, on two levels, each divided into panes or framed by curtains pulled back to an identical degree. A front door often taller than the ground floor windows. If there is a door knob it is like the noses in children’s drawings of people: centered, tiny, a concession.  There might well be a chimney whose scribbled smoke curls up into a sky with two or three clouds in it. If the student has access to  colored markers or crayons, the sky will be very blue, the clouds left the color of the paper. In front of the house, there will almost inevitably be trees, oddly dwarfed by the house, and a few flowers with gigantic blooms and on stiff, upright stems. There might be a fence around the property, almost always drawn out of perspective, suggesting both boundedness and imminent collapse. In many cases, there will be a family in the yard, stick figures whose identity is expressed through the gendered shorthand of pants or A-line dresses, and the careful Goldilocks calibration of size: father, mother, brother, sister. Sometimes there will be a dog and or a cat drawn full face to distinguish one species from the other.  

The house--and its iteration across students and classrooms-- is deeply familiar, its specificity and its architectural improbability consumed in a dominant—and improbable—ideal.

My Canadian grandparents lived in that house. At least I thought so as a child. With adult eyes, I can see that my father’s parents lived in a very modest A-frame in a lower-middle class neighborhood of Vancouver, fifty years before the housing bubble made modest living impossible in that city. Clad—I recently learned this lovely word from British home renovation shows—in wood, painted white, it had three bedrooms and, I think, two baths. But this enumeration of living spaces is already acceding to a language of real estate that would have been unavailable to me, even as a knew there was a bedroom for my grandparents, one for my parents, and a little one for myself. This is what was important about the house: it had two stories; it had a fireplace; and it had a back door and a garden. The two stories meant it had an interior staircase, an object of profound desire and enchantment to someone who had always lived in an apartment. Hadn’t I read book after book about children sliding down bannisters? I tried to slide several times myself and found that it was harder than the books let on. After I fell off and cracked my shoulder I focused on less dangerous attractions of the stairway: listening for different footfalls on the stairs as I lay in bed; reading on the top step looking down onto the entryway; the sense, again tucked up in bed, of being suspended in leafy comfort above the sound of grown-up voices. Almost as enchanting was the fireplace, although since we were always there in the late spring, my grandmother usually lit it only to burn garbage. While this function of fires was never mentioned in the family sagas I liked to read, I was undaunted, taking up the poses of hundreds of fictional children and adults as they stretched out their hands to warm themselves on the family hearth. I would come in from a not very cold walk to kneel and warm my hands; I even toasted bread—and less happily, cheese—in the flames. The garden, that third element in this trinity of household gods, was my grandfather’s domain and full of daffodils and tulips. It was there, out of earshot of my atheist parents, that he would tell me stories about Jesus, here that he handed me a book full of those stories that my parents threatened to burn in the fireplace. Although I sometimes found my grandfather’s stories and the tension they incurred uncomfortable, and although I found this grandmother more brusque than warm, I always looked forward to what the United Nations called my father’s “home leave” to Canada. I was an apartment child, vacationing in the world made normal by the books I read—and of course the pictures I drew.

With adult eyes and an adult calculus, the apartment I lived in with my parents in the Parioli section of  Rome was a far more desirable place. It had seven rooms and every one of them had a different design in the plaster of the ceiling. When I looked up from my bed in the morning, woken perhaps by the sound of church bells, I could see cherubs plaster in an alternating design of scrolls and squares. The apartment had two terraces, a smaller square one in the front where my mother grew daisies in pots, and a big one with a sort of annex in the back where my father built a workshop with a big bench and window for him, and a smaller bench and lower window for me. I grew morning glories from seed. My father embedded tiles and sea glass in  low concrete walls that we pored together to form garden beds. There was room to ride a bike in a tight loop back and forth between outdoor rooms. Inside there was enough space that we did not use the formal living room, which remained exotic with antiques my father had bought on a yearlong stint in Asia. When I think of the apartment as an adult, I am filled with desire to see it, to live in it again—perhaps (this is a fantasy after all)—to own it.

Once I say the word “own,” I enter, I re-enter, the idiom of real estate. As a young child I did not pause to think whether my grandparents owned their home or whether my parents owned theirs. Everything I knew about mortgages—that they were disgraceful—I learned from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I am not sure when I began to realize that my immediate family and my mother’s extended family who lived in New York were renters, and that although this was common in the city, many people at the New York school I moved to at age ten owned second homes—cabins, beach houses, mansions in the country. For a long period of my life, home ownership was associated with death. When my grandfather died,  my grandmother had sold the house for  enough money to buy a small apartment on the water of the sort that she had apparently always wanted. I never liked the apartment, despite its location, and missed, at every visit even as a teenager, the fireplace, the garden, and especially the staircase. My parents never owned any of what the British still call “real property” together; for them it was furniture, artifacts, small objects whose portability gives us the French word “meubles.” When my father died and my mother moved back to New York, her reentry coincided with a new world of condo ownership. With the proceeds from his life insurance, she bought a small apartment and crowded it with the familiar furnishing of apartments past.

Of course, condos inhabit a space on the real estate market somewhere mysterious between ownership and rental; my mother paid more in monthly condo fees than I eventually did for my monthly mortgage payments. Condos, as we know from the recent tragic collapse in Miami, are interdependent communities. There are quarrels on condo boards, negotiations with and endless stories about a large cast of characters: doormen, handymen, superintendents. My purchase, with my husband, of my first house in Houston broke with a family tradition and launched me into an unfamiliar world of self-reliance. Our first Thanksgiving, a month after purchasing the house, was spent without water because I did not understand that water bills were not included in the mortgage. As I hauled water from the house of our savvier neighbors, I was rehearsing the rituals that would be associated with future hurricanes and real estate heartaches. During my mother’s first visit, as we sat looking with a sort of proud bewilderment over the garden just on the other side of a picture window, we witnessed something odd: the slow, and graceful collapse of our beautiful trellis—perhaps it was even a pergola— covered with confederate jasmine and morning glories. Panicked phone calls revealed that our garage was full of creatures known as  boring beetles who had eaten away at the wood in and around the structure. There was no landlord to call, no super to show up late or not at all. We stared at the wreck that was the trellis (or pergola) and realized that this indeed was home ownership. This was real estate, this was real property and it was lying in the middle of my first back yard.