In Spite of Everything (21 page)

Cal and I did, and we were, as it turns out, in generational company. In the fall of 2005, Generation X had higher home ownership rates than any previous generation, in spite of the recent housing bubble. In 1983, when older Baby Boomers were in their thirties, more than 60 percent of them owned their own homes; a decade later, that number dipped to 55.8 percent for younger Baby Boomers in their thirties. In 2005, more than 61 percent of thirtysomethings, now Generation X, owned homes. Why? A major reason, the report pointed out, is that Generation X was much more likely to look at their home as an investment than previous generations, owing largely—you guessed it—to having lived through the ’90s recession, followed by the stock market losses in the early years of the twenty-first century.

For those of us crawling our way out of the wreckage of the dot-bomb period, that’s what made those low or no down payment and ARM mortgages so irresistible. Indeed, surveys conducted by the National Association of Realtors show that four out of ten first-time buyers used no-money-down mortgages in 2005 and 2006; the median down payment for first-time buyers in those years was just 2 percent. What this seems to mean is that the collective feeling was, basically, screw stocks, invest in a home, and pay for it when you get back on your feet.

This evidently seemed like a no-brainer for phoenixlike Xers. We’d always landed on our feet. For one thing, we’re not only better educated than Baby Boomers, but we made more money than they did, too, with median incomes nearly 50 percent higher than older Baby Boomers and $12,000 higher than their most immediate predecessors in the younger Baby Boom. So what if the housing prices
were so high now that we couldn’t afford to buy? “If we use education as a proxy for future and potential wealth,” surmised the JCHS report, “this indicates that members of Generation X carry the same potential for high future earnings.” Right! That’s what we were thinking, too! Indeed, Xers in 2000 had higher levels of confidence in their own financial situation than any other generation—“an indication,” concluded the Harvard report, “that Gen Xers have more actual or perceived opportunities for upward financial mobility.”

Far be it from the banks to have disabused anyone of that notion. That was Cal, me, and, after months of home hunting, our bank. In fewer than six months after the late-night baby-food-a-thon of shame with the mothers’ group, Cal and I became hard-core yuppie real estate porn addicts, compulsively hitting the refresh button on the
New York Times
real estate section online a jillion times a day, taking walks in our neighborhood not for the fun of it but to scout the
FOR SALE
signs of low-rent Brooklyn-based real estate firms that might offer better deals than white-glove Manhattan-based outfits. Everything was getting so damned
expensive
! We despaired. We should have bought something
years
ago! Maybe we just had to face it: We couldn’t afford to live in the city anymore.

We took weekend trips to the New Jersey suburbs, where an exodus from Park Slope had been steadily headed for the past several years. We were driven around by pleasant real estate agents, sitting in the backs of their station wagons with Zanny patiently babbling in her car seat, watching the rows of 1920s Cape Cod, colonial, and ranch-style houses undulate by. We were led into many of these places, climbed their carpeted staircases, circled their kitchen islands, witnessed the sports trophies in the children’s rooms. All I could envision was our children as teenagers in a suburban wasteland, driving around drunkenly to the next party where the parents weren’t home: my own adolescence. For Cal, it was the ultimate knock to his first-generation immigrant ego: settling for second best because he couldn’t hack it in the big leagues. I said: “I hate it, too, but this could be a great move for the children—do we really have a
good
reason for putting the kibosh on Jersey?” Cal accelerated toward the Goethals Bridge. “Yes,” he said. “I don’t want to.”

But something else was afoot for Cal and me, too. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly; mostly, it seemed exciting and strangely grown up. Having our babies had not made me feel grown up in this kind of capacity. Having the babies brought about an intimate, profound transformation: I’d been instantly forged into a real
human
with a soul. But this home-buying gauntlet was a categorically different rite of passage. There were documents requiring signatures in a hundred different places, binding us to a hundred different legal stipulations; there were banks investigating our financial histories and making long-term projections about our future as employable taxpayers; lawyers, notaries, agents, secretaries were all summoned and working to vet and authorize the legitimacy of our role in the transaction. If having children had inducted us into the deeply sweet and complex realm of humanity, buying property was indoctrinating us into incontrovertible adulthood. We were grown-ups now: an actual married couple, doing what actual married couples did. It was kind of awesome. But there was also something disquieting about it.

As the momentum generated by our compulsive scouring of interest rates and mortgage packages grew more and more giddy and frenzied, something in our center of gravity began tilting. Certainly, we were both obsessed, discussing nothing but percentage points, paint colors. But Cal had never been so on fire about anything. He was hounding real estate agents, tracking down the perfect loan, calculating closing costs. And he was determined to find the kind of place he wanted. Each time we’d allowed ourselves to look at a property that he loved but was out of reach for us financially, he was genuinely defeated. I floated the idea of moving to another Brooklyn area, where prices were cheaper. “I don’t want to live in some crappy place in a shit-bag neighborhood!” he’d rail. I knew how he felt, but what could we do? This was our first place, a starter home; it was
supposed
to be modest. We shouldn’t feel bad about that. “I just can’t do it,” he said. “I want a
nice
place.” He was anxious, sleepless.
It ate at his ego. It would make him “feel like shit” to see those other “smug” parents in the neighborhood with their “sweet places” while we had “nothing.” He knew he was being hyperbolic. But he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t rest.

The place Cal and I liked most
was
nice—it was perfect. It was out of our price range. He had taken his parents to see it. “It is beautiful—it has ‘old world charm,’ ” said his mother. “But you cannot afford it.” Cal was furious. He should have gone to medical school, at least law school, his mother snipped.
Oof
. But she had a point. We weren’t doctors, lawyers, or bond traders; we were a writer and an independent consultant. Maybe we just had to come to terms with the blunt truth that we had been priced out of our neighborhood; a lot of other people in our position had moved into other spots in Brooklyn and were making it work. Plus, if this area was becoming so yuppie and rich, did we really want to be here, anyway? Fuck them! We should concentrate less on the real estate end of this and more on making a genuine
home
. Cal went into a funk. So he was just going to have to raise his kids in a
dump
?
That’s
how it was going to go for him? He wasn’t going to
get
the nice place—that’s all there was to
that
. He watched TV late into the night, was detached and grumpy during the day. His swagger faded.

I couldn’t figure it out. I wanted a nice place, a homey home, too—
definitely
wanted it. But the status element, while it had its devilish appeal, didn’t seem like such a big deal. It was shattering for Cal. I’d never seen this in him. But when I thought about it more, I realized that perhaps it had always been there, just in a slightly different form. That Cal had always enjoyed incontestable authority among his friends, and certainly inspired a great deal of it in his business dealings, was a given. That I had always relied on his sense of confidence was also a given. But the more I contemplated his struggle with this whole real estate brouhaha, it began to dawn on me that perhaps his sense of authority and confidence was more tenuous than I had imagined. Perhaps, in some way, it hinged on the very appearance of authority and confidence. That is, he
needed
a nice place
in order to uphold his sense of competence, and that without it as bolstering context, he would feel exposed to others, to himself. The system would disintegrate. I panicked. I might want a home, but
he needed that place
.

I convinced Cal to help me lobby each set of parents (except my father) to lend us some money to make a good-sized down payment, and with a five-year ARM, we would be able to afford the monthly payments. We threw caution to the wind, bid, and won the place we wanted: a gorgeous three-bedroom co-op in a prewar limestone building in the best school district in Brooklyn. I remember the loan officer at WAMU telling Cal and me that although we were cash poor now, he could tell we were the kind of people who would make money in the future. We were the kind of people, he said, that the bank wanted to “invest in.”

We didn’t question the banks’ pretzel logic any more than we did our own, and neither, apparently, did the majority of Xers. We trusted ourselves, the banks trusted us, we trusted the banks. Again, so say the numbers. According to research, members of Generation X in 2000 had more faith in the financial industry than previous generations at the same age. Evidently, we were so collectively sure of our own against-all-odds capabilities that it didn’t strike us as odd that the banks should be, too—even though we had provided them with no actual proof that they should.

And, as usual, in a Psychology 101 way, it makes some sense. One of the notorious legacies of Generation X’s home-alone childhood is an abiding suspicion of authority. All this has been well documented, e.g., we hate ass-kissing the boss, so just let us do our thing because we rock as self-starters. But when the whole housing bubble started to swell, the dynamic shifted: Enter the banks, as approving parents. At last! They gave us a
home
! It was as though we were finally getting the apology and consolation prize we’d always secretly hoped for: You didn’t get a real home as a kid, but you worked hard, succeeded on your own steam, and now we’re going to give it to you and
your
children. Welcome home. You earned it.

I
n a few months, we moved into our new apartment: a little perfectly cut jewel. It was on the top floor of a lovely 1910 limestone building on quite possibly the prettiest block in Park Slope. It was small, but the layout was ideal for us to build a family in, and I was soon pregnant with our second baby. And it was a
homey
home; you could feel the historical happiness embedded in its details. The bedrooms were nests, barely big enough for the beds they contained, but that was fine, because they were soft and cozy, with no room for the kind of clutter that can distract one from the important conduct of quiet and slumber. Our lives were lived in the living spaces, which were large and lovely. The entrance hallway was ample and welcoming and led directly to a massive Edwardian dining room, complete with a nonfunctioning but pretty maroon-tile-lined gas fireplace. Lumbering old wooden pocket doors separated it from the also massive living room, complete with functioning wood-burning, wood-manteled fireplace. The ceilings were grand, punctuated at the center with period chandeliers and festively bordered with egg-and-dart crown molding. These rooms, though originally designed to be pretentious, were made warm with our kooky mishmash of stuff—all laden with familial meaning. I should say, laden for
me
.

By his own admission, Cal’s decorating preferences had, when we were living separately, tended to the 1980s single-guy variety: black furniture and media consoles. The décor of his own childhood home was decidedly not to his taste: reproductions of French Impressionist paintings, fussy Victorian settees, the white baby grand. I felt strongly, perhaps hysterically, that our home should look and feel like
home
. Cal shrugged. I could steer the decorating; he didn’t care. In my ideal, home should reflect our current and past family history. With that in mind, the dining room served as a mixed-use space: eating center and art studio for our children. Since meals with very young children meant getting food shrapnel all over the floor, I figured it was okay to get art-related shrapnel all over the place, too.
They had an easel with actual tempera paints, clay, and tons of crafts supplies. I framed their pictures and paintings and hung them on the most expansive wall in the dining room in a rotating exhibition. The apartment’s long hallway was the perfect venue for curating family photographs.

Populating our home’s remaining territory were things I had grown up with in my childhood home before it split apart. One of the things that had been so devastating following my parents’ divorce was seeing all of our things in separate houses. Over the years, both parents had pruned back a good deal; a lot of the stuff that had been so important to me was no longer important to them. So whenever they were getting rid of things, I appeared in a car with an open trunk. Now, everything was here, it was all
together
. My children and I would share the same sort of attachment to these odd things, not valuable in the
Antiques Roadshow
sense, but so deeply imbued with importance and place that each was like a talisman.