Playing House (3 page)

I bought my first house all on my own, without a man or a friend or even much money to speak of. I bought it on a salary of $25,000 a year, in 1993, in a rundown section of Boston, where there were murderers and car thieves and kids smoking pot on porch stoops in the smog-filled summers. Everyone told me not to do it. The house was wrapped in vinyl siding with a gorgeous old slate roof and radon in the basement, and had peeling lead paint and windows so drafty the weather came through. My first winter in my brand-new house, I would wake up and find my counters and computer covered in small snow drifts, and my breath was visible, sterling silver
O
s in the air, if I pursed my lips just right, each
O
rising up towards the buckled ceiling like a little exclamation of pleasure or surprise. I wrapped myself in an afghan, bought a crock-pot, and made myself some stew.

I have always, always wanted to own my own home. This may have something to do with the fact that I had left my family for a foster home, and what I got in place of my own abode was a foster family I knew would never really be mine. I became aware, at a very young age, of DNA’s sweeping spirals and how those spirals were like ropes binding you to your people, whom you could never replace. My foster family was good and kind, but in the nights I dreamt of houses, of finding a house in a cove or on a dark, dead-end street and going inside and there seeing butter-yellow walls and stacks of colorful quilts and white rabbits on tiled tables and rooms. The dreams always featured me, lone and lost, entering what looked like a normal or even suspicious-looking house to find that it unfolded endlessly, room upon room, garden upon garden, terraces unseen from the street, a horse with his head hanging in the kitchen window, a bowl of bright cherries in every cupboard.

I eventually left my foster family and went to college and lived in a dorm my first year, which I despised, with its cinderblock walls and stained couches and cold, iron beds. Then I rented a house off-campus with three friends, which I liked somewhat better, but the house wasn’t mine. I wanted, more than a man, a best friend, a child, or talent, I wanted to own my own home because I knew that as soon as it became mine, it would become magical, the “mine” and “magical” conflated here, ownership as fairytale.

I was thirty and working as a literacy instructor when I decided it was time to buy. I’d just gotten my first book deal and it had left me with some extra cash. I wanted a huge house with at least seven rooms so I could paint each in one of the seven spectrum colors and thus have a rainbow on my hands. I found a two-thousand-square-foot dump, my neighbor on one side an old lady with orange hair, and on the other side a convicted murderer with a bracelet on his ankle. In the nights, police-car lights swished by on my walls. The crime rate was high. My father, whom I’d reconnected with, told me not to do it, a waste of money, and what did I, a single woman, need with so much space? My boyfriend of the time was miffed. I knew I wouldn’t marry him, and even if he were “the one,” why should I wait, and who, really, could accompany me in the pursuit of this deeply private dream? I didn’t buy a house in which to start a marriage or a family; I bought a house to right old wrongs, to fix my past—not to form my future; I bought a house so I could, once and for all, prove to myself that the roof over my head was of my own making, and if wind or weather or sheer bad luck tore it away, I’d find it again. I could afford it, in every sense of that word.

I moved into my new house in early summer. Within ten minutes of getting the keys, I had torn off the drop ceilings to find the old pressed tin beneath. Within three days I had the floors painted. I didn’t want wood; I wanted white, and turquoise, sea and sand, and blue, so it would be like walking on a hard enamel sky. In the attic closet I found three old, curved canes with the word
Noam
carved into the wood: Noam, like gnome.

My enthusiasm for rehabilitation that summer knew no bounds. I started work on the exterior of the house by tearing off the tilted, rotting porch and ripping up the floorboards and replacing them with fir. I was a one hundred percent u-do-it gal, working on my own with little plan or skill. Call it confidence, or ecstasy, or beginner’s luck: all my projects went well. Nails sunk swiftly into wood. Paint painted itself onto freshly spackled walls. Then something happened.

I was working on the porch in the hot summer sun. I was digging four-foot holes in which I planned to place new posts to hold up the new floor. I swung my pick and from deep in the earth I heard the sound of something moan and clang. I stopped. The moan was like a person, buried alive, while the clang had the mournful echo of a hollow pipe. I swung again. Again this echoing moan, and then a geyser of water sprang up from the ground, a fountain with all the force of someone’s rage; I had hit a waterline. Water spread across the ground, under the powdery foundation of my home, and, when I ran inside, I saw it seep up between the kitchen floorboards. It just kept coming. I was in it up to my ankles, this wellspring, this never-ending
source
of what I was not sure. And in an instant all my ecstasy and confidence was replaced with total bone-freezing fear: I couldn’t do it, I was fundamentally alone, I would drown, or get electrocuted, or simply float forever in some unclaimed and unnamed space. By the time the plumbers came I was crying. By the time the leak, to put it mildly, was fixed, the ground outside my home had eroded and my first floor smelled like wet dog.

Soon after that, men came with what they called a French drain and suctioned the water out of my house, but it took days and days to dry, and the wood warped. I calmed down. What was wrong with a little warp and wobble here and there? I had dreamt of houses, old suspicious-looking houses with many wonders in them; this could be one. A long time ago, I recalled, when I left my first home, never to return, I had taken with me a tiny floor tile, pried it loose, held it close in my palm as the car drove me away forever. I had the floor tile with me then, and I still do now. Two nights after the furious fountain burst, I found the tile in a box left unpacked. It was blue-and-white striped. I held it up to the light and it gleamed like an old eye. I redid the ruined floor with tile this time. I found beautiful green-floral tiles in a steep sale, and I laid square by square. I laid it all down. With the flat of my putty knife, I creamed in the white grout. In the center of my brand-new floor I placed the small blue piece from my past, where for years it had stared at me, it now affirmed me, saying (and still saying), “You last.”

When I first met my husband, I thought his beard was sexy. It was a shadow of stubble, the color of iron filings, giving him a look that was at once tattered and tough. The fact that my husband is neither of these things—he is a chemist and a self-proclaimed Druid—only added to the appeal. I loved my husband’s beard, the way it hovered halfway, how it felt against my skin, both soft and sharp. I came to know his face by the presence and particularities of this beard. I was attracted to him in part because of this beard. It would not be entirely wrong to say I married my husband based on his beard; based on other things too, of course—his humor, his intelligence, his kindness, his quirkiness—but the beard was a factor.

Before we married—while we were courting, that is—my husband took care of his beard. When it started to get fluffy, he trimmed it with a tiny pair of sewing scissors and a black electric razor. But after we married—I don’t know exactly when, a year, maybe two—once we were settled down into domesticity, once our relationship had lost the anxious edge that comes without commitment, he started to let his beard go. He started to let it grow. It came in curls and frizz, and it seemed to spread sideways more than down, making his face look fat. Once during this time he took a business trip, and when I came to pick him up at the airport I was shocked to see him with the clarity that comes from absence. He looked like an old-fashioned lumberjack, or Moses, his lips barely visible, fully fringed with hair. He also appeared crazed. He got into the car, tossing his suitcase in the back.

“How are you?” he said, and he leaned over to kiss me. The beard had a strange smell, a smell familiar but impossible to place, the inside of an old trunk maybe, cedar chips and dust. I flinched and drew away. “What’s wrong?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said, and I hated myself then, hated myself for the lie and also for my superficiality.

We were mostly quiet on the way home. The highway hummed under our wheels, the long ribbon of road unfurling before us, green signs flashing in the headlights and then yanked back into blackness. As we pulled into our driveway, I said, “You know, I think you should cut your beard.”

He pulled on it and smiled. “I kinda like it this way,” he said.

“I don’t think I do. You remind me . . . I mean, you don’t look like my husband. You look . . . avuncular. I really think you should trim it at least.”

“It’s my beard,” he said.

“But I’m the one who kisses it,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a bat flew out of that mess.”

“Cool,” he said. “A bat in my beard. I like it.”

My husband then swung open the car door, bounded up our front steps. The dogs were ecstatic when they saw him. They leapt up, barked, and he funneled his face down close to theirs, tongues slurping, wet noses, and when he looked up, his beard had some slobber on it.

I was grumpy then. Days passed and the grumpiness would not leave. And then, one week later, my husband came home and his beard was gone. Presto. Poof. I had never, ever seen the lower half of his face in plain light before. There it was, stark, white, white, stark, pale, plucked; he looked young, very young, the shaved skin red as a diaper rash. I hate to say it but I yelped. It was as though he had snuck up on me wearing a Halloween mask, only the mask was his actual face, and his actual face was as unfamiliar as a stranger’s.

“You like?” he said.

“Why’d you do that?” I said.

“You asked me to,” he said.

“I said trim your beard, not strip it.”

“I want to try out a beardless identity. I want to pass as a Republican.”

“What,” I said, irritated, “you think a beard is radical? I’m sure the Christian Right has a large bearded base.”

“You know,” he said, “you look a little scared.”

“You should have warned me,” I said. “You don’t look anything like yourself.”

“It’s me,” he said, and of course he was right. It was him, and that was precisely the problem.

Everyone likes to think that looks are secondary in love. We pick our partners for their talents, their brilliance, their ambition, their stature. Sure, we like a handsome man, but we don’t walk the aisle based on a face; we are holistic; we understand beauty is emitted in many ways, and comes in many shapes and sizes. This is what we like to tell ourselves. But in fact, recent studies have shown that human beings tend to favor (i.e., love) the people in their lives who are most attractive. In a 2005 study, researchers at the University of Alberta gathered some disturbing results after hanging out in supermarkets and watching mothers interact with their children. They found that mothers gave more praise and positive reinforcement to their more beautiful children. Other studies have shown that people with conventionally pretty faces are more likely to be picked for job offerings and are more likely to advance up the corporate ladder. In his study on mate selection, psychologist David Buss showed a series of faces to people from Katmandu to Kentucky, and whatever the culture, everyone seemed to agree on which faces were the most attractive. As human beings, we know beauty, and we love beauty. I did not find my beardless husband beautiful. He had no chin.

What happens when the partner we pick gets too fat, or too thin, or too . . . chinless or . . . something? I felt I was falling out of love, or out of attraction. I did not want to have sex with this man. That night we did have sex and it was creepy, the foreign face floating above mine, the moon peeping in our window. I wanted, more than anything, to feel the click of connection, but it wasn’t there. I kept saying to myself, “This is Benjamin, Benjamin, Benjamin,” but it seemed he’d shaved more than his beard; he’d shaved his self. Without his beard, his voice sounded different to me, higher and more hollow, as though he were not quite real, as though a motor ticked inside him. It was a subtle shift. His voice sounded different to me the same way a piano sounds different when it’s slightly out of tune. You keep pressing the note you know, and it keeps coming back at you all the more warped because it has within it the sound of something familiar, but far away. Later that night, when Benjamin was asleep, I got up and pulled out our wedding album. Now there was the man I’d married.

Understand, I wanted to learn to love beardless Benjamin. In fact, I wanted to learn to love and be desirous of my husband in whatever guise he came in. To that end I decided what I needed to do was desensitize myself to his new face, force it into neutrality, whereupon, perhaps, I could learn to love it. I had a whole desperate theory worked out. It went like this: He had shocked me by shaving his beard and not telling me. I now associated his shaven face with shock, discomfort, even fear, and because of these associated emotions, I was bound to think he was ugly. Therefore, I needed to look at him beardless as much as possible. I needed to stare at his face, feel his face, run my fingers over his chinny chin chinlessness, come to recognize the blades of bones that had been hidden beneath his hair. I did this. Over dinner, in bed, I would lay the flat of my hand against him; I would touch him like a blind person, searching for clues, for the familiar . . .
oh, it’s you!
I went so far as to study his new face beneath a magnifying glass, when he was sleeping, of course, his pores huge, stalks of stubble struggling up through the pocked skin. Oh dear. He woke up. “What are you doing?” he said.

“Studying you,” I said.

“You hate the way I look without a beard,” he said. “I know.”