The Suburban You (7 page)

Christine's fellow students started noticing the extra attention that Christine was getting, and enjoying, from François. Before long, Christine's friends booked François for a different time, leaving Christine to go one on one with François, which, as you have heard, they did frequently. Pretty soon, Christine's neighbors began to notice a car parked outside Christine's house at various times, but always after the kids went to school and before they returned home, with license plates that read
GOLFPRO
. Suspicions were raised, because many people—particularly women—take golf lessons from François and know his famous plates. There was much talk among people in your suburb about this marked car outside Christine's house. Your neighbors had heard the stories that were circulating and started to put one and one together.

One day, Christine's son came home from first grade and asked his mother why his friends were telling him that his mommy had a boyfriend who played golf. François even showed up at a holiday party that Christine and her husband, Bob, threw at their house. You heard, from those who were in attendance, that Christine paid an inordinate amount of attention to François that night, making many of her guests uncomfortable. Most left early, out of respect for Bob, because they did not want Bob to think that they were condoning Christine's behavior.

This story has no good ending for anyone.

Watch Your Neighbors Move

You live in an upwardly mobile suburb. You can say this because there is evidence all around you. You witness your neighbors buy one house, then trade up to another house just a few blocks away. You observe this house-flipping and you hear about it occasionally because it is the talk at the cocktail parties that you go to. You think that this activity of frequent house-flipping may be disruptive to a family, and these frequent conversations do not really draw you in.

One day, however, you meet a genuine house-flipper who could write a book on the topic. You meet people who, while it does not appear to be their mission, have sort of assumed house-flipping as a lifestyle. It is not what you would call an intentional activity for these people, more an involuntary activity, where you move and, just as you are settled, you move again. Like other involuntary activities, if you don't move you will be uncomfortable, and when you move you are not so aware of what you are doing.

Like most of the people you have met, you meet the movers through your wife. Your wife becomes friends with your kid's buddy Paul Schiller's mom. And, because your kid's friend's mom has become your wife's friend, then you, being at the tail end of this food chain, will become friends with your kid's friend's dad. When you meet these people, you would not have guessed them to be house-flippers, but they are.

You first meet the Schiller family when they are 90 percent completed with the renovation of their home. Because you did not know the home before they poured and poured money into it, your frame of reference is what you are told. You have had these discussions many times. People will draw imaginary lines in the air to tell you where old homes ended and new additions begin. They will gesture with two outstretched palms to describe to you where the stairway once was and will point out rooms that are now kitchens and studies that were once living rooms and bedrooms. You feign interest during these house tours but are really hoping that some kid will fall and scream so that you will have a legitimate excuse to break away.

You know a few of what you would call top-line issues regarding this house renovation. First of all, there were hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in change orders. A change order is when you plan to do one thing when you only have drawings, and your contractor gives you a price on that, and then, when you see the home under construction, you have a different idea about what it should look like, resulting in changes and thus, change orders. As you go through this house tour, you hear of one midstream change order after another. These are the changes that a contractor loves, because he knows that he has you. Predictably, a contractor will tell you that the architect should have thought of that earlier, and that in order to do it right it will cost you tens of thousands of dollars more, first to undo what has been done and then to do what will make you happy. Contractors make their money on change orders. The other thing that you conclude about this project is that the addition doubled the size of the preexisting house. There are rooms in this house that even the Schillers do not know what to call or how to use. In this renovation, you have no question that wherever there is grout it is epoxy grout.

After two years, the project is almost complete and your new friends tell you how much of a living hell the last two years of their life have been. They were quarantined in one section of the house while the contractor took over another. They had one temporary kitchen set up in the dining room before it was moved to the living room. Dishes were washed each night in a small bathroom sink. In the middle of all of this they had a baby. Every day, there are at least five contractors in the house, all day long.

They are happy now that the house is 90 percent done. Fireplace surrounds, molding, and things like that are the only things remaining to be completed.

Two months later, you go to the Schillers' house to pick up Paul to take him and your son to a big field to shoot off rockets. As you pull up to the house, you notice a For Sale sign outside. You walk up to the front door and tell your new friend jokingly that someone stuck a For Sale sign on his front lawn. “We're selling,” he announces to you. “I'm a trader,” he states, “and we are ready to trade.” You are astonished.

Two months later, the house is sold for a record price on this pricey block in this pricey suburb. The Schillers have to move out in forty-five days. You notice the sale price of $2.25 million in your suburban paper, which reports all sales, but after hearing about all those change orders you are not so sure that your friends made money on this trade. You do not ask them to confirm your impression.

They move into a rental in the part of your suburb where you live, close to the school, the lake, and their former home. It is, at a minimum, a $10,000-per-month proposition. Your new friends decide to settle for a while in this rental while they find something suitable for themselves to buy. They are planning to rent for only a month or two, you are told, but they move their furniture, clothes, toys, sporting equipment, trampoline, bikes, stereos, tableware, TVs, and everything else to the rental and unpack all of it. They want to get their five kids situated in the manner to which they have grown accustomed.

Four months into the rental, they find the perfect house to buy. It is a house that they will spend $1 million on and it is on a corner lot, like their last home. But there is no way that these new friends of yours can live in that million-dollar house the way it is. It is not suitable, it needs a “ton of work.” They hire an architect, who you guess will charge somewhere around $60,000 to $80,000 to work up a set of drawings and to obtain permits. The architect takes four months to develop these plans. You do the math: architect's fees plus monthly rental plus principal and interest on an $800,000 loan. You figure that without any architect's fees or other incidentals this transition is costing your friends $17,000 to $20,000 per month.

Because your other friends know that the Schillers are your friends, you field a lot of questions about what these people are doing. “Why don't they move into their new house?” your other friends ask. “Isn't that house good enough for them?” they ask. You respond that you are not so sure what they are doing, and that you think they may not be so sure, either.

After all that, work never begins on the new million-dollar house; it sits vacant for another six months. Two months later, you see a For Sale sign posted on the lawn of this never-lived-in house. “We are moving to Chappaqua,” your new friends announce to your wife. “We are going out looking for homes this week. Jeff got a new job.”

They come back and Jill calls your wife. They have found a house, but it needs so much work, she tells your wife. “It is a small house,” she says. Of course it does and of course it is, your wife responds. Two months later your friends pack up and move.

Six months later, you see in the paper, confirming what you suspected, that the house that your new friends acquired but never moved into has been sold for $200,000 less than what your new friends paid for it. The Fairchilds bought it.

Three months later, just after the Chappaqua house renovation has wound down, your wife gets a call from Jill. “We are moving back,” she says. “We found a house, but it needs a ton of work.”

Send and Receive Holiday Cards

It is the holiday season. Your earliest recollections of the holiday season include the exchanging of Christmas cards among friends and family. You remember your mother and father keeping track of who sent them holiday cards when you were a young child. But, like most people, you assume, they also kept track of who
did not
send them a holiday card. The people on this list were delegated to friendship purgatory, so to speak, unless they had a death in the family, in which case they were legitimately excused from sending a holiday card that year. This was an important mental list, and so you grew up thinking that there were very few things that were more important than sending holiday cards to your friends and family during the holiday season. Sending holiday cards is a genetic impulse that has been passed along to you.

It's December 5, and you ask your wife, “Honey, do we have a holiday card yet?” assuming that she has taken care of this detail that, although you have never spoken about it, is a job that you believe to be hers. You are hoping for an answer of yes, but your hopes soon fade.

As she does every year at this time, she looks at you and asks, “Do we really need to send out a holiday card this year?” You imagine everyone you know walking around with their mental checklist, this blacklist that your parents maintained, and you respond as follows: “What are you talking about? Of course we have to send out a holiday card. It's the holiday season. What can you possibly be thinking?” Reluctantly, she acknowledges that you are right, a rare admission. “What are we going to send out?” she asks. “I don't know,” you respond, but you have noticed since moving to your suburb that every single card you get includes a photograph of kids or of entire families. Each one is elaborate and there is no money spared on these once-a-year greetings. One guy you know, who does not have a wife or kids, sends out a card with a photo of his dog, Bart, on it. “Whatever we do, the card has to have a photo,” you say to your wife.

You think back to when you were growing up. Most of the cards you received were generic and were simply purchased at a store. The majority of them had a stylized green Christmas tree on the front or some quaint, snow-covered scene. Out of the big stack of cards that came in, only one or two came with photos, and those were always from the people who lived in the largest houses that you had been to, in suburbs that were different from your own.

You think about it and realize that there has been a cultural shift in card-giving, or, come to think of it, maybe you shifted cultures; you are not so sure which. Now you cannot send or receive a card that does not include a family photo, usually taken in some exotic locale. As if that is not enough, the exact location is usually graphically typeset in a not-to-be-missed place on the card.

You enjoy sending out funny cards, and you want to come up with something better than the Halloween-themed Christmas card that your wife selected last year. You thought that it was odd to send out a Christmas card with a photo of your son as Frankenstein and your daughter as a fairy princess on it, and, judging from the lack of comments from your friends and family, they did, too. But the reality is that when your wife showed you the Halloween photo that she selected and thought to be the best kid photo out of the five hundred or so pictures that you had of them that year, you rejected it outright when she asked for your opinion. You told her that you thought it was inappropriate to send out a Christmas card with a photo of your kids dressed for Halloween, and suggested that if she wanted your friends and family to see that photo perhaps you could send out a Halloween card next October. This opinion, which you offered to your wife upon her request, like many opinions that you offer, did not matter to her. She liked that Halloween picture and that was the only good photo that you had of the kids, according to her.

That year, while you were awaiting your wife's idea for the card and for the photo, you noticed a shoe box in the dining room. “What's that?” you asked your wife, noting that it was unusual for there to be a shoe box in the dining room. “The Christmas cards,” she responded. “That what?” You opened the box to see three hundred cards, all of which have a photo of your son as Frankenstein and your daughter as the fairy princess on the front. You couldn't quite believe that this would be sent to your closest three hundred friends and family members, including your parents, Brian and his “wife” at the Clayton Inn, the Fairchilds, Annika, and your friend-boss and his family, who you are sure would all react like you, thinking, “Why did the Falangas send out a Halloween photo for Christmas? What were they thinking?” This is bad, you thought. You ignored it and made a mental note to assert yourself more next year. You received not even one single follow-up complimentary call on your card that year. Of the hundreds of cards you received, there were none that were Halloween-themed, like yours.

This year, you are more engaged in the process. You would like something funny, but neither you nor your wife has an idea. Nothing clever comes to mind, and you feel that you have to do something big to make up for last year. You put your wife up to the challenge. “What kind of funny Christmas card can we come up with this year?” you ask. You both think on it and think on it some more and cannot come up with anything.

Then your wife, who seems to have hundreds of friends with whom she confers on even the most mundane aspects of her life, calls Karen, her most creative friend in matters of graphic design, to see if she has any ideas.

Not even an hour later, Karen calls back, while she is clearing the dinner table, and tells your wife that she has an idea. In less than one hour, while she was preparing dinner and feeding her three kids, Karen, who has never celebrated Christmas in her entire life, calls your wife and reveals her idea for your card. “How about ‘Happy Holidays from the Falalalalalalalalangas,'” she says.

Instantly, you and your wife know that there will never be any holiday card from the Falangas better than that. You have had the last name Falanga for your entire life, and your wife has had it for fifteen years. No one, in generations of Falangas, has ever thought of this idea—not your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, or anyone before them. No other relatives, either. Karen, who has never celebrated Christmas, did in less than an hour what the Falangas have not done in at least four generations.

Your wife finds a printer and she takes Karen's unbelievable concept to him and in three days you have what you know will be
the
big-hit holiday card in your suburb. You will more than make up for last year with this card and you have Karen to thank. The cards go out and the calls pour in.

Prove to Your Kids That There Really Is a Santa

Your son is eight years old and is in second grade, way too young, you think, to be questioning whether or not Santa is real, but there is no doubt that he is suspicious. You think that it is a shame that such a young boy is starting to be robbed of the magic that for you lasted through fifth grade. For the most part, you sort of ignore your son's questions on the topic of whether or not
you
are really Santa. You do not want to deceive him straight on and you do not want to raise his suspicions further by arguing too hard.

A week before Christmas, you are at a neighborhood holiday party—which, by the way, you were made aware of one half hour before leaving your house—and they have hired Santa to entertain this adult-only crowd. Of the many, he is one of the best Santas that you have seen at a party in the neighborhood. At this party, standing next to the fireplace mantel, you meet a woman. She is admiring all of the prominently displayed holiday cards featuring family upon family photographed at one exotic location after another. One says, “Happy Holidays from the Falalalalalalalalangas.”

After introducing yourself to her as Mark Falalalalalalalalanga, she tells you that her young kids were once skeptical that Santa was real. “How did you address that issue?” you ask, looking for some clues. She tells you a story that intrigues you. Last year, she tells you, she hired the very Santa that is at this party to come into their home and distribute gifts. She said that after that her kids were totally convinced that Santa was real. Your wife, who gets even more excited about this holiday than you do, even though she never celebrated it as a child, gets an idea. That night, she hires Santa to come over to your house a week later, at 11
P
.
M
. on Christmas Eve. It is her idea to set up the video camera with the kids earlier on Christmas Eve to see if they can capture Santa on film. You tell the kids that you are not sure if Santa will show up on video or not. You say that Santa, because of his magical qualities, may be invisible on the video. You do all of this in such a way that your kids think that all of this is their idea.

Your son thinks that he's got you now, because he has this brilliant idea, and if you are Santa, as he suspects you are, then you will be the one captured on that video film tomorrow morning, not Santa.

It is 9:30
P
.
M
., Christmas Eve. The video is set up on a tripod and it is pointing at the tree. The kids go upstairs and get ready for bed. After reading together, you say a prayer (a Catholic one) and the kids go to sleep. At 11
P
.
M
., Santa arrives, just as your wife had previously arranged. He is the best Santa that you have ever seen and he has shown up with a big sack. You brief him about your two children and you tell him what is in the packages that he will deliver. He earns the $80 he requests and you tip him $20.

The next morning, your kids wake you up and, like every Christmas morning, you all go barreling down the stairs to the living room together. Your kids open all of their presents, and as they are winding down your son remembers the video camera. He turns to the family and says, “Hey, let's see the video. Let's see if Santa came last night, let's see if he is real.” You tell him that is a good idea. You rewind the video and press two or three buttons on the thing before you get it into play mode. You hope that you did not erase anything that may have been recorded the prior night.

For the next half hour on that video, you and your family witness something spectacular: the process of Santa delivering the wrapped gifts that your kids just opened. The grate of the fireplace rumbles. Santa is not yet in the view of the screen. But you can hear him. He talks to Rudolph, Prancer, and Dancer. He eats the cookies that your kids have left out for him and drinks his hot cocoa, plain as day. You hear the boxes rumble. In his thirty-minute performance, he talks specifically about both of your kids by name and he tells your kids to respect each other and to always try their best, while looking directly at the camera. He talks as he moves between the fireplace and the tree and places all of the gifts that your kids just opened. Your kids cannot believe what they have seen and your eight-year-old becomes his school's biggest Santa advocate. You have bought another year.

Get a New Computer

You have two computers in your house. One is your wife's 1984 Macintosh SE, so it doesn't really count. It is more like a souped-up Selectric typewriter, and even your children regard it as useless because it has no application for anything they are interested in—no Internet, no CD, no games. They cannot imagine what their mother uses it for.

You have another computer, which is now four years old, an eternity in computer years, which, in your mind, are like triple dog years, making your computer eighty-four years old. Your kids have a library of fifty, sixty—you don't know—seventy computer games, all on disks. You notice now that every time they insert one of these games it runs slowly, the sound stutters, the colors are weird, or the game doesn't open. The computer frequently sends you messages that the hard drive is full. “Not Enough Disk Space for This Application,” it says. Not knowing much about computers, except the commonsense logic that you develop after years as a lightweight user, you think that if you delete things on your hard drive then everything will be OK. By OK, you mean that you will not be interrupted from whatever it is that you are doing anytime one of your kids turns on the computer to do something and gets frustrated because the computer is not doing what they want.

Typically in this situation you stop whatever you are doing, no matter what it is, and you start to deal with the source of your kids' frustration, the eighty-four-year-old computer. They call you and not your wife because you have billed yourself to your kids as a “dad who can fix anything.” They know that your wife, who has not ventured beyond her 1984 Macintosh SE, will be useless in restoring their computer well-being. “My dad can fix anything,” your daughter tells her friends, and that makes you feel good. Now it is time to deliver on that promise.

Your diagnostic inquiry starts with the easiest, most obvious thing: you take the CD out of the C or D drive—you are not really sure which one it is or what that really means—and you clean it with Windex. You insert the disk. Fifty percent of the time this cures the problem. This is the kind of repair that you like the most. On top of the fact that the computer now works, your kids have developed a newfound respect for you.