Sam Bell
My husband Dan and I stepped into the front room of a townhouse in Lawrence, Kansas, and were presented with a long tube of what appeared to be cat feces. The rental agent, a nice young woman new at this job, hoping to rent us this townhouse, stepped over it, red-faced and mortified. At the stairs, a short woman appeared. The rental agent asked if she was the tenant. She said no, but that the apartment wasn’t “show-able.”
The rental agent stopped in her tracks and said, “Really? We told them it would be shown today.”
The woman shook her head, and turned to face me and Dan, and said, “No, really, it’s not show-able.” Then she got into her pick-up truck and left.
The rental agent looked at our faces, and said, “Well, it will be nice for you just to see the space,” and herded us up the stairs. The tube was definitely cat poop.
We went up to the first floor of the space. There was a fireplace full of ash, and a half-empty handle of Jim Beam on a plastic tub functioning as a coffee table. Half-empty beers were on almost every surface.
“They must have been celebrating,” the agent said as we stepped over clothes and towels. The kitchen had exploded with trash and pasta sauce, red smudges on the counters. There were windows, but they were greasy. The half- bathroom was out of toilet paper.
“We would, of course, clean and, um, bomb the place before you moved in,” the agent muttered. A shiny black cat passed through the clutter and jumped onto the kitchen table.
We moved to the second floor.
Dan and I currently live in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment with plenty of sunshine and natural light, big windows, nice neighbors. We have lived here since we moved to Kansas five years ago. I was getting itchy for two floors, stairs, two bathrooms, but these elements of living space were parts of this townhouse and it paled in comparison to our apartment.
On the second floor were two bedrooms and a very narrow hallway. In the “master” bedroom was a lonely, odd bathroom sink in one corner. The full bathroom was small and covered in towels and make-up. There was a small den overlooking a dumpster in the parking lot.
Dan went pale.
As we disembarked and stepped back into the foyer, the agent turned the lights off in an obvious effort to cover up the poop. I felt bad for the cat.
This townhouse had every single thing that I was looking for. I wondered – if the townhouse had been cleaned and respectable, would I have been interested? I started to probe my psyche. Why was I so insistent that we move? Was it just the years piling up in one place that was getting to me? Was it our friends that were making swift moves into the housing market, with a tax credit and good rates? I hadn’t stopped to question my motives about moving. Instead, I poured over classified ads for townhouses, one-story homes we could likely afford in not-half-bad neighborhoods. Dan, however, had no motivation to move, never cared for social competitions about houses and lawns, and was against my efforts to find a new place to live. He came home one night last week to a yellow sheet of paper with my printing on top: “House Hunt 2010!” and laughed.
We both knew the townhouse did not have our names on it. Dan loved the idea of a fireplace, but we talked about where we would get and store firewood. The huge kitchen windows didn’t open. The half-bath was so small Dan’s knees would hit the walls. The walls were paper thin. The rent was $200 more than we paid where we were, nestled next to a field with a long, wooden deck. We went home and had a beer together on that deck. We laughed about the poop. We talked about why we would move at all.
The weekend before, I pulled Dan away from a lovely afternoon get-together with friends in order to go to Target and buy over $100 worth of cloth drapes for our large apartment windows. We spent the afternoon drilling holes that were probably illegal in the rental agreement, and hanging floor-length drapes in navy and burgundy. They blow in the breeze when the windows are open, and they shut out nearly all outside light at night. I am in love with these drapes. After five years, my instinct is to make the place we live in a home. Dan pointed out that we have already done this through the years of collecting a desk, an antique podium where he writes, standing up, a kitchen full of shelving and good lighting, and a layout for guests and movie nights. Nothing, Dan pointed out, was wrong with the place in which we lived. Still, I felt an urge outward.
A very good friend of ours just purchased her first house. She took us to see the lot in the dark when she was told she had to either put an immediate offer on it or face competitive offers that would be made by other individuals in the morning. It is a darling little house, with a corner lot and full-grown trees. The space of it is comparable to our apartment’s space, minus the yard. But she had to borrow a significant sum of money for the down payment, and the tax credit will be lost to the repayment of this loan, and to a remodel of the kitchen and bathroom. She wanted to be a home-owner, and I understand the urge. I am unsure if I only understand the urge because I feel external pressures from like-minded friends and family who assume that Dan and I will one day soon purchase a house.
These same people who expect us to live in a house expect us to make babies. When I told my mother on the phone that we were thinking of staying in our apartment for another year, she sighed, “Well, just for one more year.” She said this as if I was in prison and my parole was denied. “Then,” she went on, “you and Dan can find a lovely little place, where you can start a family, in a good school district.” We live a half-mile from a public elementary school, a mile and a half from the high schools. The only missing elements in her picture of a perfect American life were babies and a mortgage, and these are the two scariest elements of adult life to me right now.
Dan and I have close friends who love apartment living, and I take lessons from them. They moved from an apartment in a house whose roof was crashing down and the toilet disconnected from the floor with one tug. From here, they moved into a new apartment in an office park, and they love the counter space and the quiet. We haven’t seen it yet, but it looks lovely in photos. And, they celebrate the low-maintenance livability of an apartment, as Dan and I do. We don’t pay to fix the laundry machine, the toilet, the shower-tile.
There is a social expectation in middle-class American families that living in a house seems like the final step into the world of adulthood. This scares me. I have friends who have moved back into the very neighborhoods in which they grew up. My value system does not permit me to yearn for that return home, but again, I might understand the urge. I do not, however, understand the urge to strap every resource available to move into a house and subsequently eat beans and lettuce for dinner to afford the mortgage.
My grandmother lived on the side of a very large hill off of a dirt road in Lyme, New Hampshire, and this remains one of my favorite places on Earth. The porch faced a sloped field of beautiful trees. At night, deer and bears swept through the paths and the wind moved through the downstairs bedroom window. The rain hit hard on the roof when it poured. The house was a log cabin with a wood-burning stove. I loved everything about the place, from the kitchen on the second floor to the mossy, raw earth smell wafting through the hallways. There were lilies on the sides of the rock path leading to her house. If I try hard, I am right back there, in the muddy side yard, watching the green trees tilt in the wind. But what I remember most fondly are the family gatherings on the wrap-around deck, the time Uncle Keith threw me into the pool, the night we all danced to Dire Straits in the kitchen during a rainstorm. The log cabin commemorates the memories, the people, not the other way around.
Over the winter, Dan and I visited his brother and sister-in-law; they had just purchased a new home. It was, on all accounts, a wonderful place, with a huge lawn. It was, as my sister-in-law put it, the house they would die in. They scraped and saved, living with Dan’s parents to afford the house. Located at the start of a housing development, it had huge rooms, wooden floors, a nice kitchen. It was everything I would not want in a house, which startled me. I assumed that I would feel a familiar pull, as they did, to house the two kids that I eventually have with my husband in a large, spacious home. Instead, I thought about all the unused space, the similarities among all the houses on the block, the cold feel of the emptiness in the front room.
I have a lot of friends who live in suburbs. I have friends that express hatred for the suburbs. I only believe a few of these complaints. In some cases, I believe the criticism is jealousy. I lived in a suburb growing up, and though I said I hated it, I loved the neighborhood when it was full of friends and kids I could play with. I celebrated the feelings of home my parents created. They hung stockings from the stairs. They put the Christmas tree in the corner near the front door. They opened the front-room blinds on sunny days.
As I age, it slowly becomes clear to me that the space itself isn’t what I am looking for. It is what I do with that space that makes it meaningful.
My Aunt Barb and Uncle Keith live in a beautiful stone house in Enfield, New Hampshire. It is two stories, with hardwood floors, a cozy living room, and walls of windows overlooking acres of field and lake. The kitchen is beautiful, spacious, with a small fireplace in it. In the great room is a wide, expansive fireplace that spans the entire wall. It is one of the most beautiful homes I have ever been in, but not because of the Tiffany lamps or the new floors they put in this winter. Dan and I were married here, in the backyard, and the kitchen was the first place we were ushered into after the ceremony for a few minutes to ourselves before Keith presented us to all our guests as husband and wife.
As I look around our apartment, what brings me happiness are the drapes billowing in the pre-spring wind, the white lights above the kitchen island that sparkle at dinner, the cat on the kitchen table. Sure, I would love a larger hallway, a bigger bedroom. But I am not sure what I would do with that space.
The story goes that when my parents bought the land to build their first (and only) house, they sat down with the contractor and discussed what they liked and didn’t like about the initial and then final blueprints. Turns out that my parents each claimed to like design elements of the house to please the other, and they ended up with a house that has structural and design features they both hated. My mother had a small kitchen, which drove her crazy. My father wanted a dining room, and got an odd space next to the kitchen instead. Neither liked the upstairs; I would learn to hate it, as I shared a bedroom wall with my parents. The times in that house that stand out are active memories, not me admiring the fireplace from afar. I loved that fireplace during the ice Storm of 1990, when we needed its warmth and ate marshmallows for dinner. I remember building the deck from scratch, playing on wooden planks, half-finished, in the dusk.
My father made the brick walkway. There was a creek that formed in the front yard that, as a child, provided wonderment to me and my fascination with geology. I liked to stare at the blue jays in the baby trees in the sloped backyard. My tiny bedroom closet was great for hushed phone conversations with boys. It didn’t matter that I had a small closet. What made me happy was how I used the space. My first conversation with Rob Newcomb was in that closet. I was on the phone in the closet on a sunny afternoon when I realized the boy I loved actually loved me back. In hindsight, that closet was like a lucky talisman, a portal to my adolescent fortunes.
Kansas springtime is delightful. Unlike back East, things bloom early and bold in Kansas. It actually gets warm during the sunny afternoons. I love our apartment best when all the windows are open, the wind forming a current between the front room and our bedroom. And in winter, we like to stand at the sliding glass door that opens to the deck and watch it snow.
Our best friend Ben has recently become more involved with the concept of usability. He composts, he mends old clothing, and he tries to find uses for space. In his apartment with his wife, they have shared and separate workspaces, a specific place for exercising, and a large kitchen. They appreciate space more than anyone I know. Ben also carries with him an appreciation for the smallest elements of life, like finding a piece of red string on the walk home, or smelling barbecue as he sits outside and reads.
What I am learning about space is to appreciate it. In the townhouse Dan and I toured, we would have used the space inventively. It wasn’t the fecal matter and the mess that prohibited us from taking the place, it was the lack of a feel of home that spoke more to who we are and what we value.
Front rooms in houses make me laugh. My family had one, and Dan’s, too. These are rooms that are polished and off-limits from daily use. They exist as decoration, statements of privilege. I don’t know how many homeless people in Lawrence, many of whom I see weekly or even daily, would appreciate that space that is sitting unused. Success, to me, isn’t about having more rooms in my home than I can fill. It is, instead, how I have chosen to fill my own rooms.
I should mention that I have been in in the middle of a job search. I teach currently, but put myself on the market after recently completing my Ph.D. in English. I believe that my itchy feet and my job search belong together, somehow entangled. I am struggling to affirm my successes by making external demonstrations sit in for personal validation. This is to say, I have been misguided. I have been searching for a larger apartment in hopes of obtaining a higher-paying job. I had to stop and rethink this. I love teaching. I love the new drapes. I love sitting at the kitchen table over dinner with Dan. I love sitting on the deck with friends. I love grading at the large desk we purchased from a friend, sitting in the front room next to the antique podium. I have to be mindful of who I am – I can only contribute to space positively if I myself am fulfilled, and this no longer means money or a house in the suburbs. It means contributing to my community, my students, my own self, and my family as best as I can.
One spring, when we were in graduate school, Dan, Ben, and I drove to a campground on a beach in South Carolina. We would spend the week together in a tent and on the beach. It was an exercise in duality. The tent, large enough for three but contained and tiny, afforded us a forum to talk each night as we faded off to sleep. One night, during a fierce wind, we held tightly to one another, needing less space and more warmth against the rainstorm. The other space – the ocean – is, of course, a great expanse. We waded in its largeness. We ran down the length of the beach.
On the first night of our vacation, we arrived at the campground after dark. We parked the car that had housed us for over two days. We exited the car and found a darkened path to the ocean. We could hear the waves before we could see them through the brush and dunes. Finally, at the end of the sanded path were the beach and the sea. We walked in silence toward the waves. The night sky was wide and bridled with stars. I looked up, then down the beach. Here we were, the three of us, staring out at the space of the sea, the possibility it contained. When we were finished staring, we moved back down the narrow path toward the tent, where we slept in sleeping bags and made room for one another.
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Sam Bell is a Contributing Editor for Emprise Review.