The emails come in from three different regions sometime after 1am. This means whether I wake up at 4:30 (can’t sleep, too much on my mind), 6:30 (grabbing two cold hard boiled eggs, rushing to work) or 8:30 (Saturday mornings, kids playing Lego quietly for an hour already), the real estate emails are there waiting. The emails appear as faithfully as my questions of Where to next?
Why bother looking at emails every day when there isn’t a job yet? Why bother looking at real estate in three different locations when not one of those places is sure?
It might be a compulsion.
It might be coping.
Every day, pictures arrive in my inbox. New houses appear. The best ones eventually disappear—This property is no longer available.
I started looking at houses when summer cracked the skies open like a can of blue paint. Some too-expensive houses flaunted pools and reclined deck chairs. Then for a few nostalgic weeks, the trees flamed red and porches glistened wet with autumn rain. In the yards, leaves gathered in corners like cattle before a storm. Now there is a skiff of snow in some regions, in others, yards are smothered. There is no way of knowing what is underneath.
It might be compulsion. It might be coping.
Every house has a few guarantees. Every home has a front and a back door, at least one kitchen, cupboards to store dishes in. There will be bedrooms and bathrooms and roofs, stairs.
Every house in my price range has a quirk. This week, two newer houses had open concept closets in the master suites, no closet doors. Shelves pecked with a million holes to be versatile, customizable. And they look fine, decorative even since the shelves are currently empty and there are three crisp white shirts hung on three white hangers. But my husband would not dutifully fold his jeans so the hems are tucked in and the folded edges face out, neatly. He would not cross the arms of his sweaters so they do not fall free. The legs and arms would be like so many wild animals scattering. One galley kitchen had white-washed boards running the length of the walls hung where cupboards normally go, every planked inch packed with canisters of coffee and tea and spices and bottles of oil. All the insides out. Some other houses had orange cupboards or green countertops or a different kind of flooring for each and every room—pink carpet, green carpet, little striped wooden squares going off in every direction.
This might be a personality test. What does it tell you if I want grey planked floors seamlessly tying rooms together, many windowpanes divided in neat squares edged thick with white? Three bedrooms up and an extra down, two bathrooms or more, a fenced yard, a silver chandelier, a quiet corner for an upholstered writing chair, some sprawling trees, a garage? What does it say if I want a house laced with sunlight, soft colours training, cathedral ceilings,
spotless? The view itself doesn’t matter: waterfront or ravine-backing or blinds opening to the Prairie gleaming like God’s bald head.
This might be a test of character. I try on houses in my mind. Who might I be here? Is there space for their Lego, my dumbbells, room for three piles of homework on the kitchen island?
If it is a character test, I come up short on seeing the good in what is long-standing. I don’t want to gut that bathroom. There is no room for guests in that kitchen. I don’t want that roof falling in on my head. How much easier to picture myself in a place that is scrubbed new, where the insulation is already held in by sheets of drywall.
The things to date about houses that I don’t understand:
A deck with many short planks painted white, blue, purple, randomly patterned
Neighbours who have old toilets and bookshelves on the lawn
Carpet in the bathroom
Carpet in the kitchen
Orange paint
A dead goose hanging from the roof
“Tree in the front lawn not included with sale of the house”
It is not difficult to tell which properties have been staged and professionally photographed. The textured blankets draped over dining room chairs, the pillows crisply karate-chopped in the middle, the three perfectly potted herbs on the kitchen counter, a stuffed dog in a stuffed dog bed beside the glass table set with four towers of dishes for four invisible people. I fall for it every time.
The dark pictures are another story, with their cluttered countertops and loose doorknobs. I don’t want to see myself there in the shadows, there with wobbling knobs, in basements where the webs hang thick. I want life brightly lit, minimally cluttered. I want things beautiful, reliable, safe.
Some mornings I’m not thinking real estate. I’m thinking about Antonio. He lives in the park across the street from my church, sleeps in the subway. I wake up early and pull my bare arm back under the blanket in from the chill and wonder where he is sleeping, how cold he might be. I’ve started looking at single-room rentals—how much they cost per month. The rooms I can afford are mostly asking for a “roomie,” una señorita. Most want long-term contracts signed
and I am thinking about the three months of cold, about how long we can help for, about how long it is healthy to help. We can’t really keep him in our current apartment, three boys already sharing one bedroom, us already working from the couch or the bed. But in my apartment, the afternoon sunlight spills in slanted through the wall of windows and outside my bedroom window there is a tree. Here the furniture is softly grey, dressed with pillows and area rugs in plush ruby and teal and a bold elephant palate-painted as tall as a man hangs on the wall. Where in this would we put a homeless man the age of my father?
I think about safety. I’ve had friends leave the country because of trusting too much and their kids ended up assaulted. Privacy. Without a room for him, he would reside in all our public spaces where we often work, where we rest.
Leaves are swirling now, gathering chill. Is my heart losing square footage? Is some moral roof falling in? I don’t have a room for him, although I technically have space. How exactly can I build a life on hoping for more space for myself when I don’t know how to make enough space for someone else first?
Antonio comes over once a week so he can shower and have a hot meal. I choose unpretentious menus with easily chewed entrees to accommodate his rotting bottom teeth. The first week we bought new socks, underwear, jeans, two shirts, a jacket, a touque. Every week, we wash the plastic bag of clothing not on Antonio’s back. As the week wears on, the stain under his chin pools larger around the neck of his jacket, the smell of urine wafts sooner.
Antonio is a concert pianist. He often worked in hotels. He asks us about the cold in our country, about igloos, about our educational system. He doesn’t complain about his life, though sometimes he falls in the subway. Those times I carefully help him in and out of his shirt. He flushes with embarrassment. My Spanish soothes him, like a child and I keep my eyes low. He listens patiently to my youngest explain how Optimus Prime transforms. My oldest son teaches
him to shoot a Lego rifle. Every week he takes a 40-minute shower. The second week he borrowed my husband’s electric razor and shaved off his Santa beard. “I liked him better with the beard,” one of the boys whispered in English. “People look at me with a beard and think I’m homeless,” he commented in Spanish as if he understood, small upper lip pursed, then he laughed. My littlest son climbed in his lap declaring, “You are my best friend.” Antonio blinked, moving his arms around the little child as though feeling was coming back to limbs long pricked with sleep.
Antonio has lost track of his family. Most have left Mexico. “I don’t know if my sisters are alive,” he says. “I’d like to help them if they need anything.”
But how can he help, I wonder, when he can’t help himself? He carried their addresses in his breast pocket for years until one day the police robbed him and took everything he had, even those dog-eared papers. “They shouldn’t call themselves police,” my youngest son grumbled. “They should call themselves crooks.”
Paracaistas are crooks too, I found out today from Marina. Once a week, Marina comes and helps clean the apartment, scrubbing the gas stove, washing the outside of the floor-to-ceiling windows with a cloth draped over a broom, standing on a stool to reach the microwave. Something is always going wrong with her family; every week the amount we pay her seems to increase.
Her daughter’s family was living in an apartment. There was some illegality about the landlady’s papers that was being sorted out. One day while they and the landlady were out, the lawyer “helping” her case paid some drug addicts to smash in the windows and doors. Sixteen chihuahuas jumped past the broken glass and ran down the street. The group of men, armed with knives, took up residence in the apartment block, chaining the doors shut. They are still there, holding hostage all of the possessions inside. This is occurring with greater frequency in certain neighbourhoods. The men call themselves
paracaistas and they “parachute” in, invading homes and refusing to leave. Since there are legal issues with the apartment building, the police are paid off and do nothing to protect the rightful inhabitants. The hope is that the tenants and landlords will lose both heart and patience and relinquish the property and then the profits will be split between the lawyers and the addicts.
Marina handles it calmly. “I don’t know why these things are happening but at least they can move in with me now and not stay on the street. At least the children weren’t alone in the apartment then because who knows how that would have turned out.”
Her grandchildren are my children’s age. Even their school bags are being held hostage. I went through my children’s closets and pulled out pajamas, shirts, sweaters, some pants. I forgot to ask what size the mother wore. I forgot to send food. I forgot about the emails.
I forgot that what you think about depends on where you are looking. Like driving down a long prairie road, unconsciously steering toward your gaze. Stores will tell us “Not enough!” but our closets have extras. Emails tell us “Not enough!” but we have more than most.
I forgot doors are for opening, not for smashing in or even for admiring. I forgot that families are for the lonely, homes for the living, not for staging and shooting in soft lights only.
This remembering is a parachute slowly opening, suspending the descent.
I forgot I’d like to be a house, extending as wide as arms, indefinitely, in the direction of the park benches, front porch washed by seasons into gleaming pools, where every tree stands ignited and the light itself is a whole world gathering.