My house!

I came home to a letter taped to my door. I saw the same envelopes on my neighbors'. It didn't take a great stretch to know this was either a notice that the owners sold the development and we would have to pay someone else going forward or a rent increase. The last time we had dealt with the latter, the managers wanted to turn the slick mud and broken concrete of the driveway into something made of pavement that would be feasible to drive up, so perhaps we are due.

It is the rent hike, though they give no reason other than they wish to. There is a matter of political expediency, that the increased housing prices under Trump coupled with the lingering effect of COVID afflicting local real estate with fleeing cidiots means they can charge what they wish.

It is 20%. They will evict us in under sixty days if we don't pay it, plus an additional $250 deposit.

I laugh because what can they actually do to us? If Amber and I are not out of this development on our own in sixty days, something has gone horribly wrong with the house we have been trying to buy for months—which is distantly possible, as one lawyer or another has thrown up speed bumps that stop the process for weeks while one form has to be filled out and signed by people I will never meet.

It seems a message from on high that I am supposed to leave here, or I am choosing to take it as such. I need my omens.

When Amber sees the letter, they note that our mortgage is now less than a thousand over what we would pay for rent. I narrow my eyes and tell them not to ruin this for me by reminding me of the number. I have only had to ask them every few days if they are sure this will work out and not financially destroy us. Best not to give me a reason to amplify the frequency of my anxiety.

The next day, at work, I saw the email while revising the syllabus for my college class. Amber and I have been approved to close on the house. I immediately sent them a GIF of Kermit the Frog waving ecstatically. They replied in an irrationally sedate, almost off-handed way, as though we (mostly they) hadn't expended significant time and money on this goal.

A coworker and former neighbor enters the education office and asks if I received the letter taped to my door. He had just moved into a new house, so it doesn't directly impact him, but his mother is still in the development. I tell him I will close on a house next week.

"So, I left," he says, "You're leaving. An apartment under my mom's hasn't had someone living there for months. I don't see how they think they will fill more apartments by charging more."

He isn't wrong, but I am pleased to be part of that problem.

It is trite to call the closing surreal, though my mental illness hits like a gran casa. I refrain from letting anyone know I am here in body only.

Amber proofreads the checks I have signed to the lawyer, which I find pedantic. I am upset, but I am not careless.

"You wrote the wrong amount."

"No, I didn't. Look, I wrote one thousand and eight dollars and thirty-eight cents."

"You didn't write the two hundred."

I look down at the check. I wrote the number correctly, and then the script omitted it.

"You did it with this one too."

I look down and, yes, that one is also missing the number in the hundreds place. The lawyers should have asked for the checks first rather than briefly re-explaining and making me hand-sign things I perused this morning and e-signed. Why do they keep forcing me to do this? What was the point of e-signing? They could have told me the amounts in advance, and I could have arrived with written checks. I came in with a bank check for over forty thousand dollars. I am capable of moderate preparation.

I want to leave this office. I need a break, but I cannot get one without seeming like a freak, without everyone thinking I am buying a house under considerable duress.

Am I?

More forms are handed my way. I sign one in the wrong place. What on earth is the purpose of any of this? I have already signed most of these. Then they make me sign a form and hand me the same form again, unsigned, like a joke. I raise an eyebrow.

"We like to have one signed for the buyer and one for the seller," the lawyer explains.

Is this not why the Good Lord Above invented the copy machine?

Then it is over. The lawyer directs our real estate agent, Erin, to hand us the keys. We already had the keys, which the seller left in the mailbox. We had just come from a final walkthrough of the house, where Amber and Erin picked apart every flaw in the home I will be paying off until I am seventy-four. Still, ceremony must be maintained.

We escape the office a little over half an hour after arriving. Amber asks how I am. I give them an expression whose contours I do not know from the inside but which fills Amber with utter horror.

When I get into the car, I break down sobbing. I cannot say why; I only know this is the most pressure I have experienced. The house is fine with me and will be finer after Amber's many tweaks. I don't love how much money I have just thrown at these people--$14,000 of which was paying them to sit there and chat with one another about bribes. Still, most of my end was covered by bonds that sat accruing far less interest than they were supposed to. The monthly numbers are unlovely things, but the mortgage is lower than many rents I see advertised. Rents will continue to rise as our mortgage will stay the same. If we wait until I am in my seventies to make our final payment, we will have paid over six hundred thousand dollars for a house that is, let's be honest with ourselves, a cube on a quarter acre. I had been telling myself we would be better off actually putting money into a building that belonged to us rather than tossing it into a hole presided over by faceless, negligent management companies who ignore that we have to keep the windows open in all seasons to stave off dangerous levels of radon.

Amber sobs in sympathy and fear, believing they have ruined my life.

This is not how I want to tell the story. It is not the character I want to play in Amber's. This is one of the most important things I have ever done, one that might have been overdue. I have not resisted much about it once I acclimated to the idea. I want to tell you I was unambiguous, that signing these final documents felt like relief. They are not to me, and I cannot fully articulate why that might be. It is a considerable burden, going from no debt after decades of paying it down to a staggering amount of debt, but that is not it. I have lost my fear that all the money will disappear, which possessed me for years of steady paychecks.

Somewhere under my weeping is a better story, but I have lived it the wrong way.

I am not being coy. I can list how the totality of this emotion protrudes--my overwhelming irritability, how dissociated I become, how uncontrollable my bawling--but I cannot draw solid lines between cause and effect. I do not have one solid reason why I am so distraught.

Do I hate the house? I do not. It is cute and has enough space for us. Do I feel trapped with Amber? No. My years with them have been my best and most self-actualized; I adore them and cosigned a more significant change than this. Red Hook has been my home, my community. I have never felt more welcome somewhere. The taxes are a bit high, but all the kids I've met here have been delights, and my car's suspension isn't shot from potholes, so the money is being used well. I trust Amber has factored we can afford this.

It tethers us in politically dangerous times. However, the brownshirts will not focus on upstate New York first; we will be forewarned. Also, we don't have up-to-date passports, so where were we going?

It feels overdue, something newlyweds in their mid-twenties did in bygone eras. At twenty-five, I was in the wrong relationship, finishing a master's degree in education and pretty sure I did not want to teach. I lived either in a dilapidated one-room apartment with that girlfriend or with my parents when Emily missed rent on that apartment. I was not an adult and far from mentally stable enough that a thirty-year mortgage wouldn't have sounded like a death sentence. It would have been a disaster for both of us to get a house, especially as Emily left me for another man a few years later.

Amber says we could not have afforded the down payment that made our house possible until recently. They have been working part-time for years but only graduated in May. They did not get into Cornell, which freed up their money that otherwise went to tuition. My student loans were forgiven a few years ago, freeing up hundreds more. It feels unjust that I have paid over a hundred thousand in rent in the decade we have lived in this apartment, money that could have been far better applied to a house, but that is the way of things. We had to live somewhere.

I want to lose myself in the emptiness of this despair, but we are due to a celebratory dinner with their mom. Amber offers they could go alone, but that would be too much of an oddity; I couldn't possibly.

My mask affixes so well that no more tears to loosen it. I will not cry more about this, as I cannot express why I cried at all.

Julie, their mother, is pleasant as always. That I can tell, Amber does not signal my catastrophic distress, even when I use the restroom. I might not have let this slip with a family member, but more from secondhand embarrassment than direct kindness.

I still feel empty as I do not know what triggered this, but kung pao noodles fill some part. These real estate lawyers should have provided snacks. I am not normal. Nothing is normal, but the pretending comes more fluidly. I do not imagine Julie suspects but perhaps Amber will share this in one of their nightly calls. Given that there is next to no way I would not write about this, I could not fault Amber for a little gossip. It would, at worst, be spoilers, and they should be allowed their confession and release.

One of these will be the color of our living room.
Or not.

Making the house ours is a project for Amber, something on which they can hyperfixate as much as they did buying it. My responsibility is largely keeping out of their view while they do the lion's share of the work. I clean the kitchen while dancing--I would have been a highly sought-after Manic Pixie had a Y been an X. I want to keep out of their hair while also avoiding the stereotype of the helpless husband by asking for tasks. I try to ameliorate this by requesting up front a list of useful things I can do and subsequently scratch off.

Amber occasionally comes in and asks if I have cleaned the cabinets or swept the floor, which I have, only they didn't see it happen, so they do not fully believe it did.

I am not keeping Amber company, as this would be unnecessary. Their tiny speaker plays crooning music, which I occasionally hear through the podcasts in my headphones. Amber has no obligation to relieve me of how useless I feel.

I like the house. I am sure I will love it one day, but I like it well enough. It will be a relief to have my own space again, something I have not had since I lived in a studio apartment when I was poor. I was on someone else's turf every other time, from living with my parents to working at a boarding school to cohabiting with a partner. It is not as though I have a home to myself--what would that look like? Why would I do this?--but the designation that some part of this belongs to me is novel.

The other, larger room that is not our bedroom is technically Amber's studio, but it is really our guest room and is addressed as such. I may allow an inflatable mattress on my floor should the company require it, but it will not be a permanent installation. I do not know for sure that Amber's studio won't end up with a daybed.

We have our apartment until the end of February, and I realize Amber intends to use much of that time. I fear it will be the twenty-second or later before they will relent that we can move in, and will do so in crying frustration that they didn't do more. They will not allow me to pick up a paintbrush or roller, as they need to do this, even though it would halve their burden.

I am permitted to sand, sweep, and pick out paint swatches. Every room will be a different color; only their studio seems neutral. When I half-joke that my room might look smart in a deep red, they shake their head and inform me they will have nothing to do with a red room.

I put my mother, an inveterate internet shopper, on the case of finding me a proper desk. I had looked at a few, but they were either thousands of dollars or made of carbon fiber overlaid particle board. Our home needs more important purchases, and I must consider a desk a luxury.

I did not want any desk. I fantasized about the roll-top desk my grandfather had when I was a child, which seemed so classy as I sat beside it and scribbled. When my grandmother died, I wanted this desk most of all, feeling it was my due as an author, but I lived in a tiny apartment with Amber. Given the paucity of space, I could not justify taking it. Even in our current apartment, it would have been tight.

I didn't know where the desk went. I assumed some ungrateful relative or other had taken it, though I didn't know who. I hoped it hadn't been sold or destroyed, but I couldn't know.

My mother sends me the ad for a desk, which is okay, but my heart isn't in it.

"Do you want Dad's old desk?" my mother asks.

My father tends to have desks bought from Walmart and assembled of pressed wood, which suffice, but I avoid these new and would not like secondhand.

"I mean your grandpa's," she corrects before I can decline my father's hand-me-down.

It is as though the prodigal son had shown over the horizon. "You have this? Where?"

"It's up in the shed," a cinder block building on my parents' property. As far as I remember, it is homely but functional, housing mostly disused lawnmowers and Halloween decorations. Its wood beams are decorated with permanent marker graffiti from my older brother and his friends using it as a place to hotbox thirty years ago.

Had I known, I would have paid homage whenever I visited, rubbing linseed oil into its wood and promising to come for it one day.

"We gave it to your brother when he had his business," my mother explains. "He didn't like it. He gave it back when he got rid of the business."

I assured her I loved that desk as a child. She did as well, but it doesn't match her decor.

She gives me the dimensions. I remember it towering, but I see it through a child's eyes (though the last time I saw it, I was thirty-one). I mark it with chalk on the floor. It is even smaller than I remember, which my mother echoes. It is a piece of furniture with presence.

"You could paint it freaky colors," she suggests.

I will be doing no such thing. What blasphemy.

I delightedly dance about the house, finding this a good omen.

She soon starts hedging and sending me ads for other desks.

"Why?" I demand.

She says she wants me to see the desk before deciding, but I cannot sacrifice the hours on a weekend when I need to get us closer to living in our house. In my head, this should have been a week and a half, then we could begin moving boxes. Amber finds this concept unfathomable. The house must be perfect, painted, and prepped before we can imagine any such thing.

"What is wrong with my desk?"

They thought the shed was dry enough for a desk that must be seventy years old. Nature disagreed, filling it with mold and mildew and eroding the wood. I am distraught that this coveted object has been ruined by unwitting neglect.

My mother wants to shove a used desk from Craigslist into my home immediately. Amber will need weeks more before they can conceive of allowing any furniture in our house, let alone a strange desk.

"The point," Amber says, "is that it was your grandfather's desk. That was okay because it could wait until I'm ready. We have nowhere to put it now."

I see no plenty in the argument. Amber has their plan, and their brain will not allow this deviation without complaint.

It had snowed, light and powdery, and I felt a small pride in shoveling the driveway for the first time, though it was more pushing it aside than digging.

We hear a man, our diagonal neighbor, screaming. For seconds, Amber and I dwell in the frigid air of forced voyeurism. Then, as his profanity grows more intricate and direct, the crying woman standing in the snowy bed of the pickup truck failing to defend herself against his barrage that she always does this because she is an idiot and is costing him $8000, our seeing becomes evidence collection. What if he hits her? What do we do then? As a mandated reporter, I would already be calling this in if she were a child. If I alert the police there is a potential domestic violence situation developing, does one of them end up shot? One of the local officers is notorious for having killed two barking dogs who might otherwise have done nothing threatening. Is it worth the possibility? We have yet to make our first of 360 mortgage payments. The man might guess who dropped a dime.

Amber and I scurry into my car so we do not have to learn enough to force the decision. Later, I check the local groups and see nothing about it. It could be only some marital stress and weak conflict-resolution skills.

5-0!

I park our driveway. A police car pulls onto the street in front of my house. I tense up, thinking I might have committed some traffic infraction in the last mile (unlikely), then that he might want to interrogate us about our house. We do not have curtains yet, and the house is scattered with evidence of our moving. I will remain silent shortly after asking him to return with a warrant.

He gets out in no rush and walks into our neighbor's house (across the street, not diagonal) without knocking. This is a cute development of residential boxes in a nice neighborhood a few miles from town. There is no wrong side of the tracks in Red Hook.

"Maybe they are friends?" Amber suggests.

An ambulance pulls up a minute after I enter the house. There is no crime here, probably.

The EMTs exit, also in no hurry. Amber cautions me to stop peeking through the slats of the blinds, but I suspect such casualness means my neighbor is dead, or they would be quicker.

Another ambulance pulls in. The EMTs are as lethargic. No one has come out of the house yet.

Finally, they bring in a gurney, which I hope means they will transport a person and not remains.

I look away to scrub the floor.

During our visits, I heard barking once. Otherwise, everyone was quiet, even as we walked through the small neighborhood. What if we bought into a lifetime of domestic misery?

Our first apartment was above and beside a hardware store (at which we recently spent hundreds of dollars), close to the town center. We could not have known they got their deliveries every Tuesday at 4 am, yards from our sleeping heads, when we signed the lease. Our next and current apartment only had a geriatric man who would knock on our door for help with his phone or rampant alcoholism. What eccentricities will find us at our house? We have not spent the night yet. We cannot know.

I need to love this house to which I am dedicating so much of our savings—and we have not finished. For all their effort, Amber has yet to buy the paints that will cover our walls. They want a corner bench for our kitchen. I need a desk. We just bought a combination washer-dryer to fill the space left where the house flipper's son took the appliances out of pettiness. It was $1700 on sale, for which I sent my wife two grand in a few taps.

The expenses will not let up for a while, encompassing things even the overprepared Amber has not imagined or realized. It is the nature of translating a house into our home.

It may be more manageable when I stop trying to be useful. I made a nest in one corner, a cushion from my car that made the seat too tall, and a teal husband pillow. It's not much, but it's home.

Amber is at the other end of the hallways, prepping the room or some other exceedingly useful thing that will allow us to actually start moving boxes. Then, they will work on the bedroom. Next, I expect, will be the living room, kitchen, and, eventually, my office. We want this place ready before introducing the cats, as we will surely struggle once they are here.

I sit in reserve, ready to be helpful at a moment's notice, but only really used as a supplemental set of eyes for our new washer-dryer combo.

This morning, I figured out some school tax rebate program and deduced how to have all my money vanish every two weeks. Amber congratulated me on having good percentages already. It was nothing I had done intentionally.

They are caulking windows and filling tight holes. I am an adult. I do not have to engage with such obvious bait.

I occasionally walk around when I have sat in inutility. When neighbors pull into their houses, I nakedly peep at them from my uncovered windows. I read books on my phone I am meant to review. I do a load of dishes, as the dishwasher here is not held together by gummy rubber bands--not a joke--then load them back into my car to bring to an apartment warmed only by space heaters, as though it resents our leaving, so it killed the boiler the town will not allow the landlord to replace.

last watched: Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man
reading: Once and Future Me