Wendy Markham - Slightly Suburban

So, long story that could go on and on—no, I don’t want to live in Brookside.

But I don’t want to live in Manhattan, either.

“I want to live someplace where the sun shines and we can have a house, and a garden—” I see Jack cast a dubious glance at the barely alive philodendron on the windowsill “—and trees,” I go on, “and a driveway—”

“We don’t have a car.”

“We’ll get one. Wouldn’t it be great to have a car, Jack? We’d be so free.” It’s funny how basic things you took for granted most of your life—like cars, or greenery, or walls, ceilings, and floors without strangers lurking on the other side—can seem luxurious when you haven’t had them for a while.

“I don’t know,” Jack says again.

“Come on, Jack.”

“But…I get allergic smelling hay!” he quips in his best Zsa Zsa Gabor as Lisa Douglas imitation, which, I have to say, isn’t all that great.

“There’s no hay. I’m not talking about the country. Just the suburbs. It’s time for a change.”

“I’m not crazy about change.”

“Change is good, Jack.”

“Not all change.”

“Well, whatever, change is inevitable. We might as well embrace it, right?”

Jack doesn’t seem particularly eager to embrace it—or me, for that matter. He’s starting to look pissed off. He aims the remote at the CD player and raises the volume a little.

“I just feel like we’re stagnating here,” I tell him, above Alicia Keys’s soulful singing. “We can’t go on like this. We need a change. I desperately need a change, Jack.”

I should probably drop the subject.

But I’ve never been very good at that—not one of my more lovable qualities, but I can’t seem to help myself.

“I really think we’re missing out on a lot, living here,” I tell Jack.

“Missing out? How can you say that? This is the greatest city in the world. It’s filled with great restaurants and museums, and there’s Broadway, and—”

“When was the last time we took advantage of any of it?”

“I took advantage of it just last night,” he points out, and immediately has the grace to look apologetic and add, “It wasn’t that much fun without you.”

“Well, I feel like all we ever do is go to work and come home, and on the weekends, we scrounge around for quarters and hope we can find an empty washer in the laundry room. Wouldn’t it be great to have our own washer? We could leave stuff in it if we didn’t feel like taking it out the second it stops. We wouldn’t have to worry about strangers coming along and touching our wet underwear.”

“I don’t worry about that.”

“Well, I do,” I say, shuddering at the memory of walking in on the creepy guy from 9C fondling my Hanes Her Way. “Seriously, Jack. I want a washer. In a laundry room. In a house…”

“That Jack built.”

“No! You don’t have to build it,” I assure him, and he laughs.

“No, it’s Mother Goose,” he says, and I’m relieved that he seems a lot less pissed off. “Didn’t you ever hear that nursery rhyme? This is the cat that killed the rat that lived in the house that Jack built. Or something like that.”

“There are rats,” I say darkly. “They’re living in the alley behind this building. I saw one the other day when I took stuff down to the Dumpster.”

“There are rats all over the city.”

“Exactly! And now there’s a bad roach problem in the building.”

“How do you know that?”

“Gecko told me. He also told me the Mad Crapper has struck again.” I fill him in.

“Nice.” Jack rolls his eyes.

“Why do we live here, Jack? Let’s move.”

Oh my God! He’s tilting his head! He only does that when he’s seriously contemplating something!

Then he straightens his head and says, “This isn’t the greatest time to invest in real estate.”

“Sure it is!” I don’t care, the initial head-tilt gave me hope, and I’m clinging to it. “This is a great time! We’ve paid down our credit cards, we don’t have kids yet, we’re both making good money in stable jobs…”

Mental Note: save part II of Operation Fresh Start—in which we quit our jobs, or at least I do—for a later discussion.

“I don’t mean it’s not a great time in our personal lives,” he clarifies. “I mean it’s not a great time in the country’s general economical climate.”

“Oh, come on, Jack. It’s not like there are soup-kitchen lines around the block. The economical climate is fine,” I assure him, while wondering, um, is it?

“Anyway,” I add quickly, lest Jack point out that lately my current-events reading has mostly been limited to page-six blind items, “real estate is the most solid investment you can make.”

“Not necessarily.”

“So you’re saying you don’t think we should buy a house somewhere?”

“No, I’m not saying that.”

“Then what are you saying?” I ask in a bordering-on-shrill voice I hate.

But I swear, sometimes Jack’s utter calm makes my voice just go there in response. I can’t help it. It’s like the lower-key he is, the shriller I become.

He shrugs. “I don’t think we should jump into anything.”

“We’ve waited over two years!” Shrill, shrill. Yikes. I try to tone it down a little as I ask, “How is that jumping in? The least we can do is start looking at real-estate ads.”

“That’s fine,” he says with a shrug. “Go ahead and start looking.”

I promptly reach into the catchall basket on the floor by the chair, which is overflowing with magazines I never have time to read anymore.

Pulling out the New York Times real-estate section—which I pored over while he was still in bed earlier—I thrust it at him.

“What’s this?”

“The listings. For Westchester.”

“Westchester?” He frowns. “We never said we were moving to Westchester.”

“Back when we got married, we said we’d look in Westchester.”

“Did we? I don’t remember.”

I frown.

“What? It was a long time ago,” he says with a shrug.

“Well, then, to refresh your memory…we decided Manhattan is too expensive, the boroughs are also expensive and if we’re going to pay that much we might as well live in Manhattan—”

“Which we can’t afford,” Jack observes.

“Right. And Long Island is too inconvenient because we’d have to go through the city to get anywhere else, and the commute from Jersey can be a pain, Rockland is too far away, Connecticut is Red Sox territory…”

Kiss of death for Jack, the die-hard Yankees fan. I am nothing if not thorough and strategic.

“So,” I wind down, “by process of elimination, it’s Westchester if we’re going to live in the New York suburbs at all.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?”

“Yup.” Pleased with myself, I watch him scan the page of listings.

Westchester County, directly north of the city, is an upscale, leafy suburban wonderland. It just so happens that Jack grew up there. His mother still lives there, as do two of his four sisters.

“Won’t it be nice to live near your mom?” I ask Jack. “This way, you wouldn’t have to run up there every time she needs something. You’ll be close enough to go running over there all the time.”

To some sons, that might sound like a threat. But Jack adores his mother. They’re really close. And as mothers-in-law go, Wilma Candell is the best.

“And when we have kids,” I add for good measure as he scans the newspaper page without comment, “your mom can spend a lot of time with them.”

“I thought we weren’t talking about starting a family yet.”

“We aren’t. We’re talking about finding the house where we’re going to eventually raise our family when we start one.”