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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
We go back to old homes to reinhabit past selves. We don't own them anymore, but they belong to us nonetheless.
May 14, 2002 | "The door's open," I tell my mother. She nods. We're sitting in a car across the street from the West Los Angeles house my family owned for 20 years and hasn't occupied for 12. It was recently sold and is clearly empty, a work in progress. A Dumpster sits in the driveway beside a pile of lumber. The sound of hammering carries. "Its open," I repeat. "We could go in."
She nods again, without enthusiasm. The desire to revisit homes you've left is a quirky, eccentric one, though if you live in mobile L.A. and always read the For Sale ads, you can fulfill it surprisingly often. To my mother, who sees no point in dwelling on what's past, it is incomprehensible, though I know if I get out of the car, she'll follow. I stand at the entry I once approached with the blindness of habit, and the coming-back feeling rises: a surreal combination of utter familiarity and total strangeness. The lawn edging the driveway is overgrown; a torn screen is propped below a window. Nothing looks as it used to, but I know this place in my bones.
This was the house my family moved up to. The day we closed escrow in late 1969 was pure triumph. For my father, who still had nightmares of walking penniless through 1936 New York, the only achievement that mattered was not being poor; for my mother, needy relation in a family of successful pawnbrokers, heaven was membership in the professional middle class. And now they'd made it: From their beginnings in a Brooklyn walk-up and a Queens semidetached, they'd reached Manhattan, then a California postwar tract traditional, and finally this sprawling brick-front ranch, with breakfast bar, three bathrooms, two fireplaces, and a huge living room overlooking a heated swimming pool.
We settled in. My mother taught school and my father's law practice prospered, and soon there was money for a decorator who turned the house into a paragon of 1970s style, all burnt-orange and shag, urns of dried flowers that "echoed" the rug, and bedroom art that matched the spreads. We were sometimes happy there, often not, but our lives followed a predictable enough suburban trajectory -- my father worked endlessly, my mother chauffeured and shopped, their marriage faltered but survived; my sister and I grew, rebelled, reconciled, left.
I never liked the house, with its haute-bourgeois pretentions and utter lack of mystery or grace, but spend enough time in a place and events bind you to it. Stoned nights, political battles, yearning poetry written in a dark, incense-perfumed bedroom, furtive sex in a pool dressing room -- flip the inner photo-album pages marked "adolescence" and all the scenes are set there.
Later, when I moved almost yearly, it was my only fixed base. Still more shots: anniversary parties, birthday brunches, weekly dinners with the folks accompanied by a changing cast of brought-along men. And then my parents retired and the city grew harsher, and they left for a faux Mediterranean village 100 miles south, where no one was under 60 and where they gradually turned into old people. When my father lost his mind and began staging sit-down strikes on their front lawn, refusing to go into a home he said wasn't his, no one could figure out where he thought he belonged.
"Hello?" I call out. "Can we come in? We used to live here." The hammering stops. Someone mutters assent, then a quick "Be careful!"
