Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House by Meghan Daum Read Free Book Online

pad less than ten miles away. The proceedings, I’m told, were not hostile but rather so infused with guilt and unaccepted apologies that my mother developed a rash on her neck from rubbing it in anxiety. From what I gathered, my father and brother simply sat there, swatting away mosquitoes in a nonplussed stupor.
    By the time I deigned to get on the bus and travel the twenty miles from Manhattan, where I was living in squalid postadolescent rebellion in Greenwich Village, my mother’s new house looked like a page from the (then quite au courant) Pottery Barn catalog. Sleek modernist pieces were flawlessly juxtaposed with antiques, cut flowers leaped from glazed ceramic vases, the framed art posters that had festooned the old house seemed now to have multiplied; between the placards for my mother’s theater productions and the original, mostly abstract art either sold by or created by her new friends, there was scarcely an inch of blank wall space. Too broke to buy significant pieces of new furniture and too charitable to abscond with any major stuff from the old house, mymother had a living room sofa and chairs made of wicker. Though I do not remember this incident well (I suspect—make that hope—my mother remembers it hardly at all), I know she led me through the five rooms of the house with enough trepidation to suggest the parent-child relationship had been abruptly reversed.
    “It’s cute,” I said.
    This was a terrible time in my life. I was unhappy at college, and the unhappiness was exacerbated by guilt about being unhappy; it just seemed utterly inappropriate to the occasion. Depending on whom I was with (my mother being one example), I could be a real drag and this day was a case in point. I remember skulking around the house and eye-rollingly pronouncing it “nice” and “fine.” I remember sitting outside on the patio and eating a meal of tomatoes, French bread, and polenta, a product my mother squeezed directly from its plastic, sausagelike packing onto an earthenware plate. I remember feeling that she wanted to have some kind of seminal mother-daughter conversation but was still too shell-shocked to dare to initiate one, a vulnerability I took full advantage of by retreating into near silence. I remember that I later realized that the wicker furniture in the living room was actually the porch furniture, recushioned, from the Jones Lane veranda.
    Speaking of which, the Jones Lane house had developed the half-ghoulish, half-comical appearance of a refrigerator that’s been raided by someone hoping to go unnoticed. Like tubs of ice cream furtively poked by stray fingers in the middle of the night, the rooms hadn’t been emptied as much as they’d been manhandled into a patchier version of themselves. The sofa and dining table and the better armchairs still in place, it was smaller items—desk lamps, cheap bookshelves, a butcher board chopping block—that would suddenly reveal themselvesas not there. You’d try to set down a glass of water while watching TV and realize the end table was missing. Kitchen supplies would be thinned out in a way that, oddly, was both insignificant and highly irritating; the flour sifter would be gone from the cupboard, the preferred salad tongs absent, the “good napkins” no longer folded in the drawer on top of the less good ones.
    My mother has said that the initial idea behind getting her own house was that it would be a temporary arrangement. She simply wanted to see what living alone was like, to know she could do it, to check it off the list of life experiences that—by virtue of her generation or her hometown or her own choices—had heretofore been denied her. Indeed, in the beginning her house seemed very much like a young person’s sublet. The small things that had been purloined from Jones Lane were my mother’s big things. A single desk lamp would light her entire bedroom; an end table functioned as her desk. But given that unlike my father she had a