Alexis
SATURDAY / OCTOBER 12 / 8:30 AM
The listing popped up on my phone last night. I scrolled through the pictures at least a dozen times, then tried to conjure the house’s full layout in my mind’s eye as I fell asleep. Now, over breakfast, I am looking at the pictures again and trying to make my only-one-a-day-during-pregnancy espresso last, while Sam struggles to convince Caleb to eat the Cheerios on his highchair tray. Last night it had seemed like a good idea to schedule a 9:00 a.m. showing, but now we are running late and I have to text our realtor.
“Dammit, Alexis, can you help me out here?” Sam snaps after Caleb sweeps a chubby hand across his tray, knocking most of the cereal onto the kitchen floor. I jump to attention and quickly clear the small island, dumping our coffee mugs in the sink for later. “Don’t curse, he’s old enough to repeat you now. Just give him a yogurt pouch and I’ll get the rain jackets.”
Our weekends often devolve into a chaotic and unproductive exercise in domesticity, especially compared to the order and calm of our weekdays. Monday to Friday, we hand Caleb off to his nanny at 7:00 and take turns coming home early enough to give him dinner and put him to bed. I love the nights when it’s my turn. I’ll let him babble and splash in the bath until the water gets cold, while I sit on the floor next to the tub just grinning at him. Then, against all principles of our overdue sleep training, I hold him in my arms long after he’s fallen asleep, inhaling the clean smell of his curly auburn hair and running my fingers along the chubby curves of his delicate, new-fawn skin. Somehow, on the weekends, both of us fumbling to parent together is harder. It makes me worry how much worse things will get when the new baby comes.
As we cross the bridge over the Potomac into Northern Virginia, the mottled brown and green wall of trees clinging to the river’s steep western bank rises up in front of us through the mist. “I’m really excited about this house, Sam.”
“I’m sure you are. It’s too expensive and too old.” He smiles out at the squeaky windshield wipers and takes one big hand off the steering wheel to reach over the gearshift and squeeze my knee.
“But it’s supposed to be one of the nicest neighborhoods inside the Beltway, and old houses have a lot of character.” For the next ten minutes, I rattle off the house’s features, having memorized the listing description, while Caleb dozes off in his car seat. Sam alternates between quiet chuckles and long sighs, letting me know he’s skeptical, but doesn’t interrupt me.
When the GPS instructs us to turn into the neighborhood, I stop mid-sentence and actually say “Wow.” We’ve abruptly left behind the featureless principal roads and strip malls of D.C.’s close-in suburbs and turned onto a narrow, curving street. Thick woods on both sides open up every few hundred feet to postcard-perfect scenes of residential affluence. Manicured lawns, large houses set back from the road in a variety of tasteful architectural styles, and high-end cars casually parked in driveways combine to make me suddenly and painfully aware of the old Honda hatchback we are driving. We inherited it from Sam’s parents years ago—a perfectly fine car for people who live in the city and park anonymously on the street. Not a car for this neighborhood.
“Wow,” I say again. “I can’t believe we’ve never been back here before. We’d have to really step it up to fit in.” I’m almost whispering now, as if someone might hear us.
“We could just throw a new car into the mortgage while we’re at it,” Sam mutters, slowing down to look around himself. I can tell he is impressed.
Two more turns and we find ourselves on Shadow Road, pulling up to a large, pale blue house partially hidden behind a trio of tall evergreens. As Sam tentatively pulls into the house’s semicircular driveway, our realtor steps out of the bloodred front door waving with nearly frantic excitement.
“Good morning, Crawfords! I’ve got to say, I did not think you could get into this neighborhood!” she practically yells to us from the portico as I help Sam strap Caleb into the baby carrier on his back. Now that I am pregnant he’s grudgingly accepted this load, but he’s so tall that I have to get on the tips of my toes to do it, clutching a jumble of carrier straps pulled as long as they’ll go. I resist the urge to tell our realtor to shut up, and quickly finish all the clips so I can cut off her broadcast of our inadequate finances.
Even in the gloom, the house is beautiful. It is a Cape Cod Revival, sprawling but symmetric, with a steeply pitched roof and dormered windows sheltered by a frame of additional fully grown trees on both edges of its wide lot. As I climb up the brick steps, I notice the large house numbers spelled out in serif script above the front door and smile at the indulgence. A house worthy of writing out its numbers.
“Let me tell you this even before we go in, the house needs a lot of work, but this street is fabulous. Seriously, if I were you, I would make an offer on it today,” she continues emphatically as we step through the front door.
We worked with the same realtor when we bought our rowhouse, and I had called her a few weeks ago, the day after my positive pregnancy test. She knows how focused I am on finding an as-close-to-perfect-as-possible house before the baby comes, and we don’t waste time anymore on pleasantries.
The front door opens onto a large foyer with an elaborately detailed triple archway to the living and dining rooms, and what looks like a sunroom beyond. “Gracious entry to formal entertaining spaces,” narrates our realtor as we walk in.
“It smells musty,” Sam says, doubtful.
“Well, this house was built in the 1920s, and it’s only had two owners, can you believe it? Some of it must be additions, but it all flows together seamlessly.” She gestures to the left, past the intricately carved staircase, “There’s a den and powder room over there,” then pivots to the right. We follow her through a narrow doorway and enter an indeterminate but long-past era of poor taste—muddy-colored linoleum floors, tiny, veneered cabinets clinging to oversized soffits, and a fruit-themed backsplash.
“The kitchen is at the front of the house, which is unusual, and clearly this one has seen better days,” she continues. But beyond the main kitchen is a breakfast room, enclosed on three sides by divided-light, floor-to-ceiling windows, and another living space with a gray-veined marble fireplace surround and hearth. “Wood-burning, may not be functional,” she goes on. “This room would be an excellent playroom. You’ll be needing one of those.”
The basement is damp, Sam hits his head on the ceiling going up the stairs to the second floor, and all the bathrooms desperately need updating. But neither of us has ever lived in anything nearly as gracious, or as big. Our narrow rowhouse downtown is a new construction box, full of light and not much else. Sam’s parents’ house is perfectly fine, but its aluminum siding and identical neighbors hold little charm. My mother and I always lived in apartments—run-down rentals I’d just as soon forget. In fact, I can only think of two houses that gave me the same feeling I have right now: the Federal-style mansion of my former boss, a lifelong strategy consultant who worked in a dozen countries before buying a half block of Georgetown for one person, and back in college, the expansive Connecticut estate of my freshman-year roommate who’d taken pity and brought me home with her for a long weekend.
In this house, it feels like the same good taste and sense of wealth could be mine. Dentil and egg-and-dart moldings crown several rooms, the subtle irregularities of the thick plaster walls feel special, and the narrow-plank white-oak floors are original—according to our realtor—and quite lovely, if profusely creaky. I am enamored.
“Maybe we can get more for our rowhouse than we’ve been thinking,” I whisper up to Sam as I tickle Caleb under his soft chin. Our realtor leads us through the living room to a set of French doors opening to the backyard, her heels clicking. She must be in her late sixties, at least, and dresses up for showings on the weekend. We pad along quietly behind her in sneakers.
“Alexis, come on, this is too expensive, and I know you. You’re going to want to change everything in here.” But before I can respond, Sam turns his attention to the yard.
We are standing on a crumbling brick patio, overlooking a wide, gently sloping expanse of green that ends at a towering line of deciduous trees. Through the patchy branches, I make out what looks like an even larger backyard, a pool covered over for the season, and the stacked glass and concrete boxes of a modern mansion beyond.
“Those trees must be a hundred feet tall,” Sam says, surprised. “Definitely room back here for a pool … we could have some really good parties.”
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