A couple weeks ago Dennis and I went home to Lafayette for my old friend Clem’s wedding. We flew into New Orleans to save money and my parents dutifully drove down to pick us up. I insisted we go into the Quarter for lunch at The Gumbo Shop. We all ordered gumbo and salad and white wine. And, as I held my breath and tried to act nonchalant, Dennis picked up his glass and made a toast “to the engagement ring on Heather’s left hand.”
Really? Are you serious? Really? my father kept saying. And when I went to the bathroom, Dennis later told me, my mother wouldn’t stop hugging him.
I state this all matter-of-factly because the engagement itself actually occurred 6 months ago, on my birthday, after a blizzard, over avocado smoothies and bubble tea at the only restaurant open in Cambridge. I hadn’t told my parents until just a couple weeks ago because I wanted to tell them in person. They’d waited this long, I figured, it wouldn’t hurt them to wait a little longer. Everyone I mentioned this to thought I was nuts, but, whatever. Plus, for quite a while now they’ve really, really wanted to hear that I’m settling down and getting married…and I’m a stubborn and ornery child. I don’t like to do what other people want me to do.
And also, because I hate the giddiness and shrieks that ensue when I tell people, which we’ve been doing in a completely random and nonsensical fashion. For example, we’ve been telling people for the past 6 months that Sean Cole will be marrying us, only to finally tell Sean last weekend when we bumped into him at Peet’s. We aren’t really big on the whole announcement thing. So formal.
To be honest, I’m not really sure what I think of marriage. And this isn’t news to Dennis…we’re kind of of like minds on the matter. Which I guess is why we work together. Dennis says he used to associate marriage with death. Myself, I associate it with something grown-ups do, not people like us. And more than that, I see relationships as fluid, not something that can be defined by law and society. But it’s a rites of passage, and there’s nothing wrong with a good party.
And to my father’s point, there is something to be said for making that commitment. Like now I can say to Dennis that if he really hates being back in Boston, in a few years time if he wants to move to a new city I’ll go with him. And the whole notion of children starts to seem a little less abstract. Not much, but a little.
However, my terror of the suburbs has only increased. It’s as though being single into my 30s was to be my one last defiant streak of rebellion and now it’s gone. And our little counter-culture rebellion is doubly at risk because now we too are on the real estate investment bandwagon. Not so much because I really want to be a homeowner, but because I want a cool bathroom with a clawfoot tub. And I want a piece of Cambridge to call my own before we get completely priced out for good.
We saw a great 2-family property right in Central Square last week – Dennis’ friend Orrin dropped him a note from LA to let us know his cousin is selling his house and to offer us first dibs – we went by after work Thursday and then had dinner at River Gods right around the corner and fantasized about how cool it would be to live there and for River Gods to be our neighborhood bar …and then I tossed and turned the whole night, spreadsheets and mortgage calculators floating through my dreams, crunching impossible numbers we could never afford.
Have I mentioned being an adult sucks?
And Friday I came home from work and Dennis mentioned he’d picked up a real estate guide and to take a look it’s on the coffee table and how about Stoneham it’s a lot cheaper and isn’t so far outside of Boston… and I burst into tears.
I WILL NOT MOVE TO THE SUBURBS!! (for if I do, the SUV-driving, bad hair-wearing, 30-pound-weight-gaining, latte-sipping soccer mom alter ego will surely chase me down and kill me!)
We have this friend, Mitch. He’s an old acquaintance of Den’s from years back when he was working at a bar on Huntington Ave. We crossed paths with him a few months ago at the Philosophy Café and have since woven him into our eclectic social network. Mitch is brilliant and interesting and extremely odd and we enjoy his company because he provokes and challenges us with esoteric questions and references to volumes of books we’ll never have time to read. Yesterday over coffee Mitch asked me what it’s like to be a genius. I love this question because (a) I’m so clearly not a genius and (b) it vindicates me of my dirty little secret that back in high school I got lower SAT scores than almost anybody I know. Around here (meaning the intellectually elitist “what school did you go to” northeast) people think I’m smart because I wrinkle up my forehead a lot and don’t talk much — generally because I don’t know what to say. Everywhere else they just think I’m weird.
But I do rather like the genius angle. It’s a very lofty notion. And it lends itself nicely to this pet fantasy that I harbor at times – such as when I’m playing at being an adult, which, as I’ve mentioned really sucks – that I’m destined to be, among other things, a brilliant investor.
Friday night, in my discouraged stubborn child I-will-NOT-move-to-the-suburbs pouting funk, I sat on the floor in front of our bedroom bookshelf and looked for a book I hadn’t read yet. There are a lot actually, because now the bookshelves contain all of Dennis’ books, in addition to all the books I buy and then forget to read. We have a lot of environmental books that Dennis acquired from working at Living On Earth, and we have a lot of travel books acquired from Savvy Traveler and a lot of money and investing books from Marketplace. (Now you know – where normal employees get stock options, National Public Radio employees get left over books.) I pulled one of the investing books off the bottom shelf and adopted it for the weekend.
For no other reason than because the author describes himself as a “stewer” with an almost limitless capacity for brooding and pondering and dwelling and hemming and hawing, re-examining and reconsidering and revisiting and just generally being as neurotic as me, I arrived at the conclusion, Aha! You see I am determined to be a brilliant investor, and here’s my plan…! And I then proceded to phone my father to tell him about my plans to invest the money he’d surely see fit to loan me to buy a house in Cambridge with a clawfoot tub.
And guess what? I’m really not a genius or a brilliant investor, I’m just a simpering little girl and I really, really, really hate this stupid grown-up thing. (Nope, my father didn’t see much sense in my vision, and we’re back to the old wait-and-see game.)
But hey, I’m getting married next year, and it’ll be a good party. What comes next is anybody’s guess.
