dreamhouses

On dream houses

In his reading at the Geffen tonight, Marc Acito warned against attempting to build your dream house. “Dream on” he said, indicating it was better to imagine your dream house than attempt to make one.

Dream houses have haunted me, and my husband as well. We wander downtown Los Angeles looking through the windows of loft spaces. We imagine ourselves, younger, more talented, certainly thinner, and more alive in a new space that would make our lives perfect. We thought this when we moved to LA from Orange County, and we thought this when we moved to Orange County from Riverside. Thinness, newness, aliveness, and fulfillment filled our heads when we left New York for California, and the bohemian talent that filled the East Village would surely – we thought – fill us up like Greek coffee shop to-go cups too when we moved from East 63rd Street to 14th Street.

We have dreamt long and hard the dream of houses. And it’s no wonder. I never lived in a house. I grew up in apartments, the first one owned by my grandfather near Temple Emanuel, off 5th Avenue, before we moved east to 70th Street and Third. Then it was up and over to 75th street and Lexington to a big place which my parents then gave up, moving upstairs in the same building to a much smaller unit.

The apartments never fit us. Much too small or much too big, but never right. My father felt hemmed in by apartments while my mother despised the trouble of a house. In this sense their housing differences mirrored our situation. Their marriage never entirely fit my parents (my father drank and cheated, while my mother ate and read), and I never fit them either – being awkward, glasses-wearing, fat, shy, and quietly, strangely imaginative. Not a good child to show off to strangers, or to the private school that I attended – miserably – for years. Not good Junior League material, not even when we had some money and status -- all of which evaporated when my father lost his job.

My husband lived in a house out on Long Island, but his house was not – as they say -- a home. His father was the dutiful youngest son of a German Jewish father who was also his boss, and he was never home because he worked all the time. His mother cooked and cleaned and played solitaire in her bedroom when the kids came home from school. Periodically a frightening set of wannabe Teutonic grandparents descended upon them with m and m’s. My husband's father went into hiding under the basketball hoop near the garage. Then the entire family moved to California. My husband lived in the guesthouse. The main house in a very real way was never his domain.

But this is all too dark. Too easy. Our parents did the best they could. I loved my nutty Norwegian dad. I am a lot like him. I loved my literary mother too, and my husband’s mother – a brilliant writer trapped into housewifery and early motherhood. And my father-in-law was a refugee from Hitler. No wonder he hid whenever trouble came knocking.

We keep on dreaming about the perfect house, but we are – I think -- really -- imagining a perfect family, body, and psyche. The dream house bandages over the wound of the perfect parents that we did not have and cannot be, and the perfect marriage that we don’t experience, because no one does. The dream house becomes the incarnation of these wishes, and as such it must be a lie, a displacement of a longing that does not speak for itself on its own terms.

So we must learn to content ourselves with our small, flawed house, where, appropriately, all the windows have been installed backwards. We must accept and enjoy our peculiar, loud, predominantly orthodox neighborhood, come to value and appreciate our curiously broken and therapeutically repaired selves, our strangely aggravating, yet beloved,relatives and our almost (but not quite) perfect, bohemian, individualistic daughter.

Shall we continue to dream of the dream houses? Ok, but not for too long. The telephone rings, my husband watches some game in the kitchen, while our daughter taps away her own story of dream houses and deranged parents on her own private computer screen.