Glass Half Full

In our house love is measured in ounces. Between Mark and me at least.

Our unexceptionally-appointed kitchen has one of those do-hickies in the refrigerator door that dispenses filtered water, ice cubes, and—well, I don’t mean to brag here but—crushed ice too.

It makes me feel like royalty.

Growing up I lived in a lovely house in a beautiful seaside town. I went to an excellent school, and my dad had a good job. We had a Black Labrador, and my mom took painting classes and did lots of gardening. You could call it an entitled life.

But it was New England. Which is to say the richest man in town drove a battered ancient Volvo, everyone we knew set their thermostats to bone-chilling temps in the winter, and my mother didn’t subscribe to a single magazine. She read old back issues our neighbors passed on to her.

It wasn’t until the late-80s that my sisters and I, home for a holiday and desperate to check our apartment answering machines, went to the Apex in Pawtucket to buy Mom a touch-tone phone. Had we never done this, and were she alive today, I’ve no doubt she’d still be dragging her finger along that rotary dial, and swearing every time it slipped and she’d have to start all over again.

When I started going to school in Providence, I got a taste of life beyond the crusty Yankee world. Not that my city friends weren’t New Englanders too. But some of them were, well, new school.

I had to mask my amazement when, while making packets of Swiss Miss cocoa at Diane Prescott’s house—a structure that amazed me in its unapologetic immensity and modernity (not to mention that her mom drove a brand-new bright orange Pacer)—all we needed to do was turn the knob on a tap at the side of their kitchen sink. Amazingly, the spigot produced boiling water, instantly. It was so handy, so indulgent, I felt simultaneously dazzled and dismayed by it. Nothing should be so easy.

Of course, I never let on any of this to Diane. Though I’m sure she did wonder why, at age nine, I was perpetually desperate for a cup of tea.

But now I’m a Californian. Someone who has had regularly-scheduled massage appointments every six weeks, like haircuts. Someone who—before having kids at least—filled empty spots in the weekends by having Asian immigrants slough dry skin off my feet and scrape dirt from my toenails. I’m no longer amazed (or scandalized) when I walk onto someone’s deck and see a hot tub.

I don’t see any of these changes in me as indicators that I’ve struck it rich. In fact, I’d guess Mark and I have less money that our parents did when we were kids. It’s just that here, on the Left Coast, personal indulgences are not poo-pooed. They’re actually encouraged; signs that you’re taking care of yourself, not acting hedonistic.

When my mother visited San Francisco, sometimes between Scrabble games and her scouring my coffee pot I’d suggest that we go get mani-pedis. But she never had any desire to try one. In fact, she seemed turned off by the idea. Like her take on restaurants—”If you’ve got a kitchen and know how to cook, why would you go out?”—she was unshakeable in her views.

Our rental-house refrigerator’s water and ice dispenser is like some weird time-and-place machine. More than once when someone comes over for the first time, I’ve commented on it as I get them water. “We never had one of these when I was a kid,” I say, pressing the glass against up against the fridge door. “I feel spoiled rotten that I have one now.”

I’m laughing when I say it, but I’m really only half-kidding.

The downside to our water dispenser? It’s painfully slow. (Was Diane Prescott’s like that too? I can’t imagine it was.) To fill even a rocks-sized glass takes something like a minute, maybe two. That might not sound like long, but it feels like dog minutes. I’ve missed the better part of brilliant stories our dinner-party guests have told while I was slavishly refilling their glasses. And after packing snacks, changing diapers, and putting on coats—trying desperately to get out the door—I’ll realize I need water for the girls. My momentum screeches to a halt as I press each sippy cup against the door and wait, my blood pressure spiking.

Sometimes when this becomes unbearable I pivot to the sink to slosh water in the cups. Relief! But inevitably I envision the presence of microscopic water-borne carcinogens. I picture myself polluting my babies’ pure bodies. The burden of that guilt is sometimes worse than tacking another five minutes of lateness onto wherever it is we’re already supposed to be.

In the evenings when the girls are in bed, Mark and I convene on the couch. It’s where we exhale after punching the clock for the day. And like a game of chicken, one of us eventually gets up for something—to pee, to flip the laundry, to get ice cream—and asks, usually without thinking, “Can I get you anything?” It’s only when the response is, “Sure. Water would be great,” that we realize what we’ve done.

I joke that our water dispenser should also serve Ritalin. I can’t imagine anyone, even with a normal attention span (unlike my hummingbird-fast one), not finding the process painful. In fact, Mark tends to just use the tap these days. But every once and a while he’ll come back to me and hand me a pint-glass that’s filled nearly to the top. “This,” he’ll say proudly, “Is how much I love you.”

Renting is the New Rich

My friend’s husband swept his hand along our speckled-gray linoleum kitchen counter. “You guys are lucky,” he said wistfully. “Really.”

Why? Well, he wasn’t referring to our not-even-Corian counter top. His point was that we have the good fortune—as he sees it—to live in a 1,600-square-foot cottage. A rental. Whereas he owns a grand home in a manicured stately neighborhood. A house with a master bathroom, as well as a family room and a living room. A grown-up big boy house.

But in the past couple years he’s often grown wistful when he, his wife, and kids visit us. When he looks around at our compact living room, our Home Depot-appointed kitchen, and our children’s modestly-sized but lovingly-decorated bedrooms.

We have something that he doesn’t. Less.

It feels like the Curly Hair Straight Hair Syndrome—the thing that’ll have Paige desperate to blow-dry her curls flat some day, while Kate burns with envy over Paige’s ringlets. But this is about houses, not hair. It’s the same thing, but in bigger, more grown-up terms. We go to their neighborhood and I delight in not having to lock the car doors. I luxuriate in the adult conversation that takes place while the kids play in another room.

I admit it. I’m jealous.

We don’t see these friends nearly as much as we’d like, so when we do get together we have a lot of ground to cover. And we’ve gotten efficient about it. “The job? How’s the job? And Jeremy’s school? You still liking it?” We trade good news and worries like baseball cards. Sometimes new things are in the mix, sometimes it’s the old standbys. I’ve heard my friend’s hubbie lament their large mortgage before, but this time when she brought it up too, my concern lingered.

I mean, I know a housing crisis is raging through the country like a forest fire. But I think I’ve been naive enough to think it wouldn’t reach my friends.

And then another old friend dropped by the next day. She was on my side of the bay for a work thing, so she came over first for tea. She’d never been to our house.

“Oh your place is so cute!” she said the moment she stepped in. By her second or third remark on the charms of our Craftsman I felt obliged to point out that the place isn’t really “ours.” “We rent, you know,” I said, feeling the slightest twinge of Lowly Renter Complex.

“It’s just we were looking to buy when I was pregnant with Kate,” I went on. “And we weren’t finding anything we loved, and I was getting pregnanter and pregnanter until we finally just decided to rent. Especially since we’d never lived in the East Bay. Best to kick the tires before committing, right?”

I should carry a tape recorder around. I’d save a lot of breath on my frequently-compelled-to-utter Why We Rent Rationalization if I could just hit Play.

The part I often fail to mention is when we were looking to buy and we ran the numbers on our monthly payments, we realized I’d have to return to work right after having the baby. We couldn’t make it work on one salary. And I know myself well enough to picture myself crying in an office bathroom stall, leaking milk and lamenting that I had to leave my weeks-old baby with a sitter.

I know millions of women do this. Right now thousands of stalls nationwide are packed with weeping Mamas. And my heart—and a rumpled Kleenex—goes out to them. But if there was any way I could avoid joining their ranks I wanted to. Instead of being a slave to a mortgage, I wanted the option of staying home with my baby. If only in the short-term.

My visiting tea-drinking friend lives in a spectacular home. It’s perched high over a harbor cove with views that tourists take honeymoons to see. One whole side of their house is glass. And since I last saw the place—then a real estate wet dream—they’ve redone their kitchen, pushed out the walls. Made it even fabulouser.

I made some comment crowing over her divine place. “Well, if we can even hold onto it,” she said flatly.

The remark may well have been exaggeration, but she went on to point out the long sliver luxury car she’d pulled up in. “Oh God, that thing. It seemed like such a good idea a year ago and now it’d be impossible for us to pawn off.”

Before even covering all our catching-up bases, my friend looked at her watch and announced she needed to dash. Paige and I waved from the porch as she drove off, and when we turned around to go back inside I looked around our compact quarters with a new sense of appreciation.

“Maybe Paigey,” I said setting her down by the coffee table. “This place isn’t so bad after all.”