Other People's Houses

When I was a kid, I was convinced everyone I knew had more money than we did and lived in a nicer house. There was a period where we lived in a housing project, and the funny thing about that was how it was the first truly nice house I’d ever lived in. There were no rats, like we’d had in the house in Alabama we’d left to move to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. My eldest sister and I would lie awake at night and listen to them moving around under the bed. In the housing project, the blankets didn’t freeze to the bedroom walls like they did in the first house we moved into in Oak Ridge, which was a leftover from the 1940s, when the government built the entire town in like a month or whatever, and the majority of the houses built for the people who worked in the plants processing the uranium for the bombs we dropped on Japan had no insulation. Because who needs insulation, right? Certainly not people living in the fucking mountains of East Tennessee, that’s for sure. (Yes, that’s sarcasm. Winters there fucking suck.)

Maybe that’s where I developed the idea that everyone lived better than we did. All the houses around us were nicer and people drove nicer cars. My mother drove a 1963 Chevy Nova. The guy across the street drove a Corvette. I remember, too, that he had beads across the doorway leading from his living room to the hallway and I thought that was the height of sophistication. Thinking about it now, I wonder if he was gay. I don’t know many straight men who decorate with beaded curtains.

My friend Judy lived on the street behind us, and I’d go to her house after school and watch reruns of The Space Giants. She had a color TV in her bedroom. And all her bedroom furniture matched, like in the Sears catalog and on The Brady Bunch. She had lots of toys, too. I had toys—we weren’t that destitute—but Judy had toys I could only dream of. Like, she had one of those Pulsar dolls. His chest was clear and there was a button on his back that you pressed and it made his heart beat and blood course through his veins. It sounds like a nightmare now, but back then I was fascinated. Her older sister was pretty anti-social, though, so I never stayed too long before I trudged back home. Or I went to Karen Kennedy’s house, two doors up. Karen’s place was even nicer than Judy’s, but her parents were older, so we played outside at Karen’s. I guess because the noise made by kids enjoying themselves was too much.

Their house did have a cool garage and it was there we’d do what we called “Variety Show.” We’d all gather there and Karen would drag out her record player and we’d pretend we were a musical variety show. Karen would play her K-Tel Collections and we’d either lip sync or sing over the actual singing. This was before the advent of Mr. Microphone, so we used a hair brush. I always opened with “You Don’t Have To Be A Star (To Be In My Show” by Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr. Sometimes I’d duet with Judy or Karen on “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” or “Love Will Keep Us Together.” Those were the days, I guess.

We didn’t do many sleepovers, either. Not at our house or at anyone else’s. I remember my sister had a friend sleep over one time, and they stole a pack of cigarettes from my mother’s husband. That sent him over the edge, so that friend never came back over. I don’t blame her. My mother’s husband was a lunatic.

I usually slept over with one of my cousins. I’d do entire weeks at a time during the summer. Or we’d both—my sister and I—go over to our Aunt Etta’s house. Etta had something like ten kids (I honestly forget), and they had an enormous house. With ten kids, you’d need one. The living room there was off-limits, reserved for company. And while we were technically company, we were not the kind of company that got to sit in the living room at Aunt Etta’s house. When I was really small, it was decorated in gold velvet, but by the time I was a teenager, she’d redecorated with green velvet. It was always about ten to fifteen years out of style, of course, but that didn’t matter to me. What mattered was all that velvet.

To me, velvet was for kings and queens. They slept in it, they hung drapes made of it, and they wore it. So, to my child’s mind, anyone with velvet in their home must be doing something right.

Through junior high and into high school, it was rare for me to visit anyone’s house after school or over the weekend. I didn’t do it consciously, though. I’d see the houses they got off the bus at and I knew not to invite them over, too. In the eighth grade, our teacher invited us all over to her house for a big to-do at the end of the school year. Her house was every bit as nice as my Aunt Joan’s. Her husband was a dentist, so it tracked, I guess.

In high school, when I was a sophomore, a couple guys wanted to come over to my place for a sleepover because my mother’s husband was the manager of a liquor store and they figured there would be a massive supply of alcohol. In the end, one of the guys was grounded and couldn’t come over, so it was just me and one other guy. We pitched a tent in the side yard, got drunk on shitty whiskey, and fell asleep just after midnight. The next morning, my mom made us breakfast, then we drove him home. His house looked like something out of a magazine, and I was embarrassed that he’d sat in our kitchen and eaten breakfast.

I have a nice house these days. It’s small, but it’s just me and my husband and two dogs the size of ponies, but we don’t need six bedrooms and four bathrooms. Because if we had six bedrooms and four bathrooms, we’d have to keep them clean, and that sounds a lot easier than it is. But someone built a house up the street from us and it sold for just over a million dollars. The guy who bought it rents out rooms in it, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to afford the mortgage. Our house has appreciated quite a bit from the purchase price, but it isn’t going to sell for over a million any time soon. It’s also built a lot better than that McMansion up the street. My husband went during the open house when they were trying to sell it. He returned and said the entire house was a piece of shit and the baseboards hadn’t been installed correctly, the outlets and light switches were crooked, and there was space around most of the windows where he could see into the wall where the insulation was.

It reminded me of going to Thanksgiving one year at the home of a woman my husband used to work with. I was helping in the kitchen and opened one of the cabinets. I swear the cabinet door was made of balsa wood. But this was one of those 20,000 square feet homes that look like a literal castle, in one of the swankiest neighborhoods in Atlanta. I wasn’t impressed.

And it makes me wonder about all those houses I envied when I was a kid. I wonder how crappy the construction was in those. And I remember that house in the projects, and how well-constructed it was, and how warm in the winter and cool in the summer. I’m supposed to be ashamed of having lived there, but I’m actually not. It’s funny.