I have never liked this house much. For many years it felt like someone else’s house, not my own. It’s homely from the street, a painted brick city house, squeezed in between an alley and another identical, abandoned house next door. It’s narrow and tall, with a wrought iron railing and three steps leading up to a shallow cement porch that spans the width of the house. It was a rental for many years and the renovations to get it ready to be sold to the man we bought it from were not like the choices an owner would have made. And it was “modernised” in the ‘50s; the mantels and the woodwork were carried out to a dumpster, a neighbour told us, removing any charm that may have remained from the time it was built at the turn of the century. Even then it was a ‘spec’ house, another neighbour who researched her own house’s deed told me one day, which meant that it wasn’t built for an owner, but for someone to buy. We used up every penny we had to buy it, borrowing $5,000 from our kind-hearted realtor, who had a “secret fund” she said she kept for situations like this, which her husband didn’t know about. Our other house sold quickly so it took us just a few weeks to pay her back. We sent her flowers with the cheque, and I wonder now, a little uncharitably, if she would have extended the same credit to a black person.
We’d decided to move back to the city after a four-year stint in the suburbs. The move made no financial sense, no logical sense, really. In the suburb we’d chosen four years earlier, the little brick houses we could easily afford were well maintained and pretty enough, the schools were reliably excellent, there were even trees and sidewalks like in the city. But we’d never felt at home there. It was like something that looked good in the catalogue but didn’t fit when you tried it on, I tried to explain to my friends in the city who were annoyed with us when we moved away and fascinated when we moved back. I missed the museums, the library, the playgrounds, the parks. And I missed some of the quirky people who chose to live in the city. The lawns were carefully manicured like they were in the suburbs and the cars faced the wrong way on the streets and no one ever thought to ticket them. I thought our quirky, messy family would feel more at home there.
Once we decided to move, I began frantically looking for a house with the help of everyone I knew. I knew that we had to buy before my reluctant husband, whose decision-making process is more logical than mine, changed his mind and dug his heels in. I’d been tipped off to this house by a friend—it had recently been put on the market and sold immediately, but then the buyer backed out and it was about to go up for sale again. The day the sign went up I boldly rang the doorbell without a realtor. The woman who answered looked surprised but pleased and opened the door wide. Her two daughters were perched on the couch. “We love the house but we’re getting a divorce,” she explained sadly. “Do you want to go upstairs?” I mounted the stairs with her, passing many, many framed pictures of this beautiful family in the stairwell and in the sunny bedrooms upstairs. I tried not to stare but I couldn’t help but notice that several of the pictures had Courtney Cox and Michael Keaton in them. “We moved here from California,” the woman explained. “Michael and my ex-husband were friends.” That added to the allure of the house. By that night, we had made an offer.
It was more than we could easily afford, and as a result we lived with the choices the previous owners had made rather than try to make it our own. Paul didn’t seem to notice everything that was wrong with it, but I hated so much about the house. The fact that there were no windows on one side, limiting the light. The moist, crumbling dark basement where cement had been poured carelessly over dirt, the old kitchen with one tiny window above the sink, the stingy front porch and another even smaller porch in the back, the cheap sinks that had been installed in the bathrooms, the fireplace that we couldn’t use because it wasn’t lined properly.
One morning, when we had been living in the house for ten years, I got up early and went downstairs to the kitchen. It was winter in Pittsburgh; I was wrapped in my long worn-out red terry cloth bathrobe and slippers. I was crossing the room to open the shade of the narrow window overlooking the sink when I noticed a thick, long brown stain running from under the dishwasher and up the stove, across the countertop to a loaf of challah bread which was open and half eaten—there were crumbs scattered across the counter and over the floor— then the line tracked to the back of the counter and disappeared behind the refrigerator.
I stood there contemplating that thick line of earth-coloured mud. It felt inevitable that something dark and ominous had come into our kitchen from below the ground, from the black heart of the house. I scurried upstairs and sprang across the bed to shake my husband awake. “Something awful happened in the kitchen. You have to come see.”
He scrambled into his bathrobe and down the steps, then stood contemplating the evidence. “It’s something big,” he said. “God.”
We phoned the guy we had called in the suburbs when a mouse scampered through our bedroom; he had stopped up the openings and given us a touching lesson on mouse behaviour (“they hate the wind, not the cold”) and we never saw another mouse after that This time he examined the brown stain and solemnly broke the news. “It’s a rat,” he explained. “Came right up through the dishwasher. I’ll try to find it.” This time he told us rat stories, and they were horrifying. How they are everywhere in the city, not so much in the suburbs which have newer construction. How when you walk down the streets of the city, you can see holes if you look closely, usually at the intersections. That’s how they get into and out of the ancient sewers and into dishwashers and underneath sinks. Then they start to breed. He didn’t find the rat, but he scattered poison and promised to come back in a week to check the traps.
We didn’t tell anyone the shameful secret, including our two daughters. But a few nights later when we were seated on stools in the kitchen, our dog growled and a dark shape ran across the floor. “Did you see that?” Anna asked. “What?” my husband and I asked innocently.
The next morning we awoke to find a pool of water on our kitchen floor, and although we had more than an inkling that the rat was responsible, we didn’t mention it to the refrigerator guy we called. When he pulled the fridge away from the wall and saw the rat cowering there, he jumped, pushed the fridge back against the wall, told us about the rat with a raised eyebrow, and left. We called the animal guy back and he caught the rat, which had chewed through the refrigerator hose. He set some traps in the basement and caught more rats, including some babies, and then came weekly until we were all satisfied that they were all dead, and placed poison around the periphery of the house.
But he never said they wouldn’t come back. It took about five years before I stopped thinking about those rats every single day. I couldn’t go to the basement and see the drop ceiling where he had found the babies without thinking about it. I couldn’t turn the kitchen light on in the morning without thinking about it. I couldn’t look at the dishwasher without imagining the tunnel they must have drilled through to get to our kitchen. Although it wasn’t necessarily true, actually, that the rat had had to drill a tunnel. The animal guy, whose name was Ken Knight, which is what he felt like to me—a knight who came to our rescue—told us they can crawl through a pipe or a hose. That there’s really no way to keep them out.
It was ten more years before we were able to afford to redo the kitchen. A crew of men tore out the counter and the cabinets and the floor. We replaced the refrigerator and the dishwasher and the stove. I only began to like my house when the kitchen was stripped to the original beams. I noticed the date and the name of the lumberyard where those beams came from. It was like when I found my ancestors on Ancestry, like the house and I were connected in some deep new way because I had discovered its secrets. It took the smell of fresh wood and new paint and the sound of saws and hammers to erase my memories of the rat. And since then we’ve ripped out the ceiling tiles in the basement and painted it white and scraped the money together, little by little, to fix the gutters and line the fireplace and redo the wood floors.
The porch is still skinny and there are other things that still annoy me. I need to travel to certain windows at certain times of the day to find sunlight in the house, which also still needs work on the gutters and on the third floor. It will never be an imposing house or exactly what I want. But I have learned to treat it kindly. As I fix it and care for it and spend time and money on it, I have begun to love it a little bit. Instead of its lowly beginnings as a neglected rental property, I think about the year it was built, stamped on that beam in the kitchen, and I treat it with more of the respect due its age. And I feel like it rewards me by letting me see its little pieces of loveliness. The curve of the stairs is quite beautiful, actually, and the little window on the landing on the way to the third floor always has a nice breeze coming through. The entry hall has its original green and white tile floor that delights me every time I look at it. And it’s a friendly house, facing out to the world, to the busy sidewalk and street, without shame despite its flaws. Birds perch on the wires that run from the roof to the telephone poles that line the street and there’s a lot of squirrel traffic back and forth between the huge sycamore tree at the end of the block and the gigantic oak in the yard of the house across the street. I look out at the dog-walkers and baby carriages and families walking to the park down the street and realise that if we had a big porch hidden behind a shady tree like we did in the suburbs, my husband wouldn’t get to greet everyone that passes like he’s the mayor of a little town. And the house seems the right size, finally: small enough that we can manage the upkeep and big enough that my grandchildren can explore the rooms and discover new places to hide every time they come.
