Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development; Or, Why It's Never Too Late for Her Dumb Ass to Learn Why Froot Loops Are Not for Dinner (7 page)

Turns out our place had never passed the final electrical inspection after being built because some junction box was placed in the wrong area. Until the house passed city inspection, a meter couldn’t be installed and thus an account couldn’t be established. The house had essentially been siphoning energy for free since it was built.

Yes. Let that sink in for a moment.

Stealing from the electrical grid.

Is that not some Dr. Evil/supervillain shit or what?

According to ComEd, they’d sent many, many letters to Dick trying to right this egregious wrong to no avail. We called him and he promised to take care of everything.

“Taking care of everything” resulted in Dick doing, well,
dick
for three months, as well as the first of the big orange cutoff stickers
slapped on our front gate. Do you know how frustrating it is to finally have yourself together enough to keep the lights on only to almost lose them because of the guy whose mortgage we pay? ARGH.

From start to finish, the process of establishing an electric bill in my name took eight months. Oh, and when Dick’s moronic subcontractors finally moved the box to pass inspection, they cut the line to our alarm system. So, unbeknownst to us, from April until November our expensive radio-controlled system that we installed and paid for
didn’t work
. We found this out only when a battery needed to be changed and our landlord claimed he “couldn’t remember” the name of the alarm contractor who originally wired the house. Fortunately, we still had his card.

What’s interesting to note is the alarm contractor was
very
familiar with Dick’s name, due to over ten thousand dollars’ worth of unpaid invoices. And that’s when we decide that buying this house might result in too many more unpleasant surprises. At some point, someone’s going to
send some guys
(if you know what I mean) and I’d like to not be here when it happens.

A few years ago our plan was to buy a house in the North Shore suburbs but we never quite got there. We couldn’t decide which town we might like best and then, once we made a decision, a mold infestation forced us out of our old rental house and completely changed our buying timeline. Now that it looks like we don’t want this house, we revisit the decision to move to Lake County, largely because of Maisy.

My beautiful pit bull Maisy is pretty much the light of my life. She’s a huge reason I tried so hard to establish a writing career; I couldn’t bear the idea of having to leave her every day to work an
office job. Whenever I’d go out without her, she’d mournfully gaze at me with these soulful brown eyes, made almond shaped because of her kohl eyeliner–type markings, and I’d be overcome with guilt because I hated having her miss me. Whenever I’d leave the house, she’d be perched on the back of the couch, right by the door, waiting for me. The second she’d spot me on the sidewalk, her whole body would wag, like my coming back was the greatest thing to ever happen in her life. So now when people ask me why I became a writer, I tell them it’s because my dog was a nudge.

Anyway, every few weeks, she and I travel thirty miles up the expressway to the Veterinary Specialty Clinic in Buffalo Grove so she can undergo chemotherapy for mast cell tumors. Fortunately, we caught it early enough for treatment. She’s been in remission for a while and the majority of time she does very well, but when she gets sick, it’s very serious and very scary. If she didn’t have cancer, I’d be comfortable taking her to local emergency vets, but because she does, we go directly to her clinic. Over the past year, she and I have taken many snowy, white-knuckled, midnight rides.

Fletch and I find a map and draw a big circle around a ten-mile radius of the clinic and decide we’re living somewhere within those boundaries. We’re torn between two communities I know to be green and lovely, but what clinches our decision is Highland Park’s stance on pit bulls. In short, they don’t want them. In 2009 the mayor proposed bans on this breed, so even though it would be legal to have my dog there, [
At least for now.
] she wouldn’t be welcome. You don’t want my dog? Then you don’t get my tax dollar.

Ultimately we choose to search for homes in Lake Forest because I like lakes and I like forests and that place has both in abundance.

Of course, before anything can happen, we need a mortgage approval. With the way the lending market has been collapsing in on itself like a dying star, we’re not quite sure how this is going to work.

We had our own financial meltdown in the not so distant past, so we’re not ideal mortgage candidates, at least not on paper. For a bank to agree to lend us money, we’ve got to make a case for why we’re not the deadbeats our slow-to-improve FICO scores claim. [
I’m not one to advocate anarchy, but sometimes I think Tyler Durden had it right.
] Our friend introduces us to a broker and we meet him for lunch at a sushi place to discuss our situation.

Here’s the thing: I like sushi. I like it a lot and not just boring stuff like California rolls. Maybe I’m not at the Jeremy-Piven-human-thermometer-level of sushi lover, but I dig it. Raw halibut, flounder, trout, salmon, and tuna… if you roll it up in
tobiko
and dip it in eel sauce, I’m game. But anyone who’s ever been to a sushi joint knows that there’s one small, scary portion of the menu consisting of the superweird stuff that blurs the line between “fish,” “insect,” and “sci-fi movie mutant.” Yet when the mortgage broker suggests we order from the dark side, I’m all for it and I eat every bizarre bite that’s set in front of me, until we receive a big wad of raw quail egg–topped sea urchin.

“You might not like it,” cautions Ryan, our potential mortgage broker.

When the platter of what appears to be small tongues wrapped in seaweed and topped in ectoplasm arrived at the table a minute ago, I kind of gathered that I wouldn’t.

Yet if eating sea urchin is what determines whether or not I spend another year paying Dick rent, then sea urchin is suddenly my favorite dish. (Of course, Fletch is a culinary coward and sits out this round.)

I pick up the small, vaguely orange, tongue-shaped [
With what appear to be taste buds and everything!
] sea slug in front of me and I steel myself for what’s about to happen next. I approach the piece with an open mind, knowing that some of my favorite foods—foie gras, escargot, and caviar—gave me nightmares until I actually tasted them.

I stuff the sea urchin in my mouth and I have trouble chewing it because I’m unsure where my tongue ends and the sea urchin begins, not unlike when I’ve eaten dinner before all the Novocain wears off after a trip to the dentist. As the sea urchin lolls around my mouth, I feel like I’m being French-kissed by a Japanese fishing boat.

And the slimy raw quail egg? The texture does this bite no favors, either.

I do not love sea urchin.

I do not like sea urchin.

I do not want to put sea urchin anywhere near any of my orifices ever again.

Yet in downing it, I prove to myself that I can handle any food challenge were I ever to make it onto
Survivor
.

Also? I get us a mortgage.

Our friend is a Realtor here in the city and we ping her to help us find our new home. We want to buy a place so we can move before I leave for my book tour.

Not happening. [
If you enjoy stories about idiots buying their first home and all the things that can go wrong, I humbly suggest you check out my first novel,
If You Were Here.]

Since February, we’ve made three offers and each has imploded due to poor inspections [
Chris Rock is wrong; I do not want a nice, moist house.
] or issues with the seller doing a short sale. Our buying process has morphed into a high-stakes game of Card Sharks wherein all parties involved shout “Higher!” and “Lower!” willy-nilly and the potential sale inches along until someone draws a seven card, the action freezes, and we have to write Dick yet another rent check.

We table our hunt until I finish my book tour in May. In the interim, our friend has to deal with some family business, so she helps us select a local Realtor named Nancy.

Nancy asks what kind of house we’d like and I send her a seven-page manifesto on what my ideal home might be. Attached to that are dozens and dozens of houses from the MLS with notes on what I like and dislike about each of them. (Two enthusiastic thumbs up on pools, fenced yards, and brick, and two down for Dryvit, lack of basements, and anything mauve.)

I anticipate that our search will be endless because when we were looking in late winter/early spring, we saw so many places
and the few that were right didn’t work out. I figure the process will take a few months and that we’re going to have to make tons of trips so we can see everything on the market. And that’s totally cool because I love seeing how other people live. For someone as snoopy as I, the notion of opening refrigerators and peeking in closets with impunity as part of a decision-making process is a dream come true. What kind of soap do they use? How many shoes do they have? This is the kind of stuff I need to know.

The thing is, Nancy is not only the spitting image of Jane Lynch’s character in
Best in Show,
[
Less butch, though. She wore pretty shoes, lipstick, and had a shell pink mani/pedi.
] she has the same no-nonsense personality, too. Out of the forty places I’m dying to see, she immediately dismisses almost all of them for a variety of reasons (e.g., you don’t want to deal with a foreclosure, the place is overpriced and underwater, the seller isn’t serious, etc.) and my dream of learning the
Secret Lives of North Shore Wives
dies immediately.

Nancy takes us to exactly four houses.

But I’ll be damned if each of them isn’t exactly what we want.

She is the Real Estate Whisperer. [
Or a consummate professional who knows a dawdler when she sees one.
]

We narrow our choices down to two homes—a neighborhood-y Tudor style where the interior is move-in ready without a fence or pool, and a tree-surrounded Colonial that needs a face-lift in the decorating department but the yard boasts lots of rosebushes and an in-ground pool.

I bring Stacey to see both of them and despite its being filled with window treatments she refers to as “Satan’s Golf Pantaloons”
she believes we’ll be happier in the Colonial. She says you can’t deny the place’s good bones, notwithstanding the owners’ deep and abiding love of monkey-covered wallpaper. [
As it turns out, the monkey wallpaper is
bank
. And it stays.
]

The time elapsed from making an offer to moving in is a little over a month, which isn’t nearly enough time to pack everything and yet affords me ample opportunity to freak the hell out.

Until this moment, the most expensive thing I’ve ever purchased is a handbag and here I am, saddling myself with thirty years of debt. THIRTY YEARS. And you know what? Handbags never need new roofs. Handbags don’t flood or catch on fire. Handbags don’t get termites. Handbags have never made me eat sea urchin. When I get bored with a handbag, which, coincidentally occurs every 1.38 years, I’m not obligated to keep carrying it. I can just get something new without involving Realtors and banks and mortgage brokers and attorneys. Yes, I’ve complained about living in eighteen places, but just about every time we moved, I’ve been ready to go.

But now, like it or not, I’m going to have some real roots in this new place. And that terrifies me.

What are we going to do in a home where we’re responsible for everything? As of now, every time something breaks in our place we giggle and say, “That sounds expensive!” and then we call Dick. Generally he does nothing until we withhold our rent, but at least it gets done eventually and not on our dime.

During a particularly panicky moment, Fletch sits down next to me on the deck and says, “If you want to grow up, this is your chance. Being an adult isn’t just paying taxes and investing in a Roth IRA; it’s about making decisions that scare you and following
through with them anyway. However, if for any reason you feel we’re not ready, we can stay here.”

I’m generally not one who believes in signs, but when I hear a gunshot in the distance after he says this, I pay attention. We close on our house two weeks later.

The best day of my life isn’t when we’re handed the keys to our new place. Rather it’s today, the day after we close. Fletch left early this morning to run some items up to our new place. I head north, too, only I have to take Maisy to chemotherapy first. (Loki always comes with us because what dog doesn’t enjoy a road trip?)

Maisy receives her treatment and is in excellent spirits as we spend the next twelve minutes driving from the clinic to the house. When we pull into the garage, the dogs are confused and as I let them loose in the new, empty house, they go crazy Vegas-style. They might not understand the details, but they grasp the concept that this is somehow now theirs.

Fletch is out back replacing lightbulbs but when I let everyone fly into the yard, they don’t even notice him—or all the grass and trees and roses—because they’re so distracted by the big, blue pool.