The Nest(35)
She remembered their first exploratory trips upstate as if they’d happened yesterday. Driving north, watching the scraggly city trees gradually replaced with the stately elms and elderly pines of the Taconic. Nora and Louisa asleep in their respective car seats in the back, both sucking away on identical pacifiers. Melody had instantly loved their small village with its quaint dress shops and bakeries, all the women pushing strollers while wearing jogging suits the color of sorbet. It was nothing like the grime and cacophony of their street that was technically in Spanish Harlem.
They rented a condo on the less desirable side of town. For two straight years Melody would put the twins in a stroller and walk the streets on the other side of the tracks, literally. The commuter train divided the town into its desirable (nearer the water) and less desirable (nearer the mall) side. She didn’t know what she was looking for until the day she saw it. A small house that had managed to survive the kind of gut renovation and expansion happening on most of the surrounding streets. It was an Arts and Crafts bungalow that had clearly fallen into disrepair. The morning she passed by, a man about her age was loading a car with boxes.
“Moving out?” Melody said, trying to sound friendly but not overly curious.
“Moving my mom out,” the guy said; he was staring at the girls as people tended to do. “Twins?”
“Yes,” Melody said. “They’re almost three.”
“I have twins, too.” He leaned down in front of the stroller and played with the girls for a minute, pretending to snatch a nose and then hand it back, one of their favorite games.
“So what’s going to happen to the house?” Melody asked.
The man stood and sighed. He squinted at the house. “I don’t know, man,” he said, sounding beaten. “There’s so much to do to get it in good shape to sell. The Realtor says it’s not even worth the work, someone will probably tear it down and rebuild into something like that.” He pointed disgustedly to the house next door, a renovation Melody had watched—and secretly admired—over the past months.
“Yeah, that place is pretty awful,” she said. And then without thinking: “My husband and I have been looking for a house, but everything is so much bigger than we need—and can afford. I’d love to find something to fix up, not to change but to restore.” Once the words were out of her mouth, she knew they were true.
Walt had been against the house. He thought it was overpriced for what it was and feared a real-estate downturn. The seller liked Melody, but even with all the work the house needed—and it needed everything—he held firm on the price, which was more than they should borrow given that she didn’t work. (Her working had never been worth the price of child care and now who would hire her?) Walt’s salary as a computer technician in Pearl River was okay but not great.
The house’s interior was dated, but Melody could see past the ugly carpet and ’70s wallpaper to its excellent bones and understand what it could be: a home, a place her girls would feel safe and cared for. She loved the tiny leaded glass windows, the breakfast nook, the window seat at the landing of the front stair, the enormous oak in the front yard and the sugar maples in the back turning brilliant shades of orange. She and Walt would take the front bedroom, the one under the eaves. There were two small bedrooms in the back, perfect for Nora and Louisa. She could see birthday parties in the yard under the maples, early morning breakfasts in the paneled dining room; she knew exactly where she’d put the Christmas tree. The Realtor had pulled up a corner of the living room carpet to show Melody the original heart pine floor. She fought for that house in a way she’d never fought for anything before.
“All the mechanicals are going to need an upgrade,” Walt had said, frowning. “Any money we have is going to go behind the walls, in the basement, under the floors—we’ll drain our savings for things you can’t see.”
“That’s okay,” Melody said. And it was. She knew how to do the other stuff, how to strip paint and steam off wallpaper and refinish. What she didn’t know she’d learn. The house would be her project, her job. Alan Greenspan was on her side! And Walt couldn’t argue with the concrete fact of The Nest.
But he did. For weeks. And when she thought they’d waited too long and the property would go to someone else, she’d broken out into head-to-toe hives. She’d been soaking in a tub of colloidal oatmeal, bereft, when he’d come to her to tell her the property—and hefty mortgage—was theirs. She knew his capitulation had finally come down to this: He loved her, he wanted her to be happy.
“Why can’t we move to a town where everyone isn’t a gazillionaire?” Walt would say to her every so often, usually when Melody was in a tizzy about something the girls needed—clothes, after-school activities, summer camp. But she didn’t want to move. They lived in one of the best school districts in the Northeast. Melody had learned where to shop, how to poke around for what the girls needed. She knew how to wait for sales and who would take money off when she said she was buying for twins. She always came up with funds when necessary—for special school trips or instruments so they could take music lessons. When they joined the ski club, she’d paged through old school directories and called parents of twins who’d gone off to college asking if they had any equipment they would be willing to sell and she hit the jackpot, a bored-sounding father who told her if she’d come clean his garage of ski equipment—along with the ice skates and tennis rackets and bikes that his daughters never, ever touched—she could have it all for free.