The condo on Meserole was still for sale. It had been over a year now. Each Sunday an increasingly hopeless realtor taped his sign to the lobby window: the words “Open House” accompanied by a faded photograph of the apartment’s interior with its neutral palate and white marble kitchen. Brie stood outside, staring at this bastardized testament of modern architecture. The brick wasn’t brick but a washed-out, textured, plasticized version of what had inspired it. The windows were the cheap, Home Depot variety that leaked during the rainy seasons. Even if Brie had had the money to buy it, which she didn’t, there was nothing about this place that made her want to live here.
Nearly every weekend of her childhood, Brie’s mother, June, would take her around the neighborhood to look at the local open houses. They never intended to move; her mother to this day lives in the house Brie grew up in. There was something about an open house that made June feel as though she were legally trespassing, and that was about as adventurous as her mother ever dared to be. June might not have been a dare devil, but she surely was a snoop. Seeing the inside of someone’s house was like seeing who they really were, not just what they wanted to present themselves as. June always told Brie, “When you meet someone, you’re not meeting them; you’re meeting the representative.” We were all our own diplomats, mitigating our flaws and quirks until we had roped a person in closely enough to make them forgive us them all.
Houses, Brie found, where much the same as people. In her experiences with men as a grown woman, she found that dating was quite similar to house hunting. Our ability to chose the right person was directly correlated to how desperately we needed them at the time. Similarly, the person in desperate need to find a home, and find it quickly, was going to necessarily make some concessions. It wouldn’t be their dream home, but it would be a home nonetheless.
Despite her young age, Brie adopted the house-hunting obsession as her own. It was unavoidable. She became well versed in the art of quality windows (wooden and double-paned) and she knew how to look for signs of termites or cracked foundations (shed wings and unlevel cement, respectively). Her favorite thing in the world was to discover that a home had hardwood floors buried under sullied carpet and disintegrating padding. “Look, Mom!” Brie would yell, on hands and knees in the corner of a room somewhere, pulling the carpet up from its wire tacks and revealing the chalky wood beneath. Her mother was never as excited about these findings as Brie. “Oh, that’s nice, sweetie,” she would say, and then continue wandering down the halls, remaking how she couldn’t believe so-and-so lived in a bedroom so tiny or, “Look at the state of this bathroom! Can you imagine how ____________ ever lived like this?!”
People were the very same way. We all had secrets, sharp barbs we kept hidden under nice clothes and toned figures. Brie had always found that one’s appearance to the outside world was so misleading. We covered up insecurities with useless knowledge and mitigated fear with the acquisition of money. No one was perfect, and though Brie never pretended to be, she always came off a shade closer to it than she ever actually was.
Brie continued down the street, turning onto Franklin. She generally avoided this stretch of her neighborhood; she had dated a boy who lived on this block about a year ago. He had given her one of those It’s –Not-You-It’s-Me speeches about not being ready for a relationship but how he thought Brie was really great. When she had heard this, Brie had rolled her eyes and looked up and out the window, trying to keep the tears from welling and streaming down her cheeks. “Uh huh,” she’d said, still turned away from him, her throat choking on the words. Even though the conversation was intended to sound kind and sensitive, it had still made her feel like a kicked puppy. It was easier to hate him when she found out that he had started dating this red headed chick she knew a week after they stopped seeing each other. The politics of love.
Last year, long after Brie had moved away, both from Oregon and her mother, she was left to search for apartments on her own. There were few things more difficult in this life than finding an apartment in New York City. She had seen sixty-three before she found one suitable for living. The majority of places were dark hovels more conducive to dependably routine bouts of depression than anything else.
There was one apartment she had seen, a particularly tragic studio so small the blow-up mattress they had been using to sleep on was two inches away from the refrigerator on one side, and two inches away from the garbage cans on the other. Florescent lights flickered above her like a scene out of Hostel. She knew there was a bathroom tucked into the corner somewhere but Brie didn’t bother looking at it; she wanted to sleep soundly that night. Welcome to New York. This too could be yours for a mere $1500 a month.
As was often the case, Brie descended the stairs to multiple people coming to look at the very same place. And what routinely blew her mind was that someone was going to take that apartment. To one person, that apartment would suit them just fine. Brie got to the lobby filled with stacks of baby blue garbage bags, scratching at a stress rash that had developed in the last four minutes.
The men that had once been temporary staples in her life, even the worst of the worst, were like valuable pieces of real estate. It seemed as though after they were done with her (it was rarely the other way around), they had no trouble whatsoever finding another woman willing to date them. In the end, someone was always willing to make the concessions required to live life not alone.
This afternoon, Brie knew better than to walk into the condo on Meserole. As she had gotten older, she had become more discerning, the result of twenty years of strolling through the doors of a many a stranger’s home. She knew which places were worth walking into and which places were not. She was twenty-seven and knew was she liked: places with war wounds and ancient, gouged hardwood floors, walls covered in twenty layers of paint and cracked bits of tile. This was something she appreciated about getting older: knowing herself better and being truer to herself more often, at least when it came to her clothing, the people she chose to be friends with, and the apartment she chose to live in. And though Brie was well aware that all of this was completely applicable to her own love life, she never seemed to learn the lesson and stay away from men she suspected weren’t the perfect fit. She needed too desperately. She wanted to find a home for her heart too eagerly, and that had been much to her detriment.
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