The Suburban You Read online

  You arrive home with the bags of groceries and you put everything away, trying to pitch in and help as much as possible while your wife is ill. You put the can of paint on the kitchen counter and twenty minutes later Eton Paint calls, a call that your wife answers immediately after looking at the caller ID, which reads “Eton Paint.” While asking you why Eton Paint is calling, but before you respond, she answers the phone after two rings and says, “My husband was just there. He has the paint and it is here.” She hangs up and she is upset. She cannot believe how badly you screwed up. “Where did you go to pick up the paint?” she asks. You tell her that you went to Eton Paint, the one that you always go to, in Southington. “I ordered the paint at the Eton Paint in Northington, not Southington,” she tells you, a store that you did not know even exists.

  “The Northington store custom-mixed the paint that you were supposed to pick up,” she tells you. “Now we will have to pay $34 for paint that we don't need.” She cannot fathom having to pay $34 for an extra gallon of paint on this ceiling paint job, which has already cost $1,105 and will likely cost more than $1,600 when it is done.

  You think that you could probably talk the Northington Eton Paint store out of having to pay the $34, and if you can't you understand that that $34 represents about 2 percent of the money that you have so far invested in this project and, by the time the project is done, will represent little more than 1 percent. The worst-case scenario is that you have an extra $34 gallon of paint in the house, even if it is a custom color. You have absorbed larger-scale losses than this, that you know for a fact.

  You call the Northington Eton Paint guy back and tell him that you went to the Southington store by mistake because you did not know there was a store in Northington. He tells you that there is no problem. “Don't worry about it,” he says. “Happens all the time.”

  For some reason that you do not wish to explore, your wife is still upset with you, like you went out and intentionally bought her the incorrect paint at the wrong store and inconsiderately ignored her wishes, just to mess with her. Your wife then looks at the paint that you brought home and it says “Pearl Finish.” You explain to her what the Eton Paint expert told you, that satin is oil-based and that it is incompatible with the preexisting latex that is on the ceiling now. You sound authoritative. She is not convinced by your explanation, and now she is upset that you have the right color but a finish that is pearl instead of satin.

  She is mad at you again, and this time she is really mad. She is upset because the painter is coming in just seventeen hours, and that she will not have the correct materials for him to work with. Horror stories of buying an extra gallon of paint resurface in your wife's mind.

  You call over to the Eton Paint Northington store to tell him about the paint that you were given by the expert in the Southington store. He describes to you that there is an antimold formula in the paint that you should have, but it is not in the pearl-finish paint that you have in your possession. You ask if you can switch out the pearl paint you have for the satin gallon that he mixed. He says, “Yes, no problem.” You drive over to the store and get the perfect paint, the paint that should restore your wife's happiness.

  With the paint issue resolved, your wife is now ready to move on to the next thing that is upsetting her, the Post Grape-Nuts that you brought home, which are not the Kellogg's Crunchy Nuggets that she specified. You hope that your wife feels better really soon.

  Pay Your Bills

  Now you decide to paint the exterior of your house and you go out and get a few quotes to make sure you are getting the best possible price available. You find two painters through a free weekly city newspaper in which you believe you will find the names of painters who have not done much work in the suburbs and who have not yet figured out what most of the painters who paint houses in your suburbs have figured out: that they can add a massive upcharge for doing work for people who have the capacity to pay for it.

  To confirm your theory about this, you get quotes from two suburban painters whom you find in the phone book. Their quotes are three and five times the quotes of the highest city painter, and five and seven times the lowest city painter.

  You hire the city guy with the lowest quote, because you think that painting is painting and that you can get your house painted seven times over for the amount of money that the most expensive suburban painter wants to paint it once.

  The painter shows up Monday with his crew and he begins to paint your house.

  On Saturday, as he is finishing his work, you are talking with him about the job he has done. You compliment him. He has done a fine job and you are feeling smart for hiring him. As you are talking with him, he slips in a story that is unrelated to anything that you have ever talked about with him. He tells you that he was painting a house, located at 6830 West Center Street, in the city, and that he did not get paid for the job. After the job was completed, he called, stopped by a few times, and even wrote a letter to the homeowner to get his final payment. It never came.

  One Tuesday, after a month of this, the painter goes to a place called “the Pool,” in the city, where temporary laborers stand early in the morning to be hired by the day by contractors and others looking for temporary help. It is an informal labor pool and it works for everyone.

  Your painter rounds up three of the strongest-looking guys standing there and gives them each a crisp $100 bill. He tells them that he has a rush garage-demolition project and that by 4 P.M. the freshly painted two-car frame garage located behind 6830 West Center Street must be leveled to the ground. “Just throw all the debris in the backyard,” the painter directs, “and you can have anything that was left inside.” These are his parting comments to the three strong men that he hired.

  That Saturday, before your painter has completed the paint job on your house, you cut him his final payment and then some.

  Get New Towels for Your House

  You are a guy who likes a quick shower. Like eating, showering is something that, for you, is a task to be completed as quickly as possible. It is not a recreational activity to be enjoyed. To you, the process of showering takes time away from doing the things that you enjoy doing, like hanging out with your family and looking at buildings to buy.

  You want to take your shower, get out of the shower, dry off, shave, put on some deodorant, get dressed, and go. You are in control of this process and you have it down to five minutes—that is, until your wife buys new towels for the master bathroom.

  Your favorite towels are the ones that you “inadvertently” brought home from the gym on a few occasions. They are small, they are plain white, and they dry you faster and better than anything else that you would call a towel in your home.

  Finding these small, plain white towels that you like so much is oftentimes a struggle, as your wife does not like the way they look. To her, they look like what they are—gym towels. They do not fit in with your master-bath décor, she would say. “Out of sight, out of mind” is her philosophy when it comes to the towels that you like because they dry you so well. Her solution to what she perceives as your towel problem is to go out and buy new towels, ones that will, as she sees it, be visually compatible with the aesthetic theme of the master bathroom, whatever that is.

  In the nineteen years that you have known your wife, she has had this knack for buying new towels that do not dry you. It is not as though she buys new towels frequently, but every time she does she buys ones that fail to dry. When she buys the towels, she does not think to inquire as to how the towels will dry you, nor does she look to see what material the towels are made of. Rather, her focus is purely on the visual attributes of the towels. “Will the herringbone pattern of the towel complement the texture and color of the new epoxy tile grout?” you imagine her to be asking herself as she is deciding between one nondrying towel pattern and another. You hope these new towels are not the spark of inspiration that will lead her to make a $1,600-plus bathroom-ceiling color change in your bathroom.

/>   One morning after your shower, you notice the new towels, the ones with the herringbone pattern. You reach for one unexcitedly, because you have been the victim of your wife's new towels before. You slide the towel over your body and you are still damp, no matter how much you rub either side of the towel over yourself.

  You open up the sink-base cabinet to find your gym towels, the ones that you know will dry you, but they have been moved to a location that you know you will never guess. You have no option other than to do your best with the new towel.

  After spending twice as long to dry off as you usually do, you complete your shave and rely on your suit pants and starched white shirt to complete the drying process. You try to brush off the new towel fuzz that has affixed itself to your face, but it does not want to let go. You will work on that on the train ride in.

  The next morning, you take your shower downstairs because your shower has just been regrouted and is drying. You know that the basement bathroom towels dry you reliably, and for this the hassle of walking downstairs to take a shower is worthwhile. You take your shower and reach for a towel, only to realize it is a towel that you have never seen before. Your wife, in addition to upgrading the upstairs towels, has changed the basement towels as well.

  Tomorrow you look forward to taking your shower at the gym.

  Have Your Relatives Visit

  Your parents are in their mid-seventies and they live in a suburb of San Francisco. They moved there from a suburb of New York. They are retired and have a pretty good life. Your father, a retired Wall Street banker, has had some minor complications with his health, like a stroke, five-way bypass surgery, getting hit by a car and breaking his leg, and a few other things that you are unable to remember. He has pulled through all of this miraculously well and, besides getting a little confused every once in a while, he is pretty much like he was. Your mother is a saint in dealing with your father's ailments. She has flow, and you believe that it is from her that you have acquired your flow and your ability to laugh at everyday things.

  Your parents enjoy visiting you and your family, and are excited to see your new eighty-three-year-old suburban home for the first time, now that the kids' bathroom ceiling is the right color and the herringbone-patterned master-bath towels match the $705 epoxy grout. They even come in the winter, which surprises you because they have quickly gotten acclimated to that California weather, where they define anything below fifty degrees as cold. Like many Californians, they enjoy talking about the weather to you in the winter, when they know that it is five degrees below zero where you live and seventy degrees where they live. They are in a competition that you will lose every time.

  The way that you can tell that your father has had a massive stroke, a five-way bypass, a broken leg, and some other stuff that you can't quite remember is that when he comes to your house to visit, things happen to him that never happened to him before all that. During their visit, your father is sporting hearing aids, which he has never worn before. Growing up, your father frequently responded with “What?” to many things that were said, and when he watched TV it was always too loud for you and the rest of your family, so you all left the room. You, your sister, and your mother would tell your father that he should have his hearing checked and get a hearing aid. To which he would respond, “What?” When he finally understood what you were talking about, he would shake his head no, indicating that there were no deficiencies with his hearing. Finally, at seventy-five, he has heeded this advice, mostly coming from your mother, who at this point, day in and day out, was having to yell everything to him just so he could hear her.

  The hearing aids that your father purchased are the high-tech ones, the ones with $100 batteries that need to be changed every two months. Your frugal father keeps his hearing aids turned down low in order to preserve the life of his batteries and thereby save energy and money. The downside is that when they are turned down so low he cannot hear, but the upside is that by doing this he extends the life of his batteries for another half a month. So, rather than hearing things clearly for two months before the batteries need to be changed, he chooses not to hear things for two and a half months, and he saves $120 a year on batteries.

  These hearing aids make a high-pitched sound when they are not adjusted correctly, which is most of the time. The sound is annoying and can be heard by everyone except your father, because he has his hearing aids turned down so low. It is the sound that you imagine a dog whistle would make, if you could hear such a thing. When this happens, you and everyone else calls your father's attention to it, but he fails to be convinced that there is anything wrong. He will not even acknowledge that this annoying sound is originating from him; he is convinced that it is coming from your suburban home.

  Your father has a bit of a hard time with technology. He grew up in a world where most things that required controlling were controlled manually, not electronically. Video players and computers are confusing to him. So are house alarms. When you bought your house, you inherited a house alarm, and you try not to activate it when your parents visit. And, just in case you do, you change the access code to 1111 while they are in town so that everyone can remember and use it, if necessary. You give everyone instructions about how to open the door and then walk to the keypad and enter 1111 to deactivate the alarm. You demonstrate this to everyone, even though you know there will be no circumstance when the alarm is set and no occasion when either of your parents will be entering the house alone.

  Your alarm system is tied in to the police department, and, while it has never been tested, you assume that when the alarm goes off the police will show up. You are not quite sure how this connection works, but you do understand that you pay $48.32 per month for it. One Saturday, your father decides to go for a walk. He wants to go alone, to challenge himself to see if he can find his way back home easily, like he would be able to before having a stroke, a heart attack, and a compound fracture in his leg. He will not be gone long, he says. He takes the key and heads out for some fresh air in your new suburb, which he is visiting for the first time. While he is out, your wife and mother take your son and daughter for a walk to the park, which is close by. You are home waiting for your father and decide to run to the hardware store for some sandpaper for your son's pinewood-derby car. Without thinking, you set the alarm, like you do each time you leave the house. The house is empty.

  Your father is the first to return from his outing. He unexpectedly beats you home. He unlocks the door and opens it. There is a high-pitched sound that fills the house, which sounds like his hearing aids when they are not adjusted correctly, which he does not hear because his hearing aids are turned down to their lowest setting to conserve money and energy. The alarm tone that he does not hear means that he has sixty seconds to enter the code, 1111, into the keypad, but he does not realize this because he cannot hear the high-pitched alarm tone. If the code is not entered within sixty seconds, the alarm will sound and the police will be notified; that's what the former owner told you, anyway.

  Your father goes into the living room, sits down, and gets himself comfortable with the newspaper. Within five minutes, there are two police cars parked outside your house and the doorbell is ringing, the doorbell that your father cannot hear because he is saving money on his hearing-aid batteries. The police are knocking and ringing and their expressions are getting more serious as there continues to be no response. At that point, you pull up to your house with the sandpaper you purchased from the hardware store and see two police cars parked outside. One policeman is standing at your front door with his gun drawn and the other is crouched and trying to see into your living-room window.

  You run to the front porch and ask the policeman what is wrong. The policeman tells you that the alarm has been triggered. He tells you that they are accustomed to false alarms—“It happens all the time,” he says—but usually people come to the door when that happens. You tell the two policemen to hold on, and you enter the house, because you think that your fat
her may have something to do with the activated alarm. Inside the house, the alarm is sounding, a sound that you have never heard before. It is audible from the living room, where your father is sitting on the couch, reading the paper, like nothing is going on. He is really conserving his batteries now. You deactivate the alarm, go back outside, and tell the police that your father activated the alarm because he did not enter the code, and that he did not hear the alarm or the doorbell because he was saving money on his hearing-aid batteries. You thank the two officers for coming out and give each a doughnut, for which they are very appreciative.

  You go back inside and your father looks up at you and says, “Is everything OK, my boy? I made it back to the house. Your neighbors look very nice.”

  Embrace Diversity

  You live in a quaint and safe suburb with brick streets that seems as though it is 98.3 percent white and 1.7 percent Asian American. So 1.7 percent of the kids in your suburb will get better SAT scores than the other 98.3 percent. The only people of color that you have ever seen in your suburb are William Jones and the Jesse White Tumblers.

  William Jones is a guy whom you brought into your suburb one Saturday morning for a kids' sports camp that you organize. Every Saturday morning in the summer, you meet fifteen to twenty kids, who are your kids' friends, along with their dads, who are your friends, and you play a sport. This Saturday, the kids will play football and you have invited William Jones to be the guest coach. You invited William because during your informational interview with him at work, as he was exploring different career options, you found out that he plays football for a college football team and he has a shot at the pros. You think that he is more qualified to teach your kids about football than anyone you know.

  The Jesse White Tumblers are a group of African American kids, of all ages, who live in the projects in the city. They are world-class tumblers—fliers, you should really say. The team was started in 1959 by the current Illinois Secretary of State, Jesse White, who is also African American. The Jesse White Tumblers are so amazing that they perform all over the world. They are welcomed into your suburb one day a year, every Fourth of July, when they fly for your entire suburb.