Alexis
SATURDAY / OCTOBER 12 / 8:30 AM
The listing popped up on my phone last night. I scrolled through the pictures at least a dozen times, then tried to conjure the house’s full layout in my mind’s eye as I fell asleep. Now, over breakfast, I am looking at the pictures again and trying to make my only-one-a-day-during-pregnancy espresso last, while Sam struggles to convince Caleb to eat the Cheerios on his highchair tray. Last night it had seemed like a good idea to schedule a 9:00 a.m. showing, but now we are running late and I have to text our realtor.
“Dammit, Alexis, can you help me out here?” Sam snaps after Caleb sweeps a chubby hand across his tray, knocking most of the cereal onto the kitchen floor. I jump to attention and quickly clear the small island, dumping our coffee mugs in the sink for later. “Don’t curse, he’s old enough to repeat you now. Just give him a yogurt pouch and I’ll get the rain jackets.”
Our weekends often devolve into a chaotic and unproductive exercise in domesticity, especially compared to the order and calm of our weekdays. Monday to Friday, we hand Caleb off to his nanny at 7:00 and take turns coming home early enough to give him dinner and put him to bed. I love the nights when it’s my turn. I’ll let him babble and splash in the bath until the water gets cold, while I sit on the floor next to the tub just grinning at him. Then, against all principles of our overdue sleep training, I hold him in my arms long after he’s fallen asleep, inhaling the clean smell of his curly auburn hair and running my fingers along the chubby curves of his delicate, new-fawn skin. Somehow, on the weekends, both of us fumbling to parent together is harder. It makes me worry how much worse things will get when the new baby comes.
As we cross the bridge over the Potomac into Northern Virginia, the mottled brown and green wall of trees clinging to the river’s steep western bank rises up in front of us through the mist. “I’m really excited about this house, Sam.”
“I’m sure you are. It’s too expensive and too old.” He smiles out at the squeaky windshield wipers and takes one big hand off the steering wheel to reach over the gearshift and squeeze my knee.
“But it’s supposed to be one of the nicest neighborhoods inside the Beltway, and old houses have a lot of character.” For the next ten minutes, I rattle off the house’s features, having memorized the listing description, while Caleb dozes off in his car seat. Sam alternates between quiet chuckles and long sighs, letting me know he’s skeptical, but doesn’t interrupt me.
When the GPS instructs us to turn into the neighborhood, I stop mid-sentence and actually say “Wow.” We’ve abruptly left behind the featureless principal roads and strip malls of D.C.’s close-in suburbs and turned onto a narrow, curving street. Thick woods on both sides open up every few hundred feet to postcard-perfect scenes of residential affluence. Manicured lawns, large houses set back from the road in a variety of tasteful architectural styles, and high-end cars casually parked in driveways combine to make me suddenly and painfully aware of the old Honda hatchback we are driving. We inherited it from Sam’s parents years ago—a perfectly fine car for people who live in the city and park anonymously on the street. Not a car for this neighborhood.
“Wow,” I say again. “I can’t believe we’ve never been back here before. We’d have to really step it up to fit in.” I’m almost whispering now, as if someone might hear us.
“We could just throw a new car into the mortgage while we’re at it,” Sam mutters, slowing down to look around himself. I can tell he is impressed.
Two more turns and we find ourselves on Shadow Road, pulling up to a large, pale blue house partially hidden behind a trio of tall evergreens. As Sam tentatively pulls into the house’s semicircular driveway, our realtor steps out of the bloodred front door waving with nearly frantic excitement.
“Good morning, Crawfords! I’ve got to say, I did not think you could get into this neighborhood!” she practically yells to us from the portico as I help Sam strap Caleb into the baby carrier on his back. Now that I am pregnant he’s grudgingly accepted this load, but he’s so tall that I have to get on the tips of my toes to do it, clutching a jumble of carrier straps pulled as long as they’ll go. I resist the urge to tell our realtor to shut up, and quickly finish all the clips so I can cut off her broadcast of our inadequate finances.
Even in the gloom, the house is beautiful. It is a Cape Cod Revival, sprawling but symmetric, with a steeply pitched roof and dormered windows sheltered by a frame of additional fully grown trees on both edges of its wide lot. As I climb up the brick steps, I notice the large house numbers spelled out in serif script above the front door and smile at the indulgence. A house worthy of writing out its numbers.
“Let me tell you this even before we go in, the house needs a lot of work, but this street is fabulous. Seriously, if I were you, I would make an offer on it today,” she continues emphatically as we step through the front door.
We worked with the same realtor when we bought our rowhouse, and I had called her a few weeks ago, the day after my positive pregnancy test. She knows how focused I am on finding an as-close-to-perfect-as-possible house before the baby comes, and we don’t waste time anymore on pleasantries.
The front door opens onto a large foyer with an elaborately detailed triple archway to the living and dining rooms, and what looks like a sunroom beyond. “Gracious entry to formal entertaining spaces,” narrates our realtor as we walk in.
“It smells musty,” Sam says, doubtful.
“Well, this house was built in the 1920s, and it’s only had two owners, can you believe it? Some of it must be additions, but it all flows together seamlessly.” She gestures to the left, past the intricately carved staircase, “There’s a den and powder room over there,” then pivots to the right. We follow her through a narrow doorway and enter an indeterminate but long-past era of poor taste—muddy-colored linoleum floors, tiny, veneered cabinets clinging to oversized soffits, and a fruit-themed backsplash.
“The kitchen is at the front of the house, which is unusual, and clearly this one has seen better days,” she continues. But beyond the main kitchen is a breakfast room, enclosed on three sides by divided-light, floor-to-ceiling windows, and another living space with a gray-veined marble fireplace surround and hearth. “Wood-burning, may not be functional,” she goes on. “This room would be an excellent playroom. You’ll be needing one of those.”
The basement is damp, Sam hits his head on the ceiling going up the stairs to the second floor, and all the bathrooms desperately need updating. But neither of us has ever lived in anything nearly as gracious, or as big. Our narrow rowhouse downtown is a new construction box, full of light and not much else. Sam’s parents’ house is perfectly fine, but its aluminum siding and identical neighbors hold little charm. My mother and I always lived in apartments—run-down rentals I’d just as soon forget. In fact, I can only think of two houses that gave me the same feeling I have right now: the Federal-style mansion of my former boss, a lifelong strategy consultant who worked in a dozen countries before buying a half block of Georgetown for one person, and back in college, the expansive Connecticut estate of my freshman-year roommate who’d taken pity and brought me home with her for a long weekend.
In this house, it feels like the same good taste and sense of wealth could be mine. Dentil and egg-and-dart moldings crown several rooms, the subtle irregularities of the thick plaster walls feel special, and the narrow-plank white-oak floors are original—according to our realtor—and quite lovely, if profusely creaky. I am enamored.
“Maybe we can get more for our rowhouse than we’ve been thinking,” I whisper up to Sam as I tickle Caleb under his soft chin. Our realtor leads us through the living room to a set of French doors opening to the backyard, her heels clicking. She must be in her late sixties, at least, and dresses up for showings on the weekend. We pad along quietly behind her in sneakers.
“Alexis, come on, this is too expensive, and I know you. You’re going to want to change everything in here.” But before I can respond, Sam turns his attention to the yard.
We are standing on a crumbling brick patio, overlooking a wide, gently sloping expanse of green that ends at a towering line of deciduous trees. Through the patchy branches, I make out what looks like an even larger backyard, a pool covered over for the season, and the stacked glass and concrete boxes of a modern mansion beyond.
“Those trees must be a hundred feet tall,” Sam says, surprised. “Definitely room back here for a pool … we could have some really good parties.”
Sam likes to pretend that he is a middle-class kind of guy, a Midwesterner with sensible, modest tastes, like his parents. But the truth is that he is as dazzled by nice things as I am. The first year he worked at his law firm, when we were trying to save up for a down payment, he spent half of his bonus on a watch. I didn’t try to stop him. Now I feel his mind working, imagining the people he could impress with this house, and I know that this is my opportunity.
“Can we go for a walk around the neighborhood, see how it looks, and then give you a call?” I ask our realtor.
“Of course. Down the road,” she points a red manicured nail toward the right, “you’ll hit a cul-de-sac almost immediately, and between two of the properties there’s trail access down to the Potomac River. Going back the way you came will take you to many other beautiful streets.”
She steps toward us and leans in as if she has a secret to tell. Her face is close enough for me to see the foundation settled into the crow’s feet around her eyes. It reminds me that I forgot to put anything on my face after showering this morning. She must think we are a mess.
“And I’ll tell you, the listing agent just texted me, there are three other showings this afternoon, and he’s expecting a big crowd at the open house tomorrow.” She looks knowingly from me to Sam, and back to me.
My fingertips are beginning to tingle. I know we have a lead, but the race is on. “You’ll hear from us soon, one way or the other,” I say over my shoulder, as I follow Sam around the side of the house. It is already 10:00, and we don’t have much time.
After grabbing hats from the car, we turn toward the cul-de-sac, walking quickly as Caleb starts to babble on Sam’s back. “Trail directly to the river, now that’s something,” Sam says, absentmindedly rubbing at the ginger stubble on his cheeks. We both run and have spent enough crowded mornings in Rock Creek Park to know how valuable this is. 52 Shadow Road is across the street, a large yellow farmhouse with a front porch running the span of the façade, centered on what must be a double lot. A white-haired man is sitting on the porch with a blanket on his lap and appears to be engrossed in a magazine.
“This neighborhood is so much nicer than any of the others we’ve seen,” I say to Sam, as the man lowers the magazine to his blanket and raises a hand to wave. “Doesn’t it feel so exclusive? There probably aren’t too many young children, but still, these people must all be really successful, don’t you think?”
“Ya that’s pretty obvious,” Sam laughs. “I think one of my senior partners lives somewhere around here. This street is amazing, it’s exactly the kind of place I thought we’d live eventually. But that house is in rough shape.”
“Exactly, how else could we afford to live here?” I continue without waiting for him to answer. “Look at the size of these lots, and the trees, and we’d never have to move again, this is the top school pyramid in the area. We could renovate slowly. The kitchen is the only thing that would really need to be done right away. I mean, we can’t live with a kitchen like that.”
I’m not sure whether my monologue is swaying Sam, but I can tell the walk is. 53 Shadow Road is next, separated from what I hope will be our house by a narrow but dense grove of trees. It is an oversized new construction built in a modern Tudor style, with an austere white stucco façade broken up by the dramatic peaks and swoops of a black roof. Only one mature tree remains in the front yard, and it looks like most of the first-floor lights are on against the morning gloom. I imagine a happy family inside, enjoying the type of cozy and relaxed Saturday morning I hope we will eventually have. The wide cul-de-sac is now straight ahead, carved into three equally grand properties.
“God, all these houses are huge. They’re practically estates,” Sam says appreciatively. “I’d better make partner next year, we’ll need the money.”
We notice the house on our left first, 54 Shadow Road. It is a massive, white Federal-style mansion with black shutters, thick columns, and an elegant row of dormered third-story windows. This is the house of my dreams, anyone’s dreams really. I say “Wow” for the third time this morning.
Sam goes on, “You should reconsider going back to your old firm too. Country club memberships don’t run cheap.”
“Come on, Sam, why are you bringing that up? You know we can afford the house. That’s the only thing we’re talking about buying—” I stop myself when we see them, coming around one side of their house in a loose huddle, relaxed and laughing.
First, the husband—a square-jawed, dark blond man with a rake in his hand—followed by three teenagers, each a different shade of blond. The tallest of the three, a boy, is cradling a large bag of soil, while the other two hold shovels, rakes, and gloves. The wife brings up the rear empty-handed, a slim woman whose sandy blond hair is pulled into a low ponytail. Even from fifty feet away, I can see that she is quite good-looking. The five of them are dressed in subtly coordinating quilted pullovers and rubber boots, comfortable in their affluence—exactly the type of people I had expected to live on a street like this. Sam makes a joke about vanity gardening, since everyone in this neighborhood must hire a landscaper. I am still smiling at this when the wife sees us.
We have been staring at their house, and I suppose that is why she starts walking toward us, leaving the husband and children to begin their work near the garage. “Hi there,” she calls out in a bright, expectant voice, almost as if asking a question. I clear my throat reflexively, my mind scrambling to compose a satisfying explanation for our presence.
“Good morning!” Sam answers before I can.
“Hi!” I add quickly. “We were just touring the house that’s for sale and wanted to get a better feel for the neighborhood. We’re thinking about making an offer.”
“That’s great!” the woman replies, taking in the picture of our family as we had just done with hers. “I hope you like what you see. Your little one is adorable!” She dismisses us with a big smile, turning back toward her house before either of us can answer.
We immediately start walking again, quicker than before, propelled by the eyes of this catalogue family on our backs and the wet chill of the day creeping between our toes. We must look like shoddy prospective neighbors, with Sam’s tall frame all a crumple of rain jacket and baby carrier straps. Without needing to look in a mirror, I know I’m even worse—in a faded old windbreaker that barely zips over my already showing belly, and frizz poking out from my old knit cap and sticking to my face in the dampness. But here we are. There is no time to go home and pull ourselves together for a better first impression.
55 Shadow Road is a hulking orange-brick Colonial facing 54, likely a product of the 1990s—perfectly fine and exceedingly large, but nothing compared to its neighbors. 56, sitting at the apex of the cul-de-sac, is an imposing stone house with at least four chimneys. Next to its mailbox stands a plinth of matching stone, with a little silver plaque mounted on it. The plaque is engraved with a paragraph explaining that the house was the Colonial-era manor of the area and that the original owners’ descendants—lucky them—had slowly sold off all the surrounding parcels over the last two centuries.
We do not stop long to look at either house, having spotted the green county sign denoting the trailhead with pictograms of a pedestrian, a cyclist, and a small wave with an “x” through it. The sign stands neatly on what looks to be a no-man’s-land between the side yard fences demarcating the property lines of 55 and 56, a gravel trail about six feet wide leading straight into dense woods. A “no parking” placard immediately below the green county sign signals exclusivity, and Sam is thrilled.
As we turn to walk back toward the house, he says, “You’ll be shocked to hear this, but I think you’re right. We should make an offer. This neighborhood is unbelievable.”
“Really?” I counter.
“Yes, really. What? Now you don’t want it anymore?”
“No, of course I want it. Worst house, best block, it will be a great investment. Let’s do it,” I reply, grabbing his big hand and smiling to show him that we are on the same side about this. There is no need for an argument.
We keep holding hands and marveling to each other about the passing landscape. We make a brisk loop past 51, to the end of the block where Shadow Road intersects with Sunrise Lane, and back. Sam wonders aloud if the houses on Sunrise command a premium for being on a more hopeful-sounding street, and we both laugh.
It is past 10:30 when we return to the driveway of 51 and Caleb is getting fussy, but before unlocking the car doors, I glance down the street to see if the family in the white Federal is still in their front yard. I’m mortified by the possibility of them seeing us get in the Honda. Happily, they are nowhere in sight.
I call our realtor while Sam drives us home, and the deal is done by the time I start the dishwasher after dinner—a full-price offer with no contingencies, and the quickest closing our lender will commit to. Every other house we’ve seen has been so obviously problematic—new construction awkwardly towering over modest ranches, a coffee shop around the corner but a convenience store sign glaring in the backyard—I was starting to think we’d be stuck in our skinny rowhouse, forever climbing stairs and tripping over toys. This house—our new house—will have problems to be sure. I’ve read that old houses always do. But the bones, the lot, and the location are just so good. It feels like we’ve purchased it by an incredible stroke of luck, so quickly and easily do our lives shift course for Shadow Road.
Copyright © 2023 by Melissa Adelman
