Excerpt from ‘City Mouse,’ by Stacey Lender
Stacey Lender
Stacey Lender
Photo: Contributed Photo / Akashic BooksIt was the bathroom that finally started us house hunting on the weekends up in Westchester. Sharon and Dave had just moved to Scarsdale from the city and I swear during brunch they slipped Aaron some suburban Kool-Aid with their day-old bagels. While the kids played on a giant plastic gym set in their cavernous empty living room, they proudly gave us a tour of their five-bedroom Colonial, closet by closet. Aaron seemed bored, as usual, but when we entered the en suite master bathroom, complete with double sinks and a rainfall shower, I heard him gasp. “A separate little room for the toilet!” he said, eyes glowing wide with bathroom envy.
“You know,” Sharon said, “our builder is working on plans for the house next door.”
“We’re not quite ready,” I replied.
“But we can take the number, just in case,” Aaron said.
I shot him a look. Take the number? Are you kidding?
Sharon pounced on the opening like an eager puppy.
“You guys would just love it here! It’s such a great community.”
I glanced at my watch. It had taken her less than an hour to get to the “C” word, which meant I had won the over-under bet that Aaron and I had started making on our visits to our recently relocated friends. As if following some ecumenical suburban script, right after the house tour came the crowing about the community. The state-ranked public pre-K their twins were attending (with only eighteen kids per class!), the annual Quaker Ridge neighborhood picnic (with pony rides!), and, the icing, a special pilot composting program. Sharon gestured excitedly to a little green plastic bin on the counter next to the sink. “It reduces our trash output by nearly a third!”
“Impressive,” I said. Excited by the garbage . In less than two months and twenty miles out of the city, was it possible she was actually turned on by her own trash?
Nearly all of our married friends had embarked on the Great Migration with their toddlers in tow, over rivers and up highways to Westchester, Long Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey, to Short Hills and Chappaqua, Westport, Manhasset, Rye Brook, Milburn, Stamford, and Montclair. Usually it was the birth of their second child that initiated their quests for great rooms and garages and gargantuan cedar jungle gyms. Led by a bevy of pied piper brokers, they seemed to find everything on their wish lists in abundance, in the hamlets to the north and east and west of Manhattan, all within an hour’s commute.
We were still happy living in the city, although I knew we’d be a whole lot happier once we finally moved out of our one-bedroom rental. We had been looking for a bigger apartment for nearly two years, ever since the day our daughter Phoebe moved from sleeping in a bassinet to a crib and we put up a temporary wall to create a sleeping alcove for her in our bedroom. Despite the thin slab of plywood privacy, she was still less than ten feet away, and our new routine of half-clothed, quiet quickie sex began — Shhhhh, don’t wake the baby . . . Yes, don’t stop, right there, I’m . . . SHHHH! DON’T WAKE THE BABY!— an act that may have technically qualified as sex, but barely registered as satisfying.
Our search started out with a keen sense of urgency, but our timing couldn’t have been worse: right at the peak of Manhattan’s real estate market. We thought we had saved enough for a down payment on a comfortable two-bedroom in our Upper West Side neighborhood, one with hardwood floors, an eat-in kitchen, and maybe an extra little room for a den or office. But we quickly discovered that apartments with those “high end” amenities were selling for two million dollars. For a two-bedroom apartment! No matter how we did the math, we didn’t have even close to that kind of money.
Brokers urged us to look in emerging Manhattan neighborhoods where the prices were slightly more reasonable, like Harlem or Hell’s Kitchen. But we didn’t want to settle. We loved the Upper West Side and figured at some point the real estate frenzy would die down. So we agreed to make do in our small space and wait for the apartment cupid to strike, never expecting to still be looking two frustrating years later while our firstborn slumbered behind the makeshift wall. And now we had baby number two back there, to boot.
Sharon freshened up our coffees while Dave had Aaron mesmerized with a demonstration of how smoothly their custom kitchen drawers glided to an automatic close. Maybe Aaron was blinded by all of that stainless: the cabinets were stainless, the dishwasher was stainless, the fridge was stainless. Even the backsplash was crafted of hundreds of silver rectangles, lined up like a wall of antiseptic armor. I thought kitchens were supposed to be warm and inviting; this one made me feel like I was in a haute designer morgue.
I couldn’t wait to leave.
Stacey Lender graduated from Cornell University. She started her career as a roadie and rose through the ranks from luggage schlepper to marketing executive for entertainment brands, including Radio City Music Hall, USA Network, Madison Square Garden, Sesame Street Live, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and One World Observatory at the top of One World Trade Center. She lives in New Preston and Manhattan with her husband and two daughters.
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