Chapter 5
— Chapter 5 —
Step bought the house before he met my mother. My grandmother, Momo, was the one who found the listing, nudging him along until he believed it was his own idea to make an offer. Momo figured homeownership would position my father as a more attractive prospect to a suitable young woman. Or at the very least get her thirty-six-year-old son out of her house so the neighbors would stop making Boo Radley jokes. Momo’s theory was correct, because the house was a selling point for my mother, who was a single mom with a deadbeat ex-husband and couldn’t stand living under her parents’ roof for one more minute.
They met at a continuing education class at Westchester Community College. My mother was trying to get a job as a bookkeeper, and my father was trying to learn how to do the bookkeeping for his new insurance business. She was the best in the class, and he was the worst, so he hired her.
Step was not my mother’s type by any means. He was wispy and awkward, always wore the wrong clothes and said the wrong thing. But when my mother saw his house, she imagined six-year-old Steena riding a bike up and down the long driveway while she planted petunias in the garden on the landing. And Step liked that my mother already had a daughter, so from the outside he wouldn’t look like a late bloomer anymore.
When they first got married, my mother worked at Arnalds Insurance part-time, doing the books while Steena was at school. The little converted cottage worked fine for their little converted family, and everyone was happy. But after my mother got pregnant with me, she decided the house was too small for four people and talked Step into building an addition. As the house grew, and her belly grew, and their expenses grew, so did her criticisms of those books she was keeping. According to my mother, the only thing Step had going for him as a businessman was that he was a man. So she had to play backseat driver, constantly working on ways to draw in new customers, getting none of the credit when her efforts paid off. They fought about it, constantly.
At twenty-three—before an ill-fated reunion with her high school sweetheart saddled my mother with Steena and a Catholic-guilt marriage—she worked in Manhattan and had a career path, an apartment, nice shoes, and symphony tickets, and her boss took her to dinner at Quo Vadis once a month. So even though her life in Somers was better than living in her childhood bedroom in her parents’ Mount Vernon walk-up, once the shine wore off, my mother hated our town.
Somers is what people from New York City call a bedroom community—almost rural, but an hour and change on the train gets you right into Grand Central Station. In the 1920s city people bought farmland and built little neighborhoods of summer cottages around man-made lakes on meandering roads designed for fair-weather Sunday drives. But when the suburbs started creeping north, those drafty cottages were winterized with oil tanks and insulation, and commuters tried to carve out a four-season life in a two-season town that didn’t have sidewalks or streetlights or house numbers.
“The problem with Somers,” my mother would always say, “is that it isn’t actually any place at all.” She’d pretend not to notice when it hurt Step’s feelings, even though all of us knew that was the point.