A Room of One’s Own

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; it is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry…That five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, that lock on the door means the power to think for oneself…

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.
- “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf

Not too many years ago, it was popular for women of notable social rank and particular luxury to keep a bedroom separate from their husbands. Jackie Kennedy had one, Lady Slim Keith had one, the Duchess of Windsor and Ann Woodward had one, which even facilitated her supposed motive for shooting her husband as an intruder. There were many reasons for this – demanding social schedules required a separate dressing space for formal events, without having to be bothered to wade through your husband’s cufflinks and ties – written correspondence was had not yet been dumbed down to a laptop and an Internet connection, therefore necessitating a proper desk, stationary, and a private place to think – and it lent an air of mystery, if not an illustration of gender separation, to a relationship, when a woman could bathe, dress, and apply makeup in private.

But most importantly, perhaps, the women who could afford it kept a separate bedroom from their husbands because of the underlying desire to have a space entirely uninterrupted, solely to themselves. This practice fell out of fashion for a good while, with the suggestion that couples who don’t sleep together obviously don’t have a happy marriage. (Because, of course – how could you be happy in a space completely outside your husband’s realm?) Thankfully, construction trends seem to be bringing it back.

When I moved into this rumbly old house, I had privately staked out one of the guest bedrooms for my own. It trumped, in my opinion, even the master bedroom. It had two nice windows, one that looked out onto the backyard. It had a spare closet, and the most blank wall space – a treasure indeed, for those of us with a veritable library of books that we tote around with us like old friends and battles-scarred comrades.

But I kept these desires to myself. It wasn’t, after all, my house yet – it was Jack’s, and I supposed it was bad form to start putting up claim flags when you’d only been asked to move in a few days prior.

Then, one day, we were standing there in the doorway, contemplating ideas for the empty room.

“What about a library of sorts,” I suggested shyly.

Jack eyed the room carefully.

“Yes, we could do that,” he said. “But I was thinking maybe more like a study, for just you. It’s important, after all, for a woman to have a room of her own, don’t you think?”

This was definitely, indeed, without a doubt, the man I’d been waiting for.

“I want to do it myself,” I said, after I’d brought paint and supplies home. “It’s important that I do it all by myself.”

Jack agreed, but four coats of paint on a 13×13 room takes a long time by yourself, and so he took to sneaking in while I was at work to put extra coats on the ceiling and trim.

It’s finished, and moved into, now.

It has creamy off-white walls (“Coconut milk?” Jack asked, staring at the label on the paint can. “I want to be the person paid money to think these names up”). It has a red loveseat from Macy’s that folds into a twin bed, with room enough for Jack and I to sit side by side and talk in the evenings, him with his feet on the footrest and me with my knees tucked up under me. It has a brown and red and beige polka dot arm chair where I do all my fiction and essay writing. It has an chocolate stained desk where I pay bills and write letters.

It has brown and red boxes of all shapes and sizes for my stationary, my files, my photographs, and other treasures. It even has a large black and red butsudan – an engagement present from Jack – for my gohonzon.

The floor is all hardwood, and the lighting fixture, door, and heating vent are the originals from 1910.

And best of all, it has seven huge bookshelves that line the walls like railroad tracks to Wonderland. Jack made them himself, spending hours designing them, cutting them, sanding them, and finally hanging them.

They hold all of our books. A whole shelf for feminist theory, another for non-profit management, another for biographies. A whole separate shelf for my Stephen King collection, and another for all Jack’s books in French. Tons and tons of space for things in between.

Like my heart, it’s a small space that is entirely my own. It holds secrets and hopes. And, like my heart, I don’t even have to let anyone in if I don’t want, but of course, I do.

Increasingly, this house is becoming more and more the symbol of both our lives intertwining.

“Did you ever think you’d get married?” I asked Jack the other day.

“No…yes…well,” he said, thinking. “I didn’t have a word for what I wanted. Or at least, I didn’t have an idea to put with that word, until I met you. The concept was sort of like the parlor downstairs. When I bought the house, there was this big open space the front door lead into. It wasn’t the living room, and it wasn’t the dining room, but it was obviously meant for receiving people. I couldn’t think of a word for it. But then you came over for the first time, took one look at it, and said, ‘Oh, you have a parlor,’ and it was so obvious. Of course it was a parlor, and you named it perfectly. The concept of marriage was like that. I had the word in my vocabulary, but you were the one who named it perfectly.”

THE HOUSE IS GONNA BE GREAT

So I read the following passage today at a friend-of-a-friend’s blog:

Sometimes I am so excited to marry him that I can barely contain it. Every day it seems my love for him grows – as I learn more about him; as I learn more about myself. Sometimes I wonder who I was outside the scope of him.

And the first thought I had, after I managed to choke back the nausea, was:

“Man. It’s all I can do not to stab Jack with a screwdriver sometimes.”

You know, I seldom write directly about Jack, because I adore him, and I don’t want to be one of those women that runs to her 10 billion closest friends on the Internet to complain every time we have a fight. But I tell you what – restoring this old house has been the deal-breaker that I never thought it would be when we embarked on it.

Planning our wedding has been easier. By far.

Two weeks ago, we were in Lowe’s. We had been in Lowe’s for two hours. Everyone’s patience and budget was a little stretched at this point (including: me, Jack, the woman who mixes the paint, the man who makes keys, and the other man who was quietly shelving tile, minding his own business, when I descended upon him and started asking all sorts of questions whose answers could have been found if I had, you know, done ANY RESEARCH AT ALL before entering Lowe’s).

And I was complaining about how I didn’t want cheap white ceramic tile in the bathroom, because we already have cheap white ceramic tile in the bathroom, and I didn’t want to rip up that tile to replace it with the same damn thing, even if it was only $2.99 a square foot. Fuck that noise.

To which Jack said, and I quote:
“I think your aristocratic upbringing has skewed your view of tile.”

Those exact words. All of the sudden, time went into slow motion like an Abbott and Costello movie – “Slowly I turned…step by step…inch by inch…”

And then I excused myself to go chain-smoke in the car before I committed homicide with a near-by socket wrench.

This is just a day in the life. We took down the wallpaper in the bathroom (which I really should have saved a scrap of, for posterity’s sake) to discover that the reason the owner had hastily wallpapered it in the first place was because the sheet rock was crumbling.

We took up the tile in the downstairs bathroom to discover that the hardwood floor had been replaced by rotting plywood.

When we removed the sink cabinet, which was slapped together and already leaning on a drunken tilt, we discovered that there is no wall behind the sink. Only a large hole leading to the basement.

Which is about the point where I started laughing hysterically like Tom Hanks in The Money Pit when the bathtub falls through the floor. This is also the point at which we took up screaming, “THE HOUSE IS GONNA BE GREAT!” at each other when one of us started to have an emotional breakdown.

Actually, to be fair, I’m the only one having the emotional breakdowns. Jack is completely convinced everything can be fixed with a power saw and some love. I’m learning to use the power saw so that, when the floorboards in the kitchen finally cave and I fall into the basement, I can use it to saw Jack’s remains into pieces and bury them in the backyard…

…I kid, I kid! Ha ha…hah.

And you know, we could have moved into a nice house that already had kitchen cabinets. We would have, if I had any say in the matter, but the house was here before me, and so here we are. Embarking on An Adventure! Home Depot Ahoy, Matey!

Also, to be fair, I have become so disgusted by the entire thing that I sit around in my Ralph Lauren bathrobe in the study, drinking iced tea and writing, while Jack does complicated things with wiring and plumbing that I don’t really understand. He is a saint, this way. The man stayed up until 4 a.m. painting all the baseboards white because I complained that they looked like someone had vomited upon them sometime in the mid 1970s. He is great. Fantastic. Too good for me, in this instance, really.

But things are becoming livable. We got new windows – ones that actually open! I can now plug in my hairdryer and a clock at the same time without blowing all the lights out in the house, if I keep the setting on “low.” The upstairs bathroom is no longer leaking into the kitchen downstairs. All the rooms are painted, and all the hardwood is in excellent shape except for the kitchen and downstairs bath.

My mother came up in June, and saw this house for the first time, before we had even lifted a paintbrush. It was a surprise visit, or else I would have found some way to head it off at the pass. As we pulled up to the front, she exclaimed, “Oh, Lily Beth, I love it!” Cause the front is deceiving – from the street, it looks like an adorable, large cross between a Victorian and a Cape Cod. It’s painted light blue. It has stained glass, a side porch, and a curvy little walkway.

Inside, it is The Seventh Circle of Hell. Obviously, I’m a little touchy about it.

As we toured the house, I watched her face fall more and more with each room. “It needs a lot of work,” she kept saying. “A lot of work.”

And then as we were leaving and I was thoroughly feeling like a failure, just for having fallen in love with a man attached to such a large, rumbling fix-er-upper, my mother said, “But you know, your Daddy and I lived in the Flats the first year we were married. In a tiny little apartment. We didn’t have a table, so we ate off T.V. trays. I had to go down the street to do my laundry. We would have loved to have this house. We would have given our right arm, in fact, to have a house like this.”

And you know what? Lots of people would. I have single girlfriends sharing tiny apartments with as many as five people, just to make ends meet. I have married friends renting astronomically priced apartments with no air conditioning and roach infestations.

And at night, when I pull up outside, and all the lights are on, you can see into the stairwell through the big parlor windows. And I see that warm, wood staircase, and all those family portraits hanging above it, and the china hutch by the foyer with all my mother’s crisp, white china in it. And two little sets of triangles – the dog’s ears – peaking at me through the windows, over the tops of the hedge.

And I am home.

The house is gonna be great.