“Turn left here. Left! Here! Turn left right now! The map says left! Left, left, left! Now, now, now!”
Mac glances at me in the rearview mirror, raising a single eyebrow. Okay, would everyone stop doing that? It makes me very self-conscious.
“Why are you not turning left? The blue line on this map is the most direct route to where we’re going,” I yelp. “Go! Left! Leeeeefffttt!”
Calmly, Mac replies, “Because I trust the GPS system more than I do your cartography prowess, and because the line you’re looking at is a river.”
Mac, Liz, and I are navigating our way up to see houses in the exclusive suburban town of Abington Cambs. We chose to concentrate our search in the Cambs23 for a couple of reasons, but mostly because. . this is Shermer! I’m so keyed up I can barely stay in my seat.
Abington Cambs was not only Hughes’s inspiration for the fictional town of Shermer, but so many of his outdoor scenes were filmed here. We’ve already driven past the little stucco-and-beam shopping plaza from Ferris Bueller, and I’m pretty sure I just spotted the McCallister house from Home Alone. I mean, how perfect is that?
This is the most beautiful community I’ve ever seen; that’s probably because it’s also one of the wealthiest. Forbes magazine recently called Abington Cambs “the Hamptons of Middle America.” Everything here is landscaped and manicured and tidy, exactly like I remember from the movies. I’m pretty sure if ORNESTEGA wrote his name on anything, the zoning board would publicly execute him on the bucolic grounds of the market square.
Naturally this is where stupid, undeserving Vienna grew up, and, yes, that fact kills me a little inside.
Anyway, when I graduated from college and moved to Chicago, I was dying to see the Cambs firsthand. As it so happened, my first job was in sales, and I ended up servicing some hospital accounts close to here.
I’d often head to the Cambs after my meetings just to spot landmarks, and sometimes I’d stop to hit their McDonald’s. The first time I went there, I almost missed it. Instead of sporting the familiar red-shingled roof and a big golden-arched sign, the McDonald’s in the Cambs is a pretty green wooden building with cream trim and shake shingles. Were it not for the tasteful little sign at the parking lot entrance, no one would know it wasn’t a beautifully appointed — albeit oddly placed — barn.
From what I’ve read, the town is maniacal about more than just fast-food joints. Mr. T lived here in the eighties, and when he cut down his oak trees, the locals’ outrage made the New York Times. Residents called it “The Abington Cambs Chain Saw Massacre.”24
When the weather was nice, I’d opt to drive back to the city down the picturesque stretch of Meridian Road instead of the expressway. I’d go really slowly, making sure to take in all the mansions bordering Lake Michigan. Balustrades! Crushed-shell driveways extending half a mile! Sculpture gardens! Proud as I was of my first studio apartment by Wrigley Field, seeing those grand old homes on the water made me dream big. Matter of fact, I came up with the plot to Valley of the Faceless Dolls on that ride one warm spring night.
Between my blurting directions and Mac’s ignoring them, we reach our first showing. We pull up to a diminutive taupe Cape Cod in a pretty subdivision far west of the lake. The trees in the neighborhood are bare save for a coating of snow, but I can already tell how pleasantly shaded this street will be when winter’s finally over. Liz deftly works the lockbox, quickly extracting a key. She calls over her shoulder, “Let’s have a peek.”
The door opens into a sunny, inviting entry hall with plenty of room for coats and umbrellas and all the other detritus associated with living above the arctic circle.25 I lean on Mac while I kick off my snowy Merrell clogs and slide on a pair of blue flannel elastic booties. “You really don’t need to wear those if you’re in your socks,” Liz tells me.
“Eh.” I shrug. “I don’t mind.” The hardwood is made of thick planks of polished oak, stained to a lovely cherry color. There’s a solidly protective level of varnish on top of it, so I already know the floor will stand up to years of muddy paws and throw-up kitties.
We first step into the small living room — or rather, I skid, as the combination of socks and booties turns the floor into a hot skillet and my feet into pats of butter — and we admire the picture window and the view. “There’s not a crackhead to be seen out there,” Mac remarks with more than a little awe.
We then wander into the dining room, which feels extra cozy with its raised hearth surrounded by built-in bead-board shelves. “Lovely,” we all murmur. The walls are covered in wallpaper — normally my nemesis — but it’s so rich and understated that at no point do I begin to look for loose corners to tug. We move on to the family room.
One of the rules I’ve learned from watching the home-buying shows is that you’re not supposed to base your opinion on the homeowners’ possessions; rather you’re obligated to look beyond their stuff to see the real features, like double-paned windows, or the real problems, like a water-damaged ceiling. A professionally staged living room is great, but it doesn’t matter if the furnace is on its last legs and the house is located in a floodplain.
Of course, the home-selling shows are all about staging, because it’s a fact that well-presented houses sell faster.26 And even though my head understands that staging is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, my heart can’t help but leap when I see their furniture. “Oh, my God,” I exclaim. “They have the Lancaster sofa set from Restoration Hardware! That’s what we have! We already know exactly what it would look like if we lived here!”
We pass through the breakfast area (sunny! airy!) and the well-appointed galley kitchen (a warming drawer! double ovens!) and into the narrow mudroom with the spanking new front-loading washer and dryer. Mac gets a faraway look on his face, lost in a daydream about all the towels and jeans we could wash in a single load.27
“Shall we check out the backyard?” Liz asks.
We put our shoes back on and step out onto a tidy stone patio that overlooks half an acre of young trees, all enclosed by a new fence. “The dogs would have so much fun out here,” Mac remarks.
“Yeah, not really. Daisy would pee on the patio and then demand to be let back into the house, and Duckie would do nothing but stand in the farthest part of the yard and protect us from falling leaves and squirrels with his nonstop barking. Then I’d have to wade through snowbanks in my slippers to get him to stop, because he never comes when he’s called,” I reply. “No, thank you.”
“We have plenty of room to put in a pool,” Mac says.
“And now I’m back on board with the yard.”
We return inside, stomping off snow and reapplying the sockcondoms. We check out the cute basement and find it more than suits our needs. The ceilings are high and the windows well positioned to eliminate glare when setting up the home theater. There’s a wee office off the main part of the basement, and the second we step inside, Mac shouts, “Mine!”
Off the office, there’s an additional storage area where we stumble upon a litter box. Okay, this? Is the biggest selling feature of all. Even though our current house is huge, there aren’t a lot of good places for the kittens’ boxes. No matter where I place them or how often I change the clay, the open-concept layout means the stink wafts through the whole place to the point that when visitors come over, they don’t notice the crown molding or cherry floors. Rather, the first thing out of everyone’s mouth is, “How many cats do you have?” Shameful.
After a thorough basement inspection, we move up to the second floor. The first room we see must be the owners’ little girl’s room, because it looks like Easter has thrown up on a Disney film. Everything is either pale pink or mint green. Pink-and-green gingham ribbons suspend white wooden blocks spelling out SOPHIA over the big window. The floor is covered in a floral pastel rug in shades of green and gold, and a white chair rail divides the walls in half. The bottom part of the wall is ballet-slipper pink, and the top part is covered in pink toile wallpaper. Only rather than the traditional eighteenth-century pastoral scene of oxen and farmers and straw-roofed huts, the lime green line drawings are of bunnies and frogs in repose.
“Obviously you’d want to change this,” Liz notes.
Obviously.
I mean, I’d need to find blocks that spelled out MIA.
The other bedrooms are large and well laid out, and some come with attached baths where the fixtures are new and the water pressure impressive.
According to the MLS listing, the whole house has been recently renovated and everything’s brand-new — the floors, the furnace, the water heater, etc. The house is compact, but it’s move-in ready, and all we’d have to do would be to replace the owners’ sturdy leather family room set with our own.
As we put our shoes on again and take one final glance behind us, Liz says, “The house shows really well and it’s priced right. But what do you think?”
Mac and I glance at each other. In theory, this house is what we want. Granted, it’s smaller than what we have now, but it’s in a nice neighborhood, and it wouldn’t require a single tweak before moving in. The best part is, we’d never have to deal with Vienna again.
And yet now that we’re standing here in the handsome foyer with the good closets and indestructible floor, something about the place doesn’t feel right. There’s no opportunity for us to make our mark on it, because everything’s already been done just so. I mean, I don’t want to do major construction, but updating things a bit would be a lot of fun.
Nothing particularly draws me to this house. At first, I thought because they had our sofa, that was a sign, but upon closer inspection, they’ve got the Maxwell model, not the Lancaster. The difference between rounded and squared-off arms is subtle, but crucial.
This house is like meeting a guy who’s totally into marriage, comes from a fantastic family, has a well-paying job that makes him happy, and whose favorite hobbies include buying you designer handbags and watching reality television. I mean, where’s the challenge? Where’s the struggle? Where’s the satisfaction that comes from finally breaking Mac — I mean him—of his bad habits?
“Liz, I have kind of a weird question. Is it possible that sometimes a house can be too perfect and it’s kind of a turnoff?” I ask.
She smiles back at me. “I see that all the time. Remember, purchasing a house is more than just figuring out numbers. You buy with your gut, too. And if your gut says this isn’t the one, then we have plenty more to see.”
We walk out to the car and Liz asks me again if I wouldn’t rather sit in the front seat.
“Nope,” I reply. “If I do, Mac will try to make me use the navigation system.”
“And what’s wrong with that?” he calls over his shoulder.
“Listen, I did not spend all that time last night poring over my map just to have some officious German voice second-guess me. My map kicks ass. My map is bank.”
Mac chuckles at me. “Still trying to make ‘bank’ happen?”28
“Of course.” I have a running bet with my college roommate, Ann Marie. It started when I was convinced I’d come up with the expression “all that and a bag of chips.” She didn’t believe me, claiming I’d heard someone say it on Oprah.29 I never forgave Ann Marie for crushing my dream, so ever since then we’ve had an ongoing challenge on who can make the Next Big Expression happen. She’s been trying to get “sweet baby Ray!” into the collective unconscious, while I’ve been pushing “bank.”
Despite being a blond-bobbed soccer mom from Connecticut, Ann Marie is vaguely terrifying. She once instigated a coup at a Pampered Chef party. . and it wasn’t bloodless. Ann Marie works as a prosecuting attorney, and I sat in on one of her cases once. She showed up to court that day in a tangerine print shift, a padded headband, and a triple string of pearls. I had to laugh when the defense visibly relaxed upon spotting her. They had no idea they were about to be hit by a Lilly-clad guided missile. As the shell-shocked defendant was led out in cuffs, he kept repeating, “What just happened here?”
My point is that even with my international audience of socially networked teenagers reading my term, she’s more likely to make her expression mainstream first. I’m pretty sure I heard a random person exclaim, “Sweet baby Ray!” at the grocery store last week, but I’m going to pretend they were looking at barbecue sauce.
Still, you have to admit that “bank” kicks ass as a turn of phrase. It’s short for “bank on it” or “you can take that to the bank,” kind of like how Vince Vaughn30 described everything as “money” before he got all famous and bloated.
I tell Mac, “I was thinking I’d work ‘bank’ into my next book, maybe have Ezekiel say it after a particularly successful barn raising or something.”
“Do the Amish even use banks?” Mac wonders.
“No clue,” I admit.
“Wait. You write about the Amish,” Liz interjects. “Shouldn’t you know? Wouldn’t that have come up in your research?”
I shrug and smooth out my map. “Why would I research them? They don’t read my work, so it’s not like I have to worry about my inaccuracies offending the Amish community. Or the zombie community, for that matter. What are they going to do, download my books on their Kindles? Read my Twitter feed? Does the milking shed have Wi-Fi? Seriously, you think Stephenie Meyer spends her time researching vampires’ banking habits? Doubtful. She’s probably too busy taking money baths.”31
Liz wrinkles her brow.32 “I’m curious, then: If you haven’t done any research, then how do you know so much about the Amish?”
Mac speaks up before I get the chance. “She watched John Stossel do a report on them on 20/20. Once.”
“And yet my books about the Amish have done well enough to buy you this Benz,” I calmly respond. I wonder what Mr. Stephenie Meyer drives. Probably a flying fucking car.
Mac’s grinning when he glances at me in the rearview mirror. “Maybe if you knew a little more I could have upgraded to the big engine.”
I know he’s teasing me, but this still grates a little. I choose not to explain — again — how my books really aren’t about being Amish or the undead eating flesh. Rather, they’re about what it’s like to be a teenager. I want kids to read my books and feel like I did when I watched The Breakfast Club; I want them to know that like John Hughes, I’m quite aware of what they’re going through.33
The Amish bit is really just a device for a couple of reasons. I like to write about stolen glances and clandestine feelings rather than big, blown-out, fully articulated sex scenes. The buildup to a first kiss can be every bit as riveting as a couple yanking each other’s pants off, sometimes even more so.
I’ve gotten decidedly more modest as I’ve aged. At twenty-two, fresh out of college and four years of playing I Never at fraternity parties, I’d have had no problem going on and on about my character’s o-r-g-a. .34 But I’m a proper35 married lady now, and writing explicit scenes just doesn’t sit right with me. I’m not judging anyone else who puts out racy novels — and I’ll probably even read them — but writing them isn’t for me. Plus, there’s something very satisfying about keeping my characters innocent.
I’ve chosen to write about the Amish because their stories aren’t going to get bogged down with technology, either. I don’t want my writing to get all cloudy and convoluted because I didn’t realize that Tumblr is the new Facebook which is the new Myspace.
Also, if I had to deal with characters that ran around spouting text message — speak like, “OMGWTFBBQ!” I’d probably want to kick a lung out of myself. Sure, the technology, lingo, and costumes change from generation to generation, but the pressure of being trapped somewhere between childhood and adulthood is universal.
In other words, the point isn’t about getting sparkly in the sun, Stephenie.
While I pout in the backseat, we get to the next house. We’re a little farther east in the Cambs, and the trees in this neighborhood are more mature, forming what’s got to be a spectacular canopy over the street when the leaves fill in. That’s the one downside of new construction in a subdivision. Sure, you might get a fancy community clubhouse and wide, smooth streets covered in fresh blacktop, and a brand-new roof, but unless the builder spends a mint on landscaping, the tiny little trees are dwarfed by whatever house they’re placed next to, no matter how modest. Given the choice, I’d prefer a house that’s older, maybe in a more established neighborhood.
The driveway is way longer than the last one, and under the snow I detect the sound of crushed shells. The house is solid brick, not just a brick facade, like where we live now, and the yard is substantially larger than the last. Homes in this neighborhood are set farther apart, and if you squint just right, it almost looks like an estate. This is a promising start.
Our promising start comes to a screeching halt the second we step inside.
“What’s that smell?” I ask, pulling my wooly scarf over my nose and mouth. I’m assaulted by an aroma that stings my eyes and burns my throat. My lungs instantly feel like there’s a steel vise around them.
Liz breathes into her gloved hand while consulting her MLS listing. “It says here they had a tiny problem with mold.”
Mac points to an enormous black bloom on the far wall in the kitchen. “Had mold? Ladies, that ain’t modern art. More like has mold.”
“Do we even need to look at this one?” I ask.
“Been there, done that, burned the T-shirt,” Mac replies.
We dash back outdoors and gasp for fresh air. “No wonder it was in our price range.”
To start this process, we ran our financials past our banker again. We’d been approved for a generous amount before, but with my recent book sales, we wondered if that would alter our budget. Turns out our bank is very enthusiastic about teenage Amish zombies in love and they increased our preapproval amount substantially.36 We’re not ready to spend our self-imposed limit, but we did allocate more funds to the search.
With this sum, we could get a spectacular home anywhere in the whole Chicagoland area. . except here. Since this is such an elite enclave, prices are ridiculously inflated compared to other suburbs. A sane person would simply go where he got the most bang for his buck, but come on, this is Shermer! I’ve waited my whole life to live here!
We load back up into the car and drive another mile due east.Yay, east! From what I’ve read, the farther east you live in the Cambs, the better. Apparently there’s a whole east side/west side rivalry raging up here. The west side is where Pretty in Pink’s Andie lived, and the east side is where the sad-little-rich-boy-Blane-who-was-conflicted-about-liking-her (and-who-was-not-in-fact-a-major-appliance) was from. What John Hughes couldn’t have predicted back then is that twenty years later, even Andie’s teardown would be worth half a mil.
We pull into the circular drive of the third house. “Circular drive!” I exclaim. “All the best homes on the lake have circular drives! I feel good about this place!”
The house has an interesting footprint — from the front, it looks like a modest ranch, but in the back it balloons up to two and a half stories. The entire south wall is made of glass and it looks out onto acres and acres of forest preserve. I’m already mentally leashing up the dogs and taking them on long, luxurious, woodsy walks where I don’t have to worry about them stepping on glass or trying to eat a syringe or a cigarette. Once while we were out walking, I had to wrestle a chicken wing out of Daisy’s mouth. Seriously.
Liz punches in the code to get the key and we step out of our shoes and into the flannel booties. We’re prepared to be wowed. The ceilings inside are low and sloped, and there’s nothing but pale wood planks everywhere we look. There’s wood on the walls, wood on the countertops, a wood-covered refrigerator, wood paneling over the dishwasher, and wood on the slanted ceilings. The only place in our line of sight that’s not decked out in wood is the sunken living room. It appears to be about a foot lower than the rest of the house, but the carpet is so shaggy it’s more like six inches. I sort of want to do the Nestea plunge onto it.
“What do you call this architecture style?” Mac asks.
Liz scans her sheet.“The listing says it’s‘ Colorado contemporary.’ ”
“The listing should say, ‘Mork and Mindy’s house,’”I correct.
The decor doesn’t get any more contemporary37 as we move past the entry. We notice the living room contains nothing but one of those big egg-shaped chairs and a curved chrome lamp.
“Suddenly I have the urge to sit in here wearing my hiking boots, listening to Dan Fogelberg on my eight-track while I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” Mac says.
“While feathering your hair with your enormous plastic pocket comb,” Liz adds.
I chime in, “In rainbow suspenders. While smoking an enormous doob.”
There are three different spiral staircases leading to oddly angled nooks upstairs, and every bedroom has either a water bed or access to a hot tub or both. And wood. So very, very much wood.
“Anyone else get the feeling this place was a porn set?” Mac asks.
I nod gravely. “So very, very much porn.”
We continue the tour, mostly because it’s funny.
“Who would buy this place?” I ask.
Liz consults a column of dates on the second page of the listing. “It’s been on the market for a year. You know, the construction is solid and someone obviously spent a lot of money on the paneling, but design like this can’t be fixed without a bulldozer. Unless they drop their asking price several hundred thousand dollars—”
“Or find Pam Dawber,” I interject.
“Or find Pam Dawber, no one will buy this place.”
We bid good-bye to Porn House and move on to the next listing. We’re there before I can even locate the place on the map. We park in front of a sagging colonial bordered by a couple of scruffy trees. “Okay, here we go,” Liz says. “This is it, 613 Maple Knoll Road.”
Hmm. Why does this address sound familiar? Have I been here before? No, today’s pretty much my first foray into anything other than the Cambs’ McDonald’s. And yet this address rings a bell.Why?
“Have you mentioned this place to us before?” I ask Liz.
“Not that I know of,” she replies.
“Mac, does this seem at all familiar to you?”
Whenever Mac really needs to concentrate, he squints and puts his hand to his mouth. He finally opens his eyes and says, “The place looks a little like a down-market version of my grandparents’ house, I guess?”
“No, no, that’s not it. But the address, it’s right on the edge of my subconscious. What is it? What could it be?” I stomp around the porch, shaking snow off my clogs. I notice a lady walk by with a dog and I smile and wave. In return, she scowls. Okay, what was that about?
The lock is sticking, so we have a couple more moments to cool our heels before we enter. I continue to try to jog my memory. “Maple Knoll, Maple Knoll, Maple Knoll. . ” And then I notice the street address in big brass numbers on the mailbox and it comes to me. “I’ve got it! I know how I know this house!”
“Yeah? How’s that?” Liz asks. “Have you been here before? I just showed a place to a couple, and in the middle of the tour, the wife exclaimed, ‘I threw up in these bushes!’ I guess she’d been to a party there once in high school.”
“That’s hilarious, but we didn’t grow up in Illinois — we’re from Indiana. We only moved up here after college. But I remember why I know this address! A child molester lived here!”
At the same time, Mac and Liz exclaim, “What?”
“I cross-referenced the MLS with the Illinois Sex Offender Database.” Both Liz and Mac stare at me incredulously.38
Liz looks worried as she works the locks. “Was it one of those situations where the guy was nineteen and the girl was seventeen and it was more of a parent thing and less of a sex crime?”
“Oh, no,” I exclaim. “This guy was a full-on perv. Child pornography. Videotaping and shit. Don’t even worry about the lock, because we can’t live here. Too much terrible karma.”
Mac quickly agrees. “You’re right. The neighbors might not know we were the new people and we’d be ostracized.”
I nod. “I guess that explains why the woman who just walked by here was staring daggers at us. Also? I’d hate to get a pedophile’s mail.”
We quickly leave and spend the rest of the afternoon trolling around the west side of Abington Cambs. What’s really unfortunate is that the Porn House and the Perv House are the highlights of the day. Everything we see next is small or chopped up or completely overpriced or full of questionable wiring and a hundred layers of hideous wallpaper and totally not worth removing our shoes. Mac and I are both really frustrated that we may not be able to find a decent place up here.
“Hey, is anyone thirsty?” Mac asks. “We should find a 7-Eleven or a Starbucks or something.”
I’m quick to help. “Let me see what I can locate on my trusty map.”
Exasperated by our lack of success, he runs his hand through his hair. “Okay, seriously, enough with the frigging map. You’re using what’s essentially a child’s place mat from a seafood restaurant, and you keep telling us to turn left into bodies of water so we can avoid pirates while we search for the goddamn buried treasure! This is like driving around with Homer Simpson. I guarantee you there’s no place to get a hot beverage on that thing, so please stop barking commands and let me see what I can find.”
I cross my arms and lean back into my seat. If my navigational skills aren’t wanted, then I’ll keep them to myself.
We cruise up and down Whitefish Bay Road for fifteen minutes, passing the oddly placed green barn no less than five times.
At no point do I mention that that’s the McDonald’s. . which is clearly marked on my map.