Open House Read online

  Then there were the seagulls. No one had warned us about the seagulls.

  Our first memory of Brixham was of driving into the town and watching masses of gulls wheel and dip against a steel-wool sky, white feathers lit by a single shard of sun that had penetrated dense stratocumulus clouds. We could not hear them—our car windows were rolled up tightly against the threat of rain—but even with the windows down I doubt we would have noticed. Their languid arabesques muted all our other senses and transported us to imaginary childhood memories of seaside holidays. This was Famous Five territory. Enid Blyton awaited us with sand pail and shovel in hand.

  How quickly seagulls go from being the siren of playful days at the beach to the siren that drives you to consider self-harm or murder. Noisy, dirty scavengers. By night they kept us awake; by day they terrorized us in our garden.

  I had decided to turn the shed at the top of our garden into a writing studio, but this did not sit well with the seagulls. As I repainted the shed and stocked it with my supplies and writing totems, a pair of gulls perched on a nearby roof, monitoring my movements like Gestapo agents, screaming their disapproval to their brethren, who seconds later swooped in and joined the squawk of displeasure. I persisted. But hunched over my laptop, working up my thoughts, I could hear the seagulls land on the shed roof with a great thud and stomp back and forth, their gnarly talons scraping the abrasive asphalt felting like fingernails on a chalkboard. I would emerge from the shed and yell and shake my fist at them; they would step up their assault, dive-bombing and pelting me with their guano. Eventually, I surrendered. I packed up my laptop, files, writing materials, and carried them back down the perilous steps, into the house and up two flights of stairs, where I set up camp in a spare bedroom. Which faced the road with the bumper-to-bumper traffic and the swearing drivers.

  Moving my study inside did not silence the seagulls. They were particularly vociferous during their breeding and nesting seasons, but even in the off-season they made an unholy racket. At 3 a.m. one morning, they inexplicably erupted into a wild round of screeching that sounded like a party of toddlers having a go at one another with baseball bats and knives in the ball pool at Ikea. The Husband, who is a friend to nature and is so gentlemanly that his face winces and his body jerks when he hears profanity, shot up in bed and shouted, “WHEN THE FUCK ARE THEY GOING TO SHUT UP?” The seagulls were turning us into ugly versions of ourselves, driving us away as quickly as they had ensnared us.

  Another big negative was that natural light was an infrequent visitor in our home. The narrow road we lived on was bordered on both sides by towering terraced homes that blocked virtually all available light and sense of the outdoors from the ground level of our home. We had to climb two flights of stairs to view the sky and get a true picture of the weather conditions. Something had to give.

  Surreptitiously at first, I began to troll the property websites. As desperation mounted, I called estate agents and arranged for viewings of other homes. We would return from these outings and slink in the front door, not wanting to offend The House, not wanting it to know what we had been up to. But The House knew. It could tell we had been out admiring another house; it could smell the cleaning products of a rival on our clothes; it could read our distracted expressions, our lost affection as we wrestled with how to break the news to it. I sensed it glowering at us, hands on hips, scolding, “You’ve been seeing other houses. I know you have. You shameful two-timers!”

  The House was all wrong for me for other reasons. I thought I would be happy living a small-town life, but I was not. I felt cut off from the wider world. I wanted more: more culture, more discourse, more diversity, nicer shops, galleries, a cinema, more anonymity, and I began to not only resent the absence of these things but mourn them like the loss of oxygen. Each time we drove back into town after being away for a few hours or a few days I could feel a part of me dying inside.

  I DO NOT KNOW WHAT went through The Husband’s head that day when we parted at Gatwick’s security cordon, or his first reaction upon reading the note that lay under his pillow. For me, I adopted a fearless, stoic resolution that you only see on the faces of veterans of war. I marched resolutely through security, sat patiently in the departures lounge while flipping through property websites, and then boarded the flight. Settled into my window seat, I stared tight jawed at the tarmac beyond and took a deep breath. “We have to move,” I finally said aloud to no one in particular, after having repeated the phrase so many times to myself.

  2

  The Foundation Is Set

  Moving has been in my blood, has been my way of life since my earliest years, but the crucial support framework necessary for a lifetime of moving house was not as robust as it could have been.

  I was born in Toronto, in the midst of a baby boom and a building boom. The city was reinventing itself for the modern age, and by extension so was its citizenry. Time to shake off that colonial past, develop some can-do spirit, give Hog Town a cosmopolitan makeover. The urgency for progress was dizzying, as if the city had just discovered a cache of mortar that had to be used up. Like all new things, everyone wanted it yesterday. You might be able to renovate a house virtually overnight, but not an entire city or its population. It would be many decades before a whiff of cosmopolitanism descended on Toronto the Good. In the meantime, the movers and shakers had set about redrawing the city, and they were assembling cranes and hoisting up the wrecking ball. Down came the old and dowdy; up went the tall and shiny. Houses, office buildings, hospitals, schools, shopping malls.

  My generation was the lucky beneficiary of this modernization scheme. We entered brand-new schools where everything was pristine: there was not so much as a film of chalk dust in the classrooms or worn varnish on the gymnasium floors. I experienced this over and over, because by the time I was nine years old, I had already lived in three houses and attended five different schools. The pattern was firmly imprinted.

  Psychologists today would have lots to say about the impact of a peripatetic life on a youngster. Perhaps back then there was a body of work that revealed disturbing statistics on the subject, some insight into the effects on so-called army brats—the children of servicemen and -women who were frequently uprooted from one military base to another with their parents. But for the most part no one considered the emotional, psychological, or social ramifications that numerous moves had on a child. My parents certainly did not. Neither of them was in the armed forces; they just moved a lot. Had there been any such research, they would not have paid it the slightest heed. Especially my mother. She was the reason we always moved.

  I do not recall my young self being particularly flustered about moving from one house to another. I had tried to absorb it as an adventure, an opportunity to explore new places and meet a new tribe of youngsters who were ready to play with me. I tried to rationalize moving as a normal part of life: that all families moved into a house, lived there for a while, then packed up and moved to a different one. Like musical chairs, but with houses.

  Except that my apparent amenability was a ruse, a necessary coping mechanism to please my parents so they would not worry about me. The reality for me was that moving was a black hole that sucked out familiar friends and hurtled me into an unknown universe to make new ones. Sure, being part of the great baby boom meant there was no shortage of young playmates, but for a shy, anxious child like me this was no consolation. I acquired—as if by osmosis—chameleon attributes: seeking the background, adopting a muted expression. I wore the mask of the polite and deferential; of the easygoing and compliant that, while not at all my natural character, would at least score friends. If I knew anything at that age, it was that no one likes a bossy-boots, and you are more likely to attract friends if you appear submissive.

  It was the finality of moving that disturbed me, of being wrenched from the familiar and tossed into a quadrant far away with no hope of returning. Nowadays, when I track our various homes on a map of Toronto, I am surprised at how close
they are in relation to one another. But distance is an abstract concept when you are nine years old and do not drive: tell a kid that you are moving four miles away and you might as well tell them you are moving to Saturn.

  Moving is said to make a person more resilient, more able to adapt and integrate into different social situations. That was the reasoning my parents used. But it was not my experience: I grew more sensitive, more aware of how different our family was. An invisible line of demarcation between the normal and “us” was cleaved into my understanding. I felt like an outsider.

  My mother was unimpressed with my sentimental attachment to friends. I confided in her my doubts about moving, my fears about missing my friends, but she scoffed, “Friends do not matter. You’ll forget them the moment we’re in our new home. New home, new friends.”

  No, I thought, that cannot be right: Friends are vital for people like me. They are facilitators and guides to the complexity of neighbourhoods, schoolyards, relationships, and life in general. My circle of friends was small, but they were good, loyal pals who were savvier than I.

  My best friend was Cheryll. She lived one street over from me in the then new suburb of Don Mills. She and I had met in kindergarten, and we formed one of those adhesive friendships that, if you are lucky, will accompany you through life. Crucially, Cheryll had a grasp of the world that I lacked, and through her I learned how life operated outside the tightly controlled home of my parents. What I was to appreciate decades later was that childhood friends are the glue of one’s past: who else remembers you as that tentative, awkward kid but a friend from primary school?

  Still, I had to trust that what my mother said about friends was true, even if she refused to acknowledge that my personality made it difficult for me to make new friends. Then she said something so shocking that it lodged itself permanently in my consciousness: “People are important, but they will not get you ahead in life. Only property can do that. Remember that. Property first, people second.”

  Her words stunned me and confused my green world concerning the nature of relationships. How could she say such a thing? Hadn’t we just learned in Sunday school that passage from John saying something about there being no greater demonstration of love than that of someone laying down his life for his friends? Not laying down his life for his property; for his friends.

  I argued the point with my mother. This moving thing was grossly unfair. She stood her ground.

  “Don’t be so sensitive. You need to roll with the punches. You need to toughen up.”

  “But what about your friends?” I finally said with as much petulance as I could get away with without being spanked or sent to my room.

  “Your father and I will make new ones, just like you will.”

  They did. Of course they did. They had a car and a telephone, and so their social circle expanded exponentially and effortlessly, whereas my social circle shrank because it was constantly being redrawn.

  Exploratory forays into each new neighbourhood confirmed for me that my family was different, perhaps even weird in terms of their frequent moves. My opener when meeting potential playmates was “How long have you lived here?” It astonished me to meet people who had lived in the same house for more than four years. Or who had been born in their home; had only known the house they were living in. In turn, they reacted with suspicion when I rhymed off the places where I had lived, regaling them the way an intrepid explorer might regale fellow adventurers around a tavern table but who in the midst of the telling rapidly recognizes how foolhardy it must sound.

  “Why do you have to move so much?” my playmates quizzed.

  “I have no idea.”

  WHEN I THINK BACK to all the homes of my childhood, the one that resonates most strongly is Larkfield Drive. Perhaps the reason has to do with the fact that I was young; that it is the first home I remember, and that it was the only brand-new home we ever lived in. Larkfield Drive was in the new experimental development of Don Mills, and it was here that my world view was formed.

  The area encompassing Don Mills was settled in 1817. Its name was conferred by Elizabeth Simcoe, wife of John Graves Simcoe, Upper Canada’s first lieutenant-governor, who in 1793 wrote that the river that ran through this area east of the city of York (now Toronto) reminded her of the River Don in her home county of Yorkshire.

  From the time Earth was formed up until the mid-1950s, Don Mills was largely untamed, an area of gentle hills, forests, rivers wending innocently through a landscape that gradually included farmland and pastures. A few miles away, Toronto was racing toward its hopeful status as Centre of the Universe: immigrants were arriving weekly to supply labour to a growing host of industries, businesses, and services. Expansion was furious. Bucolic Don Mills remained virtually untouched, until it bumped up against dump trucks and planning schematics, and then redevelopment pounced swiftly. In 1950, Don Mills was home to about two dozen farms; five years later, it was home to about fifteen thousand new homes—the first planned residential community in Canada, and a blueprint for future North American cities.

  Don Mills was built around the Bauhaus principles of its founder Walter Gropius, a pioneer of modern architecture. The movement gained traction in post–Second World War North America, where it was lauded, or criticized, depending on your sensibilities, for its radical house designs: angular and sculptural in appearance; low to the ground, with split-level layouts. Oddly, while espousing leading-edge designs and worthy principles about green spaces, Bauhaus exerted draconian control and conformity, and it became one of those creative movements that sees itself as so ahead of the curve that it fails to recognize its own hypocrisy: to wit, streetscapes were subject to regulated design edicts, and homeowners were forbidden to change the colour of their homes, not even the front door.

  My parents’ home at 10 Larkfield Drive (since demolished and replaced by one of those monster homes that have bullied their way into older suburban enclaves) was a popular model in the development: a split-level, three-bedroom home with a broad, obtuse roofline. The front entrance was a recessed courtyard with irregular windows whose shapes mimicked the roofline. On the main level was a study/den, and behind it an open-plan dining/living room with a large glass wall and door that faced the backyard and patio. The kitchen, small but functional, had a side door that my brother and I were instructed to use whenever we came indoors from playing outside. The upstairs was compact: three bedrooms and a bathroom. Below the main floor were two lower levels: the first led to our family room, with its green-marbled linoleum floor; one more level down was the cellar, where the laundry was done and where my dad kept his few tools, though it could not be said that he was in any way handy.

  Where our house differed from those of my friends was in its interior. My friends’ homes had furniture with straight sides, glossy surfaces, sofas and chairs of easy comfort, the type of furniture that suited a Bauhaus home. Our furniture was unusually shaped, embellished with carvings, turned feet, winged armrests, filigreed handles. Mahogany chairs, tables, sideboards, and cabinets looked distinctly out of place in this modern surrounding, like a group of elderly gentlemen who have wandered into a rave. That my mother referred to some of the pieces by name, such as “the Adam” and “the Chippendale,” added to the weirdness, and made my friends snicker.

  “Why does she have names for her furniture?”

  “I think they are like her pets,” I gamely said.

  Indeed, my mother stroked, buffed, nurtured, doted on her furniture, and ensured the pieces were in prizewinning condition. Young fingers were discouraged from touching them; the bite would have been severe. At the same time, that furniture, erect and imperious, appeared to hold us all to account, and the collection sat among us as if it were doing us a huge favour by deigning to live in suburbia.

  Outside our Victorian/Bauhaus home, newness reigned—in the young fledgling trees planted throughout the subdivision that grew quickly and softened the harsh geometric shapes of the houses; in the smell of fr
eshly rolled-out turf; in the slick, shiny blacktop driveways; and in the thousands of smartly dressed young families and their babies who moved into the area. It was like a specific demographic had been selected to colonize the area, and we were its pioneers.

  The writer John Cheever, who hated the suburbs but ended up living in one, lamented in an article that appeared in Esquire in 1960: “My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city’s boundaries like enemy territory, and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in The New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.”

  But Don Mills was not a cesspool of “indescribable dreariness”: it was the place to live if you were young and ambitious, which my parents were. The average homeowner was between twenty and thirty years old, and included journalists, actors, artists, academics, advertising and marketing professionals, TV performers and writers.