I woke up early in anticipation of a full, and probably nerve-wracking, day. We were moving from our house on Locust Road in the District to our new house on Aspen Street in Chevy Chase, Maryland. I was expecting the moving truck at 8 a.m., but the clock showed barely 6. There was no way I could go back to sleep, and I thought I might as well start the day.
The move was the culmination of about six months of talking, deciding and looking. I first raised the idea of moving with my husband, Julie, when it became clear that Jonathan, my eldest son, enrolled in the Jewish Day School, should not continue in their high school. It had too few students and was limited in its offerings. Also, the students had been together since kindergarten, and it felt too in-grown. Moving to Maryland, with its choice of good high schools, seemed to be the answer.
Although Julie wasn’t enthusiastic about leaving the District, he agreed that it made sense and that we could afford the upgrade. We had been living in the District for slightly more than fifteen years, since we first came to Washington. We liked its convenience as well as being part of a racially integrated Neighbors Inc. community in upper Northwest D.C. Our house was comfortable and it worked reasonably well, although the rooms were small and the closet space limited.
We focused on Chevy Chase, Maryland, in the B-CC High School district, and we had a relaxed timetable. I began going to open houses to get a sense of the market and see what was available. Sometimes Julie and I went together, but it was easier if one stayed home with the children while the other checked out the possibilities. Walking through an open house one day I heard my name called, as Sheila L. stepped out of the shadows. Though Sheila’s son and my younger son were classmates and friends, I didn’t know that she was an agent for Long and Foster, and one of their highest performers in the Chevy Chase area. I could see why within a few minutes, as she quickly established her credentials to help me find the right house and become my agent.
Working with Sheila proved advantageous, as she quickly learned what I wanted and screened the suitability of houses as they came on the market. That saved me a lot of time. About two months later, on a Thursday afternoon, she called to tell me that a house she thought I would like would be shown at an open house that Sunday. Another company was listing it, but she could arrange for me to see it the next day. She expressed a sense of urgency, and I agreed to meet her mid-day.
The house was located on Aspen Street, and as I approached I drove through an overhead canopy formed by the large and majestic oak trees that lined both sides of the street. Sheila arrived just ahead of me and we entered together. I was not in the house very long when I felt this was the one for us. It was a large center-hall colonial with rooms that were spacious, airy and light. Most importantly, it was in move-in condition. The current owners had lived there slightly more than two years and had made major improvements such as central air, a new kitchen, an expanded master bedroom with a walk-in closet, renovated closets in two other bedrooms, new carpeting and drapes. Their expected stay was cut short when the husband was offered a promotion that required relocating to the Midwest. The house met all our needs, was in move-in condition and would represent an upgrade in comfort and amenities. I was sold.
I called Julie when I got home, excitedly telling him about the house, suggesting that he stop by to see it on his way home from work. Sheila met him there, and when he got home he agreed that we should make an offer. After dinner we conferred between ourselves and then with Sheila. Most of the evening was devoted to ironing out the details of the contract, and I was struck by the irony that three parents of students at the Jewish Day School were intensely involved in the business of buying a house on a Shabbat evening, when work was supposed to be set aside.
The next morning, Sheila stopped by for our signatures before bringing the offer to the seller. She was pleased by the terms, and especially the large cash down payment that Julie wanted to make. I saw it as a sign of his interest in the house. Also he put no contingencies on the contract, aside from an inspection, which made it appealing even though we were offering a few thousand dollars less than their asking price. Later in the day Sheila called to say that our offer had been accepted. It had all happened so fast that it seemed unreal, and I could hardly believe our good fortune.
Within hours, Julie’s mood changed and it felt like a wall had come down between us. I didn’t understand what was happening. He withdrew, went for a long walk and was barely communicative. As the evening wore on, distressed by his puzzling behavior, I told him, “We don’t have to buy the house; we can withdraw from the contract.” “It will be alright,” he replied. “We will make it work.” I wasn’t sure what was happening and was at a loss about what I could say or do. When I asked about selling the house on Locust Road, he replied, “We will keep it as a rental,” giving me the sense that he had already decided.
Although I was uneasy, I got absorbed and distracted with the work of arranging the move, sorting through belongings, and getting Jonathan ready for his first summer at sleep-away camp. I stopped by the house several times to check out details and room measurements, and seeing the house excited me every time. All the subsequent arrangements of getting the house inspected, a mortgage and then the closing also moved smoothly, and we were ready to move in slightly less than three months later, just several days after Jonathan left for camp.
I took off from work the following week and devoted myself to unpacking and getting settled. Sarah, our housekeeper, and I worked pretty much non-stop, and by the end of the week most of the boxes had been emptied. Moving into a larger house made it relatively easy to find places for everything.
When Julie came home from work that Friday, one week after we had moved in, I was ready for us to hang the artwork. “I’ve organized the pictures by room,” I said. “See what you think.” We walked through the living room, dining room and sun-room, holding the artwork up on various walls to see how they looked. I held them while Julie stepped back to look, and then we changed places. Slowly we came to decisions about what would go where, and began hammering in the hooks. When that was finished we both stepped back to admire how nice everything looked. It didn’t look like we had just moved in, as the drapes and carpeting that the owner had left gave the rooms a finished look. I was feeling pleased, almost elated, about the attractiveness of the light and airy sun-filled rooms, noting to myself that we would need additional furniture to fill out the spacious living room.
I was standing there, lost in thought, trying to visualize the furniture needed to fill the room, when Julie turned to me and said, “I hope you will be happy here.” I turned to him, as he repeated, “I hope you will be happy here. I will be leaving.”
More than forty years later, I hear his words, straightforward and unemotional, as if he had said them yesterday. I hardly remember what I replied, but I remember turning stone cold, with the breath sucked out of me. At that moment it felt like the earth had opened up and swallowed me.
I can’t imagine how I got through the subsequent days and weeks. I needed to understand what had led him to that decision. I said we had young children, ages 9 and 12, and that we should try and save the marriage, at the very least for their sake. At that point I still believed marriages were forever, and to end one was unfathomable. I urged that we seek counseling. “You should do that if you think it would be helpful. I am not interested,” he replied. It took me a very long time to forgive his unwillingness to try.
I found a therapist and started quickly. It was supportive, but not that helpful in understanding how my world had suddenly swerved in an unanticipated direction. We talked a lot that summer, and the more we talked, the less things made sense to me. It was even more confusing when he agreed that we had a pretty good marriage, maybe a B or B-minus. “I guess you only settle for A’s,” I said sardonically, with the verses of the song from Fiddler, “Do You Love Me?”, running through my head. Over time I came to realize that we were not having fun anymore, and we were not each other’s best friends or confidants. Perhaps we had never been.
With Jonathan away at summer camp, we agreed to wait until he came home to tell both him and my younger son that we would divorce. This was Jonathan’s first time at a sleep-away camp, which he was enjoying immensely. I didn’t want to ruin it for him, and felt that neither a letter nor a phone call would be a suitable way to break the news. Waiting until he returned home seemed like the best option.
About a week after Jonathan returned from camp, we told the children that we wanted to talk to them, and ushered them into the living room. My younger son stood in the front hallway and started yelling, “You are getting a divorce. I don’t want you to get a divorce.” I was stunned, and had not realized that he had picked up on the charged atmosphere between me and Julie, or that he might have overheard us talking. I reached out to hug and try to comfort him as I led him into the living room, but all I could say was “Everything will be alright.” He put his hands over his ears and immediately dived under the living room sofa. “I am not listening,” he yelled from under the sofa as he banged on the carpet and the sofa bottom. I let Julie take the lead in breaking the news. I was numb and too distracted to hear what he said. But then Jonathan interrupted, shouting, “You deceived me all summer. You knew and didn’t tell me. You lied to me.” I was stung by his charges. How to explain that our intentions were good; that we didn’t want to ruin his summer.
Somehow we carried on into the fall with some semblance of family life. We established routines in the new house, and Julie and I began to live parallel lives. It seemed as though it fell on me to actualize his decision to end the marriage. In late October, when he announced he had a ten-day business trip to South America, I told him not to return to the house when his trip was over. He agreed, and when he returned he moved into a furnished basement apartment in the neighborhood until he could move back into the Locust Road house, which by then had been rented.
The association of the new house with the end of my marriage cast a pall over my initial excitement about it. It felt tainted, and linked in my mind with the divorce. When we bought it, the house represented a new level of comfort and the next stage of “feathering our nest” and enhancing our marriage. I felt we had moved into the house under false pretenses, and that perhaps it was not a choice I would have made had I known what was coming. It did not bring me the joy I thought it would, even as I undertook refurnishing the living room with a cash gift from my parents. But with time, the space, the light, the airiness, the convenient location and the house’s overall comfort and amenities began to work their magic, and my perspective started to shift. I came to see the house as his way of making amends. He set it up so that with a low mortgage I could afford to live there. When I sold the house, more than twenty years later, the equity I had accumulated made a substantial contribution to a comfortable retirement.
This past fall, Jonathan and his oldest daughter, my granddaughter, stayed with me while he visited his father, who was recuperating from a bad fall and subsequent surgery. He left early Sunday morning to catch some extra visiting time, and I told him I would bring my granddaughter to the Locust Road house, where Julie still lived, so they could leave from there. She had asked to see the Chevy Chase house, where her father lived from the age of 12, and I said I would swing by it on the way.
It was a bright and sunny Sunday, and as I pulled up in front of the house, I saw a sign on the lawn celebrating their daughter’s graduation from Stone Ridge. My granddaughter got out so she could walk around and left me to muse. The house, with its fresh coat of paint, shone in the sunlight, much like the first time I saw it; it hardly seemed possible that more than forty years had passed since we moved in.
I sold the house to a friend of Jonathan’s, whose interest accelerated a process of considering a change that had been under way for some time. As Jonathan said, “Jane and Roger lit a fire under me.” They moved to Texas after about ten years and I didn’t know who they sold it to.
From the lawn sign, I knew that a family with children lived there, much as we had been. I thought about how much we came to enjoy the house and the space it afforded us for family dinners, celebrations and children’s overnights, which whizzed through my mind. The exterior was unchanged and I wondered what changes they had made to the inside. Perhaps, I thought, when the pandemic is over, I will ring the bell and ask for a tour.