On Sundays in Southern California (more specifically, the Inland Empire, the foothills, the I-10, the suburbs, the defunct vineyards, the razed orange groves), the sun is hot and the lawns are newly mown. After church, my mother piles us into the burgundy Chrysler minivan, one rear window covered in plastic sheeting duct-taped in place, and drives us to the newest subdivision. It’s the nineties; this area is growing very quickly. Chapparral is being bulldozed to make way, mostly for small lots with large stucco two-story single-family homes. The older track homes are sometimes manse-like, huge, imposing, situated well away from the street on large lots. They lack sidewalks.
We only go to the new ones, however. We walk around the model homes, counting it especially lucky when there is stale microwave popcorn or bottled water for the taking. The realtors somehow take my mother seriously in spite of the dilapidated minivan–and we do, too, my sisters and I. “This one’s my room!” we call as we enter the professionally decorated bedrooms. The televisions are fake, but each room usually has one; everything is pristine, but there are touches that make you think somebody might live here: a sweater draped over a chair back, a turned-down bed and a teddy bear, food box-facades in the kitchen’s refrigerator.
My mother always frames these as outings, but they are outings with a purpose. She is particularly smitten with the idea of leaving our house (a model home once itself; by the time we are touring track homes, it has a leaky roof, an out-of-control backyard, and stained carpet) and moving into one of these cavernous, clean, history-less houses. No ghosts haunt them; no cat piss lingers in that one corner where Gus liked to spray. The kitchen is not crowded with two marriages (and two divorces) worth of mixing bowls, electronics, and utensils. The bathroom is grime-free and the towels match. There are no broken toys or impulse buys or secondhand clothes shoved into any of the hall closets. No dogs leave their hair everywhere here; but it is pleasant to imagine them slurping water out of bowls on the kitchen floor, sunlight falling on their backs through the French doors.
The whole appeal of this place is, of course, that we do not live there–that nobody does. This does not keep me, in particular, from feeling secretly hostile when other families wander through and admire “our” house. I am comforted by reminding myself of what my mother says often enough: that nobody wants the model, and so if we take it, this very model, I’ll get that 3-ft-tall decorative giraffe and elephant poster for my very own. I will own fake TVs that are sleeker and more glamorous than our real TV, and since the real point is to enjoy inhabiting this space, to enjoy inhabiting this outline of a narrative that someone else has set up for us, it doesn’t matter that my channel-changing gesture doesn’t alter the grey facade.
