Fort Worth has a lot of ranch houses. This is a ranch house. There’s a black geometric gate just outside the front door, it sounds like a velociraptor in labor when you open it. The area inside it is an austere little courtyard about the size of a folding table. There are stones lining either side, left from an era when stones were the rage in landscaping. The doorbell is 16 ominous tones loud enough to wake a dead Victorian from the grave. The door itself is heavy and much wider than I know most front doors to be.
We don’t go in that way.
The garage is at the end of a large, steep, and sloping driveway that used to scare the shit out of 16-year-old me as I backed my jittery Mazda up it and onto the street, never achieving a straight line. The garage door is painted a dark midnight blue, the windows have been painted over as well, there was a robbery once. There’s a horseshoe above the garage, for luck.
The garage door is heavy and slow, opening it sounds like you’re doing it an inconvenience. When grown ups would push the button from inside the garage and run out before the door hit the ground I was always very nervous.
The door to the house from inside the garage is two little steps up from the concrete of the garage floor, covered in green outdoor carpeting that, by appearances, has seen more foot traffic than Grand Central.
The first thing you see in the house is a giant upright freezer, there’s a full fridge and freezer in the kitchen, and one more in the garage. You can call it preparedness, but I think we’re just Jews.
Past the freezer is the kitchen, once wallpapered in a yellow and green design I miss very much but updated to a more mellow scheme sometime in the 90s. The cabinetry remained yellow. There are endless drawers which is convenient when you need a “milk” and “meat” set of everything.
The kitchen’s best feature, in my opinion, is the table. It’s round white formica with one central leg and six sloping chairs that once had plastic yellow cushions. One kitchen exit leads to the den, that was once, if you can believe it, carpeted in black shag. It’s a watery colored hardwood now.
The dining room is through the other kitchen exit and is made up of 80% table. A long, brown wood table that played host to all our family dinners, most frequently on Friday nights. My grandparents sat at either end, my mother next to my her, then me, then my brother, closest to my grandfather. My aunt, uncle, and cousins sat on the other side. I’ve tried but I can’t remember in what order.
She was a big fan of lucite. The water pitchers were my favorite. Harshly rectangular with a much too small spout. Always filled with water and just four or five melting ice cubes in that awkward half moon shape.
One wall of the dining room is entirely built-in cabinetry home to fine glass wear from Germany, porcelain figures that were supposed to be important, and homemade Seder plates from when we were little and in a private Hebrew School. It closed when I was in 5th grade.
The dining room’s carpet is shag as well, this time a cream color, which isn’t very smart, when you think about it. The other walls of the dining room were covered in very ominous Jewish art. The windows have large wooden blinds that were never open, not one day I was there.
The opposite wall of the dining room is half open into a formal living room, one tiny step down. We never spent much time in there. No one ever spent much time in there. It is the most frozen still room I’ve ever known. There’s a brown piano, I used to peck out sounds until someone told me to stop. If you open the bench there are lots of books of music from the 60s. Essentially it was a very large and intricate thing to dust.
Out the other end of the formal living room is the entryway that lies on the other side of the front door. It’s got one mirrored wall and marble flooring partly covered by a black and white rug with a little green vine pattern. Through there you’re in the den, and through there you’re in the kitchen, so you can imagine walking around the house in a circle.
The den is where I watched MTV if I was alone, Wheel of Fortune if I wasn’t. The brick fireplace is painted white, the brown couch is ridiculously long. There’s a matching ottoman that’s also the size of a folding table. The coffee table, like so much of the furniture, is a Midcentury item made of a heavy piece of v-shaped marble with lucite legs holding it up, and a glass top that made a void in the middle that you’d fit into until about age seven.
Oh I don’t want to forget to tell you about the swordfish. You know how you don’t realize your grandparents have style until you’re older? My cool ass grandparents had a goddamned swordfish. It was eventually replaced by a hanging quilt which, though handmade by my great grandmother, wasn’t as striking.
The den’s best feature is its far wall, fabric covered in a pattern that, I assume, once took some real bravery to commit to. I adore it, and intend to try and replicate it one day.
Through the den, if you’re not going through the entryway and down the hall where the bedrooms are, you can instead go into…the sun room.
The sun room’s door is sliding glass. There’s a giant pair of longhorns installed above it. These Jews are Texan. There’s a round orange and blue sticker in the middle of the sliding glass door. It wasn’t always there, there was an accident once. Keeping the sliding glass door closed is of course its lock, and it’s extra chain lock at the top you secure with a little pin, but really what keeps that door secure is the stick. The stick is, I assume, a former broom or mop handle cut or broken to lay behind the sliding glass door and prevent it from budging when firmly in place. That stick kept us safer than any fancy ass alarm system, I can promise you that. Thank you, stick.
The sun room itself has a charming past. I remember entire seasons passing with access to the sunroom forbidden due to a leaking, if not crumbling, ceiling. Each wall is entirely made of glass, the carpeting is that same green lining the garage steps, but in far better condition. Which isn’t saying much. The carpet never seemed to fit the room, kind of the way a Shar Pei has too many rolls of skin.
There’s a built-in white brick bar I’ll be envious of for the rest of my life, and the room is furnished in white wicker with cushions in a primarily magenta floral design. Another sliding glass door lets you out into the back yard, a huge space broken into sections with stone landscaping, containing trees that bore what always seemed like a comical amount of leaves.
Down the hallway off the entry there are three bedrooms, a completely normal one with white twin beds and connecting full bath, the toilet and bathtub in a separate room from the vanity. That’s a design technique lost, if you ask me. Plenty of built-in cabinets, whose contents never changed, no matter the decade. I recently found an entire box of wet wipes no more recently made than 1973. We won’t talk about the various creams and salves.
The other bedroom has no windows to the outside. It’s one window, covered in more wooden blinds, looks out into the sunroom, which is something I guess. It’s been my uncle Alan’s room, a guest room, and most recently an office-like area for my grandfather’s computer. Every single room has its built-ins, this room has one entire wall as a bookcase.
The hallway is lined in linen and cedar closets. My brother’s baby blanket remained hidden in one of them for roughly 25 years. I never said a word. The end of the hallway is built-in cabinetry for displaying awards and other treasures, typically acquired through travel. When you turn on the cabinet’s interior lights they flicker for a long time before fully coming on.
To the left of that is my grandparent’s bedroom, a large and dark space with more windows that seemed permanently charged with blocking out natural light. An enormous Midcentury bed is flanked by beautiful wood nightstands and huge lamps. There used to be a big cardboard half-tube you’d stuff pillows into and fold the comforter over when making the bed. My grandfather’s closet and armoire are to the right. Her side was the left.
The bathroom vanity is really part of the bedroom, and is lined in lime green and silver chrome wallpaper and I’m not kidding. On the right side of it is a small bathroom with a sink, toilet, and shower, on the left is her closet. The whole room is full of excellent light fixtures. In the bathroom a metal panel set into the tiles reveals a toothbrush holder when you turn it around.
In June of 2017 my grandfather sold his house. It is the only house my family has had since before I was born. They bought it when my mother was in High School, I think. It was far too much house for my 89-year-old grandfather to manage and I’m glad he was able to sell it quickly. It’s in a very good school district. It belongs to a young couple now.
I had two days to go through the house and take with me whatever I wanted. Most things, like the sound of the doorbell or the fabric wall in the den, had to stay where they are. So things like photographs and letters and old luggage tags and the salt and pepper shaker that were never not on that dining room table are now in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn wondering where the hell their house went. I am, too.
Before I left I stood in front of her silver and green vanity and listened for her. It is always easier to hear her in her own home. I can be told 1,000 times that possessions, even houses, are just things, and things don’t matter like people. And that’s true, unless a house is the center of you. The easiest way to say it is that I spent more time here than most grandchildren spend in their grandparents’ homes. All of their grandchildren did.
I couldn’t breathe. Being in that house for the last time was a reality unfathomable, and unacceptable. There was dizziness and panic. I heard her voice and I left.
There wasn’t any way to survive the situation other than by ignoring it. I will never be okay with or over it. The house is simply gone, both a reminder of the pain of loss, and the privilege of those still here.
There was nothing I could do to stop it. I had no money to buy the house and it would have been an illogical purchase if I did. There is nothing more reminiscent of childlike helplessness than knowing something is true that you don’t want to be true. This is just one thing that is now true. No matter how clearly I hear her, she isn’t anywhere in that house. She hasn’t been for a long time. And now, neither are we.