I left my neighborhood in the 1970s. Even though the razor-sharp edge of living in Petworth has dulled, I now hoard the memories. I find myself looking back, repeatedly — at street corners, empty stretches of Kansas Avenue, Sherman Circle — and these quiet scenes are arranged in my mind into strange, chaotic stacks, as if waiting for the day they will reveal themselves as the hidden alphabet that somehow spells out my life’s meaning.
The potency is in the stacking. Laying them down in a brushed-steel coffin was too cold, I needed to heat them up with my experiences since that time and bring the life back to them. They needed to be honored. The characters and events struggled for a place in my soul. This is the richness I’m now willing to talk about.
A.R.M. And the woman
by Laura Lippman
Chevy Chase, N.W.
Sally Holt was seldom the prettiest woman in the room, but for three decades now she had consistently been one of the most sought-after for one simple fact: She was a wonderful listener. Whether it was her eight-year-old son or her eighty-year-old neighbor or some male in-between, Sally rested her chin in her palm and leaned forward, expression rapt, soft laugh at the ready — but not o ready, which gave the speaker a feeling of power when the shy, sweet sound finally bubbled forth, almost in spite of itself. In the Northwest quadrant of Washington, where overtly decorative women were seen as suspect if not out-and-out tacky, a charm like Sally’s was much prized. It had served her well, too, helping her glide into the perfect marriage to her college sweetheart, a dermatologist, then allowing her to become one of Northwest Washington’s best hostesses, albeit in the amateur division. Sally and her husband, Peter, did not move in and did not aspire to the more rarefied social whirl, the one dominated by embassy parties and pink-faced journalists who competed to shout pithy things over one another on cable television shows. They lived in a quieter, in some ways more exclusive world, a charming, old-fashioned neighborhood comprising middle-class houses that now required upper-class incomes to own and maintain.
And if, on occasion, in a dark corner at one of the endless parties Sally and Peter hosted and attended, her unwavering attention was mistaken for affection, she managed to deflect the ensuing pass with a graceful shake of her auburn curls. “You wouldn’t want me,” she told the briefly smitten men. “I’m just another soccer mom.” The husbands backed away, sheepish and relieved, confiding in each other what a lucky son of a bitch Peter Holt was. Sally Holt had kept her figure, hadn’t allowed herself to thicken into that androgynous khaki-trousered — let’s be honest, downright dykish — mom so common in the area, which did have a lot of former field hockey players gone to seed. Plus, she was so great to talk to, interested in the world, not forever prattling about her children and their school.
Sally’s secret was that she didn’t actually hear a word that her admirers said, just nodded and laughed at the right moments, cued by their inflections as to how to react. Meanwhile, deep inside her head, she was mapping out the logistics of her next day. Just a soccer mom, indeed. To be a stay-at-home mother in Northwest D.C. was to be nothing less than a general, the Patton of the car pool, the Eisenhower of the HOV lane. Sally spent most of her afternoons behind the wheel of a Porsche SUV, moving her children and other people’s children from school to lessons, from lessons to games, from games to home. She was ruthlessly efficient with her time and motion, her radio always tuned to WTOP to catch the traffic on the eights, her brain filled with alternative routes and illegal shortcuts, her gaze at the ready to thaw the nastiest traffic cop. She could envision her section of the city in a three-dimensional grid in her head, her house on Morrison and the Dutton School off Nebraska the two fixed stars in her universe. Given all she had to do, you really couldn’t blame her for not listening to the men who bent her ear, a figure of speech that struck her as particularly apt. If she allowed all those words into her head, her ears would be bent — as crimped, tattered, and chewed-up looking as the old tom cat she had owned as a child, a cat who could not avoid brawls even after he was neutered.
But when Peter came to her in the seventeenth year of their marriage and said he wanted out, she heard him loud and clear. And when his lawyer said their house, mortgaged for a mere $400,000, was now worth $1.8 million, which meant she needed $700,000 to buy Peter’s equity stake, she heard that, too. For as much time as she spent behind the wheel of her car, Sally was her house, her house was Sally. The 1920s stucco two-story was tasteful and individual, with a kind of perfection that a decorator could never have achieved. She was determined to keep the house at all costs and when her lawyer proposed a way it could be done, without sacrificing anything in child support or her share of Peter’s retirement funds, she had approved it instantly and then, as was her habit, glazed over as the details were explained.
“What do you mean, I owe a million dollars on the house?” she asked her accountant, Kenny, three years later.
“You refinanced your house with an interest-only balloon mortgage in order to have the cash to buy Peter out of his share. Now it’s come due.”
“But I don’t have a million dollars,” Sally said, as if Kenny didn’t know this fact better than anyone. It was April, he had her tax return in front of him.
“No biggie. You get a new mortgage. Unfortunately, your timing sucks. Interest rates are up. Your monthly payment is going to be a lot bigger — just as the alimony is ending. Another bit of bad timing.”
Kenny relayed all this information with zero emotion. After all, it didn’t affect his bottom line. It occurred to Sally that an accountant should have a much more serious name. What was she doing, trusting someone named Kenny with her money?
“What about the equity I’ve built up in the past three years?”
“It was an interest-only loan, Sally. There is no additional equity.” Kenny, a square-jawed man who bore a regrettable resemblance to Frankenstein, sighed. “Your lawyer did you no favors, steering you into this deal. Did you know the mortgage broker he referred you to was his brother-in-law? And that your lawyer is a partner in the title company? He even stuck you with P.M.I.”
Sally was beginning to feel as if they were discussing sexually transmitted diseases instead of basic financial transactions
“I thought I got an adjustable-rate mortgage. A.R.M.’s have conversion rates, don’t they? And caps? What does any of this have to do with P.M.I.?”
“A.R.M.’s do. But you got a balloon, and balloons come due. All at once, in a big lump. Hence the name. You had a three-year grace period, in which you had an artificially low rate of less than three percent, with Peter’s four thousand in rehabilitative alimony giving you a big cushion. Now it’s over. In today’s market, I recommend a thirty-year fixed, but even that’s not the deal it was two years ago. According to today’s rates, the best you can do is—”
Frankennystein used an old-fashioned adding machine, the kind with a paper roll, an affectation Sally had once found charming. He punched the keys and the paper churned out, delivering its noisy verdict.
“A million financed at a thirty-year fixed rate — you’re looking at almost $6,000 a month and that’s just the loan. No taxes, no insurance.”
It was an increase of almost $2,000 a month over what she had been paying for the last three years, not taking into account the alimony she was about to lose, which came to $4,000 a month. A net loss of $6,000.