Of course you don’t. But if you did, you’d know what Seattle real estate was like for me.
I came up here on a whim, pretty much. We’d been living in L.A. when Elgie’s animation company was bought by Big Brother. Whoops, did I say Big Brother? I meant Microsoft. Around the same time, I’d had a Huge Hideous Thing happen to me (which we definitely do not need to get into). Let’s just say that it was so huge and so hideous that it made me want to flee L.A. and never return.
Even though Elgie didn’t need to relocate to Seattle, Big Brother strongly recommended it. I was more than happy to use it as an excuse to hightail it out of La-La Land.
My first trip up here, to Seattle, the realtor picked me up at the airport to look at houses. The morning batch were all Craftsman, which is all they have here, if you don’t count the rash of view-busting apartment buildings that appear in inexplicable clumps, as if the zoning chief was asleep at his desk during the sixties and seventies and turned architectural design over to the Soviets.
Everything else is Craftsman. Turn-of-the-century Craftsman, beautifully restored Craftsman, reinterpretation of Craftsman, needs-some-love Craftsman, modern take on Craftsman. It’s like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle in a collective trance. You are getting sleepy, when you wake up you will want to live only in a Craftsman house, the year won’t matter to you, all that will matter is that the walls will be thick, the windows tiny, the rooms dark, the ceilings low, and it will be poorly situated on the lot.
The main thing about this cornucopia of Craftsmans: compared to L.A., they were Ikea-cheap!
Ryan, the realtor, took me to lunch downtown at a Tom Douglas restaurant. Tom Douglas is a local chef who has a dozen restaurants, each one better than the last. Eating at Lola — that coconut cream pie! that garlic spread! — made me believe I could actually be happy making a life for myself in this Canada-close sinkhole they call the Emerald City. I blame you, Tom Douglas!
After lunch, we headed to the realtor’s car for the afternoon rounds. Looming over downtown was a hill crammed with, say what, Craftsman houses. At the top of the hill, on the left, I could discern a brick building with a huge yard overlooking Elliott Bay.
“What’s that?” I asked Ryan.
“Straight Gate,” he said. “It was a Catholic school for wayward girls built at the turn of the century.”
“What is it now?” I said.
“Oh, it hasn’t been anything for years. Every so often some developer tries to convert it to condos.”
“So it’s for sale?”
“It was supposed to be converted into eight condos,” he said. Then, his eyes began to pirouette, sensing a sale. “The property is three whole acres, mostly flat. Plus, you own the entire hillside, which you can’t build on, but it does ensure privacy. Gatehouse — which is what the developers renamed it because Straight Gate seemed antigay — is about twelve thousand square feet, loaded with charm. There is some deferred maintenance, but we’re talking crown jewel.”
“How much are they asking?”
Ryan gave a dramatic pause. “Four hundred thousand.” He watched with satisfaction as my jaw dropped. The other houses we’d seen were the same price, and they were on tiny lots.
Turns out the huge yard had been deeded to open space for tax purposes, and the Queen Anne Neighborhood Association had designated Straight Gate a historic site, which made it impossible to touch the exterior or interior walls. So the Straight Gate School for Girls was stuck in building-code limbo.
“But the area is zoned for single-family residences,” I said.
“Let’s take a look-see.” Ryan shoved me into his car.
In terms of layout, it was kind of brilliant. The basement — where the girls were penned, it appeared, from the dungeon door that locked from the outside — was certainly creepy and depressing. But it was five thousand square feet, which left seven thousand feet above-grade, a swell size for a house. On the ground floor was a kitchen opening onto a dining room — pretty fabulous — a huge receiving area that could be our living room, and a couple of small offices. On the second floor was a chapel with stained-glass windows and a row of confessionals. Perfect for a master bedroom and closet! The other rooms could be a kid’s room and a guest room. All that was required was cosmetic: weatherproofing, refinishing, paint. A cinch.
Standing on the back portico, facing west, I noticed ferry boats gliding like snails along the water.
“Where are they going?” I asked.
“Bainbridge Island.” Ryan answered. No dummy, he added, “Lots of people have second homes out there.”
I stayed an extra day and grabbed a beach house, too.
From: Manjula Kapoor
To: Bernadette Fox
Dear Ms. Fox,
The items on the packing list will be shipped to the Gate Avenue address.
Warm regards,
Manjula
From: Bernadette Fox
To: Manjula Kapoor
Oh! Could you make dinner reservations for us on Thanksgiving? You can call up the Washington Athletic Club and get us something for 7 PM for three. You are able to place calls, aren’t you? Of course, what am I thinking? That’s all you people do now.
I recognize it’s slightly odd to ask you to call from India to make a reservation for a place I can see out my window, but here’s the thing: there’s always this one guy who answers the phone, “Washington Athletic Club, how may I direct your call?”
And he always says it in this friendly, flat… Canadian way. One of the main reasons I don’t like leaving the house is because I might find myself face-to-face with a Canadian. Seattle is crawling with them. You probably think, U.S./Canada, they’re interchangeable because they’re both filled with English-speaking, morbidly obese white people. Well, Manjula, you couldn’t be more mistaken.
Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass — anything and everything — the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that. The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that’s how I fear Canadians. To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone’s ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don’t understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated as such.
Yes, I’m done.
If the WAC can’t take us, which may be the case, because Thanksgiving is only two days away, you can find someplace else on the magical Internet.
I was wondering how we ended up at Daniel’s Broiler for Thanksgiving dinner. That morning, I slept late and came downstairs in my pajamas. I knew it was going to rain because on my way to the kitchen I passed a patchwork of plastic bags and towels. It was a system Mom had invented for when the house leaks.
First we lay out plastic bags under the leaks and cover them with towels or moving blankets. Then we put a spaghetti pot in the middle to catch the water. The trash bags are necessary because it might leak for hours in one place, then move over two inches. Mom’s pièce de résistance is putting an old T-shirt inside the spaghetti pot to muffle the drip-drip-drip. Because that can drive you crazy when you’re trying to sleep.
It was one of the rare mornings when Dad was around. He’d gotten up early to go cycling, and he was sweaty, standing at the counter in his goony fluorescent racing pants, drinking green juice of his own making. His shirt was off, and he had a black heart-rate monitor strapped across his chest, plus some shoulder brace he invented, which is supposedly good for his back because it pulls his shoulders into alignment when he’s at the computer.