The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History. Jonathan Franzen
its situation in the Catholic school district attached to the church of Mary, Queen of Peace. Given the quality of the Webster Groves public schools, I didn’t understand why a family would pay extra to live in this district in order to then pay further extra for schooling by nuns, but there were a lot of things I didn’t understand about being Catholic. According to my mother, Catholic parents from all over St. Louis eagerly awaited listings in the district, and families in Webster Groves had been known to pull up stakes and move just one or two blocks to get inside its boundaries.
Unfortunately, once the school year started, three weeks from now, young parents wouldn’t be so eager. I felt some additional pressure to help my brother Tom, the executor of the estate, to finish his work quickly. I felt a different kind of pressure from my other brother, Bob, who had urged me to remember that we were talking about real money. (“People knock $782,000 down to $770,000 when they’re negotiating, they think it’s basically the same number,” he’d told me. “Well, no, in fact, it’s twelve thousand dollars less. I don’t know about you, but I can think of a lot of things I’d rather do with twelve thousand dollars than give it to the stranger who’s buying my house.”) But the really serious pressure came from my mother, who, before she died, had made it clear that there was no better way to honor her memory and validate the last decades of her life than to sell the house for a shocking amount of money.
Counting had always been a comfort to her. She wasn’t a collector of anything except Danish Christmas china and mint plate blocks of U.S. postage, but she maintained lists of every trip she’d ever taken, every country she’d set foot in, every one of the “Wonderful (Exceptional) European Restaurants” she’d eaten in, every operation she’d undergone, and every insurable object in her house and her safe-deposit box. She was a founding member of a penny-ante investment club called Girl Tycoons, whose portfolio’s performance she tracked minutely. In the last two years of her life, as her prognosis worsened, she’d paid particular attention to the sale price of other houses in our neighborhood, writing down their location and square footage. On a sheet of paper marked Real Estate guide for listing property at 83 Webster Woods, she’d composed a sample advertisement the way someone else might have drafted her own obituary:
Two story solid brick three bedroom center hall colonial home on shaded lot on cul de sac on private street. There are three bedrooms, living room, dining room with bay, main floor den, eat-in kitchen with new G.E. dishwasher, etc. There are two screened porches, two wood-burning fireplaces, two car attached garage, security burglary and fire system, hardwood floors throughout and divided basement.
At the bottom of the page, below a list of new appliances and recent home repairs, was her final guess about the house’s worth: “1999—Est. value $350,000.00+.” This figure was more than ten times what she and my father had paid for the place in 1965. The house not only constituted the bulk of her assets but was by far the most successful investment she’d ever made. I wasn’t a ten times happier person than my father, her grandchildren weren’t ten times better educated than she was. What else in her life had done even half so well as real estate?
“It’ll sell the house!” my father had exclaimed after he built a little half-bathroom in our basement. “It’ll sell the house!” my mother had said after she paid a contractor to redo our front walkway in brick. She repeated the phrase so many times that my father lost his temper and began to enumerate the many improvements he’d made, including the new half-bathroom, which she evidently thought would not sell the house; he wondered aloud why he’d bothered working every weekend for so many years when all it took to “sell the house” was buying a new brick walkway! He refused to have anything to do with the walkway, leaving it to my mother to scrub the moss off the bricks and to chip away gently at the ice in winter. But after he’d spent half a month of Sundays installing decorative moldings in the dining room, mitering and spackling and painting, he and she both stood and admired the finished work and said, over and over, with great satisfaction, “It’ll sell the house.”
“It’ll sell the house.”
“It’ll sell the house.”
Long past midnight, I turned off the lights downstairs and went up to my bedroom, which Tom and I had shared until he went away to college. My aunt had done some cleaning before she went back to New York, and I had now taken away all the family pictures, and the bedroom looked ready to show to buyers. The dressertops and desktop were clear; the grain of the carpeting was neatly scalloped from my aunt’s vacuuming of it; the twin beds had a freshly made look. And so I was startled, when I peeled back my bedspread, to find something on the mattress by my pillow. It was a bundle of postage stamps in little waxed-paper envelopes: my mother’s old collection of plate blocks.
The bundle was so radiantly out of place here that the back of my neck began to tingle, as if I might turn around and see my mother still standing in the doorway. She was clearly the person who’d hidden the stamps. She must have done it in July, as she was getting ready to leave the house for the last time. Some years earlier, when I’d asked her if I could have her old plate blocks, she’d said I was welcome to whatever was left when she died. And possibly she was afraid that Bob, who collected stamps, would appropriate the bundle for himself, or possibly she was just checking items off her to-do list. But she’d taken the envelopes from a drawer in the dining room and moved them upstairs to the one place I would most likely be the next person to disturb. Such micromanagerial prescience! The private message that the stamps represented, the complicit wink in her bypassing of Bob, the signal arriving when the sender was dead: it wasn’t the intimate look that Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty exchange in Bonnie and Clyde an instant before they’re both shot dead, but it was as close to intimate as my mom and I were going to get. Finding the bundle now was like hearing her say, “I’m paying attention to my details. Are you paying attention to yours?”
The three realtors I interviewed the next day were as various as three suitors in a fairy tale. The first was a straw-haired, shiny-skinned woman from Century 21 for whom it appeared to be a struggle to say nice things about the house. Each room came as a fresh disappointment to her and her strongly cologned male associate; they conferred in low voices about “potential” and “additions.” My mother was a bartender’s daughter who never finished college, and her taste was what she liked to call Traditional, but it seemed to me unlikely that the other houses on Century 21’s list were decorated in substantially better taste. I was annoyed by the realtor’s failure to be charmed by my mother’s Parisian watercolors. The realtor, however, was comparing our quaint little kitchen with the hangarlike spaces in newer houses. If I wanted to list with her, she said, she would suggest asking between $340,000 and $360,000.
The second realtor, a handsome woman named Pat who was wearing an elegant summer suit, was the friend of a good family friend of ours and came highly recommended. She was accompanied by her daughter, Kim, who was in business with her. As the two of them moved from room to room, stopping to admire precisely the details that my mother had been proudest of, they seemed to me two avatars of Webster Groves domesticity. It was as if Pat were thinking of buying the house for Kim; as if Kim would soon be Pat’s age and, like Pat, would want a house where everything was quiet and the fabrics and furniture were all just right. Child replacing parent, family succeeding family, the cycle of suburban life. We sat down together in the living room.
“This is a lovely, lovely home,” Pat said. “Your mother kept it up beautifully. And I think we can get a good price for it, but we have to act fast. I’d suggest listing it at three hundred fifty thousand, putting an ad in the paper on Tuesday, and having an open house next weekend.”
“And your commission?”
“Six percent,” she said, looking at me steadily. “I know several people who would be very interested right now.”
I told her I would let her know by the end of the day.
The third realtor burst into the house an hour later. Her name was Mike, she was a pretty, short-haired blonde about my own age, and she was wearing excellent jeans. Her plate was overfull, she said in a husky voice, she was coming from her third open house of the day, but after I’d phoned her on Friday she’d driven over to see our house and had fallen in love with