I'm a Big Girl Now

After almost two and a half months, I am finally settling into my new apartment.

Having lived in shared dorms and apartments over the past eight years, most of which had common areas already furnished with university standard-issue or roommates’ various familial hand-me-downs and sidewalk finds, I didn’t really have a lot of stuff when I moved in. A full bedroom set – bed with headboard and footboard, nightstand, bureau, “lingerie chest” (really just a very tall chest of drawers that holds not unmentionables but sweaters), desk. A couple of those $19 Ikea bookcases that are made of pressboard and thick white corrugated paper that you nail to the back. A single black pleather chair, also from Ikea, sized for the average Oompa Loompa. In short, not nearly enough to furnish a fairly spacious two bedroom apartment.

Like any twenty six year old on a fairly modest budget, I turned to my family. My parents had plenty of goodies for me: a small kitchen table with coordinating chairs, a microwave cart, an étagère for supplementary bathroom storage (I like products. My skincare regimen has like 43 steps.). Things were looking good. I made plans to return to New Hampshire for a weekend to raid their basement and pick up some incidental household items tax-free and with the luxury of a car (it’s difficult to buy, for instance, a china service for 12 when you have to carry it home a mile and a half on foot).

Of course, things that can go wrong have a tendency to do so, and just a few days before I was due to head home I got the call from my mother: the hot water heater had exploded and the cellar had flooded. Everything I was planning on taking had been ruined with water damage – in fact, basically every single thing they had in storage was now trash, and the insurance company would be bringing a dumpster by the following week to dispose of it all.

Despite my initial disappointment, I decided that this was actually a good thing, if only because I occasionally become concerned that one day I’ll get a call from my brothers asking me if I would be open to participating in an episode of A&E’s Hoarders, and this turn of events seemed to be a preemptive strike against this possibility. Furthermore, my mother pointed out that I could use the insurance money to buy myself new things to replace the ones that had been destroyed.

Trouble is, real furniture stores are not like Ikea. You cannot generally stroll in, look around, point, and say, “I shall have that table; please wrap it and transport it to my automobile.” Most items have to be ordered, and they take an extended period of time to arrive. So I found myself once again in a basement, this time my grandmother’s, picking through furnishings and household goods considerably older than me. Turns out I’d hit the jackpot: a kitchen table and chairs nicer than the ones my mother had, a mail table with a matching mirror and wall sconces that hold taper candles instead of lights (which everyone in my family habitually refers to as “scones” despite my repeated attempts to set the record straight [Renée, agitated: “Do these look like QUICKBREADS to you?]), an old fashioned coat rack, a hutch to house the impressive collection of vintage dishes and serveware that I also collected, saving them from an eternity languishing in cardboard boxes. To top it all off, my grandmother had recently replaced her pull-out couch, and tried to get me to take the old one off her hands. When I demurred (it had a certain air of country kitsch about it, whereas French country is as country as I get despite my rural New Hampshire roots) she gave me $500 to buy a new couch. O-kay.

So the place is beginning to look terrific - okay, so the money my grandmother gave me has been collecting interest in my savings account because when forced to choose between convertible seating and the financial freedom to buy a ticket to, say, Vienna at a moment’s notice, the hypothetical plane ticket always wins. The futon left over from my college apartments makes for a perfectly serviceable couch on which to lounge around reading Real Simple and watching Fringe for hours on end to the point that you start having dreams that you’re slowly mutating into a vampire-like creature (this was last night), even if you wouldn’t necessarily want to sleep on it (I should know: I did, for two years, in protest of my parents willingness to supply me with a bed only if it was a twin bed, for ideological reasons). I could still use a bookcase, or nine, to house the fruits of my severe book-buying addiction, and the office in general is a bit sparsely furnished unless you count footwear (its secondary function is as a shoe closet) but there are items of furniture to fulfill every basic modern human need: sleeping, sitting, eating, housing one’s epic wardrobe.

For the first time, I live in a place that has actual décor. Photographs from my travels have been framed and hung, and the reproduction art nouveau nightclub ads I picked up from one of the bouquinistes along the Seine in Paris may be stuck to the walls with double sided tape but they are stuck to the walls nonetheless. (Well, sometimes they are. Incidentally, double stick tape, while a strategic choice for hanging posters and the like, doesn’t take so well to frames, no matter how shoddy and lightweight they are – the things fall down like, hourly.). And the kitchen – don’t even get me started. It’s like somebody’s wedding registry threw up in there. I have two fondue pots – two. Because if one is having a fondue party, it is only appropriate to serve a dessert fondue in addition to the entrée fondue. I had two turkey basters, but gave one to my mother after wondering aloud what on earth I would do with a spare turkey baster and subsequently collapsed into peals of laughter. Pasta making attachment for KitchenAid stand mixer? Check. Coffeemaker, cafétière, and espresso maker, so I can have my morning Bustelo prepared any of three ways? Indeed (although I dropped the ceramic cafétière on its top shortly after opening the box and its decorative nubbin broke off tragically). Antique crystal banana bowl, with grooves cut in for each individual fruit? Obviously. I have aprons galore, dishtowels for all seasons (especially the holiday season), and an Aerogarden in glorious full bloom. That’s right: as seen on TV.

Where I’m getting at with all this is that I finally have a place that’s all my own, which has always struck me as being the last step to official adulthood (well, assuming you are, like me, on the Marriage Is for the Patriarchy/Bourgeois/Over-35 Set bandwagon). Now when people, knowing that I am a single twentysomething, ask me if I have roommates, I can say, “Why no, as a matter of fact I am a totally independent woman; in the immortal words of Destiny’s Child, the house I live in, I bought it, ‘cause I depend on me if I want it.” Well, strictly speaking, the house I live in, I signed a fixed-term lease on it, but you get my drift.