"One is not born, but rather becomes, a homeowner."

Had Simone de Beauvoir purchased a house in the suburbs, her most famous book¹ might have begun with this line, and she might never have inspired the second wave of the women’s movement. Rather than hanging out in those cafes in turtlenecks and black berets drinking red wine and smoking Gauloises with the other French existentialists, she would surely have given serious thought to the identity homeowner, a being or more precisely a condition of human existence that is a walloping roller coaster ride of existential crises and ch-ch-ch-changes. Talk about condemned to freedom: the fact that there is now no one to stop you from lining the walls with peacock feathers if you want is both the good news and the bad news.

I have learned this and more since my partner and I bought our first house (as if this were going to be a series!) last summer. I was not prepared for the radical alterations of subjectivity I would experience. These are frightening to the extreme, in ways best expressed by David Sedaris when Real Estate Brain overtook him on his visit to Anne Frank’s apartment in Amsterdam: “I thought the room beside the kitchen might be my office, but then I saw the attic, with its charming dormer windows, and the room beside the kitchen became a little leisure nook.”²

Where the existentialists came closest to dealing with life as homeowner was in their discussions of the struggle to death with the Other. I most often encounter this in the endless aisles of Home Despot as I search for some hitherto unknown, completely obscure but now utterly necessary object, one upon which not only my immediate project but the very Lifeblood of the House depends. In the first days of homeowning this need recurred every few hours; now, months later, only several times a week. In fact, it was in these very aisles that I discovered to my dismay that, just as I had become a woman and a homeowner, I had become another animal altogether, a homeowning woman.

No one would really characterize me as the girliest girl on the block. (Well, considering my neighbors, maybe on this block, but not most blocks.) Short hair, no makeup, my standard uniform an ensemble that could generously be called casual. Despite having grown up in West Texas, I could not make sense of the phrase “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” until well into adulthood, when it became a useful tool for decoding certain puzzling behaviors of other women. This distance from standard expectations for my sex made me scoff at the idea of womanhood having any essence. But new and disturbing realities began to assert themselves one day at the evil hardware empire when my partner and I had between us clocked roughly 10 miles not including backtracking as we hunted for yet another desperately necessary item. Clearly, it was time for the dreaded confrontation with a clerk, which could only occur after successfully tracking one down and persuading him or her to stand still, face me, and engage in at least some rudimentary form of communication, a task that has brought down many a far more worthy homeowner than I could ever aspire to be.

After several implosions with curses emanating silently from my ears and nostrils in the form of highly combustible blue gases, eight or nine terse exchanges with my partner, a series of plans to split up, perhaps for good but certainly for the next 10 minutes, and yet another hopeless rendezvous set for yet another aisle, I Found My Clerk. Don’t act too desperate, I cautioned myself, don’t scare him away. Next thing I knew, a bright and chipper voice issued from the vicinity of my head and I was winking and grinning like a mechanical monkey in the hands of a manic child. I was, yes, flirting with a Home Despot homunculus. This was what my life had come to.

I no longer remember what that elusive object was or the outcome of my struggle to extract information from the orange-vested Other, like Jacob wrestling for the Angel’s blessing^.3 What I learned, of course, is what every homeowner knows but no one can tell you: the horror of confronting the Other is that he is the talking (or not) mirror that shows in most unflattering terms that you are Not Worthy. And here is the unsettling impression you are left with: the evil empire he speaks for is not just a giant corporation but your very own house. How does one persist in the face of crushing despair? Here at least our French philosophical forebears are quite practical. Drink a lot of red wine (although not where there’s carpet) and smoke a lot of Gauloises (in well-ventilated spaces). Perhaps it’s time to ask yourself why they all spent so much time in cafes.