will enter my apartment to find at least five children and often twice as many, various adults, an unstable rabbit, and a tortoise named Frank. When I step off the elevator and into this wall of noise, the phrase “Women and children first” usually ticks across my brain, reminding me that there is a chance of rescue. Maybe this happens because the length of the place looks remarkably like the
People expect our home to look like one of my husband’s projects, which are featured frequently in magazines like
This sofa was a big purchase for us. It was a special order from one of the fancy upholsterers that my husband uses for his clients, a rich brown leather with real down cushions for extra comfort. We waited four months for it to arrive. I watched nervously as the deliverymen maneuvered it into the freight elevator. When they finally got it into our apartment, I sniffed the air around it, taking in the distinct smell of new. They set it in place and began to unwrap it. Once revealed, the sofa was perfect, gorgeous, a giant Manolo for my ass.
That was twelve years and a few babies ago. The poor thing still sits there, a shred of its former self. The luxurious leather, so soft it was almost suedelike, didn’t hold up well to vomit or leaking sippy cups. Within a year, the seat cushions were cracked and torn and I had to make fabric covers for them. When holes began to appear on the arms and backrest, we resorted to the ultimate white-trash fix-all, duct tape. When we were having guests over and trying to make the place look nice, my husband would apply a fresh coat of tape.
Any attempt I have made to have nice furniture has failed miserably in the face of my whirlwind of boys. The pair of Barcelona chairs I dreamt of owning since I studied Mies van der Rohe in architecture school sits deteriorating, buttons gone and foam chunks oozing from the once beautifully tufted leather cushions. In a feat that impressed even me, my kids managed to destroy the matching table, somehow getting the seventy-five-pound piece of glass off its graceful chrome base and smashing it. The Jacobsen swan chairs with their smooth swivel action and hand-upholstered wool seats are now so encrusted with indeterminate substances that the color has turned from a warm red to a unnamable shade of grunge. My tall, slender Mackintosh ladderback chair has been knocked over so many times that the grid is no longer orthogonal. The seventeenth-century fruitwood bombe chest that my husband inherited from his mother now has gouges all over the wood where multiple wheeled objects have repeatedly slammed into it.
It’s not just the furniture that has been marked by the destructiveness of my minions. Our once-pristine white walls now have a wainscoting of scribbles at child-height; the blank canvas is just too much for budding artists to resist. Nonremovable stickers of a special industrial grade pepper the windows. Behind every door is a crater where the knob slammed into the sheetrock during a game of chase.
About six years ago, I reluctantly cried uncle and turned the apartment over to the kids. Kitchen appliances are buried beneath notices of field trips past and present, and artwork I can’t be caught throwing away. Every television sits in a nest of the tangled miles of cords and controllers it takes to power the various video game systems. Several swings and a punching bag now hang from the ceiling. Overflowing baskets of sporting equipment and bins of headless action figures inhabit every corner. A life-size coffin, perfectly acceptable at Halloween but a bit macabre any other time of the year, serves as a coffee table because we have no place to store it.
Sometime in the future, when my children have homes of their own to destroy, I will have a beautifully furnished apartment. It will be as fabulous as the interiors my husband designs for his clients, with all of the classic twentieth-century furniture I covet. But for now, IKEA is all my kids deserve.
Because the existing furniture is one notch short of disposable, and there is nothing of value left to break, our loft is the perfect place to have big parties. There’s our annual Halloween bash. The “Viva Las Vegas” party is admittedly a cliche but still always a favorite, especially when there are at least twenty little kids running around dressed like Elvis. “Party Like a Rock Star” headlined forty kids in faux-hawks with inflatable guitars crammed on a stage lip-synching Led Zeppelin. “If You’re Indicted You’re Invited” saw an amazing array of favorite criminals, from O. J. Simpson to Jean Harris. Vincent “the Chin” Gigante showed up in his robe, on Heidi Fleiss’s arm. One of my personal favorites combined the themes of all the other parties into one name—Michael Jackson. People came as any version of MJ from the little black boy belting “ABC” to the child-molesting plastic-surgery victim dangling a baby off a hotel balcony.
As much fun as this apartment is, it also has its drawbacks. It’s an open-plan loft, so we basically live in one big room. There are two bedrooms, one large and one small. The large one is filled with bunk beds that are not specifically assigned. First come, first served—if you want to sleep on the bottom, then go to bed first. The smaller bedroom harbors Peter, the baby, and me, but not always in that order.
Because the bedrooms leave little space for activities other than sleeping, everything else—with the exception of bathroom things—happens out in the open, and often we are in a state of Too Much Information.
Finding space around here can prove challenging. I wind up hiding in that fallback safe haven, the bathroom. What’s not to love about a room designed for one that has a locking door? And who can possibly argue with the reply “Not now, I’m on the toilet”? If things get too overwhelming, I just schedule myself a dentist appointment. There is nothing like a root canal to secure some guilt-free me time. One medicated hour in the chair with no disturbances can be pure bliss, and as a special bonus, I get to leave with a Vicodin prescription.
Constant proximity to my family is not a problem for now, but may become one in the very near future. I fear man smell the way some people fear snakes or spiders, and because I have five boys, my fears are not unfounded. An older boy named Oskar lives in our building; when he was going through puberty, I could literally smell him move past our floor in the elevator. My thirteen-year-old hasn’t yet fallen headlong into the fetid depths of puberty, but one stroll down the seventh-grade hallway gives me a hint of what I am in for, and it doesn’t smell pretty. It is the putrid hormonal byproduct of boys turning into men.
“Why do you all smell so bad?” I asked Peik after I was safely outside the building and once again able to breathe through my nose.
“You mean this?” He struck a superhero pose. “I busted in there, and with one flex the smell of man bounced off the walls.”
“Put your man smell away already,” I said, trying not to laugh at him.
In an attempt to ward off the inevitable, I have tried to stock up on odor-blocking body products, the way John Birch Society members fill their basements with canned food, but in my heart I know there isn’t enough Old Spice High Endurance Long Lasting Stop Smelling Up My Damn House Deodorant Stick in the world. And really, what is more disgusting, the stench of newly minted manhood, or the stench of newly minted manhood with a side order of “Mountain Fresh”?
I’ve done the math. Assuming man smell lasts for only two years—and I trust it is temporary, because my husband doesn’t stink—by the time all five of my boys have passed through the noisome years of puberty and I can take a deep breath in my own home, the year will be 2023.
Mini-men aren’t the only thing with an off smell in this loft. Our apartment could double as a petting zoo. I have successfully denied the kids anything large that would really require care, like a dog or a cat, but the small animals keep making their way into our household. We have a goldfish named Bubble Bath who swims in a vase on the kitchen counter, completely ignored by whichever child asserted that he would “prove I can take care of a dog” by receiving the fish. It was a short stroll to the hamster request. Ours is an insomniac who spends his nights running on a wheel that squeaks, and his days attempting to chew his way out of his ten-gallon glass aquarium home. I have applied countless rounds of WD-40 to that little circus ride, but the urine-induced rust just doesn’t seem to respond and the nightly squeaking continues. He is not a friendly creature—none of my five boys dares to handle him.
If Hamster is unfriendly, our rabbit can only be described as downright vicious. Princess started out as a “class rabbit,” which makes her sound more appealing than she is. She came home for Christmas vacation one year and never left. Small wonder the teacher never put in a call of concern regarding Princess’s whereabouts. Again, I have no idea what child conspired against me to get another mouth into the house, but none of them seem
