Bunny’s hands are shaking. She asks him if it’s possible to turn up the heat.
“No problem.… You know, I have elder cousins who lived in the U Street Corridor and they bought their house for fifty-one thousand back in 1949 and it hadn’t been updated since the sixties or whatever. And some developers came through because the house was twenty-six feet wide, so they said, we want to split this up into—it was a four-story house, three stories and a basement—they said, look we want to sell three condos, and the basement we’re going to rent out and that’s going to pay the condo fees for the condo association. Brilliant! Just brilliant. So they paid her four hundred thousand cash for the place, and they paid her six hundred dollars a month to live there, this was back in 2013. So you know what she did? She went and built her own new house in southeast Virginia where her part of the family is from, and she still had money left over. So, so my whole thing is, how, how, how is this wrong?”
Bunny nods her head, pretending to listen. Thinking about Anthony, the falling dominoes of her preconceived ideas about him, how her fundamental assumptions about his life keep revealing themselves; they feel almost uncontrollable, impulsive, even if she can’t see them yet as being derived from something disease-like, so pervasive she feels completely powerless. How her foundation of belief rests on the underpinnings of all the responses she seems to think are right only to come to learn they’re wrong.
Her head aches at the thought of having to meet her mother and Phyllis at the Christmas Homes Tour of Georgetown in a few minutes.
“My wife and I live out in the country. I’m done with city life. I have my little piece of earth—sixteen acres of open space behind us. So I got my smoker on my deck. I cooked a brisket this past weekend. The kids can run outside—well, now they’re teenagers, but they’d go out and fly their kites. And that’s one of the reasons why I love America. I grew up in the projects, my father was an alcoholic. My mother, she was overwhelmed. I was a drug addict when I was a teenager myself, and now I got twenty years sober—look what can happen when we do the work. Miracles.” He shakes his head in disbelief.
Light snowfall trickles across the windshield as the Uber driver pulls up to Thirty-Third Street. “Alrighty, I think this is it.” He turns his head over his shoulder. “You stay warm now.”
Bunny looks up, disoriented, in a different world than the one she’s pulled up to. “Thank you.”
Bunny shuts the car door, her strawberry blond hair glowing in the yellow streetlight. Lamps adorned with round Christmas wreaths and red bows. A Christmas fairy tale as Georgetown’s cobblestone streets bustle with stay-at-home moms in their furs and camels and wools, wine hidden in coffee mugs, ready for the Christmas Homes Tour.
“Sweetheart!” Meredith runs up the sidewalk, the spitting image of Bunny’s grandmother in a vintage fur and a hat reminiscent of some kind of twentieth-century bonnet. “Hurry, hurry, put these on before we go inside.” Meredith hands Bunny a pair of cloth bootees for her shoes to prevent mud and snow from damaging the expensive rugs they’re about to trample. The bootees look like hospital caps, blue netting with white elastic around the ankle.
“I don’t want to miss this house. It’s supposed to be one of the more exotic homes of Georgetown. New to the list this year. Phyllis is on her way. They just had the last group at her home, she’s going to stop at the gorgeous Federal on N Street, one of the Kennedys’. Divine—they really ramped up the patriotic feel to it. Anyway, she’ll meet us in a bit.”
Meredith’s excitement feels nauseating to Bunny. “Mom, I need to tell you something—”
“Aren’t you excited? It’s our first year doing this together!” Meredith is not listening, her own anxiety about the family business escalating her enthusiasm into an artificial and forced elation. “Remember when you were a little girl and you would sit on the floor in my study and flip through my Architectural Digest pointing at which designs you loved—you loved kitchens. You were only seven! But you had a good eye.”
Bunny shivers on the brick sidewalk, greeted by the home tour sponsors and hosts: THE KENNEDY CENTER, WASHINGTON FINE PROPERTIES, THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH.
“Mom…” Bunny tries again to get her attention. “I got a call from the bank, my money didn’t go through.…”
Meredith ignores her, adjusting her bootee around her black boot in front of a steel plaque reading: NATIONAL COLONIAL DAMES OF AMERICA: ONE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON’S FAVORITE PLACES TO GET DRUNK.
“Mom…” Bunny’s blood feels hot, a tantrum forming inside of her as Meredith walks ahead, stepping into the foyer. Behind her, Bunny hops on one foot, placing the bootees over each Doc Marten.
Hot tea simmers in fine silver displayed on an antique console as Bunny follows her mother inside. The house smells of cinnamon and vanilla potpourri, poinsettias clumped by the foot of the grand staircase.
“Welcome to number Fifteen Fifty-Two on Thirty-Third Street. This is one of the more unique homes of Washington’s Georgetown, as it is not a Federal but is built of wooden planks. Rumor was they were from an old ship back when Georgetown was the largest tobacco shipping port in the country,” says the real estate agent, who looks like the Monopoly man.
Bunny can’t help but notice the wooden beams, the racks of white dishware for decoration. Who’s so boring they put plates on the wall? She knows it will never be her.
They continue into
