The first time I took a housesitting gig, I was 15 years old. I was already out on my own, working as a dishwasher at night and an au pair in the mornings. A gig elsewhere was a vacation; an escape. An older lady I knew in our small town by her leopard coats and catseye glasses as possessing the kind of mystery and glamour I hoped to have for myself one day. In my jeans with the thighs worn thin as paper and black t-shirt, I took the tour of her little home. 

“The anthuriums will need to be watered twice before I come back, just do it on both Saturdays. The cacti, ignore them. They like it that way. Open the blinds in the morning, as soon as you wake up— you don’t sleep in late, do you?”

I who closed my pizza place at either midnight or two in the morning, depending on whether we had a comedy show or not, said, “No,” like the very idea scandalized me.

“Good. And then close them at sunset. If you leave it open at night, you’re up on this hillside and this window is like a television screen. Everyone can see everything you do.”

As soon as she was gone, I was wearing one of her minks, laid out on her chaise longue, and reading Anaïs Nin while practicing becoming the kind of person who lived in a place like this, with its prisms and sumptuous textures. I tucked myself into her velveted and feathered bed that night, soaking in a life that would remain out of reach. 

It wasn’t just her finery I coveted over the next few days as I reveled in her HBO while I ate the pizzas I brought home from work and the red wine that I never seemed to get carded for. It was the fact that this house, small though it was and paneled in ugly dark fake wood and stained yellow from her years of smoking indoors, was hers. She had decided she wanted a little white cat and just gone out and gotten one. She had no landlord to inform. She had decided she wanted a deep pink bathtub and had simply made it so. 

I, who had grown up in every kind of rental and squat and unheated garage and barracks and well-surfed couch, viewed her privilege with a kind of remote longing that primitive man felt for the stars. It wasn’t in the cards for me, and I knew that in 1997. 

Fifteen years later, along the Great Highway in San Francisco, I could hear every bad disc brake, every dead fanbelt, every chopping, sputtering 1960s VW still coaxed into running coming up and down the road, even over the rush and retreat of the Pacific. The building was crumbling, with single-pane windows that were older than I was and a facade of stained stucco with the original upward-tilting cursive naming it Twenty-One. 

Outside, kids were sledding down the sand dunes. It was Christmas Day. I was house sitting because I wanted to write and be alone. The single friend who lived there had two cats named after members of the Rat Pack and suspended his bike from the ceiling to save space. His office was the first “cloffice” (a walk-in closet with a desk and chair shoved into it) I had ever seen. I sat in that little cube and tried to write, but in the end the kitchen table that face the ocean was the only place I wanted to be. I sat there until the sunset burned orange through my eyelids and the cats yowled for supper. 

He didn’t own that place, because owning a beach apartment or house is impossible for anyone my age who wasn’t born with a platinum Amex in their mouth. He paid an astronomical rent to hang on there, at the literal rim of the world. I envied that, too. 

Other friends my own age hired me/allowed me to house sit when they left town, offering me their ramshackle houses where the neighbors scream-sang along with James Taylor and Bruce Springsteen to express their emotions. A friend called me when her brother violated his parole to occupy his apartment until the end of the lease, because he was going away for more than a year. It was a hideously depressing place, with no envy to be wrung from the beaten-down gummy carpet or the kitchen that screamed both poverty and ineptitude. It wasn’t just the gig that brought me a frothy mix of joy and jealousy. It was something else. 

A close and dear friend asked me to take care of his Norwegian forest cat, a luxurious long-haired breed who was adorable and affectionate and slept in a banana box on their dining room table. I knew this friend to be a man of taste but even so, I was knocked out by the good leather sofa, the real Persian rugs, the curated bookshelf, the original built-in appliances, the excellent lighting, the restful and uncluttered bedroom. This was the house that finally taught me what I was after, why I always took house sitting gigs when my own apartment was always there: rent paid and space appointed as well I could make it. As much as I love and enjoy my own space and the time I put into it, there has always been a degree of accident to it. 

Since I left home as a teen and started accepting these gigs as a way to make intermittent homelessness seem chic and breezy, I had cobbled together an idea of home that was impermanent and necessarily improvised. Raised as an army brat and under constant conditions of eviction or the steps that lead to it, I was fascinated by homes that looked permanent. The Norwegian forest cat stalked and flopped and coughed up hairballs around a house where history was on full display in the tile and the unfucked-with wooden floors. On top of those gestures of permanence, my friend had layered his own choices and his own personality. He had built his glittering garden of succulents in the old box bay window and painted the walls his own calm colors. He had hung up in his office the stained glass project he’d executed on some weekend of artistic exploration. His throw pillow of Divine the drag queen and his excellent thread-count sheets. 

Not a piece of it was found on a curb and not a stick was left there by a previous occupant. Everything there was something he had chosen, all of it the product of decision rather than fate. 

My own apartment seemed a childish collage of different selves, of things I didn’t know how to let go of, so long as they still had some use. Here an object introduced and left behind by an inconsiderate roommate, there the fridge the landlord decided I should have, rattling the death song of its compressor for the last four years. Every address I’ve ever had is still half-etched in memory, one of hundreds I knew would not be the place I stayed. Never any place that was truly my own. Every sign I’ve ever hung up to make a place my own, to tell the postman or just myself that I live here, has been something I put up with tape. 

The Egyptian novelist ​​Naguib Mahfouz said “Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.” 

House sitting has always been an escape. Not only of my own space, but of my own life. I have escaped these temporary places and lives, to try on someone else’s furs and pet some foreign cats. To return home and see the things that have outstayed their welcome in the most unflattering light. Some of those things were within me. 

For a long time, I took every house sitting gig I was offered. I wanted to see those interiors, to try on those lives. I wanted to put my hand to the fire of knowing I’ll never own a house by feeling the grooves made by someone else’s ass in a nicer couch than I’ve ever had. Floating in someone’s jetted tub, counting the hours until I’d have to destroy all the evidence of my existence and vacate as if I’d never been there. To get back to where I belonged, as if I knew.

The last gig I accepted was at the home of a couple I love in New York City. The place was on Wall St, an area of Manhattan where I truly believed no one lived. For ten days, I tried on the suffocating leotard of that life, the unfamiliar subway routes and the incongruous sight of Trinity Church, intruding in my day like the silhouette of a god, the shed skin of the leviathan. In those ten days, I invited the man who would become my husband to stay with me, and try each other on. To see what that life felt like. 

Together, we now rent another ramshackle place. It’s half a duplex in a saltbox house built in 1900, with dirt floors in the basement and a landlord who painted over the lightswitch covers. Some of our furniture happened by accident, occurring in other lives and coming from junk stores, built from flat packs and worsened by constant moving from apartment to apartment in all the lives we’ve both lived and left behind. 

It isn’t ours, but it is the first life I have had where I’ve felt all my attempts to escape come to an end. So it’s home. 

And I don’t house sit anymore. 

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