Sweet home Santa Barbara
SATURDAY MORNING, and the mercury had already hit 100 in the Salinas Valley. My car, a college-student special, had no air conditioning. At Paso Robles, the traffic virtually halted: road construction. My hair frizzed, my clothes wilted, and I was running late to one of the most important meetings of my life: a chance to get a good apartment, for a decent price, in Santa Barbara.
As a recent graduate of UC Berkeley, where, despite the housing horror stories, I’d lucked into a roomy, inexpensive studio a few blocks from campus, I figured it would be a cinch to find a spot near much smaller UC Santa Barbara, where I start graduate school in English lit in September. OK, that might not have been my brightest moment, but remember, I’m more comfortable with Milton than markets. I had no idea I was moving to the seventh most expensive ZIP Code in the country, armed with only a fellowship and some savings from a one-semester stint as a legal assistant.
After a few panicked weeks of hunting through craigslist.com and the university housing website, plus a couple of field trips, it became clear that, at $1,100 for a decent studio, I would have to get a roommate. What if she smoked? Worse, what if she were a vegan?
Tara and I found each other (craigslist came through), and we seemed like a natural pair. Two studious, fairly tidy humanities types (she took her bachelor’s in history from UC Davis). She was sharp and funny and ate meat. And we both were leaving behind boyfriends in Northern California -- I could see all sorts of weekend carpooling-to-see-the-boys possibilities.
Little did we know the challenges our budding relationship would face, even before we tackled the inevitable debate over wall decorations. Tara insisted on a dishwasher. I insisted on bare floors (allergic to carpet). I wanted charm; she wanted convenience. We both wanted a safe, quiet neighborhood. And although cheap was out of the question in Santa Barbara, reasonably affordable would have been nice.
We were on a mutually exclusive quest for the all-but-impossible. I gagged when Tara showed me online photos of an anonymous carpeted apartment in a giant complex that looked like an aging motor inn. She vetoed the one-bedroom with hardwood floors, where I could have slept on my IKEA sleeper sofa. It hardly mattered, considering how fast the apartments were snapped up, and at what prices.
Supposedly airy, spacious places were, in fact, grungy little flats with stained carpets. The town house with the loft was taken seemingly before it was even listed. One landlord made it clear only millionaire graduate students need apply; others wanted our parents’ life savings as a security deposit.
By the time I stumbled across an ad on the university website for a “lovely Craftsman duplex w/hardwood floors, nice garden,” I was so jaded that I almost passed it by. The landlord probably had a waiting list out the door. “Lovely” probably meant cork-and-mirror walls. But because misappropriating the office phone for such research was pretty much equivalent to breathing by then, I picked it up and dialed.
The landlord was so nice that I began to think we might have a shot. He didn’t have pictures to e-mail, but he described the apartment and allowed as how there had been plenty of interest. In desperation and in my best-polished legal assistant’s voice, I offered two weeks’ extra rent and an immediate credit check. I even faxed a copy of the university’s fellowship offer as proof of future income. Handing over enough private information for this charming stranger to have stolen my identity and my parents’ was nerve-racking. But not as nerve-racking as the prospect of losing out on what might turn out to be a great duplex in a nice neighborhood for $1,500 a month.
“It’s probably totally grotty,” I warned Tara.
“We’ll take it anyway,” she said, ever the willing compromiser, except when it came to dishwashers.
“I’m driving down Saturday,” I told the landlord, my next day off.
If anything was grotty by the time I got to Santa Barbara, it was me, as I peeled myself out of my baking car. The landlord, chatting about my grad school plans, Shakespeare and the heat, led me to what had been the carriage house for his own Queen Anne next door.
Wide, well-worn floorboards greeted me. The walls were painted a sunny beige; the bathroom had an old-fashioned claw-foot tub. Tara’s dishwasher waited beneath the tiled countertop in the kitchen. One of the bedrooms was about half the size of the other, but there were two of them. Would he give it to us? As he drew up the papers, I waited, tense and edgy, until he added his signature to the bottom of the page. Only then did I feel brave enough to ask him, “Why us?”
“My son was an English major,” he said, smiling. “And I liked that you would drive all the way to Santa Barbara just to see a place that had character.”
After this, I’m thinking that finding a tenure-track English professorship in six years will be a snap.
