Hungarian Love
My husband bought a house in
Brookline, MA. I live in Budapest with our two kids. The day he signed the
deal, he ran into a new neighbor, who happens to be Hungarian. My husband
explained that his wife and kids live in Budapest. The new neighbor concluded
that I must want to live in Budapest because I have a lover.
When my husband recounted the
exchange via Skype, I told him that my lovers are pint-sized. Right on cue the partially
clad kids streaked behind me, climbed on my shoulders, and his image froze.
To clarify, he is the
Hungarian from Transylvania. I am the American from Kansas. We came to Budapest three years ago on vacation
with our young children. It was supposed to be a three-month stay. We had invested
in an apartment, our first piece of real estate in Hungary. Many people in
Brookline have vacation homes on Cape Cod. It turned out that we are not Cape
Cod people. Instead we put roots down in Budapest.
True, the commute is too far
for weekend trips. But we envisioned summers in Europe and our Hungarian-American
kids growing up with the neighborhood pack. We want them to be bilingual and
bicontinental. I had always enjoyed my
visits to Hungary and Transylvania. Then something happened. An internal switch
flipped. Probably it was my mother-in-law who came to live with us. Suddenly we
had a live-in Grandma. She doesn’t speak English. I speak only enough Hungarian
to be exceedingly polite. It was magic. And here I am, still in Budapest,
planning trips home for vacation.
Brookline, where we now have
(our first or second?) home is a foreign land to me as well. We moved there for
my husband’s work, leaving behind my teaching job and friends in South Bend,
Indiana, where we met and lived for ten years. Then we had two babies,
seventeen months apart. I had made a few new friends, but felt adrift and
lonely and yet never, ever alone with my little ones. Yet I was still surprised,
when I realized I wanted to be in the heart of this energetic city rather than
ensconced in a suburb. I stayed. He agreed to commute. Since then he has spent
one month with us, and returned to Boston for one month to work. You do the
math.
Our new neighbor in Brookline
suggested to my husband I must want to stay in Budapest because I have taken a
lover. Can I just say that it is very
Hungarian to 1) conclude that I have a lover, and 2) more so, to say it out
loud on the corner in front of the new house he has just purchased for his
family. Perhaps it is not fair to categorize this as Hungarian, but it is certainly
not the way I was raised.
If I thought my new
neighbor’s wife had taken a lover several time zones away from him, I sure as
heck wouldn’t say it to his face. I might, however, discuss it with my friends
and shake my head. That poor man. His wife
is playing him and eating her cake too. Budapest, as you may know, being
famous for its elegant and rich cakes.
My husband bought the house
in Brookline because we decided our first suburban home was too far from the
city. Brookline juts up against the city, but the schools are decent. My husband
can ride his bike to work. The kids can walk to school. There are excellent
cafes. After we decided to try splitting our homes, he rented from a friend, a
tenuous arrangement that was genial when it started as a short-term
solution. Years had passed. It was time
for him to move on. The new house in Brookline has everything we need, even the
price was right. The kids can walk to a great local public school. I have no
excuse to not move back.
Except that I do have an
excuse to stay in Budapest. Our new Hungarian neighbor in Brookline was right. I
do have a boyfriend.
At first I admitted it to
myself, and then to my husband. Budapest is my boyfriend. That sounds
cute, right? I am in love with the yellow 47 tram, the covered market, the
superb coffee, and the chicken paprikas.
Did I mention the thermal baths? How about that we don’t need a car? I take my
kids to school each day by mounting a roller and zooming the four minutes to
the first school, and the five minutes to the nursery school. We could walk to school. Most Hungarians do. But
we ride our rollers because it is fun. I like being the oddball American in the
staid Hungarian crowd. It gives me freedom to not fit in. Of course, it means I
don’t fit in, which has a price too. But the pleasures of the expat life are
many and sweet. Did I mention the thermal baths?
Anyway, I was effectively a
foreigner in Boston too. We moved there and had two babies very closely spaced.
I didn’t know anyone or have family close by to aid with infant mayhem. We were
new to that city too. But it wasn’t the
expat life. It was flat. Much like people claim about Kansas, which is where I
started.
Life would be more
comfortable in Brookline. I wouldn’t have to struggle to communicate with my
kids’ teachers in my broken Hungarian. Life would be more comfortable in
Brookline, but it is more exciting here.
I walked around for weeks in
love with my new boyfriend, Budapest. I had finally found a way to express my
choice to live here and not there. I was
quite pleased with myself as I indulged in a slice of dobos torte on a fall afternoon while the kids were otherwise
engaged. A slice of cake, a cup of coffee, time to myself. It was glorious.
It was not lonely.
Budapest is a very good
boyfriend. You have to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, of
course. You have to grit your teeth when the old ladies stop your five-year-old
son on the street to chastise him for wearing “girl” shoes. My daughter did not
want to sign up for soccer as the only girl. They don’t offer a girl’s team. But
these are part of the deal when you are the outsider trying to live inside the
local boxes.
I fooled myself for quite a
while that it was Budapest who was my new lover. It sounds blithe, right? Oh, you know I just adore Budapest.
The truth, however, is more
scandalous. It is certainly more strange.
But then again, I am a foreigner in this land. I don’t speak the
language. Sometimes I think I never
will. My parents spoke the same language. I suppose love is both more and less
than what it at first seems. It seems to hinge on real estate, I’ve learned. And
cake.
I haven’t told my husband
yet. I do have a boyfriend. He lives in another country and comes to me six
times a year. He comes with bleary eyes and cravings for thick slabs of vanilla
cream cake. He changes burned-out light bulbs when he is in town. I leave the
exploded, blackened bulbs in place until he arrives. Sometimes the apartment is
half in shadow for weeks. And then when he returns the kids gleefully scale the
ladder with him. My daughter hands him the new bulbs with utter seriousness for
the task. Then the apartment blazes with wattage, the light casting us in full
relief.
Our arrangement is what it
is, for now. When I describe it people, they often say, Oh that must be so hard! And I sometimes say, How long have you been married? Together? We have been together
since 1997. You do the math. My parents were married for 52 years. They lived
under one roof for all those years. Astounding. For me, life and love, not to
mention real estate and the question of where to school the children, have
produced a new algorithm.
Should I tell him? It might
destroy the romance.
If I tell him, will he stay
or go? Will we stay or go?
I want to keep my boyfriend. I
want to stay in Budapest.
#modernlovereject
