The new lease and life

On September 1, all over Boston, couches are passing each other in stairways, and people are at loose ends

by Ellen Barry

Everything went to hell in mid-July. One week the wind was at my back; lights turned green as I approached them. I was getting parking tickets and leaving them nonchalantly under my windshield wiper to blow away during the course of the day. Nothing could break my stride.

Then, all of a sudden, it was mid-July, and my life congealed around me like aspic. I found myself writing down cramped lists of priorities on scraps of paper during elevator rides and bathroom breaks. The lists involved happiness and love and creative fulfillment and my lease, not necessarily in that order.

I was not alone. All our leases were ending. That week my friends were considering moving -- variously -- to Bali, or Allston, or Europe, or the West Coast, or Tampa, or Nantucket, or another apartment in the same building. I got them on the horn several times a day to talk about it.

The proposed moves involved seemingly random career redirection (Bed and breakfasts! The Net! True crime!) and dramatic lifestyle change -- September 1 would be the first day of the New Austerity, or the New Hedonism, or the New Willingness to Take Fashion Risks. The beginning of the new lease was, as my next-door neighbor Victor said, the next iteration. Victor himself is looking forward to the New Acquisition of Furniture.

Certain locusts live in this way. Every 17 years they crawl from underground together, shed their larval skin together, and make noise with their thoraxes together for one week before expiring together during the last days of summer. This serves the biological purpose of preventing inbreeding and also creates a seamless generational identity. Locusts hit puberty together, and mate together, and, when it comes to that, rot together.

If there is any city in America that approaches that level of arthropod synchronicity, it is Boston. There are neighborhoods in Boston -- Brighton, Allston, Back Bay, the Fenway, and Brookline are among them -- where some years, 25 percent of the apartment stock changes hands on September 1. Washington, DC, rivals Boston for transience, but only here is a vast population, including many mature adults, held hostage by the academic year.

Here, we go back to school whether we like it or not. In Brighton alone, between three and five thousand people are moving to different apartments on September 1. This makes for a lively real-estate dynamic; I walked into an office on July 17 and saw an apparently well-nourished realtor fall to the floor in a dead faint. This level of transience affects a neighborhood in observable ways. Tenants write things in permanent marker on walls (the first apartment I saw in Boston bore the inspirational but also troubling message I AM CRAWLING, I AM WALKING, I AM FLYING) and give away perfectly good couches for free.

Furthermore, it is not uncommon for whole slices of the population to become nervous to the point of insomnia in late summer, while the last weeks of their present situation dwindle away. The end of the lease is the beginning of anxiety. Although one would like to think that by one's late-middle 20s, overarching goals would make the signing of a lease seem like a relatively unimportant moment, that is not the case. Instead, the end of a lease prompts a panicked reassessment of jobs, of relationships, of perceived purpose in life, as if you have to renew those in triplicate, too.

THESE WERE the questions I was asking myself in mid-July, anyway, as I turned on and off the faucets in a series of apartments and arranged elaborate good-bye parties for someone who would ultimately end up not leaving. Is it time to euthanize the cat? I wondered. Should I stop smoking, or should I stop jogging, or can I maintain this equilibrium until the decision seems obvious? Are my friends "fun," or are they irritating? Would I perk up in a tropical climate? Have I drifted too far from the church of my youth? Would the next tenants like to have this couch as a gift? Should I be aiming for a career that does not humiliate me? Have I been called to serve a higher good?

As it turned out, I had not. But anything can happen during the last weeks of a lease -- doomsday cults, inexplicable breakups, radical color-scheme alterations. It is a brief and volatile moment; small things can throw you off. When I went to the bank to change my address, the bank teller cheerfully asked me if I was moving to a better place. I thought about it. "No," I told him. I went into a panic.

My realtor, who is a philosophical man, sat me down and made me draw a deep breath. He told me my worries were perfectly normal. Don't kid yourself, he said, in the tones of a man who has calmed down more than one client. During the Apartment Years -- years when our parents were signing mortgages, as they periodically remind us -- September 1 is the last existing rite of passage. New Year's Eve, by comparison, is a night on the town; it's moving day that makes people rake their lives over the coals.

"Everyone always thinks they're moving into their last apartment," he said. "They're not. But they think they are."

In point of fact, my realtor himself never expected to turn 29 -- as he recently did -- in an apartment shared with four other guys. But that's neither here nor there. This year, as in years before, he will shepherd a population of 200 shell-shocked twentynothings between a series of nearly identical apartments, with all that implies about their success, and their adulthood, and their vaporized expectations. Their couches will pass each other on stairways all over town. And my realtor will be waiting in the office, absorbing the waves of concentrated anxiety that he has come to expect. This will be his third September 1 in the business.

"You know how sometimes you can't focus your eyes? That whole day is like that," my realtor told me. "I stop seeing people and just see a blur. And you know what? I get so shitfaced that night. I don't even go home. I just close the door and drink."

Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.