Fauntlee Hills Was My Roseburg: An Essay in Episodes

"Pilot"

Director's Note: Sometimes it is not enough to watch Mary Richards's life unfold on television. I read the world she gave me like a map—a merry atlas, if you will—looking for points of intersection in our experiences and plotting coordinates where they do not at first appear.

When I say I come from a snow globe, this is no exaggeration. Fauntlee Hills was built on a bluff overlooking the sea during the early 1950s. Before then, those hills were wooded, unsettled. To the east, Seattle loomed, like a great silver star of culture and commerce. It beckoned to some; others, it drove away.

Of the families seeking a quieter life—call it solace if you like, call it isolation—the Wade family moved among them. My grandparents belonged to the first wave of new inhabitants. Grandma June still lived in her original house from 1953 four decades later. My father came of age in that house; his sister Linda, too. Then, he married my mother and moved into another house just like it, just around the corner. And when my parents spoke to me of the future at all, it looked so much like the present, which looked so much like the past, they fused together into a single mural of red brick, mid-century floor plans, clean-swept carports, flower boxes effervescing with petunias and begonias and geraniums, picture windows with heavy curtains to modulate the light, and peepholes, naturally, on every sturdy door. My parents promised that I would marry one day and move into a house like theirs, a house just around the corner.

I began to wonder how the neighborhood of Fauntlee Hills, small and pretty and hermetically sealed, compared in size and style and homogeneity to the place that gave rise to Mary Richards: Roseburg, a fictional town in the real state of Minnesota. More than one person has told me that I seem like I come from a fictional town. Sometimes I believe them.

In my early world, we were not used to people moving in, people from the outside, people who had lived somewhere else before. Everyone stayed. Everyone was old. Most of the neighbors were retired by then, so they made a life out of watching, keeping tabs. Remember those peepholes and picture windows. It was a hard place to trespass without getting caught, which is probably why I longed for the thrill of sleuthing. But I was "June Wade's granddaughter" after all, so some people made exceptions for me. They, quite literally, looked the other way as I traipsed through their gardens, crouched inside their toolsheds, hunkered down inside their window wells and rhododendron bushes.

________

Then, Edna Kaufman died. Then, Jim Kaufman couldn't take care of himself anymore. Then, their children came, who were also old. They cleaned the house, drained the wishing well, took the wind chimes out of the trees. Cleary, they didn't understand whimsy. When they left for good, a for sale sign stood in the yard on two white pickets. I had never seen pickets that weren't part of a fence before, and I had never seen a for sale sign either—not in real life, only on television.

I was playing jacks on my grandmother's drive or picking weeds for pay from her parking strip. I might even have been dangling from one of her flowering trees. But I remember most vividly the day a young blond woman in a dark blazer and paisley skirt parked her Toyota by the curb, wheels turned in just so. The for sale sign wore a sash that read sold. This woman took it down. She tried to pull the whole structure out of the ground, but it stuck like a stubborn tooth, and I took her efforts as my entrance cue.

"Hi!" I said, "I'm Julie," in my sitcom-friendly way. "Do you live here now?"

She smiled, and her glasses slipped down on her nose. "Yes. I'm Linda, and as a matter of fact, I do."

"That's my...