Part 3 (1/2)

My mother's fears were legion, though I did not know that when I was young, because she hid them so well behind various s.h.i.+elds: gaiety, ferocity, silence, anger, and most of all, feigned normality. I always thought that one of her favorite lines-”We're so normal we're weird”-was meant as a statement of fact, not desire. She didn't tell me about her depressions until I was twenty-eight. She didn't tell me they had returned until another dozen years had pa.s.sed. Her two revelations were both too little, too late.

N ine months after the shooting, we were still in America, waiting until John's doctors felt he had recuperated enough to return to work. He was not the only one impatient to get back. The truth was, I wanted John better yesterday. I wanted his liver count normal. I wanted his yellow eyes white. I wanted him bounding out of bed in the morning, as he always had. I wanted him giggling and teasing, gabbing incessantly. I wanted him dancing me around the kitchen, spouting Latin jokes. I wanted him wearing a belt, not those ridiculous suspenders. I wanted him looking into my eyes, not off into s.p.a.ce. In short, I wanted John back, the man I married, so that we could return to the years-long honeymoon we had enjoyed before I was beaten, before he got shot. I was preternaturally impatient to get back to our real lives, not these fake lives we had been living, with him playing patient and me playing nurse. ine months after the shooting, we were still in America, waiting until John's doctors felt he had recuperated enough to return to work. He was not the only one impatient to get back. The truth was, I wanted John better yesterday. I wanted his liver count normal. I wanted his yellow eyes white. I wanted him bounding out of bed in the morning, as he always had. I wanted him giggling and teasing, gabbing incessantly. I wanted him dancing me around the kitchen, spouting Latin jokes. I wanted him wearing a belt, not those ridiculous suspenders. I wanted him looking into my eyes, not off into s.p.a.ce. In short, I wanted John back, the man I married, so that we could return to the years-long honeymoon we had enjoyed before I was beaten, before he got shot. I was preternaturally impatient to get back to our real lives, not these fake lives we had been living, with him playing patient and me playing nurse.

John had no idea how impatient I was at the time, when my idea of a helpful spouse was still naivete itself: patience, fort.i.tude, endurance. Only now do I think that I was not acting like a spouse at all, but like a child, a child who watches her own mother suffering in a similar way but who feels powerless to help, afraid to do anything but watch and wait, lie low and hope.

We were fortunate that the editors at The New York Times The New York Times could not have been more accommodating. They kept telling John to take his time and recuperate fully, though none of us truly understood how long that would take. But we were blessed that John's editors in New York had arranged for the Bonn bureau manager to find and set up a new office in a tree-lined neighborhood of West Berlin so that it would be ready when John arrived. It would have been beyond us both to even try. could not have been more accommodating. They kept telling John to take his time and recuperate fully, though none of us truly understood how long that would take. But we were blessed that John's editors in New York had arranged for the Bonn bureau manager to find and set up a new office in a tree-lined neighborhood of West Berlin so that it would be ready when John arrived. It would have been beyond us both to even try.

Ever so slowly John's physical condition improved, while even more slowly he began withdrawing into himself. Although neither of us recognized he was slipping into depression until he was already there, his overall mood continued to slide imperceptibly downward and inward, worsening when I lost my job and the financial burdens fell more heavily to him, improving superficially and temporarily only when Peter and Anna were with us. Two summers after the shooting, we finally managed a visit to Trevignano with the children, with high hopes for what it might do for all of us.

But that longed-for vacation was cut short when John was called back to work early, to cover the revolution in Yugoslavia. There, exposed to the same kind of urban warfare he had seen in Romania, he began experiencing vivid flashbacks to the night he was shot. I begged him in nightly phone conversations to tell the foreign desk he had to leave, but he refused, saying he had to take the bad a.s.signments with the good. Had I been listening to my heart and not to my head, I would have made the call to the desk myself and let them know what was going on. But I was afraid to interfere. I still feel that had I called then, had John been ordered out of harm's way before Yugoslav snipers started shooting in the streets of Zagreb as Romanian snipers had shot in the streets of Timioara, we might have avoided years of woe. But I did not understand this at the time. I had yet to figure out what my role in John's recovery would have to be.

At precisely the same time John began experiencing flashbacks in Yugoslavia, my parents called me to say that my mother's clinical depression, which had been lying low for some thirty years, had returned unexpectedly. My mother-my own introduction to the woes that depression can bring to a family-tried everything her doctors prescribed. Electroshock therapy, which had unfailingly pulled her out of her earlier depressions, was out of fas.h.i.+on in the early 1990s, supplanted by new drugs that the big pharmaceutical concerns were churning out. My mother started medication immediately after seeking treatment, but after a few weeks her psychologist sent her to a psychiatrist, saying she was not responding and that she needed a doctor who himself could prescribe stronger drugs.

As the days and weeks of that sunny, warm autumn pa.s.sed, it was soon clear that the new drugs were not braking her descent, but in fact hastening it. Like John, she too spiraled downward and inward until, in the middle of a mid-November night, she slipped out of the house and into the cold, black waters of Ash Creek, the salt.w.a.ter tidal basin that lay at the foot of their street. By the time she was found, it was too late.

The shock of her death was worse than any of us could have imagined, a devastation of body and soul. ”Heartsick,” just a word or cliche before, took on an unutterable reality after. I lived, heartsick and unhinged, for months. When I think back to that time of violent grief, I think always of waves: waves of grief like body blows that started each morning before my eyes had opened; waves of pain that would convulse gut, heart, and head day after day, night after night. Were there waves slapping against the sh.o.r.e the night she slipped into the water? Or was the tide, as it so often did in that sheltered bay, rising silently, pulled by the moon, just as my mother was pulled into the water by her illness?

Months later, when I thought I had finally hit bottom, I realized with horror that my mother's death had taken on a virulent life of its own, infecting us all in our own ways. Her death helped push John back toward the depression he thought he had left safely behind the monastery walls three decades earlier. At the same time, however, her death would propel me to be on top of John's case, to remember always where depression could lead. In that way, I think, she helped save him, too.

Throughout that long, disturbing autumn of my mother's last bout with depression, I felt a growing ache to take her on my lap and in my arms as if she were a child, to hold her tight, to try communicating physically that she was not alone. When I think back on those unreal weeks, I see myself sitting on the floor of our Berlin bedroom, a phone receiver glued to my ear, night after night talking to my mother in Connecticut, night after night talking to John in whatever Eastern European hotel room he happened to be staying. It is tempting to think that my mother's full-blown depression made me miss the signals of John's incipient one. But I am certain I would have missed them in any case, just as my father had missed them at the beginning of my mother's descent. Perhaps we missed these initial warning signs because both John and my mother unwound quietly and at a crawl, because both were used to fighting depressive feelings on their own and hiding so well the ones they could not master.

But ignorance and the silence that surrounds mental illness played an enormous role, too. Neither my father nor I had ever seen the list-available these days on countless websites, in doctors' office pamphlet racks, in newspaper articles, in books-of textbook warning signs for depression. Neither of us knew such a list existed. And even though we had lived for decades with my mother's repeated bouts of depression, we both were still shockingly unaware of depression's potential power and fury. In fact, it may have been our basic familiarity with my mother's depressive collapses in the early 1950s, when she was young, that contributed to our inability to see that this one was different. In her first four brushes with the illness, my mother suffered mightily, but after electroshock she always pulled through. When she collapsed again, no longer young, we were worried about her health, not her life. And all of us accepted what the doctors told us at the time, that drugs were now the best, most enlightened treatment. If the medical community had begun to discover cases of drug-resistant depression, we certainly had never heard of it.

I could only make sense of a few basics. My utterly prudish mother had left the house in nothing but her nightgown. My mother, always cold and s.h.i.+very, had gone out on a frigid, rainy night without a coat and boots and scarf and hat. My mother, who loathed cold water to the point of giving up swimming even in August, had willingly walked or jumped or dived into Ash Creek in the middle of November. My mother, who prayed on her knees nightly before getting into bed, who feared her G.o.d perhaps as much as she loved him, had broken the great taboo on taking her own life.

Intellectually I understood nothing about my mother's death at the time it happened, although intuitively I began to sense that her depression had been of a depth that only a fellow sufferer might have begun to imagine. Though the coroner's report of her death rightly and logically says suicide, my gut knows today that it was not my mother who took her life. It was the depression that took her life, the chemical imbalances in her brain that caused the depression that took her life. My mother, all five feet, one inch of her, fought heroically for most of her seventy-three years against those chemical imbalances. She battled silently and unceasingly, more than I ever really understood until long after her death.

It has taken me nearly twenty years to lose the denial, anger, anguish, terror, and confusion I felt after her death. It has taken me nearly twenty years to discover the depths of my admiration for the battle she waged. It has taken me nearly twenty years to be able to say, with pride and with love, that she fought like the tiny sc.r.a.pper she was. Ave! Ave!

10.

Fruit Salad.

The Clam Box was Westport's premier fish restaurant for most of my childhood. An enormous hulk of a building, painted white with dark green trim, it sat high and dry on the old Post Road, a couple of miles from the beach. No clam shack catering to the beach crowd, it offered fresh lobsters, shrimp, scrod, turbot, sole, steamers in their own broth, tiny, fried little-neck clams, raw cherrystones, even finnan haddie for the odd sort who enjoyed his fish smoked.

Waitresses were generally middle-aged except for the summer help, twenty-one-year-olds drawn to the pricey restaurant by the potential tips. We all wore dowdy white dresses, dowdier white ap.r.o.ns, and sensible white nurses' shoes; long hair was pulled back off the face and coiled neatly into a bun or French twist. When Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who lived nearby, would slip in for an occasional meal, the white-haired Greek boss would immediately dispatch his eldest, dowdiest, and most circ.u.mspect waitress to their table. Even first-year servers like me knew that our job was not only not to stare, but to keep the occasional swooning fan at bay so that the Newmans could enjoy a good meal, undisturbed.

Except for the post-lunch lull, we were run off our feet on the job. But the tips were solid and I needed every nickel to pay for my first trip to Europe later that summer. Somehow my exhaustion would lift each night once I arrived home, sat down at the kitchen table with my parents, ate a dish of blueberries or a cut-up peach, and counted out my nightly take. I quickly found my rhythm, and the tips, the mainstay of my earnings, began piling up.

One night I got stuck with a client who had slipped past the radar of the chief hostess, the boss's tall, skinny daughter. A man of late middle age, alone, he was not the usual Clam Box patron, though in his crisp suit and rep tie he was dressed like one. Single guests, especially men who arrived half lit, were normally seated at the counter, apart from the main dining room, where they could be watched and kept from disturbing their neighbors. This man was trying his best to appear sober, but even I, who had seen only the occasional drunken boy at a prom, could see he was far gone.

Trying to focus his eyes, he rasped out his drink order in a venomous whisper, a double Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks. He complained, in the softest of voices, about the size of the gla.s.s and the shape of the ice cubes when it arrived, then tasted it and quietly accused the house of pouring him a Johnnie Walker Red at the price of the Black. Gla.s.sy-eyed, he quietly demanded a second scotch while ordering his food, and complained bitterly in a low voice about every item I brought to his table, from the bread basket and salad, to dessert and coffee. Each time I approached, he would spew forth whispered vitriol. If I tried ignoring him, focusing on my four other tables, parties of four and six, he would threaten softly to ”have my job.” I never thought to alert the boss's daughter, and each time I had to deliver a new course or clear a plate from his table my stomach would knot.

By evening's end I was not expecting a tip, just another quiet onslaught when I brought him his change. But the large quant.i.ty of food he had eaten must have soaked up some of the scotch he had drunk, for suddenly he seemed to have sobered up. ”Sorry,” he mumbled, looking down at his hands. He left a wad of bills on the table before he walked out. Stuffing his tip uncounted into my ap.r.o.n pocket, I hurried to help with the usual cleanup once the last guests left.

I drove home seething and settled myself at the kitchen table with my mother and father, who always waited up for me. They liked to hear the stories of my day as I counted my tips, in those days much of it in small change. That night, I burst into tears as I told them about my drunk. My mother, always sensitive to frazzled nerves in anyone, suggested my father make me one of his Italian fruit salads while I figured my night's take, nearly $20 from my four normal tables. While my father was busy cutting fresh fruit into a soup bowl, I reached into my ap.r.o.n pocket and pulled out my last tip. My mother's eyes grew wide as I counted and kept counting: $26, far more than the cost of his meal, and a fortune for those days, when the minimum wage was $1.60 per hour. The windfall, however, had not been worth the agida, agida, or aggravation, and my stomach started churning as my mind replayed the evening. or aggravation, and my stomach started churning as my mind replayed the evening.

My mother tried to cheer me up, reminding me what I could do with a tip of that size, while my father whipped a few table-spoons of olive oil with lemon juice, salt, and lots of freshly ground black pepper to pour on the fruit. I can still hear my mother's voice that night, trying to draw out my frustration, coax my tears away. I can still hear my father beating that sauce with a fork before he placed his fruit salad in front of me and joined my mother and me at the table. They were a formidable team when their children were involved, Team b.u.t.turini, as my brother would describe them when he grew up, a team with a game plan and determination. When we were good, both of them were always there, rooting us on; when we were bad, only one of them would play the heavy. Each of them believed that no child should ever have two parents angry with them at once. That night my mother coaxed me to talk and urged me to eat; my father cut up the fruit; they both watched me chew, both listened to me unwind, until by the end of the bowl I was no longer sputtering with indignation and pique. Once I had worked through that mountain of fruit, my anger was spent. I stuffed my night's take into the cigar box where I h.o.a.rded my tips, kissed them good night, went upstairs, and slept without the slightest difficulty.

I still make that fruit salad even if the sectioning of the orange and the peeling and slicing of the rest of the fruit all take time. Somehow it seems like time well spent, for as long as you have a sharp knife, it is the sort of routine kitchen work that both calms the spirit and sets the appet.i.te in motion. What I like best is hearing the rhythmic clickety-clack of my fork-an echo of my father's-beating against the little blue-and-white Italian ceramic bowl I always use to make the sauce. What I miss most is the sound of my mother's voice, trying to cheer me up. Even today I cannot eat that fruit salad without thinking of my mother sitting across from me at our kitchen table, and my father standing at the countertop, both of them listening to me rant about a drunken customer who left me a tip big enough to pay for my meals for nearly a week when I got to Paris.

My father came to Berlin to spend the rest of the winter with us, so that he wouldn't have to mourn alone in a small house that suddenly seemed too big. Near the end of his stay he was desperate for suns.h.i.+ne, and John, who had to travel for a week for work, urged the two of us to fly as far south as we could. We hopped a charter flight to southern Portugal, walked along cool but fiercely sunny beaches, ate in simple seaside restaurants. I can still taste the dry white port, served cold with a twist of lemon, that we drank as an aperitif that first night. It was the first time anything tasted good to me since my mother's death-the first time anything had a taste at all. Whatever freshly caught seafood we ate that night satisfied our hunger and soothed our soul. The cheerful noise of the restaurant helped, too, the easy laughter of the tables around us somehow helping to lighten our spirits. We ended that meal, and every other meal that week, with an enormous, juice-filled orange, freshly peeled and sliced into rounds at our table. Each time our waiter would cut the skin away-always in one continuous spiraling peel that would slowly bob up and down like an oversize Slinky-I would think back to our kitchen in Connecticut, where my father prepared his special Italian fruit salad for me that night twenty years earlier, where my mother was sitting across from me at our kitchen table, trying her best to make me forget my drunken client. By the end of that week, my father and I began to be able to talk again, about nothing and everything, the way we used to do at table before, before there was a ” before” to consider.

It was in Portugal, four months after my mother's death, that I first experienced the healing that can come from a beautiful place and its food, even if I wasn't yet fully aware of it. The strong winter suns.h.i.+ne; the cloudless, deep blue skies; the salt air; the laughing gulls; the feel of cold sand on tender winter feet; and the simple, good food served forth without pretense, prepared similarly to the way my father or mother or I might have cooked it at home: all of it helped put an end to the physical shock of my mother's death. The grieving, of course, had just begun, but it was no longer a grief fueled by adrenaline and physical panic. It may not sound like much, but it was my first real step out of shock.

John's own descent into clinical depression was so very gradual, creeping at such a lifelessly glacial pace, that I did not see it coming until long after it had arrived. When I think back now to that period, I see that John, normally sociable, jovial, and easygoing, an inveterate teller of hopelessly old-fas.h.i.+oned jokes, was increasingly withdrawing into himself. Normally never happier than when he was deep in work on a story, he seemed stressed, pained, and exhausted by his work, his usual effervescence and intellectual excitement gone. Normally thoughtful, caring, comforting, he seemed unable to look beyond his own nose. All pleasure had left him.

It remains galling to me even today that I was so blind to what was occurring. My mother's death had so recently made me see the degree to which I had misunderstood her, throughout my childhood and well into adulthood, had misunderstood the role her clinical depressions had played in her complicated nature and our complicated relations.h.i.+p. Now that I knew the truth, how could I be so blind to the same disease in my husband?

At the time it seemed to me as if it all happened in one weekend, a week before we were to move to yet another new posting, this one in Chicago. We had already packed our things, flown to the States, and signed a lease on an apartment. We were staying a few days at my father's house when John basically stopped speaking and seemed to curl up inside himself; he had realized too late that he was unable to put the Atlantic between him and the children, unwilling to leave Europe after twenty-five years. The move to Chicago was clearly that final drop of water that makes a br.i.m.m.i.n.g gla.s.s spill over, an image doctors often use to describe the onset of depression. The old, lively light in John's eyes, which had been dimming since he began suffering the effects of hepat.i.tis B nearly two years earlier, simply went out completely that weekend. Just as when he had had hepat.i.tis, John's internal body clock was turned upside down, and he began sleeping and dozing throughout the day, while lying awake, usually in a panic, during the night. Sometimes he would break into uncontrollable sobbing, sometimes he would simply sleep or pretend to sleep or lie in bed, rigid, eyes closed, fists clenched. He could not or would not talk, other than to make an occasional grunting response to a question. Once I alerted John's editor to the situation, the Times Times immediately gave John a reprieve, put our move on hold, and helped John begin treatment with a doctor in New York. immediately gave John a reprieve, put our move on hold, and helped John begin treatment with a doctor in New York.

A friend gave me a reference for a doctor of my own, and the first time I walked into her office, I told her I needed to know whether I was about to slip into a depression myself. I gave her a quick recap of what had happened to us over the past couple of years; I told her that I was feeling extremely tense and nervous, to the point that I often felt light-headed, nearly dizzy, and that I had a sense at times of watching-warily and from outside myself-all that was going on in my life. In response to her questions, I told her I was still able to eat, still able to sleep and not particularly weepy. She listened intently, this older, gray-haired woman whom I instinctively took to, and what she told me kept me going for a very long time. She told me it was normal that I felt tense and nervous, given the number of extraordinarily painful events that had occurred in my life in recent years. She told me that what I needed, more than anything, was a change of luck. She and I talked several more times that spring and early summer, and her commonsense approach to our predicament never failed to calm my nerves.

And then, as July approached, John seized on the idea of flying to Italy for vacation to see if a return to Europe might help brake his descent into full-blown depression. His doctor agreed on two conditions: that John continue taking the medicines the doctor had prescribed, and that they talk regularly and often by telephone. Once John agreed, we quickly made plans to fly back to Rome, meet Peter and Anna, and head north to Trevignano Romano for our usual summer stay.

11.

Soup.

When I was little, I loathed the canned soups my mother occasionally served for Sat.u.r.day lunch. Tomato soup had a sharp, cloying aftertaste that caught at the back of my throat. Campbell's Cream of Mushroom made me gag. I hated the soggy texture of the vegetables in Progresso's Minestrone enough to try to swallow them like pills, without chewing. I might grudgingly eat a small bowl of canned chicken soup with its mushy rice, but somehow, to me at least, all canned soups tasted more of the can or preservatives than they did of real food.

To this day, I don't know if I was spoiled by the honest taste of homemade soups or just plain spoiled. Perhaps I simply had an overdeveloped sense of taste. But I do know that until I turned seven or eight, if it wasn't my paternal grandmother's chicken soup, or my mother's copy of it-homemade, and often featuring one of my grandmother's worn-out hens-I simply could not get it down.

Decades later, even the thought of my grandmother's chicken soup still makes me close my eyes and take a deep breath of antic.i.p.ation: clear, golden broth with all the fat skimmed off after the pot had spent the night chilling. Angelina's chicken soup smelled of onion, carrot, celery, celery leaves, garlic, handfuls of parsley, and a single bay leaf. It was served with tiny stars of store-bought pastina or, even better, with a few of her homemade fettuccine, chopped roughly into bite-size pieces and barely cooked.

At its best, my grandmother's chicken soup would come out of the fridge in a Jell-O-like state. I loved to watch it, thick and clear, all aquiver, as my mother or father ladled it out of the kettle into a smaller pot for heating. When the ladle dipped into our battered soup kettle, the soup sometimes made a sucking noise, which I loved to listen for when I was little. But what I liked best was the resounding, rea.s.suring ”plop” a ladleful of jelled chicken broth made when it fell into the smaller pot. I still don't understand how the gelatin in the bones of the chicken necks and backs leach out into the soup, but I knew even then that it was the one thing in the world I liked best to eat.

Later, I fell in love with the rest of the family repertoire of homemade soups: my grandmother's bean soup, started with salt pork, onions, carrots, and celery, minced together so finely that it turned into a paste; my mother's split-pea soup, made only after a holiday supper yielded a meaty ham bone; her turkey soup, dark, strong, and made only once a year, after the Thanksgiving carca.s.s had been picked nearly clean; and finally her onion soup, made with a mountain of finely sliced onions that sweated and cooked over the lowest of flames, then simmered in quarts of her best broth. Each of those soups filled the entire house with its own aroma and whetted my appet.i.te so sharply that often I had to beg a tiny bowl of it before we sat down to eat.

I still have the recipes for all those soups, and like all the cooking of my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, recipes-precise recipes-existed for just about everything any of us made. My mother cooked by the book. My father cooked by the book. And I, even in first grade, cooked by the book. I still have my yellowing children's cookbooks, in tatters now: Mary Alden's Cookbook for Children, Mary Alden's Cookbook for Children, which must have been put out by Quaker, as nearly every other recipe includes Quaker-brand oats, cornmeal, or puffed wheat; and which must have been put out by Quaker, as nearly every other recipe includes Quaker-brand oats, cornmeal, or puffed wheat; and Betty Crocker's Cookbook for Boys and Girls Betty Crocker's Cookbook for Boys and Girls, a first edition from General Mills, whose recipes feature the brand's flours, not to mention its mixes for cakes, m.u.f.fins, biscuits, and frostings. I cooked my way through both of those books by the time I was ten, and my mother made my children's meatloaf recipe for decades. We both learned early to avoid any recipe pretending to be Italian; neither the Quaker man nor Betty Crocker had a clue to Italian food.

The first supper I ever made for my mother and me-strategically planned so that the initial efforts of a seven-year-old occurred on the one night a month my father had a dinner meeting-came from Betty Crocker. My mother, famous for her impatience, had the great good sense to leave me alone in the kitchen. She retired to the living room, where she promised to be available to field any questions. Alone then, I browned chopped onion, ground beef, and salt in a tablespoon of fat, sprinkled the mixture with flour, then cooked it briefly with milk. Served over mashed potatoes, ”Saucy Hamburger Crumble” disappointed as much as it delighted. Nearly fifty years later, my shame over the look of the gloppy, gray goo that I had produced nearly overpowered my pride in having actually cooked an entire supper by myself. Despite its blandness, the meal didn't taste half as bad as it looked. Even a bad recipe has its uses: ”Saucy Hamburger Crumble” was an unforgettable way to learn that food tastes better when it looks appealing.

When we landed at Rome's airport shortly after dawn, John was deeply and clinically depressed, heavily medicated, still half asleep from the long overnight flight. His eyes-not his own eyes, but a stranger's eyes that had mysteriously taken up residence in his head-sometimes glittered as they darted nervously from side to side. At other times, these stranger's eyes-at once terrified and terrifying-appeared dull, lifeless, and unseeing, as if they were turned so far inward that no light from the outer world could possibly find its way in.

Waiting for Peter and Anna's flight to arrive from Germany, John was trying his utmost to appear ”normal” or at least as ”normal” as possible under the circ.u.mstances. But his agitation was palpable. He ground his teeth. He did not speak. He worked his lips nervously, pursing and relaxing them uncontrollably. Even when the children appeared, his smile was, like his eyes, a stranger's, crooked and frozen. But the children hugged and kissed him w.i.l.l.y-nilly, and we managed to find our rental car and pile our four small bags into its tiny trunk. We headed northeast, past the welcoming umbrella pines that still line the airport approach road, past the herds of fat sheep that used to graze on the parched fields, past the red-tiled roofs of old stone farmhouses that have since given way to high-tech factories and office buildings.