“Oh my God!” I said as I began jumping up and down, barely able to contain my glee. “Maybe it’s the sex offender! Maybe they’ve finally come for Kenny Ray!”
“Oh!” my husband suddenly remembered. “I forgot to tell you that when I was walking Bella in the park this morning—”
“She stopped and took a crap in front of the gang members sitting at the picnic table who snickered at you until she finished?” I asked eagerly.
“No, we don’t walk by the picnic tables anymore after that happened last week,” he said, wagging his finger. “As the sun was rising at five-thirty, I came upon a very tall woman in a sequined dress who was standing at one of the community barbecues. As I passed, I noted that she was cooking her breakfast—what I thought was a steak, but as I got closer, it turned out to be a huge, inch-thick, shiny piece of bacon! Then she turned and said very invitingly, ‘Good morning,’ like Ginger from Gilligan’s Island, but if Ginger were a man.”
I gasped.
“I cannot believe you saw a park tranny grilling bacon at the break of dawn,” I said, moaning. “You see all the good stuff!”
“Speaking of seeing things, what’s that shiny round thing over there in the corner of the yard?” he asked as he began to walk over to it and I followed the several steps it took to get there behind him.
“What is that?” I asked as we got closer.
“I think it’s a car wheel,” my husband answered as he stood over it.
“Okay, and what’s that?” I said as I pointed to the sidewalk directly in front of us.
“Silly of you to ask,” my husband said, shaking his head in disgust. “Can’t you see that’s a five-foot-tall hockey trophy sitting on a skateboard?”
“I see it now,” I admitted. “It was silly of me not to realize there was an enormous sports trophy sitting in front of my house on a skateboard. Am I drunk? Did I just sniff too much glue? What is wrong with me? Why wouldn’t a skateboard, a trophy, and a wheel be in my yard?”
“You would think that if someone was going to dump some stolen things in our front yard, they would at least give us some of our own stolen stuff back,” he said as we headed toward the house.
“The bathroom sink would be a nice start,” I added as I followed. “Why can’t that pop up on a pair of roller skates next to my clay pot of pincushion flowers that was stolen on Mother’s Day?”
“See?” my husband said as he suddenly stopped. “I know you’re sad to leave this house, I know you love it, and I know how much it means to you. But there are lots of things we won’t miss about living here, and in Eugene, let’s make sure we buy a house where a fifty-pound clay pot with a cubic meter of dirt in it won’t walk away with a little help from an asshole who didn’t think ahead to call FTD, okay?”
Wait,” I said, and pointed to the mass of stolen loot heaped in our front yard. “What should we do about that? Should we bring them to the alley?”
“Are you kidding?” my husband answered as he looked at me unbelievingly. “Have you learned nothing while living here? If we go inside and pretend we left it outside, another thief will be along momentarily and resteal it so we don’t have to worry about dragging it back to the garbage.”
He was absolutely right. Within the hour, the crap had vanished, clearly on its way to another front yard in another part of the neighborhood.
I nodded and smiled, but I couldn’t help it.
I still wanted to hug the wall.
Apparently, having a FOR SALE sign in your front yard was akin to draping a banner over your roofline that proclaimed, “ATTENTION, PLEASE: Neighbors, friends, clientele of Crack Park, people driving by, folks walking their dogs, illegal aliens and countrymen: Kindly do everything within your power to ensure that we cannot possibly sell our house under any circumstance imaginable. Please. Your cooperation is appreciated.”
As soon as that sign went up and prospective buyers made appointments to view the house, someone threw a car speaker through the window of my husband’s truck, creating a glittery, shiny, massive pool of shattered, sparkling glass in front of our house. Dogs crapped in our yard in unprecedented amounts; beer bottles and cans were often aimlessly thrown onto the grass, while other receptacles, like syringes and condom wrappers, were neatly perched on the hedge. And a hooker in a fishnet tank top decided to tap a new, fresh market by setting up shop a block away and propositioned high school kids on their way home in the afternoon. A pack of wild dogs, led by a mean, stumpy corgi, began roaming the neighborhood and surprised my next-door neighbor by appearing in her kitchen and devouring the contents of a Purina bag after gaining access through her doggie door. And one day, as I was about to pull into my driveway, a goat ran in front of my car.
“I can’t sell my house if you aren’t keeping tabs on your livestock and your herds!” I screamed at the top of my lungs to no one as I slammed my car door and trudged into my house in a goat rage. I was about to call my husband and scream about the goat encounter as soon as I threw my house keys and a new bouquet of brilliant sunflowers on Veronica’s perfect dining room table when through the living room window I saw a German shepherd assuming the position on my lawn, which we had just paid to have fertilized and cut.
“Jesus Christ,” I hissed through clenched teeth as I swung open the door and marched outside to my front porch, where I saw a blond woman standing by patiently as her dog defiled my thirty-dollar-a-week grass.
“Hi!” I called out to her cheerily as I waved and walked down the steps toward her.
“Hi,” she replied without the enthusiasm I had reserved for my salutation.
“Can I have your address?” I asked with a big smile as I got close enough to her to push her down.
“Why?” she asked with a squint.
“Oh,” I said, laughing. “Because by my estimate, my dog will be ready to take a huge, stinking, big-ass shit in about an hour, and I want to take her to your house to do it. Okay?
“Hey!” I called out after her as she and her reluctant dog, its hindquarters pinched, raced down the street. “If you’re missing a goat, I think he ran off with the whore, but I’m sure they’ll both come back as soon as they’re done digesting their last meal!”
And spotting the FOR SALE sign in the front yard didn’t merely energize perpetrators of random fecal vandalism, either. People from all over, including some of my neighbors, saw it as an open invitation to knock on my door and expect to be invited in and receive a tour of my house at any time of the day or night that was convenient for them. We found one couple and their friend hanging out on our front porch at ten-thirty one night after we got home from the movies. One lady popped up at 7 A.M. and pounded on the door so insistently that the only reason I got out of bed was because I thought my backyard was on fire again. At other times, I’d be out in the front yard getting the mail or picking up that day’s shit deposit when someone merely walking by would stop to ask if he could “take a look around.”
“Well, I’d have to chain up the pit bulls and lock up the python, and that means I’ve gotta find him first,” I told one man who I suspected was not as interested in buying my house as he was in casing it. “Unless you can bench-press a car, ’cause if you can do that, you can probably peel him away from your neck as he’s strangling the last breath out of you. Would you be willing to sign a waiver, because my old man’s been drinking and at last look, he was juggling his guns again.”
Liberties unbound themselves even further when prospective buyers were in my house with their Realtors unsupervised and behaved as if they were in a rented hotel room and they were in Guns N’ Roses. I came home after Realtor appointments on several occasions to find the decorative foot of my claw-foot bathtub knocked off from where it had been cemented, footprints on my furniture from where someone had been standing, my area rugs pulled up and left there, and an open kitchen-cabinet door that revealed a twenty-five-dollar Williams-Sonoma cracker collection—“classic companions for artisanal cheeses”—that had been viol
ated and was no longer pure.
What kind of person does that? I thought to myself as I felt my blood pressure shoot up, and I vaguely identified the smell of burned hair. What kind of person walks into another person’s house and helps himself to snacks and destruction? Those aren’t even my crackers; those are Veronica’s, and what if she was planning on having ladies from the club over later?
“Don,” I said to my Realtor over the phone, “would you please inform people that I would appreciate it if when they enter, they resist the overwhelming urge to browse around, test out the merchandise, and, most important, abstain from nibbling on a free lunch out of my cupboards and refrigerator? Where do these people think they are, Costco?”
“You’re kidding!” Don replied, completely aghast. “I’m so sorry! I can’t believe someone did that!”
“I was quite surprised myself. Some filthy goblin broke into my box of artisanal cheese crackers and ate a handful,” I informed him. “There were crumbs all over the counter!”
“That’s appalling,” he agreed.
“Naturally, ‘the Biscotti al Formaggio feature thin slices of hearth-baked bread that are dipped in melted butter, topped with Romano cheese and Italian herbs, then baked a second time until they achieve the perfect degree of crispness,’” I told him as I read the description off the attractive gift box that housed them. “I mean, what’s next? I’m afraid I’m going to come home one day and Papa Bear is going to be in my bed. Waiting.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Don promised, and I believed him.
But my faith quickly lost ground the next day as I was driving back home while another starving, nosy-bodied, sticky-fingered looky-loo pulled away from my house with her mouth suctioned around one of Veronica’s fancy blue-glass bottles of purified water from the south of France.
I couldn’t believe it. I was so angry, especially since Don was the one showing her the house. Was my house being mistaken for a hostel? Were people going to start asking for a test drive next, moving in for a couple days or week to see if it was a good fit? Should I supply clean towels and soap in case someone wanted to freshen up? This was getting ridiculous.
“Don,” I said firmly into the receiver, “I am not running a bed-and-breakfast here. I just saw that woman chugging a five-dollar bottle of water as she left my house. If that’s what she’s doing in the wide open, I don’t want to even know what she did behind the cover of a closed door. Please tell me she kept her pants buttoned the whole time.”
“In the big picture, Laurie, a blue bottle of water is not a big deal, I promise,” Don tried to reassure me, laughing. “Especially when the person drinking it just offered you full asking price for the house. I almost gave her your fancy crackers, but I wanted to keep them for myself, so she got the water.”
I was stunned into complete silence. I wasn’t sure what to say. She wanted to buy my house? She was going to buy my house, just like that? How could she do that, when I could still change my mind? I mean, all I needed to do was go outside and hire the next tweaker scratching himself that passed by to kick the sign down.
I wasn’t ready for this. The house had barely been on the market for two weeks. I was expecting months, time I needed to hug walls and yell at goats and enjoy living in Veronica’s house. Enough time to have more of my things stolen and for the police helicopter to wake us up at night, and I never thought I’d say this, but I needed to sweat more. Maybe even get another dehydration-related kidney stone. I needed to be so extraordinarily sick of this place that it was easy to leave it and never look back. Never be sorry.
And certainly, I was afraid of leaving my family, but my plan was, with the direct flight back and forth from Eugene and Phoenix, I would be able to fly in once a month. I would see my family a little less than I saw them now. Still, once I sold the house, it was gone. I could never come back again.
“Laurie,” Don urged on the other end of the phone. “Did you hear me? She wants the house! You sold your house! Isn’t that fantastic?”
I nodded, swallowing hard. “Yeah, that’s great, Don,” I said, trying to put a smile into my voice. “That’s so great. Did she see the cat farm across the street, and the gang graffiti tagged on the fence? And that the neighbors on the corner park in their front yard? And then we have our own rapist.”
“The corgi dog gang even chased her from her car to the front door,” Don said excitedly. “She saw it all. She wants the house, and don’t you even think about backing out. I’m making double commission on this, and I’ve already booked my cruise!”
I’ve never printed the pictures of the house we took on that last day.
I’ve looked at them once or twice, flipped through the folder I keep them in on my computer, but the emptiness that swallows the rooms catches me in the throat and makes my eyes burn. There’s my husband and our dog, Bella, kneeling down in front of the fireplace and the built-in bookcases, smiling, the floor so shiny and wide behind them. Barnaby, our old, deranged cat, standing on the spot where he peed in his kitty bed and stained the floor in my office where I had just finished writing my fourth book. My deserted kitchen, the soapstone counter patterned with the reflections of the tree outside, and the cabinets free of even Veronica’s things.
Everything looks so still in those pictures, like a house about to be left.
The woman who bought our house worked in historic preservation for the city, so I knew that she wouldn’t gut the place and tear all the wonderful things about it out. She had just gotten divorced, and I was honest when I told her that the house would take care of her, because as much as we had taken care of it, it had taken care of us. Especially with the iron bars on the windows and doors and the crowbar I left on the windowsill.
The last picture I took of the house that day was from the sidewalk, and the sky is so blue and the sun so bright and shining that it makes everything look so magnificently clean. It makes it look brilliant. The grass had just been mowed, the stripes of each lawn mower pass are apparent, and there’s not an errant piece of dog shit in sight. The sky is so blue, strikingly blue, and oddly enough, everything against it, the grass and the trees, looks amazingly green.
It was a lovely house, both Veronica’s and mine.
“Did you want one last hug?” my husband asked as I got into the car, packed with Bella, Barnaby, her bed, his litter box, and everything else that was relevant for our three-day drive up to Eugene and our new apartment.
I shook my head. “No, that last one took up most of the morning, and I still have the imprint of the wall texture on my cheek,” I said. “I think I’m good.”
“You brought those fancy crackers, right?” he questioned. “I’ve never had crackers like that. They are so good!”
“I got ’em, they’re in the back,” I replied.
And with that, we pulled away from the curb of our house and headed toward the freeway, toward I-5 West.
Balls and Putters
One of the last things I heard on the Phoenix nightly news before I left was that a male-only golf course was being planned for Maricopa, a small desert town a couple of miles outside of Phoenix. Consequently, I have to admit that I was mad.
I was mad and offended, thinking that the whole thing smacked of sexism and inequality. I was imagining the male-only golf course in my head, picturing the fellas slapping each other on the back, remarking, “Listen to how quiet it is here without women! It’s so peaceful! I haven’t heard a sound since Bill’s last burp and the splash of Bob’s urine hitting that tree trunk. It’s remarkable.”
And then, all of a sudden, I realized that a male-only golf course was a miracle. A pure miracle! In fact, women have been waiting for this event for years, hoping it would come, looking toward the skies for a sign. And now the time had arrived.
Naturally, it had to be men who made the first move of boorishly excluding the other sex, mainly because most women are far too polite to do such a thing. We’d worry about hurting men’s “feelings,” completely forg
etting that most men don’t typically purchase the biological upgrade package that includes those options, although they’ll fork over eighty thousand dollars for a lifetime membership to a men’s only golf club. And now that it’s done, now that the line of exclusion has been crossed, it opens everything else up. I hope you’re ready, boys.
For starters, I’d like to suggest a female-only airline. I mean, imagine, ladies, actually utilizing an armrest that hasn’t been staked out and claimed by a big man arm, despite the fact that half of it is legally yours. Imagine the luxury of never having the dimwit in front of you recline all the back into your lap because he’s more self-absorbed than a Bounty paper towel and understands others around him merely to be props. Imagine a whole entire flight without getting kicked in the kidneys once by a Florsheim. And the peanuts would disappear, replaced lovingly by Ghirardelli chocolate squares.
Second, I’d like to propose women-only roads and freeways. Sure, you might get tailgated once in a while by a sister applying lipstick, but at least you can be fairly confident that when she passes you, there won’t the barrel of a shotgun poking out her window with your forehead centered nicely in the scope. And if that isn’t enough incentive, chances are that you’ll never have to hear a Boston or Rush tune blaring out of the Firebird pulled up next to you, or the thumping bass in a rap song played so loud that the sound waves are strong enough to remove the plaque from your teeth.
Next, I’d like to submit the idea of female-only bars. Yes, I know that we already have some of those, but I’m talking about some that aren’t so special-interest specific, I guess. Just a good old place where a girl can have a drink without anyone assuming that she used to work for Heidi Fleiss. It would also be nice to have a beer or two without hearing the words “High five!” and “Score!”
Now, a good majority of the offenses listed aren’t committed by all men, just by the kind of guy who thinks that his golf club should only be open to half of the world’s population. Unfortunately, however, it still means that all males would be excluded, not just the suckiest ones.