Welcome to the Dollhouse
No fixer-uppers.
Those words echoed in my head as I stood in the doorway, surveying the house John and I were just about to sign our lives away for. “No fixer-uppers,” our broker Rita underscored in her notes when we first met. “No fixer-uppers” became our mantra as we rejected house after house on our search. I guess my thinking was that if you repeated something as stupid-sounding as “fixer-upper” long and loudly enough, you might make yourself believe it.
And yet, there we stood, the scales dropping from my eyes for the first time. This is it, our house? How did I not see that awful turd-brown runner on the stairs? No, calling that color turd-brown is an insult to fecal matter everywhere. And what is that smell? When we were looking at the house, it smelled like a house. You know, things cooking, people living. This smell is like something dead. Dead and rotting. Rotting inside the walls. Under the floors. Speaking of floors, what were the owners doing on these, anyway? Giving tap lessons? And oh my God, I can’t believe we didn’t notice that sag in the ceiling. I can’t believe I am buying a house with such an enormous sag in the ceiling (which is not there the next time I look). And what is all this crap? Look at all the crap the owners left behind.
(“Broom clean,” it said on our contract. The term sounded so tidy, but they must have meant using a broom on the inside of the oven and to clean the kitchen sink.) Broom clean, my ass. This place is gross.
And small. I remember the living room as twice the size. I thought it had a giant dogleg. Where’d the dogleg go? Wasn’t there a wall over there? This is not the house I saw last time. Ha ha, good joke. Now take me to the house we’re actually buying.
But our greatest shock came when we climbed the stairs and took a good, long look at the bathroom. I almost swooned, honestly I did. Was this door kept locked when we were looking? Did I even see this room? Shag carpet? Beigeshag carpet? In a bathroom? I guess they wanted a nice contrast to the powder-blue toilet and sink (which provided a nice contrast to the claw foot tub, which someone had painted maroon with gold-leaf feet). Maybe I hadn’t noticed any of these things because they had been obscured by the big plaster bulge in the west wall and the layers of forest green paint (coincidentally, the same paint on the latticework under the front porch) covering the wallboard and cast-iron baseboard. Or the decorative border of maroon lilacs (maroon lilacs?), which I can’t wait to get my fingernails under. Just as soon as I can don a HAZMAT suit.
We concluded our walk-through with a trip to the garage, which was filled with cans of frozen paint, old batteries, a busted lawnmower, old tools and bags of rotting leaves. There was brush piled so high next to the garage I expected a beaver family to waddle out from under it. Rita was taking notes, tsking, keeping her calm. All I knew was that this was not the house we had looked at, and I didn’t want this one.
John and I were silent as we drove to Yarmouth for the closing. I didn’t dare open my mouth, lest bats might fly out of it. I didn’t want to say what was screaming in my mind: I don’t want that dump. I cannot live there. Why did we want to buy a house, anyway? We were perfectly happy in our carefree apartment lives. Why did we have to wreck it all and buy a house?
At the closing there were about a million papers to sign, which an attorney friend had told us not to bother to read. (I’m sure the film rights to everything I ever write were included somewhere in there.) So we signed and nodded, nodded and signed. At one point, we had to sign a document to verify we were signing all the other documents we were signing. Yes sir, Major Major.
Suddenly, the room started to close in on me. Everyone seemed sinister. It felt as though these people were averting my eyes, like in those insane-asylum movies when the board of evil doctors tells the nice sane girl she’ll need to stay locked up. I couldn’t see Rita from where I was sitting. I figured the others had planned it that way. I wanted to ask someone to move so she could sit nearer and hold my hand. Still, John and I signed and nodded, nodded and signed. Checks were distributed. I saw dollar confetti flying through the air and heard a rousing chorus of, Ha ha, chumps. Sign away! We are hosing you clean. We screwed the rubes! Meanwhile, my inner Yankee (who loathes nothing more than getting hosed) started his own chorus of, Ye are a moron. Thou art too stupid to own a home. A fool and the money she will earn for the next 30 years are soon parted. It was a little like “Girl, Interrupted, Buys a House” playing in my brain. I wished I had brought popcorn.
Somehow we made it through the signing without a complete meltdown on my part. We were handed a sheaf of papers and a bunch of keys, and that was that. It was done. Over. We (and the bank) owned the house. This was a big moment. One of those pivotal milestones one should savor. Except for the fact that John had a dinner meeting in Kennebunkport in the next hour or so (to which I had mooched an invitation), so there would be no clinking champagne glasses in front of the fire, or even strolling through our rooms together. We all raced back to Portland – me, John, Rita, the former owner – and tried to resolve some of the not-broom-clean issues. The guy crammed as much crap into the back of his Honda Civic as he could. Rita filled the trunk of her BMW with paint cans. And then time was up. We had to leave. We decided to let everything else – the brush and the trash and the skuzz – go, and call it good. John lugged me across the threshold for good measure, and we were off.
Gazing out the window as we raced down the highway, the words: We own a house. We own a house. We finally own a house echoed in my head. But what I was really thinking was, What was that smell?
At dinner, I proceeded to drink my weight in wine.
Watch Elizabeth Peavey and The Bollard‘s own Chris Busby square off for camera time when they appear together on WCSH TV’s “207” on Wed., April 5, at 7 p.m. (Parenthetical discretion is advised.)
