Selling My Beautiful House
by Jim Shahin
When the blur of cleaning was over, it occurred to me that the act
of selling your house is like committing identity theft of
yourself: This was not our beautiful house. I mean, it was,
literally, our beautiful house. But it was unrecognizable for its
deep glow, radiating as if it had just come from a week of
pampering at the spa.
It was so clean that I thought I was someone else. To describe the
sensation, I mispronounced my own name, which is sha as in shah and
heen as in unbelievably clean. "That James Shayhin sure does keep
an immaculate, uncluttered house."
As much of a problem as it was to make the house look like somebody
other than me lived there, it was an even bigger problem keeping it
that way. I zeroed in on the tiniest speck of paper. If I spied a
molecule of dirt over in a corner, I'd pounce on it vengefully, as
if it had insulted my family.
Meanwhile, I left notes for our teenaged son and a teenaged
relative who had come to stay with us, thanking them for cleaning
up after themselves and urging them to seek out new and better
cleaning opportunities. My wife was traveling a lot at the time,
which was a shame because she didn't get to enjoy living with this
new guy who looked like her husband but who was much more attentive
to the house.
And the house, spit-shined and ready for its inspection by
strangers, sat there. We had an open house. And another. And yet
another after that. Nobody bid. Through the days, people came,
looked around, passed judgment, and went.
As the days went on, a small pile of magazines appeared on a dining
room counter. Over on the kitchen counter, a cutting board was
allowed to stay visible. In the bathroom, the soap dish was
permitted to have regular, not perfume-scented, soap in it.
Things were unraveling dangerously back to normal. As if real
people actually lived here.
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