Strangers are in my house saying bad things about me. I can hear
them.
"Yeah, I guess you could call the art abstract. But I'd say it is
more accurate to call it horrid."
"Color blindness. What else would explain that ghastly pale peach
on these kitchen walls?"
"He reads that? What a philistine."
I have no idea who these people are, and (full disclosure) I can't
hear them, not technically.
I am in a
sports bar across town, drinking beer, eating chicken
wings, and decrying the wretched plays of my favorite team.
For all I know, none of the people in my house are saying any of
those things. For all I know, no people are even in my house.
But I would rather have strangers in my house trashing my taste in
art and paint colors and rigged-up books than have no one there at
all. Yes, I am happy to bare my soul to strangers, pleased to run
naked through the brambles of public scrutiny, downright ecstatic
to invite the world to come into my domicile and pass judgment.
For I need their tender attention. And by tender, I mean legal
tender. As in money.
I am, you see, selling my house.
SELLING YOUR HOUSE means never having to say you're home.
People come tromping through whenever they want, and I am not
supposed to be here because I might say something stupid, like,
"That smell? Dinner. Unless you don't like the smell. Then, it's
the landfill this house was built on. Hey, I'm joking. Come back.
It's a joke!"
The other thing selling your house means is that you have to do
something called … bear with me while I look up this word in the
dictionary … ah, there it is … clean. We dusted and mopped and
swept and vacuumed and sponged and sprayed and wiped and
elbow-greased this and spit-polished that. I felt like I was
captaining the USS Enterprise of cleanliness - brooms went where no
broom had gone before.
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.
By now, if we haven’t sold the house, we’re still in it. And if we’re still in it, it is definitely not our beautiful house. Because there is no way we could have kept it beautiful for this long.
But if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then our house, piles of papers here and magazines there, is, to us, gorgeous again.