Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life (9 page)

A FRIEND OFFERED HER MAGNIFICENT HOME TO BE INCLUDED
in her neighborhood historical society’s fund-raising tour. This is the kind of casually glamorous thing that happens to this friend all the time, and she invited me to join her while she checked out the other houses on the tour. Notice I said
her
neighborhood historical society. My neighborhood doesn’t have a historical society. The closest we’ve come to civic beautification is an 800 number for abandoned shopping carts. Sometimes, one of these carts bears the insignia from a supermarket no longer in business, which, I guess, might qualify it as historical. Anyway, my friend told me to get to her place at 2:30 p.m., when her tour-giving shift ended. I arrived a few minutes early and marched across her spacious front yard past a three-piece Dixieland band and tables laden with punch and cookies. Visitors in period dress milled and chatted, sipped punch, and nibbled cookies. I approached the front door where a historically clad docent said cheerily, “Welcome to the Magnolia House, please put on the booties before entering. The next tour begins in four minutes.” She pointed to a basket of what appeared to be huge, fuzzy condoms in a festive blue.

“Actually,” I whispered to her, feeling somehow like I was trying to cut in line, “I’m a friend of the owner.”

Her heavily lashed eyes widened, but ever so slightly. She asked my name and disappeared into the house. As I waited I
watched the people around me slip terrycloth galoshes over their shoes to protect the vintage flooring inside. Another historically clad woman came onto the porch, and at that moment I realized I was the only person on the property not wearing a picture hat and an ankle-length skirt. I tried to strike a historically appropriate pose. It was the least I could do to keep in the spirit of things. The first docent reappeared and nodded my way. “Mrs. G—knows you are here and will be right out,” she explained, in a buttery tone. “In the meanwhile, I am going to have to start the next tour. You probably know
all
about the house, so please be patient with me.” The other guests looked over at me respectfully as someone who was allowed into the house without paying. As I slipped on my Muppet overshoes, I had the brief and mostly alien sensation of being the coolest person in a thirty-foot radius.

The docent took a square of paper from her historically accurate bag, unfolded it, and began reading. Magnolia House, she announced, was large. Magnolia House had been made using a kind of wood that you hardly see on the West Coast anymore (which, of course, might be related to having been all chopped down to make big houses like Magnolia House). You may have noticed that Magnolia House’s front yard has the largest tree in the neighborhood, which, it was said, had been used by the local Native American tribes as a meeting place. We all turned and looked at the tree. The docent then mentioned that a guest on an earlier tour told her it wasn’t a native tree so it couldn’t have been a Native American meeting place. We all stared at the tree for a second longer, admiring its no-longer-a-meeting-place-but-still-very-attractive qualities. Then we turned back toward Magnolia House. The docent noted that Magnolia
House had been exquisitely restored by the owner. At this point, the docent smiled at me. Apparently, my friend’s unflagging ability to find authentic leaded-glass inserts somehow left a residual glow upon me. I tried to look modest but worthy.

Now it was time to go inside. Everyone tightened their fuzzy shoe-condoms and the front door opened. My friend—having spent the required time giving the tour and keeping people from touching her toothpaste—came flying through it. She had transferred her tour obligations to another docent so we could now walk around the neighborhood and check out the other houses.

Half a block later, we approached the next house on the tour and were given the brief external prelude, which involved John Barrymore having owned the house until he lost it in a divorce. Nearly every house on the tour had a history with one of the better divorce lawyers in Ye Olde Los Angeles. English country houses have the Reformation; Los Angeles houses have the Deposition. We walked inside and while everyone else said, “Oooh,” I very softly said, “Oh,” and instinctively wrapped my arms around my torso. It hadn’t occurred to me until just that moment that all of these houses would be filled with such very nice things. I don’t do well with very nice things. I am not a bull in a china shop; I am a bull terrier in a china shop, capable of doing far more damage with my small, lively frame than one might think. Hearing the docent tell us about the one-of-a-kind bibelots sitting on the mockingly fragile side table, the mate of which was in the Royal Museum of Flimsy Things in Stuttgart, didn’t help. While trying to make myself smaller, I hit the eighteenth-century Irish breakfront with my elbow. The original glass shivered slightly, the inlay appeared to loosen a touch. Because I
didn’t want to turn this lovely afternoon into another public lesson about why Quinn can’t have nice things, I slithered away from the group and parked myself in a corner behind a solid-looking couch. I stood very straight. I kept my arms at my sides. I tried not to move my head. My historically appropriate character would have been Bridget, the frightened immigrant maid.

This secure perch provided me the unexpected benefit of observing several different tours. The house, it seems, had been in dreadful shape. The present owner had spent much time and, it was understood, wheelbarrows full of thousand-dollar bills to bring the home back to its prime. No continent save Antarctica had been unmolested in pursuit of exactly the right details, which were endless. The tone the docents took was the same tone documentary filmmakers take when covering the Civil War:
be of good cheer during the battles, for we all know how this turns out
. Also, as with certain Civil War buffs, their passions weren’t always my passions. When the fifth tour was encouraged to note the original push-button light switches and marvel at how these were only the third push-button light switches to be installed in the city of Los Angeles, my mind started to meander.

I am a terrible shopper for anything of consequence. I’m instinctively drawn toward objects that excite a sense of pity in more reasonable consumers. If the thing to be bought is clean and attractive, my first thought is
Everyone is going to want that
and I steer my quest toward something odd and unsettling, preferably leaking a sticky fluid or bulging ominously at the seams. The dark side of being “of help” is that once you take on the big projects, the big projects sense your soft-heartedness and reward you with some of the most abusive and bizarre be
havior ever seen outside the
Prussian Journal of Abnormal Psychology.

Which explains my house.

I never actually wanted to buy a house. I hate owning things and what is a house but a really big stinking thing with countless smaller things piled inside? All through my twenties, I enjoyed the obligation-free lifestyle of renting, especially the part where when something goes wrong your greatest concern is locating Ivan the maintenance guy before Ivan locates his daily Big Gulp laced with Sterno. The way I understood it, when something went wrong with a house you actually
owned
you were not encouraged to run into the front yard, find the nearest publicly inebriated geezer, and insist it was
his
job to snake your drains.

Both my mother and my accountant grew adamant that handing vast amounts of my meager income to the government was a mortal sin. Not to mention the whole rent versus equity-building argument—a baroque opera my accountant could sing in all its parts. And did. Every quarter. Finally, I was told in no uncertain terms to buy a house. I tried avoiding the inevitable by hating every single house I saw, which wasn’t hard. The only good thing I could say about house shopping was that it made dating less depressing.

There were a few options open to me at the time, nearly all of which were unbearable: I could buy a condominium of such anonymity that had I walked into the wrong unit I could have lived there for a week before asking myself, “When did I buy pickled beets?” Or I could buy a real, honest-to-God house with a yard and everything, but it would have been so far away from the actual city that I would visit it only on weekends,
spending the remaining five nights a week in my Swedish pied-à-terre parked behind a diner on Sunset. Or, finally, I could buy a house in need of repair in a neighborhood known for a lively mixture of the artsy and the gangtsy. As long as I wasn’t absolutely tied to the idea of viable plumbing or a neighbor without a meth lab, I too could pursue the American dream within the city’s borders.

The house had been described by the real estate agent as “charming,” which I came to understand meant, “You want glass in those windows? Well, la dee dah. Ain’t you the Queen of France!” The present owners had self-funded an independent feature that would never find a projector much less a paying audience so they were desperate to sell the house. I walked into the living room, flinched at the stained carpet, winced at the painted-over beams, cowered under the popcorn ceiling, and covered my eyes from the glare of the Home Depot track lighting. The whole effect was that of a back-alley dentist. Yet once we opened the shades (and set them aside as they fell off their hinges), the light streaming in was copious and beautiful.

When the bathroom was last renovated, back in the seventies, the owners must have gotten a killer deal on black tile, black fixtures, and black “wet-look” paint. Frustrated when they couldn’t paint the original pink floor tiles, they tried bleaching them instead. This created the appearance of a grimy Big Stick perpetually melting on the bathroom floor. There was a shabbily made soffit suspended over the bathroom sink with a fluorescent fixture humming from within. The soffit was large, curved, and painted high-gloss black. It was as if Death were looming over your shoulder, monitoring your hair loss.

The kitchen “suite” was made up of a couple of small, sepa
rate rooms, including the original kitchen and an adjacent space that was once an outdoor porch. The other rooms had a mysterious, aggressively vacant quality. There was a room that the Realtor, an undiagnosed psychotic with a puckish sense of humor, referred to as the “third bedroom.” It was an exact duplicate of the room on Ellis Island where they held people with weeping eye infections. There was also a curious little four by six enclosure with five electrical outlets and a built-in, fold-up ironing board longer than the room itself. Electrical outlets were a kind of leitmotif in the house. There was no room without at least five. One small room had ten. They served as a nice counterpoint to the four phone lines into the house, all of which spawned outlets in each room. I assumed this allowed a previous occupant to call four friends at once and brag about how many outlets he had.

The whole house was a big, throbbing “NO,” with a heaping helping of “Why is there a working toilet in the bedroom closet?” thrown in for emphasis. And yet, there was that afternoon light in the living room, warm and pervasive without being insistent. Unconsciously, I noted where the Christmas tree would go. At first nearly inaudible, then louder, then drowning out the real estate agent’s blather about lot size was a voice in my head saying,
We can fix this
.

I know this voice. It’s the same voice that encouraged me to adopt a cat who despised me and was later diagnosed with something called “feline rage.” It’s the same voice that caused me to take a job with a woman whom I had been warned was as crazy as a shit-house rat, with the added caveat that if I valued my mental health, I’d grab my purse, race to my car, and change my phone number. It’s the same voice that picked everyone I
dated from seventeen to twenty-seven. This voice sings in a three-part harmony of generosity (“I
should
fix this”), hubris (“I
will
fix this”), and teeth-gnashing naïveté (“I
can
fix this”). It tells me everyone else has failed at fixing something so now it’s
my
job. I will spend time and money finding the cat the perfect scratching post even though she showed a preference for my corneas; I shall offer up my self-esteem as brittle Parmesan against the human cheese grater for whom I work; I shall live on Twizzlers and Diet Cokes while my boyfriend writes his romantic comedy about mutant robots; I will walk into home ownership with my eyes wide open, knowing I will spend vast sums of time and money trying to elevate this home from “charming” to habitable.

Back on the historical tour, the docents had a seemingly endless array of happy-accident anecdotes:

My renovation surprises were less serendipitous:

Do you know you have a cat skeleton under there?

The plumber was standing in the back doorway, the dust and cobwebs from the crawl space forming a kind of gray mantilla. I internally replayed what he said several times, trying to find some way I could have misunderstood it. I played it safe and went with repeating the noun and not the other noun.

“Cat?”

He mulled my question while totaling up the bill. “Maybe a skunk, but probably a cat. It’s just bones,” he said hastily, mistaking my look of general horror with a fear of putrefaction. “I’m just telling you so you can tell the electrician.”

“Why will I be telling the electrician?” I asked with perfect enunciation.

The plumber frowned. “Because,” he said slowly, “he might want to know before he puts his hand on it?”