The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death (10 page)

I smiled. I nodded. “You’re supposed to move the sandblaster around and not hold it in one place like you’re peeing,” I reminded him.

“I remember when you thought it would be a good idea to hire a homeless man to remove the dead trees in the front yard,” he continued. “And I came home to a delusional, scabby schizophrenic running across my yard and then kung fu kicking the tree, like he was some sort of zombie Bruce Lee.”

“I got in trouble for that.”

“Yes, you did,” he agreed. “And I remember a girl who wanted to save her house so bad she went out and fought a fire in her underwear, the ones that looked like a hula skirt. You could have and should have been arrested for indecent exposure, but that’s how much you love this house. You risked being naked,
outside,
to protect it. I was in my underwear, too, so I just watched you from the bedroom window.”

A laugh burst out of my throat.

“I
knew
I saw you in there,” I said, breaking the hug. “I have to go out and look at the sign. I need to get this over with.”

My husband followed me outside, and we stood together for a long time, just looking at the Realty Executives sign spiked in the middle of our front yard.

“I just can’t believe we’re doing this,” I admitted. “I can’t believe we’re moving. I love this house.”

“I love this house, too,” my husband replied. “We’ll get a great house in Oregon, I promise, but this will always be our first house. It will always be a special place for both of us.”

“I forgot to tell you!” I suddenly said, remembering the police helicopter that had swooped in over my house at lunchtime. “A ghetto bird flew the lowest I’ve ever seen it today and shook the windows so hard I thought they were going to break! They must have been after someone good!”

“Well, I know it can’t be anyone who has broken into our house, because they are invisible to law enforcement agents,” my husband said.

“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 violated 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.”