Neighborly(7)

“So Kat DVRed, like, every episode of every show on the THN,” Doug continues. “She got really inspired. And she was most excited about stairs. Under the stair storage! Pull-out drawers built right into the staircase! Steps turned in bookshelves! Every day, I’d come home and there would be another idea about a flight of stairs.”

“I’d never even thought before of how pretty that expression is—a flight of stairs. It’s like a flight of fancy, you know?” I say, because I feel like I should be contributing, that Doug and I should be like Stone and Brandon, a variety show, a vaudeville act. But either my timing is off or my tone. I can see that despite my hopeful “you know?” our audience doesn’t know. I feel my face growing hot, and I stuff it full of corn bread.

“So you know how it is in this market,” Doug continues, and they turn into bobblehead dolls. That, they know. “It’s like pandemonium, and there are so many people at the open house, and our agent is like, ‘Hurry up, write the offer, bid high, waive your contingencies!’ You barely have time to even look around; you’re just eyeballing all these people, your competition, and you’re in a frenzy. Did you guys see the hordes spilling out onto the sidewalk, frothing at the mouth? It’s like we’d all been let out of the zoo or an asylum.” He pauses for audience appreciation.

He’s flattering them. Who doesn’t like to think they have what other people want? Sunday open house was probably like game day, watching the masses with a beer and some chips. Well, maybe not chips. They probably had a vibe about who they liked. Maybe they even saw Doug, Sadie, and me. Were they rooting for us? Did they want us on their team?

Doug smiles at me. “So when we finally get into the house, we’re walking around, taking it all in, saying, ‘This is it, this is where we live, we made it!’ and then I see Kat is standing frozen in front of our stairs, and she just looks crushed. Like, totally defeated. In all our daydreaming, we sort of forgot our house is more like a split-level but with only two levels. We’ve got five steps, and each one is yea tall.” He pantomimes the distance. “No under-the-stair anything for us! Back to the THN drawing board!”

Everyone finds him charming, and he is, but I wish he hadn’t spent so long underscoring our mini house and my preoccupation with stair storage. Yes, the houses on the street are of different sizes, it’s one of the cool aspects of the AV, but even the next-smallest house to ours is probably double our square footage.

Also, listening to Doug has taken me back to the thud in my chest the day I thought we’d made a big mistake. We’d come out of the purgatorial escrow and gotten our keys. We pushed open the front door, electrified with excitement, and looked around. Really looked around. We had seen the house only that one time, when we had to assume that if everyone wanted it, it was worth having. Then we were in a bidding war, waiving all inspection contingencies and writing sycophantic letters and pimping out our newborn. And then we were exultant. We were winners! Who doesn’t want to be a winner? After that, fantasy (and THN) took over.

But staring around at the reality of the unstaged living room, I realized how much I had forgotten, or rather, how much we’d never had the time to register. Like the five crummy little steps. Like the hardwood floors that needed a polish, at a minimum, and the largest space in the house that would encompass our living room at one end and dining room at the other, which featured the galaxy’s cheapest aluminum blinds to keep us from looking directly into our neighbors’ house. Why were random wires protruding from a floorboard? Was that a loose brick in the nonoperational fireplace? I also realized anew the fact that I’d conveniently overlooked: 960 square feet with two bedrooms was actually smaller than the one bedroom in which we’d been living.

This was, indeed, a tiny house, and a well-worn one at that. No, well loved.

“It’s the Velveteen Rabbit of houses,” I told Doug. We smiled and clasped hands in silent agreement: there would be no looking back.

Sadie’s been passed around enough by this point; she’s starting to let out little protest cries. I reattach her to me via the Bj?rn, and she immediately starts to fuss in that way that makes me think she could use a diaper change and some milk, maybe some homemade carrot puree. The introvert in me would like a break from all the socializing anyway.

I tell Doug that I’m going inside for a bit, but just as I’m stepping onto the sidewalk in front of our house, I’m nearly run over by the sixteen-year-old Goth girl who lives next door to us with her mother, June. (I can remember June’s name because it’s the same as the current month, the one in which we moved into our dream house.)

“I’m going out, and you can’t stop me!” the teenager yells. June doesn’t even notice me, she’s so busy giving chase. “Take my car keys, I don’t give a fuck! I’ll find another way!” They both round the corner, and I see June grabbing her daughter’s arm roughly. I avert my eyes, realizing that others are doing the same.

June seems friendly but distracted, like her head is permanently turned around on her neck, seeking out her wayward daughter. Every time I’ve seen her, she’s been racing in and out of the house, giving off the fumes of the desperately late, or maybe just the desperate.

Mother and daughter don’t look anything like each other. June has curly auburn hair and blue eyes, and she’s in a pair of jeans and a pretty floral top with spaghetti straps. She’s no Tennyson, but she’s definitely attractive. The daughter’s face is covered in white paint, and she has piercings in her lip and nose. She dresses head to toe in black. Her hair is also black, with electric-blue streaks. She has her own Audi and frequently tears out at far too high a speed for a residential street. I’ve seen June on the sidewalk, shaking with impotence in her daughter’s wake. I’m pretty sure there’s no husband.