Best Staged Plans (7 page)

Mrs. Bentley’s basement was a total blast from the past—flecked acoustical ceiling tiles, orange shag carpeting. The Big Bird yellow of the Parsons tables popped against a brown-and-avocado-plaid sofa and armchair set. Above the couch a groovy chrome-framed Peter Max poster looked down on the plaid sofa as if to say
this room isn’t big enough for both of us
. A dark wood built-in bar dotted with bright yellow ashtrays took over one entire wall of the room.

When I was growing up, we’d had a bar just like this in our basement. It was my father’s pride and joy. I’d had my first Shirley Temple there, with two extra maraschino cherries, sitting on one of the padded vinyl barstools that spun all the way around. My sister and brother and I would crack open peanuts and were actually allowed to throw the shells on the cement floor. Then one day the rules mysteriously changed, and we got a linoleum floor and had to start putting the peanut shells in wooden bar bowls instead.

The next owner could turn this space into an Irish pub, or an old western-style saloon, or even a billiards room. But it was more likely that the basement would be gutted and turned into a media room, complete with theater-style seating and surround sound. If the old wooden bar were lucky enough to survive at all, it would become a movie concession stand.

If Denise’s boyfriend ever got around to actually calling me about that boutique hotel in Atlanta, I might try something elaborate like that, but for this job I was going for a quick fix. I’d turn this basement into an exercise room.

A big part of what home stagers do is create fantasy space. We’d already gotten rid of all the rest of the furniture in the room except for one overstuffed chair. The painters and I placed the elliptical in full view of the television. I threw a white terry cloth robe over the chair and arranged Mrs. Bentley’s exercise videos—mostly unopened, I noticed—on the bookshelf. I spread out an exercise mat on the freshly cleaned carpeting midway between the elliptical and the TV. I crisscrossed two shiny purple weights on top of the mat and placed a royal blue exercise ball beside it.

Next, I took down all the dusty old liquor bottles from the open shelves in the bar and boxed them up. Mrs. Bentley and her husband would have to either rent a storage unit or drink up all that booze fast. I lugged the boxes out to the garage. I rolled up five plush white towels and arranged them on the shelves where the liquor bottles had been. I placed some fancy, overpriced bottles of water on the bar.

The moment potential buyers enter a house, they make a judgment, either conscious or unconscious, based on the smell. They make a second olfactory assessment as they head down the basement stairs. Fortunately, Mrs. Bentley’s basement didn’t have even a trace of mustiness, so all I had to do was bring in some candles.

I arranged three grapefruit candles in round metal tins across the length of the bar like bowls of cocktail peanuts. The citrusy smell would bring a clean crispness to the space, and the grapefruit might send a subliminal message to potential owners that they were losing weight already just by standing here. This was the exercise room that might finally get them into shape.

Now that all the work was done, Mrs. Bentley meandered into the room. You just never knew with clients. Sometimes they were such hard workers, if only inspired by the thought of cutting down my final bill, that I’d be tempted to hire them to work for me. Other times they treated me like I was the hired help, which I supposed, technically, I was.

Mrs. Bentley didn’t say a word as she looked her staged basement up and down. I tried to read her expression, but it was hard to gauge. I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. Once her house sold, she’d come around and tell all her friends about me. Or she wouldn’t. Either way, I’d have my check and be out of there.

There was always a chance she’d eventually be so impressed that she’d want to hire me to help her get her next place set up. Even though I marketed myself as someone who staged to sell, it was a natural offshoot, so I did it all the time.

All I knew was that Mrs. Bentley and her husband had already bought a condo and that they were paying two mortgages.

I faked a big smile. “So, what do you think?”

She shrugged. Clients, especially women, often got really territorial about the homes they were trying to get rid of. Any change I made felt like a personal attack on their taste, or lack thereof. It’s crazy. If you want to sell your house, you have to keep your eye on the prize and let that kind of thing go.

I kept smiling. “I don’t think I’ve even asked you where you’re heading next. Is your new condo local?”

Mrs. Bentley ran a hand through her hair. “Minneapolis.”

“Wow,” I said. “Minneapolis. Great place to get out of the winter.”

She still didn’t say anything.

“Ha,” I said. “Actually, I love Minneapolis. Such warm, friendly people. Fabulous arts scene. And those skyways are genius. Why are you moving there?”

Mrs. Bentley shrugged. “Our kids live there. They love it.”

As a civil engineer, Greg had spent far too much time working outside during the cold New England winters, so we’d always talked about heading to some warm southern beach one day. Maybe Siesta Key. Or St. Simons or Tybee Island. Or even Amelia Island. Fairhope, Alabama?

Or maybe we’d follow one of our kids so we’d be around when the grandkids came, and they’d be nearby to house-sit for us when we traveled. But what if we got to Atlanta, and then Shannon and her husband packed up and moved somewhere else? And then again, while I knew booting Luke out of the bat cave would be the best thing that ever happened to him, he didn’t seem to have any noticeable plans for his next horizon. He might need us to stay in the area, at least temporarily, to keep an eye on him from an easily commutable distance.

We could always put our things in storage and just rent for a while. Somewhere. Or we could even rent a tour bus instead of a house and take the next stage of our life on the road.

Greg and I had had the
where next
conversation over and over again, in ever-widening circles. Maybe we had to let go of one place for the next one to call out to us.

Or maybe we wouldn’t really be able to let go of the house we were in until we knew where we were headed.

And then again, perhaps we just had a bad case of analysis paralysis.

CHAPTER 10

T
HAT FIRST WINTER
in our new old house I almost got pregnant again. Two kids were the trend back then. I’d like to think we were above being influenced by that sort of thing, but I’ve wondered since what would have happened if we’d had our children a few years later instead, when the pendulum started swinging back in the big family direction.

In any case, Greg and I had agreed that two children, a girl and a boy, no less, made our family perfectly complete. We each had one hand for each kid. When we were both around, we could trade off and give them lots of one-on-one attention. What could be better? I went back on the pill after Luke was born, and Greg promised to get a vasectomy as soon as things settled down and we had some extra money.

I kept my birth control pills in the cabinet closest to the kitchen sink, where we also kept our One A Day vitamins and the kids’ Flintstone chewables. Like any habit, taking a pill at the same time each day reinforces the behavior, and I was religious about it. I believed, and still do, that we choose our lives by our attention to the little things.

My system was that before I went to bed, I’d put everyone’s vitamins on the kitchen table next to their juice glasses and take my birth control pill at the same time. I’d leave the rectangular top of the pink plastic case up, and I’d place the vitamin bottles right on top of the pills so I couldn’t miss them.

We drank our morning orange juice from Welch’s grape jelly juice glasses. We’d collected the complete set of the dinosaur glasses at the supermarket, but Luke would only drink from the gray pterodactyl. Shannon preferred her glass to match her vitamins, so she used a Pebbles’ Baby Sitters glass from the 1960s we’d found at a yard sale. I still had my red and blue Betty and Veronica Give a Party glass from high school, and we finally talked Greg’s mother into letting go of an original 1953 Howdy Doody glass from her collection of family heirlooms, so Greg could have his own special Welch’s grape jelly juice glass, too.

One night when I set out our glasses and went to take my birth control pill for Day 12, I noticed Day 13 was missing. It had been a long week, so I just figured I’d taken the wrong pill the night before. I took Day 12 and forgot about it.

The next night, Day 17 was missing.

“We need to talk,” I said to Greg.

He looked up from adding wood to the old Vermont Castings stove the minister and the wayward boys had left behind. After we’d emptied our savings account to fill the 275-gallon tank with oil and to have the furnace cleaned, the furnace had fired up, coughed, and then turned off forever. We didn’t have enough money to buy a cord of wood at that point, let alone a new furnace. So we took the kids for daily walks in the woods instead, scrounging what we could and piling it into the back of our minivan. At least we weren’t chopping up the furniture. Yet.

The stove door let out a rusty creak when Greg closed it. “Just let me get my boots off.” He walked by me in the direction of the mudroom.

This seemed unreasonable, given the circumstances. “If you want to have another baby, you should just come out and say it,” I said to his back.

Greg turned around. He had a soot smear on his right cheek from the stove and matching dark circles under his eyes. “
What
are you talking about?”

“I mean, I saw a
Jerry Springer
show like this. The husband poked a little hole in his wife’s diaphragm with a diaper pin and then pretended to be surprised when she got pregnant. I just didn’t think you were capable of doing anything this sneaky,
Greg
.”

Greg caught the back of one boot with the toe of the other and tried to wiggle it off. “I’m so tired right now I’m not even capable of following you,
Sandy
.”

We looked at each other.

“You’re not sabotaging my birth control pills?” I said.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he said.

It was Greg’s idea to put a mousetrap in the pill cabinet. The pill-popping mouse was apprehended by the next morning. I stayed in the bathroom so I didn’t have to look while Greg threw it into the wooded area at the far end of the backyard.

“Where’s the trap?” I asked when Greg came back in.

“With the mouse.”

I filled two mugs with coffee. “I have to admit I wondered why you’d chew a hole through the top of the plastic instead of just pushing the pill out through the foil in the back.”

Greg didn’t say anything.

“Sorry,” I said.

He washed his hands in the kitchen sink.

When he finished, I handed him a towel. “Why do you think it went after my pills and not the vitamins? Maybe it was a girl mouse?”

“More like those childproof caps don’t just work on children.” Greg took a long sip of coffee. “So, you don’t think you could be, do you? You know, pregnant?”

It was my idea not to have sex until after I got my next period. We put our energy into ripping down the rancid-grease-soaked kitchen ceiling instead. Mouse droppings rained down on our bandanna-covered heads, along with a handful of mouse skeletons.

“Gross,” I said. “This is almost as disgusting as that chicken.”

Shannon was already eyeing the skeletons. “Cool,” she said. “Can I take one to school for science?”

We finally agreed, but I put it in a Baggie and made her promise not to take it out. “I know,” she said. “You have to be careful of bubonic plague.”

“Me take mousetrap to Show and Tell,” Luke growled. Luke had been growling a lot lately. One day Shannon overheard us whispering to each other about whether or not we should have him evaluated for developmental delays. “He’s not delayed,” she said. “He’s just being Animal on
Muppet Babies
.”

We nixed the mousetrap and gave Luke a Baggie-wrapped mouse skeleton to take instead, and tried not to think about how it would fly at preschool.

When we finished demolishing the ceiling, we knocked down two old pantries, which opened up the kitchen to the dead front parlor where the pulpit had been. Suddenly our house had flow. Instead of having to go back out to the center hallway to reach each room, the kids could jog laps from the kitchen to the old parlor/new great room to the living room to the dining room and back to the kitchen again.

When the pantries came down we uncovered a big freestanding chimney. One day down the road when we had some money we’d hire someone to build a big granite island around it. Until then, we backed Shannon and Luke up against it and marked and dated their heights with a fat piece of chalk.

We knew we’d survived the winter when it warmed up enough to stop foraging for wood. A week later a new challenge reared its head. Some people move into a neighborhood only to be surprised by theft or gangs or an explosion of homelessness. We found out we were on the St. Patrick’s Day parade route.

None of us were parade people. We’d taken the kids to watch one once, because it seemed like one of those things you just did when you had kids. Luke covered his ears with his hands when the marching band went by.

“You shouldn’t walk and play at the same time,” Shannon said. “You could choke on your instrument.”

“Yeah,” Greg said. “I swallowed a tuba once when I was your age.”

“Da-ad,” Shannon and Luke said at the same time.

“This is boring,” Shannon said a minute later.

“Me go home,” Luke growled. He sat down in the midst of a sea of legs. I scooped him up before he could get trampled.

“How about an ice-cream cone instead?” Greg said, and we ditched the parade.

It was impossible to ditch the one in our new front yard. The first people dressed in all green arrived a full two hours before the parade started. They pulled their cars right onto our property, gouging the soft spring soil all around the edge of our pie slice–shaped front lawn.