The Last Beach Bungalow (7 page)

“I can come pick you up before practice,” I said.

“I’m staying for practice.”

“Jackie, don’t be ridiculous.”

“I can run, I can do sit-ups. The doctor said that if it doesn’t hurt in a week, I can hit, so I’ll probably be able to play the Holiday Classic.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. It’s hard to argue with a child who is a patriotic, vegetarian, straight-A student who exercises every day and cares about the working poor. It’s hard to argue when you feel as if your child has her life more together than you do. “Fine,” I said, “but promise me you’ll call if it starts to hurt.”

“I promise,” she said, in a sing-song voice. She gave me a quick hug and then waltzed out the door.

After Jackie left, I pulled the stack of pilfered papers out of my purse. I slipped the
Town & Country
piece into a folder marked “Ideas” and spread the newspaper ad out on my desk. Who would sell a house like that in a contest? And what did it mean,
Bring your stories
? I did a Google search on “house contests, Los Angeles, beach cities,” and came up with a list of organizations that had raffled off million-dollar homes as fund-raising stunts. For the price of a raffle ticket— $150—you could gain the chance to win a home in Palos Verdes, Santa Barbara or Malibu. Farther down the Google list, there was a series of entries about a contest for a Manhattan Beach house that had ended in a lawsuit when it was revealed that the winner was the husband of the owner’s niece. On page three, there was an entry about a guy in Venice Beach who was going to raze a nine-hundred-square-foot bungalow built in 1906 and was offering it free to anyone who would move it, serious inquiries only.

I remembered driving North to the Boundary Waters one summer when I was a kid, living in Minnesota. We had a station wagon that year, and I liked to count the other station wagons we passed along the way. As I watched from the backseat we rolled by a flatbed truck whose cargo was half a house. The house had been sliced completely in half, like a cake, and I could see inside the walls and the floor, under the skin of that house. I held my breath until we were completely past, and then I turned around and craned my neck to watch it behind us.

“Did you see that?” I asked. “There was a house on a truck. They cut it in half.”

“You’re such a doofus,” my brother said, shoving me in the stomach with his elbow. He was blessed with the ability to read in the car and had his head buried in a comic book.

“They unbolt it from the foundation,” my dad explained, “and lift it right off for transportation.” He was a manager at a company that manufactured furniture. The year before that, he had been a manager at a company that made china plates and cups. In a few years, he would be a manager for something else and we would be moving again, leaving our house and whatever friends I’d managed to make when I finally figured out what kind of jeans the kids wore to school in that town.

“You can take your house with you when you move?” I asked. My heart was pounding in my chest, my throat, my ears. We had left a house with an attic playroom and another with a three-car garage. My room in the house in Minnesota had two small windows that looked out over a steeply pitched roof. The windows were like two eyes that looked out onto the world. I loved to sit at those windows and read late into the night—stories about other girls in other houses in other places in other times. There were little houses on prairies and big houses in cities, houses with servants and houses with curtains that could be made into dresses. Sometimes I drew sketches of the houses so that I could get a better idea how far away the kitchen was from the dining room, or where, exactly, a big hallway led. Moving to the next place where Dad had a job—a better job! more responsibility!—wouldn’t be half as bad if I could take that room with me.

“I suppose you
could
take a house with you,” my mother chimed in, “though it’s just wallboard and wood. I don’t know why anyone would want to.”

I was around thirteen years old, and it was the first instance where I knew without a shadow of a doubt that my mother was wrong. The possibility of her flawed nature had occurred to me before that moment, of course—sometimes around the topic of blue jeans and hairstyles, but most often around the topic of my dad. He watched a lot of hockey. He took frequent business trips that seemed to center around his secretary. No matter what job he took, there invariably materialized an unfair boss, a boss who was a jerk, a boss my dad couldn’t tolerate. I wouldn’t understand until I was much older that my dad was a philandering flake, but at thirteen, I understood that my mom was putting up with a lot for what she seemed to be getting out of her marriage. The moment she said that a house was nothing more than wallboard and wood—a shelter, a lean-to that was easy to leave behind—was the moment when I started to hate her for it.

I left my Google search and picked up the phone and called Vanessa. “Have you heard about that beach bungalow they’re selling in a contest?”

“I understand that the owner’s lived there for forty-nine years,” Vanessa said. “Her husband just died and the daughter is moving her up to San Francisco. She agreed to go so long as she could find the right owner for her house.”

“There’s something very cool about it.”

“She picked the wrong year though,” Vanessa said. “The market’s too hot.”

“Why should that matter?”

“Did you ever hear of the Dutch Tulip craze?”

“I can’t say that I have.”

“The richest men in Holland fought over these dirty little root balls that could produce a flower that was just the right red or yellow. Huge fortunes were made and lost, but the thing is that those men couldn’t have cared less about the actual flowers. They weren’t gardeners. They just liked the art of the deal and the promise of making huge amounts of money in ridiculously short periods of time. We’ve got the same thing here with houses. People will do anything for the right house.”

“Maybe that’s exactly why she’s doing this right now. To rise above all that.”

“How is she going to tell who’s just spinning a yarn about loving her house? There’s no way to know. Someone told me the other day about this couple who won a bidding war on a house because they convinced the sellers how much they loved the kitchen—how they’d use the two ovens to bake their special holiday cookies and how they’d have other couples over for gourmet dinner parties in which the guests would slice and season the fresh ahi steaks at the big central island right before they were seared. Three weeks after escrow closed, they bulldozed the lot.”

“Maybe the bungalow owner has a special bullshit detector,” I said.

“You know what I like about you, April? You don’t have a cynical bone in your body.”

As if to prove Vanessa’s point, I immediately called an editor at
Metropolitan Home.
Without even developing a story pitch, I just picked up the phone and dialed. “There’s a house in L.A. being sold by a widow in a contest,” I said. “It’s an old beach bungalow worth several million dollars. All she wants is three hundred thousand dollars from the right buyer. A buyer with the right soul. It’s a great feature story.”

“Californians are seriously strange about their real estate,” she said.

“
Quirky
was the word I was thinking of.”

“Too quirky for us.”

“It’s got great visuals,” I said. “It’s a perfectly preserved early Craftsman bungalow standing all alone on a street of McMansions. There are fruit trees all over the yard.”

“Try
This Old House.
Or
Sunset.
”

“
Sunset
will probably want to scout
my
house. They’d love the glass wall concept. They’re not going to do an old beach bungalow.”

“And neither are we,” she said. “But we’re doing a series on the most popular household items of all time. We need someone to talk to Chuck Williams. You interested?”

“You’re talking about the Williams-Sonoma Chuck Williams?”

“He’s eighty-seven. We need eight hundred words.”

“What’s the deadline?”

“First week of January.”

“Sure,” I said, because it’s what I always said to keep myself in business, “I can do it.”

I drove to the Williams-Sonoma in the mall on the hill in order to soak up the atmosphere. I somehow ignored the fact that it was a week before Christmas and the atmosphere would be chaos. Even in the parking lot I could see the fierce looks on the drivers’ faces, the tense set of their jaws. After three trips around the lot, trolling for a spot, I caught the eye of a mom with two young kids in a stroller. She nodded her head toward the next lane over, and I sped around, stopped in the middle of the lane, flipped on my turn signal and waited to claim the spot as my own. I waited ten minutes while the mom opened her minivan and buckled in first one kid, then another. She came around to the back and folded up her stroller, then hoisted it inside. Finally, she got in her seat, buckled up and backed out. I began to move toward the spot, when a man in a silver BMW zipped up from the other side, flew around the minivan and skidded into the empty spot. I pulled up directly behind him and leaned on my horn.

“What?” he asked, leaning out of his car as if he’d done nothing wrong.

“No way,” I said. “There is no way. That’s my spot.”

“Says who?”

“Don’t be a jerk,” I said. “It’s Christmas.”

He got back in his car, backed out and vacated the spot. “Merry fucking Christmas,” he yelled, as he drove away. I pulled in and turned off the car. I was shaking. A few weeks before, someone had been shot in a mall parking lot. Someone’s grandmother. She’d come back to her car, her arms full of bags from Nordstrom, and someone came right up and shot her for the money in her purse. Why had I thought I would be immune?

The front windows of Williams-Sonoma displayed KitchenAid mixers in red, yellow, pumpkin and sage, with melamine bowls of matching spatulas arranged like tulips. Even from outside, I could smell apple cider and cinnamon. I stepped in. There was a woman doing a demonstration on how to make English toffee, and people were crammed around her workstation trying to see exactly how she got such an even covering of nuts. People were also lined up at the cash register clutching fluted ceramic pie dishes, sets of copper cookie cutters, coffee cake mixes and French dish towels tied up with cotton bows. I walked along the far wall past the shelves that held vegetable graters, lemon zesters and wooden spoons in every conceivable size and shape. All of it was gorgeous, ready to be wrapped, opened and used to whip up something that would no doubt be delectable.

I selected a pumpkin-colored spatula and took my place in the line.

“Quite a scene,” I said to the woman in front of me. She was holding a bright red silicone muffin tray.

“But worth it,” she said. “I buy all my gifts here.”

“Always muffin trays?” I asked.

“Oh, no, this is for me,” she said. “I like to give vinegars and olive oils. The bottles are so pretty.”

When it was my turn to pay, I asked the cashier if it had been this hectic all week.

“It’s been very busy,” she said. “We can hardly keep most of the items stocked.” She looked roughly my age, and I guessed that she had taken this job because her kids no longer needed her and this was the place where she felt most comfortable. Her kids had, perhaps, embarked on a new life on a college campus somewhere and she had embarked on a new life at Williams-Sonoma.

“What do you think makes it so compelling?” I asked, as if the question had just popped into my head.

She answered as if she were reading from the annual report. “We sell quality kitchen products displayed like fine jewelry. I mean, every pot has its place on the shelf, with its handle turned just so. It lets women behave like kids in a candy store.”

She wrapped my spatula in tissue paper and tucked it into a green paper bag with twined handles. “Enjoy!” she said.

I took my bag and made my way to the second floor, to Borders, where I could buy a copy of
This Old House.
Near the top of the escalator, I passed by a shop I swore I had never seen before. It was called Soothe Your Soul. There were giant gongs in the window, and wind chimes and a banner announcing that there were great holiday gifts inside.
Soothe Your Soul
. It sounded, in that moment, exactly like what I needed. I walked in.

The small store was filled with the sound of falling water. There were fountains plugged in against three walls. Stones were laid on the ground near the fountains, carved with words like
BREATHE
,
ABUNDANCE
and
TRUST.
There was a musty smell, and as I walked through the store I could discern lavender, sage and something sweet, like ginger. I scanned the bookshelves, wanting to buy each title for its breezy promise of peace, and when I got to the end, I was near the cash register.

“Can I help you?” the woman behind the counter asked. She had long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail and not a lick of makeup on her face. Was she at peace? Did she feel the harmony of the universe? Was the God of her childhood something she still believed in? She didn’t look like a woman whose body was patched together, constantly on the verge of flying apart.

I turned toward her to answer—“
I’m just looking
”— and saw a gathering of small, carved Buddhas. They were jade, only about a half inch tall. Some of them seemed to hold things in their hands or over their heads. I picked one up. He was holding a kind of cup or platter overhead. I could see veins running through the stone. His round belly made him look jolly. I realized that I had no idea who Buddha really was or what he represented. I knew the story of Jesus inside out: Jesus’s conception, Jesus’s birth, Jesus’s parables, Jesus’s miracles, Jesus’s death. I knew Jesus’s story better than I knew my own.

“What does this one mean?” I asked the woman.