Best Staged Plans (2 page)

I loved my work, and I was good at it. I had a string of local Realtors who referred clients to me, backed up by terrific word of mouth that rippled out and brought in the next wave. But I had to admit that I hadn’t exactly been walking my talk on the home front. Oh, the complicated and treacherous mysteries of our overloaded lives. Does the land surveyor’s family know where its property lines are, and why-oh-why don’t the cobbler’s kids have any shoes?

OMG, as my daughter would say, I am old enough to remember cobblers.

I’ll fast-forward. In college I double-majored in philosophy and art history. With a minor in women’s studies, no less. My dorm was perpetually shrouded in pot haze, and when I walked the length of the hallway, my feet stuck to keg leak, which may have contributed to the fact that I never once considered employability as I boogied down my academic path. When reality reared its ugly head at graduation, I decided my only hope was to teach.

I set my sights on elementary art, because I thought the kids would be young enough not to notice that while I could tell them anything they wanted to know about Picasso’s blue period, I couldn’t draw for beans. I kicked butt when it came to macaroni necklaces though. And tracing chubby little hands to make turkey place mats.

When the budget cuts came, we lost most of our department as well as the art room. I spent a few years rolling an overstuffed art cart from classroom to classroom. I bailed when they added another two schools to my rotation. I still miss the kids. Sometimes I dream that “Tutti Frutti” is blasting on the portable CD player I carted everywhere, and we’re all dancing around with a colored marker in each hand, laughing like crazy and drawing the sound of the music on one monstrous strip of shared paper. I was an awesome teacher.

Next I managed an art gallery until it went under, which was absolutely not my fault. I started wallpapering when a contractor friend came out of our bathroom at a party and asked for the phone number of the person who’d done that great wallpaper job in there. When wallpaper went out of style, I hopped to faux finishing.

Faux finishing died a merciful death, and suddenly home staging was all the rage. And the wonderful thing about this crazy world we live in is that you can be anything you want to be if you just jump in with both feet and fake it till you make it.

IT WAS PROBABLY
Gertrude Lanabaster’s bordello of a bathroom that put me over the edge.

She met me at the door and guided me through an obstacle course of dusty ceramic figurines and fuzzy African violets perched on tarnished silver tray tables. A philodendron began in a pot in the living room and wound its way up the wall, across the narrow hallway, and into the dining room, guided by green twist ties attached to white cup hooks screwed into the ceiling. The ceilings were popcorn throughout and yellowed like they’d been doused with butter.

By the time we got to the bathroom I had my game plan. “Mrs. Lanabaster—”

“Trudy.” She ran her gnarled, gold-ringed fingers over the black lace she was holding. When she smiled, more gold twinkled at her gumline.

“Sandra,” I said. “Trudy, staging a home for sale is less about personal taste and more about neutralizing the home so potential buyers can imagine their own possessions there.”

“Lovely, dear. Now about my bathroom.” She held up the black lace. “I think we’ve got just enough here for the windows
and
a shower curtain.”

I took in the shiny brass fixtures, the strip of Hollywood lights above the ornate gold gilt medicine cabinet. A mildew-spotted Rubenesque nude posed coquettishly on the wall over the toilet tank, peering down at the fluffy zebra-striped toilet seat cover. On top of the tank, the legs of a Barbie-like doll pierced a roll of toilet paper, which was discreetly covered by the crocheted flounce of her skirt. For just a moment I imagined making Knockoff Barbie a jaunty little hat with leftover scraps of the black lace.

I tore myself away and went for the big guns. “You
are
hoping to sell your house, aren’t you, Trudy?”

“Mother of God, no. They’ll have to carry me out in a box.”

I looked through her bifocals and into her eyes, trying to figure out if anyone was home behind them.

“Do you know what a home stager is, Trudy?” I finally asked.

“I do, dear. I’ve got every single episode of
Designed to Sell
on DVD.”

The impact of HGTV on our society simply can’t be overstated. Home & Garden TV rocked our world. Everyone from eight to eighty has been sprawled on their couches ever since it first appeared in 1994, addicted as if to porn, literally watching the grass grow, the deck go up, the walls change color. We spend hours and hours sucked in by
House Hunters
,
Divine Design
,
Curb Appeal
, and
Color Splash
, becoming armchair experts at everything from electrical wiring to decorating.

I took a stab at it. “So you’re saying that even though you’re not selling your house, you want me to stage it anyway?”

She held up the lace. “Yes, dear. I want you to stage this bathroom until it’s so hot it could fry an egg. And then I’m going to keep it for myself.”

WTF, as my kids would say.

Mrs. Lanabaster and I had a blast. I didn’t want to overcharge her, so we dragged out her old sewing machine and I got to work right then and there. There was enough crap in her house that in only a couple of hours we had a bathroom bordello that would make any octogenarian with bad taste proud. All it needed was a couple of red bulbs for the strip light.

It wasn’t until I was coming out of Home Depot with the bulbs that a shiver came over me. It started between my shoulder blades and ran up the back of my neck. It was easily distinguishable from a hot flash by both temperature and trajectory, since as everybody who’s been there knows, hot flashes tended to begin in the face and work their way down.

An epiphany arrived with the chill: If I didn’t play my cards right, in a few short decades I could
be
Mrs. Lanabaster.

My husband and I would still be living in the house we’d meant to dump years ago to downsize, before we got too old and it all became too overwhelming. Halfhearted piles of book-filled boxes would be sitting in limbo. The roof would need to be replaced
again
. Even our prized granite kitchen counters would have gone hopelessly out of fashion as we dawdled and dawdled and dawdled some more. A balding Luke would still be down in the bat cave, where half-eaten bowls of ramen noodles would be stacked floor to ceiling. And, best staged plans and all, my doddering old husband and I would have missed that glorious second honeymoon of life, when the kids are gone but not forgotten, and the two of you buy a tiny cottage near a warm beach somewhere just like you’d always planned.

When I finally pulled into our driveway, my husband, Greg, was leaning up against our freshly painted house, stretching his hamstrings in the unseasonably warm weather.

“What a workout,” he said.

“What else did you do today?” I said.

He switched legs. “How was your day?”

I walked by him without answering.

Luke was at the kitchen sink, draining a pot of ramen noodles.

“How can you eat those things?” I said.

He poured them into a bowl. “I like them. They remind me of college.”

I bit my tongue so I wouldn’t yell,
Oh grow up
.

“We used to heat the water on the radiator,” Luke said for what might have been the zillionth time. “We’d all gather around and shoot the crap while we waited for it to boil. Actually, it never totally made it to a boil—”

“We need to talk,” I said just as Greg took a careful step into the kitchen.

Greg froze. He slid one sneaker backward. It squeaked against the newly refinished floor.

“Don’t even think about it,” I said.

“
What?
” they both said at once.

I pointed to the dining room, which we only used for holidays and family meetings.

“Somebody please tell me it’s Thanksgiving,” Luke said. He twirled his noodles around a fork as he walked.

Greg pulled out my chair for me. He leaned over to kiss me on top of the head as I sat down. “Don’t try to butter me up,” I said.

I waited while Greg walked around the table and took the seat across from me and next to Luke. Then I slapped both palms down on the distressed farm table.

They both jumped a bit. As well they should have.

“The plan,” I said. “Remember?”

I could feel them wanting to look at each other.

My husband stretched his sweaty T-shirt away from his body. He hated not being able to change as soon as he got home from a run. “Of course we do, hon,” he said.

I looked at Luke. He shrugged. “What he said.”

I bit my tongue and counted slowly to ten.

“What’s the date today?” I asked when I finished.

Luke checked his cell phone. He started to raise his hand, then remembered his school days were over and self-corrected. “March fifteenth. Whoa, beware the ides of March.”

I nodded. “And we were going to have the house on the market when?”

“Sometime in March?” Greg said.

“March first,” I said. “And we’re not even close to being ready. Do we need to go through our lists again?”

They shook their heads in tandem.

I blew out a frigid gust of air. “Listen. We made a deal. You know what you have to do. You’ve got two weeks. Either shape up . . .”

I watched them shift in their chairs while I let the tension build.

When I’d decided they’d had enough, I cleared my throat. “. . . or I ship out. And don’t think I’m kidding.”

CHAPTER 3

S
OME PEOPLE
were born for early retirement, and my husband, Greg, was one of them. He’d never looked better. He’d never felt better. His days were a blur of running to the beach, driving to the gym, and playing tennis with a group of guys who were in the same boat. They met up at the town tennis courts every day at four and played for an hour. If it snowed, they brought shovels.

Greg was a civil engineer and had spent most of his career with the same company. When they went under, he never looked back. We moved his 401K into a cash reserve fund until we could figure out what to do with it, and purely by luck, when the market crashed we didn’t lose a cent.

He had a small pension waiting down the road for him, and I had an even smaller one from my teaching days. Our two kids were both out of college, at least physically, and our daughter was married. Greg and I would jump on our Social Security the minute we turned sixty-two, since we were both of the get-it-while-you-can philosophy.

But that was the better part of a decade away. Technically, Greg was still consulting, though there was not a lot happening in the building arena these days. I pulled in decent money, so we were holding our own. But while our mortgage was all but paid off, we’d rolled most of two college educations and one wedding into a home equity loan. Every time I looked at the balance, my breath would catch and my heart would add an extra beat.

Our house was our ticket out.

Situated in a resident-only beach town with train service to Boston, the house was a sprawling 1890 Victorian with an attached screened gazebo porch. It was set on a pie slice–shaped acre of lawn that looked like an old New England town common. The lawn was bisected about a third of the way up from the point by a driveway that opened at either end onto charming tree-lined streets. Massive conifers reached for the sky, and perennial gardens curved seductively.

We’d applied for and received official recognition by the historical society. A white oval plaque edged in black arrived by mail and confirmed the date and the home’s original owner, John Otis. The fact that his wife’s name wasn’t on there, too, totally pissed me off. Even though Massachusetts had passed a law in 1854 that stated women could own property separate from their husbands, the reality, confirmed by a careful drive around my plaque-filled town, was that they didn’t even co-own the house they lived in
with
their husbands. I thought we could at least give it to Mrs. Otis posthumously, but my arguments didn’t fly with the historical society. Principle eventually caved to increased property value, and I nailed the damn plaque over the massive original front door anyway.

Inside the house were maple floors, ten-foot ceilings, and some of the most beautiful decorative moldings I’d ever seen. A wide central hallway led to an elegant mahogany staircase and opened to large, gracious rooms on either side. A mudroom straddled the space between house and garage, and from the mudroom a back staircase led up to separate quarters for the maid and butler. Since neither had come with the house, the kids used it as a playroom. They called it the secret room.

Our current home was a testament to the benefits of sweat equity and naïveté. When our previous house, a one-bath ranch, began triggering at least one family battle a day, we decided to brave another rung on the property ladder. We hired a Saturday afternoon sitter for the kids while a Realtor friend showed us a series of boring garrison Colonials on cul-de-sacs.

“What about that one?” Greg pointed as we drove by a
FOR SALE
sign in front of a big white house that was shielded from the road by a half circle of ancient trees.

“Ha,” our Realtor said. “Rent
The Money Pit
first and then we’ll talk.”

“How bad can it be?” I said.

The smell inside the house wasn’t very encouraging, and we couldn’t turn on the lights because the electricity had been shut off. The wooden pulpit in the center of the front parlor and the
REPENT
sign over the fireplace didn’t exactly add to the ambiance. Royal blue shag carpeting was everywhere, and a massive burgundy stain halfway up the stairs made it look like someone had died there. A huge stainless steel commercial refrigerator blocked the bay window in the dining room. We actually found empty shotgun shells in the room up over the garage.