Déjà vu

The house goes on the market again this weekend. We have been here before–twice, as a matter of fact, in the spring of 2009 and again in 2010. This time, I have spared no expense and worked much harder. I won’t bore you with the huge list of necessary improvements, but the sagging floors that spooked buyers have been expensively re-engineered and replaced and refinished. There is plenty of fresh paint. I have given away (or thrown away) all the cheap, unwieldy, sidewalk-scavenged furniture, I have purged the house of detritus, I have cleaned and re-organized the damned place within an inch of its life. The porch screens have been replaced. What else? There must be something else. It has been months and months since this whole process began–I had originally aimed to list the house in April. I’m heartily tired of it all, yet strangely elated. If it sells–if it sells–my life will change for the better.

Oh, the house represents all manner of things–the marriage, a financial shackle linking me to my ex-husband against both of our wills, the miserable backdrop to the miserable separation and divorce, the lost days of happiness, babies and dogs, my innocence and optimism gone forever–and yet I don’t care. I am unmoved, this time, by sentimental concerns–the house is too big, and too much work, and too expensive, and I want out. The first two times I listed it I wanted out, too–but I would have been sad to go. (You can, I’ve discovered, desperately want to leave something and still regret doing so. Oh, the life lessons, the metaphors, how they do pile up! I could write a whole fucking sappy-assed post about the house and what it means, but I’d be milking an expired horse. This time around, dear readers, I simply want out.)

The kids are both sick, and I have a seven hundred and twenty page book to read and review. It’s a dream assignment (Mark Helprin!) but a rather daunting one, as well. “Oh, you can’t do it! You don’t have time!” my mother exclaimed, trying to be nice, at which point I bit her poor little head off. I don’t WANT to give up INTELLECTUAL WORK because I need more time to scrub FLOORS, I hissed ungraciously, and then felt ashamed of myself. I am, however, powerfully sick of scrubbing things.

Well, let it sell quickly (though it’s hardly the best time to put a house without central air conditioning on the market) and let us find a new place here in this lovely little town (a tiny house or part of a house, an apartment, some professor on sabbatical’s sublet) and let the whole homeowner’s chapter of my life close forever, because I really have no intention of ever doing this again. Owning a house is a poisoned well. I’d get married again before I’d ever buy another stupid house, and I’d submit to being flayed alive before I’d ever get married again. I’m not angry, just adamant. I fantasize about having a landlord the way most people fantasize about having a team of servants to iron their sheets.

So please think good, deep-pocketed thoughts that involve happy young families eager to take possession of what is, by any standards, a wonderful sprawling house with a huge yard in a quaint old-fashioned town. And please, if you know any tricks of the house-selling trade, enlighten me. I buried a statue of St. Joseph in the yard today, I kid you not. Consoling-windows friend and another friend who’d come over to do yardwork with me in the broiling heat and I dug a little trough for him next to the front door, in a jungly patch of ivy. There’s a helpful name and address on the box St. Joseph came in, just in case (it says) you realize more money than you’d dared hope from the sale of your house, and want to share the profits.

A devout Catholic friend left the statue on my doorstep last week. “Calling in the big guns to help you sell!” she wrote in the note she left. Amen.