by Matthew Batt
I am ashamed to admit that I so dreaded doing this last, relatively small task that we have lived in the house for almost three years without them. The varying width of the gaps was daunting but, as it turns out, easy to ignore. Until now.
The only solution is either to use crown molding on the floor—which would be, to say the least, unconventional—or to try some combination of baseboards and molding to layer the transition from the walls. This is all very pleasant to talk about, but when you’re actually setting about making this manifest in the world, it becomes a little tricky. My job is essentially to build a picture frame for the floor, the problem being that neither room is square, and on top of that, I am going to have to build one frame and then another frame for that frame, including: two rooms with five doorways, a closet, three heat registers, four electrical outlets, a forty-five-degree slanted corner, a gently arched outer wall, and a floor that was laid at two different levels. I am not looking forward to this.
One afternoon, as I take measurement upon measurement, I stop for a break and notice, much to my surprise, men in our backyard. After a second of shock I realize it must be the crew that Bob was sending over, and suddenly I feel like quite the pimp. I not only have people working for me, I have somebody working for me who has other people working for me. Best yet, no cash comes out of my pocket. The house, our glorious house, is going to pay for them. I walk to the front and find that they have already been there.
The yard looks great, except for one thing: they have whacked down the flower beds along with the weeds.
I know I am going to have to tell Jenae before she sees it herself. “Hey, baby,” I say, cuddling the phone by proxy. “You busy?”
“What’s wrong?” she says. It is her mama bear voice. “Is Maggie all right?”
The worst time I had to make a call like this, we were living in our second-floor apartment in Columbus, using the fire escape as the main entrance. Maggie and I had just come back from our morning walk and were at the top of the rusty metal stairs when she spotted a squirrel on the first-floor roof. Maggie took off and jumped on it. The squirrel was long gone by the time Maggie hit the slate shingles and started to slide, slowly but inevitably, toward the edge. I practically jumped down the entire fire escape, but I wasn’t able to beat her to the ground. She landed on all fours, wobbled for a second, and crumpled to her belly.
I picked her up as gently as I could and laid her across the back seat of my Jeep. When I started the engine, however, she sprang up in panic and struggled to get onto my lap. There is nothing, bar none, that Maggie hates more than the car.
After the vet gave her a miraculously clean bill of health, I called Jenae. (At that time, nobody except drug dealers and Don Johnson had cell phones, so I hadn’t had a chance to call earlier.)
This is how I sound now, when I call to tell her about her flowers.
“No, baby,” I say, “we’re all safe and sound, and I think that’s the important thing to remember here.”
“What is it, then?” she says.
“The good news is the grass looks great.”
When she gets home, she goes from sorrowful weeping to Old Testament keening. You would think that our own firstborn has been torn from her arms and smote with paving stones.
“Why don’t you let me call Bob Plumb,” I say. “I’m sure we can work something out. It was just a misunderstanding.”
“No,” she says. “No. I am going to call Bob Plumb.”
I have to step outside.
Less than half an hour later, Bob pulls up in his white Acura to survey the damage. He is a pro.
“What a shame,” he says. “All those flowers. All that work.” Then he smiles his big Plumb smile. “How do we make this right?” he says. “I know there’s no getting back your flowers or the work wasted, but how can we get close?”
Jenae looks as though she has just been asked to put a price on an orphanage fire.
“Do you want me to have my guys come back with a few flats of petunias or something? They can knock it out in a couple of minutes and you’ll have a yard full of blooms before dark.”
“No,” Jenae says. “I want to do it. It’s still my yard and I didn’t spend hundreds of hours for a bunch of stupid petunias.”
Bob looks at me generously. He is not judging me. He is not judging Jenae. This guy sells houses that are worth ten times what ours is. He knows this shit is stressful.
“How about this,” Bob says. He reaches for his money clip and starts counting out twenties. “I know it’s only getting close, right—I’m not paying you off—but would a hundred bucks help? Or a hundred fifty? Or no, I only got twenties. One-forty? Would that get you closer to where you want the yard to be?”
What could we say? He tucks the bills into Jenae’s palm and pats her hand.
“I gotta go, kids,” he says, maintaining eye contact but sidling back around to his car. “We’ll be rolling soon and this will all be behind us. Don’t sweat it.”
Dragging myself around the house in a handyman’s stations of the cross, I work toward the end of our seemingly perpetual list of projects. I lay the baseboards in the dining room with Liquid Nails à la Stanley, tack them in place with some tenpenny brads, and move on to the next room by lunchtime. The living room with its split-level floor is a lot more challenging, but I realize that because the difference in height is only a quarter of an inch, I can lay the baseboard on shims where there is a height difference, so it will be the same height all the way around. Then, when I go back to attach the quarter-round molding (basically a long wooden dowel about the size of a broomstick which has been sawed the long way into four equal pieces—take one of those and you’ve got a quarter of a round stick), it will cover the shims and the gap with only one Z-shaped joint, and nobody’ll be the wiser. It is an obvious solution any tradesman would have known to do before he scratched his ass, but to me it was more complicated than French literary theories based on rhizomes.
That’s not true. It is less complicated than rhizome theory, but it wouldn’t have been an easy fix for anybody. This is a good fix not just anybody could have come up with. It’s about damned time I stop apologizing for being decent at one or two things. I am going to get my PhD in a couple of weeks, and figuring out how to use a stick to cover a crack feels like the greater achievement.
The guys across the street moved into their place about the time we did ours, and as it turns out, they put their house on the market just a month before us. The house is no bigger than the cabin of a small crab boat, and the two men who live there, a husky, ruddy gay couple, could pass as fraternity brothers or missionaries.
One day while Jenae and I are replanting some decorative grasses in the parking strip, I talk with Marcus, the slightly bigger guy with the slightly darker goatee.
“It has been such a tremendous pain in the ass,” he says. He sucks on his cigarette and exhales tensely. “For the first month,” he says, “our realtor would call us three, four times a day and say, ‘Can you guys be gone in half an hour?’ So we’d have to split for an hour and drive around with our cat, because, you know, you can’t trust anybody to not let little Brigham out. Weekdays, weekends, holidays . . . it never mattered. I’m just so tired. I just want it done.”
We are standing across the street from each other. I’m holding a shovel like Pa Kettle and he’s expertly smoking. I ask Marcus where they are moving.
“New development,” he says, rolling his head and stroking his goatee. “Eagle Mountain. It’s just north of Utah County. We’ll have to play nice down there, but if we get what we’re asking for out of this place, we can buy a brand-new house with three bedrooms, a two-car garage, a yard, and a big flipping fence.”
“Utah County?” I ask. Orem. Provo. Gilmore. Suicide mission, I think.
“I know, I know,” he says. “But we work at eBay down there, and despite what the Church thinks, there’s actually a lot of gay folks down that way. It’ll be awesome. Anyway, I gotta go, but go
od luck with everything,” he says. He flicks his cigarette down the street. “And my God, I hope you aren’t asking too much. I don’t want anybody to have to go through what we did for these months.”
The big day, a Friday morning, comes with an eight A.M. call from Bob Plumb’s brother, Rick. Bob told us that Rick is usually involved with most of the business, but he had broken his leg in a motocross accident and is getting fat back in the office eating all the fruit and cashews from the get-well baskets.
“Got some biters,” Rick says. “Can we show it at one?”
“The sign’s not even in the yard yet,” I say.
“We have our ways,” Rick says.
I say sure and flurry into action. I was hoping we’d at least get a good night’s sleep, but the game isn’t going to wait for me to hit my snooze button. As I brush my teeth, I wander around the house in a state of preemptive nostalgia, wondering if I am going to miss the underfoot feel of a fairly well-finished hardwood floor or the way the sun rises in the east over the Wasatch Mountains—ever so slightly visible through the one window if you stand, as I do, in my boxer shorts, brushing my teeth, gazing out.
Just then I notice a motorcycle parked out front. From time to time people would park their cars there to go to church events across the street, and occasionally sketchy guys in pimped-out Civics or Regals would swap some oregano or whatnot and then speed away. I called the cops a few times but never to any effect, though there seemed to be less commerce in the past year or so. Still, the motorcycle is disconcerting.
I continue to brush, and as I walk into the living room to open the curtains I find a guy standing on the corner, staring at our house. He is youngish, like me, and he is wearing a Colorado Avalanche jersey, talking on his cell phone. I blink. He waves. I close the curtains and go to the bathroom to spit.
Jenae is already at work, so I am left to fend for Maggie and Skillet while the realtors show the house. At first I think I’ll drive around with the pets, but that’s dumb. Maggie, of course, hates cars, and Skillet hates pretty much everything.
Not having any other options, I coax Skillet into his crate and put him in the back of my car. I urge Maggie to stay in the passenger seat while I start the engine, but before I have my seat belt buckled she leaps onto my lap.
It’s a beautiful day. Spring is arguably what Utah does best. The snow has melted in the valley and the foothills, so there is plenty of runoff to spruce up the lawns and gardens. Everywhere trees bud forth and flowers burst like hormonal teenagers. I play Maggie’s favorite Iron & Wine album on the stereo, figuring we have an hour to kill. Skillet begins his air-raid-siren yowling from the back, and as we pass a park on McClelland all the parents look up warily at the noise. Even from the street it must sound as if I am giving the little jerk the Gitmo treatment. I suppose I am, but Maggie is getting more and more frantic on my lap, and her stomach is throbbing and wrenching as though she has swallowed a couple of gyroscopes.
What the hell, I think, I’ll take them to Sugarhouse Park.
The night before, there was a story on the news about a little girl who was playing near the river in the park and got swept away by the high water. There happened to be a Boy Scout downriver (and even though this is Salt Lake City, you can’t take for granted that there will be one posted every fifty feet). If he hadn’t been there, she’d have been a goner. As it was, she got sucked through a forty-foot culvert that ran under the park road. She was lucky that no grating covered the culvert or she would have been blasted into it like so much sausage through a grinder’s die.
I would take Maggie to Sugarhouse Park late in the summer, when the water was so calm she could jump in and lie in the sandy shallows. The river is fed entirely by snowmelt, so even in July and August the water is nut-wrenchingly cold. I figured we would hang out on the park’s ridge on 17th East, which overlooks the rest of the valley. Today there are a few sunbathers braving the mid-fifties temperature, folks playing fetch with their dogs, and a few teenagers who must be ditching class from Highland High School next door. I get Skillet out and put him a few yards away under an apple tree and then release Maggie. She bounds out of the car and springs through the shaggy grass like a puppy, leaving the anxiety of the car behind along with all of the shed fur now coating my lap. Then she realizes that Skillet’s still with us and is immediately bummed out.
She casts a doubtful expression my way. I grab a tennis ball and chuck it down the hill. The ball bounces and rolls until it’s damn near in the river. I can hear the water from two hundred yards away. It must be running really hard and high. Maggie sprints after the ball, and when she scoops it up like a sparrow she keeps running, almost out of control, the hill is so steep. I start to scream because she is too close to the water, but in a smooth pivot she pulls easily out of her descent and heads back uphill to me and her orange bastard brother.
I throw the ball more carefully now, but I know this can’t last long. She is a spaniel, bred to hunt. All her life she has insisted on staying close to me whenever we were in a park. If I stopped walking, she stopped walking. It was a little disappointing at first; most dog owners have fanciful dreams of taking their pooches to the park on a Saturday morning with a newspaper and a cup of coffee and kicking back on a bench while their doggies perform perfect circuits of joy like furry satellites. Not my Maggie. If I sit on a park bench, she wants to sit next to me, preferably on the bench.
What the hell, I figure. I open Skillet’s crate carefully, fearing he’ll be a cat-in-the-box and erupt from his blue plastic cell and rocket down the hill. I swing open the gate but he doesn’t budge. Despite the fact that the inside of his crate is featureless and smooth, he has managed to adhere himself to the interior.
As I drag him out and put his fat-boy harness on, I look around through his eyes and see that the circumference of his known world has just expanded from 1,700 or so square feet (plus a small fenced-in backyard) to—what?—a few hundred square miles, including the tectonic drama of the Wasatch Mountains behind us, the Oquirrh Mountains across the valley, all of metro Salt Lake City, and the great saline pond itself, glinting in the distance. It must feel as if the world has been a child’s shoebox diorama and, without warning, the roof and walls fall away to reveal that your little hut has been jettisoned into nearly infinite space.
Once I get him all suited up, I don’t want to leave anything behind. There is no telling how far and wide Skillet might like to wander. I have him on one of those cheap retractable leashes, and I think he might really like it. We head down the hill, Skillet sulkily in tow, Maggie bounding in all her spaniel glory.
Everything is on the line. How the next few days or weeks turn out will by and large determine how well we have done with the house. If we priced it too high and the work we did inside was deemed too quirky or shoddy, we’ll be sitting on an inert stack of bricks and sticks, desperate for a buyer, unless some bank or turn-and-burn investor takes it over for pennies on the dollar. It seems that all our neighbors are selling their houses within a couple of days—or not at all.
My phone rings as we head down toward the river. The water is running so loudly that I can barely hear Rick Plumb.
“Now we’re cooking, baby,” he says. “Got room at the dance for a couple more?”
Maggie frolics ahead of me and Skillet is lumped in place behind, refusing to move.
“Sweet,” I say to Rick, without enthusiasm. This means I am going to have to do something with the pets for another hour at least. Sounds like no big deal, but there’s a reason you see only weird, depraved people with cats on leashes.
The next day comes and no offer follows. We can hardly complain—it is only the second day—but still. More showings are scheduled, however, and though it is a little tedious, we decide to follow the same routine. Jenae has to work, and there are folks lined up to see the house all morning and afternoon, so I hope that the critters can settle down in the park with me for a lazy day.
I’m carrying the messenger
bag that our dear friend Melanie has recently given me upon completion of my degree. It’s a classic black bag that’s small enough to take anywhere but big enough for all the essentials: wallet, phone, keys, cinnamon-raisin bagel (untoasted, plain cream cheese), book (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City), and a few poop bags for, you know, whomever. Carrying everything I need makes me feel jaunty and adventurous, like a latter-day Marquette—only my Joliet is furry and English, not French, and we have a grossly obese orange-and-white hairball in lieu of a foxy Indian guide.
Before we hunker down for the morning, Maggie leads Skillet and me into the woods by the river, and the thought that this house selling is going to take not days but weeks—maybe months, God help us—begins to sink in. This is only the second day in the park with the dog and cat together, and it is kind of fun, but I have serious doubts about doing it another, say, thirty or forty times. It’s beginning to look as if taking ten or fifteen grand off the price might well be worth it.
The fast water is at once soothing and frightening. Skillet wants nothing to do with it, and Maggie, I assume, will know to do the same. I, however, love being near it. The rush and the thunder of it is nothing like the gentle flow in late summer. Whereas in August it seems as calm as a birdbath, the river is now a good five or six feet deep and runs with the force of what it is: nature shedding its winter weight down the side of a mountain and into a narrow-shouldered channel. It’s violently gorgeous.
From a high bank, Maggie sniffs at the water. In the summer, she usually can’t even see the river from here. Now it is right at her nose.
“Bunny,” I say firmly. “Too cold, too fast. No fun for rabbits.”
Maggie scoots backward and resumes wagging and sniffing in the tall weeds around the riverbank. Skillet is over it. Rare is the occasion when a cat wants nothing more than to get back into his own crate, but this is one of those times. I just want to give Maggie a little more adventure time before we return to our pensive perch atop the hill, waiting for the brothers Plumb to call and let us back into our home.