The Stager: A Novel

by Susan Coll

  I haven’t bothered to complain to my mom about the coach, because I know she’ll just say that I should listen to my teachers and that a little exercise is probably a good thing. I sent a text about this to my dad, figuring he’d be more sympathetic, but he never replied.

  I try to remember if Nabila was living with us the last time my dad disappeared, or if that was Adriana. Probably Adriana, because otherwise Nabila wouldn’t be so freaked-out. He goes off every once in a while, and then he comes back and adjusts his meds and everything is fine until it happens all over again.

  The only thing different this time is that Dominique is missing, too. Our family members are disappearing one by one. I wonder if this is my fault. It makes me think about disappearing myself, maybe going back to Unfurlings to get another snack.

  * * *

  DIANA RECENTLY TOLD me about something called blackmail. I liked the sound of this. It means that you know something that someone wishes you didn’t know, and you can make him do things for you so you’ll keep the secret. Here’s how it worked for Diana: She promised her mother she wouldn’t tell her father about the Golden Goose boots she’d just bought that cost twelve hundred dollars and came pre-rolled in dirt to make them look broken in. Her mother got her a new iPhone in return. Then she promised her father she wouldn’t tell her mother that she found his boxer shorts in the stable, even though she didn’t understand why that needed to be a secret, and he got her a pony that she named Iris. I couldn’t believe I’d never heard about this before, and when Nabila finally announces it’s time to take me to practice even though it already began, I decide to try something like this myself, even though I know there’s no pony in it for me.

  “If you let me stay home, I won’t tell my mom about the bag of leaves,” I try.

  “My goodness, Elsa. That’s pretty wicked. You’re totally obsessed with that bag of leaves, even though I’ve told you it’s just tea. Someone gave it to me. I didn’t remember I’d slipped it in my pocket until you swiped it. Where is it, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. I think I threw it away.”

  “You threw it away? First you steal it, then you throw it away without asking?”

  “Well, if it’s only tea, why do you care?”

  “So you think tea has no value? Maybe I want to drink it.”

  “What kind of tea is it?”

  “That’s kind of the point. I can’t answer that, because you went snooping through my things and then stole it before I even got to taste it.”

  “I wasn’t snooping, I was cleaning. Anyway, who is this guy who gave it to you? Is he in love with you? How do you know he’s not a drug dealer?”

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but his name is Eton, and I already told you he’s that guy who sells wildflowers and produce outside the gate at Unfurlings. Your mom told me to pick up some fruit and honey there a few days ago, and he gave me the bag of tea. He said it’s compost tea, and he wanted to know if I thought it was any good.”

  “Is it?”

  “I don’t know. Remember what I just said?”

  “Oh, right. Well, maybe can we try some later?”

  “Maybe. Although that’s kind of your call, since you took it and I don’t know where it is. For now, let’s stop talking and get in the car.”

  “I have a much better idea. Let’s have a tea party! Maybe the Stager can come, too. It will be like that Mad Hatter’s tea party.”

  “The what?”

  “Don’t you know Alice in Wonderland?”

  “Vaguely. Anyway, can we please stop talking about the tea already? I’ll be honest with you, I’d rather just forget about the whole thing, okay?”

  “Okay. I’ll forget about it if you let me skip practice and play with the Stager again.”

  “I told you, she’s only here to finish the front door and fix the flowerpot situation. She just got here a few minutes ago, because she had to swing by the garden store first. Your open house is tomorrow. Your mom said under no circumstances should you be playing with the Stager. They are paying her a lot of money to fix up the house, and she doesn’t have time to play with you. Your mom thinks there is something kind of strange about the whole thing. Plus, not to pile it on, Elsa, but given that you almost caused her to lose this job, why do you think she’d even want to play with you?”

  “Fine. Maybe she doesn’t want to play with me, but she needs to fix my rug.”

  “What are you talking about? She’s done with the inside of the house.”

  “Did you see my rug?”

  “No. Elsa, please don’t tell me…”

  “Sorry! Sorry! My God, don’t get all mad about it. It’s just got some red paint spilled on it.”

  “Did you do that on purpose?”

  “That’s mean, Nabila.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past you.”

  “You are supposed to be my friend.”

  Nabila and I lock eyes for a while, like we’re in a staring contest. Then she goes outside and asks the Stager if, when she finishes painting the front door, she’d mind coming upstairs to my room to take a look at my rug.

  * * *

  I CAN’T DECIDE if the most fun thing to do with the Stager will be to bake, paint, or play with the dolls. She’s taking a very long time with the door. I go downstairs and ask how long she thinks she’ll be, and all she says is “a while.” She doesn’t even look at me. I wonder if there’s anyone in the world who isn’t mad at me.

  I go back upstairs and stare at the mess. Molly is slumped over again, falling right back into her dinner plate, even though I sat her up straight last time we played. The American Girl food is still spread all over the floor. Maybe the Stager will be less mad at me if I clean up my room. It’s pretty bad, but maybe it’s like homework: Once you start, it doesn’t always wind up taking as long as it seems like it might. Except sometimes it does.

  I open the toy box and scoop up a handful of plastic food—a fruit basket, some sunny-side-up eggs, a carton of orange juice—and drop them inside. Plastic food landing in a toy box does not make very much noise, however. I go to the other side of the room and begin to toss the pieces in one by one. When that doesn’t work, I shout to her.

  “I’m cleaning up my room!”

  “Good girl,” she says.

  “Do you want to come see?”

  “In a few minutes.”

  “Why? What’s taking so long?”

  “I don’t know, this paint isn’t the best. I’m not sure what’s going on. They may have mixed it too thin or something. It’s just not going on smoothly, and I’m having trouble getting the red to even out.”

  “Do you want help?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Do you want me to Google anything about how to make the red even out?”

  “No, thanks.”

  I turn on my iPad and Google “painting the door red.” Some of the same stuff the Stager has already told me comes up, along with a lot of stupid questions (if you paint the outside red, do you have to paint the inside red, even if the color doesn’t match?). Then, on the side of the screen, an ad pops up. It’s for an app called Staging 101.

  “Oh my God, you’ve got to come see this!” I can’t believe there’s a stager app. Four days ago I hadn’t even known there was such a thing as a stager, and now there’s an app?

  “In a few minutes, Elsa.”

  “Hurry! You are not going to believe this! I’m going to download the stager app.”

  “Okay, just behave. It’s hard to hear you from out here. Just give me a few minutes.”

  It takes a long time to download, but when it does, the first thing I see is something called a cost calculator that tells you how much money you can make, or save, by hiring a home stager. I play with that for a while, but I don’t really understand how it works. Even though I’m good at math, this doesn’t make sense. If you spend between three and four thousand dollars on home staging, you can make between fifteen and twenty thousand, it says, which
sounds like a mistake. I put in some more numbers to see what happens if you spend between thirty and forty thousand. Before it finishes calculating, a box pops up on the screen and a beautiful lady in a red dress who looks a little bit like Amanda Hoffstead but with blond hair and big earrings appears and says, “Let me stage your home and I guarantee you will make a five hundred and eighty-six percent return on your investment or your money back.”

  I hadn’t thought about there being other stagers in the world, or ones that come with money-back guarantees. I wonder if Eve Brenner comes with a money-back guarantee.

  “Do you come with a money-back guarantee? Can you promise a five hundred and eighty-six percent return on investment?” I shout.

  “Elsa, I can’t really hear you. Just give me a few minutes, okay?”

  I wonder if the staging app has anything to say about the Rule of Three, or crazy ladies with nail guns, or no toasters on the kitchen counter. I don’t see anything about that, but I do see a button that says “Stage Your Own Virtual House!”

  I click on that, and, my God, it’s amazing: you can do anything you want in the virtual house! First you can pick the outside of your house—anything from a small house that’s all on one level called “a rambler,” to an enormous house with turrets that looks like a castle. I pick the house that looks the most like ours. It’s called a Tudor, even though our house is a lot bigger and more modern-looking. Then, inside the house, you can add on rooms, and you can even create extra levels. I add a room to the top floor, just like where my parents’ room is, and I make a room like Nabila’s in the basement. It goes well until I try to put the swimming pool in the backyard. I’m having trouble dragging it into the right spot, and it winds up on the side of the house, which looks pretty weird. I fool around with it for a while and I can’t get it to move. When I click on it to drag it, it just gets bigger. Soon I’ve accidentally created an Olympic-sized pool between the house and the one next door. When I try to make it smaller, the whole thing freezes, so I leave it there and go back to the part of the app that lets you fill the house with furniture.

  “Do you know if your mom keeps any spare potting soil?” the Stager calls from downstairs.

  “I don’t know. We have a gardener named Alejandro who usually does all that stuff. You should ask him. You’ve really got to come see this!”

  “Okay, just give me a few more minutes. I’m going to go look in your back shed.”

  “Okay. I’ll finish making the virtual house, and then I’ll put some furniture in it.”

  “Please promise me you’ll behave while I pop around to the back for a few minutes.”

  “Yes, I’ll behave. No problem.”

  Staring at the screen, I decide that what the house needs first is more windows, especially since my dad likes a lot of light. There’s a toolbox on the left side of the screen, containing things like doors and windows. Then, when you click on the item, it gives you a choice of which kind. Who knew there were so many different types! For doors there are slab, French, Dutch, sliding, and bifold. For windows there are single-pane and double-pane, casement and block-glass. Also accent, picture, and bay bow. There are all sorts of different ways of opening them, too—sliding to the side, pulling open from the top, or just normal. It seems like you could spend an hour trying to decide which kind of doors and windows to put in your house. And then there are all sorts of different doorknobs, which I’ve never even noticed before! I decide to do one of each kind of window in the master bedroom, but then I run out of space on the wall, so I have to enlarge the room. But to get it big enough to fit every kind of window, the master bedroom starts to grow, and soon it takes over the whole upstairs. I have to get rid of all of the other bedrooms on the top floor, but once I do, I make it the biggest, most light-filled master bedroom in the world.

  Then I decide that the downstairs needs to be just as bright, but this means that, instead of staging each room, I’m going to have to do some destaging. I wonder if that’s even a word.

  “Do you destage something, or do you unstage it?” I yell.

  She doesn’t answer. I take out the stove and the sink and the countertops and put in some sliding glass doors. It makes the room look much bigger. I add three windows on the side that’s looking out onto the ginormous pool, then three more, and then another three. Now the kitchen has nine windows. I begin destaging the bathrooms and adding windows to them as well. I wonder if I can keep doing this forever, or if at some point the program will run out of windows and shut down. I’m so busy with this, I don’t see the Stager standing at my door. She has her arms crossed and she has dirt on her pants. Like everyone else in the world, she seems to be mad at me.

  “My God, Elsa, what happened to the rug? And the toys! I thought you were going to clean this all up.” She walks over to the part of the rug that has the most red paint and squats down to look more closely. “Seriously, what are we going to do about this carpet? It’s too late to get it replaced.” Now she stands up and glares at me again. “This room is a disaster.”

  “I thought it was the best room in the house!”

  “Well, it was. But look at it now!”

  “It’s just the carpet. Are you sure it’s too late to get it fixed? Have you seen those commercials for Mrs. Karpet? I think they can do same-day installation!”

  “Really? Is that your plan? Just make a huge mess and let someone else take care of it for you? Like mother, like daughter.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You said something about my mother.”

  “You’re hearing things. So what’s our plan?”

  “Our plan is, we use some soap … or maybe shampoo. I’ll get it. But let me just show you something first—it’s a stager app.”

  “A what?”

  “You know, an app for the iPad.”

  “You have an iPad?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, well, I only have an iPad 2, so it’s not that big of a deal. Here, look. Really, I promise we’ll fix my room right after I show you. I’ll start you a new house, since this one is pretty messed up. It’s all windows.”

  “People in glass houses…”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It’s just an expression.”

  “You are saying a lot of weird stuff. Do you want a colonial, or a rambler, or a studio apartment … What’s a studio apartment? What’s this mean, a Murphy bed?”

  “A Murphy bed is a bed that folds up into the wall. It’s for small spaces like a studio apartment, which is an apartment that’s just one room.”

  “The whole house is one room and the bed is in the wall? Why would anyone live that way?”

  “Housing can be expensive, especially in cities, and sometimes that’s all people can afford.”

  “So they sleep in the same room where they eat and play?”

  “They do, but that can be kind of nice. Not everyone needs, or wants, lots of space. Some people like to minimalize.”

  “That’s kind of sad. Especially when we have so many extra rooms. If your staging doesn’t work and we move to London and no one is living in this house, maybe some people who only live in one room could move in here.”

  “Well, that’s a nice idea, but the world doesn’t really work that way. Also, it’s really the case that some people want to live in smaller spaces. They feel it’s liberating to spend less time and money taking care of their homes. There’s even something called the Tiny House Movement now. People deliberately build tiny little houses, even smaller than this bedroom.”

  “My God, I’ve never heard of such a thing. I think you’re making that up. Do they have tiny houses at Unfurlings?”

  “No, but maybe if they did it wouldn’t be in foreclosure. The thinking behind that place was kind of backward. It was built on the premise that we’re not living the right way, that our houses are too far apart, and too far away from anything, and that this fosters loneliness a
nd isolation. And yet the houses are monstrously huge and on big lots, which is kind of retrograde thinking. There’s no dancing in the streets anymore, the way we live.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That the houses are…”

  “No, the dancing-in-the-street part, I mean.”

  “Oh, just an observation about the way we live these days. Back in the old days—or even now, in other countries—there’s much more communal activity. More joy. There are bands, mariachi bands playing outdoors, outdoor theater, festivals, there’s just a lot more playfulness. People literally dance in the streets. Now we have shopping malls and highways.”

  “People do Zumba at my mom’s gym.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s the modern-day equivalent, which is a little sad.”

  “It’s not sad. I’ve watched them do it, and it looks like fun! Also, we went to New Orleans once and there was dancing in the street.”

  “That’s true, Elsa. Good point. Maybe we should all move to New Orleans.”

  “Anyway, nothing is stopping us from dancing in the street. Right? We can go outside and dance right now!”

  “Sure, we could, but we don’t.”

  “Why not? Let’s just do it! There’s not that much traffic. We can bring my phone, maybe hook it up to some speakers and live-stream some music.”

  “I’m not even sure what that means. But whatever. Listen, let’s first clean your room, then we’ll talk about dancing. Now, tell me once and for all, what are we going to do about the carpet?”

  “I’m sure we can get the paint out. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “I would worry about it. I am worried about it.”

  “I have an idea. Let’s just move the bed over the big part of the splotch. Then maybe we can scrub the footprints out with carpet cleaner.”

  We both stare at the bed, and stare at the red splotch, and stare at the trail of red footprints leading to and from the bathroom.

  “That looks like one very heavy bed! Even if we manage to move it, the bed will be sort of floating in the center of the room, which is a little strange, but we can work with that, I suppose. There aren’t a lot of better options at this point—that huge blotch of paint isn’t going to come out, although you may be right that we can get the footprints out. Better to try than to postpone the open house. But … I don’t know, if we move the bed there, not even taking into consideration the question of how we would do it—that thing is a monster—where would we put the dresser, and the end tables? That left one might have to go in the attic.”