Scream (24 page)

Which is awful, because the people you can't stand should be forgettable.

my new home

T
he Greek Revival house I bought was a simple, old upstate New York farmhouse, common to the region, filled to the ceiling with garbage, with broken walls and trees growing in through the porch. Inside were bloodstains and someone had scrawled in spray paint
KILL MOM
on the wall at the top of the stairs.

Every single room had fire damage and big holes cut in the floor, here and there, because obviously no one had ever been warm inside that house in 160 years. There had been attempts to install propane heaters, oil heaters, wood-burning stoves, potbelly pellet stoves, and electric heaters; there had been nothing but freezing cold people in there for all that time. The floors were rotten, the ceiling was broken, the walls were crumbling, there was the garbage.

It was my riding teacher, Stasia Newell, who had first told me about the property. She was, to me, a goddess, a guru, a Zen master. She didn't care whether anybody
liked
her or not! I spent my whole life wanting to be “liked,” except in my writing. My writing, I wanted to be
unlikable
—but I even wanted to be liked for writing unlikable stuff.

Stasia was different. As I say, she didn't care if she was liked or not. For women, generally speaking, that attribute is what makes them leaders.

She walked like a panther on the face of this earth. She was hard and tough and rock-and-roll. She was androgynous and beautiful and unpretentious. She drove a tractor and could use a chain saw and could ride a horse on a hundred-mile endurance ride and do so elegantly. There was no more ferocious, exotic creature on the planet.

If only she weren't also a great salesperson, explaining to me how whoever lived in this house, right on the Finger Lakes National Forest, was going to be very happy there! How it would be in a family for generations and while the rest of the world got more and more built up, NO ONE could ever build up the place around here because it had the Finger Lakes National Forest on three sides. How it would always be a part of the beautiful forest.

I am not sure what else she said. I just knew I HAD to have that place. And, after all, it would have cost a hundred grand just to put my mom's rickety house back in some kind of shape.

No one had spent a dime on that farmhouse in at least thirty years, apart from cutting a new hole in the floor to attach to another heating system that didn't provide warmth. It couldn't be warmed, not when the windows were hundred-year-old nonthermal panes set in rotten wood frames, not when the walls were filled with straw and bits of paper that wasn't real insulation. There was a basement full of water and ancient dripping fiberglass put up by some previous inhabitant, which dangled uselessly to the floor.

When I emerged from looking over the place, Larry appeared—my soon-to-be new neighbor. He lived in the trailer up the road. He was dressed in an East German military mechanic's outfit, a one-piece jumpsuit. I think he had been wearing that since before the Berlin Wall came down, which may have been the last time he had seen another person. He was very sweet, but it had been a long time since he had spoken to another human being, and he needed to make up for all those years of silence. Remarkably, he was able to materialize every time I went out, holding a poem he had written for me. He had never been off Logan Road. He had lived with his mother until her death. Until our falling-out I had promised that some day I would take him to Walmart, where he had never been. His brother, with whom he lived in the trailer, had a truck—but this brother wouldn't give him a ride.

My offer was accepted for the 1850 farmhouse with forty acres surrounded on three sides by the Finger Lakes National Forest.

I saw it in July and got a contractor to look at it in August. The contractor was a local, grumpy, Kool-smoking guy—if you wanted to say that a guy who was hiring his sister and his sister's wife and his father to build my house was a contractor. He was, but to me, that made him a construction worker. A real contractor had a crew who weren't relatives.

But I hadn't closed on this house yet. I couldn't get the owner to complete the paperwork. The contractor kept telling me, “Look, if it wasn't for waiting for you to close, so I can get the work done while the weather is still good, I would be in the Adirondacks, I would be
hunting bear
.”

I didn't want to lose the opportunity to have this man—highly recommended by Master Stasia Newell—renovate the house. So I was very anxious. Later I realized I was overreacting. Bear hunting season didn't even open for months.

The contractor said that while I was waiting for the property to close I should just come and live in his house. He called his home “the cabin.” I was like, no, I was not going to go live with this contractor, but he kept mumbling that he lived with his girlfriend. She owned a year-round Christmas shop on the Glen, where the lake was located, specializing in elves, Norwegian sweaters, and handmade velvet Christmas tree blankets, the kind that hide the base of the tree where it has been cut off and put in a stand full of water. (Although later I found out they weren't actually handmade—they were mass produced in a Christmas tree blanket factory in China and she cut off the labels and sewed on her own.) His home, “the cabin,” was empty.

I asked my friend Sue Martin if she would come with me to go and look at it. The contractor was the sort of man who, for some reason, I didn't want to be alone with in a room, let alone a cabin.

He said it was only about ten minutes away from my “new” house, where he would be working, and from the farm where I leased a horse.

We got in his car to go see. We drove and drove. It was not ten minutes. We pulled in. From the road, it was a work facility, a barn with a tiny roof, one of those places you pass on the roadside. “This is it!” said the contractor.

“Twenty-three minutes,” said Sue Martin, who was timing our drive.

The front side resembled a workspace, a factory. On the other side, it was a log cabin. He had built the roadside to look like a workplace. Around the back, it was High Adirondacks, skinned logs, a hot tub out on the upper deck—what anybody would probably refer to as a testosterone palace. You've probably seen these places on TV, where real men live in Alaska. Inside, if it was indigenous to North America and a man could kill it and have it stuffed, it was there.

There were stuffed and mounted trout and bass. There were stuffed and mounted turkeys. There were the heads of deer with antlers with few points and the heads of deer with antlers with many points. Fortunately there weren't any foxes, but there was a framed poster of a girl wearing a cowboy hat and skimpy shorts with her buttocks hanging out and the caption
WIDE OPEN SPACES
. I guess because she was looking out to the west.

“Wow,” said Sue.

“Come in here,” he said, and took me into the bathroom. There was a big shower, with large river stones lining the walls. “You could fit four people in this shower!” he said.

You could, too.

But why would you?

The whole place, it was great. It was authentic, it was real, I did like it. Don't get me wrong. If you took me into a 1500s farmhouse in Wiltshire, of daub, wattle, and thatched roof, with a large spit over the fire upon which be roasting a haunch, a loud beehive glade (you know the kind of place I'm talking about), it could not be more authentic. “So, you can live here,” he said. “I ain't gonna be bothering you, I ain't around here. I'm living with my girlfriend, it's empty.”

A few weeks passed and I was still down there, waiting for my “new” house to close. Closing on a house is something to do with contracts. It takes a long time as legal documents are prepared.

The contractor had gone over the whole place—with me, on his own—many times.

Every time I met him and he went over the property to give me an estimate, he sighed and shook his head. I didn't understand why, exactly.

I knew the place was kind of a mess. I knew maybe you would want stairs that you didn't fall through to get upstairs, and you would want things like a toilet and a sink. I just didn't know why having a place with walls that were falling down and floors that were buckling and broken windows signified any major issues.

Every time we arranged to meet and he went over the place and kept sighing, I kept sighing, too.

So, while the contractor viewed the property on which I had not yet closed and kept shaking his head, I kept sighing because he seemed to think it was going to be such a difficult task, fixing up this crumbling farmhouse.

He was a contractor, wasn't he? He knew how to do all that stuff.

Then I really screwed up. I fell in love with him.

He worked and worked and he stayed there, nights, while I slept in his warm man-cave cabin. And after a few months, even though it was a total gut renovation and he had had to rip out floors and rebuild them, and redo the wiring and the plumbing and the walls and the ceiling and the insulation and every single aspect, just like a house built from scratch, only more difficult, it looked like that house was ready for me to move into. From October to mid-December, that's how long it took him. It wasn't entirely finished, but he did a brilliant, elegant, very, very fine job.

I was innocent then. I did not understand that pipes had to be connected to other pipes and then to some kind of tank or pump in order to have water. I did not understand that you had to have wires going through the walls connected to a pole, or a generator, in order to get electricity. I did not understand.

I want to communicate. If you are reading this, and you have gotten this far in my memoirs, can you tell me how the elevator works if you are in an office, or the subway, if you had to take a subway to get to work, or your engine, if you drove a car? If you know, I am proud and happy for you.

Do you know how the key to your car is made? Where you put the transmission fluid? How your phone works? Let's say you are by your refrigerator, do you know about that coolant or whatever it is? I am sure you do.

But you are smarter than I. I don't get it. If there is a radio program, where does the sound go when it's over? Where does the image that comes out of your TV set go to, after the scene changes? What happens to the leftovers you toss from the vegetable bin? Where are the files you “deleted” from your computer? How do you use a sander? How do you level the ceiling?

Okay, I know—you know all this stuff.

But I don't! I don't understand.

My three months overlapped the right time. But the closing kept being postponed. I knew even once I had officially bought it, there would be months and months of additional renovation. That place was still not inhabitable. But for some reason, I just couldn't register these mathematical time-frame facts.

It was supposed to close the same day I sold my mom's house. It did not. My mom's house sold. I shipped the kid off to college, I put all the contents of my mom's house into storage. I had eight poodles and nowhere to go.

a trailer named esperanza

I
n all those years, my mother's colleagues from the university had never called me to see how I was doing. A couple might have visited my mom once. They never asked if I might want to teach a workshop at Cornell, or give a reading, or go to dinner. I know, people are busy.

But my new friend Sue Martin was different. She said if I had nowhere to go, I could live with her and her wife while the work was done on my new place. But I just couldn't inflict that on anyone that I wanted to stay friends with.

Sue found an ad for me on Craigslist. It was for an old trailer. The trailer was a 1966 silver thing; there was a picture of it in a field.

The woman was asking $450 a month, and I called her. She was in California. She said the trailer was named Esperanza and was in the middle of ten acres and it would be fine to go and live there with my dogs. I could live there until probably November, when it would get too cold. The place wasn't heated, but my dogs would be fine there and it would be a good place for a writer.

Anne had raised her daughter in the area, in a house next to Esperanza that was now rented out. Now she had moved to California, where she rescued seals.

She said she would have Esperanza's cistern filled with water and that it held a couple hundred gallons. She said she would get the propane turned on soon, and the electric. “And if you want to bathe,” Anne said, “you can go for a swim in the lake. Or there's an old bathtub outside. If it rains, maybe it will fill up!”

I was slightly worried, but I was happy I had somewhere to go.

I put my eight poodles in the car and we drove the half hour to the trailer named Esperanza.

The trailer was in the middle of a field. It was a tiny trailer and the field was very sunny and very hot. I opened the door to the trailer. A wave of heat approximately 140 degrees swooshed out. Maybe it was more. I don't know.