Take My House, Please

Jenny Allen

Word Count 2163

Friends!

Happy Fourth of July to you all! Please forgive the mass e-mail, but I hope you’ll read on. I have a terrific idea, and I hope you agree. Why not take your vacation on Martha’s Vineyard this summer? At my house! I’ve decided to rent it, and I’m excited to tell you a little bit about it here. I’ve been working like crazy to get the house in shape for you. I remind myself of Frank Sinatra when he ran around having his Palm Springs place spruced up for President Kennedy’s visit—I’m all “Spare no expense!” and “I want those doorknobs to shine!” Unlike Frank, I am yelling at myself, but I like to pretend I have a staff like he did, just for fun. Also, I’m counting on a happy ending. The president never came to Frank’s estate because of Frank’s Mob connections, but I don’t have any Mob connections. (Which I’m kind of sad about, by the way. I’d love to have some stories to tell.) So come!

Anyhoo, I do have one helper. His name is Chet, and he’s my handyman. And by my I mean “everyone’s” handyman. Chet has a lot of other customers because none of the other handymen here show up, but Chet has a heart as big as all outdoors and does his best to fit me into his schedule. By the way, if Chet shows up to finish de-molding the walls while you’re here, please invite him to stay for dinner. Most of his other customers are loaded and pay him a lot more than I do, so meals are the least I can offer. You’ll like Chet; he has good stories. Ask him about the time he had to saw a hole in the wall here at my house to get at some smoking electrical wires. That’s a good one.

I’m a divorcée now, which sounds kind of sexy and naughty, doesn’t it? Like someone sashaying through a cocktail party in a spandex dress and three-inch heels, looking for someone’s husband to steal. In fact, the correct translation of divorcée is “person with no money.” Even if I went in for stealing other women’s husbands, who has time? I’m way too busy digging through the sofa cushions for loose change, and eyeing the bits of silver here and there—a picture frame, my children’s engraved baby cups—wondering if I can sell them as is or whether I have to melt them down first. But enough about my troubles!

My house is a sweet old shingled farmhouse, with two “real” bedrooms and a cute little one off the kitchen that I’m guessing, from a certain earthy smell on humid days, used to be a milking shed, or a pigsty. We have two full bathrooms, except that the shower in the upstairs bathroom doesn’t work. The shower per se works, but something’s wrong with the drain, so water from the shower leaks down to the kitchen ceiling below, and then pours onto the floor. So limit yourselves to that downstairs shower, okay? Thanks much!

You’re probably thinking that the house sounds like it’s on the smallish side, but you don’t want to stay in one of those new giant houses the rich people build here now. They’re just gross. They’re vulgar. You could fly a helicopter in those living rooms. You feel like a dwarf standing in them. You want to rusticate, am I right? You want your vacation to be real. Old-fashioned, a little funky, but real. Summer living the way it used to be, before the billionaires got here and discovered that if they said “lap pool,” someone would build it for them.

Things you need to know when you get here: The trash cans, and the washing machine and dryer, are in the toolshed to the left of the kitchen door. Chet replaced some of the old beams holding up the shed’s roof this winter because it was sagging pretty badly, and he’s almost done now, but if you hear a lot of hammering in the night, that’s him, fitting the job into his schedule. Try to avoid walking right under the old beams, though. Some bug or worm has eaten away at them, and now they have these daggerish shards of wood jutting out, and you’ll get a big splinter in your head. If you do, just go to the emergency room.

I think Chet has found all the rusty nails sticking out of the wooden stairs to the house, but Chet—he’s funny, he cracks me up—calls trying to find them “whack-a-nail”: Just when you think you’ve banged them all down, another one pops up. If you step on one of the popped-up ones by accident, promise me you’ll go to the emergency room for a tetanus shot, okay?

Apropos the toilet. Big favor: if the toilet doesn’t flush, do not call Jim, our wonderful plumber. You need to save your calls to the plumbers here for important things; if you call them for every little problem, they look at their cell phones, see your number, and say, “Would you look who’s calling again?” and turn them off. To fix the toilet, all you have to do is open up the tank. You know that big bulb that’s attached to a rod? At the other end of the rod is a little wire loop we rigged up that should hold the rod on to the hook that connects to the metal stick that connects to whatever makes the toilet flush. When the toilet doesn’t flush, it means that the little piece of wire has broken. Just cut some more wire from the spool of wire that’s somewhere in the toolshed and make another loop. It’s easy. In the time it’s taken you to read this paragraph, you could’ve done it twice, that’s how cinchy it is.

It takes a little longer to clean out the downstairs shower nozzle, but please don’t call Jim for that, either. If the spray coming out of the nozzle is more like a trickle, it means that calcium or lead or what-not from the old pipes has clogged the little nozzle holes. Just take a pin and poke at those hundred or so holes until they’re clear. Presto, the water flow will be full and robust again.

If the water coming out of the faucets looks rusty or tastes funny, it’s time to change the water filter. Get a new filter from the toolshed—they look just like paint rollers, and I think they’re in the corner, in that heap of paint rollers—and go down to the pit under the house that holds the furnace.

You get to the pit by lifting the trapdoor cut into the floorboards in the hallway. The trapdoor weighs a ton, so watch your fingers; also, crouch down when you go down the stairs into the pit, because the ceiling’s about three feet over your head and you’ll get a nasty gash if you hit it. If you’re not already going to the emergency room for something else, you’ll have to make another trip there.

The water-filter holder is an old glass cylinder, and all you have to do is screw it off from its holder, take out the sludge-covered old filter, and replace it with the new one. You know what? I think you’ll like this job. I do. It makes you feel good knowing that no one in your family is drinking poisoned water anymore.

Speaking of water, sometimes this oily black water escapes from our old cast-iron radiators and forms little puddles on the floor. You know what’s crazy? It does this in the summer as well as in the winter, and in the summer we’re not even using the radiators. Go figure! Anyway, make sure you blot up the oily water with a paper towel before any pets start lapping at it (pet emergency room).

Don’t flush either toilet when anyone is taking a shower or the shower water will turn boiling hot (emergency room).

Don’t use the dishwasher when you’re using the washing machine. Doing this seems to confuse the pipe that delivers hot water to both machines, and it will deliver only frigid water to both; also, both machines will refuse to progress to the rinse cycle.

Don’t use the washing machine and the dryer at the same time. This overtaxes the wall outlet they share and may cause a small explosion (emergency room).

Don’t use the shower or the dishwasher or the washing machine or the kitchen faucet or the outdoor hose or the toaster while you’re running a bath, or none of them will work. You know what? Just to make life simpler? Don’t take a bath.

Re: the toaster, the little lever on it doesn’t stay down while you’re toasting, so just stand there and hold it down manually until your toast is done, which takes about fifteen minutes. You won’t mind—you’re on vacation, right?

Please be supercareful of the windows in the bedrooms. They’ve lost the springs that help them open and shut. We prop them open with those old hardcover John Gunther volumes you’ll see on the floor nearby. If you remove the books, make absolutely sure that none of your fingers are under the window when it slams down (emergency room).

Our boiler is very flatulent, especially in the dead of night, but nothing’s wrong with it. You’ll get used to the rumblings; they won’t even wake you up after your fourth or fifth night. That reminds me. Sometimes the house will make a thudding sound, a big thunk. It’s disconcerting.  Not to worry: Chet says this is just the house “settling.” It’s 150 years old—you’d think it would be settled by now! But Chet says this happens with old houses, especially the ones that don’t have a real foundation.

Our house stands on top of a few stubby ancient brick columns, and boulders scrounged long ago from a field. The boulders and columns have shifted in recent years, which you can tell by the various swells in the downstairs floors. Especially in the living room, where there’s a big bulge right in the middle of the room. That’s because one of the boulders is sticking up pretty far now. Chet’s doing me a huge favor and promises to finish working on the whole boulder/column situation while you’re here. He’s been at it since February, working under the house. I never know exactly what he does down there, but he’s using a professional sander. After he’s been at it a few hours, there’s a film of white dust, which comes up through the cracks in the old floorboards, over all the downstairs furniture, and all over Chet, who crawls out covered in white, like a ghost, or like he’s just survived an explosion in a chalk factory.

If he’s working while you’re here, just wipe the dust off the furniture. Chet doesn’t seem to mind the dust, so you don’t have to wipe him off.

But you might want to keep any easily startled small children at a distance.

We have our own underground well and a pump to supply our water. Isn’t that neat? But sometimes the pipe running from the well to the house gets a crack in it, and a little geyser bubbles up onto the backyard.

Okay, here I go again: Don’t call Jim. This is a job for the pump people. By the time they get here, in a few days or weeks, the pond will have become its own little ecosystem, with frogs hopping in and out and mosquitoes skating over its surface. Some people call this “standing water” and warn against it, nervous about the mosquitoes carrying diseases. I say it’s a pond, and enjoy it.

We also have our own cesspool, installed before modern septic tanks were even a glimmer in someone’s eye. The upside about cesspools is that you don’t have to have them pumped regularly, the way you have to do with septic tanks. The bacteria in the cesspool magically work to break down all the waste that goes into it. Cool, right? The downside, at least at our house, is that every few years you’ll hear a gurgling sound coming from the kitchen sink. Or you’ll smell something unpleasant wafting from that direction. This means that a wad of toilet paper (use sparingly!) has clogged the pipe to the cesspool, and waste matter is finding its way into the sink. Please don’t panic. This is what plungers are for! I keep ours right there in the kitchen, next to the trash can, for just this reason. If, after a couple of hours of plunging, the sink is still filling up, call the number I keep next to the phone. It’s for Jim. Now’s the time to call him.

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Jenny’s collection of essays, "Would Everyone Please Stop?", was a finalist for the Thurber Prize. Her one-person play, "I Got Sick Then I Got Better," premiered at New York Theatre Workshop, won the Gilda's Club "It's Always Something" award, and has been seen across the country. Jenny has been published in the New Yorker, The New York Times, and many other publications. She has sold her house and lives in New York City.