No Accounting for Taste

Cha's mother's old boss is selling her Towson home--it's a 1950s split-level and is in need of some significant re-vamping, but has a nice yard on a corner lot about four blocks from our current house. My mother-in-law insisted that we go see it today. "She said she will wait for you to decide before she sells it!" The whole thing was made urgent by Ma's weird obsessive insistance, and we only really went to see it to placate her, because if we're staying in Towson we're staying where we are--there's no reason to move four blocks unless we get some substantial payoff for our trouble.

We got to the house at 11:30am as scheduled, and an old Greek woman--the mother-in-law's former boss's mother--answered the door in her bathrobe. We told her who we were and she had no idea why we were there. "We told Arcy to wait two weeks so we could clean up!" she moaned. There were boxes everywhere, and piles of junk. All I could see was a really awful paint job around the exposed wood beams in the cathedral ceiling, and truly terrible painted tiles on said ceiling, and black and gold wallpaper that would've been gauche in a Nevada madam's saloon 150 years ago. We're talking shiny gold giftwrap patterns on black felt. Cha liked it, which really concerned me. If you've ever seen the restored print of Vertigo, there's a scene in a restaurant with similar wallpaper, tho in crimson and garish red. Hitchcock used such paper to evoke the feeling his film's title was referring to. Oh, and nausea.

We waited for ten minutes while the old woman told us about her chronic arthritis. I kept staring at the foyer closet and its sliding particle board doors, spray-painted a bronze color that clashed with the gold. This same spray-paint bronze covered all the visible moldings, including those in the dining room, which was painted yellow. The windows were of the sort you see in trailer homes, or in car ports--several stacked panes with rusted handcranks for each one. They let in a lot of light, certainly, and look like shit. I've already seen enough, but Cha's Ma showed up at our house twenty minutes later, after the old woman had kicked us out and told us to come back in two weeks, demanding to know why we'd stood her up. "I told you to meet me there," she cried, and Cha had already gone back to work, so I was left to explain that we were rudely shown the door because we weren't supposed to see it yet. Cha's Ma is nearly deaf, so this made for an entertaining conversation:

Me: She told us we could not see the house today, and asked us to leave.

Ma: You love the house?

Me: She said we HAD TO LEAVE!

Ma: You have to leave now?

Me: Ma, the house is not ready to show, it's a mess!

Ma: You went to a show at Ames? (Ames is pronounced Ah-mess)

Me: I have to go to work now. Do you want to watch TV until Dad picks you up?

Ma: No, I already ate. I'll watch TV for a while until Daddy picks me up.

Me: I'm going now.

Ma: Why did you not go to the house to look?

Me: Ma, we were there! She told us to leave!

Ma: You have to leave?

Me: (a vein throbbing in my temple) Bye Ma, I'll see you later!

Tonight I'm sure Cha will find an angry phone message asking why we weren't waiting for Ma at the house for sale, and Cha will have to scream into the phone for ten minutes until Ma puts Daddy on the phone so he can write it down for her.

I'm SOOO not interested in that house, and now I feel guilty because Ma told her former boss we would like it, and her former boss is not going to list it because she's holding it for us. Jesus fucking Christ. She's selling it for $350,000--no fucking way. It needs $50k in redecorating/remodelling, and I only saw the living room/dining room (and two huge cracks in the cement foundation at the head of the driveway, which drains INTO the foundation of the house--that alone is tens of thousands of dollars).