Fixer-Upper

Saturday morning. I was awakened by the shrill demands of our cordless phone around 10 a.m. I was alone in the apartment. Brian had left the evening before to spend the weekend in Minnesota with his parents. I had opted not to go, pointing to all of the chores that could not wait until Monday night--laundry, grocery shopping, and, of course, the dishes. Brian's expression was briefly clouded by disappointment, but he did not complain. I was frankly relieved to see him go. Seeing him every night, pretending to be happy--well, it was all starting to feel a little oppressive.

I picked up the phone with a yawn. "Hello?" I said, stretching my left arm to scratch as far down my back as I could.

"Oh. My. God, 'Ony."

"Hey, Gertie, what's up?"

"Do you get the Region Reader?" she asked urgently.

"Yeah, I think so. It's probably out on the doorstep." It seemed an insurmountable distance.

"Go get it. I'll wait. Look at the front page."

"Oh, all right. Hold on," I sighed. I opened the front door and peeked outside. I was wearing one of Brian's soft cotton t-shirts and my light blue shorts. My feet were bare. I found the Reader rolled snugly in its transparent orange cellophane bag on the third step leading to our apartment. I stepped out on the warm, smooth cement and grabbed the paper with the tips of my fingers. When I walked back into the living room, where the phone was awaiting my return, I pulled the paper out of the bag and examined the bottom half of the front page. Picking the phone back up and cradling it between my right ear and my shoulder, I said, "Uh, okay. The Boy Scouts are having a pancake breakfast in Highland. Big deal." I could hear Gertie sigh in frustration. I flipped the paper over to the top half. "I don't see what you find so...holy shit."

My eyes rested on the headline, my mind barely registering the meaning of the bold black print. "Jay Street Home Receives Much-Needed Makeover by TV's Frank Landon," Sophie Watson, a staff reporter for the Region Reader announced.

"That's my house," I said, more to myself than to Gertie. I shook my head. "Well, it used to be my house, anyway. What the...? Who are these people?" I asked, staring at the black-and-white photo of a beaming 30-ish white couple standing in front of my childhood home. The female half of the pair appeared to be very pregnant.

"Isn't that wild?" she asked, "Your old house is going to be on Frank Landon's Fixer-Uppers."

A new, more troubling thought struck me. Presumably, many things had changed in the house after my dad and I had left it, but what of the things that remained? What if our old brown carpet was still there--the carpet that I had puked on one Thanksgiving day when I was nine years old, the carpet that our dog had peed on numerous times when he was a puppy, the carpet where I lay on my stomach watching TV about three inches from the screen? What if the old blue wooden cabinets in the kitchen were still there--the cabinets where we kept baking ingredients and old bottles of spices, the cabinets that I would slam shut if I were throwing a tantrum over doing the dishes? What about the light green paint on the walls of my old bedroom, where I had taped pictures of Gertie, Jack, Marnie, Jason, and me, R.E.M. posters, and academic award certificates? Would these things be presented on television for all to see so that they could be scoffed at, ripped down, tossed aside, removed, repainted, hidden, or replaced? Would Frank Landon, that blissed-out Californian do-it-yourself guru, expose and then exorcise our ghosts with a circular saw and some electrical tape? Would he make that which was ragged and raw in my childhood level and plumb?

"We used to build those gigantic forts in your living room out of old sheets and the dining room chairs, remember? And we'd camp out all night under there..." Gertie reminisced.

"Yeah," I replied, "Dad would always bitch about how he couldn't even walk through the living room..."

"And we'd play those pretend games in your attic for hours..."

"Remember when you spent the night, and we pretended that we were astronauts the whole time?"

"Yeah. That game lasted 20 hours, I swear to God. Man, I bet that bourgeois-y couple is going to turn your attic into some fancy-schmancy playroom for their kids or something."

"With a skylight and shit..." I sighed.

"And brightly-colored walls and some huge-ass tastefully decorated dollhouse. Your attic was better though. It was so wild and dark and cluttered, packed to the roof with your family's dark secrets..."

"Uh, yeah, I guess that's a compliment..."

"No, seriously, though," Gertie continued, "It was like an uncharted planet, some post-apocalyptic land inhabited only by broken toys and 20-year-old bank statements..."

"Well, you didn't have to live there," I replied. I remembered that when I was a young girl, I was so proud of my home--and the attic, especially. I thought of it in exactly the same way Gertie remembered it. Sometimes when I was alone, I would go on little treasure hunts up there for hours, searching for toys I had long since outgrown, searching for any trace of my mother...but then adolescence hit, and I wanted to be anything I was not, and I wanted my father to be someone else, and I wanted a cleaner, more impressive-looking home. I never outgrew my pubescent shame of my house and rarely invited anyone over and was much relieved when Dad finally got rid of it.

"I always liked it," Gertie added quietly.

There was a short pause.

"Hey," she suggested, brightening up considerably, "you should go over there--while they're filming! Sounds like Tuesday is going to be the last day 'cause in the article, it said that they're doing three rooms, and they're almost done."

"Nah," I said, "maybe if it had been the people we sold the house to, because we got to know them a little bit, but I have no idea who these people are."

"It doesn't matter. Just go over there. Tell them that you used to live there and that you'd like to take a look around."

"Oh, just like that, huh?"

"Yeah, it happens all the time. Believe me, they'll be as pleased as punch."

* * *

Well, Gertie was right about one thing; the new mistress of the house was certainly pleased as punch. "Well, of course! Come right in!" she cried, holding the front screen door open with one hand and beckoning me inside with the other. "Welcome home, I guess! It's going to look so clean on the show, but boy, are they making a mess around here," she said, looking over her shoulder at the film crew who were assembling lights and repositioning the camera tripod in the kitchen. The hallway leading into the kitchen was cluttered with lighting equipment, carrying cases, thick black cables, and a red cooler presumably filled with water bottles and other snacks. The film crew seemed to be composed entirely of tall and wiry young men in their mid-twenties. Almost all of them wore identical-looking tan cargo pants and various thrift-store-chic t-shirts. Frank Landon did not appear to be among the crowd.

"Frank never shows up until just before they start filming," the woman said to me in a low voice, as if she could read my thoughts. "And he always seems so friendly and laidback on TV, but boy, when something goes wrong, he sure curses up a storm! He really likes my coffee, though. I make a full pot for him every day," she beamed.

I nodded in a daze as we walked through the living room. The brown carpet had been replaced with a white one. She's sure going to regret that when the baby arrives, I thought. A wooden ceiling fan had been installed overhead. It was all so surreal. I felt panicky and out-of-place. I shouldn't have come, I concluded.

"Does the living room look a lot different to you?" she asked. I nodded with a gulp. "Yeah, it was like that when we got here, and maybe we'll do something to it some other time, but it's fine for right now. Let's see...they've done the baby's room and the bathroom, and now they're working on new cabinets and a new countertop for the kitchen. I think it takes them ten times as long to do it for the show as it would normally take just to do it yourself, you know, but I must say I've enjoyed all the excitement around here! The neighbors are so nosy about it, it's really funny."

"Yeah, if most of the same people are still there, they were kind of always like that."

"Well, why don't we take a look at the baby's room?" She led me over to my old bedroom, the bedroom where I nearly tore myself apart with sobs when Bill Howell, the boy I most adored in fourth grade, loudly announced that I was ugly. The light green walls had been painted a bright sky blue. An expensive-looking crib stood proudly where my old twin-size bed had been. Above the crib spun a brightly colored mobile made of the unlikely combination of red airplanes and blue trucks and yellow suns. A sizeable collection of stuffed animals was artfully arranged about the room. Some of them sat on a large white wooden chest that was placed underneath the window. "They built that white toy chest for us. Isn't that nice? It's kind of like a bench too, so when my son gets older, he can sit on it and look outside. They enlarged the window just above it. It lets in so much more light now."

"Yeah, it's lovely." I said, a small lump forming in my throat. I was appalled at my own sentimentality. Stop it, stop it, stop it, I commanded myself with disgust. Still, I couldn't help envying that little boy, yet to be born, whose story in my old home would most likely be so different...

"Why don't we take a look at the bathroom?" she suggested, and I meekly followed. I wondered if she had ever been a real estate agent. We walked through the living room again, through the dining room, and into the bathroom. Our garish yellow floral wallpaper was gone; the walls were now sterile and white. A simple country pattern in navy blue, cream, and maroon was stenciled in a border that ran just below the ceiling. The scent of peaches-and-cream potpourri hung in the air. "See, they changed the light fixtures in here, and they installed this big new bathtub."

The bathtub was indeed very different. It was large and deep and had jet streams like a mini-spa. It was almost too big for the cramped bathroom. I laughed softly to myself and shook my head in disbelief.

"A lot of old memories, huh?" the woman asked.

"Yeah," I said, "my mother killed herself in this room."

--karen