sunday afternoons in realty

sometimes when there were three different families in the house, in the one house, too small, awkwardly furnished, cramped floor plan house, she felt as if her head were electric.

There would be moments where no one was in the kitchen. She would stand against the table, not leaning, but pressing the tops of her thighs against the curved wooden table edge. She would stand there poised and tense, waiting for the running footsteps of toddlers to come thumping back down the steps, the curious bewildered overweight and unshowered woman in the back room to come lurching down the hall, the starry eyed young couple -- (could they even be twenty?) to emerge from the basement (are they kissing down there? groping one another feeling eager and anxious and daring?). As she waited her head felt electric with plans and possibilities.

Could she keep them from following one another into a room? Down a hallway? Could she avert their gaze from the moldy trim on the floorboard across the room? She struggled to make herself guard her eyes from the greenish blackish blotches? Who were these owners? How could they miss that mold?

If she stood with her shoulder leaned forward to the frump, could she discourage her from staying, could she shoo her out? Could she creak her foot on the basement step and make the newlyweds flee in embarassment?

But whenever she started to think in these maths, she knew she couldn't count on her intuition. The young family with the toddlers seemed the most right for this house, but so far, two years in, she was finding that houses rarely fit people in the ways that she thought that they should.

In fact, she knew almost instantly when she saw a house the kind of owner or family or inhabitant that would fit that house best. Sometimes she needed to stand in the middle of the living room before the picture developed in her head -- who they were, how they would use this space.

But the other sundays had convinced her that this gift, this knack that had just maybe been responsible for landing her in this particular life, was maleformed. Families most often did not fit the houses they bought and houses did most often not fit their families. On days when lunch was sitting well and her hair did not feel too unruly and she had managed to have just exactly the right amount of coffee (3.5 cups, she knew it, but when she drank with clients or in a conversation, she just couldn't monitor it, so more often than not she ended up with a headache or feeling down), on those days, she knew that her gift was right, but people made bad decisions regarding houses because it was a practical decision. People employed criteria that were entirely heartless. And all she could see with was her heart. For her, houses and inhabitants should be love matches.

Yes, the other sundays, most sundays she spent the duration of the long afternoons all alone in the houses. She tried to take interest in the family photos, but she found them so depressing. All these children in the exactly same poses and clothing that Walmart had sold to every other mother in every other house that she waited in. She tried to take interest in the needlepoint by some or another great aunt, and then the similarities were even more frightening. Certainly everyone's rural aunts weren't swapping their patterns at walmart, but the doilies and quilts and the chintzy towels felt as continuous as the false windowpanes on the pulldown backdrops behind the pained smiles of a hundred coaxed and prodded children on a hundred walls hanging just above a hundred sofas that had gone out of style in New York three years before they had ever arrived in the show rooms here in the midwest.

During these sundays she became convinced that they filled their houses with these identical photos, these mass-marketed sofas, these carefully selected heirlooms, these silk flower arrangements, these collectibles and this high tech electronics equipment all as a strategy for survival. There had been some moment when they had recognized that this was not the house for them. (She could have told them before they ever had the house inspector come to look for traces of mice and termites that their search was misdirected.) In a panic, a concerted and controlled frenzy, they had erected these shrines. These objects when placed carefully in relationship to one another acted as shrines marking a kind of holy space that could transcend any house. The house didn't need to matter at all. So it didn't make then happy in the way they imagined it would or in the way they hoped it might. These oak dining room chairs, these carefully matched craftsman endtables, these Thomas Kincaide prints *could* reassure them that they were indeed living as well as they might.

If only the yellow pages had a section for House Purchasing Shaman. She really had no interest in being a "Realty Agent." She wanted to be a Home Selection Shaman. She could be cross referenced with Termite Inspections and Kitchen and Bathroom Contractors.

The toddlers feet started thumping on the stairs.

She stood up. She realized she had been sitting, not just leaning, not really poised anymore. And the energy that had been buzzing in her head faded across the memory of a hundred sundays before and a hundred sundays to come in silent unsellable, but ultimately sold houses.

She moved to the far corner of the living room. If she stood there in the corner with a broad smile (not too intrusive, not too warm) and an arm vaguely lifted toward the kitchen, she just knew they would move that direction. And that movement would startle the passionate duo below and possibly they would all cross paths right here in front of her. And the frump would misread the sign of her slightly uplifted arm to be a signal to her, and when she would look below her arm, she would see the grate on the fireplace and realize that it reminded her exactly of the grate over her own fireplace in her own childhood home and thirty days later, she would sit across the table from the frump, smiling (not at all intrusive, not at all warm, just trying not to be plastic), as she sorted through a stack of signing papers.

Oh this was the house for her, she could just hear the frump saying, and the parents of the toddlers, whose financing had not come through yet, would be meeting at the door of their apartment, he coming in, she exiting, shouting instructions about dinner in the oven and he must, he absolutely must have a bath tonight, and if we had a bathtub sometime in the next year, wouldn't that be a miracle.

The toddler jumped onto the landing from the stairs and stared into her eyes. He looked at her raised arm, widened his eyes, and pointed in the same direction. Happy. Mom! Dad! He called. Their feet on the stairs, and he obediently runs toward the kitchen.