This Is My House

The house had been listed for seven months. It was the only one I could possibly afford. I called Joanne, the realtor I'd spoken to a few times but never met.

“Listen, make an offer—anything—they are ready to sell,” she said.

Her nasal voice was more annoying than usual. I don’t know why but every time I spoke with her I envisioned her sitting on the toilet, putting ruby red nail polish on her toes with her cell phone resting on the urine-ridden filthy tile.

“Seventy-two, that’s all I can do,” I said.

I swear I could picture her, frozen, holding her left foot while her right hand hovered in hesitation with the little polish brush—I know she was making a face.

“That’s a very arbitrary low number,” she could barely fake being nice about it. “They are asking a hundred thousand, Judy, you do realize, right?”

Hello, I’m trying to get a deal, of course I do realize—It’s called a low-ball offer.

“I do realize. You said anything, that’s my everything—seventy-two.” I don’t know from where I got that number, I had been pre-approved for one hundred, but I had had a bad day. I was on my period and the donut I had after lunch about just killed me. Also, my ex, James, said I would end up homeless. But I no longer think about James.

She was so bitter handing me the key.

“The owner said to wish you well, to excuse the mess, and remember to fertilize the roses in March,” she said.

The hell I will!

She could have at least gotten a better keyring. It was rusty and it pricked my finger. She probably wanted me to get tetanus.

“Thank you, Joanne, you were great,” I said.

The sound she made, which I think was supposed to be ‘yeah’, was kind of like an airhorn, or a trumpet when they put the mute over it to make it that pinched sound.

The doorknob to the front door was super loose. I could see that someone had already stripped the little X’s out of the screws. What was Phillips thinking when he came up with such a lousy design?

It was a bit messy, but not so bad. Thank God the water and power were on, I really needed to use my new toilet—my very own, seventy-two thousand dollar toilet.

“That will be another grand to have the house cleaned,” Joanne had said.

I squatted over the discolored eighties-pink wooden toilet seat in the company of the dried-out roaches. My weak thighs were barely holding me up, but I was winning. Take that, James! Who is laughing now?

Houses really were better done in the eighties. The toilet paper holder was built into the wall, grouted in, and it matched the tile. It was maybe a bit much, but at least they really tried. I could almost smell the talcum powder in lieu of a bath. Who thought it was a good idea to paint the hardware on the built-ins?

I watched every rerun of Family Feud on the Game Show Network during winter. Ray Combs really was the best host, but Steve Harvey is doing a good job. I can’t remember ever washing a dish. Pretty much everything I ate came in a frozen pack, or a wrapper. James used to do most of the cooking, but I was no longer thinking about him. He had moved on, and so had I. That new hag he is with did me a favor by making him unavailable.

The roses died, of course. I did as I was told, I put fertilizer on them, enough to burn the roots according to my nosey neighbor, Crystal. She is nice and all, but she is in the middle of everything.

I probably wouldn’t have bought the house if it had been April, instead of December. I will never forget April seventeen. I woke up in the middle of the night. Covers stuck to my body from sweat. I went over to the A-C and I turned it on high. The debris from the vent hit me like a fistful of dirt thrown right at me. But that wasn’t the problem, it was the stench. I had never smelled anything like it. It wasn’t coming out of the A-C, it was coming out of the walls and drafts from the crawl space, it stank like death. I nearly burned the house down with candles to mask the smell. I could hardly sleep through the night. I guess it had been so dry that only when the humidity started going up in the evenings, it just activated the smell.

“Oh honey, that’s rats, many of them,” said Crystal.

Bless her heart, she was trying to be nice about it, but she did have to pinch her nose and made up some lame excuse to go back to her house. She didn’t come around as often after that. She safely waved from the distance.

I went through a bucket of that industrial-grade poison that they put behind the restaurants. I had to buy the black box to hold the bait and everything. It became a pastime to see how much they have eaten. The clerk at the extermination place said one disk could kill like twenty. Lately they have barely been touching it, but the smell lingers depending on the weather.

I kept hearing something in the attic, and I knew it couldn’t be rats—I had killed those suckers. I thought maybe bats had gotten in, or maybe raccoons. Turned out to be a creepy rocking horse that moved with the draft in the attic; somehow it was still glossy under all the dust. I’m convinced it was possessed. But it wasn’t possessing me! I gave that thing to the Salvation Army. Someone’s child is probably doing the backwards exorcist crawl right now.

I don’t think anyone had been in that attic for at least thirty years. The Sears catalog was dated 1980. It was mostly junk in there: rolls of carpet, wallpaper, gift wrapping inside suitcases, just a dust pile—and the possessed rocking horse of course. The only treasure I found was the stack of letters to Mrs. Leonora Patricia Miller—and what a treasure that was.

_______

February 18, 1975

My dear Leonora,

How long hast it been? Did you get my last letter? I think this is it, I am leaving Eleanor. At last we shall walk hand in hand, fearless. Do you remember that day in Savannah? I remember it like it was yesterday. We had that ice cream by the pier, and the seagull was screaming at you for that piece of cone you gave it. We were happy. I so desperately miss you. Please let me know you think of me.

Yours, truly,

Raymond Parks

_______

I want happy ice cream by the pier in Savannah too, the gull can have my cone.

I spent days reading the letters. Some were very steamy. I was shocked that someone would write such things back then.

_______

March 28, 1976

My dear Leonora,

I thought of you while I made love to Eleanor, as I often do. I thought of your lips on mine, as my hands caress your breasts and the smell of your perfume, the scent of roses all over your skin.

Please tell me I can see you soon.

Yours, and only yours,

Raymond Parks

_______

I obsessed over the love affair of Mrs. Leonora Miller and Mr. Parks. I organized the letters by date and I counted how many times Parks said he was going to leave Eleanor. The irony! All the same letters but one o in both names.

I needed to know more about this Leonora. The last letter was dated June 17, 1980.

I called Joanne and told her about the letters. She was unhelpful as I imagined she would be.

“I just want to give them back to the owner, you know?” I said.

“Judy, I can’t tell you details about the seller. The house was owned by an LLC and I am not at liberty to disclose.”

“So the LLC told you to remind me to fertilize the roses?” I was getting annoyed. I knew she was holding back information.

“Sorry, I can’t help you.”

Bitch.

If anyone should have known something it was Crystal—she had to know.

“I’m sorry honey, I only ever saw someone that would come in some kind of company van, Elio’s, Cheerio’s, or something like that. I always thought it was very strange.”

I didn’t know you could find so much information online about LLCs and companies in general. There are cookie crumbs all over the Google.

I pulled into 2051 Stoney Circle determined to find what happened. Elviro’s was a tortilla chip dealer. Some kind of import/export deal making all the guac lovers happy across the south. It would of course be my luck that as I walked in there he was: James.

He looked so different, he had lost a little weight, and he had a goatee. He knew I hated a goatee. Was that on purpose? The uniform was so silly, he looked like a mail boy, or something. Drab horrible green putrid color and the fabric looked so stiff and itchy.

“Didn’t take you for a tortilla chip lover,” he said. He had fixed that chipped tooth that I kept nagging he should fix.

“Didn’t take you for a worker,” I said, not knowing how else to attack.

“What does that even mean? I’ve always worked.”

“Oh yeah, well, not enough.”

Why did I have to snort like that finishing the sentence?

“What are you doing here anyway? I told you not to look for me.”

“As if!” I snorted again. “I am not here for you. I’m here to know about the woman that owned my house.”

“You bought a house?”

The disbelief in his voice was nauseating. I hated James, I really did.

“Yes, James, I did buy a house. Turns out my life didn’t end with you gone.”

“Neither did your appetite…”

I could have slapped him. I could have slapped him so hard that there would have been assault and battery charges. I would have done time for that slap, and I wouldn’t have cared. But I didn’t. I walked away.

I didn’t walk away empty-handed though. Susan, the secretary, was very cooperative. Turns out a Raul Parks owns the company. But it couldn’t be that easy. I knew the search wasn’t over.

It took a while, but I tracked down Raymond Parks to Magnolia Place, a dreadful, drab nursing home one removed from hell—if you ask me.

It felt like home to me in a way; it smelled almost as bad as my house back in April seventeen, maybe even a little worse.

Parks was a good-looking old man, much better looking than my ex James, even now. I could see why Leonora wanted to run around with him even though he was a married man.

It wasn’t very convenient that he could barely speak. He looked so confused when I showed him the letters, but I think he knew they were his. His jaw and tongue were really fighting to make words, but it was awful, no one could understand that. I do think he was trying to say Leonora though; it sounded like it to me.

“Mr. Parks, your wife is waiting for you in the activity room,” the girl with the red scrubs about to blow up said.

Wait, his wife?

I invented some relationship to Parks to follow them. His aide was very willing to talk, no regard for HIPAA or anything like that.

“When he be having a good day, he cool. But when he mad… gurl you don’t wanna be around him—he mean.”

Come to find out, he never left Eleanor; there she was, in the flesh. Skinny old thing with smeared pink lipstick and blue eyeliner. That big ole ring on her long arthritic finger, that thing must have cost a pretty penny. Gaudi-awful red stone.

Eleanor, she could speak alright, unlike Raymond Parks. I do think she was a little cuckoo, but she knew what those letters were.

“Oh, thank you, honey, you brought my mail,” she said in her fake old Southern lilt.

“No ma’am, these are Mr. Parks’ letters.” I wasn’t falling for that fake act.

Parks was now really trying to make sounds.

“Mr. Parks, calm down, sugar. You gotta stay calm,” the aide said.

I left. I had gotten him too aroused. He looked scared, probably scared of that phony witch, that Eleanor.

Leave it to Crystal to get a Jack Russell terror from the pound.

“I wonder why they got rid of him?” I asked.

“Oh, I know, sweet old thing. Isn’t he precious?”

She really didn’t catch my sarcasm. That hideous thing would not stop humping my leg.

“Look, he likes you,” she said.

“A little too much,” I said as I kept trying to keep him away from me.

It barked and yapped all night. I had to turn the TV on to fall asleep. Thank goodness for the Game Show Network.

Little Terror, as I called him, dug out of Crystal’s fence and got into Mr. Culpepper’s garden. It tore it all to pieces. His precious flowers were torn to shreds by the monster. There was shouting, there was screaming, there were threats; it was the Jerry Springer show live. I was amused, I must confess. The best part is that as they fought, Little Terror was already digging another hole.

I began having nightmares about Raymond and Leonora. Somehow I was Leonora in the dreams. Things I had read in the letters were getting mixed up and I was living them.

I woke up covered in sweat, screaming and feeling pressure all over my body, and I had to find the letter of the dream. I knew I had not made it up, I had read about it. It was making sense now.

_______

April 20, 1979

My dear Leonora with the skin as soft as petals. Oh how I long for your touch, your sweet caress, and the smell of you. I’m saddened that you did not accept my gift. My heart belongs to you and only you. That ruby was the color of your lips, and the scent of your perfume; it was the color of my aching heart waiting for the day that we are one. Soon, my love.

Yours, even if not now,

Raymond Parks

_______

What a dramatic fool. You should have left Eleanor and taken Leonora for good.

In my dream I kept the ring and it was tight around my finger. I couldn’t breathe; the tighter it got around my finger the tighter the pressure was around my neck. I had seen that ring. It was that ring in Eleanor’s hand!

I burned the letters on the grill. I soaked them in lighter fluid and I sent them to ash heaven. The nightmares needed to stop. I was losing my mind.

Then it came to me as I saw the flames: that damn possessed rocking horse. It had a name written on it. I really began feeling crazy. I’m pretty sure it said Raul.

I went to Salvation Army looking for the horse.

“Oh, sorry sweetie, we sold that not too long ago.”

Sweetie? What am I, eighty?

“But we have other toys for your… child.”

Why did you hesitate?

“I don’t have children, I hate them.” That’s all I said, cold.

Little Terror tore up my dead grass. Did me a favor, I didn’t care. Maybe the Mormons won’t knock on my door if they see I don’t even have money, or decency, to fix my grass.

The nightmares did stop. And I really needed them to. I was soon gonna need a job. I had been making the payments on the house with the extra I had borrowed. I needed some decent sleep and a better routine.

I was feeling lucky when I had five of those little dried shrimp in my Cup Noodles. Little Terror was on a tether. The sky was gray and gloomy the way I like it. Everything was perfect, it was my kind of day. But then James was at my door.

“What do you want?”

“My boss, Raul, he owned this house.”

“I know that, I could have told you that.”

“No, you don’t get it. He was really angry when he spoke about it. He said his mother forced the sale.”

And then his face turned really ugly.

“Mercy, what is that smell?”

I stepped outside and closed the door. I was barefoot and had only pajamas on.

“The septic broke.”

“You are on a septic?”

He didn’t buy it. But it didn’t matter. I ran him away.

But then I couldn’t understand: why was Raul mad? And why was his rocking horse still here?

I got an appointment to meet Raul. I had learned enough Spanish from Dora the Explorer to fake being a white girl working for a Mexican opening a new restaurant.

“You can wait right here,” Raul’s secretary said. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”

It was so quiet in the waiting room, like a pressure machine; my ears began to ring. I was glad when the AC came on, my thighs were sweating, I could tell I would chafe.

The secretary was a pretty thing, the kind that men use to have affairs with. I got impatient so I stood up and knocked on his door. She signaled me to come in through the small window on the door.

My whole world started spinning. I became light-headed and likely visibly nervous when I saw it: the rocking horse. A little boy with olive skin, deep green eyes, and dark curly hair was rocking on it, making dumb child noises. I was losing my mind.

“This is Leonardo, Raul’s son. Isn’t he adorable?”

I left in a panic. The hallway and the drive home were worse than the nightmares. I was nauseous, sweating; I nearly crashed. As soon as I went in the house I realized that I was escaping to the place of my horrors. I was seeking safety in the very place where all my panic had started. I wanted it to be winter again, when cleaning pink tiles with a toothbrush wearing fluffy flannel and singing Stronger by Britney Spears was all I had to do. At this stage, I even wanted James—anything but this.

Little Terror broke out from his tether. I screamed so hard at him but he would not stop digging. I’m not an expert but I know that a sack of Hot Happy Hen fertilizer in the soil can’t be good for a little dog like that.

“Crystal! Get your demon out of my yard before he gets sick,” I screamed.

Her big ole hips were shuffling across the yard when Little Terror finally put his nose to the ground.

Is that a… bone?

Crystal wanted to call the police immediately. I begged her not to.

“This is my house, these are my bones!”

I don’t even know from where I got that, but it worked. She sat there, complicit, petting Little Terror as I dug it all out with my bare hands.

It was getting dark and I was getting very tired and hungry. At some point I felt I was holding Crystal hostage because I kept threatening that she couldn’t leave. I had virtually kidnapped my neighbor and I was exhuming a body. I got tired of pulling out ribs. I was looking for a finger.

The sun was setting when, almost like fire, the light on it sparkled as in a kaleidoscope. There it was. The ring. She accepted the ring after all. It was bigger than Eleanor’s.

˜

The End