Closing

Greetings from my new home of Stepford, Connecticut, where all of us homemakers are happy as clams as long as we’re oiled regularly and plugged in to charge at night!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I have several days of sheer drudgery to write about, first.

I was in a bad mood, a week ago Tuesday. Well, not bad. I wasn’t snappy, or crabby, or taking out my frustrations on the nearest available husband who’d come home the day before. I was just drawn thin, and very tired. Ever since the house had sold in April, I’d been on a rampage—packing up crap that needed to be packed, ruthlessly throwing out anything that it even vaguely pained me to think about transporting across the country, donating anything that was reusable to the Salvation Army or some other charitable cause. Any charitable cause that would take the crap. They could’ve been representing the most evangelical Christians or Satan’s Minions or the freakin’ Lollipop Guild for all I cared. So long as they were willing to take a single metal table leg, a bunch of old towels, and a pair of 30-year-old duck boots, I was good to go.

Craig had arrived home from Connecticut, very late Sunday night. He was pretty helpful about pretending to help with my mania, and smiled cheerfully and ambled around while I yelled out things like, The file cabinet has to go to the curb!, or, I can’t tell you what to do! Just pick up stuff! GET IT TO THE CURB!, or, Oh my god, where the effity eff did all those CANDLES come from?! TAKE THEM TO THE CURB! But he was downstairs in the basement when the doorbell rang. I answered it carrying the unlikely combination of a bathmat, a fluorescent light tube, and a tub of Clorox bathroom wipes.

A short, ferret-faced man stood outside. His hands were on his hips, and he stared at me. He didn’t say anything for a moment, and I wasn’t exactly in the mood to come up with a snappy greeting, so I just raised my left eyebrow and waited. I honestly thought he was going to solicit me for spare pop bottles, which is what they did with alarming frequency in my old neighborhood. (Who is drinking that many carbonated beverages?)

But no, instead he huffed out, “I am the agent for the other side, and I demand to know your intentions!”

My eyebrow remained raised for another few moments while I processed that one. At first I thought he was playing secret agents, the way some kids play cops and robbers. But that made no sense. “Excuse me?” I said.

“Are you the owner? Cause look. I needa know what the hell is going on here,” he growled, hands still on his hips. I flipped the lock on the screen door. Because, you know, a flimsy little metal latch and a thin layer of plastic screening is the best protection from crazy people lunging at you. ”What are your intentions?”

Only then did it really occur to me that this guy was the real estate agent for the couple buying our house. Mind you, he hadn’t introduced himself to me by name. He hadn’t given me a business card, which would have been nice. He’d just marched up and told me what he needa know. “Well,” I said, in that tone I fly in directly from the Arctic Circle when I’m affronted. “Tomorrow we are closing. Thursday, the movers come to pack our belongings. Friday, they move us out.”

“Well, how’m I supposeda know that?” he barked. “No one told me.”

“Our agent has known our plans for weeks,” I said. “We made the moving arrangements the week after we got the offer from your clients.”

“Well I didn’t know.”

“Did you call our agent?” I asked, deadly calm.

“No.”

“Perhaps, sir, if you had,” I said, “we could have avoided this unseemly confrontation.” If you ever need to judge my level of upset, just listen to how I’m speaking. If I drop my usual mush-mouth routine and suddenly sound like Mr. Darcy addressing the Bennet sisters as if they were dancing a quadrille on his very last nerve, I’m likely seething.

“My clients wanteda close on the twenty-fifth!” he growled at me. “And they thought you were gonna be out on the first.”

“We never made any plans to close on the twenty-fifth,” I told him. “The purchase agreement has always stated that closing would be on the first, and that we would have three days after to vacate. My agent could have told you that at any point.”

“Well are you planning to pay the per diem?!”

I was pretty sure that the per diem had been written into the agreement, but I wasn’t going to commit to anything on my sketchy memory and then find out the whole thing had been a gotcha! setup. “If that’s what the agreement says.”

“Is that what the agreement says?”

“Forgive me, but you don’t seem to know when closing is, or how long the agreement says we have to vacate, or whether there’s a per diem,” I said. My hackles were thoroughly ruffled, by now. I mean, hadn’t he been the one who’d actually drawn up the agreement on behalf of his clients? “I advise you consult the agreement in order to find out its exact terms.”

“So what are your intentions, then?” he wanted to know.

I thought we’d covered that bit by now. “Please contact my agent if you have further questions.”

“Look, I’m just trying to look out for my clients here.”

“Please contact my agent if you have further questions,” I repeated.

Then I shut the door in his face. And watched as he huffed off to his car to call our agent. Which is what he really should’ve done in the first place.

I’m not really one of those people who thrives on confrontation; it makes my nerves jangle for hours after. Days, even. Heck, it’s been a week and I’m still not shaking it off. Though I was aware I’d stood up for myself pretty well in this case—though I still wasn’t exactly sure for what I was standing up or why I’d had to do it—I still have the automatic instinct that not rolling over and being the politest sweetest most helpful young feller is wrong and ungrateful, and as if I’m letting someone down, somehow.

But I had trash to accumulate, and stuff to wipe with Clorox, so I went about my business and it was only fifteen minutes later, when Craig emerged from the basement after pretending to do something or another, that I thought to get indignant and tell him a story that began, “You will never believe . . . !”

At the closing the next morning the hairs on my neck were still raised enough that I seriously considered demanding that I not be seated in the presence of that man, but he wasn’t even there, to start. Only the couple buying the house were present, and they were both as cute as a couple of extremely cute buttons, so it was difficult to maintain my usual icy hauteur (even though they kind of freaked me out a little by introducing themselves to me with the words, “WE READ YOUR BLOG!” and I was all like, oh crap, which one, the boring one, or the secret documents I prepare for Wikileaks?).

Their agent arrived about a half-hour late, after just about everything was signed, and played Angry Birds at the other end of the table on his phone the entire time. Only once did he speak up, and that was when the buyer was insisting that she’d gotten some kind of mortgage payment insurance that didn’t seem to be reflected in the papers. The mortgage person went through all the documents, looking for anything that might verify her claim, and wasn’t finding anything. The agent spoke up. “She just doesn’t understand what she’s talking about,” he said, in the most condescending tone imaginable, to the mortgage woman. “Don’t worry about it.”

And I was like, dang, if he’d been my agent and spoken about me like that, I’d have fired him on the spot. The mortgage woman, to her credit, got up from the table and made a couple of phone calls, only to come back and announced that the buyer had indeed been correct about having that particular kind of insurance, but it simply wasn’t reflected in the paperwork. The agent didn’t apologize. But secretly, I was all, BOOM! In yo’ FACE, Angry Birds loser!

Because dude. Would it really have killed you to have given me a card when you introduced yourself?

The Goodreads Roundup

I've lately been taking advantage of my local library's ebook loans. I like the convenience of the ebooks, and the freeness of the library. Yet browsing the selection of offerings that Overdrive provides is not the most optimal of processes, to be honest; you'd think that a library would be more on top of providing its patrons ways of investigating what books they have to lend electronically.

Oh, it's simple enough to investigate what they have by flipping through a list of books by topic. Adding a book to your checkout list, however, is a multi-click process that, when you're done, takes you back to the library's main page. So if you were originally ten pages deep in the biography section, well, that's tough luck. You'll have to navigate back to where you left off, if you remember.

The selection at my local library is pretty horrid, too. I'd be in luck if I liked vampire novels (I don't), or very long young adult Harry Potter knockoff series. So usually I have to make do with what I find in the biographies or nonfiction areas, with the occasional novel tossed my way.

My biggest complaint—or perhaps it's the source of a lot of excitement, it's difficult to tell—is the delivery method. I've never once been able to download a book immediately. Even for the most obscure titles I've been placed on a waiting list. I never know exactly when I might be notified that my book's ready for checkout. All I can do is wait, and then one morning I'll fire up my email client and receive a notice to rush! rush! rush! and download my book as quickly as I can before the privilege is taken away from me. I leap into action, and then watch the countdown timer slowly start to tick away on my two weeks to finish the darned thing.

For someone whose library experience has typically been walking in and coming away with an armful of books right there and then (maybe not always my first choice, but definitely there's some immediate gratification involved), it's a disappointment not to know exactly when I'll be getting my choices. Worse was when I got three of them, which I'd requested at various times over the course of maybe four months, all within three days. One of them was an extra-large tome that I didn't even get a portion of the way through before my time ran out. And who knows when I'll get it again?

Anyway, I thought I'd share some of my Goodreads reviews of some of my recent reads, for those of you who aren't on Goodreads.

Water for Elephantw

by Sara Gruen

2 out of 5 stars

Everything I Learned in Water for Elephants: A Book Report by V. Briceland

1. Growing old sucks.

2. Men who are mean to elephants and women, but mostly elephants, deserve their grisly deaths.

3. A pageant of cardboard characters is totally okay as long as someone gets thrown off a moving train every 20-30 pages.

The End.

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

by Mike Brown

4 out of 5 stars

Short and eminently readable, Brown's account of his race to discover the solar system's tenth planet—and the subsequent change of heart that led him to recommend that neither it nor Pluto be considered planets at all—has two distinct plusses. First, he makes a lot of difficult material extremely approachable for non-astronomists. Second, it contains a ripping cast of villains, from evil internet chat room folk to disreputable scientists scheming to steal the work of others . . . and more importantly, Brown faces off against the two great antagonists of all astronomers, the too-slow passage of time and light itself.

If Brown tends to go a little overboard for my tastes in his passages devoted to his daughter, it's still refreshing to see a man of science who's even more passionate about his parenting. Otherwise, the work is an informative, quick, and fun read that's suited for just about anyone who's gazed at the sky and wondered what else could be out there.

Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

by Gabrielle Hamilton

2 out of 5 stars

Toward the end of Hamilton's interminable chef memoir, she admits to having a certain sense of Gallic superiority to the rest of the world. Hoo boy, is that an understatement. While Hamilton's recollections of her unconventional childhood and rise to celebrity as the owner of Prune offer up a credible pastiche of MFA-style literary writing, the author's personality is so off-putting that I found the book nearly unreadable.

When Hamilton is talking about cooking, or about the restaurant industry and its quirks, she's very nearly engaging--that is, if one can overlook her arty tendency to switch between first-person-past and second-person-present-tense narrative on the turn of a very thinly-sliced wafer of pancetta.

Hamilton's narrative style rests on the piling-on of rich layers of detail, however, yet throughout long passages of the book I found myself distrusting the accuracy of those details. I raised an eyebrow, for example, when she described driving down from Ann Arbor, Michigan, across 8 Mile Road into downtown Detroit--a nice shout-out to one of Detroit's more infamous landmarks, but a geographically-dubious route into the city. And it's outright disingenuous of her to spout foodie nonsense about how her childhood once-a-week dessert was a single square of really good imported chocolate or a lightly-sweetened slice of buttered bread, when she's mentioned, only a few pages before, gorging on Tastykakes. If one can't trust the details, what, exactly, can one relate to in a memoir like this?

Certainly not the thorn-skinned author, herself. A similar tone of superiority mars a good deal of the narrative. Hamilton dislikes children and their preference for French fries and macaroni and cheese over that single square of really good chocolate, or any of the more exotic fares she serves in Prune; she's dismissive of their parents and indeed, of anyone who will eat less-than-gourmet fare instead of skipping a meal altogether. She spends a large portion of the book secretly mocking and sniggering at her graduate school comrades only to turn around and justify the behavior by accusing them of condescending to her. And the meandering last third of her book turns on the cold fury she experiences, and the subsequent two-week silent treatment she gives to her (long-suffering) husband when he mentions that he'd like to buy a new iPhone.

There really is some minutiae that probably should be left out of a memoir, apparently.

American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee

by Karen Abbott

3 out of 5 stars

Gypsy Rose Lee's rise to fame rested upon a strip-tease act in which she removed very little and left her audience hanging. Karen Abbott's biography of the forceful personality manages to do very much the same.

Half straightforward biography and half social history of the rise and fall of the American burlesque theater, Abbott uneasily alternates between a historian's documentary approach to her subjects and third-person present-tense narrations of Lee's thoughts and inner turmoils. She further muddies the waters by jumping backward and forward in time, between Lee's successful career after the events narrated in the musical and movie Gypsy, and the actual events that went into the heavily fictionalized and sanitized account of Lee's upbringing. Toss in the alternate narrative of the Minsky brothers and the burlesque stages of New York City, and it's a confusing, if amiable, mess.

What's disappointing about the book is that it promises to expose many of the scandals involving Lee and her domineering, force-of-nature mother. It does not. It hints heavily at murders, mob involvement, and family betrayal, but never makes good on the promise to explain any of them—not well, at any rate. Like Lee's act itself, Abbott teases at the evidence, then backs away, leaving readers uncertain how much (if anything) they might actually have glimpsed.

American Rose is highly readable, but that seems to be more a function of Gypsy Rose Lee's outsized personality than Abbott's leap-frogging narrative. And that's a shame, because instead of a nation or even a strip-tease artist laid bare, I felt like a spectator in the front row of the Minsky's Republic after one of Lee's specialty numbers—highly entertained, but aware that the artist had done little but rearrange the draperies.

Lips Unsealed: A Memoir

by Belinda Carlisle

3 out of 5 stars

When it comes to celebrity memoirs, I can't think of any I've read that have quite as many eye-popping drug-related revelations as Carlisle's tell-all. In fact, I'm not sure how any of them are going to top Carlisle's confession about taking a large opium ball as a suppository. And I'm not sure I'm really want to find out.

Carlisle's memoir is a fairly absorbing read about her outsider childhood and adolescence and the founding, flare-ups, and eventual reconciliations between the Go-Go's, mostly set against a background of drug and alcohol abuse that continued for the vast majority of Carlisle's career. Her frank confessions of repeatedly lying in public and to the press about having kicked her habit while still hitting the hard stuff, however, leaves the reader unsettled and uncertain about the reliability of this particular narrator. And that's a shame, because like the best of the Go-Go's output, I want this particular song to end with a jangling major chord.

The Murder of King Tut

by James Patterson & Martin Dugard

1 out of 5 stars and I wish it could've been less than that

I have never read any of Mr. Patterson's other books, and therefore can't state with certainty that they're all written as if for developmentally-challenged seventh graders. But this one certainly made me feel as if I were reading while riding on the short bus.

Mr. Patterson's begins his investigation into the death of everyone's favorite ancient boy king with a prologue reminding readers (in all capital letters) that the role of the historian is never to embellish, but only to illuminate fact. He then follows up his decree with dozens of chapters filled with made-up dialogue and awkward, imagined sex scenes.

As for the mystery itself, well, apparently this book need be the only last word on the cause of Tutankhamen's death. His solution must be correct because, as Mr. Patterson reminds us in a late chapter, Time Magazine called him "the man who can't miss!" It's tough to beat so sound and circular a logic.