Research: Journals
The Journal
Past Issues
26.1
Dan Roche
Housesitting: An ApologyCigarette butts hid in the dry grass like fire ants, revealing themselves one by one when I mowed the lawn, when I raked leaves—a seemingly endless supply that I kept finding well into the warm fall and throughout the snow-less Arkansas winter. Each time I bent to reach for one, I thought of the summer before, when we’d hired a young guy to live in our house for the months we were away. But I didn’t think only of Blake. I imagined, also, his friends: a half-dozen nineteen-year-olds posing on my porch, their thin butts straining the caning on my weathered rocking chairs, their Velcroed sandals and bony toes propped on the cement ledge next to brown sweaty bottles of cheap beer and a few potted cacti one of them has brought over; a backgammon board opened on someone’s lap, its brown and tan stones storing the heat of the just-passed afternoon. It’s evening, and the teenagers are smoking their way through a carton one of them has gotten for just over twenty bucks at the Price Cutter. Maybe it’ll take them all week to get through the entire carton, but they’re serious about how much progress they make each evening. On each cigarette they take a final drag when the embers get close to their fingers, rotate the butt deftly and cock a middle finger behind it, then flick it in a long arc to the grass. It was a dry summer, and in my brief imagined scenarios, not one of them thinks for an instant that the grass could go up in blazes.
I was, of course, possessive. Each cigarette butt made my chest tighten a little more with that feeling. I could let most of it go—an exhalation—when I looked at the house and saw that it was still standing, that beyond the cigarette butts there was little hard evidence that Blake had even been there. A scratch on the wood floor, a broken glass pitcher. Normal wear and tear. And yet there were so many cigarette butts, like the parking lot of a smoke-free office building. Each butt seemed to be a tease, a clue that would fill out a story we’d be better off not knowing.
We had told Blake to make himself at home, and we didn’t set specific limits on what he couldn’t do. We didn’t tell him, for instance, that he couldn’t buy eighty-five packets of wildflower seeds and sow them in the back yard, water them until they sprouted, then let them and the grass grow unchecked until the day before we got home. We didn’t tell him that he couldn’t have a candle party during which he and his friends filled the living room with close to a hundred candles and then passed around pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. We didn’t tell him that he couldn’t rearrange all of the living room furniture. We didn’t tell him that, if his old red three-speed got a flat tire, he couldn’t ride my new mountain bike, lowering the seat and tightening the toe clips and forgetting to return them to their previous positions so I wouldn’t know. We didn’t tell him he couldn’t have one of his friends, a guy we’d never met and whose name we still don’t know, substitute as a housesitter for four days while Blake himself went to Chicago.
We didn’t tell him a lot of things. A parent’s sarcastic voice hammered inside my head: Would you jump off a bridge just because I didn’t tell you not to? Obviously, though, that voice did not hammer inside the head of our housesitter.
But the house was still standing, with little damage beyond what I would have done, or my two-year-old daughter would have done. And when I think about it, can I say it was a mistake for him to plant the wildflowers, to burn the candles, to move the furniture, to go to Chicago? Or was his real mistake—one of youth and honesty and irrepressible enthusiasm (“It looked really awesome!” he said about the one hundred candles flickering in our mostly-wood living room)—the fact that he admitted it at all? Told us without us even asking. With a smile, a gee-whiz amazement that I’m sure he’s come to depend on to carry him through any number of crazy schemes in his young life. He wanted us to know that he hadn’t merely lived in the house, hadn’t simply kept things alive, but that he’d inhabited it, that he’d enjoyed it.
There’s something to be said for that quality in a housesitter—just as there’s something to be said for a homeowner who can let such a housesitter do his inhabiting, his enjoying, his smoking. If you’re leaving for the summer, isn’t one of your goals to let things be what they may, while you enjoy your time in Vermont or Switzerland or at a dude ranch in Wyoming where you’re trying to forget your house and your job and your cats anyway?
~~~
“You want some uptightness in a housesitter,” Maura, my wife, theorized. “Not excessive amounts, but not none, either.”
This insight came after we got back from our months away—about the same time that I began finding cigarette butts.
“Now, Kristi, she was a good housesitter,” Maura continued. “Just about the perfect balance.”
We’d hired Kristi two years earlier. She was blond and perky and smart and nice. And she was also a student, though an older one. She’d just graduated and was killing time before going off to grad school. Her stint in our house was shorter—only two weeks—but long enough to convince us that she was the most trustworthy and responsible person we could imagine. An above-and-beyond kind of person. One we would have hired again if she’d been available. She didn’t complain, for instance, when I showed her the reel mower that I’d recently bought because I don’t like the noise of power mowers. She nodded when I explained that it took a little more muscle, that you had to get some momentum up to make the blades spin like an eggbeater, and that the whole thing often jerked to a halt if a small stick jammed its way into the blades. Remove the stick, back up, and fling the mower forward again, I told her, and cut the grass often, while it’s still short enough to be cut rather than just bent over. All in all, using that mower on our yard was like giving yourself a haircut with a sharpened stone. But Kristi did it. She may not have kept it up if she’d had to mow for an entire summer, but during those two weeks she was as diligent as if she were a new employee on probation. And then she went above and beyond. She raked all of the dead magnolia leaves in the front yard into a big pile. I imagined her out there—sweaty, dusty, without any reason except to make the place look better for us when we got back. I thanked her, told her how impressed I was by her motivation. She apologized for not having time to bag up all the leaves. We paid her—not nearly what she was worth!—and off she went.
How many times over the next year did I almost go out there with a string of large black garbage bags? How often did I look at that pile of magnolia leaves—big and brown and hard as discarded armadillo shells, leaves that don’t decompose the way oak or maple leaves do, leaves that will last forever unless you pulverize them and break them down to their basic constituents, the way you would, say, plastic milk jugs—and wish that Kristi had been a little less diligent? Spent a little more time on the porch with a bottle of beer, enjoying the wholesome shagginess of a yard in which the grass regularly creeps over the edge of the curb and into the street, in which the hard clay shows through like a wash?
I wished it many times, until I finally borrowed a friend’s power mower, spread the leaves out to about two inches high, and went back and forth in a great cloud of red dust until there was nothing left but magnolia confetti, light enough to blow away.
~~~
The summer I was twelve, my friend Jim Roberts and I were asked by our former teacher to feed her cats while she and her husband went out of town for the weekend. They lived three blocks away, and while Jim and I had spent most of the previous year, when this woman was our teacher, memorizing the facial and bodily features that made her beautiful, we’d never met her husband. Like any adolescent boys enamored of a twenty-three-year-old who leans softly over your shoulder to give you help on a math problem, we didn’t even imagine that she had a husband. And when we finally met him, on the day that we went to their house to be trained for the job—the cat got an egg yolk in with its canned food, and she had to teach us how to crack and separate an egg—it somehow didn’t surprise us that the guy was an ass. We didn’t expect to find anyone (beyond ourselves) who would be worthy of her. He was a lieutenant in the Air Force, too proud of his uniforms and little silver bars. He hung quietly in the kitchen doorway while his wife had us each crack a couple of eggs—she’d bought a dozen for us to practice on, and she held our hands lightly as we each first tapped the egg on the edge of the counter, then cupped it back and forth so that the white strung itself into the sink and we were left with just the yolk to plop into the cat food. Then when she took us on a tour of the house, he shuffled behind, getting in our way when we got to the end of the hall and had to backtrack. His only redeeming quality, we found out when we got to the living room, was his record collection—several feet of albums arranged neatly in black-wire racks. Moments later, as we were getting ready to leave and palming the house key that his wife had just showed us the intricacies of using, we found out for sure why we hated him. He told us not to play the stereo, not to touch any of his records. He didn’t say it nicely, as in Now, you boys be careful with whatever you touch here. He said it as if he didn’t trust the choice that his wife had made in hiring us, as if he didn’t much like the idea of her associating with sixth-graders at all. His wife gave him a glare.
We came back that Friday evening and began to do what any twelve-year-old boys would—which was to play the stereo, to rifle through his record collection, to sit in the overstuffed chairs and sing along with every song we knew the words to. How was he going to know? Dust for fingerprints on the smoky brown plastic cover of his turntable? Play every album to check for new scratches? We had a fine time. Like Blake himself thirty years later, we didn’t just watch the house, we enjoyed it. And come Sunday evening, when our old teacher and her husband arrived home early, just as Jim Roberts and I were finishing giving the cat his dinner and only moments after we’d listened one more time to the Chicago IV album, we were shocked when the lieutenant strode right from the front door to the stereo—no hello—and discovered that we’d forgotten to unplug it again.
~~~
I never set up Blake in the way that that lieutenant set us up. Though I can still vividly recall how that lieutenant yanked the plug from the outlet and held it up silently for his wife as if to prove what he must have been predicting all the way home, it never occurred to me to do something similar with Blake.
And if, after Blake left, I began thinking that maybe I should have installed a web cam in the upper corner of the living room, I still knew I never could have done it. Maybe going away for a weekend is one thing, and going away for a summer is quite another. Maybe you can expect to retain almost complete control over the course of two days, while trying to do so for two months would drive you nuts.
Some of my empathy for Blake, some of my lack of umbrage at his willingness to take us at our word when we told him to consider the place his, comes from being charmed by his youthfulness. He is tall and soft, he favors loose-fitting Hawaiian shirts and khaki fatigue pants, and when he first answered the email I’d sent out to the university listserv asking for a housesitter, he pleaded, “Please don’t discount me just because I’m a student.” All of the other replies I got, in fact, were from people at least a few years older than Blake—grad students, people in between apartment leases, single folks moving to town and wanting a chance to get a feel for the place before committing to living in one neighborhood or another. One woman volunteered her fiancé as a housesitter; he was moving in from North Carolina a few months before the wedding and couldn’t, for whatever reason, stay with her. But the prospect of having anyone feed our cats who was also going through the inevitable mess of a wedding didn’t sound like a wise idea for us or them. In the end, Blake came with good recommendations from people we knew, he said he’d housesat for his English teacher in high school, and he sincerely seemed to need summer housing the most. “If this doesn’t come through for me,” he said, “I have to go home and spend the summer with my completely insane family. I don’t want to do that.”
So we hired him on. We of course wanted him to treat and take care of the house and the cats in exactly the same ways we would, but we also knew that wouldn’t happen. He had a life to live—a busy one—which is why he needed to stay in town in the first place. So, like people having to decide what possessions to pull from a burning home, we told him what was most important to us. Feed the cats and clean their litter boxes was the first item on a list Maura made up called IF YOU DON’T DO ANYTHING ELSE . . . . Water the young azalea bushes. Water the white oak sapling in the front yard. Water the Russian Olive tree next to the front porch. Basically, the list boiled down to, keep things alive.
~~~
Housesitting is one of those privileged times, when someone gives over to you something private. Trusts you. The perks seem so enticing that Maura and I have ourselves frequently dreamed of being professional caretakers. “The perfect way to live cheaply in a beautiful place while not needing another job—like getting a fellowship with lawn-mowing duties,” Maura says. We would have time to write, time to spend with our daughter. No mortgage, no property taxes. Once, I did research on taking care of lighthouses. There is a market for it. A lighthouse-caretaker’s newsletter announces openings and gives tips on making your lighthouse comfortable and your life within it satisfying. We dreamed for weeks of waves crashing against our very own rocks on the coast of Maine, of writing and cooking and every once in while climbing the steps to make sure the big bulb was still lit.
Now and then we read The Caretaker Gazette, “the only publication in the world devoted to the property-caretaking field.” It provides profiles of successful caretakers and advertises opportunities, most of them in places offering plenty of privacy.
CARETAKER(S) WANTED for very remote homestead near Hells Canyon, Idaho. Must have 4WD vehicle and be self-reliant. Mild climate but winter access varies. Homestead has hydroelectricity & most amenities but no phone. Animals fine. Great free retreat for the right persons. We just want someone to be living in our home.
Or:
COUPLE, or a single person able to handle isolation, is needed on a remote southern Arizona ranch. Caretaker, cooking, housekeeping, and maintenance responsibilities. Small salary, housing and insurance provided.
Others, though, offer spectacular, vacation-like locales and amenities. One is “within walking distance of one of the world’s most biodiverse national parks.” Another, in Alaska, has “Orcas, eiders, sea otters, caribou, hydroelectric power, Internet, loom, hot tub.” One in California promises that you “can fish off the porch. Keep all gold found in the river.” There’s a cruise-ship enthusiasm to many of the ads, hinting that there’d be no work involved at all, that one’s biggest worry would be having heavy enough fishing line to haul in the really big gold nuggets. (This impression is reinforced by the address for The Caretaker Gazette itself, which is a P.O. box in Carefree, Arizona.)
~~~
Housesitting, however, is never really carefree. Maura and I didn’t want our housesitters to think it is, and we never let ourselves assume it is during the two times we had been housesitters ourselves. Neither job was “professional.” Each was a favor to friends, and a favor to ourselves. Both jobs came in the same year, the first in the dead of winter, the second the following summer. We were grad students in Iowa, comfortable in an apartment of our own, well past the stage of dislocation and unrootedness that characterizes many people’s early adulthoods.
For three weeks that December and January, we lived in the rambling Victorian house of one of my professors. It was only six blocks from our apartment, but we rarely ventured back home. It was cold out. (My professor and his wife had gone to Hawaii.) And their house had all the luxuries of a grandparents’ home—comfortable furniture, big TVs that had cable, cabinets full of spices and Tupperware, a furnace that kicked out enough hot air to let us walk around in summer clothes. They’d left a goose in the freezer and insisted we cook it for Christmas dinner. We did. They’d gotten a tree, an eight-foot blue spruce. We baked lemon slices and strung them for decorations. My professor told me to use his writing space—an oak-paneled third-floor attic lined with books and windows overlooking the half-acre backyard, the snow-tinged black soil of the huge and empty vegetable garden, the tops of neighbors’ houses on the other side of the block. On his computer I kept a daily log of “house happenings”: a casual count of the birds (finches, cardinals, sparrows, juncos) attracted to the suet and seed outside the kitchen window; a description of the snowplow rumbling down their street early one morning; the story of us cooking the goose. I didn’t put down everything. I didn’t mention the comfort of lying in their bed and reading from the neat stacks of magazines on the side table; or of sitting at their small wooden kitchen table each morning, listening to their coffee-maker gurgle and browsing their copy of the newspaper; or of other private moments that the walls of one’s home ought to keep from people’s sight. But I imagined that my professor and his wife would be interested not only in how we got along during their absence, but in how their house got along. A report card, an activity record. In a way, I suppose, I was doing the same thing that Blake did for us—providing proof to our employers that Maura and I were worthy occupants of the house, that we’d known how to see it and feel it and understand it. That we’d appreciated the house.
When Carl and Kate returned, though, bundled reluctantly in parkas, their minds seemed more in Hawaii than in Iowa—and not much at all on the small highlights I’d recorded about the comings and goings around their house. They described with enthusiasm and longing the trails they’d hiked and volcanoes they’d seen—as if only by holding on to at least the memory of a tropical lushness could they get through the rest of a Midwestern winter.
They wanted to know, of course, that the house was okay for us, that it hadn’t given us any problems. “No problems at all,” we assured them, and then we moved back into our tinier and chillier apartment, without the cable, without the newspaper subscription and the blue spruce.
I was neither surprised nor disappointed by the minor response to my record-keeping. The observations must have been commonplace for Carl and Kate, telling them nothing they hadn’t come to know and expect after thirty years in that house. Who wouldn’t rather dwell on the tropics than on the regular rumble of a snowplow outside one’s front door?
But I experienced both surprise and disappointment—plus a re-evaluation of those pleasant few weeks—when, a month later, Carl revealed to us that when they’d come back their minds hadn’t even really been in Hawaii—or at least not as much as they’d wanted them to be. Instead, he explained, the trip had been hastily taken under the dark knowledge that Kate’s breast cancer was recurring. Another mastectomy was looming, and they’d wanted an environment of sun and thick vegetation to help put the immediate future into perspective.
No wonder they couldn’t go much beyond a quiet appreciation that we’d kept the house standing. No wonder we came to believe that our contribution was nowhere near enough—even if steadiness was all that Carl and Kate wanted, and adding more change to what was already on the horizon would have been only a complication. Steadiness is easy to give, and if we’d known beforehand, we could have gone further: stepping more gingerly through the house, doing something to improve the place rather than simply hold it steady, doing something equivalent to Kristi’s raking of our magnolia leaves.
~~~
The summer gig was longer and the result of both parties needing a change of scene. Iowa was steamy and claustrophobic, the countryside of western Pennsylvania temporarily too rural for my friend Phil and his girlfriend Chris, who had booked a June-August sublet of an apartment in Manhattan. I’d once shared a house with Phil, and we’d been friends for ten years. If there was anybody’s space I knew how to take care of at least as well as my own, it was his.
But the complication of the approaching summer was that the space we’d be moving into was only barely his. He’d been in it two years, and was still in the process of staking his claim. Its real owner was Chris, who’d been there twenty years, who’d played out an entire previous marriage there, who’d grown gardens and dug a pond and been a steadfast part of the close-knit neighborhood. We’d visited three times since Phil had moved in, and we’d become friends with Chris quickly and easily. But she, Maura, and I all share quiet personalities and the habit of growing into relationships slowly. This friendship was still new, and very early in its development. And because we had not yet seen Chris anywhere but in her house and on her land, it was impossible to know her apart from that environment. That is, Chris was her house and her land and her gardens, just as much as she was a person beyond all that. That intertwining was a big part of what attracted us to her: the solidity with which she occupied her space, the confidence that made us feel relaxed and welcomed and secure when we were there.
The house was stout and square, red-bricked, slate-roofed. It had been built in 1884 as a one-room schoolhouse. In the years since, someone had added interior walls and a second floor, yet it retained a schoolhouse feel—busy, warm, tight. It sat on twenty-five acres, some of it in woods, much of it in a sloping field grown in hay, the pond at the low end.
It was the gardens, though—vegetable, flower, and herb—that spoke most powerfully and impressively of Chris’s history in her home, of her identity with it. On our first visit, in high summer, she’d given us a tour. There were the greens—Romaine, buttercrunch, arugula. She’d been growing peppers and potatoes and onions and basil and yellow crookneck squash and zucchini and sweet corn and black beauty eggplant and twenty different kinds of tomatoes. She ringed the huge garden with hollyhocks and bee balm and statice and asters and zinnias and nicotianas and sweet williams and irises and columbines. She kept one large plot (fifty by one hundred feet) for the heavy crop and the spreading cucumbers and pumpkins, and a smaller (twenty by twenty feet) for strawberries and peas and more gentle things. In July, to ease your car to a stop on their gravel driveway and get out slowly into the elegance and richness of that garden is like coming upon Eden, or Tuscany. Chris will play it down, will not say anything about the effort of early morning watering, of weeding (all by hand, all organic), of nurturing each plant into ripeness and fullness. Of sowing new lettuce and endive and arugula through the summer and into the fall. Of harvesting and canning and making jams and tomato sauces. She works at it as quietly as the plants themselves.
She’d recently converted to Judaism and taken as her Hebrew name Ganya—Garden.
In early spring, a week or two after we’d agreed that we would be housesitting, Chris called to ask what she should plant, what she might get going for us. It was a politeness, a generosity, like offering to stock our favorite shampoos. She insisted we didn’t have to have anything in; the garden could lie fallow for a year. She had no expectation that everyone’s yard should blossom like hers, or that hers should blossom when she wasn’t there to entice it into doing so. But if we wanted something in, she’d start it. She was going to do some spring lettuce anyway. Well, tomatoes, we said, and lettuce and peppers, basics we could enjoy, vegetables within our capabilities as novice gardeners.
Maura and I had been doing a little gardening. The previous summer we’d borrowed a small plot from our landlord and coaxed into being a few tomatoes and some basil, as well as plenty of weeds that we began to overlook by the middle of the hot July. We knew we could have done much better, been more diligent, knew that in the future we could devote ourselves fully to the hobby. The summer had gotten away from us; other tasks had seemed more important. And, we came to conclude, it was just a trial run. After Chris offered us space for a second go-round, and after we began to think about the possibilities, we called back to tell her: Some onions, and feel free to plant carrots. Whatever is easy for you, put it in. We’ll take care of it. We grew more and more confident.
There was, for one, her energy about the place. In a vague way, we probably assumed all we’d need would be to give the garden an occasional push once she got it rolling. For another, there was my own explanation—boasting?—to her of what I’d been learning about gardening from Carl, my Iowa professor, who for several years had hired me to turn his garden plot with a shovel each November, who had me help him plant seeds each spring, who explained to me on any mid-summer day I happened to drop by the results of his gardening experiments over the years, the assumptions that informed his idiosyncratic methods. He was writing a book about being a gardener, and there I was in it, portrayed with shovel in hand. Maybe I made more of that portrayal than was really warranted.
Chris never said to us, as we later said to Blake, Just keep things alive. In fact, several times before we arrived, she mentioned again that we should feel no pressure with the garden. She wisely didn’t stop there. She planted the smaller bed in buckwheat, to keep it from being a burden on us and to let it reabsorb some nutrients. “Don’t let the garden take over your lives,” she advised us. We heard her words as less of a warning than we should have, because we saw how the garden had taken over her life, and remembered what it looked like each summer because of that.
“We’ll care for it,” we insisted, “we want to,” even though as the summer went on we would come to take her at her word, as she—believing we were better gardeners than we were—took us at ours.
~~~
They were long, languorous months. I rarely listened to the radio or watched TV, but when I did it was usually to hear how close we were to record highs that day, how long the heat spell would last. Mostly I didn’t care because I spent afternoons floating on an inner tube in the pond, paddling myself to one shore or another, scooping up green algae with a white plastic oar and flinging it in long strands into the grass. When Phil and Chris called, they told of how much hotter it was in the city, of how anyone with any sense had gotten the hell out of town. But also of the change of pace that was invigorating, of being able to see movies, eat in delis, volunteer at a soup kitchen.
We treated our visitors to fine times as our guests in the house—feeding them what fresh vegetables we could on the picnic table under the pine tree, letting them sleep on the guest beds, floating with them in warm inner-tubes on the pond. When nobody was there, I was trying to write a book, and Maura was reading her way through the English Renaissance.
The lettuce bolted, and we pulled it up and planted more. The tomatoes ripened, but most split before we got them off the vines—small failures that baffled me (too much water? not enough?) and rotted like bad omens. Few peppers, inexplicably, appeared on what otherwise looked like healthy plants. The onions seemed to be fine, though when we skipped a week of weeding, we lost track of their fine shoots and couldn’t tell what to pull up. The thing that grew best was the buckwheat, which was knee-high by the Fourth of July and thick as a pompadour. I wondered whether to do a mowing, as with hay, but I’d never grown buckwheat, and I finally concluded: the more, the better. Still, there was shagginess about the place, and I compensated by tending the things around the garden—mowing the lawn religiously, repairing a leak in the kitchen faucet, refolding all the sheets in the linen closet. I even went to a barber and had him cut my own hair down to the scalp.
But things grew all around us, including blueberries from the six bushes on the east side of the house. I spread nets over them as Chris had instructed, and so got most of the berries before the birds did. It was a small but bountiful triumph, and in late July, when Maura was going to New York anyway to rendezvous with her mother, I sent her off with a pie. Some fruits for their rightful owners. Maura took the train, and she carried the pie, which must’ve weighed eight or ten pounds, on her lap all the way to Penn Station, then in the taxi to Mulberry Street, then carefully into Phil and Chris’s sublet apartment itself. I imagine Phil and Chris cutting into that pie—the juice of their own berries running thick off the knife and then off the spatula and then off their forks, the berries themselves popping softly between their teeth—and I think of how anyone far from home must exist blissfully in two worlds when a package like that arrives, like a box of cookies that my mom sent to my dad when he was in Vietnam.
~~~
Housesitters operate under illusions. Wandering freely from room to room, privy to closets and bookshelves and junk drawers in the kitchen, they think they know something of the lives that normally get lived there. But houses left unto themselves are static, and when the owners’ lives move elsewhere, no house can reveal the secrets its owners took with them, or the ones that grow in those other places. We’d found that out with Carl and Kate, discovered that whatever we ate from their refrigerator, whatever we learned from listening to the creaks of their stairs and counting their visiting birds told us nothing about what dominated the minds and hearts of the owners themselves.
It was mere coincidence that the circumstances that colored the end of our summer as housesitters were so similar to the ones that had retroactively colored our previous winter as housesitters. First Kate’s cancer. Then Chris’s.
Chris’s showed up in New York—a lump unforeseen, a mugging. We wouldn’t know the details until Chris and Phil returned home—wouldn’t, in fact, know anything about the lump or the hospital visits or the lump’s removal, wouldn’t have any clue to imagine that their urban summer had become something much more than just museums and foreign films and ethnic restaurants and bookstores and humid afternoons when they longed for the pond where I was usually floating.
They didn’t call to tell us about it, and didn’t say anything to Maura when she visited. They dealt as privately with their own more serious struggles in the city as we did with our insignificant tomato failures in the country. There are kinds of news that don’t travel well between housesitters and house owners.
But news, of course, comes out in the end. I hoped our own would be mild and summer-ish—a hope nearly dashed at the last minute when our mediocre gardening got upstaged by a failed refrigerator. It seized up like an old engine. I struggled for a day trying to fix it, cursing the thing’s weakness and its timing. Not long before, a friend had told me about asking her neighbor to feed her bird—a small budgie—while she went on vacation. The neighbor forgot the bird for a week, and then went to find it dead on the bottom of its cage. She felt horrible, admitted with shame her stupidity and irresponsibility. I’d done nothing to the fridge, but it was as dead as that bird, and I felt the same guilt.
I was alone when they got home. Maura had gone back to Iowa a week earlier, and I’d spent the previous days cleaning and straightening, making the house look as if I had not touched a thing. The refrigerator hulked silently in the kitchen, and the image of that lieutenant striding to his stereo was absurdly in my head.
It got dark, and I sat on the couch reading a magazine. When they arrived at eleven, Phil backed the truck up to the front door, for ease of unloading clothes and books and the delicacies they’d stocked up on at Zabar’s: cheeses, pestos, sauces, a refrigerator’s worth of perishables. There was an awkward pause when I told them there was no place to store them. Chris went to the basement and made room in the deep-freeze. Then she went to bed.
After warm beers and quiet talk that skimmed along the top of Phil’s own exhaustion, he and I went, too. I slept in the guest bed.
~~~
Whether to abandon the place immediately, or stay and catch up? Isn’t there a reason parents send baby-sitters home quickly, gathering their homes back around them, peeking into bedrooms as a way to re-accept their own responsibilities and privileges? How rarely do we want waiters to loom over us after they bring the food?
I should have left that night, should have slept all that day and had the dark highway to myself, so they could have the house to themselves. Times of transition are private and usually edited out of novels and movies, for good reasons. There were temptations, of course. Phil and I didn’t get to visit often, and neither wanted to suggest that we should miss this opportunity. On Phil’s part, I suspect, was politeness. On mine, pride. I wanted to see their relief at the shape of the house, the clarity of the pond’s water. I wanted to witness pleasure at washing the grime of the city out of their pores.
I slept poorly, and when Phil and I drove off to play tennis the next morning, I felt as if I should be moving further than from one side of a court to another. But we played, he told me painfully what had transpired in New York, and then at noon, when we eased back into the driveway, we saw that nothing looked the same as it had when we left. Chris was dismounting from the riding lawn mower. The buckwheat plot was gone. The garden was mostly dirt, with mounds of green humped along the grassy edges—the weeds she’d yanked. Our sweat was dry from the ride home, but hers was glistening on her face and dripping into her eyes. No one said much.
It was difficult to think of disturbing the languidness of the summer, but it was also clear that the languidness was no longer there to be disturbed. The city had swooped in, and the country was not in good enough shape to hold up to it. My job as caretaker was over, and the only other roles I could imagine inhabiting right then were apologist or vanisher. I didn’t know Chris well enough to ask her about the cancer, and it wasn’t me anyway that she wanted to commune with. I may have said quietly that I was sorry for the mess—meaning, vaguely, the garden, the fridge, the lump—and she may have accepted my apology, but without trying to seem that I was in a rush, I loaded the car quickly and left.
~~~
If Chris strode to the garden and unplugged it in the same way that lieutenant did his stereo, then it was clearly for better reasons, a more necessary sense of control, of possessiveness.
If I did not tell Chris and Phil once again how much we’d enjoyed the property, if I did not Gee-whiz about the experience in the way that Blake would later do so disarmingly to us, it was because to mention my joys and relaxations would’ve only seemed as if I were trying to shift the focus away from the shortfalls in front of us.
There are only two ways a housesitter—like that other itinerant, the camper—can do the job perfectly: Leave no trace or Leave it better than you found it. Isn’t either of these the secret to being a perfect housesitter? Isn’t either of these, especially when there is in the picture a homeowner who has the least bit of understandable and human possessiveness, as impossible as any perfection?
I imagine Blake searching for a power mower on that day before we were due home, maybe charming one from a professor or a friend whose family lived close by. I imagine him trying to figure out whether all the furniture was back in its original arrangement, and what to do about the rosemary and sage plants in pots on the back porch that he did not keep alive (though they were on the “If you do nothing else” list). He left them where they were, and said nothing about them. Like Blake, like Kristi, like me, you can finally do nothing but abandon the place in the shape it’s in. The chances are gone. There is no more time to bag the magnolia leaves, no more time for the right thoughts to hammer inside your head and for you to redo everything in exactly the way the homeowner would have done it, no more time to uncook the goose, no more time to save yourself—as we ought to but can’t in any relationship—from failing.
