Ghost house
I'm house-sitting this week.
People have told me I need to enjoy the spectacle of wealth that is this giant, rather fancily-accoutre'd house (in-wall espresso machine as well as open access to space-age washing machine and wine cooler: Not as in Bartles & James, but rather a full-length refrigerator-type unit built for storing--and chock full of--wines kept at just such a temperature.)
Instead I feel uneasy. For life is not made good through the magic of an accomodating kitchen, no.
The house is undergoing renovation; it smells new--Or, like nothing, really. The ceilings are very high; the walls are shaded in hues of eggplant and pine green. There's little furniture on the pristine hardwood and clay-tile floors (cold)--and nothing lying out on the quartz kitchen counter. All is track mood-lighting--on the dimmest setting when I arrived until I figured out how to turn all the lights up to their very highest. The house echoes. It's like a house waiting to happen.
Late this afternoon, a Fed-Ex guy came by with a package for the owners. As I opened the tall (creaky, somehow) door to greet him, some other guy looking through the pile of renovation debris in the torn-up front yard (A very well-dressed man: This is a part of town where trash-picking is a profitable sport for all) looked up and said to the Fed-Ex man, as I stood in the doorway, "Nobody lives there."
I laughed as I signed the Fed-Ex clipboard, thinking the man was some jokey neighbor and friend of my absent hosts. He didn't smile back, only motioned to the rattan chair in the garbage pile and said, "What's wrong with this?"
"I don't know. I'm house-sitting."
I thanked Mr. Fed-Ex and closed the door, scuttled back through the chilly, utterly bare front room and set the package squarely in the center of the otherwise naked 10-foot dining room table.
No one lives here. The owners' greyhound skitters insubstantially about me as I cook, do free laundry and generally try hard not to sit still and feel the complete silence, the complete lack of smell or texture. There is no radio in this house--not one.
I'm living here, but I'm not. Living. If I holed up here until the owners got back, who would notice? Who would know, at all? That man on the sunny street outside did not see me. Maybe I am a ghost, too.
I'm house-sitting this week.
People have told me I need to enjoy the spectacle of wealth that is this giant, rather fancily-accoutre'd house (in-wall espresso machine as well as open access to space-age washing machine and wine cooler: Not as in Bartles & James, but rather a full-length refrigerator-type unit built for storing--and chock full of--wines kept at just such a temperature.)
Instead I feel uneasy. For life is not made good through the magic of an accomodating kitchen, no.
The house is undergoing renovation; it smells new--Or, like nothing, really. The ceilings are very high; the walls are shaded in hues of eggplant and pine green. There's little furniture on the pristine hardwood and clay-tile floors (cold)--and nothing lying out on the quartz kitchen counter. All is track mood-lighting--on the dimmest setting when I arrived until I figured out how to turn all the lights up to their very highest. The house echoes. It's like a house waiting to happen.
Late this afternoon, a Fed-Ex guy came by with a package for the owners. As I opened the tall (creaky, somehow) door to greet him, some other guy looking through the pile of renovation debris in the torn-up front yard (A very well-dressed man: This is a part of town where trash-picking is a profitable sport for all) looked up and said to the Fed-Ex man, as I stood in the doorway, "Nobody lives there."
I laughed as I signed the Fed-Ex clipboard, thinking the man was some jokey neighbor and friend of my absent hosts. He didn't smile back, only motioned to the rattan chair in the garbage pile and said, "What's wrong with this?"
"I don't know. I'm house-sitting."
I thanked Mr. Fed-Ex and closed the door, scuttled back through the chilly, utterly bare front room and set the package squarely in the center of the otherwise naked 10-foot dining room table.
No one lives here. The owners' greyhound skitters insubstantially about me as I cook, do free laundry and generally try hard not to sit still and feel the complete silence, the complete lack of smell or texture. There is no radio in this house--not one.
I'm living here, but I'm not. Living. If I holed up here until the owners got back, who would notice? Who would know, at all? That man on the sunny street outside did not see me. Maybe I am a ghost, too.
posted by Alice at 11:36 PM
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