Lightning Strikes House, Twice

1573 Arbutus Drive, circa 1990

Long before the term “short sale” entered the common vernacular, my ex-husband and I lost our family’s home and equity through one. The events leading up to the short sale demonstrated, in high relief, the curious combination of disengenuousness and duplicity that ultimately put the “ex” in ex-husband. It was a stressful time for everyone touched by it, but my children emerged intact out the other side and grew into splendid adults—thoughtful, interesting, and responsible. The house changed hands several times, my ex-husband moved to a third-world country ruled by a military dictatorship, and I remarried.  In 2006, our former house was acquired by the current owners for $995,000. Let’s round up the numbers and call it a million dollars for a nice, thoroughly unremarkable, 3-bedroom, 2 -bath, 55-year-old suburban ranch-style house within prime commuting distance of San Francisco.

Through Interweb magic, I learned that 1573 Arbutus Drive is again on the market. It's as a short sale listed at $685K, more than $300K less than its closing price in 2006. I visited the house last week during an open house conducted under a lowering clouds by an improbably optimistic real estate agent.

Short sales carry about them an unmistakable air of desuetude—there's no gain for the about-to-be-ex-owners beyond a marginally less crippling blow to one's credit, so often people will not even bother to sweep the floors before the house is shown. And—voice of experience—the Stations of the Cross on the way to Short Sale Golgotha include Lack of Maintenance Funds, and Too Dispirited to Pick Up a Paintbrush, which can result in significant aesthetic deficits for the house. This house was no exception, a little pocket of Appalachia blighted by deteriorating pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey “enhancements” perpetrated by the guy who bought it in our short sale and tried, unsuccessfully, to turn it into a micro-McMansion.

Tarted up in lurid, chipped paint, dragged down by an excess of hardware, and burdened by a gargantuan fiberglass bathtub wedged into one of the minuscule bathrooms, the modest bones of the old house were barely discernable. The recognizeable stuff was bad news. Wasn’t that the same deck, now glossed over in worn paint, that needed to be replaced 17 years ago? That cook top, the same one that was in the house when I owned it, had been bought, used, at a restaurant liquidation sale in 1985. Industrial-cool then, it now looks like a health hazard. And whatever possessed the McMansion fetishist to install those down-market fake-granite Formica counters?

Muffled screams and crashes were coming from one of the bedrooms, where a multitasking teenager was jabbing at the controls of a video game while emitting streams of invective into a cell phone. “Fuck, blah blah, fuck, blah blah, fuck. Fuck fuck fuck,” he was saying, and my heart went out to him. Strangers were trooping through his family’s home, drawn by the blood in the water of a sale at less than market value. Someone was going to benefit from his family’s misfortune, and he had no say in the matter, other than that stream of futile fucks.

The kid had drawn a line in the sand against an approaching tidal wave churned up by grownups—bankers and real estate brokers and his unlucky parents. It stood for something like, “This is still my fucking room. I’m staying put, even during the fucking open house when I’m supposed to be gone so strangers can fucking pass judgment on my family’s taste and hygiene and finances in fucking freedom.” My own teenager had drawn a similar line all those years ago, expressed somewhat more elegantly.

There was no way to act upon the impulse to put my arms around him and whisper into his ear that he was going to be fine, that what was happening now was indeed a very big deal, but it would get smaller and smaller and then one day be just one memory among many, one domicile among many, and frankly, Sweetie, one sadness among many, because that is life. I wanted to tell him about the defiant note my 10-year-old daughter and her friends penciled in tiny letters inside what was now, for the moment, still his closet, claiming the room as forever hers, imbued with her spirit.

It’s not, of course, nor would she wish it to be. Owners have come and gone over the years, and the little girl is now a woman with her own home. It is filled with love and warmth and cheer—qualities and capacities that she and her brother and sister took with them when we left the house. These were not the only things—there was plenty of bad stuff to work through—but they are the most enduring and authentic, and therefore the most valuable. They were ported over with great care to the places we lived afterward, and, eventually, to the kids’ own apartments and houses. That is itself a kind of magic, and a more accurate measure of the real worth of a home than the crazy mad fluctuations of real estate values. It’s what I wish for that teenager and the family whose turn it is to leave behind the house on Arbutus Drive.

As for the rest: in the end, Sweetie, it doesn’t mean fuck-all.

 

Comments

[Julie G.]

Nice positive spin on something bad.

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