If You Were Here

deftly works the lockbox, quickly extracting a key. She calls over her shoulder, “Let’s have a peek.”

The door opens into a sunny, inviting entry hall with plenty of room for coats and umbrellas and all the other detritus associated with living above the arctic circle.²⁵ I lean on Mac while I kick off my snowy Merrell clogs and slide on a pair of blue flannel elastic booties. “You really don’t need to wear those if you’re in your socks,” Liz tells me.

“Eh.” I shrug. “I don’t mind.” The hardwood is made of thick planks of polished oak, stained to a lovely cherry color. There’s a solidly protective level of varnish on top of it, so I already know the floor will stand up to years of muddy paws and throw-up kitties.

We first step into the small living room — or rather, I skid, as the combination of socks and booties turns the floor into a hot skillet and my feet into pats of butter — and we admire the picture window and the view. “There’s not a crackhead to be seen out there,” Mac remarks with more than a little awe.

We then wander into the dining room, which feels extra cozy with its raised hearth surrounded by built-in bead-board shelves. “Lovely,” we all murmur. The walls are covered in wallpaper — normally my nemesis — but it’s so rich and understated that at no point do I begin to look for loose corners to tug. We move on to the family room.

One of the rules I’ve learned from watching the home-buying shows is that you’re not supposed to base your opinion on the homeowners’ possessions; rather you’re obligated to look beyond their stuff to see the real features, like double-paned windows, or the real problems, like a water-damaged ceiling. A professionally staged living room is great, but it doesn’t matter if the furnace is on its last legs and the house is located in a floodplain.

Of course, the home-selling shows are all about staging, because it’s a fact that well-presented houses sell faster.²⁶ And even though my head understands that staging is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, my heart can’t help but leap when I see their furniture. “Oh, my God,” I exclaim. “They have the Lancaster sofa set from Restoration Hardware! That’s what we have! We already know exactly what it would look like if we lived here!”

We pass through the breakfast area (sunny! airy!) and the well-appointed galley kitchen (a warming drawer! double ovens!) and into the narrow mudroom with the spanking new front-loading washer and dryer. Mac gets a faraway look on his face, lost in a daydream about all the towels and jeans we could wash in a single load.²⁷

“Shall we check out the backyard?” Liz asks.

We put our shoes back on and step out onto a tidy stone patio that overlooks half an acre of young trees, all enclosed by a new fence. “The dogs would have so much fun out here,” Mac remarks.

“Yeah, not really. Daisy would pee on the patio and then demand to be let back into the house, and Duckie would do nothing but stand in the farthest part of the yard and protect us from falling leaves and squirrels with his nonstop barking. Then I’d have to wade through snowbanks in my slippers to get him to stop, because he never comes when he’s called,” I reply. “No, thank you.”

“We have plenty of room to put in a pool,” Mac says.

“And now I’m back on board with the yard.”

We return inside, stomping off snow and reapplying the sockcondoms. We check out the cute basement and find it more than suits our needs. The ceilings are high and the windows well positioned to eliminate glare when setting up the home theater. There’s a wee office off the main part of the basement, and the second we step inside, Mac shouts, “Mine!”

Off the office, there’s an additional storage area where we stumble upon a litter box. Okay, this? Is the biggest selling feature of all. Even though our current house is huge, there aren’t a lot of good places for the kittens’ boxes. No matter where I place them or how often I change the clay, the open-concept layout means the stink wafts through the whole place to the point that when visitors come over, they don’t notice the crown molding or cherry floors. Rather, the first thing out of everyone’s mouth is, “How many cats do you have?” Shameful.

After a thorough basement inspection, we move up to the second floor. The first room we see must be the owners’ little girl’s room, because it looks like Easter has thrown up on a Disney film. Everything is either pale pink or mint green. Pink-and-green gingham ribbons suspend white wooden blocks spelling out SOPHIA over the big window. The floor is covered in a floral pastel rug in shades of green and gold, and a white chair rail divides the walls in half. The bottom part of the wall is ballet-slipper pink, and the top part is covered in pink toile wallpaper. Only rather than the traditional eighteenth-century pastoral scene of oxen and farmers and straw-roofed huts, the lime green line drawings are of bunnies and frogs in repose.

“Obviously you’d want to change this,” Liz notes.

Obviously.

I mean, I’d need to find blocks that spelled out MIA.

The other bedrooms are large and well laid out, and some come with attached baths where the fixtures are new and the water pressure impressive.

According to the MLS listing, the whole house has been recently renovated and everything’s brand-new — the floors, the furnace, the water heater, etc. The house is compact, but it’s move-in ready, and all we’d have to do would be to replace the owners’ sturdy leather family room set with our own.

As we put our shoes on again and take one final glance behind us, Liz says, “The house shows really well and it’s priced right. But what do you think?”

Mac and I glance at each other. In theory, this house is what we want. Granted, it’s smaller than what we have now, but it’s in a nice neighborhood, and it wouldn’t require a single tweak before moving in. The best part is, we’d never have to deal with Vienna again.

And yet now that we’re standing here in the handsome foyer with the good closets and indestructible floor, something about the place doesn’t feel right. There’s no opportunity for us to make our mark on it, because everything’s already been done just so. I mean, I don’t want to do major construction, but updating things a bit would be a lot of fun.

Nothing particularly draws me to this house. At first, I thought because they had our sofa, that was a sign, but upon closer inspection, they’ve got the Maxwell model, not the Lancaster. The difference between rounded and squared-off arms is subtle, but crucial.

This house is like meeting a guy who’s totally into marriage, comes from a fantastic family, has a well-paying job that makes him happy, and whose favorite hobbies include buying you designer handbags and watching reality television. I mean, where’s the challenge? Where’s the struggle? Where’s the satisfaction that comes from finally breaking Mac — I mean him—of his bad habits?

“Liz, I have kind of a weird question. Is it possible that sometimes a house can be too perfect and it’s kind of a turnoff?” I ask.

She smiles back at me. “I see that all the time. Remember, purchasing a house is more than just figuring out numbers. You buy with your gut, too. And if your gut says this isn’t the one, then we have plenty more to see.”

We walk out to the car and Liz asks me again if I wouldn’t rather sit in the front seat.

“Nope,” I reply. “If I do, Mac will try to make me use the navigation system.”

“And what’s wrong with that?” he calls over his shoulder.

“Listen, I did not spend all that time last night poring over my map just to have some officious German voice second-guess me. My map kicks ass. My map is bank.”

Mac chuckles at me. “Still trying to make ‘bank’ happen?”²⁸

“Of course.” I have a running bet with my college roommate, Ann Marie. It started when I was convinced I’d come up with the expression “all that and a bag of chips.” She didn’t believe me, claiming I’d heard someone say it on Oprah.²⁹ I never forgave Ann Marie for crushing my dream, so ever since then we’ve had an ongoing challenge on who can make the Next Big Expression happen. She’s been trying to get “sweet baby Ray!” into the collective unconscious, while I’ve been pushing “bank.”

Despite being a blond-bobbed soccer mom from Connecticut, Ann Marie is vaguely terrifying. She once instigated a coup at a Pampered Chef party. . and it wasn’t bloodless. Ann Marie works as a prosecuting attorney, and I sat in on one of her cases once. She showed up to court that day in a tangerine print shift, a padded headband, and a triple string of pearls. I had to laugh when the defense visibly relaxed upon spotting her. They had no idea they were about to be hit by a Lilly-clad guided missile. As the shell-shocked defendant was led out in cuffs, he kept repeating, “What just happened here?”

My point is that even with my international audience of socially networked teenagers reading my term, she’s