Your Guests Will Never Leave

SHORT FICTION from 1995 by Deda Edney

Even while she was doing it she knew it was crazy and there would be repercussions. It was one of those ideas you have for personal entertainment and never act on. But today nobody was around and Elaine put it into action.

She wrote to five friends back in Louisiana saying she had found the perfect house and had put a down payment on it.

This was a lie.

That morning in the laundromat while she waited for the dryers to finish Elaine had picked up a free Western North Carolina Real Estate listings book.

Smiling realtors punched out optimism from every page. “Affordable … welcome … your new property … your land … everyone’s dream,” plenty of exclamation points.

On page three a woman with big teeth and a wedge of hair-sprayed bangs was saying, “Your guests will never want to leave.” As if whispered in Elaine’s ear, this gave her the idea to cut out pictures of houses to send to her friends.

Each friend would receive a different house from the real estate book.

The burst of energy Elaine felt supported her fantasy and made her feel quite unusual. It was time to tell the friends she left two months ago that, instead of still being jobless and in a 1 BR, 1 BA rented apartment full of moving boxes, her dreams were about to come true.

Her friends would write her back, saying how incredibly fast her progress was, and how right she was to have left her job, her husband, her home, and even them, and go on a mid-life spiritual quest to the mountains of North Carolina.

Look, they would say, here’s a picture of Elaine’s new home! Now they could fantasize for themselves in detail about the place they would soon visit on their mountain vacation.

Elaine’s excitement about this brought on a hot flash, which wasn’t too unpleasant. The rest of the afternoon she wrote the letters.

She was careful to choose homes from the ads that weren’t incredibly expensive. The $80,000 range seemed realistic, since she wanted her friends to feel comfortable about it.

A certain amount of land around the house was important. Privacy and the presence of nature would suggest the intimacy Elaine and her friends had established in their crones circle back in Louisiana. They would sometimes take a picnic cloth to a meadow where, while eating, they could sense the presence of the Mother Goddess. Being grounded to their feminine selves like this helped them stay sane while their usefulness as mothers and wives was breaking apart.

These pieces of themselves drifted off when they became fifty and older, but their ceremonies of loss and rebirth kept them together, both as individuals and as a group.

Today Elaine was about to reassure the group that although she had broken away from them, she was not drifting, and would soon host the circle in her new home.

She wrote to Margaret about “a log cabin in a semi-secluded area with beautiful cathedral ceiling and Jacuzzi”. The picture she cut out showed room for several cars. The kitchen would be decorated with vintage items picked up for nothing at a country auction.

On her letter to Clarissa she pasted a house nearly obscured by trees. Obscurity allowed for possibility. This house, like the Earth Mother, could assume any features you wanted. The caption said the house was newly remodeled and the owner would pay closing costs.

The house that Elaine pasted on Janine’s letter had an in-ground pool, but Elaine planned to fill it in for a garden based on the book she had about Monet’s picnics. She would use the drained water to create a pond.

Charlotte would see a sophisticated A-frame winterized house with views for $150,000, a bit unrealistic but irresistible. It was a nice getaway home, it said, with “hardwood floors, lake, mountains and sunsets, this house has it all”. This house made Elaine feel uneasy, not really comfortable with a place that might, for this price, require more experience as a hostess than she had. The fear of having reached a bit far felt like the tingling sensation before a hot flash.

Months ago, before she realized she was menopausal, Elaine woke up at night with a painful tingling in her legs. She thought she was dreaming about falling, or something equally fearful. Sometimes a dream would present her with details and the tingling would wake her in time to escape an encroaching figure or while rescuing a child from a crumbling bridge. Even though it was just a chemical change, she chose to view the sensation as a signal from her youth telling her to be careful.

Today while pasting down the picture of the house with “the sunset … everything”, Elaine got the signal to be careful. But the next step in her personal growth should be to overcome her inner critic, so she forced herself to ignore it, and sealed the envelope to Charlotte.

For her fifth letter, to Angela, Elaine exercised new decisiveness. She cut out a white two-story house with dormers, a large porch, gardens and gazebo. She matched it with the caption from another, less charming house which described fireplaces and mountain views, and was stamped “SOLD”.

Inspired, Elaine wrote to Angela her full expression of accomplishment, of having managed her resources well (in such a short time, too), of having kept a steady course, of defeating the elusiveness of fate.

Now the five envelopes were sealed and stamped, sitting by her purse on a moving box full of blankets near the front door. She would mail the letters tomorrow, sharing her wonderful news. On her way to the post office she would pass the storage unit where most of her furniture was, imagining how it would not be there much longer. She anticipated this pleasure and then another one, of receiving excited replies from her friends by return mail.

The next morning, Monday, Elaine had her coffee, scanned the paper for employment ads and walked to the post office. She stood in front of the out-of-town mail slot in the lobby holding the five letters, wondering how far she was going to go with this game.

Certainly her friends would think she was crazy when they compared the pictures of the houses they received and saw that each one was different. Something was seriously wrong. Elaine was hot with embarrassment, afraid she would never recover from the results of mailing these letters.

Then she realized she would be extremely safe for the two or three days before the letters reached her friends in Louisiana. The idea of security drifted through her mind. It seemed to settle and as she stood there it became a house. Elaine pictured her furniture in this house, her books on the shelves, her laundry drying on the line in the yard, lots of space for contented guests. She dropped the letters in the slot.

“Just listed, Immaculate.”

“Your guests will never want to leave.”

“Just listed – spacious beyond imagination.”

“Spectacular views and much, much more.”

“Convenient location, owner says sell.”

Short fiction by Deda Edney