Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home

by Matthew Batt

  Sully was just getting off the phone when a couple of semi-young folks came up the driveway, trailed by a man wearing a blond blazer that matched his mustache and pompadour. A good person would have told them to just hop on in and that the owner was out for a walk. A bad person would have grabbed Sully around the waist and said something like, “Sorry, there’s been a mistake. My partner and I have decided not to sell. Good luck.” We just gave them the stink-eye and waited.

  Jenae showed up, did a thirty-second tour, and said, “All right.” It had only been a week since we broke up with Fiona and lost that first house. When we told Sully it was a go, it felt like a rebound sort of move, a hopeless grab at something beyond our reach, and a test of our new relationship with Sully. He knew we were still waiting on some of the financing to go through and that we were a few weeks away from any kind of actual money, but he told us the place was ours.

  “How can you be so sure?” I asked. I reminded him that we’d been burned by another house three blocks away from this one.

  “Simple,” Sully said. He licked his thumb and smoothed the pleats on his khakis. Then he licked again and touched the newel post. “Dibs,” he said.

  I had to work that night, so the plan was to have Jenae and Sully get everything ready while I was at the restaurant. Then, as soon as I got off, I’d go to his office, sign by all the little X’s, and we’d fax over the offer. It’d all be wrapped up by first light.

  I ended up having to stay until closing time, so when I called at eleven, I thought Jenae and Sully would be playing Boggle they’d be so bored. As it turned out, they were still hard at work. While I had been dropping dishes and swearing at known violent offenders and illegal foreign nationals at the restaurant, they had heard from the seller’s realtor. By six P.M. she had received three offers, not including ours. So instead of playing nice, the sellers wanted a statement of preapproval for a loan, a written offer, and, unbelievably, a personal letter.

  We were at Sully’s office until nearly two A.M. By the time we were done, choruses of angels and orchestras of virgins were singing timeless arias about what beautiful people like us could do with a little patience, faith, coconut mulch, and latex paint.

  No matter how many verses we could get out of our castrati, however, my grandpa couldn’t get in touch with Miss Ricketts in the depths of her Peoria midnight.

  Sully was relentless with his whole-lotta-love routine. He was sure they’d take our offer, if not adopt us. Preapproval to him meant next to nothing. “After all,” he said, “we’re not trying to close on the house tomorrow. Preapproval schmreeapproval.”

  When we didn’t hear anything before I went to work at ten-thirty A.M., I knew. They had accepted another offer and were busy making the pretty little coronation bouquets and nosegays and couldn’t yet bother telling us that we had lost.

  Business at the restaurant was slow, and my only table was a couple of yuppie pricks wearing golf shirts from a course whose greens fees were higher than a month of my rent. They sat sprawling expansively in their booth, as though to express their masculinity, literally, in real estate.

  I was bitterly refilling their Arnold Palmers when Carole, the matron of the waitstaff, touched my elbow and told me I had a call. I took it in the coat check closet.

  “Hey, buddy,” Sully said. It could not be good news. He was talking like a human being.

  It was neither Friend Sully nor Realtor Sully. It was Elder Saul. The Elder Saul that was presiding over the funeral of our dream.

  He told me about how much the sellers loved our letter, how they struggled all morning making their decision. “But,” he said, “another buyer put up forty large in cash.”

  “That’s just fucking great,” I said.

  Elder Saul was silent. He didn’t handle cursing well. I looked around for something to break. There were only coat hangers, buckets of anise mints, and Carole’s face, which my profanity had drained entirely of blood.

  “What you need is a cheap and easy comeback house,” he said, ignoring my murderous mood. “I know this skanky duplex over in West Valley City. We could grab some chalupas and head over there for a little picnic after your shift. What you say, chica?”

  I am a bad person. I was pissed off.

  Sully was already way over it. For him, there hadn’t even been an “it.”

  I think he knew that this was the time when realtors write their own checks. Now that our hearts had been broken, we’d be looking for something with a roof and a door or two, nothing particular, just get it over with. Gimme shelter. That’s all.

  “Or we could stay the course,” he said, shifting gears. “There’s this dapper little bungalow a hop, skip, and a dump away?”

  I told him I didn’t think so.

  “Come on, Matthew-san,” he tried. I’ll give him that; he tried. His Miyagi voice made me remember his tie and that apple cobbler and then I was right back in the foyer of the house I’d never live in, the ghost of my grandmother baking away for other people’s children. “Remember house time?” he said. “Chuck Norris?” he said. “Time?”

  “Fuck Chuck,” I said. “I got food dying in the window. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Okey-dokey,” he said.

  I felt like Oedipus, post–eye/fork incident. And yet right after I got back on the floor, my friend Susan asked if we got the house.

  She is one of the five kindest people on this earth. She’s worked with at-risk teenagers and has a dog named Ezekiel. She is a poet and has crazy curly hair like mine. I wanted to make her cry.

  “No,” I said. “Didn’t work out.”

  “Oh, yippee!” she said. Her exclamation point felt like an ice pick. “Now’s when you find the house you were really meant to have!”

  “Great,” I said. I didn’t know what she meant, but I knew it was more positive than I could handle at the moment. “Zip-a-dee-fucking-doo-dah.”

  South of Bountiful

  GRAM AND I WOULD stay up long into the small hours, drinking Dewar’s and eating oyster crackers, talking about how the Hoosiers look like real contenders this year, about how overworked Mom was, about how big a jerkoff everyone named Bob was. Bob, my mom’s newest, third husband. Bob, Gram’s own husband. Bobby Knight, she said, got a bye. I thought we were mostly kidding. She was a dear heart of a woman, but she was also fiercely protective of the people she loved—pretty much just me and my mom. She always said, hoisting her Scotch high, “You are going to get what you deserve, damn it. I didn’t stay with him for all these years for nothing!”

  I thought she was hilarious.

  I didn’t really think about what she was saying then. If I did, I shrugged it off as her being a little harder than necessary on Grandpa’s lack of conversational polish or on my mom’s newest husband’s uncouth Cudahy ways. I certainly never imagined that she spent her whole life married to a man she hated just so she could afford a better one for her daughter and her grandson.

  The story, as I half remember, half imagine it—it was not a popular fairy tale growing up—starts with when she was a nursing student at Indiana University. She had caught tuberculosis and was quarantined in the TB ward where my grandfather, a med student, was doing his rotation. They hadn’t met before. With most of her ward mates being as attractive as anyone with consumption can be, he must have been a welcome sight.

  After her release, my grandfather persuaded her to spend time with him, since he had a colleague’s old Hudson convertible at his disposal. It didn’t hurt, of course, that he was going to be a doctor, and that he had a some land up in Shelby County near her hometown of Pendleton, Indiana. When he asked her to marry him, however, she said no.

  “He was good-looking enough, I suppose,” she said, “for the second son of a pig farmer.”

  Gram spun the ice in her glass and watched it whirl.

  “That was almost fifty years ago, if you can believe that.” She shook her head and held the empty glass. “Anyway, he asked for my hand.” She looked at th
e dark picture window, now covered with fluttering moths, and turned her mouth somehow both down and into a smile. “‘I don’t believe I care to’ is exactly what I said to that. I thought a very good deal of myself back then, as you might imagine.”

  She shook her head and looked into her glass.

  “But soon enough, well, everybody was joining the Army to improve their chances of staying stateside instead of being drafted and sent Lord knows where. Married couples got better picks and better accommodations, if you could call them that. They weren’t, it turned out. Smartest thing I ever did was to say no to that man. But I didn’t say it enough, now, did I?”

  She got up to close the shade on the picture window. “Not very nice of me to torment those poor moths,” she said, dropping the blind. “What they think they’re missing in here I’m sure I’ll never know.”

  Now, in the weeks after Gram’s death, something was wrong with my grandfather. He was not sleeping. He was losing weight. He was drinking more and more. And he was having a harder time urinating. “Probably that goddamned prostate,” he said over the phone. “There never has been any cure for getting old.”

  It wasn’t what we wanted, to lose both of them. But still, Mom and I felt an odd sense of relief. If Grandpa was really ill, surely the nonsense with his—former? current?—lover named Ruth would have to end. It was almost as if we could finally say, Thank God—now we know it can’t get worse.

  All our lives, my mother and I knew my grandfather through his obstinacy, his meaty silence. He was not an uncomplicated man. When he was called in to work or went out to fetch pralines and cream, my mom, my grandmother, and I spent much of the time trying to figure out what he was thinking, what he would say, what would make him talk.

  It was not entirely unpleasant. His words were simple and direct, and interpretation was generally uncalled for. He said what he meant, leaving little cause for wonder. I have inherited his sometime stoniness, and hear him through my reticence.

  That all changed after Gram died. Not with him and me: between us talk was business—good business—about school, about work, about books—but business nonetheless. Then, within days of Gram’s death, bouts of loquaciousness came over him. His thoughts were as odd as they were suddenly frequent—both because they were what they were, and because they were at all.

  One night, Grandpa, Bob, and I were waiting for my mom and Jenae to meet us at the Grandview Inn in Waukesha for dinner. It was two days after the funeral, and Jenae and I would be leaving for Utah soon. It seemed like a good idea to get out of the house. My mom had to do the flowers for somebody else’s funeral that afternoon, and Jenae went to help, so the three of us sat, womanless, at the bar. We ate pretzels and watched a recap of the Masters. There was nothing to talk about except when were Mom and Jenae going to get there. My grandpa ordered a second gin on the rocks—never a good sign.

  “Do you know,” he said, staring up at the TV, “how long it’s been since I had sex?”

  I thought I may have confused something Dick Enberg said on the overhead TV. Bob did not show any signs of hearing—which was not unusual: he too was an elderly man, only a handful of years younger than my grandfather. I looked at Grandpa. He was watching the TV. I looked at the TV. Golf. Nothing but golf. Green fields and putters. I said nothing.

  The words continued to wrap around the inside of my skull —Do you know how long it’s been since I had sex?—as though a teenager were toilet-papering my head.

  “No,” I said softly.

  He just shook his head.

  Shortly thereafter, my mom and Jenae showed up and the maitre d’ took us to a table with six chairs. My mom sobbed into a napkin while a busboy got rid of the extra chair.

  “It’s a sickness,” my mom had said. “He’s a sick man.”

  With Gram cremated, and me safely back in Salt Lake City, my mom began to tell me things. Some things that she had known. Some things that she was just discovering. Things that both of us could very well have gone without knowing.

  It all started the night when Gram got suspicious enough to pack my mom, twelve years old at the time, into her Buick and drive her all around Pekin looking for his bottom-of-the-line Porsche in the driveways of various women. Pekin was and is a small, chatty city, one where secrets were as poorly kept as they were prolific. My mom couldn’t get down low enough in the passenger seat.

  Now, she told me, there are at least three women.

  Ruth was sixty-something. She was a radiology tech back in Pekin. She lives with her daughter in Indianapolis, and while no one knows how long it had been since they’d seen each other, as soon as Gram died, Grandpa started talking to her and flying out to see her. They’ve been having an on-again, off-again affair for decades. Ten years longer, in fact, than I have been alive.

  Lorraine was in her seventies. Quite soon after Gram died, my mom decided Grandpa needed some age-appropriate company and tried to set him up with a few of her elderly neighbors and customers. Better than Ruth, she thought, who was about the same age as my mom. My grandfather went out with five or six ladies within a couple of weeks but found all of them, except Lorraine, boring and self-absorbed. “All they want to talk about is their goddamned angina,” he said. “You’re old,” he told them. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  And then there was Tonya.

  Tonya was a nurse’s aide who helped take care of Gram three days a week. This was in the last few months, when a squad of helpers settled into the condo. Nurses, nurses’ aides, social workers—they were all good women, all with empathetic eyes and pursed lips, but they turned my grandparents’ home into a kind of field hospital, and as much as we wanted them gone, their final absence would mean only one terrible thing.

  Tonya smelled like a bowling alley and had a swagger that was at once undermined and exaggerated by her scrubs, which had butterflies on them. The other nurses’ aides stayed busy and moved quickly, as if they might wreck the furniture if they lit upon it. After Tonya got Gram into bed, she’d plop down on the couch or on Gram’s own chair, kick her feet up on the coffee table, and reach for the bowl of nuts.

  “Jesus,” she’d say, “that’s a lot of work.”

  Tonya came to the funeral with her ex-husband/now-boyfriend. She wore a yellow dress fit for an Easter pageant, and the two of them gamboled through the narthex as though they were selling Fort Lauderdale time-shares. A week after the funeral, she started coming around again, at three in the afternoon, just like she used to, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

  “She says she’s worried about me,” my grandfather explained. “It’s just for a little while.”

  “She’s a goldbagger,” my mom said to me. “A golddigger—whatever. I don’t like it one bit.”

  It was May, and Gram had been gone a month, and I admitted to my mother that I didn’t like it either. “But he’s Grandpa,” I said, as if a de facto statement of his relation to me would at once describe and prescribe, render him back to the quiet elderly man who always had batteries for my toys, who laughed out loud at Victor Borge, a man for whom a foxtrot is damned near reckless.

  I was supposed to be the smart one in the family. My mom wanted to know now what everything meant. And because you can only say “I don’t know” for so long, I did what I have done most of my life: made shit up.

  “We’re all dealing with loss in our own ways, Mom,” I said. My voice was draped in tweedy condescension. I was a teacher, a doctoral candidate; I knew what I was talking about. I was smart.

  But that was bullshit. There are times when communication should be illegal, subjects absolutely forbidden. This was certainly one of them, and I’m using it here as a dramatic expository backdrop for my own life story. I didn’t know what to do then, and I don’t know what to do now, but we need to believe in something—if not our actual lives as they are lived, then at least the stories we can distill from them.

  But to my mom I talked about pain the way Kant talked about music, which is to say,
briefly and without regard to the fact that it has its own life, its own categorical imperatives.

  “Think about it, Mom,” I said. “He’s displacing all the energy and time and life he had put into caring for Gram into something new, something that makes him feel necessary again. It’s a terrible thing,” I told her, “to feel useless.”

  It is true, what I said. It is false.

  “I know, Matt,” she said. “Jesus Christ, do I know.”

  My mom kept setting Grandpa up with her golf-league widows, and one by one my grandfather dismissed them to their knitting. All the while he was flying back and forth between Milwaukee and Indianapolis to see Ruth. Tonya was “stopping by” who knows when or how often, except that the crystal ashtray on his coffee table, usually filled with peanut M&M’s, was lately choked with cigarette butts, and the recycling bin in his garage was overflowing with cans of domestic beer he never drank.

  Meanwhile, his doctor expressed some concern over Grandpa’s prostate, and he had been scheduled to undergo radiation therapy in lieu of surgery. I was useless in Salt Lake, but my mom was confident it would turn out to be a good thing.

  “I know it’s terrible,” she told me, “but I think it’s what we need. It’ll knock some sense into him. And he won’t be able to take care of himself, so I will, and I promised Gram—she made me swear—that I wouldn’t put him in a home. I said I’m going to take care of him,” she said, “and that’s what I’m going to do.”