Goodbye to All This

Goodbye to All This Rebecca McClanahan It's a lot like dying," Donald has begun teUing our friends. "Except you get to see where aU your stuff goes." He's referring to the state of our rapidly emptying home. Each week another room is decluttered, swept free ofits past, its stories. I box up books, dishes, paintings, photos that house our history.Then, with a black marker, I make my selections, dividing the goats from the lambs: NYC Urgent. Goodwill. Garage Sale. Store. No Rush.Attic, keep dry. Breakable. The emptying is partly for our benefit, an attempt to sweep the path clean for the journey ahead.We'U be leaving in a few months, perhaps sooner if the sale goes quickly. The emptying is also for prospective buyers, the strangers who will soon walk through these rooms. "It's time to start wearing buyers' glasses," our agent has advised. "To see your house through their eyes.Your house should look occupied by someone—just not a particular someone. Do you understand ?" Yes, I understand perfectly. We want to give the impression that somebody stiU lives here—no desperation sale, we're in no rush, we won't take just any offer. On the other hand, if we continue to fully inhabit this place, we wiU leave no room for the buyer's dream. A buyer must be able to imagine himself as the inhabitant—sitting at the dining room table, fining the bird feeder, stoking the fire. Our home is a stage to be set, everything polished and gleaming, all the props arranged for the upcoming show, or showing , as the realtor calls it. "Your house shows well," he says as he walks through the rooms carrying a clipboard. "Except for. And maybe. And you might consider. Nothing drastic, you understand. Just." "Certainly," we say."We'U get right on it." Since the money from the sale of the house must support us for the next year or two, we can't afford sentimentality . First we remove all that might offend: incense burners, the photograph of two nude men embracing, the sculpture of bare-breasted crones 4 Fourth Genre dancing in a circle, the Buddhist quotes over my writing desk. Then, item by item, we hide traces of ourselves, anything that might keep a prospective buyer from inhabiting his own dream: the cat's bowl, my grandmother's moth-nibbled afghan, my husband's pipe and brandy snifter. What is left is tasteful, the way chicken cutlets are tasteful. Or fish that you buy because it tastes like chicken. A house prepared for the eyes of others allows only what is tasteful.A home, on the other hand, is Uke a family member or a trusted friend, the kind you don't dress up for.A home has seen you at your worst: morning breath, worn corduroy robe, feverish head hanging over the toilet bowl. As you've seen it: cluttered, dust-bunnied, bare-mattressed , smudged.Why then this sadness, this longing to stay? A week before the showing, I cry, I scream, I rant, I kick boxes, I sink down onto the floor of the tasteful, gleaming room and cry. Donald knows better than to try to console me. "I wish I could do that," he says, "let it aU out, say goodbye. Months from now it will ambush me, I'm sure of it. I'U be walking in midtown, maybe getting into a taxi or standing in line"—"on line," I correct him, translating the phrase to its NewYork equivalent. "And it wiU hit me," he says. "What have we done, what were we thinking. And it wfll be too late to go back." To leave a place you love, you must be wiUing to go the distance. Once our home is Usted, the contract signed, there wfll be no going back. Our leaving , for the past few months a mere hum on rumor's vine, wfll be public knowledge. Strangers wfll caU, real estate rubberneckers wfll slow to stare, voyeurs will walk through our garden and peek into our windows which, the realtor is advising, should glisten, every room ablaze with light. "You know you...