It Gets Weirder

The best-selling greeting card in the world says “Things are getting worse.” Inside it says, “Please send chocolate.”

Not that you should send chocolate (though I’d be a fool to turn it down), but things are still getting worse. I wasn’t going to write about my weird house exchange, because I support house exchanges and I didn’t want to discourage anybody. I know several people who do them regularly and I’ve heard nothing but good stories. The most egregious thing that typically happens is that people put your kitchen items back in the wrong place.

But then there’s my house exchange.

So I arranged to live in a house in Cambridge for part of the summer, and the exchangers were going to come and live in my house in the City of Dreams. I located them through HouseExchange.com. The website doesn’t vet people, they just take postings. But these people seemed amiable and jolly, and they live in a scenic close-in part of town, so it was all systems go.

And I know you have to go with the flow on these things. After all, you’re getting a free house to stay in, not a dinky expensive hotel room. But people do live in that house year-round, so you can’t expect it to be set up solely for your convenience.

Nevertheless.

The Bean and I had a nice lunch with the Exchangers, and the father and the daughter seemed particularly nice. I was living elsewhere in Cambridge till they left for my house, but I was surprised to get a phone call one Thursday: “We’re leaving tomorrow morning, so you need to be over here to take care of the dog.” “But I thought you were leaving Saturday?” “We just looked at the tickets and found out it was tomorrow.” Oh, okay. So I moved over on short notice. The Exchangers had already left. The first thing we noticed was that the electricity did not work. It turns out they had shut it off and forgotten to tell us. It took an hour and a half of groping around in closets to find the boxes and turn it back on. “This electricity is not wired right,” said the knowledgeable friend who was helping me. Prophetic words.

Also, there was no fridge in the kitchen. The fridge was in a shed at the bottom of the garden. Behind a combination lock.

Also, there was no hot water.

You could turn the hot water on by turning on the radiators. But then the house grew stiflingly hot very quickly. I talked to them on the phone about this. “There’s supposed to be a way to turn off the radiators, but the switch is broken,” they said. “We didn’t realize anyone would want hot water.”

The shower made its own hot water, and cycled from cold to scalding on its own schedule. The Bean is afraid of showers, so I had to shower enough water into the tub to for him to take a bath.

I don’t know how they wash dishes. Maybe they don’t cook much, since I couldn’t find a saucepan. I got the unused microwave out of the shed and brought it into the kitchen.

There was no inside dining table. In the dining room there was a sofa and a TV on the floor. Nothing else. Zip.

They had a sweet dog, but he was so untrained and rambunctious that walking him was a battle. Once when he dashed in front of a car, I had to grab the lead so hard to hold him back that I sliced open my right hand, and it was unusable for several days.

But okay, it’s all an adventure, and if you want a hotel, you book at a hotel. But then.

The last day in Cambridge. I spend the day cleaning. Then, in the pouring rain, we trek over to a house I e-mailed about housesitting next year, to find that the owner is not home. No idea what happened to him. The Bean is on a non-stop complaining streak.

We get home, cheered by the fact that we’re going to a great restaurant with a friend for the evening. She calls. She has a kidney stone and is in enormous pain. Dinner is cancelled.

I attempt to vacuum the dog hair off the carpet. The vacuum cleaner is not working very well. I cannot find new bags. Eventually both of us get down on our knees and scrape dog hair off the carpet with our fingers. This takes a long time.

The lady of the house phones from America. “I just want to make sure you clean up after yourselves!” she barks. I am startled. “I want no mess in that house!” she says. “I want nothing in the refrigerator!”

I make conciliatory noises at them, but her anger is a bit unnerving.

Then when I’m upstairs in “my” bedroom, where the electricity has never worked, I hear a strange crackling sound. I trace it to the outlet. It is either sparking or on fire in there. There is nothing plugged in. The outlet is turned off. I listen as the crackling gets louder. It goes on and on. Yikes! I phone 999, which is emergency services. They send the fire brigade.

The fire brigade is very nice and the Bean is impressed. They tell me urgently to turn the electricity off. Fortunately I know where the box is, from the ordeal early in the summer. Then we rush up the stairs and the crackling has stopped. They tell me not under any circumstances to turn it back on, and that I should call an electrician. But we’re leaving early in the morning! Yikes!

I phone the House Exchangers on their mobile phone, which is supposed to work abroad. No answer. I phone the girl who is supposed to walk the dog (because the House Exchangers got the date they’d be coming back wrong too). She agrees not to turn the electricity back on. I text the Exchangers. I soon won’t be able to use my phone, because I can’t recharge it. Their landline is cordless and not working.

We spend the rest of the evening in forlorn darkness. Meanwhile I haven’t slept well in two days and I am feeling like someone ran over me with a truck. We struggle into bed.

In the middle of the night I’m awoken by vomiting sounds. The Bean is ill. Repeatedly. All night long. He keeps trying to make it to the loo and throwing up along the way. I try to clean up, but I can’t see worth a darn. Of course there’s no hot water to clean up in. Even the scalding shower is disabled by the lack of electricity.

In the light of morning I take stock. Oops! Signs of projectile vomiting! I clean up a storm. I throw the sponge away afterwards. I mop us both up as best I can with cold water. I muster up every plastic bag I can for the trip home. The taxi arrives. I bid farewell to the strange house.

The trip back takes 24 hours door to door, and I’m here to say that opaque plastic bags are the way to go for vomiting children. The transparent ones add a certain uckiness factor that makes the whole experience much more tawdry.

So now I’m back in our house in the City of Dreams. The House Exchangers departed several days ago, leaving me something to remember them by. Little poisonous notes all over the house! I open the drawers and find a note in each one “Dirt!” “Dirt!” “Dirt!” In case you think I’m a sanitation nightmare who’s in denial, I’ll just say that I did clean the house before I left. I had two sets of housesitters in July before the House Exchangers, both of them faculty couples I know. My Ex, who looked in on the house, assured me that both couples had left the house spic & span. But it isn’t a hotel room, and it isn’t bare. There are two boxes of stuff being unpacked in the study. There was a covered basket and two bottles of vitamins on the dresser. There were videos lined up on the sideboard. All these, and everything else personal, were removed by the House Exchangers and put places like the floor of the closet. They moved the furniture from room to room and didn’t put it back. They took off the combination lock from the garage and replaced it with a key lock. (What the heck?) And the little notes everywhere. It seems very mean-spirited of them. My printer ran out of ink just before I left, and I wrote a little note to remind myself: “Printer needs ink.” The woman wrote: “Why does this not surprise me?”

Was this strictly necessary?

I suppose I should be grateful they didn’t take the fridge and put it in the shed.

My faith in the essential goodness of human nature has taken a hit here. I can’t say I ever want to do an exchange again.

Upside down, under a stack of other things, I found a note from the man of the couple: “Thanks -- [name].”

The drifts of poisonous notes are in the woman's handwriting. What kind of woman goes around leaving notes that say “Dirt!” everywhere? You can probably guess what she does in everyday life. She’s a psychologist and therapist. Words fail me.