Best Staged Plans

  TO MY READERS

  IN READERS

  (now or before you know it)

  AND OUR FARSIGHTED FUTURE

  I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life—

  and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a

  single thing I wanted to do.

  —GEORGIA O’KEEFFE

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Readers for Readers

  Sandra Sullivan’s Best Staging Tips

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with Claire Cook

  About the Author

  Also by Claire Cook

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  OKAY, so I accidentally wrapped my reading glasses in one of the packages I mailed.

  “It could have happened to anyone,” I said to my daughter, Shannon.

  “Wow, that’s pretty lame. Even for you, Mom.” The all-knowingness of her three and a half months of marriage reverberated through the phone line.

  I ignored it. “If you get them, just mail them back, okay, honey?”

  The minute life starts getting easier, your eyes go. So the time you once spent looking after your kids is now spent looking for your reading glasses. I hated that.

  “Good one, Sand,” my best friend, Denise, said when I called her next. “Remember that time you left Luke at the pediatrician’s office in his baby carrier?”

  “Your point?” I said.

  As if summoned by the decades-old reference, Luke lumbered into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. He nodded once, either by way of thanks or a belated good morning, then turned and thudded his way back down to the bat cave.

  “Good morning to you, too, honey,” I yelled after him.

  I was packing up our old life in order to drag my husband kicking and screaming into a new one. The rest of the morning’s boxes were still sitting on the kitchen island, so I rifled through them quickly. Foam packing peanuts fluttered to the floor like a dusting of snow. As soon as each box proved itself glasses-free, I tore a strip from a mammoth roll of packing tape and sealed it shut.

  It’s not like I didn’t have other readers. There were at least a dozen pairs scattered throughout the house. Somewhere. But this pair had been my hands-down absolute favorite. Midnight blue with subtle black stripes and a little extra bling from some silver detailing on the sidepieces. The perfect strong rectangular shape to offset my swiftly sagging jawline. Unique in a world of boring drugstore glasses, they were my go-to readers whenever I needed to see anything smaller than a bread box. The only thing about them that drove me crazy was their tendency to fall off my face when I leaned forward.

  It turned out to be their fatal flaw.

  Once I’d determined that they’d left the premises, I’d retraced my steps to the post office. The man who’d waited on me earlier was a total jerk. So, of course, wouldn’t you just know he’d still be working when I walked back in.

  A kind of angry arrogance radiated from this guy, maybe fueled by the inadequacy of a spindly gray ponytail that petered out inches after it began. “Anything liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous?” he’d always ask in such a bullying tone that he’d manage to convince me I was a closet pyromaniac and he was the first to catch on.

  I thought my best bet was to strategize so I’d get the nice woman at the other end of the counter. I counted the people in the single line, divided by two, and gave up my place to the person behind me.

  Somehow I still got the mean guy.

  “Anything liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous?” he sneered.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Apparently my life.” I laughed my best laugh, the one designed to melt the heart of even a great big bully of a jerk.

  His flat eyes scanned me like a bar code. “This. Is. Not. A. Joking. Matter.” He took a slow step back and reached for something under the counter. An alarm? A can of Mace? A double-barreled shotgun?

  I held up one hand like it might actually protect me. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. It’s just that you’re not going to believe what I—”

  His hand was still under the counter. The crowded post office had gone quiet. I seemed to have fallen into a Seinfeld episode. The guy behind the counter was the post office Nazi. I was Elaine. At least I hoped I was Elaine and not George. Or even Newman. Oh, God, please don’t let me be Newman.

  “Answer. The. Question.”

  “No,” I said.

  One gray eyebrow shot up. “No? You’re refusing to answer the question?”

  “No,” I said. “No is the answer to the potentially hazardous question.”

  The whole room was staring. I tried to imagine a graceful segue to getting my packages back just long enough for a quick peek inside. No post office rules about how once you send them, neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor reading glasses can impede your packages’ journey to their final destination. No extra charge for double mailing. Ponytail Guy would even help me tape my packages back up with federally funded tape.

  I shook my head. “Never mind,” I said. “Final answer.”

  ONCE I GOT HOME I made my phone calls. I took a moment to shrug off the post office fiasco and to grieve the at least temporary loss of my favorite reading glasses. Then I moved on.

  I turned on the TV to keep me company while I searched for backup cheaters. I found a hot pink pair (what had I been thinking?) in the junk drawer in the kitchen. They were a bit weak, maybe a 2.25 or 2.50, but they’d do in a pinch. I found two pairs of narrow, full-strength readers, still in their tubular cases, no less, at the bottom of my unbleached canvas grocery bag. One was kind of a dull bronze and the other more of a flat pewter. I wasn’t really crazy about either of them.

  A little retail therapy seemed like the next logical step, so I sat down at the kitchen island and fired up my laptop. Best deal on large quantity of funky but not over-the-top bargain-priced reading glasses to replace lost favorites and if at all possible to make midlife woman feel like her pre-vision-impaired hip self again I typed into the Google search bar. Amazingly, it fit.

  I paused, my index finger hovering over Google Search. I moved it incrementally to the right and contemplated the single-result-producing button. I’m Feeling Lucky, it said.

  It was more than a slight exaggeration, but I pressed it anyway.

  SEND YOUR FRUMPY READERS PACKING! Pitch your boring and outdated drugstore readers and become a fashion-forward reading spectacle! Pack a pair in your purse, tote, car, office, home, and vacation getaway bag, and you’ll never be blindsided again. Set includes 8 pairs stylish reading glasses in fashionista colors, along with 1 pair reading sung
lasses in root beer with tortoise highlights, plus 9 individual color-coded drawstring pouches and 1 designer polypropylene water-resistant case. That’s 19, count ’em, 19 individual pieces for an astonishing $29.95. Retail value $169.99. Styled in the U.S.A./Made in China.

  It seemed too good to be true, but who cared. The price was right, and they looked great in the photo, so the worst that could happen was that I’d wear each pair a couple of times and dump them when they fell apart. The truth was that I thought husbands and houses should be built to last forever, but the less sturdy nature of everything else could be a good thing. I mean, who wanted to be married to an outdated set of dishes or a dining room table you were completely over but couldn’t afford to unload because you’d spent a veritable fortune on it? Cheaper, easily replaceable items could be the spices of life.

  From across the room, the television clicked into my consciousness. I glanced up. A blond reporter who looked about twelve was standing in front of a cookie-cutter house. She was surrounded by an assortment of broken chairs and three Easy-Bake ovens. Two overflowing Dumpsters were parked in the driveway like cars.

  She took a quick, shallow breath. “A four-month search for a local woman came to a grisly end this week when her husband spotted her feet poking out from under a floor-to-ceiling pile of filth.”

  A cat sprang on top of one of the ovens. The reporter jumped. “Police say they searched the house behind me many times, even bringing in cadaver dogs, but they were unable to locate the body among the endless layers of clothing, knickknacks, and rotting food.”

  I gave my disheveled kitchen a quick glance, assessing the potential challenge to cadaver dogs.

  The camera pulled back, and the reporter introduced an expert on hoarding.

  “Two to five percent of Americans are chronic hoarders,” the expert began. “But that doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook. The problem for so many of us . . .”

  I waited. The flavor-of-the-month reporter nodded her highlighted head encouragingly. Or maybe just to speed things up so she could breathe again.

  “. . . is that we’re drowning in our stuff. We can’t find what we have. So we buy more. We can’t remember what we have. So we buy more. We’re emotionally attached to what we have, and we can’t let it go. And still we buy more. We can’t get past all the accumulated stuff in our lives to get to our own next chapters. We’re stuck, and until we get rid of all the stuff that’s holding us back and stop the endless accumulation of stuff, stuff, and more stuff . . . we’ll stay stuck.”

  “Thanks for sharing,” the reporter said. “And now a word from our friends at Big Lots.”

  I clicked off the TV, but I couldn’t shake the image of that poor dead woman with her feet sticking out from under a pile of junk, like some new twist on the Wicked Witch of the East. This was it, the exact message I needed to hear at the exact moment in time I needed to hear it.

  I wouldn’t just pack up the mess and relocate it. I’d weed out my life. Eradicate. Eliminate. Streamline. Simplify. And once the dust settled, my next chapter would sprout up to greet me like a sunflower on a fierce summer day.

  But first I leaned over my laptop and ordered nine new pairs of reading glasses, just so I’d be able to see my way out.

  CHAPTER 2

  VOLTAIRE SAID that illusion is the first of all pleasures. As a professional home stager, I’d have to say he was spot-on. Home staging is all about illusion. It’s the sleight of hand that infuses an ordinary house with heart, with panache, with soul. After the purging and scrubbing, the organizing and arranging, it’s the single perfect strand of pearls for that little black dress. It’s the art of creating a mood.

  The way you live in your house and the way you sell it are two completely different things. Proper home staging will ensure that your home appeals to the greatest number of buyers, thereby selling more quickly, even in a down market.

  I loved my work, and I was good at it. I had a string of local Realtors who referred clients to me, backed up by terrific word of mouth that rippled out and brought in the next wave. But I had to admit that I hadn’t exactly been walking my talk on the home front. Oh, the complicated and treacherous mysteries of our overloaded lives. Does the land surveyor’s family know where its property lines are, and why-oh-why don’t the cobbler’s kids have any shoes?

  OMG, as my daughter would say, I am old enough to remember cobblers.

  I’ll fast-forward. In college I double-majored in philosophy and art history. With a minor in women’s studies, no less. My dorm was perpetually shrouded in pot haze, and when I walked the length of the hallway, my feet stuck to keg leak, which may have contributed to the fact that I never once considered employability as I boogied down my academic path. When reality reared its ugly head at graduation, I decided my only hope was to teach.

  I set my sights on elementary art, because I thought the kids would be young enough not to notice that while I could tell them anything they wanted to know about Picasso’s blue period, I couldn’t draw for beans. I kicked butt when it came to macaroni necklaces though. And tracing chubby little hands to make turkey place mats.

  When the budget cuts came, we lost most of our department as well as the art room. I spent a few years rolling an overstuffed art cart from classroom to classroom. I bailed when they added another two schools to my rotation. I still miss the kids. Sometimes I dream that “Tutti Frutti” is blasting on the portable CD player I carted everywhere, and we’re all dancing around with a colored marker in each hand, laughing like crazy and drawing the sound of the music on one monstrous strip of shared paper. I was an awesome teacher.

  Next I managed an art gallery until it went under, which was absolutely not my fault. I started wallpapering when a contractor friend came out of our bathroom at a party and asked for the phone number of the person who’d done that great wallpaper job in there. When wallpaper went out of style, I hopped to faux finishing.

  Faux finishing died a merciful death, and suddenly home staging was all the rage. And the wonderful thing about this crazy world we live in is that you can be anything you want to be if you just jump in with both feet and fake it till you make it.

  IT WAS PROBABLY Gertrude Lanabaster’s bordello of a bathroom that put me over the edge.

  She met me at the door and guided me through an obstacle course of dusty ceramic figurines and fuzzy African violets perched on tarnished silver tray tables. A philodendron began in a pot in the living room and wound its way up the wall, across the narrow hallway, and into the dining room, guided by green twist ties attached to white cup hooks screwed into the ceiling. The ceilings were popcorn throughout and yellowed like they’d been doused with butter.

  By the time we got to the bathroom I had my game plan. “Mrs. Lanabaster—”

  “Trudy.” She ran her gnarled, gold-ringed fingers over the black lace she was holding. When she smiled, more gold twinkled at her gumline.

  “Sandra,” I said. “Trudy, staging a home for sale is less about personal taste and more about neutralizing the home so potential buyers can imagine their own possessions there.”

  “Lovely, dear. Now about my bathroom.” She held up the black lace. “I think we’ve got just enough here for the windows and a shower curtain.”

  I took in the shiny brass fixtures, the strip of Hollywood lights above the ornate gold gilt medicine cabinet. A mildew-spotted Rubenesque nude posed coquettishly on the wall over the toilet tank, peering down at the fluffy zebra-striped toilet seat cover. On top of the tank, the legs of a Barbie-like doll pierced a roll of toilet paper, which was discreetly covered by the crocheted flounce of her skirt. For just a moment I imagined making Knockoff Barbie a jaunty little hat with leftover scraps of the black lace.

  I tore myself away and went for the big guns. “You are hoping to sell your house, aren’t you, Trudy?”

  “Mother of God, no. They’ll have to carry me out in a box.”

  I looked through her bifocals and into her eyes, trying to figure
out if anyone was home behind them.

  “Do you know what a home stager is, Trudy?” I finally asked.

  “I do, dear. I’ve got every single episode of Designed to Sell on DVD.”

  The impact of HGTV on our society simply can’t be overstated. Home & Garden TV rocked our world. Everyone from eight to eighty has been sprawled on their couches ever since it first appeared in 1994, addicted as if to porn, literally watching the grass grow, the deck go up, the walls change color. We spend hours and hours sucked in by House Hunters, Divine Design, Curb Appeal, and Color Splash, becoming armchair experts at everything from electrical wiring to decorating.

  I took a stab at it. “So you’re saying that even though you’re not selling your house, you want me to stage it anyway?”

  She held up the lace. “Yes, dear. I want you to stage this bathroom until it’s so hot it could fry an egg. And then I’m going to keep it for myself.”

  WTF, as my kids would say.

  Mrs. Lanabaster and I had a blast. I didn’t want to overcharge her, so we dragged out her old sewing machine and I got to work right then and there. There was enough crap in her house that in only a couple of hours we had a bathroom bordello that would make any octogenarian with bad taste proud. All it needed was a couple of red bulbs for the strip light.

  It wasn’t until I was coming out of Home Depot with the bulbs that a shiver came over me. It started between my shoulder blades and ran up the back of my neck. It was easily distinguishable from a hot flash by both temperature and trajectory, since as everybody who’s been there knows, hot flashes tended to begin in the face and work their way down.