Bungalow Boogie Countdown

By REBECCA BAUMANN

 

Ten 

We claw-dance between the folding walls. 

 “Are we sinking?” I ask. 

 Our backs flatten into herringbone patterns against the floorboards. Oil from our noses stains the adobe ceiling. 

“We’re doing the boogie!” he says. 

He waggles a finger that can no longer stretch up. I laugh-cry. I listen to the house moan.  “Do you hear me creaking?” 

My ribcage smushes into a desert plateau. 

“It’s not us. It’s only the wooden boards, I’m sure,” he says. 

I believe him. Our jaws begin to no longer align and limbs freeze up in the growing pile of rubble. My eyes face south to the new homes. His face north to the speakers, still uncrushed, singing Nina Simone to our bones. 

 

Nine 

The house is a Matriarch. A figurehead between rows of since-razed craftsman figureheads on a once tree-lined street that now belongs to various HOAs. She looks ancient next to the metal condo garages and stucco siding and shades of beige trim. Dilapidated among all of this new, she is a shell of her former self. Born at the tip of the Los Angeles Spanish revival, she is a river mouth, pooling what is left of her 1920s architecture into some protective cradle of reverence and dignity. The last post-colonial sister to Frank Lloyd Wright’s pre-Colombian Hollyhock, she is alone. Surely, they will not take her, too, in this melting away of decades, this erasure of peoples.

Inside of her my feet melt into the mahogany floorboards, the ones he did himself a few weeks earlier. I say they’re still wet but he says they’re fine, that the stain has dried. That the brown on my feet is only dust. I’m not so sure. I breathe it in, a fish gasping in a hot tackle box. Hands around each other, I lean into him, buzzy, spilling the wine. 

“I can taste you,” I say, licking the salt from his shoulder. I want to take back the nutrients lost from our bodies.

He says nothing, but leans in, eating from me in the heat of the evening. Sucking my sweat.

The roof collapses. 

 

Eight

No matter we haven’t ventured out of the home in months. No matter our skin hangs more sagged and wrinkled than ever, just like our Matriarch. No matter he lost full-time last year. That he was offered per-diem instead, but he didn’t want to be a dog on call. No matter.

“I want to be someone,” he’d say.

And he’d hold his head high, shaking alive that old elementary school promise:

YOU CAN BE ANYTHING.

*If you work hard enough.

**If you follow your dreams.

What was the dream? To be a house of three? That was diagnosed impossible. By me, not him. No matter. He holds me, rocks me back and forth. We drink more wine. A happy state, in the womb of our Matriarch. We are the family of three.

“We need no one else,” he assures me when I pull thin flaps of bicep skin six inches from bone like a flying squirrel. 

“We look like skeletons,” I say. 

He laughs. “We’re the foundation of ourselves.” 

We keep rocking. Our phones died weeks ago; visitors stopped coming weeks ago. There is no doorbell, no knock on the windows. Just us. Together. The house. Nina on those speakers of his. We vibrate to the trudging of horn lines deep and powerful. Jazz-swung time swaddles the home in a sense of grounding, a sense of rebellion. Our thin glasses settle into an endless ebb and flow of empty and filled and empty and filled. We cheers our Matriarch.

 

Seven 

“I Put a Spell on You” is the only record left. The rest have sold, or cracked, scratched, and shattered in their old age. But Nina still goes round and round. He re-sets the needle. She plays again. We listen.

Outside, littered across the lawn, suffocating the mint-green tin mailbox that hangs from the front porch beam between the unopened bills and the assorted ads touting fun at a price, there are stuffed envelopes with red labels stamped at an angle across the cream white: FORECLOSED. We don’t care. We aren’t leaving. We’re a family of three. Me and my husband and the Matriarch. I push my finger into the screen door, toward the growing pile of bank threats.

“Should we at least get the mail? It looks suspicious.”

“If we go outside, someone might see. They’ll call the cops. They’ll kick us out for good. Lots of mail means there’s no one here. It’s not suspicious. It’s strategy.”

I consider us. A pair, hurtling through some trajectory of American goalposts. We have the marriage, we have the house-child, we have the home—almost. Is this what we want?

“If this doesn’t work out, we could rent again?” It is a question because I question our rentability. Our credit is shot.

“No,” he says. “She’s ours.”

I nod again. “Good. We’re here to stay.”

Resolved, I lean against her cool white plaster walls. I look up to the 1950s stained-glass ceiling light fixture, to the old dusty fan that stopped its lazy whirling when the electricity was shut off last week.

Where else does a couple go? Wearing the same Y2K clothes for so long that they themselves have become today’s vintage. He says, back when he had work, that colleagues half his age called it Recession Core—a gentle, well-meaning name for one generation’s prolonged dying.

He removes my finger from the screen door, closes the flimsy Dutch door with the little split in the center for fresh summer air. He locks the two halves of the door together, locks the handle, locks the safety chain, locks the bar lock, and presses a doorstop into the bottom for good measure. I trust the good measures, they feel secure. We are shut in. We lie down. We fall asleep. 

 

Six 

Morning comes brightly as we sit up together, nocturnal and diurnal beasts, the old Tannoy speakers buzzing white noise from the needle head. He crawls over to them, re-sets the needle in the middle of the record, this time to “Feelin’ Good,” the only entertainment left in the house. His sweet Nina, his holy adoration.

“I just love her,” he says.

“I know.” He says it every time.  

We let Nina cycle. The needle stops again. He re-sets it again. Pushes the speakers to medium-high volume. Not enough to call attention to our presence, but enough to drown out the rumble of jackhammering and cement churning across the street. 

“Original, from 1960. You really feel the era with these babies,” he scream-talks over Nina as he pats the speaker heads. He sways in circles to her cries, tired and automatic, an also-machine turning round and round. It seems it is all he can do.

“I know,” I repeat.

I’ve lived with the speakers for years. I know what they sound like. I am waiting for him to do something, anything other than sway. 

“I just love her.”

He tears up, looks somewhere else, tracing her invisible voice through the air above our heads.

“Didn’t you have work?” I ask, pouring him a 7 a.m. shiraz.

He stands, takes a sip, and walks to the window. 

“Eh,” he trails off. 

It seems he is no longer on call. I follow suit, trailing off toward the window to meet him. We get lost in the view of new construction. We remember easier things. Like how at dinner parties he called himself an artist, but his old day job confined him to a dingy office (in his words, shabby-chic) near the Arts District, where he used to sit at a small desk making graphic designs for ad companies who found Adobe Suite befuddling and cheaply outsourced talent. Easy money.

Then the easier things stopped. The recession came, full-time became on-call, the friends no longer threw expensive dinner parties. Then their babies came. And when our babies couldn’t come we no longer found precedence in the tiers of social standing, other than perhaps a pitied glance or on the day of the news, a few bouquets of mourning flowers from moms and old coworkers and a smattering of distant family.

But no matter. The social pressure of children has gone. We are glad. It’s my husband, the Matriarch, and me. We make her our bungalow boogie baby, we dance together across her floors. This is where we’re supposed to be.

I remember my freelance projects, when we first bought the Matriarch, selling kitschy trinkets on Etsy that I hand-crafted. Time spent perched cross-legged on grandma’s wicker chair under the shade of our red-tiled front porch. Vintage, all of it. This old home and its old bones and the old things we put in it. I reach for my favorite Etsy item, the last crocheted uterus period pouch with an angry emoji face sewn into it. The only one I kept. The rest sold out. Hundreds of them shipped. But hundreds were not made back. We went broke.

I fondle the frizzy pink uterus yarn, run my thumb across the stitched emoji face. I watch him watching the outside commotion through the front window.

“Do you see that?” he asks me. 

The pathway to the sidewalk is an ocean of political ads, Sunday Times, grocery store coupons, flyers promising nightlife scenes and weekend warrior must-dos. They must know a couple lives here. They have traced us somehow. We gaze past the marketing piles, across the street and up to the tops of the finished townhome that boasts artisan terra cotta roofing stacked in a flawless display of prestige for hungry buyers. A billboard above reads LUXURY ECO TOWN HOMES.

“Bastards,” he says to it all. To the builders and greenwashing and investors and price hikers.  

I nod another agreeable nod. We shake our fists in the general direction of a tenacious industrialism. We turn away from it, back to the music with our filled stem glasses. We, the anti-capitalists. We, who shall not be moved.

 

Five 

A letter unlike the weekend warrior ads sits curt on the porch. I eye it through the opened top of the Dutch door. The first FORECLOSED notice. We know what follows. The bank sale, the LLC buy out, the property razing, the breaking of ground with champagne to welcome new construction. Out with the old, in with the new. I open the bottom of the Dutch door. I have not bothered with clothes today. I toe the letter away from the porch. It flutters onto the lawn. The sprinklers wet it. I watch the red bleed out across the white. I’m feelin’ blue.  

“What are you doing?” My husband asks of my foot halfway out the door.

“Fucking the man’s various government infrastructural systems and amorphisms of bureaucracy,” I say.

“Good,” he smiles.

I smile back, proud. We are the final bastions of some fading Americana. Or is the fading the progress? I second guess it all. Our evasion of these economic systems.

“Do you think we’re safe?” I ask him.

“If they bother to check for squatters, which they certainly will,” he says. “Surely, they will. They can’t raze a house with people in it.”

“No,” I agree.

I bend to grab the bottle of wine nearest my right pinky toe, now one of many bottles across the floor. Its coolness fades as the glass loses contact with my skin. I scan the room for the opener and find it at the foot of the 1970s Goodwill couch. As the sun tucks away for the evening and ripples in the window, distorting a sherbet sky, it casts an electric orange through the rush hour smog. Without clothes, my torso has burned.

“Wow! That’s red,” I slur to the sky, sucked in by its changing colors, to its intense warmth. 

My husband comes up behind me.

“Wow, you’re red!” he says back and pokes at the side of my sunburnt breast, just at the lifted curve that hangs taut like sweet fruit above my lolling foothills of ribs and valleys.  “Ow!” I say, holding myself. 

I scowl at him and he grins at me until I lighten up a little and we burst and cackle and fall to the floor in heaps. We touch each other, feeling our wetness. Feeling our wine. 

 

Four 

I am up at dawn, alone, the empty bottle on its side by my hand, my clothes at my feet. He must have left for work, but a small note on the subway tile kitchen counter reads: Will get more TBC. Terse promises. He’d awoken a grouch. Something about infighting at his full-time gig, the low and not-rising pay that cannot keep up with the cost of this all. Boomers versus Millennials versus Gen Z, all three fearing the Alphas to come. That, and he’d said decent carrots were almost eight dollars a pack these days so technically alcohol is now cheaper than produce and isn’t that America for you, and that I’d already sold most of our things to make the mortgage payments so if I can’t find a job we’re kerfuffled. All understandable fodder for his anger. Nothing a Two-Buck Chuck can’t fix, a mantra we adopted the first month of marriage after an uninsured fender bender with a parking lot pole rendered the car totaled, though he more often says “TBC to the rescue!” these days.

I finish scanning his chicken scratch and glide in hazy dream flight back to the poured glass window, so engrossed with the sounds of building that I’d forgotten my own walking. I leave my clothes where they lay. My never-plucked brows furrow at the industry across the street. What were yesterday only bare bones of wood and nail now outline a hoard of townhomes. They are covered with walls, all the same. They are covered with paint, all the same. They seep with promises of a monochrome ease. My skin prickles at the speed of their rising, at the disregard for the histories torn down. At the elimination. We are in a queue. I fear for our Matriarch, the last on her street.

While he is at work and I am out of work, there is nothing to do but stare, entranced all day by the men across the street, also at work, scurrying like carpenter ants, carrying and lifting and building up, up, up. My feet throb purple after hours of watching, motionless. My areolas and raw, exposed torso are tender from the day’s cycled light. I look at the skin, feel heat on my face, see the arrow-straight line of red across my hips that splits me in half. I laugh. The front door bursts open. I jump for my clothes. 

“You scared the shit out of me!” I say. 

“Sorry,” he says. “Wrote I’d get more wine.” 

“Yes, I saw.” 

He unloads three duffle bags of table wine lugged from Grocery Outlet (also cheap but not TBC, not Trader Joe’s as hoped), sliding them on their sides across the living room floor where they clank against her original adobe walls. A few hit my heavy feet, coaxing them to lift. I know we will need nothing else, just Nina and the wine.I bring the glasses. We are hunkering down.

They can’t raze a house with people in it.

 

Three 

The boxes are moved in by August. We sit as a couple in our new living room sipping a $1.75 clearance table red bought from our now walkable Trader Joe’s, surrounded by towers of open, half-rummaged boxes with scribbled Sharpie labels: KITCHEN, FRAGILE, BATH, MISCELLANEOUS SHIT.

I lean my head against his shoulder. “This is perfect.”

We stare lazily out of her 1920s poured-glass living room window. The old Matriarch is aged-pristine, her ebony hardwood floors like tar. 

“It is. It is perfect.” he says. “I’ll refurbish the floors. Back to the original.” 

This pleases me. I cheers my glass to his. The wine trickles across our lips. Into our necks and muscles. Into lust, for each other, for the idea of this Matriarchal womb. A place of our own. A place for a family? The Moms keep saying so, that we have to be quick, but what do we know about timelines. We only want to nestle into the crux of this queen. Not every womb needs filling.

We rise from the hard floors. From the window, the view across the street is mundane, non-picturesque, ugly. A razed field. A parked BMW. A man in a suit, holding a clipboard, pointing at other men in reflective vests and hardhats who are scrambling to put up chain link fencing. We scan the pre-construction site. Perhaps something nice. Perhaps a coffee shop. Perhaps a park. A green space.

“Does it bother you?” I ask him of the fence.

“Nothing but a short-term eyesore,” he assures me. 

We sit. We melt into the sofa. The street is lined with condos. Our bungalow sits alone, the last house of its kind surrounded by new: townhomes, artist lofts, organic farmers markets. The razed field is an anomaly. Maybe a promise.

 

Two 

We accept the little paper scrap, smile, and forget about the advertised listing completely until two weeks later, on laundry day, when he shoves his hand into the dryer to find the crumpled and somewhat legible clipping stuck to the air release vent: ICONIC SOCAL SPANISH BUNGALOW–ONE-TIME LOW-COST OFFER. HOT UP-AND-COMING NEIGHBORHOOD. 

“Hey, remember this?” 

He shoves the clipping into my open palm. His grin is different. It stretches ear to ear, toothy, hungry, as if the home were gold to seek. A beautiful relic in a sea of same. A far cry from our cockroach-infested, 600-square-foot rental off Sunset. A sensible place for a child, Mom said when she gave it to us.

Instead, the details are a draw: cheap, close to work, in a buzzy neighborhood. It is something with character, something artsy. Something cool but not mainstream cool, still trendy but not like everyone-had-it trendy, because it had to be unique. Something hipster.   

 

One 

At the family dinner, Mom smiles and rummages through her purse. She pulls out a For Sale ad from the Sunday paper. Not, of course, in the Sunday Times online, to which my husband and I are subscribed and prime members. It is a clipping she cut herself to physically give us, with no understanding of cloud-sharing options or AirDrop. An imperfect zig-zag-cut trapezoid, detached from the whole newspaper and folded to sit in her purse for weeks in want of a family dinnerwhere the news could be shared with my mother-in-law and her grown child, my husband, who she still affectionately calls Little One. 

“Look, Little One. For a family,” my mother-in-law says as she hands the clipping to my mother. My husband laughs. My eyes laugh back. I urge him to take the clipping. He takes the ad and studies it. 

“It does look nice,” he says. He hands it to me backwards, where a little cartoon was half cut off by a frantic scissoring. The joke ends where mom tore it away from the paper.

I flip it over and, like my husband, study the house for sale. I reach for the bowl of mashed potatoes. I look at my expectant mother-in-law. I see Mom, expectant too, smiling at the newspaper ad in my hand. The mothers hope for the same. A family.

I fiddle with the paper and glance down at what of the cartoon the scissors spared. A husband elephant with his elephant wife throws his trunk in the air: IN THIS ECONOMY? I’D RATHER—

 

Zero 

My now-husband lies face-up in bed. He rolls the ring around my knuckle. Admires its newness. A hot breeze rolls in through our rental window. Sirens ring outside on the street. Clouds reveal a bright honeymoon. Black silhouettes of tiny roaches dot the light along the vinyl flooring. The refrigerator whirs.

“What do you think about a house?” I ask him. 

“Expensive,” he says. 

“Less than renting. After initial costs,” I add.

I feel hungry, in this moment, for a settled life. For the safety of a place all our own. I begin, in the depths of my head, to idealize it. I begin to refuse to let this go.

“We’re priced out of the new stuff. We’d have to go fixer upper. Still expensive,” he counters.

“You have a solid gig,” I remind him.

“What if I lose the gig?” He turns to face me. I can see the same hunger in him. A companion animal looking to nest. “They’d raze a fixer-upper to the ground. Build more new homes. Or another Whole Foods. So if they razed it. If they could do such a thing, what would you rather do?”

I consider the efficacy of making a house a home against the potential of losing it. I consider the absurd idea that a company could raze a house with people in it. I consider the joy of an old womb, a matriarchal place of comfort and solidarity and union. A life raft in a flood of landlords.

“I’d rather die in it,” I say. 

He nods in agreement. It’s settled. We’d go down with the ship. We’d stain her white ceiling with the oil from our noses. If we had to, we’d claw-dance until her walls folded in.

 

 

Rebecca Baumann is an LA native, California writer, and editor. Her work can be found in Black Warrior Review, Golden State: Best New Writing from California, 52 Men: The Podcast, and 7X7 LA Magazine, among others. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin, where she is pursuing a PhD in English and Women’s & Gender Studies. Her novel about a child prodigy’s fame, exploitation, and love in the art world is seeking its forever home.