Read Online The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life by Melanie Shankle - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Melanie Shankle
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one, except with toast instead of a murderer wearing a bad sweater.
Right at that moment, Perry walked through the front door and I went into total FREAK-OUT mode about the noise and being assaulted by a piece of half-eaten toast. To which he replied, “That’s weird. We don’t even eat toast.”
Yes. That’s the weird part.
Not the fact that something THREW, nay HURLED, a piece of toast at me. And I may not know if possums belong to the phylum Rodentia, but I knew there was no way they were capable of throwing toast. For starters, they’re basically blind.
So Perry set a trap that night and caught a rat. Not a mouse. Not a cousin of Stuart Little. A rat. A rat with a penchant for burned toast. Or maybe he hated the burned toast, and that’s why he threw it at me. And, oh, it was an angry rat. It hissed at Perry and jumped on the side of the cage like it wanted to attack.
Needless to say, we started looking for a new place to live the very next day. Because possums are one thing, but when a rat shows up, it’s time to move. Or burn the place to the ground. It’s your call.
But as for me and my house, we began searching the real estate listings the next day. Because there are some things that even Young Love can’t handle.
CHAPTER 6
The Great House Search
A T SOME POINT during my teenage years, I decided it would be a dream of mine to buy a house with my future husband that would be the home we would live in forever. The house where we’d raise our family and mark doorways with kids’ heights and open presents on Christmas morning and create a whole host of magical memories.
Maybe it was because my parents divorced when I was nine, and by the time I left for college, the only places that really felt like home were my grandparents’ homes. Or maybe it was because I became slightly obsessed with the movie Father of the Bride and wanted a hypothetical daughter to have her wedding reception in the backyard of the house where she grew up.
Of course, now that I have an actual daughter, she’s repeatedlytold me that ALL HER FRIENDS have gotten to move to new houses and she’s the ONLY ONE who has to stay in the same old house. So in my desire to fulfill my lifelong dream, I may be inadvertently raising a child who will become a wandering gypsy.
The rat incident was the perfect opportunity to begin the hunt for the perfect house since the only other option at that point was to live in a tent outside. The only problem was that we were poor. And houses tend to cost money and require things like insurance and property taxes and down payments because GAH, being a grown-up is hard.
But the six months of living virtually rent-free had given us a chance to save some money, so I began to search the Sunday newspaper for open houses and promptly fell in love with several homes way out of our price range, because frankly, our price range was depressing. I wasn’t completely sure our price range was going to be able to afford us the luxury of indoor plumbing.
And after several tearful weeks where Perry would keep having to reel me back into reality, we decided it might be best to find a Realtor to help us in our house search. We ended up with the kindest, most patient Realtor ever. He didn’t even laugh when we told him our budget, even though he agreed it might be tough to find everything we were looking for at that price point.
Over the next month or so, we looked at a series of houses that were each more depressing than the last. Some of which might have been located next door to a crack house. We discovered that people like to call a large closet a “third bedroom” and that “updated kitchen” just means it was updated sometime after 1953. And every time we found something remotely promising, it already had a contract on it.
But finally the day came when our Realtor, Robert, called meand whispered furiously, “I’m listening to a deal falling through in the next cubicle on a great house. We need to get
Right at that moment, Perry walked through the front door and I went into total FREAK-OUT mode about the noise and being assaulted by a piece of half-eaten toast. To which he replied, “That’s weird. We don’t even eat toast.”
Yes. That’s the weird part.
Not the fact that something THREW, nay HURLED, a piece of toast at me. And I may not know if possums belong to the phylum Rodentia, but I knew there was no way they were capable of throwing toast. For starters, they’re basically blind.
So Perry set a trap that night and caught a rat. Not a mouse. Not a cousin of Stuart Little. A rat. A rat with a penchant for burned toast. Or maybe he hated the burned toast, and that’s why he threw it at me. And, oh, it was an angry rat. It hissed at Perry and jumped on the side of the cage like it wanted to attack.
Needless to say, we started looking for a new place to live the very next day. Because possums are one thing, but when a rat shows up, it’s time to move. Or burn the place to the ground. It’s your call.
But as for me and my house, we began searching the real estate listings the next day. Because there are some things that even Young Love can’t handle.
CHAPTER 6
The Great House Search
A T SOME POINT during my teenage years, I decided it would be a dream of mine to buy a house with my future husband that would be the home we would live in forever. The house where we’d raise our family and mark doorways with kids’ heights and open presents on Christmas morning and create a whole host of magical memories.
Maybe it was because my parents divorced when I was nine, and by the time I left for college, the only places that really felt like home were my grandparents’ homes. Or maybe it was because I became slightly obsessed with the movie Father of the Bride and wanted a hypothetical daughter to have her wedding reception in the backyard of the house where she grew up.
Of course, now that I have an actual daughter, she’s repeatedlytold me that ALL HER FRIENDS have gotten to move to new houses and she’s the ONLY ONE who has to stay in the same old house. So in my desire to fulfill my lifelong dream, I may be inadvertently raising a child who will become a wandering gypsy.
The rat incident was the perfect opportunity to begin the hunt for the perfect house since the only other option at that point was to live in a tent outside. The only problem was that we were poor. And houses tend to cost money and require things like insurance and property taxes and down payments because GAH, being a grown-up is hard.
But the six months of living virtually rent-free had given us a chance to save some money, so I began to search the Sunday newspaper for open houses and promptly fell in love with several homes way out of our price range, because frankly, our price range was depressing. I wasn’t completely sure our price range was going to be able to afford us the luxury of indoor plumbing.
And after several tearful weeks where Perry would keep having to reel me back into reality, we decided it might be best to find a Realtor to help us in our house search. We ended up with the kindest, most patient Realtor ever. He didn’t even laugh when we told him our budget, even though he agreed it might be tough to find everything we were looking for at that price point.
Over the next month or so, we looked at a series of houses that were each more depressing than the last. Some of which might have been located next door to a crack house. We discovered that people like to call a large closet a “third bedroom” and that “updated kitchen” just means it was updated sometime after 1953. And every time we found something remotely promising, it already had a contract on it.
But finally the day came when our Realtor, Robert, called meand whispered furiously, “I’m listening to a deal falling through in the next cubicle on a great house. We need to get
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