“We’ll need a formal living room,” I said, writing down the words, confident a clearly detailed list of our needs would prevent further domestic disaster.
“Is that the room where I watch football?” Candler asked.
“You don’t watch football,” I said.
“I’m thinking about taking it up,” he said.
“Oh, no you don’t. I swore I’d never marry anyone who watched football,” I replied.
“That’s very un-American of you,” he said.
I hated televised sports, as it reminded me of my drunk, chain-smoking father’s endless football, baseball, basketball, golf, and tennis watching weekends. My whole life I had sworn I’d never marry a man who watched sports on television. (Life Lesson #78, 354, 623, 807 and so on: Remember to stop saying “never” – it’s a magnet for trouble.)
“No football,” I said firmly.
“In the living room?”
“In any room.”
And so the negotiations began. Our final draft included fifteen main rooms, excluding bathrooms, formal living room, dining room, family room, breakfast room, master bedroom, guest room for Candler’s parents who came from Australia to visit two months of the year (the other ten months it would be available for my mother), a guest room for my son – a child always needs to know they can come home, no matter how old they are – an additional guest room for me to escape domestic bliss, an office for my husband, an office for me, a sunroom (woman-cave), a man-cave for football (I said yes. . .what did you expect?), a workout/yoga room, a private bathroom for each bedroom and office, a laundry room, a kitchen and of course a screened porch. The need for an additional room to house our red silk sofa had quickly grown to 7,000 square feet. I wanted to shoot that damn red butterfly that had fluttered its wings and started this tsunami.
Exhausted from years of legal wrangling and fragile health, I desperately needed a few years free from work, lawsuits and crises to recover. Apparently, abstaining from work had made my new husband’s top-ten-list, too. Candler looked at my lush apartment, fur coats, Mercedes and diamonds – all of which I had earned – and felt a fifteen-room home suited our status perfectly. “Who’s paying for all this?” I asked. He stared at me and smiled.
The solution of how to satiate our needs without me sacrificing all the nuts I’d squirreled away for the winter came from my mother. One Sunday afternoon, not long after the furniture-shuffling exercise, she spoke that seven-syllable word that always preceded a life altering suggestion.
“D-a-r-l-i-n-g,” she said. Her Southern drawl stretched the word out like the slinky dog in Toy Story. “I read in the Atlanta Journal about this woman living in an enormous mansion on West Paces Ferry. Mag-nif-i-cent. A pool and g-o-r-g-e-o-u-s grounds. Just the kind of house you need. All she paid was $2000 a month, including her pool man, gardener and maid.” My mother’s words were cast like a master fly fisherman, the long line thrown into the deep waters of my pocketbook; she dropped her lure at just the right moment, hoping to bait me.
“The house is so mammoth that it felt like an empty tomb,” she continued, “The builder just couldn’t sell it. Sotheby’s hired a woman to furnish it with her lovely things. She’s been living in this g-l-or-i-o-u-s house for four years, all for pennies on the dollar. ”
“Is the house still on the market while she’s living in it?” I asked.
“Certainly, Violet. The point is to sell it. Her decorating provides vision for potential buyers. Besides, her presence keeps burglars away.”
“What do burglars steal in an empty house?”
“Appliances, copper piping, marble, limestone. Buckhead builders are losing thousands on vacant mansions stripped to the bone. These burglars are vultures picking the flesh off a carcass. They even pulled up the hardwoods in one house.”
“I’m not interested in a job as a security guard,” I said.
“Why do you have that loaded 38 if you never really need it? Don’t you think you ought to take it out and use it once in a while?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
“Violet, these realtors are desperate. They need women just like you with exquisite furnishings. The fact that you happen to be packing and dangerous should be an added benefit.” my mother said.
“Drop it,” I said.
“You’ll save a fortune in rent and still live in luxury,” she insisted.
“Why would I want strangers traipsing through my living room?” I asked.
“Rich strangers,” my mother remarked. “You never know who you’ll meet.”
I turned up my nose. I had moved nearly two dozen times during the mold years and fifteen times in the two decades preceding that. Living in anything short term was out of the question. I was so tired of moving that by the time I purchased the mold house, I told my mother, “I’ll die here before I move again.” Kindly enough, God made sure I didn’t.
Despite my disinterest in my mother’s proposal, I was still faced with the dilemma created by my new red sofa and a ring on my left hand. In those pre-economic-collapse days, I was quickly struck with the fiscal reality of paying in excess of $10,000 a month in rent for our fifteen-room necessity. Extending the math over several years was sobering.
Although I had won a reasonable settlement in my aforementioned toxic mold lawsuit, it is not as though I was set for life. After decades of single parenthood, 25 years of eighteen-hour workdays and a four-year lawsuit, I was physiological and emotionally spent. Burned to a crisp. Going back to work to pay for an expensive lifestyle wasn’t even in the realm of possibility. Despite the fact that I had fallen down a long dark tunnel into Tim Burton’s version of Wonderland I wasn’t insane — at least not yet.
As my realtor drove us between appointments, I couldn’t help but notice enormous, empty mansions adorning the tree-lined streets of Buckhead. I began glancing at Sotheby’s website. Homes for sale in the 5-to-10 million-dollar range were plentiful and breathtaking. I began to ask myself, is it really worth $120,000 a year to not have strangers traipsing through my living room once or twice a month?
With each potential rental came the proverbial mold test. As I was still in extremely delicate health, each home was analyzed through the use of Petri-dishes to determine the home’s mold content. The standard for my health was zero incidents of mold, nearly an impossible standard to achieve. This was an exhaustive and expensive process, though mandatory to maintain the ground I had managed to gain over the last five years. Mold was my archenemy. The little fungal terrorists that had set up camp in my body multiplied exponentially unless I kept a multi-tiered anti-terrorism plan in place at all times.
Tier one of my counter-terrorist fungi-stopping plan was environmental. Think Boy in a Plastic Bubble. Before moving into my beautiful blue apartment, it had been meticulously analyzed for mold. I had tested 273 homes before finding my apartment. None of the others passed. Once all the appropriate environmental tests were concluded, the apartment was fogged with grapefruit seed extract every day for a week before I was allowed to move in. The air in my apartment was scrubbed by the finest ultraviolet air filtration systems available, 24/7. Air scrubbers stood like sentries in the foyer on both sides of my front door, feverishly sucking mold off anyone’s clothing that entered. Additional air scrubbers were positioned in every room to filter out any mold brought in from the real world on my clothing. My apartment was my only safe haven from a dangerous mold-infested world. Choosing a new home that met my stringent mold-free standards would be challenging.
Tier two: Diet. White was my out! No rice, pasta, sugar, or flour. No yeast or tannins. That meant no wine, no beer, no alcohol and no bread of any kind. Goat and sheep cheeses only, as all other cheeses are aged, which equals mold. Ripe pears, bananas, grapes, pineapple, and all fruit juices were strictly out. Their natural sugar content was equivalent to eating a Snickers bar. No chlorine, whether washing or drinking. Approved items were strictly vegetables, lean protein, lentils (thrilling), nuts and a few fruits.
The first year of my new diet I lived on the east bank of a river known as denial. I’d sit on one side of the river nibbling on my bark and tree rations, eyeing the Brie and Cabernet on the west bank. Occasionally, under the cloak of darkness, I would wade across the river and treat myself. My taste buds turned cartwheels, but by morning I was vomiting uncontrollably and bleeding from places I didn’t even know could bleed. The slightest deviation landed me in bed or the hospital for weeks. I kept thinking that I’d kill off the little terrorists with grapefruit seed pills or my constant body cleanses, but only abstinence from all my earthly delights sufficed. Wasn’t it enough that I’d lost my home and my business? Must I lose my wine collection, too? I watched as another layer of my identity washed away down the river and into the sea.
Having lost the ability to consume or frequent most of my previous life pleasures, it was paramount that I regain my workout regimen. Daily running, spinning and weight lifting became my only pleasures. The endorphin rush provided the first happiness I’d known in years. But living on nuts and berries, while burning 4500 calories a day, made me thin. Very thin. My family and friends began to worry I had an eating disorder. They tirelessly tried to fatten me up via bread, sweets or pastas. After repeated trips to the hospital for such indulgences I simply said, “No.” Practice makes perfect.
As long as I remained on my diet, lived in a mold-free environment and didn’t frequent establishments with carpet, pets, plants, or too many dyes, I gradually began to regain some semblance of a life. Draining my nest egg to pay for our fifteen-room home felt like a reversal of fortune, and I had had too much of that already; thus I crossed the threshold of no return and called my mother.
“I was wondering if you could tell me more about that article you read in the paper,” I said.
“What article?” she asked.
“The one about the woman living in the mansion on West Paces Ferry,” I replied.
I could hear my mother smile as I bit the hook. With the dexterity of a world champion, she reeled me in.