You Look Like That Girl by Lisa Jakub

Author:Lisa Jakub
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beaufort Books
Published: 2015-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Open Door Policy

After all those years of corporate apartments and murderous mansions, it was time to find a more permanent place to lay my head in Los Angeles. Age fifteen seemed a good time to get into the real estate game. The house my mom found was close to my favorite bagel place and had a gorgeous grapefruit tree in the backyard. So, I bought a tree, which just happened to come with a house.

It was the summer of 1994. The Northridge earthquake had hit in January and the city was still reeling. Rubble remained strewn about, as people tried put their lives back together while waiting for the insurance checks to clear. We had been in Canada for Christmas and missed the seismic event but my mother, always the opportunist, saw something positive amongst all the cracked drywall and crumbling roofs.

It was a simple one level ranch-style house with two bedrooms. It had been built in the 1930s and had all the charm and architecture of the era. It also had all of the crappy plumbing and electrical wiring of the era. It was a weird little place. The shower door was decorated with a frosted glass deer, eating frosted glass flowers in a frosted glass field. There had been clumsy and certainly illegal additions, meaning that there were random brick walls or windows that peered into adjacent rooms. Surprised guests would open a door, expecting a coat closet, and find themselves in a completely tiled room that served as a shower or a handy place to commit an easy-clean-up slaughter. Modern conveniences, such as temperature control, functional kitchen appliances, or windows that closed all the way were not part of the house’s repertoire.

I lacked the motivation to fix those sorts of things, and without stable money coming in, those kinds of luxurious extras didn’t seem financially feasible. The money in the bank was what I’d have until the next job, and if there was no next job, it needed to last until my actor’s union pension kicked in. My actor friends always complained about their lack of funds, so, I tended to be in a constant state of panic that I was broke. Even though I was still a teenager, I was convinced that each paycheck might be the last one I would ever get.

The house had seen better days. Before me, it had been mostly inhabited, it seemed, by feral cats. The floor buckled in some places, pushing up cheap parquet tiles into jagged, threatening peaks. The ceiling was collapsing in other places, raining down insulation and rat droppings onto horrified Sunday Open House visitors. The house had a long line of short-term tenants in its past, who had no concern for sustaining its health. The earthquake appeared to be the final straw, the last owners had abandoned it and the bank became its reluctant owner. The house needed saving. It was awkward and strange and I absolutely loved it. We had a kinship. Mom and I did just enough renovation to make it livable, moved in, and made it our California home.

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