selling aunt betty's house

brickyard pizza with olives and bell peppers

I'm crashing at Aunt Betty's house, along with a group of young guys, skater types. I think they're along for the ride, but I'm there to get down to business. We're selling the house, but not as Betty left it, rather as Dan has rennovated it. [Which I've never seen in real life.] I answer the door and it's a middle aged woman with long blonde hair dressed in black trousers and sweater. I kick into gear and offer to tour her around the house. I show her the first bedroom, point out the white slump block fireplace, which I insist "goes all tge way through," and indeed the back of the fireplace is a strange angular concoction that receeds back out of sight somehow, probablt turning an improbable angle into the next room's fireplace, which is very much the fireplace from the living room when I show it to her, blonde brick face and tiled bench.

I point out the windows in the former back wall of the house, that they are floor to ceiling, and stretch the entire length of the house. The bars are still on, but the new back room is there, too, all glass. We go out onto the former porch and I show her how the new back sun room is this wierd prismatic space of joined glass planes, which you can hardly even make out, except where they come together as a point that juts out into the back yard. The woman asks how my aunt and uncle came to live in such a modern house back when, I point out that this and that are recent rennovations, but the house overall was the house for a 60's party couple, I intimate a life of cocktail partys and wild living.

We go out into the back yard. The skaters are splashing around with their girls in the pool. The yard has been seriously altered since I seen it, now terraced down away from the house, expanded to several acres. There is a ridge that runs along and away from the house, from which we look down onto a veritable pine forest, and on to vistas of a quaint distant village. I emphasize that the yard is huge, but XERIC, and requires almost no upkeep.

She has to talk about it with her husband, and shortly she turns into her balding, slightly portly husband. He and I are back inside the wierd sunroom, talking. An apparition of Aunt Betty walks behind him, smiling, carrying a try of sweets or some sort, she makes eye contact and vanishes at the plane of the sliding door. I get all teary eyed, it's very WB.