525 Cranberry Lane, Fleetwood
Few queers, I imagine, would willingly answer a Craigslist ad for a basement apartment in the mountains of Jeffersonville, NCââbut here we were: driving our harassed Toyota Camry up the steep gravel drive of Cranberry Lane. Neither Mandy nor I could have fully anticipated our landlady, Joyceââ but we had an inkling of her chaotic energy soon after our first phone call. During what should have been a five-minute phone call to schedule an appointment, this sixty-something mountain grandma glossed right over my explanation that we were a queer couple and proceeded to tell me about her brother (on the other side of the holler) who tried to cheat her out of her inheritance, about her youngest daughter whoâd married a decent but distant man (making a slapshot living digging up ginkgo biloba root in her woods), about her eldest daughter (who also lived on the property with her two kids and their golden lab), and about a fraught relationship with her middle-daughter (who sometimes helped her clean houses but who no longer lived with Joyce because she âsimply will not stay on her medsâ). We left the call with a Saturday afternoon appointment and few other details about the place, other than the fact that Cranberry Lane is easy to miss, unless you keep an eye out for the row of six mailboxes that doot the foot of the drive.Â
The road dead-ends into a freshly built country mansion with a wrap-around porch, surrounded by matching bungalows on all sides. Both my wife and I expected a petite, affluent lady who owned a cleaning service and a handful of rentals. Neither of us, I donât think, expected the plump befreckled woman, towering over us at six-feet tallââwhose dull gray roots peppered through a long since abandoned strawberry blonde dye job. Turns out weâd arrived at the property just minutes after Joyce, who had returned from a Saturday morning cleaningââ a shop vac and piles of cleaning supplies poured from her open Honda Civic hatchback onto the gravel driveway.Â
Abandoning her hatchback and its contents, Joyce took us around the back of her house, kicked off her ruddy Asics at the front door, and keyed into a dark two-bedroom apartment. Sheâd barely crossed the threshold when her juvenile golden doodle, Doc, muscled past us into the basement apartment, leaving a trail of mud and twigs in his wake. Joyce had given up on wrangling the dog and, instead, ushered us from room to room at breakneck speedââ then stopped, suddenly in the RV-style kitchen to sermonize on septic-safe cleaning products. We watched red splotches spread across her face and neck as she decried previous renters, who âcost her thousands of dollarsâ by failing to notify her when the sump pump failed after a storm. âPardon my saying so but there was... shit all over the yard. Feces everywhere.âÂ
And, with that, Joyce abruptly exited the apartment and began a wide-stride walking tour of her rental compound. Waving off the odd tenant as we passed, Joyce spun a story of a struggling single woman, whose husband left her right at âthe change of life,â and who pulled herself up by her bootstraps with frugality (and, it seems, the hundreds of thousands of dollars it took to build a small housing complex on a remote mountain holler). All tenants must similarly value frugality, she explained, as all residents split the heating, water, electric, and internet bills. âI keep the thermostat at 68 degrees in the winterââ wear layers.â At that, Joyce abruptly returned to her husband (the catalyst for said frugality), who âhad the gall to bring that woman into our homeâ this past Thanksgiving. Yes, ten years had passed, âbut did he ever consider how his daughters would feelââno!â Standing on the hillside garden patch, our eyes darted to each other (and to our car), not thirty feet away. Surely, this tour had neared its end.
Alas, no.
Joyce insisted that we also see the inside of her home (with its stacks of canned goods lining the walls, its pile of rolled up carpets in the entry, its two salt-water fish tanks in the living room, and its smell of cat urine and rotting compost). Offering us glasses of Crystal Lite and then quickly forgetting them in favor of a story about her ânew truck driver beau,â Joyce began rifling through a kitchen cupboard filled not with drinking glasses but with stacks of lose paper. âMy contracts,â she says, calling over her shoulder. Then, without ever checking our references or gauging our interest in the apartment, she retrieved her bifocals from behind a countertop compost bin, took a blue Bic from a coffee mug, and began to fill in our names onto a photocopied rental agreementââ taking this opportunity to share warn of the $525 penalty for breaking the year-long contract.Â
And this, dear reader, is how, without a word in edgewise, my wife and I found ourselves renting from a millionaire maid, whose penchant for hoarding had (by the time we broke the lease seven months later) expanded to include a flock of fifty-odd, free-range chickens who shit with reckless abandon on the property grounds. The month before we notified her of our intention to break the lease, we discovered that the flock also included several sets of chicks, sitting under a heat lamp in her master bathroom tub.