overnight

My friend and fellow Houghton classmate Charlie Gardiner, the estimable “CG,” who graduated with me 40 years ago way back in 1966, is threatening to overnight at our house.
This is because he purchased a chest of drawers at auction, thinking it was in Montreal, but actually it was in Toronto.
Getting it means an eight-hour driving marathon from his humble abode in central Massachusetts (Ashburnham).
Charlie is one of the vaunted ne’er-do-wells, also one of the infamous Cronies that caused great fear and loathing at the college during our freshman year.
As such I swap e-mails with him, and have visited him twice.
Eight-hour driving marathons could be beyond us old geezers. I remember a horrid all-day driving marathon from Huntington, W. Va. I was totally blasted.
So I announced this possibility to Linda and got a wince.
“Well, I guess I gotta start cleaning up the house.”
“I don’t think we need to,” I said. “The appearance of this house doesn’t matter that much to me.”
“It does to me,” Linda said.
It’s the old waazoo. Pants-wearers don’t care that much about digs, but skirts do.
Charlie’s wife Elaine was clearly embarrassed by the ramshackle appearance of Charlie’s house.
Most distressing was that the kitchen was no different than it was years earlier, when supposedly Charlie was in the midst of kitchen upgrades.
I was directed to Charlie’s ‘pyooter, buried in a detritus of old magazines and clippings. The house wasn’t air-conditioned, and it was the middle of July. So here I was, dripping with sweat, trying to field the usual loving rotten tomatoes lobbed from West Bridgewater.
I was taken (i.e. we drove) to Charlie’s vacation abode in Jamaica, Vt.; actually the old Holton homestead. (Mary Holton, Charlie’s cousin, also graduated Houghton.)
The homestead is very rustic. I don’t think it has central-heating, but it does have plumbing, although you don’t drink the water.
The roof is slate.
Charlie has converted the old house into an antique shop — he has antiques sprayed all over the central foyer. I guess he dabbles in antiques for a living: an eBayer.
I was taken upstairs to the dingy* bedroom I used on my first visit. The wallpaper is water-stained, and the single central bulb, operated by a frayed pull-cord, is bare. *Seems fine to me.
“If you have to pee, just go out the window,” Charlie said (the single bathroom is downstairs).
“Through the screen and onto the roof?” I asked.
“Yep,” he said, ever-confident.
I can just imagine how this would go over with skirts.
The bathroom was originally probably not a bathroom, and has a large shelf cluttered with smashed toothpaste tubes and other bathroom paraphernalia.
The toilet was also tilted, probably due to rotting sills.
“I have quilting stuff on the spare bed that needs to be moved before we can use it,” Linda said.
“I think that’s all we need to do,” I said.
Wince.
“When is he threatening to show up?” Linda asked.
“Week to 10 days,” I said.
Wince.
I suggested Charlie might want to find a motel-room in Toronto.
It’s not like I feel he’s unwelcome here, but Toronto-to-here is four hours.
Another option is staying with us both coming-and-going; in which case the marathons get halved.