Vineyard House Guest Horror Stories

Written by Holly Nadler

We all know Mark Twain’s line about guests and fish smelling after three days. Most of our visitors stay longer; a week is probably an allotment of time once approved by Emily Post.

There’s a pure joy in having these loved ones cross our threshold. The first dinner is festive: “I’m making lobster Normande, okay?, with a blue cheese, toasted pecans and raspberry vinaigrette salad, served with a pinot grigio!”

It’s a laugh riot as you catch up. Later, you’re delighted to scrounge for fresh towels, and make sure your guests have reading lamps handy for the latest Geraldine Brooks you’ve lent them. Same applies to the second and third day. You’re so happy to host them, you’re close to placing Godiva chocolates on their pillows.

And then . . .

The remainder of the visit is fine, but the mad pleasure fades into calm acceptance. At last, parting is sweet sorrow, but how cool to get your space back to yourself.

Are you with me on this?

Now here are some horror stories about people who have wrung the starch out of their welcome:

We know a West Tis couple, let’s call them Bev and Bill, who knew a guy whose wife sent him packing. They invited him to stay until he got his bearings. He got them, all right: After he'd spent a month in their spacious guest bedroom with a bathroom en suite and a view over Tiah’s Cove, a telephone truck pulled up to install a phone in the guest’s bedroom. Bev and Bill sent him packing.

In East Chop, Marty and I had a female friend who holed up in a front upstairs bedroom for over a month. She was homeless but rich: willing to stay at 5-star hotels or with friends, wherever her sense of adventure led her.

She was also mad about that all-carbs-no-fat-diet, and in her room she stored pizzas stacked with roasted veggies, nuking them in a small microwave she’d installed specially for upstairs midnight snacks.

She kept her door shut, but her windows wide open to admit strong night winds; heavy-duty garlic smells whooshed out from under the door and into the second-story rooms. She showed no signs of leaving, so Marty slipped the ferry schedule under the closed door. She was gone within a day and we haven’t seen her since.

We all know this: After we’ve purchased our Vineyard home, we make the mistake of inviting everyone "from the redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters" to come and bide a wee.

In hindsight we know exactly what those first summers betoken: Us changing sheets, running the washing machine nonstop, cooking, vacuuming and trying to keep our career going for five minutes at a stretch. Our mate conducts tours out of that old van we bought the second day we settled in here.

Now some guests are so darn good they spoil you for everyone else. My friend, the writer Maureen Earl (real name) was like that: She ran the dishwasher, fixed the bathtub stopper, helped with the cooking, gave us pottery and Champagne, and treated us to restaurant dinners. The meals got ritzier for the brief period she was married to Clifford Irving; Richard Gere portrayed him in the movie, The Hoax. And by the way, baby Charlie loved Cliff because he was bouncy and playful, like Tigger in Winnie-the-Pooh.

But guests who tossed their stuff around, never made their beds, and let us pick up the checks for dinners, went directly on our bolt-the-doors list.

And then there was the well-known TV comedian who brought his girlfriend, an artist from New York. After their first refreshing outdoor shower, they asked if they could lounge naked around the house. Call us prudes, but we said nuh uh.

The hardest part about having summer guests is squaring your need to work with theirs to play. I know one couple with a gift store in Oak Bluffs who’ve long enforced a rule: No one stays with them during the summer. Not for five minutes. Not for two-and-a-half minutes. They work from pre-dawn to post-dusk, and they haven’t a micro-moment to spare. Some of their best buds from off-Island try to skirt this regulation, but the shop owners won’t budge. This is their time to rake in the dough, and what’s wrong with socializing in November, for godsakes?!

The easiest method for receiving guests was laid out in English country houses. Your mansion or castle nestled on at least a hundred acres. You had forty guest rooms, a roster of employees the size of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and a long dining table that could seat 100 in a pinch.

We might enjoy that here if the top 1 percent of the wealthiest citizens sacrificed seven of their eight homes and gave them away to deserving hosts tired of putting people up in their miniscule three-bedroom cottages. It would be good for the economy because these new McMansion owners would need to hire at least some staff. We could pay for it by renting out rooms in the winter to Vineyard shufflers and the over-flow of inmates from prisons, assisted living facilities, monasteries and convents off Island.

At this point, you might wonder what I’m smoking.

And my answer? After a long summer, not enough.   

The original version of this post was published on MV Patch Sept. 19, 2011 as "Do House Guests Stink?" Read Holly's new serial novel, "Lady Slipper Farm and the Summer People," on Patch. We're publishing a classic "Vineyard Confidential" column each Saturday.