My partner Kathy and I bought a really nice summer cottage awhile backnicer, actually, than our house in some ways. In fact, there's only one problem with it: it's way too girly for us. The previous owners, an older married couple, had a penchant for purple and frills. The living/diningroom area and laundry room offered the only exceptions, with green sculpted and baby blue carpeting, respectively. But the bedroom and bathroom both had purple carpeting, most of the walls in the bedroom, livingroom, and bathroom were a deep lilac color, and everything else had some sort of pattern that prominently featured purple, such as the festoon-patterned wallpaper border in the livingroom, the floral-print wallpaper in the bathroom, and the grape-studded border in the kitchen.
Even the yard was cutsied up, with a little wooden wishing well to which was attached the silhouette of a girl in a pink dress and bonnet with a bucket.
Fortunately, the previous owners at least took their extensive collection of ceramic dolls in prissy dresses: their creepy little doll eyes made Kathy's skin crawl with how they seemed to follow her around the room. Chuckie's understudies may have been more the wife's, however, than a joint thingalthough the husband's urgent need to show off his assemblage of 600 Matchbox trucks in the garage smacked a little of protesting too much, given the flouncy curtain on the garage window. We are also happy to report that, along with their dolls and trucks, they also took the king-sized bed with a fan of petal-shaped mirrors for a headboard and the tanning bed that, to a person ( me, Kathy, her mom, our realtor ) , all at first thought was a coffin. We are as much Stephen King fans as the next guy, but something that looks like it might be a prop in Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily' is just a wee bit too Psycho for us.
But to get back to the elements that remained with the cottage, I thought it pertinent to mention that my gal and I aren't exactly the types to swagger around with cowboy boots, BVDs, and a large ring of keys thumping against a hip, but the interior decorating of this place was a like a circus peanut: sort of cute but way too sweet. As a result, we have been on a quest to butch up the place. Being vegetarians and supporters of animal rights, we won't likely be adding a moose head or a stuffed bear, but we did nail an old-fashioned tin sign for bass bait to the wall in the kitchen. We bought some other tin signs for John Deere tractors and put up a 1940s ad for Boy Scout shorts, which proclaims, 'The world over, rugged he-men choose shorts.' And we placed, on the mantle, an antique metal cowboy crooner; though the bad paint job admittedly makes him look like he might be wearing lipstick, he is at least not wearing a lacy bonnet of any sort. Speaking of which, we eighty-sixed the silhouette girl on the wishing well almost immediately and are looking to dismantle the well itself at the first opportunity.
We yanked up all of the carpeting and had wood flooring put in ( the yard, to our way of thinking, seems like a better place than plush carpeting to collect the inevitable mud and sand that comes of spending time in woods and on the beach ) . We painted the bedroom walls a nice masculine blue and are planning sage and yellow for the kitchen and livingroom, in that order.
I have entertained the idea that this redecorating we're doing could be like lemon ice between courses at an Italian restaurantsomething to cleanse the palatebut I doubt we will someday decide we need to swing the butch-femme pendulum the other way and add some lace doilies to the bench built by our neighbor that he decorated with fishing lure prints. Like the adventurers, explorers, and alpine farmers in the Boy Scout ad, we intend to wear shortsand be rugged. Just think of us as the anti-Fab FiveButch Eye for the Campy ... Camp?
c 2003 by Yvonne Zipter.
Yvonne Zipter can be reached via e-mail at yz@press.uchicago.edu .