Overnight Visitors? They’re Always Welcome to Stay. But Not in My House.

YOU CAN’T be as bad as I am,” says my friend Jon about house guests. Jon is wrong, I think. “I had a friend,” he continues, “a good friend, probably my best friend, stay with me, and he got on my nerves.”

In how many days? “What do you mean days?” asks Jon. “On the way to the airport to pick him up, I began to feel put out. Then I thought: Why does he have to let his feet touch the carpet when he walks?”

Maybe Jon does understand how I feel about house guests. My friend Marcella, on the other hand, doesn’t have a clue. Recently, she told me that we couldn’t have lunch for the next two months because she’s having company.

“Here I sit, juggling my schedule for the onslaught of the House Guest Season,” said Marcella, who entertains at least 25 visitors a year, mostly between May and September. “I even keep a guest book. There are probably 500 names in there.”

Despite Benjamin Franklin’s astute (if conservative) observation that fish and visitors smell in three days, Marcella’s guests stay an average of five days. “Though we did have one who stayed for three months,” she recalled, “and that really was too long. There cannot be a nicer guy, but I wound up hating him.”

I would have wound up killing him. I work at home. House guests (I don’t care who they are, how much I like them or how long it’s been since I last saw them) are pests, much like roaches and mice. But there are differences. You can trap roaches and mice. And they don’t want you to drive them to Disneyland.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad to see out-of-town visitors. They’re welcome at my house for breakfast, lunch or dinner--as long as they call first. It’s when they want to stay in my house, disrupting my life, fogging up my bathroom, tying up my phone, that I act like a mama bear defending her lair.

My husband found this out the hard way. When we moved in together, he blithely suggested that we turn the room that was earmarked for my office into a guest room. “You can always work on the sun porch,” Duke said, noting that the porch wasn’t big enough or private enough for overnight visitors.

I immediately went off like a car alarm.

“I guess it’s the couch in the living room if they stay,” Duke hastily conceded. Or a bigger house. Or a motel.

I’m all in favor of motels. Sure, they cost $40 a night, but they save a lot of aggravation all around. Frankly, the only thing as draining as having a house guest is being one. In your effort not to be any trouble, you do twice as much housework as you ever do at home, and still your hosts’ faces grow longer and longer as they knock themselves out trying to be cheerful.

And this is assuming that they don’t have a convertible sofa designed by a chiropractor who wants to increase business, or an unhousebroken but amorous dog. Being a house guest might be fun if you had a good experience in the Army, or if you come from a large family. But otherwise . . . .

“In the South, it’s just something you do,” says Marcella, who’s from Arkansas. “If you don’t stay with people, it’s an insult.” I’ve yet to meet anyone (and this includes friends and relatives) who was offended not to have me as a guest.

“If I travel the world, I can collect my debt,” Marcella says. “I could stay anywhere.” That would be an advantage, I suppose. “Of course, my husband wouldn’t dream of it,” she says. “Here I spent all these years working out a wonderful trade agreement, and he wants his own place with a private bath. He doesn’t like the people. Probably because they’ve been house guests.”

Probably. “The real problem with house guests is you can’t have sex whenever you want,” my friend Sabina says. “That they wake up earlier or later is unimportant. What gets me is when you’re in the kitchen doing the dishes, your husband comes in, starts nibbling on your ear, and your house guest wants a glass of milk.”

What gets me is when you’re in the kitchen doing the dishes while two ardent house guests are rolling around on your living room floor.

“You’re just not a hostess,” says my sister Laurie, who once threatened to buy me a welcome mat that said “Go away.” “You would never buy a sofa bed.” I shuffle my feet guiltily. “The first piece of furniture I got was a sofa bed,” she says.

Actually, it’s pretty comfortable. I slept on it for five days last fall when I was in New York. And I must confess I had a wonderful time. Laurie didn’t feel the slightest need to entertain me, and I didn’t feel obliged to be compulsively neat. We just basked in the intimacy of being sisters. Of course, Laurie, a workaholic, was hardly ever home.

Which brings me to the reason she’s calling me now. “Guess what?” she says. “I’m coming to L.A. on business.”

“Want to stay with me?” I automatically reply.