Yours, Mine and Ours

The vacation home was on Balboa Island. There was a patio with yellow roses, a dock with a white picket fence. The front windows were tall and wide, with a view either of boats and a promenade, or, from the outside, of the occupants in their jammies. Like pioneers, like interlopers, like Goldilocks, the guests settled in.

Suitcases were unpacked into the closets of the absentee owners. Their refrigerator was stocked with milk and unfamiliar Chardonnay. Maybe their ears burned as their decor was sized up by tourists (a bit thick with the duck knickknacks, but far nicer than that house a few years ago with the scary shag rug and the bad beds and the Polynesian wet bar).

It couldn’t have been more personal, it couldn’t have been more impersonal. It was that long-standing urban custom: the summer rental of someone else’s house.

Please forgive the digression--today’s remarks admittedly involve one of the region’s less pressing matters--but the vacation-home rental market has to be one of Southern California’s more comical inconsistencies. If there is a culture that would seem less inclined toward the opening of private households to total strangers, I can’t name it. Not for nothing is this the capital of gated communities and solo commuters and people who would rather talk to an answering machine than an actual person. Public spaces, like the Third Street Promenade, are set up specifically so that you can leave the crowd at a moment’s notice. The Southland is so inhibited that eye contact in a traffic jam is considered an invasion of space.

And yet there are families here--ours among them--who have spent an annual week or two for generations, hanging their toothbrushes in some rented home or another in Newport Beach or Santa Barbara or Avalon. Or making themselves scarce while unmet house guests clink their wineglasses and snore on their pillows, dreaming what it would be like to be the landlord, just once.

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What is it about this uncharacteristic, un-Californian urge to encroach on each other? The houses were so close that just opening the windows could attract the voice of someone two doors down arguing on the phone. (“Well, what do you want?” “Honey, I’m just telling you. . . .” “Fine, then, I’m always wrong.”)

Inside, the intimate effects of strangers called out to be noticed--their quilts and knickknacks, their trophies and trash novels and beat-up board games and framed family snapshots. Here they were when their kids were little, on the beach, on the slopes, at a resort in Hawaii. Here they were now, their faces older, their hairstyles poignantly unchanged.

There seemed no choice but to think about these strangers with the duck fetish and the cranky neighbors. No choice but to wonder what they’d think of us. And no choice--as we channel-surfed their TV or grabbed a midnight snack in their kitchen--but to feel a certain kinship: Had we not come and gone through the same Dutch doors, slept in the same bedrooms, stood at the same sea wall, watching sand crabs scuttle at ebb tide? Had we not come as close as two sets of strangers in this metropolis can expect to come?

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We drove home in cars filled with dirty clothes and faded beach towels, the sudden nip of incoming autumn in the afternoon light. Somewhere in our wake, the landlords were returning to roost again in the home they’d left behind.

The cat was in his usual spot, under the tea-rose bush by the driveway. Inside was the usual musty smell your house gets when it’s been without you for awhile. There was the mail, left by the housekeeper, who’d been told to feel free to stay over and use the pool in our absence. There was the pile of dirty clothes left by the teenager who’d come up over the weekend for a friend’s party, and who’d stopped by with some buddies to change.

And, just as the homesteaders were reclaiming the homestead, there, suddenly, protruding from the landscape, was the mark in our own house of . . . guests! And they’d settled in! And not nicely, either. There on the patio table were five cigarette butts, Marlboros, in the home of nonsmokers. Sure, people had been invited to use the place, but--evidence?

Some pioneer, some interloper, some Goldilocks had been here. Friends of the teenager, as it later turned out, but still the lesson was there: Life invades life--merrily, messily, in even the most private of destinations. There’s no getting past it. The tourists are everywhere.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.