October 29th, 2005
Holy Water
For six months we’ve been living in a construction zone, confining ourselves to the four rooms in the house done enough to be considered livable—the living room, kitchen, downstairs bathroom, and an adjacent bedroom doubling as an office.
Our unusable space includes the master bedroom and bathroom, my office, the only bedroom downstairs with adequate closet space, and the laundry room. And now, in order to run plumbing for the master bathroom, we have to tear apart the only bathroom that’s more than a thought, in order to do so.
So out goes the vanity with the sink top. Out goes all the stored toiletries, which we pile on my desk in our bedroom that’s doubling as my office and now tripling as storage and quadrupling as a “cleansing” area. Out goes the ONLY toilet. The shower/tub combo remains, but it doesn’t matter—there’s no running water in the house anyway. For two days. For two days we drink stored water, wash our hands with the hose, pee in the yard.
Finally, Sunday night, after patching drywall, retexturing, and painting, the toilet goes back in. Brian’s getting ready to turn the water on to everything but the vanity, which is another day out as we wait for the paint to dry. I leave him to it, go outside to clean up yet another mess.
In the shed, on my knees in front of the chop saw, I’m trying to loosen the wing nut so I can slide the support rail back in, and I’m thinking 1. this is NOT righty-tighty, lefty-loosey, and 2. why the hell do guys have to torque these things down so much? I have it up on end, flipped over, between my legs, and I’m wrenching on it and finally it gives. I heave it off the ground, lift it onto the worktop. And I’m done. I can go inside and shower!
As I round the corner toward the back door, I hear a shriek that’s somewhere in the vicinity of a cat in heat and a pissed off chicken—Hhoneeeeyyy!
What? I’m thinking, it didn’t take me that long to loosen that wing nut.
Brian busts out the back door, shop-vac in hand. He rips off the lid, the dust cover, and, as he dumps fifteen pounds of sawdust directly into the garbage can, he asks me where we keep the towels. I turned on the wrong line, he says, and water went everywhere.
I head inside. He’s right behind me. I’m thinking: we’ve lived here how long and you still don’t know where the towels are. But I don’t say that, because, after all these years, I, for one, have learned something. Instead I say: Okay, calm down. I’ll take care of it.
Water drips from the ceiling, runs down the walls. A pool, directly below the accidentally charged sink lines, broadens and expands, forming a river that cuts across the linoleum and onto the hardwood in the hall. I get the towels (which, to be fair, have moved three times that I can think of) and Brian vacuums up water with the shop-vac.
When it’s dry and I think he’s over it, I start laughing. I mimic his shriek and laugh some more, but it’s too early for that, so I laugh privately. And then I remember it—my book, Aimee Bender’s An Invisible Sign of My Own, that was lying between the bedroom and bathroom in the hall. Is it ruined? I ask. Brian says he picked it up and threw it on the bed. I grab it. I look at it. I shake it. I probe the cover, the pages within. Dry. Bone dry. You’re kidding, Brian says. I picked it up out of a puddle. Are you sure it’s dry? But yep, I’m sure. There’s not a drop of water on it. That’s crazy, Brian repeats. I don’t see how that’s possible.
I hold the book, think about its main character—Mona Gray, an obsessive-compulsive woman who uses math to restore order to a world that, after her father’s unnamed illness, makes little sense. To her, every number is an omen. It is a reason to quit, a mood meter, a harbinger of death. Her dependence on them, on knocking on wood, on eating soap so as not to fall in love—an invisible sign of her disease. And I remember how, in the end, all it took was someone to ask her about her dad, ask her if she was okay, someone to notice, for her to break free.
I smile at Brian and tell him it’s true. The book is dry, and there’s nothing he can do but acknowledge the truth of it, believe in this one small miracle.
Filed Under: Remodel Stories |
Our unusable space includes the master bedroom and bathroom, my office, the only bedroom downstairs with adequate closet space, and the laundry room. And now, in order to run plumbing for the master bathroom, we have to tear apart the only bathroom that’s more than a thought, in order to do so.
So out goes the vanity with the sink top. Out goes all the stored toiletries, which we pile on my desk in our bedroom that’s doubling as my office and now tripling as storage and quadrupling as a “cleansing” area. Out goes the ONLY toilet. The shower/tub combo remains, but it doesn’t matter—there’s no running water in the house anyway. For two days. For two days we drink stored water, wash our hands with the hose, pee in the yard.
Finally, Sunday night, after patching drywall, retexturing, and painting, the toilet goes back in. Brian’s getting ready to turn the water on to everything but the vanity, which is another day out as we wait for the paint to dry. I leave him to it, go outside to clean up yet another mess.
In the shed, on my knees in front of the chop saw, I’m trying to loosen the wing nut so I can slide the support rail back in, and I’m thinking 1. this is NOT righty-tighty, lefty-loosey, and 2. why the hell do guys have to torque these things down so much? I have it up on end, flipped over, between my legs, and I’m wrenching on it and finally it gives. I heave it off the ground, lift it onto the worktop. And I’m done. I can go inside and shower!
As I round the corner toward the back door, I hear a shriek that’s somewhere in the vicinity of a cat in heat and a pissed off chicken—Hhoneeeeyyy!
What? I’m thinking, it didn’t take me that long to loosen that wing nut.
Brian busts out the back door, shop-vac in hand. He rips off the lid, the dust cover, and, as he dumps fifteen pounds of sawdust directly into the garbage can, he asks me where we keep the towels. I turned on the wrong line, he says, and water went everywhere.
I head inside. He’s right behind me. I’m thinking: we’ve lived here how long and you still don’t know where the towels are. But I don’t say that, because, after all these years, I, for one, have learned something. Instead I say: Okay, calm down. I’ll take care of it.
Water drips from the ceiling, runs down the walls. A pool, directly below the accidentally charged sink lines, broadens and expands, forming a river that cuts across the linoleum and onto the hardwood in the hall. I get the towels (which, to be fair, have moved three times that I can think of) and Brian vacuums up water with the shop-vac.
When it’s dry and I think he’s over it, I start laughing. I mimic his shriek and laugh some more, but it’s too early for that, so I laugh privately. And then I remember it—my book, Aimee Bender’s An Invisible Sign of My Own, that was lying between the bedroom and bathroom in the hall. Is it ruined? I ask. Brian says he picked it up and threw it on the bed. I grab it. I look at it. I shake it. I probe the cover, the pages within. Dry. Bone dry. You’re kidding, Brian says. I picked it up out of a puddle. Are you sure it’s dry? But yep, I’m sure. There’s not a drop of water on it. That’s crazy, Brian repeats. I don’t see how that’s possible.
I hold the book, think about its main character—Mona Gray, an obsessive-compulsive woman who uses math to restore order to a world that, after her father’s unnamed illness, makes little sense. To her, every number is an omen. It is a reason to quit, a mood meter, a harbinger of death. Her dependence on them, on knocking on wood, on eating soap so as not to fall in love—an invisible sign of her disease. And I remember how, in the end, all it took was someone to ask her about her dad, ask her if she was okay, someone to notice, for her to break free.
I smile at Brian and tell him it’s true. The book is dry, and there’s nothing he can do but acknowledge the truth of it, believe in this one small miracle.
Filed Under: Remodel Stories |
