Back on the couch, we all exchange glances. Nobody says a word. The cats turn up the volume.
We watch the show in silence, and I try to spot the difference between me and the animal hoarder on the TV. I am relieved to find one basic difference.
He wears a baseball cap.
I don’t.
Therefore, I’m not an animal hoarder. Also he said that his house was cluttered, but not dirty. I’m just the opposite. My house is dirty, but not cluttered. In my defense, it’s hard not to have sagebrush of dog hair rolling across the carpet when you have pets, but this argument may be a little circular.
I remember a book club party I gave recently at my house, as a thank-you to book clubs who have the great judgment to read me. At the party, I gave a talk, after which I asked for questions. A hand went up immediately, and I called on an attractive woman.
“Yes, what’s your question?”
“It’s more like a comment,” the woman answered. “I want to say that my book club loved your book, and we appreciate your having us to your home. And we love that you’re so real and didn’t clean for us.”
Everybody exchanged glances. Nobody said a word. I wasn’t sure how to answer, so I told the truth, since honesty is so integral to a relationship:
“Actually, I cleaned the house for two days before the party.”
Laughter ensued, which is the point after all, but the question stuck with me. I realized that the problem was probably the way I kept the books I own, which number a thousand or so. I love to read and I buy a lot of books, and I kept all my books stacked everywhere in the dining room. They filled chairs, covered the dining room table, and blanketed the sideboard. There were even piles on the floor. I liked the look, but it made me think that maybe it wasn’t such a great thing, so I recently got some bookshelves, separated the books by fiction and nonfiction, and shelved them in alphabetical order by author. Now I have my own personal library, all pretty and organized, and I know the truth.
I’m not an animal hoarder, I’m a book hoarder.
Do you know what they call people who hoard books?
Smart.
The First Lesson of the New Year
More home repair drama from which I learn a Valuable Life Lesson.
You may remember that for Christmas, I got my house a big TV. It’s in the family room, where it doubles as a room divider, if not the Great Wall of China. The TV begins our saga, because it requires rewiring that sends an electrician down to my basement, and when he comes back upstairs, he asks:
“When was the last time anybody was in your crawlspace?”
Kind of personal, but I let it go. “Why?”
“It’s raining down there.”
These are words nobody wants to hear, especially on Christmas Eve, which is when our story takes place. I asked, “What happened?”
“The subfloor is soaked, the insulation’s wet and falling off, and there’s water all over. A pipe burst in your radiant heating.”
At first I didn’t even remember that I had radiant heating. Then I had a flashback from my second marriage, filled with enemy fire and assorted weaponry. I recalled that during the war, radiant heating had been installed in the entrance hall, but I had never used it. That it would explode and destroy Christmas Eve was somehow inevitable.
Anyway, the storm in the basement requires an emergency plumber, who goes down to the crawlspace and determines that I need an emergency HVAC guy, who arrives two hours later, just ahead of Santa. God bless the plumbers and HVAC guys, who work the same hours as mythical figures and don’t get half the credit.
The HVAC guy turns off the shower in the crawlspace but tells me that the plumber has to come back, which doesn’t happen until the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, when he informs me that I have to call an emergency water-damage company or I could have a “microbial problem.”
I stop him right there. “You mean, mold?”
“Yes,” he answers, cringing, because now he has an hysterical homeowner on his hands. Mold is a word that terrifies me even more than IRS audit or blind date. Plus, no woman wants microbes in her crawlspace.
So I call the water-damage people, and they zoom over, rip out the soggy insulation, and install equipment in the basement, there to suck out the microbial water. The floor in the entrance hall is wet under the rug, so they install a major dehumidifier and an Injectidry system, which is a large black box from which emanates yellow tentacles covered with red spikes, like the sea creature that ate New Year’s Eve.
They tape the tentacles to mats all over the kitchen, family room, and entrance hall, then switch on the machines, warn me they’d be loud, and leave. Five minutes later, loud doesn’t begin to describe it. It sounds like a locomotive idling in the room, and as happy as I am that my moldy water is vanishing, I can’t take the din. It scares the cats and dogs, especially new puppy Miss Peach, who huddles against me, shaking. I cuddle them all on the couch and turn on my superbig TV, but we can’t hear the shows over the clamor.
By the way, in case you think this sounds like the most boring New Year’s Eve ever, you should know that until the pipes burst, I had been looking forward to spending the evening reading and watching the big TV with my little pets. I am the ultimate homebody. Also couchbody, TVbody, and bookbody.
Anyway, to get to the life lesson part, I endured the locomotive noise until I couldn’t stand it, then I got up and examined the dehumidifier and the scary Injectidry machine. I found the power switches, but I didn’t know if I should turn off the machines. I was worried I’d damage them, and I didn’t want to call the water-damage people and bother them further on New Year’s Eve. Bottom line, I didn’t know if I was allowed to turn them off, so at midnight, the dogs, cats, and I watched the ball drop on mute and went miserably to bed.
Happy New Year.
But on the morning of the New Year, I awoke with a new determination. Last year, I was a woman who hesitated and suffered. But in the New Year, I was wiser and older, even if by a day.
Kind reader, I went downstairs and turned off the machines.
What did I learn?
Never ask permission.
Droopy Drawers
I had some excitement at the house the other night, when Daughter Francesca was home. I was getting ready to go to bed, and the cats and dogs were in their usual positions in my bedroom. Penny, Little Tony, Peach, and Ruby The Crazy Corgi were in my bed, and Mimi was curled into a black ball on the bedroom chair. Vivi was nowhere in sight, but then again, she rarely interrupts her skulking to make even a cameo appearance.
But Angie, the older golden retriever, was sitting and staring at my chest of drawers, which are built into the bedroom wall. The top drawers were partway open, with socks falling out, because I leave them that way. My drawers are a mess because I have better things to do.
“Look at that.” Francesca frowned. “That’s weird, what Angie’s doing.”
“Whatever.” I was tired. I’m always tired when I go to bed. I feel sorry for people who can’t sleep. I sleep for all of us. And when I want to go to bed, stay out of my way.
“She never does that.”
“There’s a first time for everything.” I went over to the bed and shoveled some animals aside to clear a space for my weary bones. I have a king-size bed of which I occupy six inches, surrounded on all sides by fur, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
But Francesca was eyeing the drawers with concern. “Something’s there,” she said, and as if on cue, a weird scratching sound came from the chest of drawers.
Something was behind it. Only I didn’t know there was room behind it, and I didn’t know what could be behind it. Now I was awake. I got out of bed, slowly. “Maybe it’s a mouse.”
“Or a raccoon, or a squirrel.”
“Or a dragon, or a psycho killer.”
The dogs looked over, Ruby started barking, and suddenly, my socks came alive.
Francesca screamed, I screamed, and we started hugging each other, screaming whi
le the dogs barked and barked, and my socks came spilling out of the drawer, followed by Vivi the cat, who merely yawned when she saw us hysterical.
I should have known, because of Angie.
Vivi and Angie are newly in love.
Vivi isn’t affectionate to me, and doesn’t even know me, but I keep trying to get her to love, plying her with overpriced cat food, an occasional saucer of milk, or leftover scrambled eggs. She gobbles up the food, but never looks at me in gratitude, and there’s never a thank-you note. I’d resigned myself to the fact that she didn’t like anybody in the house, except that now, out of nowhere, she has fallen in love with Angie.
Vivi spends all her time following Angie around as she goes through her day, from walking around the block, to sitting in a chair, and finally walking from her food dish to her water dish and back to her chair.
Sounds familiar.
When Angie lies down, Vivi curls up next to her, so they have trans-species spooning.
I regard that as proof that Vivi isn’t sociopathic, because before Angie, her best friend was the kitchen faucet. She used to rub her face against the faucet, so I naturally assumed that she wanted the water turned on, maybe for a drink. I would turn on the faucet, but she would just get up and walk away. Then I thought it was because I was watching, so I would turn on the faucet and walk out of the kitchen. But the same thing happened.
Then I thought she was trying to scratch her chin on the faucet, so I tried to scratch her chin for her, in the same spot. And she got up and walked away. So now she spends her time staring at the kitchen faucet, occasionally rubbing against it, and maybe fantasizing about it, for all I know.
I don’t understand Vivi at all.
You know what I mean, if you have any kind of pet. We come to know them, whatever little soul that’s in there, and also the way they think. The test is that their actions can become predictable over time, and that’s been true of all of my pets, all my life, except Vivi.
I don’t understand why she squeezes behind drawers or why she loves her faucet and Angie.
Vivi remains a mystery, even to a mystery writer.
GNO
I just went on a girls’ night out, or a GNO, and it got me thinking. How did that term, and even its acronym, enter the vernacular?
Why do we specify when it’s a girls’ night out, as opposed to a boys’ night out? And is it because a boys’ night out is the norm, so we need to specify when it’s a girls night out, which is, what, bizarre?
We all got dressed up for each other and even took pictures. Again, I doubt that guys dress up for a boys’ night out, and they leave the flip cameras at home. When girls go out, it’s not just dinner, it’s prom.
By way of background, eight of us went out to a restaurant in NYC, hosted by my great friend Robin, who has an apartment in the city. She brought two of her friends, one of whom is single and one who isn’t, and I joined them with Daughter Francesca and my assistant Laura, who’s married.
I specify because we spent the first hour of our girls’ night out talking about boys, and whether we have them or not. I’m betting that on a boys’ night out, they talk about playoffs.
The second hour of the night we spent talking about how we never go out, why we have so much fun when we go out, how we should go out more, why do we need an excuse to go out, and isn’t it crazy that it takes five weeks of planning for girls to go out? We couldn’t even have the experience without talking incessantly about it while we were having it.
Which is when I realized that the Heisenberg principle is completely wrong.
As you may know, the Heisenberg principle holds that an experience is necessarily altered by its being observed, but I disagree. Heisenberg never went on a GNO, and his principle doesn’t apply when the people having the experience are the ones observing it, and they’re still talking about it as they have it, all at the same time. For girls, the talk is the experience, especially when margaritas are present.
Mine was pineapple.
Which could have been a mistake.
I asked for a pineapple margarita as soon as I sat down, not because I’m a practiced drunk but because I’d been looking forward to it for two weeks, which gives you an idea of my social life. I wanted the pineapple margarita because I remembered that I’d had a terrific one once with Francesca. But the waiter looked at me funny and said they’d try to make me one, and she reminded me that it was a pineapple martini that I’d had that time and there might not be such a thing as a pineapple margarita.
Oh.
This mattered not at all by the third pineapple margarita, which tasted great because it was yellow.
And whether it was because of the alcohol or the estrogen, what happened then was that we girls’-night-outers got to laughing a little loud.
Or rather, one of us did.
Me.
Some men at the bar turned around at the noise, but my back was to them, so I didn’t see. I bet they were turning around to look at Robin, who is drop-dead gorgeous, but she’s so modest that she assumed it was because of our (read, my) loudness, and she said:
“Sorry, we’re celebrating.” Then Robin pointed at me. “She’s getting married.”
Wha?
Huh?
Me?
This sent all of us into new gales of laughter, and I thought it was so funny, but then I wondered:
Why do I need a reason to be loud?
Men don’t need a reason to be loud.
Girls should have an equal right to bad manners.
And I wasn’t loud anyway.
The pineapple margaritas were loud, not me.
They don’t get out enough.
They need an MNO, poor things.
Designing Woman
By Francesca Scottoline Serritella
I’ve always looked forward to decorating my own place. When my mother and stepfather parted ways, my mom conducted a massive home makeover. Gone was the compromised style of a marriage; here was the décor rebellion of a divorcée. She painted the all-white kitchen orange, reupholstered the red tartan sofa in a golden honeycomb, and covered the walls with rainbow Peter Max paintings. When she was finished, the house was sunny, feminine, and a little crazy—in other words, it was her.
As much as I love her, I was excited to live in a place that was me.
However, decorating your first apartment is not as easy as I thought it would be.
First problem: my taste is better than my budget. I envisioned a plush couch with a funky mismatched ottoman. A shop down the street has the most adorable vintage glass chandeliers that’d be great over my table. And a giant, floor-length mirror would really open up the narrow entrance hall.
All good ideas, stylish even.
But my wallet is less Crate & Barrel, more Craigslist. And sadly, IKEA does not have much by way of vintage glass chandeliers.
No use crying over financial realities. I’ve found ways around pesky money problems. No, I am not advocating theft or credit-card debt. I turned to something arguably more dangerous: eBay.
I figured eBay could be the way to get unique decorative pieces on the cheap. What could go wrong?
First, there were the little piggy salt and pepper shakers. They looked so cute in the pictures, a little boy pig and a little girl one, hand-painted, and authentic! Authentic what, I wasn’t sure. But they were $3.99 and the auction was going to end in two minutes! So I leapt into action and—sold! For $3.99.
I was the only bidder.
Maybe because, as became clear when they arrived, each was less than an inch and a half long.
They were salt and pepper thimbles.
Shipping was three times the original price, so it wasn’t as cost-effective as I had hoped, and, considering that I had selected this particular set from a list of over five hundred, not particularly time-effective either.
Okay, so now I try to get my hands on something before I buy it.
But this hands-on approach took on an all-too-literal mea
ning when I realized that most of the furniture I could afford carried this ominous warning:
“Assembly required.”
Or its more treacherous cousin, “some assembly required.”
“Some assembly required” translates in English to: just as much assembly required, now with fewer directions.
Fine, no problem. I got out my tool-kit-for-chicks (pink-handled tools, a gift from Mom), put on a Talking Heads playlist (because I was raised right), pulled on my Converse sneaks, and tied a bandana around my head.
Manual labor is better when you accessorize.
Turns out, building furniture was fun!
For the first thirty minutes.
For the next several hours, I had only my feminist self-righteousness to keep me going. But keep me going it did, and I accepted this effort as a rite of passage for being young and on your own.
The MVP of any city dweller’s tool kit is, without a doubt, the measuring tape. All of these apartments are an amalgam of tiny, weird spaces—a skinny alley of a galley kitchen, or a sleeping “nook,” meaning “closet.”
Design gurus love to tell you to use dual-functioning furniture to save space, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. And initially, I was with them. My ottoman is essentially an upholstered box that can hold blankets, and if you flip the top to the hard surface side, it doubles as a small coffee table.
Yes, I felt very clever when I bought it.
But storing my decorative throw blanket wasn’t my main space problem. I still have a kitchen with no shelves. I still have a bedroom that can’t fit a dresser. And while I’m trying to be innovative, I’m starting to resent those dopey ideas for multi-purpose living.
No, I do not want my oven to double as a pantry. Nah, I don’t think my dog’s metal crate makes for an “industrial” end table. No, I don’t think a bookshelf becomes a “secretary” desk simply by putting a stool in front of it.
I’d rather have no room to walk than sit on a barstool with my feet on the paperbacks.