Belle Weather (3 page)

At some point during the renovation of an old house, someone is going to strongly suggest that your electrical system needs to be updated. They will use grave tones and speak of “code violations,” and “serious chance of electrical fire” and “how I really need a Hawaiian vacation with my second family.”

“You’re just saying that scary stuff because you want me to pay you many thousands of dollars,” I told one electrician who had arrived to bid on the job.

“No, ma’am,” he said, “I’m just saying that scary stuff because every time I flip on a light switch in your house, I get a shock that erases my memory of the past fifteen years. Who the hell am I, anyway?”

“Oh, man up!” I told the wussy electrician. “They don’t make electrical systems like this puppy anymore.”

“It’s called knob-and-tube,” he said, “and they haven’t really made it since, hmmmmm, nineteen–and–twenty-two. Then again, how would I know that?
Who am I?
”

Another electrician arrived to give an estimate and was equally horrified by the state of our system.

“None of your outlets are even grounded,” he whined.

“Good. We’re not grounded either,” I said. “If we were, we wouldn’t be spending our kid’s entire college education fund on Beanie Babies from eBay. Oh, sure, they may be out of style now, but they’re coming back one day and we’re gonna be sittin’ pretty. Here. Take this unicorn. Could be worth a lot of money one day.”

The third electrician to put in a bid couldn’t speak English. This isn’t a deal-breaker for me because I have an uncanny ability to communicate with people no matter what their language. In this case, it was Spanish.

“Que mucho?” I asked brightly after the electrician had made his final trip over, around, and under the house.

He pointed toward our dark and spooky basement, shuddered, and then screamed out, “El Diablo!!!”

I’ve seen enough bad Westerns to know that this is Spanish for “The hair dryer!”

“Que?” I asked. There wasn’t a hair dryer down there. What a goof this guy was.

He ran from the house and leapt into his truck and I happily added his large battery-operated lantern and clipboard to a box I was filling with all the things that people who give estimates leave behind. Tape measures, a few levels, a voltage meter…One guy had even left a very nice sky blue fleece jacket. Was our house so awful that people didn’t even want to come back and claim their belongings?

I believe the answer was “Sí.”

We finally settled on electrician candidate No. 4, whose name was Mike. He was a man of few words, but when he spoke, his words really mattered, kind of like that chick who narrates
Desperate Housewives
and always makes me want to say, “If you’re so damned smart, why are you dead?”

But Mike, the man of few words, said the magic ones as far as I was concerned:

“Just knock $500 off whatever your lowest guy says and I’ll do the job for that.”

Suh-weet!

As it turned out, Mike was a fabulous electrician who had a very dependable stable of helper-bees, including one who looked, spoke, and sounded exactly like Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., right on down to a heartfelt “Shazam!” when he saw the now-famous knob-and-tube setup in the attic.

Unfortunately, as with many in-demand professionals, Mike and company were also working on roughly forty-eight other electrical jobs at the same time, so there would be days when he didn’t show up at all. This is an unfortunate reality in the contracting world.

Even my beloved “D’boyz” had left me for a couple of weeks to finish another woman’s patio, a fact that left me weirdly depressed.

“Look,” Dion finally said, after I’d called him twenty-seven times on his cell phone begging him to come over, “Don’t you realize that when we’re here, she’s probably feeling as if we’ve abandoned
her
?”

“But I don’t care about
her,
” I sniffled. “I just want you guys here!”

They returned the next day.

Dion gave me a patient smile, patted me on the shoulder, and said, “Sometimes it’s hard letting go, even for a little while.” I pulled myself together and we shared a cigarette.

“I guess you’re right,” I sniffled. “It doesn’t mean that you’ve forgotten us. Look, I’m sorry. It’s not you; it’s me.”

As Mike and his helpers set about the task of rewiring the entire house, installing some newfangled gadgets called “breakers” and such, I began to realize that the end was in sight.

Finally, on a warm Spring morning, Mike announced that, after six weeks representing roughly twenty hours of work, we were “good to go.”

I was ecstatic! The “breaker box” was labeled all neat and shiny and there were grounded outlets and something called GFCIs everywhere.

“That prevents electrical shock when you’re in kitchens and bathrooms,” Mike said proudly. He had made our house o’ horrors safe for inhabitants for the first time since the Hoover administration.

And things were pretty, too. Mike and Gomer had installed more than forty different lights in the new kitchen alone: a chandelier, assorted spots, cans, under-cabinet, halogens, pendants, most with dimmer switches so you could change the entire mood of the room from bright (Velveeta shells and cheese with kids) to romantic (Velveeta shells and cheese with kids and hubby).

After Mike left, I walked from room to room, upstairs and down, feeling safe from any electrical threat and admiring the shiny new smoke detectors Mike had installed in every room. No, nothing could hurt me now.

Nothing, except my dryer, that is.

See, Mike had installed a new 220 line for our dryer because it pulls a lot more electricity than most things in the house. A whole lot more. To put this in layman’s terms: Think of normal house current as Mary-Kate Olsen. Now think of the power needed for a dryer as Pamela Anderson. There. I think you have it.

With the new laundry room done, there was just one thing that needed to happen. Mike had entrusted me to pick up a new dryer cord because the old one wasn’t “code.”

Naturally.

I couldn’t believe that I had my washer/dryer back. For exactly five months, I had been hauling fifty pounds of laundry across town to the Laundromat.

The good news was, these weekly trips had helped my Spanish immensely. Face it; three years of high school Spanish had only equipped me to say, “My uncle can ride the unicycle!” while five months at the Laundromat had made me truly fluent. My new Hispanic friends even taught me how to use the water-extracting gizmo. It’s called the “Bock” and there’s a cartoon panel of illustrations showing an obviously brain-dead woman jumping up and down because the Bock has changed her life.

I had noticed that my new Laundromat friends tended to laugh and point at me often while saying things that I have interpreted to be either, “The blond American woman! She has such shiny quarters” or, possibly, “She is OK, but I wish she’d shut up about her uncle who rides the unicycle.”

I’d miss my “amigas” but it was time to say good-bye to weekly barbecue sandwiches from the restaurant next door and back-to-back
Matlock
episodes on the Laundromat TV.

The washer/dryer were in place and all that was stopping me was this dryer cord thing. Piece. Of. Cake.

What happened next is a blur. I remember trying to get the dryer cord out of its packaging and, when I couldn’t get it out, I just decided to plug it into the new outlet while it was still all wrapped up to see if it was the right size. Unfortunately, there’s some sort of grounding wire that has to be in the right place.

Long story short, blue flames shot across the room, my hair stood on end, and my fingers turned black (and not that cool new shade by OPI).

My husband, hearing my screams from the next room, said, “What’s for dinner?” No, no. What he said was, “Why do you look like that? And what’s for dinner?”

The dryer plug fused itself together and that goo fused to the wall outlet and Mike confirmed the next morning that I was lucky to be alive so I could finish paying him.

This was all quite scary and foolish, but I kept thinking, what if I’d turn out like John Travolta in
Phenomenon
(consult local listings; trust me, it’s on somewhere). In the movie, Travolta’s character sees a bright blue electrical light just like I saw coming at me from a dryer outlet and, well, he turns brilliant.

A former doofus, much like me, Travolta is shocked-smart!

He learns Portuguese in twenty minutes and can explain all sorts of theories that would kick Einstein’s shaggy ass.

So, I sat in the laundry room while my hair silently smoked, and waited for the genius to come.

When it still hadn’t come a few hours later, I called my friend, Christy Kramer, to complain. CK has watched every movie ever made with John Travolta in it, even the sucky ones. Right away, she reminded me that Travolta dies at the end of the movie from sheer intellectual overload.

“Dude, he dies,” CK said. “Be careful what you ask for.”

She was right. So maybe it’s better to stay mediocre. So far, there is absolutely no evidence that my near-death dryer experience has done anything to make me smarter. In fact, it may have had the opposite effect because, the other day, I actually heard myself laugh out loud at an episode of
That’s So Raven
.

Now that’s frikkin’ scary.

Although things were taking shape inside the house, it was becoming obvious that the massive renovation had taken its toll on our yard. A big-ass Dumpster had sat outside the kitchen window for months. Every few weeks, it would fill up and we’d have to pay many hundreds of dollars to get it hauled off and replaced with another.

At first, having my own Dumpster was just about the coolest thing that had happened in my life.

Every redneck dreams of having her own Dumpster to “chuck” things into. Never again would I be forced to drive the hickory-scented remains of a barbecued hog carcass all over town while trying to find a store without a night security guard on Dumpster duty. Which I’m here to tell you is nigh unto impossible. Which just makes me think that, on any given Sadday night, there are hordes of redneck men and women cruising the alleys helplessly looking for somewhere to dump the post-party picked-pig carcass. (Incidentally, did you know that it is actually possible to fit a full-grown deer, hooves and all, into the trunk of a Ford Taurus? Don’t ask me how I know, I just know. If Ford had jumped on that little tidbit, they’d still be rolling those babies off the assembly line, if you ask me.)

Face it; there are just times when having your own Dumpster is remarkably attractive.

At first, I was magnanimous to our neighbors, offering them to dump whatever accumulated household shit they wanted to into
my
Dumpster, which I had named “Brad” for no particular reason.

The neighbors thought this was great until, one day, the D guys asked me to come outside. Brad was stuffed with an awesome assortment of redneck carnage, including a stained mattress and box spring, assorted neon beer signs that had seen better days, and a taxidermied bear.

“You do realize that you’re paying by the load, right?” asked Dion.

“Well,” I said, suddenly realizing that my generosity was costing me hundreds of dollars, “Of course I knew that. Do you think I’m stupid?”

“So that’s your bear?” Damon asked.

“Hell, yeah, it’s my bear,” I said. “I’m only throwing him out because he
so
doesn’t go with the stuff I got coming from Pottery Barn.”

After a while, the word was out: Brad was no longer available to anyone who didn’t live or work in our house. It was just costing too much.

I was sad to see Brad leave but sadder still when I saw what all those months had done to the ground beneath him. My yard looked like
The Killing Fields
. For the first time in my life, I would have to call upon the services of a professional landscaper.

It was a good week for it because the D boys had taken some time off. I learned this after calling Dion late Monday morning and discovering that he was answering his cell phone from the top of the Tower of Terror ride at Walt Disney World.

“You’re in Disney World!” I said. “I didn’t know you were going to Disney World. When are you coming back? What about my kitchen?”

Dion assured me that he had told me that he was taking the wife and kids to Disney World. He probably had, but I assumed that was going to be after the kitchen was finished.

“Dude,” he said, and I could hear him lighting a cigarette, which I’m fairly certain is strictly forbidden on the Tower of Terror, “I’ll be back before you know it. Whoa. Gotta go. This thing is wicked scary. Arrrrrggggghhhhh!!”

The landscaper, whose name was Bo, listened sympathetically to my end of the conversation.

“We can fix all this,” Bo said. “I’m gonna work you in between a couple of Chili’s and an Applebee’s I’m doing.”

Sweet. I had a real landscaper guy, the kind that was hired by ginormous mediocre restaurant chains. Maybe he could carve me out a little red chili pepper out of cedar mulch like they do at the restaurant.

While Bo and his all-Hispanic crew, none of whom wanted to hear about my uncle’s unicycling prowess, installed truckloads of sod to fill the furrows left by Brad, I realized that it was up to me to do the “pretty part,” the flowers and hanging baskets and stuff like that.

At my favorite local plant store, I could have sworn that I heard the bargain-priced asparagus fern that was so handsome whisper, “Pick the begonia, no really, it’s much prettier than I.”

“Nonsense,” I said to the plant, causing a woman to pull her little girl close to her and scoot away.

I plopped the asparagus fern into my cart. When I added a couple of black-eyed Susans, I could’ve sworn I heard screams.

The clerk had been so hopeful, not knowing about my plant-killing reputation.

“These will come back every year, you know,” she said as she rang up the Susans.

“Ha! Not if they know what’s good for ’em,” I said.

My friends know that I kill plants and have even accused me of watering them with bleach.

“How else could they die so suddenly?” moaned my friend Gray. “It’s just not even possible. Maybe you have that Munchausen Syndrome for plants. You kill them for the attention it brings
you
!”

“That’s ridiculous. And you need to stop watching so many episodes of
House.
”

“No, it’s true,” she said. “I’ve never seen anyone who could kill a plant as quickly as you.” As Gray spoke, she caressed the brown, wrinkly remnants of my portulaca. Yes, that would be the one that’s a member of the cactus family, the one that the nice lady at the plant store swore could tolerate insane Jeffrey Dahmer amounts of abuse.

“We’ll just see about that,” I thought to myself, wondering, if it was related to the cactus why it would ever need any water at all. I mean it’s not as if I have time to become some sort of Henrietta Horticulture. I have a life to live, back issues of
In Touch
to read, important stuff like that.

Here’s the great thing about getting older: When you do and say crazy things, nobody gives much of a shit; it’s expected.

I’ve reached the age where I can say and do things that, if I were younger, would land me in the nearest nuthouse doing crayon therapy and weaving dream catchers all day.

Because of this, I told Gray over lunch one day, I had made a life-changing and money-saving decision.

“I’m going to plant plastic flowers in my yard.”

Her fork clattered to the floor.

“You can’t be serious,” she said. “That’s what crazy old ladies do.”

“I know!” I said, giggling and fumbling for the huge wad of Kleenex that had mysteriously found its way into my purse alongside a “guide to tipping” the size of a playing card. “Isn’t it wonderful? Is it dark in here to you? I don’t know why restaurants are so dark these days. It’s like eating in a damn cave.”

Gray was persistent.

“Only tacky people who live in trailer parks plant plastic flowers in their yards,” she said.

“Hold on there, Snobby McSnobbypants. I happen to be the only member of my family who has never lived on a chassis so you’re hitting a little close to home.”

“Sorry, but you can’t plant plastic flowers in your yard. It’s what poor Yankees do.”

Whoa. That was low.

“OK,” I said, suddenly having second thoughts. I had noticed how the Yankees who move South, the ones who can’t afford to live in those ritzy gated Yankee containment compounds with the golf courses and racquet clubs, will plant plastic flowers.

“How about in containers?” I said. “I’ve got dozens of empty containers and window boxes left over from all those weenie plants I’ve coddled over the years.”

“Coddled?” Gray shrieked. “Coddled? You barely water them and you’ve never once fertilized them.”

“Well, duh. The boy has to do that.”

She thinks she knows so much.

Fortunately, it was about this time that I met Todd, a cute guy who insisted on calling me “ma’am” even though I told him that it made me feel like Miss Daisy. Todd had the perfect solution to my landscaping woes: He’d cover up all that shit with fake cobblestones.

It turns out that this is a fabulous way to deal with an ugly yard. There’s a whole world of “hardscaping” out there that I knew nothing about.

Todd could even put a huge eagle design in the patio, if I wanted.

Which I didn’t.

“How about instead of an eagle, you do a portrait of George Clooney. That way, when I’m taking the garbage out, I can at least having something purty to look at along the way.”

“I’m not sure we can do George Clooney,” Todd said.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Todd. Only a crazy woman would want an eight-foot circular portrait of George Clooney on her patio. What I meant to say was Taye Diggs. I mean, how hard can this be? You can take a picture of anybody to the bakery and they can form a perfect likeness in ten different colors of spun sugar in under an hour and you can’t give me Matthew Fox’s image on one lousy cobblestone patio?”

“Well,” Todd said, “we have seagulls, too. Some people think those are nice.”

Oh, just forget it. I’m banking on all the attention being focused on that mulched chili pepper anyhow.