Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development

by Jen Lancaster

  There’s even a million choices when it comes to baby monitors. I’ll probably opt for the thirty-dollar model because all I want to do is hear if the cat comes into the garage. But how does any new parent see the option with the video feed and not buy it?

  As I stand next to the monitors, a couple of people give me big, happy smiles while Fletch and I compare features. In every other part of this store, everyone’s always rude and wedging in front of me. But in this aisle, the assumption is that we’re first-time parents and the attitudes are adjusted accordingly. I haven’t the heart to tell anyone I have a missing cat. [And really? I’m just kind of fat.]

  After Target, I spend more time in the woods, but find nothing. Yet I feel hopeful that something good’s going to happen because I’ve employed every possible suggestion I was given [Except for the peeing and I’m not above doing that.] including taping some of the cats’ whiskers to an unseen part of the wall. I have no clue as to why this is supposed to work, but damn it, I’m trying anyway.

  Before we get ready for bed, we slosh sardine juice all over the cage and place the bits of fish into a plastic bowl. I’ve been told the more highly scented the lure, the better. If I don’t catch a freaking bear with this stuff, I’ll be shocked. And even though I’ve happily eaten far more disgusting stuff, I have to put a scarf over my mouth when doling out the sardines.

  We set the trap and once I’m in bed, I concentrate on Gus extra hard when I say my prayers. It’s been three days—my feeling is he’s coming back tonight or he’s not coming back at all. For the past two days, Odin and Chuck have been wandering past the doors and windows all confused, like something’s out of place, but they’re not sure what. It’s a little heartbreaking.

  So tonight is my line in the sand—if Gus doesn’t come back, I’ll have to accept he doesn’t want to. Tonight determines if we actually have the bond that I imagined. I have such trouble believing that the little guy who curls up with me every night was just biding his time until he could make his escape. I think of last week when I was watching So You Think You Can Dance and he was sitting on my chest. Whenever Gus is really happy, he drools. And he must have been delighted because long strings were hanging out of either side of his mouth. Had I known then that might have been our last time, I wouldn’t have been so quick to be annoyed when he slobbered all over my shirt.

  I fall asleep cradling the baby monitor. Fletch and I laugh that this is likely the first and last time we’ll ever do so, but there’s a part of me that’s intrigued to experience one small parenthood rite of passage.

  I wake up at dawn and immediately dash out the front door. The trap has been sprung and there’s something inside. I can’t tell what because the towel’s obscuring the contents. I’m hoping desperately that it’s my boy, but whatever it is we’ve caught, I’m keeping it and I hope it likes to snuggle. I hold my breath and bend to retrieve the trap.

  I hear him before I even see him. The yowl coming out of those bars is unmistakable. I heard those sounds the first time when we were trying to move three very small, sick, angry kittens from one cat carrier to another. Then I heard them again when administering ear mite drops and checking on stitches. Sometimes I hear it when Libby gets a little pushy with where she places her snout.

  The sound is unmistakable and it can come from only one source.

  My little guy is home.

  I rush him in the house and give him a quick inspection before I open the trapdoor. Other than a scratch under his eye, he looks the same, only a little skinnier. He dashes immediately to his litter box in the basement and I idly wonder exactly how long he held it. Then he saunters back up the stairs to his food dish and digs in. The other cats crowd around him, their itch from the past few days finally scratched.

  But after he’s done with his usual business, he begins to head-butt me like he does every time he wants to be picked up. I hug him and kiss him and inhale the scent of freshly cut grass. He purrs loudly before passing out.

  I suspect that although he’s been on a grand adventure, he’s very happy to be home.

  Ever since the cats’ triumphant return, they’ve been extra-affectionate. They’ve taken to sleeping with us and now I can’t sit at my computer without a cat curling up between me and the keyboard. Although they can’t say they’re grateful to us, they certainly show it.

  The way Fletch sees it, the cats went on Rumspringa—they went out and lived their lives away from us to determine whether or not they wanted to commit to being a permanent part of our family. And now that they’ve seen what’s out there, they decided that driving cars and smoking cigarettes and listening to Judas Priest [They seem like they’d be Judas Priest fans.] just doesn’t have the same appeal of being here.

  They chose us.

  Okay, fine, we had to result to some trickery for them to choose us, but we couldn’t have rounded them up if they didn’t make the effort to come home.

  As I survey my little kingdom, I’m happier than I’ve ever been.

  Now that they’re back, I can return to the important business of picking a generator.

  Because I am never opening a window again.

  Reluctant Adult Lesson Learned:

  No one knows everything. Never be afraid to ask for help, even if that entails a quick leak in the bushes.

  C·H·A·P·T·E·R T·W·E·N·T·Y-F·I·V·E

  When Bad Things Happen to Bad People

  It takes a strong person to admit she’s weak.

  Yeah.

  That sounds like a load of crap to me, too.

  But after everything that went down with the couple next door back in the city, it was never my intention to return to my usual habits. I learned my lesson about minding other people’s business. I was strong enough to give up the spying game. Or so I thought.

  Once we moved into our house, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of solitude up here. Even though I’m on a through street, and despite being walking distance to railroad tracks, there’s a half acre of trees between me and the rest of the world.

  It’s bliss. Sweet, silent bliss.

  (Full disclosure: the trees actually do piss me off but passively, not aggressively.)

  (Also, who circles a goddamn pool with trees? Like three feet from the water? Like there’s no such thing as “gravity” or “change of seasons” and I’ve already had to replace a motor and a pump because the leaves put such a strain on the filtration system.)

  (Point is those sons of bitches are going DOWN very soon.)

  Anyway, when we were house hunting, we toured a place on Everett, one of the town’s busier roads. The listing agent told us, “You’ll hear some noise from the street and I want to make sure you’re aware of that.”

  “What kind of noise?” Fletch asked. “Gunshots? Ambulances?”

  “Err, no…” the agent replied.

  I jumped in. “Salsa music?”

  “Thumping baseline?”

  “Missing mufflers?”

  “Gang fights?”

  “Fireworks?”

  “You should come to our place during the two weeks surrounding the Fourth of July—it’s like Jalalabad out there!” Fletch added. “Last year I heard a scud missile.”

  The sweet suburban Realtor blanched. “I was referring to traffic noise.”

  We both looked at each other and laughed. “Oh, please. We used to live across the street from the Kennedy Expressway.” I gestured out the window where two vehicles had passed in the last five minutes. “Traffic? That’s a couple of cars. Traffic is eating and sleeping and watching TV and breathing in a steady diet of exhaust fumes thirty feet away from an entire convoy of truckers all hopped up on methamphetamines, using their engine brakes to make that deafening WOOOOOOOT sound in order to save five cents on gas while surrounded by eight hundred motorcycles on their way to Bike Week in Sturgis, who have thus trapped one thousand impatient Lincoln Parkers driving their base-model Beemers to work and who honestly believe that honking will get them to the
Sears Tower [Not the Willis Tower. Not now, not ever.] thirty seconds sooner. Traffic. Ha! You people up here are adorable.”

  Although we didn’t buy that house, we did give the Realtor a whole new perspective on how to sell to city buyers.

  I was amazed at how productive I could be when I didn’t have to get up from my seat and glower at disturbances every five minutes. Plus, because we have a decent yard, [Annoying pool trees notwithstanding.] the dogs get a ton of exercise and they’re no longer compelled to sit across from me and stare until I entertain them. Once in a while they bark, but only when they spot a deer and that’s just a badass reason to take a break anyway.

  Back in the city, my office overlooked a traffic light on a busy street and a bus stop. There was an illegal day care across from me, where children would be herded into a small cement-and-metal enclosure for the sole purpose of shouting eight to ten times a day. I was a few doors down from a public park, so between yard time, drop-offs and pickups, and park traffic, there was never a point in the day when the street wasn’t filled with kids.

  And they were shriekers. Every last one of them.

  Coincidentally our gate doorbell was at the exact height reachable by your average preschooler, so people rang all day long.

  At first when the door chimed, I’d run to the intercom system and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, no one would be there. Eventually I smartened up and went directly to the window where I’d watch the kids and their families ding-and-dash.

  Yet I’d be the jerk for chasing them down with my good whacking shovel.

  So not right.

  One time after hearing my bell go off a dozen times in a row, I stomped down the stairs in a swirl of righteous indignation and polar bear pajama pants. Before I could step outside to confront the stupid lady holding her toddler up next to the gate, I had to wrestle the two dogs completely losing their shit over the constant bing-bonging.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted over the thirteenth chorus of “Hear the Bells Chime” and the resulting dog melee.

  The woman merely shrugged at me while her child continued to stab at the doorbell with a sticky finger. “She push button.” From behind the door, dogs were headed into full-on-Pavlovian-bitch-panic mode.

  “Uh-huh, I noticed. But that’s my doorbell you’re ringing.”

  She shrugged again while the yelping reached a new crescendo.

  “Tell your kid to stop pushing it.”

  Shrug. “She like.”

  “I don’t like.” I pointed at the window beside the door that had since become opaque with doggie nose smudges and slather. “They don’t like. No one like.”

  Shrug. “She like.”

  While I stood shaking in impotent rage and the dogs clawed the door, the kid got bored and the mother moved on.

  A few days later they came around again, pulling the same stunt. Only this time instead of arguing, I simply released the hounds. They tore down the steps and bolted right up to the fence. If you have a single clue about dogs, you’d immediately be able to tell that Maisy and Loki were barking with unadulterated joy and nothing could have made them happier than a quick ear scratchy-scratch. Their tails were wagging like crazy, making a clanging noise against the bars of the iron fence, and their ruffs were completely smooth.

  But if you’re a fucking dolt who believes it’s your right to ring and re-ring my bell, an understanding of dog behavior may not be in your wheelhouse. While they beat a hasty retreat, I stood at my gate shouting, “What? You don’t like?”

  Up here, anyone who wants to ring my bell has to take one hundred and fourteen paces to get there from the mailbox. [Related note: sometimes an entire week goes by before I pick up my mail.] Plus, we don’t live walking distance to anything (save the railroad tracks) so there’s almost no foot traffic, which means that in moving here, we’ve neatly eliminated external distractions. I can literally sit at my desk and not be disturbed for hours… except maybe by my tree-cutting bloodlust and the lure of Internet gossip.

  So my return to neighborhood watch is completely inadvertent. I’m reading the local online community newsletter, which is a perpetual source of comedy, particularly the police beat. Whereas the crime blotter in the old ’hood routinely detailed grisly crimes best suited to an episode of a fine CBS drama, the new one comes straight out of Mayberry. Folks are always calling 911 on reports of found bicycles and raccoons trapped in garages. Last fall there was a real crime wave when an elderly man dialed 911 after waiting an hour to see his primary care physician and then didn’t receive an adequate checkup. [Police advised him to find a new doctor.]

  As I scan the blotter, I notice an entry about a traffic stop close to my house. I remember that day because the police pulled up next to my mailbox to issue the ticket and… I may or may not have lain on the floor of my dining room watching the action unfold from behind the curtain sheers.

  But come on, how can a traffic stop in my driveway not be intriguing? In a town where the greatest transgressions involve wearing white after Labor Day and improperly tasseled loafers, any police action is interesting.

  So I do a little Googling. If there’s someone in the community, say, not properly RSVPing, then I’m a part of this community and I should know.

  Then I Google a little more. Pretty soon I’ve wasted an hour clicking around the Facebook page of the poor bastard who’d forgotten to renew his city sticker.

  I’d like to say I stop here.

  I don’t.

  Constant Vigilance™ returns with a vengeance.

  Soon the police blotter becomes my National Enquirer/Page Six and my snoopy nature takes on a decidedly white-collar feel. Each week I find myself nosing around for more and more information.

  For example, did you know that the guy who made an illegal turn on red at Waukegan Road gave money to the Green Party? That boy who was caught driving drunk on Gage Lane? According to Zillow.com, he lives in a multimillion-dollar home with (what I believe to be) overly permissive parents. And don’t even get me started on what I’m sure was an inside job in that big ol’ mansion a couple of miles up the road from here—I mean, how else would thieves have known about the hidden safe?

  While I step up neighborhood patrol, Fletch involves himself in an entirely different kind of hobby. One of the reasons we bought our house is because our basement has higher than usual ceilings. Someday we’ll finish it off and make it into a rec room, but for now, it’s the perfect size and shape for a woodworking shop. As he’s been looking for a project, I suggest he refinish an old dresser that I’ve been dragging around from musty basement to dusty garage for fifteen years.

  Originally, I planned to paint the dresser myself.

  Until I saw the spider.

  Correction, spiders, whereupon I immediately morphed from the strong, independent, primary breadwinner to a prototypical fifties sitcom wife, tottering around helplessly as though deeply encumbered by heels, a frilly apron, and the right to vote.

  “This will take, what, two or three days?” I ask as we inspect the lines of the old dresser. I’m pleased that his new hobby is actually useful. A few years ago when he was into Airsoft, our house turned into a veritable Army Surplus store, with uniforms and BB guns all over the place. I always thought I was going to break an ankle slipping on one of the ten million white pellets on the basement floor left over from his target practice. But this? I could be very happy having a husband who builds stuff and doesn’t accidentally hobble me while I do a load of laundry.

  I imagine all the cool projects he’ll undertake, like constructing a lighted hutch where I can display my Carnival and Depression glass pieces. [If you’re doing any birthday shopping, I’m all about orange Carnival bowls/vases and the pink Jeanette Floral Poinsettia pattern in Depression glass. But, really, only if it’s my birthday.] A few years ago he’d have insisted on storing his Airsoft rifles in our kitchen gun cabinet [No, I’m not kidding about the cabinet or his proclivities.] but now he’ll have the tools to
turn it into a shelving unit where I can show off my teapot collection.

  I assess the scope of the project and determine it should take no longer than a week. I tell him, “We’ve got leftover paint from the cabinets and a couple of brushes, so we should be all set.”

  Oh, if it were only that easy.

  What I always forget is that Fletch doesn’t share my compulsion for half-assery when it comes to home improvement projects. He’s never once hemmed curtains with a steak knife, nor used a wad of gum to make a framed picture hang straight.

  Before he can even begin to envision slapping a few coats on the dresser, he has to ready his workshop. Clearly the basement is too dusty for paint to properly adhere, which necessitates the purchase of an enormous, expensive shop vac.

  After his work space is sterile enough to perform your garden-variety tracheotomy, he realizes he doesn’t have enough places to set things down. I suggest perhaps he use the now-immaculate floor. He laughs, but I’m not sure why that’s funny.

  Instead, he invests in a hammer drill to hang studs on the cement basement walls. Then he mounts Peg-Boards on the studs and loads them up with tools artfully displayed by make, size, and shape. Dissatisfied with his handiwork, he takes all the tools down to paint the Peg-Boards. My suggestion of, “Why not hit the dresser while you’ve got the brushes out?” falls on deaf ears.

  Workshop complete, Fletch disassembles the dresser and begins to sand. He doesn’t care for the job the finish sander is doing, so he declares the need for a random orbit sander.