Belle Weather

by Celia Rivenbark

  “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.

  5

  Mulch Ado About Nothing

  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.
<
br />   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.

  6

  Install Your Dishwasher? “Ottydidit”

  With our kitchen project slowly morphing into a kitchen/laundry room/office nook/complete landscape redesign project, long gone was the notion that we might actually come in “under budget.”

  To even write those words now, and to remember uttering them aloud, is to confess to being only slightly more intelligent than sweater fuzz.

  “The way things are going,” I had told hubby while looking at my Wal-Mart calculator, “it looks as if we may actually have money left over!”

  Yes, there was much rejoicing in the land as we recalled all the “friends” who had said, almost eagerly, “Ha! Kitchen redo, eh? Just write down your budget and then, what? Oh, yeah. Set it on fire! You always run over, maybe double or triple. You’d do better to use that budget of yours to wipe your ass. That way you’d get at least a little use out of it.”

  What would the naysayers say now? According to the calculator, we were doing just fine.

  So we forgot the plumbing.

  It’s overrated, really, that whole continuous flow of water coming out of the faucets thing.

  Oh, and the appliances. I mean with all the demolition going on, it’s not like we were thinking clearly. The old stove and fridge had long ag
o been carted off to charity, which tried to cart it back but we pretended we weren’t home.

  God, what is it with these charitable organizations that expect you to give away perfectly good stuff. Duh, if it worked, we wouldn’t be giving it away, now would we?

  Anywho, we had no plumbing, so that was the first order of business.

  Naturally, the D-Boyz had friends who knew a lot about plumbing and they would basically work for meth.

  OK, that’s not true, but let’s just say that their estimate came in quite a bit lower than anyone else’s. It was like Wal-Mart. Sure, you worry if you’re getting the same quality but, ultimately, if it saves you money, you’re going to put aside that nagging notion that you just bought a calculator made by a tiny Malaysian embryo who was paid a nickel an hour, ’cause, at heart, you’re cheap.

  Our plumbers consisted of a man known as Daddy Lloyd, who looked a lot like Santa and was twice as nice, his sons, and assorted sons-in-law and live-in boyfriends.

  “Lloyd’s Boyz” showed up every morning in a battered bus that was so old it looked like its previous owner had been Moses.

  On the first morning, Dion took me aside to explain something about Lloyd’s Boyz.

  “They have their own language,” he said. “It’s hard to understand ’em so just nod your head a lot and leave ’em the hell alone. They know what they’re doing.”

  At first, I was sure Dion was exaggerating. I was getting used to the occasional stretching of the truth. One short-term carpenter had claimed he’d have to knock off early on account of he had “severed a major artery in my leg,” only I found out later that he just wanted to catch Lamb of God at the House of Blues that night.

  Besides, how “backward” could these fellas talk, anyway? They all lived within ten miles of my house and a Sharper Image store for heaven’s sake. It wasn’t like I was Liam Neeson trying to under stand Jodie Foster’s weird “chickapee” speeches in Nell. Nell had learned to talk from the trees and the birds and the bear farts in the woods around her, so naturally she was hard to understand.