Sure.
Because couches cost $100.
If you buy them from someone’s garage.
The thing is that in all the checking accounts and retirement accounts and grown-up responsible financial things, Perry and I have made a commitment to honor God first. We try our best to remember that all things come from him and belong to him. And he has never failed to provide for us even when conventional Mr. Drysdale wisdom would say it doesn’t make sense.
I’ll never forget the look on my dad’s face several years ago when I announced that Perry and I decided I should resign from my job and pursue writing full time. It was like we’d just declared that we believed fairies would henceforth be delivering bags of money to our doorstep, and I just knew my dad was envisioning a future where he would have to let us live on his front lawn in tents that he purchased. But Perry and I knew it was a step of faith that God was calling us to take, so we —very prayerfully and soberly and freaking-outerly —walked out on a precarious financial ledge.
It was one of the hardest years of our marriage. Perry had to have surgery, and we had bad insurance, my car got broken into, and a band of gypsies depleted our savings account. (Not really, but that sounds more fun than telling you how we had to get our roof fixed.) It wasn’t fun times.
But we saw God provide what we needed time and time again. It was Proverbs 30:8 in action: he gave us neither poverty nor riches. And the upside of only getting your daily bread is it eliminates a lot of arguments about whether or not you need to get new kitchen countertops, because you don’t think much about those things when you’re busy buying five boxes of Hamburger Helper because they’re on sale for fifty-nine cents each and you’ve forgotten that you think Hamburger Helper is gross.
And ultimately it’s these times that can make or break a marriage. You can let it tear you down and make you bitter over other people who appear to have more, or you can band together and realize it’s just money. It comes and goes, but never once has it bought anyone real, lasting happiness.
A fact that Perry and I have reminded each other of repeatedly over the years during lean times as we toast each other with a glass of wine poured from a $2 bottle right before we dig into our Hamburger Helper stroganoff.
CHAPTER 8
Home Improvement
OVER THE YEARS, Perry and I have attempted various home projects, because while I normally tend to be more of the “let’s hire someone to do that” mentality, Perry is more of an “if you build it, they will come” guy. (Why am I referencing Field of Dreams in relation to home improvements? I don’t know. It just seemed to fit.)
But I’ve always contended there is nothing that will test a marriage like a project. It doesn’t matter what it is, because when you put the male mind and the female mind together in one effort, there is bound to be some disagreement on how things should be done.
One of the things we love about our house is the back house. It’s basically a wooden structure, similar to a garage, located in back of our house. Hence the name: back house.
It is a building with dual identities, much like Clark Kent, that encompasses the finest features of both garage and dwelling. The garage section is just a one-car garage with a door that slides open, and when you pull in, there is another set of doors at the back of the garage that access a shed-type area. The doors are there because our house was built when the majority of people still drove horse-drawn buggies. The original owners could pull their buggy into an enclosed garage area and tie their horse in the shed. Charles Ingalls never had it so good. This should also be an indicator of the back house’s condition. It has seen better days. Namely, the1920s.
The nongarage portion of the back house is the actual house part (although I use the term house loosely), and I suppose its original purpose was to serve as maids’ quarters. But since I am now the only maid around here, we use it for other things. Plus, no one would actually want to live there —well, except maybe a few rats.
When we bought our house, Perry immediately adopted the back house. It is his domain, but sometimes, if I ask nicely, he’ll let me store some stuff out there. Someday if Perry ever writes a book, he can call it Tales from the Back House, and I assure you it won’t be about meaningful things like cute shoes or purses but will involve words like bullet casings, gunpowder, maximum kill percentages, and carnage.
A lighthearted look at a man and his great loves.
Anyway, the back house is where the magic —and the storage —happens. This place holds more fishing equipment than any one person could ever need. Roy Scheider didn’t take out this much equipment when he was looking for Jaws. On the bright side, if 250 people ever show up at our house and need fishing tackle, we can provide it.
There is also a small partitioned area that used to house a nonworking toilet, but Perry got rid of the indoor plumbing facilities to create a storage space for a few cots, some buckets, and a sleeping bag, which tells you that it is, indeed, a man’s place. No self-respecting woman would get rid of the indoor plumbing.
Perry can have the back house. I’ll take the front house. And at least I know I’ll see him when he needs to go to the bathroom. I hope. I don’t really want to think about the alternative.
One night our friends Hannah and Stewart came over for dinner. Hannah had suddenly found herself without a job due to circumstances beyond her control and had some free time on her hands. As we sat around the dinner table, we lamented the fact that it’s awful to find yourself with all kinds of free time, yet no disposable income to go waste at Target.
I confessed that I’d pretty much confined myself for the last several weeks because I have no willpower when it comes to reduced Christmas merchandise, and it would only be a matter of time before I came home with mismatched manger scenes at unbelievably low prices.
We began to discuss what we could do with our free time, and she said she planned to clean out her garage. And I’m not sure what happened, but all of a sudden I heard myself exclaiming, “OH! That is a great idea! I’m going to paint our back house! It needs it so bad, plus it will be a great way to tone my arms for spring and summer!”
And thus, a terrible idea was born.
In all truthfulness, the back house had been driving me crazy. The paint is chipped and peeling, and let’s be honest, you can only make fun of the RV in your neighbor’s driveway for so long when you have a building on your property that is in such a state of dishabille.
We’d repainted our house when we renovated it several years ago but decided not to have the back house repainted because we had big plans to tear it down and build a great garage with an upstairs bonus room. But then we had a child, and then I quit my job, and we still haven’t won the lottery —which, I’m not one to cry “discrimination,” but I think might be directly related to the fact that we don’t buy lottery tickets.
I saw a golden opportunity to save us thousands in home repair costs, in addition to the money we were saving from my self-imposed Target ban. I hate to brag, but I felt a little bit like I was living straight out of Proverbs 31, where it says, “She rises early to paint her back house and flees the temptation to purchase excessive Mossimo goods.”
When we got home from church the following Sunday, I decided the time had come to begin my project. Perry was very supportive and found me a scraper and some type of steel brush.
“Umm, what’s this? Where’s the paint and the paintbrush?”
“You have to prep. You can’t just paint over all the chipped paint.”
“Why not?”
“It will just peel. Here, I’ll show you how to scrape.”
Perry then gave a brief demonstration of scraping technique while I wondered what on earth I’d just committed to. Who am I? Bob Vila? I thought this was only going to involve slapping fresh paint on some wood.
“Oh. Okay.”
Then he handed me a scraper, some retro mirrored safety goggles (which not surprisingly didn’t look anywhere near as cool as Tami Taylor’s a
viators on Friday Night Lights), and disappeared.
I scraped for a grand total of three minutes before I felt my forearms begin to cramp up. Which is when Perry helpfully called out, “Remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint! This whole process will probably take you a month!” and he pulled out a camera and began to take pictures as I toiled laboriously and murmured hateful things under my breath.
Marriage. For better or FOR WORSE.
But between that statement and the presence of the camera, he’d thrown down the gauntlet and, like Scarlett O’Hara, I vowed that as God is my witness, I would not be beaten, nor would it take me a month to pick cotton or paint the back house or whatever.
My progress would have been much faster if the back house weren’t three-dimensional. But I decided early on that I wasn’t completely committed to painting the backside because no one sees it except our neighbor who hasn’t mowed his grass in three years, and his opinion means nothing to me.
As the endless painting stretched before me, the whole thing began to feel like heaven. Not so much in the “there will be no tears or sorrow” kind of way, but more in the “this will be how I spend eternity” kind of way. I had just one request. I told Perry, “If this kills me, which I have no doubt it will, please make sure I’m buried in a sleeveless dress, because I have no doubt that the silver lining in all of this is that my arms will have never looked better.”
Then came a stretch of days when it was too cold to paint. At least that’s what I claimed. So I took Friday off, and then Saturday, because Caroline told me, “Painting isn’t for Saturdays. Saturday is a day for rest.” Who knew she was Jewish?
By Sunday I knew it couldn’t be avoided anymore. I had to get back in the game, or the neighbors were going to perform an intervention. It might be paranoia, but I think they’d already begun to make some calls, because while I was painting on Thursday, no fewer than three different paint companies drove by very slowly in their trucks. One of them even called out, “Do you need any help?”
I turned around excitedly in the hope that some kindly Samaritan was offering his services, but alas, it was Mr. Rodriguez of Rodriguez & Brothers Paint Company, and my intuition told me he wasn’t offering anything for free. I yelled down from my ladder, “No, thank you. I’ve got it.”
“You still have a lot of work to do!”
Thanks for pointing out the obvious. You must be related to my husband. Have a nice day.
The point is that I felt the neighbors doubted my ability to actually finish the project —doubts that weren’t helped by my two-day vacation from painting —and they were starting to call in the big guns in an attempt to lead me into the temptation to pay a professional.
But I would not be moved.
Perry took Caroline down to the ranch on Sunday afternoon, so I donned my finest painting clothes and attempted to finish applying primer. I actually enjoyed myself for a while and decided that my OCD tendencies lend themselves well to painting intricate trim work and such. In fact, if not for all the paint and the manual labor, I might have made a good professional painter.
However, just as I was complimenting myself on a job well done, I looked under the eaves in time for a drop of paint to hit me right on my eyelid. I immediately panicked. Sadly, I didn’t panic because I might be permanently blinded by paint, but because I was afraid it would cause my eyelashes to be green and I had a big week ahead of me and didn’t really need green eyelashes.
I held my eye closed and ran in the house to rinse it with water. After it was completely doused, I opened it just a little to survey the damage and found that, other than some green residue around my lash line, I was okay. I’d just sport the whole “smoky eye” look for a few days.
When I was a freshman in high school, I actually got paint in my eye (not from painting houses but rather from a big banner that read “Go Bruins! Bash the Wildcats!”), and I had to wear a patch over my eye for two weeks. I was a fourteen-year-old pirate wearing Keds and Guess overalls. It did wonders for my self-esteem, and it’s a miracle I can even pick up a paintbrush after that tragic turn of events.
After a long day of painting, I felt good about all I had accomplished. About half the back house was primed, and I figured I could finish priming the other half by the next day. When Perry got home, I told him that it wasn’t too bad, but I was getting frustrated with all the trim work on the garage door. He said, “Well don’t get frustrated this early in the game. You’re going to have to paint it at least two more times.”
“What? Do you hate me? Why? How?”
“Because one coat isn’t going to last. It needs at least two coats, maybe three.”
I don’t like to use profanity, so I’ll just say that I wasn’t pleased with this news.
But it did make me think of what Caroline had told her little friend Sadie in carpool a few days earlier about the painting project. Sadie noticed the green paint on Caroline’s hands and asked if our whole family was painting the back house. Caroline said, “Well, Mama and I are painting the back house. Daddy is more like our coach.”
Yes, a coach. That’s one word for it. He was a coach who needed to work on his pep-talk skills before I threw myself down in the road in front of the next paint company truck that drove by our house.
Two weeks later, I’d completely lost the will to finish. Or to live. Then Perry made the comment that since I’d let the primer sit unpainted for almost two weeks, I’d have to reprime the whole thing. And I asked him why he wanted to send us into marriage counseling over the back house.
After a little bit of research (meaning I asked enough people until someone gave me the answer I was looking for), I made the executive decision that there was no need to reprime anything. My thought was that we could just keep a can of paint nearby and touch up anything that started to peel. Which seemed like a much more cost-effective solution than the whole repriming nonsense, because there is no way we’d have been able to afford all the therapy and medication I’d need to see me through that.
Finally, Perry threatened to let Shorty (who works for Perry’s landscaping company and is always looking for odd jobs where he can get paid by the hour and turn a two-hour job into a fifteen-hour job) finish the painting. But there was no way I was going to let Shorty steal my painting glory after I’d already done most of the hard work, so with fresh determination, I spent a good part of the weekend finishing the whole thing.
I learned a lot about myself along the way, and I can guarantee I’ll never be the same.
Neither will my permanently green hands. Or our landscaping. Or the kitchen step stool. Or the knockoff Ugg boots I wore for most of the process.
And finally, our dog, Scout, might forever have a green stripe down his back since he stayed under my feet the entire time because he is my loyal companion. Everyone else abandoned me, which maybe didn’t have as much to do with avoiding helping me as it did the fact that I was wearing maternity sweatpants, a seventeen-year-old Christmas-formal sweatshirt, and house shoes, but Scout stayed by my side the whole time.
Unfortunately, he never got the concept of wet paint and kept falling asleep right up against the house. He and I now know the wisdom contained in the immortal words of Kermit the Frog.
It’s not easy being green.
And it’s not easy doing home repairs while your husband supervises because he doesn’t believe you’ll ever finish the project.
In a lot of ways home improvement is like marriage. It’s not glamorous. It can take a lot of hard work and effort. There are days it feels like it might be easier to burn the whole thing to the ground and start all over again. Then you remember how much you love the house or your husband and you recommit yourself to what it takes to see the whole thing through.
Even when it might involve paintbrushes and compromise and sanding and scraping all the rough edges.
And when you look back on a tough patch a few months after the worst has passed, you don’t remember all the hard work and the tears. Yo
u just have the satisfaction of knowing you’ve made something beautiful.
CHAPTER 9
In Sickness and in Health
WHEN I WAS NINETEEN YEARS OLD, I made an odd discovery. I had a mole in my belly button. (Yes, my belly button. What do you call it? Your navel? Then you are much more mature than I am.) When I first noticed it, I thought maybe it was just dirt or something. And I don’t mean to imply that I don’t practice proper belly-button hygiene, but there was just something there that I had no recollection of ever seeing before. It was all so sudden.
But after pulling out a Q-tip and some alcohol, I determined that it was some type of growth. And so I told my mother about it, and she scheduled an appointment at the dermatologist for me because I guess that seemed like the logical choice for belly-button issues. The dermatologist checked it out and determined that it needed to be removed; however, it wasn’t something he felt comfortable doing since it was in such a precarious position in my belly button. So he referred us to a plastic surgeon.
Yes. I have had plastic surgery on my belly button. I know! It’s very glamorous! Quit asking me questions about it.
Truthfully, I am not alone in this. Apparently belly-button plastic surgery is a very big thing in China. But so is Hello Kitty and eating chicken feet, which means they might have questionable taste.
Anyway, it was an outpatient procedure. I went into the plastic surgeon’s office, he gave me three local injections to numb the area (sweet mercy, the pain) and then cut out the mole. After he bandaged it up, I was cleared to go home and wasn’t even offered any painkillers, which I took to be a sign that it wouldn’t be a painful recovery. I mean, it’s a belly button. That ranks lower than a gallbladder but slightly higher than a root canal.
The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life Page 7