by Murphy, R.
I walked straight to the bedroom, turned on the space heater, shucked the clothes off my rapidly goose-bumping body, and donned my warmest flannel nightgown. As traitorous as it felt after just leaving David’s arms, I started thinking about Bob. Where was he when I needed him? My sounding board? As long as Bob had his martini or flask of rye, he would sit contentedly while I chewed through my options for minutes on end. Tomorrow I could call Katie and talk things over, or even possibly Angela, but it sure would be nice to talk to Bob tonight. In so many ways, I felt like a woman with a man off on the front lines of a war somewhere, decades ago. No communication, no knowing if I’d ever see him again. In Bob’s absence I tried to keep my life busy and productive, but that big hole always gaped in the middle of everything, although David did seem to be filling it a bit.
Images of a Law and Order rerun flickered before my eyes as I sipped a glass of I-know-I’m-not-supposed-to-but-I-am-anyway pre-bed wine. Could I justify spending money on a frivolous once-in-a-lifetime weekend in New York? Where would the money come from? The savings I was setting aside for my work-lean summer months? Wasn’t that just begging for trouble?
I sipped more wine as an audience laughed uproariously at a late-night host’s opening monologue. My tired thoughts wandered. Where was my stupid ghost? If I stood on the shore during a misty ghost ball, yelling for him, would he return? If I purchased some wine at the haunted Brebeck winery, could I get those ghosts to take a message to him?
Sheesh. Too many dilemmas for this tired little puppy. Time to enjoy eight hours of well-earned oblivion.
More snow fell that night. Of course. Stan stopped by again the next morning as I shoveled. Between puffs, I explained my New York City dilemma to him. He stood still, arms resting on his upright shovel, and stared off at the frozen lake as he thought.
“Of course you have to go,” he pronounced after a minute. “There’s no question about it.”
I stopped shoveling and stared at him, open-mouthed with amazement. Stan was one of the most practical people I knew. “But how can you say that?” I protested. “Even if I could find the money, how can I justify spending it on something silly when I’m living so close to the bone these days?”
Stan plunged his shovel like a jackhammer, smashing through the coating of ice before he shoveled. While he chipped away he said, “You met Mary, Roz. I watched her get old and I can tell you she got so much joy thinking about the things she’d done in her life. She’d tell me those same stories of her adventures over and over.” He paused to heave a few shovels of chipped ice. “Mary regretted a lot of things, too, and most of the time she’d be frustrated about something she hadn’t done, or hadn’t said. In fifty years you don’t want to be an old lady sick in bed thinking about how you could have sung at Carnegie Hall. You want to be remembering what an amazing life you had.” Stan jackhammered with his shovel again and then, for the first time since he started speaking, he paused, and looked directly into my eyes. “You’ll figure out the money somehow, Roz. If your furnace broke, you’d find money to fix it. You just have to believe that your happiness is as important as your furnace.”
I’d never heard Stan put so many words together at one time. So many smart words. I stared at him, flummoxed. “You’re absolutely right, Stan. Thank you so much for helping me see the big picture on this. You’re right. If my furnace broke I would figure out a way to pay for it. Why shouldn’t a weekend in New York be as important as a furnace? At the end of my life I sure won’t remember repairing a furnace, but I will always remember singing at Carnegie Hall. I’ll do it. Somehow.”
“Good,” Stan said, as he bent over to shovel again.
We worked in silence for a few minutes and then Stan returned home for a check-in phone call from his son, Aaron. Fingertips frozen, but otherwise warm from my labors, I went inside.
The phone rang as I hung up my coat. I caught it just before it went to voicemail.
“Hello?” I said, breathlessly.
“Hey, Roz,” David said. “How’s it going?”
“It’s going great, actually. I’ve decided I’m going to do the Carnegie Hall trip,” I said without ceremony.
“No kidding! Where did that come from? I thought you were still up in the air about it.”
“Stan convinced me. We were shoveling and he said I’d always regret it if I didn’t sing at Carnegie Hall. He pointed out that I’d find the money somehow if my furnace broke and I needed to repair it, so my happiness has to be as important to me as my furnace.”
“Your happiness has to be as important as a furnace?” David echoed my words in a slightly dazed voice. “I’m not quite sure I’m following you here, Roz. But it doesn’t matter. I’m just glad you’ve decided to go.”
“Are you going?”
“I’m not 100 percent sure, but I’m leaning that way, especially if you’re going. I thought I’d try to pick up some extra hours at the winery to help with the costs. Which reminds me, that’s why I called. I spoke to Alex, my boss, and he says he can use a lot of extra hours from me. They’re going to bottle some whites, and maybe a pinot noir, so I’ll give them a hand. Unfortunately, since the sales room always slows down during the winter, he really doesn’t need another pourer right now, but he’ll keep you in mind if something opens up.”
“Thanks for checking with him.” I could sense my optimism starting to flag after Stan’s invigorating pep talk. “For now, I guess I’ll have to figure out another way to make some extra money.”
“You’ll come up with something, Roz. If we’re both going, I’ll plan a special date for us one of those nights, maybe a Broadway show or something. That’ll be fun. Oops, I’d better get going. Talk to you later, sweetie.”
“Sweetie,” I repeated as I hung up the phone. It’s been a long time since I’ve been a guy’s ‘sweetie.’ I admit, I liked it.
Before heading off to the computer and my work day, I called Katie and relayed my news. Angela would have to wait. Our relationship still felt awkward.
“Carnegie Hall?” Katie exclaimed in amazement and immediately peppered me with questions. “Your Avondale chorus will be singing at Carnegie Hall? That’s huge, Roz! And you’re going to do it? How exciting! Are you staying in the city? You can always stay with us, you know.”
Pacing the kitchen, I said, “Thanks, Katie. I don’t know all the details yet. We just heard about it last night. I’ll keep you posted as we find out more.”
“Is David going?”
I paused in my walking for a second to consider what Katie really asked with her question, then resumed pacing. “It looks like he will. He’s going to pick up some extra hours at the winery to help out with the costs.”
“Speaking of costs, are you getting enough work to be able to pay for this? Bill and I could help out.” Katie’s voice drifted off, probably worried that she might offend me with her kind offer.
“Are you kidding?” I shot back, with more emphasis than I needed. “You with a daughter in college? Don’t be silly, Katie. If I can’t figure out a way to pay for it, I won’t go.” I paused for a second, then continued. “I might take you up on your offer to stay at your place, though. I’m still trying to think through all my options.”
“Just let me know what we can do.”
“I will, once I figure things out.”
My phone stroll ended close to the microwave, so I warmed my coffee before ascending to my office. There, I double-checked each detail in the Topco entry and packed up the dummy binder for the overnight mail. Good thing I’d caught up on my shoveling. My afternoon promised a rare drive into Avondale.
After a quick, late lunch I bundled up, trudged out to the car with my heavy carton of competition materials, and said a quick prayer as I cranked the ignition. After only two tries the frozen battery turned over, and I skittered the ten miles into town along
salt-bleached roads.
A winter mid-afternoon in Avondale. Piles of dirty gray snow lined each sidewalk, and sprinkles of sand crunched underfoot with every step. Cars and trucks lumbered like prehistoric mastodons down the middle of First Street. Layers of salt and grime covered every vehicle with a gray powder that brushed off on your coat each time you wandered near it. Pedestrians hunched against the bitter cold, the weight of their winter coats and sweaters, and the knowledge that weeks more of weather just like this might be on the way.
Bright red and yellow shovels, de-icers, and car window scrapers decorated the front windows of the hardware store. From the apple shack wafted the alluring fragrance of frying cider doughnuts. I added a stop there to my mental to-do list. After I schlepped my large box up the post office stairs I emerged, ten minutes later, an unburdened woman with a big chore checked off her list.
I hesitated for a minute at the top of the post office stairs, determined to have a little fun before I returned home to dig into my Ohio client’s entry. What next? A no-brainer. Fresh cinnamon-sugar cider doughnuts from the apple shack. Do stores like this exist anywhere but the northern states? Tiny seasonal places that sell mostly apples and apple products, like cider doughnuts and cider, and maybe some locally made cheeses and maple syrup on the side. Until I’d moved to New York, I’d never realized how many kinds of apples you could buy: McIntosh, Empire, Jonathan, McCoun, Delicious, Granny Smith, Crispin, Gala, and Cortland, to name but a few. And my latest favorite, Jonamacs.
The variety of apples available from the apple shack amazed me. When I’d lived in cities, I guess I’d always just, unthinkingly, picked up a bag of Macintoshes or Empires whenever I wanted the fruit. A few months ago, faced with a dozen different varieties in the apple shack, I’d had no idea what my favorite apple was. So, I decided to do some apple taste-testing. I selected and individually bagged and weighed eight different apples that day in the store, much to the amusement of the woman at the check-out counter. Every afternoon I’d try a new apple for a snack and take notes. (Do I sound like a woman who lives by herself in the country with, perhaps, a tad too much free time on her hands? Hell, yes.) Turns out I didn’t like too-tart apples or grainy yellow-fleshed ones, or super crisp, aggressive, squirty varieties. My favorite fruits were ladylike, gentle apples, mildly sweet, moderately juicy, with dainty white flesh. In short, Jonamacs.
Like a dedicated knight on a quest, I now pursued Jonamacs whenever I could find them. I suspected I’d be desolate when they went out of season. And I wondered about other people, who’d eat whatever apple they could lay their hands on. Would they be considered apple gourmands? Apple Don Juans? Consuming enthusiastically, indiscriminately, unthinkingly, whatever random, willing apple came their way? (Yes, undoubtedly, a tad too much free time on my hands.)
After a quick visit to the apple shack, now the proud owner of ten Jonamacs and a dozen fresh cinnamon-sugar cider doughnuts I definitely didn’t need, I braved the cold to stroll the length of First Street, getting some exercise while I checked out the advertisements posted in the store windows. Nothing much new or exciting. Same ol’, same ol’. It seemed like the more jobs that left our rural county, the more fund-raising benefits that I’d see plastered in the windows, all of them involving food somehow. Spaghetti dinners, pig roasts, fish fries, and chicken barbecues. Very scary, and fattening, times down here at the bottom of the economic ladder.
After reading my third fish fry advertisement, I gave up and drove home. Better to be working than to be worrying about the poverty level in my new home county. With avoiding bankruptcy as a fresh motivation, I put in a solid four hours on Knobox’s entry.
Days passed in a blur of work, phone interviews, writing, snow, and shoveling conversations with Stan. Somewhere in there I made a pot of stew. Another time David tore himself away from his lucrative overtime and came over for a couple of hours of television. But mostly I focused on meeting my self-imposed late-February deadline. With a sigh, I overnighted the completed Knobox binder on February 20th, hitting my goal.
The worrying kicked into high gear on the drive home from the post office. Winter still reigned everywhere I looked, but now I had virtually no paying work to keep me busy in my igloo of a home. No phone calls with clients or Skype interviews. No writing, little email. Nothing ahead but those solitary snowbound weeks I’d been dreading since the day I moved into my isolated lake house last autumn.
My daily shoveling exercise hadn’t been enough to work off my worries that day, so I decided to take a walk. No iPod this time, no sweaty hillwalk. Ruts of ice along the borders of the road made it too messy for a serious workout. Instead, I took a slow meander down the temporarily plowed street that ran past my house and along the lake.
When I set out, all my troubles buzzed frantically around in my brain. Fretting over every penny, I’d paid my deposit to Stacey a few nights ago to hold a quad bed in the Manhattan hotel. That money came out of the meager savings I’d put aside to cover my household expenses for the spring, since I knew from experience my hours with Topco and Knobox would drop off until summer, when we’d start planning the autumn Community Chest campaigns. If I didn’t figure out how to replace those funds, this could get ugly, I thought to myself as I trudged along.
Little money, no work, no Bob, Manhattan expenses . . . My litany of problems kept time as I walked. For the first few minutes, I could think of nothing but my troubles. But as I wandered, my boots crunching on the grit in the road, I gradually noticed my surroundings. No cars passed. I heard only the branches creaking under the weight of a winter’s snow and the ice on the lake, screeling and screeching as water currents underneath pushed against it. The lake sounded like a quartet of one-noted cellos, or a zoo populated with alien animals. Martian birds, maybe, yowling away. Occasionally I’d notice vibrant crimson pods weighing down the tips of a bush, or catch the red flash of a cardinal darting from branch to branch out of the corner of my eye. All the tiny hairs in my nose froze and became crisp, so I started breathing through my mouth as I paced.
How about, I thought to myself, you stop whining and consider your blessings for a while, instead of your troubles? It might make a nice change. So I listed my blessings as I walked. Such a long list, thank God. Pop, Milly, Katie, Bill, Amy, Angela, her husband and children, David, Bob, my health, the fact that I actually had a tiny nest egg to worry about, Stan, chorus, a couple of decent bill-paying clients. My ability to walk. My ability to think. My abilities to see the snow-covered branches and to hear the otherworldly screeching of the ice.
By the time I’d strolled for forty-five minutes, I’d reminded myself how I truly was one of the most-blessed people I knew, with love and well-wishes surrounding me, even though much of it might come from a distance. I wrapped up my pity-party for the day and walked home, cheered with positive energy and buoyed by remembrances of all the closets, bookshelves, kitchen cabinets, and cellars that needed cleaning and organizing, taxes requiring preparation, and new casserole recipes begging for a try. As long as I could stay busy and productive until my paying jobs picked up again, I’d be fine.
Switching gears, making changes, always challenges me. I’ve often said that ‘Transitions are a bitch.’ So going from ‘billable hours’ busy to ‘household-organizing’ busy wouldn’t be easy, but once I made the revised commitment in my mind, I was usually fine.
Chapter 3
The Inevitable: Cleaning . . . and Taxes
Over the next few weeks my house became cleaner and cleaner while my freezer burst at the seams with future meals. In a rare whirlwind of energy, I emptied closets and lined and organized every drawer. I finally donated items to the Salvation Army that should have been given away months ago before being hauled to New York when I relocated. Really, where was my head when I planned that move? Panic must have discombobulated me so much that I packed up everything in my Nashville home, with no culling, no
sorting. Some of the items I moved from Nashville weren’t even good enough to donate to the Salvation Army. Muffin tins black with years of baked-on accumulations of who-knows-what and barely usable roasting pans with scratched non-stick coatings. I couldn’t give them to Salvation Army because, as I mentioned to Katie, “There’s helping the poor, and then there’s insulting the poor,” and these items definitely fell into the latter category.
Katie and I had fallen back into our old relationship. I’ve never been good at holding grudges, especially against the handful of people who genuinely love me, like my sisters. I know Katie plotted with Angela to get Bob out of my life, but I also know both Katie and Angela love me very much. They may not understand me or my perspectives or needs very well, but I truly believe they love me and, to me, that compensates for a multitude of sins.
Loving or not, though, Katie and I butted heads during our next phone call. Katie telephoned to let me know Cousin Terri would be borrowing their lake house for Easter, taking Katie up on an invitation she’d unthinkingly extended last year. Cousin Terri set my teeth on edge but “at least,” I told Katie, “I’ll be in Manhattan for most of her visit so I won’t have to deal with her.” Famous last words.
Then I mentioned I was trying to figure out how to get Bob back.
“You have got to be kidding, Roz!” Katie sputtered.