Scary Larry lived in a run-down shack with car parts and beer bottles strewn across his front yard. Word on the street (or backcountry road as the case may be) was that he had an unsavory reputation. Scary Larry had been arrested on more than one occasion for disturbing the peace, and he definitely wasn’t someone you wanted to meet in a dark alley. I don’t make a habit of letting people like Scary Larry into my house.
Yet, because a customer at the shop insisted he was both good and cheap, Scary Larry was now standing in front of me: tall and skinny, greasy black hair, smelling of alcohol. Chris led him into the master suite and I followed. This was worth getting out of bed for. As Chris spoke, Scary began pacing the room. He was mumbling something I didn’t catch. His hands were shaking. He pulled a single cigarette out of his shirt pocket. “You can’t light that,” I said. He didn’t answer. Instead, he left it dangling from his dry lips.
As Chris began showing Scary how little progress had been made in peeling the wallpaper, Scary Larry reached for something hidden in the back of his pants. He jerked around and the next thing I knew, he was holding up a huge hammer and walking toward Chris. I backed closer to the door. Chris had his back to Scary. I willed him to turn around. “Chris!” I said, but he was still talking. Scary was inches from Chris when he raised his hammer and slammed it into the wall right by Chris’s head. Then he did it three more times. The wall crumbled. Just like that. I picked my jaw up off the floor and watched as Chris let out an uneasy laugh.
“Wallpaper’s gone. Got a broom?” Scary looked at us.
That was one way to solve the problem.
He spent the rest of that afternoon putting up Sheetrock but didn’t spackle. He had also agreed to do the floors. They were worn and in desperate need of sanding and re-staining. But then Scary Larry disappeared. After three days I had a feeling he wasn’t coming back. I guess that’s what you get when you hire a guy who goes by the first name of Scary. I had tasted the sweet nectar of productivity and there was no going back. “Hang in there, little butternut squash. We’ll find someone to fix this place up before you get here,” I said, patting my round belly.
When Josephine arrived, I told her our predicament as she made her way across the room with a dry mop. She wasn’t supposed to be here until next week but had just shown up and started cleaning, and I wasn’t about to stop her. I think she knew how lonely I was. She suggested we hire her husband, Sam, to sand and stain the floors.
I needed to strike while the iron was hot—that is, before Chris changed his mind about enlisting help. A half hour later an elfish-looking man with a long scraggly beard came sauntering in. His fee was reasonable and he claimed to have experience with a floor sander. I was sold. I called Chris and asked him to rent a sander from the hardware store and then come home to work out the details. The sander whirring around the wood floors was the sweet sound of progress, and even though it was a small act, I was smugly proud of myself for facilitating it.
Feeling that my work here was done for the day, I clicked on the television, shifting around to find a comfortable position in the August heat. I found a marathon of cooking shows about desserts for kids’ birthday parties and watched in horror for two straight hours as they added excessive amounts of sugar into the batter for cupcakes, ice-cream cones, and mini cakes. Halfway through the third show, I dialed Watson.
“When I have this baby, I will never let him eat sugary crap.”
“Did you hear what you just said?”
“Oh, I know all parents say that sort of thing, but I mean it.”
“No, what you said about your baby.”
“Yeah, when I have this baby—”
“That was it. You said it again. I’m so proud of you.”
“What?”
“You exhaust me. Pay attention. You said when. Not if. Congratulations.”
“I guess I did.”
“I have to go. And by the way, your kid is so going to eat sugar.”
I smiled. As I was hanging up, I heard a screech followed by a loud crash.
I did not want to know.
I rolled myself into a seated position, grabbing the sheets for leverage, and made my way to the master suite with turtle-like stealth, cursing my naive self for not asking for references. I had a feeling that whatever was behind the door to the master suite was going to cause great animosity between me and Chris. Unwilling to commit to stepping inside, I peeked into the room. I gasped aloud and my hands flew over my mouth in horror. A large section of the floor was sanded all right. Practically down to the joists. There were huge gouges in the floorboards.
Dust swirled through the air. The sander was on its side. Sam the Elf was sitting in the corner smoking a cigarette and shaking his head. Why did all these people think it was okay to smoke in a pregnant woman’s home?
“Isn’t that interesting? I’ve never seen a floor like that. It must be a pattern underneath the old wood.” He pointed his cigarette in the direction of the divots, his beady little black eyes darting back and forth from me to the sander. Josephine peered in, shrugged, and announced she was going to a doctor’s appointment. She would be back later in the afternoon to finish up.
I was no expert, but this did not seem right, and that was no pattern. Not knowing how to respond, I closed the door and got back into bed. Holding the phone in my hand, I hesitated. It was going to ruin his day. I was tired of being the one who always ruined his day. I was a needy pregnant wife who couldn’t drive to the store, couldn’t find a decent contractor, couldn’t even keep a baby inside her own belly without it being a huge production. I hated myself. But I had no choice. There was a guy sitting amid a dust shower in our half-renovated bedroom, we were paying him by the hour, and my only hope of salvation was that he might drop that damn cigarette he shouldn’t have been smoking in the first place and burn down the whole house.
I dialed.
“You might need to come home,” I said. I could hear the hustle of the shop and a few thick, heavy voices. Landscapers, I thought.
“Hold on.” He put down the phone to finish up with a customer. When he picked up again, he said, “How can I help you?” forgetting it was me.
“You can take me out back and shoot me. Just throw me on the woodchuck pile.”
“Too easy. What’s going on?”
“The floor is having issues. If I try to explain it, my blood pressure will skyrocket and my head will explode. There will be blood on your lovely seventies wood paneling. Please come home and deal with it?”
I tried to remember what made me think it would be fun to live in an old run-down farmhouse. You read about this type of thing in the New York Times all the time: hipster couple gives up their much-sought-after-but-too-small-for-a-growing-family-industrial-loft-style apartment, quits their corporate jobs, falls hopelessly in love with a fixer-upper in the country, charmed by the shopkeepers who chat with you while taking twenty minutes to ring up three grocery items, and they decide they’ll raise goats for cheese to sell on Sundays at the local farmers’ market for forty-five dollars a pound. I wanted to be those hipsters. I wanted goats, damn it. Or llamas. I wanted the New York Times dream. But there’s something the New York Times doesn’t tell you. If they ever did a follow-up article, they would find that after maybe two years, those very same people are bankrupt and on the verge of divorce. They’re fighting over their goats in court. The man has embraced the country life: dresses in plaid, big work boots, chops more wood than he’ll ever need. But he can’t get the cheese business up and running, and the woman is hightailing it back to the city for a buttery croissant at Zabar’s. That old show Green Acres was more documentary than sitcom, and I was living it.
Chris was home minutes later. Sam the Elf had not, as I had hoped, burned the house down. I waddled behind Chris but was jolted by a sharp stabbing pain in my belly. I tried to breathe through it. This was not the usual pain. This was something else. I froze. Please don’t let this be labor. We are doing so well. Chris didn’t notice that I was no longer behind him, and I just stood there, waiting to see what would happen next. Maybe it was just gas. Maybe the Monsters were rebelling. Maybe it was God’s way of saying, “Hey, things could always get worse.” The pain dulled, and within a few moments it passed, though I stood there for an extra minute just to be sure. Okay then. Weird, but everything seemed to be back to my normal level of discomfort.
I found my stoic husband listening to Sam’s story about the unique patterns under the wood. Chris showed no emotion. His lips were a thin line and his gaze direct. It was this very face that made him intimidating to others. No one in the world could read him the way I could. It was a face that said, “You just ruined the floors that my grandfather built with his bare hands. You’ll never set foot in my house again.”
“Just stop working for now,” Chris said quietly. “I have to think about this.” He turned, kissed me on the forehead, and said, “I gotta get back to work.” I went back to my bed, rummaged around for my tiara, positioned it on my head, and consulted Google to learn a thing or two about sanding. I discovered that when you sand floors, you must keep the sander moving at all times. You cannot hold the sander in one place to answer your cell phone, light a cigarette, adjust your crotch, or admire the view. You must move evenly and steadily from one end of the floor to the other without pausing.
Chris made some calls, and soon he reappeared with another contractor. This one seemed to actually know how to use a sander.
“Thousand bucks, I can fix this mess. That’s just for one room. The other one will cost you another five hundred. Plus materials.”
I wish I were a fainter; if I were a fainter, I’d have been flat on the floor, but instead, I had to hold myself up against the doorjamb and watch Chris’s shoulder’s slump in defeat. Unfortunately, Josephine, who had recently come back to finish up her cleaning for the day, was none too happy to see another contractor taking over her husband’s job. She dropped her bucket of water and it splattered on the floor. “You can’t do this. This is Sam’s job.”
Josephine wasn’t Martha Stewart, but she was good enough, and the unspoken rule of domesticity is that when you find a housekeeper you like, you agree to sign over the mortgage to your house if she so desires. But there was no placating her, and in one fell swoop I lost not only a second contractor but a perfectly entertaining housekeeper. She gathered her mop and bucket and out of a final act of compassion said, “I’ll clean this floor, but then I’m leaving. You have some nerve. You rich people are always taking advantage.”
I was shocked that this was how she saw us. We were drowning in debt, we couldn’t catch up on our bills, but she perceived us as well-off because we owned a business and a house. Chris had taken risks that we hoped one day would pay off. He had a determination to succeed that I had never seen. Growing up, we never owned a home, we didn’t go on vacations, and I went to college on financial aid and loans. That’s where I came from, that’s who I was. But suddenly I had more assets than I ever dreamed of, and to Josephine, we were wealthy.
Chris was back in the pink-and-blue-striped chair tapping his fingers. I was trying to make eye contact, but he didn’t notice. I knew he was wondering where the fifteen hundred dollars was supposed to come from. If I tried to comfort him, it would come out all wrong and we would fight, so I stayed quiet while he tapped.
He picked up the phone to call his client Tom; Chris had been Tom’s real estate agent before taking over the shop. They still had one big deal pending, and now it was time to push for a closing. Tom was Chris’s golden goose. They used to do jiu-jitsu together, and when Tom first walked into the real estate office looking for an agent to help him buy land in the booming real estate market a year before, it was pure luck that Chris was at his desk and not out showing houses to tourists who had nothing better to do. There was no question the two would work together. For a while Chris closed one fat juicy deal after another, but just as quickly as the Hudson Valley had become the place to be, the economy began to tank. It was only the beginning, but anyone who was paying attention could see that the bubble was about to burst.
Chris got up to wash dishes in the kitchen while he spoke to Tom, but I could still hear Chris’s side of the conversation. He tended not to share too much information with people, so I was surprised to hear him telling Tom that I was on bed rest. Of course, my general greeting to anyone who called was: “Nice to hear from you, I’m on bed rest. Let me tell you about my incompetent cervix and my Monster Fibroids.” But that wasn’t Chris’s modus operandi.
Then Chris began explaining to Tom why I was on bed rest. Here were two men who tore each other limb from limb for sport, and Chris was saying, “I guess we have fibroids.” My breath caught. He said we. My husband, the Sandman, the guy who kicks people in the face for fun, said, “We have fibroids.” They were ours. He was sharing my fibroids. I laughed, and I almost cried, too. He had, in his own way, taken on my burden as his own. I sang it in my head over and over. We have fibroids. WE have fibroids.
While I listened to him describe the pressure of the Monsters on my cervix, I reveled in the love I had almost forgotten was there. I knew I’d have to do something to show him I still loved him, too.