THE ATTACK OF THE DRAPERIES
It
happened yesterday at a writer’s conference. Just as I was finishing a lecture
and starting a drawing to give away a few books, a participant stood up
unexpectedly and began describing her reactions to the last chapter in my memoir,
A Circus Without Elephants. She was pretty animated, and of course I
loved it. I won’t repeat what she said, but at the end I asked, “Can I take you
everywhere?”
Here
is the chapter she was talking about:
Chapter
Thirty: RENOVATING
THE HOUSE.
NOBODY COULD UNDERSTAND WHY we were adding on to the house. “Your children are pretty much grown,” a
friend pointed out reasonably enough.
“Why do you need more space?”
Rob answered with a grin, “We always add a room whenever a kid
leaves. Makes perfect sense to us. When all the kids are gone, we’ll build a
castle.”
I nodded. “Well actually, I
got tired of eating breakfast on top of yesterday’s mail. I know it’s ridiculous--spending
all this money for a place to put the mail.
But we don’t pretend to be rational.”
The question of whose idea it was to expand the whole rear of the
house and add a breakfast room shifted from week to week. In Rob’s mind “our idea” became “her idea” as
the kitchen began to resemble a hobo’s digs, with appliances missing
everywhere, like a mouth with half its teeth, and exposed water pipes staring
at us from the sub flooring, and the walls sporting nail holes but no cabinets.
It continued to be “her idea” as I hauled buckets of dirty dishes to the
bathtub and the temperature in the open part of the house dropped below forty
and a raccoon came in, and I do mean IN.
There he was one night in the family room, standing his ground
defiantly, eyeing us through his mask.
It became “our” project once more as the kitchen and family room
began to look sleek and modern, twice as nice as before.
“This has been an unbearable year,” Rob declared, and vowed he would
absolutely never do anything major to the house again, come hell or high water
. . .. and high water was what we seemed in danger of getting, because the
toilets in two mostly unused bathrooms had developed small leaks, and water
began seeping onto the floors when we weren’t looking, and the bathroom floors
were slowly rotting into mush. I expected to go back there one day and step
right through the sub floor onto the dirt.
And sure enough, it wasn’t long before we had to tear up the
bathrooms, too.
The house renovations began to consume all aspects of my life. One morning, for instance, I had to go to Ralph’s
Market to load up on empty cardboard boxes so I could pack up and move
everything out of our many bathroom cupboards. While I was adding rolls of
paper towels to my cart, I managed to topple about seven huge boxes out the
cart right into the path of an aristocratic-looking lady who, nonplussed,
smiled and said, “Looks like you’ve hit the Mother Lode of Boxes.”
I laughed. “You must be a
writer,” I said, hoping she was and we might get acquainted. But she merely smiled again and moved
on.
Then for some reason I kept crossing paths with the same lady
throughout the store, privately amused that she gave me and my overloaded cart
wider and wider berth.
But she was nowhere around when I became truly reckless and gave my
cart an excessive push--and sent it crashing into someone’s untended grocery
basket. Down in my duck blind of boxes I honestly hadn’t seen the other
wagon--and now I quickly backed off before the noise collected a crowd.
Well, I didn’t collect a crowd, I collected “her.”
Out from behind the bread she came, eyeing me in disbelief.
As she retrieved her cart from its bashing, she gave me a last,
funny little look and said, more to herself than me, “I knew I should have come
in the afternoon.”
She sent me out of the store laughing, but also full of regret I
would never get to know this witty lady better.
Whereas I could envision us becoming friends, she would make certain the
two of us were never in the same store again.
AS PART OF OUR house renovation, Rob and I eventually acquired a
cavalier spirit, a “What the hell” attitude which spread like recklessly sown
seeds over the entire house and meant we bought things we didn’t necessarily
need, like new living room drapes.
The old drapes might never have become part of the family history
had Rob’s car not failed just then, forcing him to borrow our son’s disreputable
Cutlass. Finding the driver’s seat literally agape at the seams, Rob searched
for something to throw over it—the closest thing at hand being one of the
discarded draperies. Rob tossed the
drape over the seat, letting the hooks dangle free in back. Since the car was,
as usual, out of fuel, he headed for the nearest gas station.
As Rob drove, he felt the drape slipping, working its way down the
seat. When he got out of the car to pump
gas he knew at once he wasn’t alone; the drape had come with him.
It took only seconds to grasp the situation: the hooks had managed
to embed themselves in the back of his bulky-knit Scottish sweater, and now
here he was, standing in the gas station with a ten-foot-long, open-weave,
gold-threaded cape flowing from his shoulders . . . and not only that, it was
pleated!
Rob realized immediately he had a serious personal appearance
problem. He glanced around, all-too-aware that he bore a remarkable similarity
to King Henry the Eighth. Reaching
around to disentangle himself, he quickly found that the hooks had dug in with
fiendish cunning, just at that point in his back where he couldn’t reach. He twirled and squirmed and shimmied, but all
his efforts to free himself merely drew attention to his bizarre
predicament.
As he spun around in his dangling cape, other customers began
reacting with startled double-takes, then fast aversions of the eyes. The man
fueling the nearest car stood at an odd angle, trying to keep one eye on the
gas nozzle and the other on Rob. Rob knew all too well what the man was
thinking. I’ve gotta get away from this nut case.
There are times when Rob’s sense of humor utterly fails him, and
this was one of them. Ever more
exasperated, he clawed at his shoulders like a demented Shakespearian
monarch. But the more frantic he became,
the more the hooks behaved like porcupine quills, tightening their grip, until
it appeared Rob might be wearing the living-room drapes for the rest of the
day.
By now a few customers were quietly leaving the gas station, some
without filling their tanks, and Rob was truly desperate. He considered disrobing right there among the
gas pumps, pulling sweater and drape up over his head and ridding himself of
both. But the sweater was tight and hard
to remove under normal conditions, and the drape was so long it dragged the
sweater down in back, and he couldn’t begin to shed the two without scissors or
a chain saw. Besides, he didn’t like the
idea of adding a strip tease to the rest of his already-underappreciated
performance.
Feeling anything but regal, he kept his head down and filled his
tank. Finished, he gathered his
remaining dignity, strode purposefully across the station, paid the bill to a
clerk who refused to look him in the eye, and sauntered back, trailing his cape
as if it were his normal attire.
Once at home he walked into the house muttering, “Here, Babe, get me
out of this damn thing!”
I took one look at his drifting, open-weave raiment and burst out
laughing. I was laughing so hard it was
difficult to make my fingers do what they had to do. “How did you happen to acquire this lovely
garment?” I asked.
“Well, it certainly wasn’t deliberate!”
The next time I saw the draperies they were heaped in a trash barrel
near the curb, which, considering who put them there, was an act of wanton
recklessness. For the man who never
throws out anything, trashing those drapes indicated profound disgust, and
meant he never, ever, wanted to see them again.
There’s a bit more to the chapter.
But it was nice to have someone speak up and give me this wonderful
moment . . . and also remind me of a chapter that embodies a spirit our family
needs right now.
