The cat sleeps, dreaming of hunting. Paws twitch in the chase; claws flex to catch the dream bird rising on sudden wings from depthless pools; teeth and tongue work, tasting and devouring, nose and whiskers quiver. Then the deed is done, to the last ticklish feather. The cat’s tail switches slowly once or twice, and he is still again, crouching in tall dream grasses, awaiting a flurry of wings.
This post is confessional, on the order of ruefully noting that when I got up yesterday, slipped on shoes, sleepily mustered breakfast and came back upstairs to shower, I found I was wearing a Liz Claiborne brown flat on my left foot and a disreputably aged Finn Comfort my right.
The night I thought the house would explode turned out to be just a little worse. About 10:30 in the evening a couple of weekends ago, just as I was about to go to bed, a buzzing, vibrating noise commenced and did not stop; clearly something electrical had gone awry. I followed the sound to the bathroom, where the sound seemed loudest. But the bathroom is a bathroom of the most ordinary sort, your basic 5′ x 8′ layout with sink, toilet and tub tucked into the space in the only possible manner. There is an exhaust fan in the ceiling above, but it was not on. The sound was unaffected by turning the light switch on and off. I thought it might come from somewhere in the walls, so I listened in the adjacent rooms. Nothing. Those walls were inert, silent. I donned shoes (even two of the same sort, mind you) and walked around to the side of the house where the bathroom perches on the second floor. I could hear only the cicadas and the faint sounds of traffic from the highway.
Inside, however, the vibrating buzz hammered persistently, intimating an electrical short and possible fire. I needed expertise I did not have, as a household repair novice who only last year learned to clear a drain with a pipe snake. The only person I could think to call is a casual friend whom I’ll call Nic. (Nic stands for “nothing in common.” The only book I’ve seen in Nic’s house is Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. On the other hand, Nic knows how to get my brushcutter cranked even though I left fuel in it for the better part of a year because I couldn’t get it cranked, of course. Nic has practical advice on all sorts of matters, so he’s definitely a value-added sort of person to know, except that he doesn’t account for the fact that I might occasionally know more than he does about this or that, which can be mildly irksome. I haven’t figured out how I add value to the acquaintanceship, given our polar differences on myriad matters of importance and even our taste in jokes, but he still calls now and then and says, “What are you doing?”) Since Nic owns and maintains a variety of rental properties, I figured he’d be able to tell me what to do. So I called and got him out of bed at 11:00 p.m. to ask him what the noise might be and whether my house might catch on fire. I had to call twice to wake him up. Guilt. Guilt.
He had me check this and that and was about to have me go turn off the circuit breakers outside in the dark, but all the while I was feeling bathroom walls and surfaces for the source of the vibration. Not this wall. Not that wall. Not the tub surround. I turned the shower on and off. Not that. The vibration was coming from the outside wall of the tub.
But you see, there’s nothing in the wall of the tub. A whirlpool would be a very fine thing, but this is your one-piece fiberglass econo-tub, and there’s no motor anywhere. So out of some dusty hollow place, this unbidden buzzing. It confounded the mind. I felt along the top surface, no longer hearing whatever it was Nic was saying. And then my hand touched my daughter’s razor, the one she’d bought saying that men’s razors work better than women’s plastic pink ones. It was alive, vibrating energetically. Now then, she and I had been shaving with this thing for weeks, but I only now saw that this was, indeed, a vibrating razor, with a battery cover in its insect-like green and silver abdomen.
I interrupted Nic, “I have just called you and gotten you out of bed at 11 o’clock because my daughter has a vibrating razor.”
Snickers were quickly followed by jokes about the true uses of vibrating razors.
Let it be said that a Gillette Mach 3 Turbo razor offers a fine shave. It is, however, likely to become possessed in the middle of the night. When I picked my daughter up in the morning from a sleepover, I regaled her with the tale of my adventures. She looked at me and laughed, “You didn’t know about the razor? That’s so funny.”
Imagine my happiness, given the humilation of it all, when I learned that this has happened and produced similar ado, in a heck of a house. (Yes, when you find you’ve been duped by technology stealthily incorporated into ordinary things that your children understand and you don’t, you fancy a bit of company.)
I was pushing a cart through Kroger last night when I heard someone call my name. I turned to see a woman I knew from the church of which I used to be a part. We’d worked closely together. We knew each other well in those days.
“I wanted you to know that I have your table,” she said.
My ex and his wife had donated what was our dining table and chairs to a church auction, and she’d bought it. It has been so important to expunge me from the house that is theirs that remodeling has extensive. Even roses and trees have been torn from the ground. All family pictures and videos have been turned over. The children’s remaining childhood toys came to me in boxes last year. I’m sure the family furniture I left so that my ex would have a bed to sleep on and a chest to put his clothes in are all long gone. I knew the table was slated to go, too - the children had said so. Having chosen it, I would have bought it, given the chance.
The table was solid cherry, with a natural oil finish and simple Shaker construction, elegant in its simplicity and as warm and unassuming as a farmhouse kitchen. We had bought leaves for it, so it would extend to seat children and grandchildren come home to visit. It had two drawers, one in each end, which made it a perfect place to store school supplies and do homework. My eyes stung a little when my old friend told me about the donation and the auction and the bidding - a bit of family given to the church all over again. She seemed sad for what had happened, too.
“I’m glad you have the table,” I managed to tell her. “I always pictured it with a big family sitting around it, home for the holidays.”
When you leave, you leave everything. Nothing will be as it was. My old friend clearly loves the table, asked how to care for it, about its history. The table will have a big family gathered around it - just different faces than I’d once envisioned.
The table I took with me when I left is years older - a small kitchen table made of ash, bought when we moved into our first house (not ours really, a parsonage). I’d finished it myself for our eat-in kitchen, coating it with four layers of polyurethane so that it would better weather years of everyday use. The faint scratches on the legs are teeth marks from our Sheltie when she was a pup, chewing as puppies must, twenty years ago. My children ate at this table in booster chairs, modeled creatures from home-made play dough there, drew their pictures, dripped their popsicles. Its knicks are a calendar of days, a record of years.
It may seem the lesser of two tables; it is not really so.
Catapult Kid’s visit home came and went so quickly; I felt what a luxury time is, day in and day, out to spend with people you love, or to be where you want to be, or doing what you want to do. He was here; he is gone again.
He looked stronger, but he was very tired, and he soaked up sleep like a sponge. He said “Yes sir” to the sales clerk in the store, and stood, when not aware, with his hands behind his back, his feet somewhat apart, at ease. He folded jeans crisply, and with attention. He was home again, yet part of him already belongs to something else, and the years of his childhood are over.
(found among drafts not posted)
Three springs ago bluebirds nested
in the paper box out by the street,
tending and flying off by turns.
Somehow I convinced red-headed boys
to leave the babies alone.
The bluebirds grew up and flew away.
Two springs ago wasps moved
into the box instead
and set to work upon papery palaces.
In deference to the mail carrier,
I rained upon them Armageddon,
a stream of white foam.
This spring nothing came
to the paper box at all
but paper fliers about lawn services
and replacement windows.
I wish the bluebirds back.
I think of putting up a house.