My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman (15 page)

I’m in love.

With my big TV.

It’s Big Love.

My big TV takes up the entire family room, but that’s one of its many charms. True, we’re in the early stages of our romance, when I still find its faults adorable. The minute it starts sucking its teeth, I’m outta here.

But I have a feeling this one’s a keeper. For example, honesty is the most important element in any relationship, and my TV always tells the truth, especially in high definition. It shows me every wrinkle on every face—except mine. How many home appliances make you feel younger?

In fact, if my third husband will be a dog, my fourth will be a big TV.

And now I have the best of both, my new puppy Peach and a big TV. We watch football together while I write, with Peach and Little Tony sleeping on either side of me, flanking the laptop on my lap. At other times, they take over and kick the laptop off my lap. If I ruled the world, they’d permanently replace the laptop, but they don’t pay the bills.

And by the way, I never forget about the other dogs, the two golden retrievers and Ruby The Corgi. The whole family has been known to sit on the couch together, watching the big TV during these long winter evenings, a motley lineup of fur and hair, sharing the same knitted blanket.

The cats, Mimi and Vivi, curl up in a nearby ottoman and the best chair in the house, respectively. They control the remote.

So it’s inevitable that I’m watching the big TV with five dogs and two cats when a show comes on A&E about animal hoarding. I’d never heard of animal hoarding, and it comes as a surprise to me. Apparently, there are people who live alone with too many pets.

Awkward.

Back on the couch, we all exchange glances. Nobody says a word. The cats turn up the volume.

We watch the show in silence, and I try to spot the difference between me and the animal hoarder on the TV. I am relieved to find one basic difference.

He wears a baseball cap.

I don’t.

Therefore, I’m not an animal hoarder. Also he said that his house was cluttered, but not dirty. I’m just the opposite. My house is dirty, but not cluttered. In my defense, it’s hard not to have sagebrush of dog hair rolling across the carpet when you have pets, but this argument may be a little circular.

I remember a book club party I gave recently at my house, as a thank-you to book clubs who have the great judgment to read me. At the party, I gave a talk, after which I asked for questions. A hand went up immediately, and I called on an attractive woman.

“Yes, what’s your question?”

“It’s more like a comment,” the woman answered. “I want to say that my book club loved your book, and we appreciate your having us to your home. And we love that you’re so real and didn’t clean for us.”

Everybody exchanged glances. Nobody said a word. I wasn’t sure how to answer, so I told the truth, since honesty is so integral to a relationship:

“Actually, I cleaned the house for two days before the party.”

Laughter ensued, which is the point after all, but the question stuck with me. I realized that the problem was probably the way I kept the books I own, which number a thousand or so. I love to read and I buy a lot of books, and I kept all my books stacked everywhere in the dining room. They filled chairs, covered the dining room table, and blanketed the sideboard. There were even piles on the floor. I liked the look, but it made me think that maybe it wasn’t such a great thing, so I recently got some bookshelves, separated the books by fiction and nonfiction, and shelved them in alphabetical order by author. Now I have my own personal library, all pretty and organized, and I know the truth.

I’m not an animal hoarder, I’m a book hoarder.

Do you know what they call people who hoard books?

Smart.

More home repair drama from which I learn a Valuable Life Lesson.

You may remember that for Christmas, I got my house a big TV. It’s in the family room, where it doubles as a room divider, if not the Great Wall of China. The TV begins our saga, because it requires rewiring that sends an electrician down to my basement, and when he comes back upstairs, he asks:

“When was the last time anybody was in your crawlspace?”

Kind of personal, but I let it go. “Why?”

“It’s raining down there.”

These are words nobody wants to hear, especially on Christmas Eve, which is when our story takes place. I asked, “What happened?”

“The subfloor is soaked, the insulation’s wet and falling off, and there’s water all over. A pipe burst in your radiant heating.”

At first I didn’t even remember that I had radiant heating. Then I had a flashback from my second marriage, filled with enemy fire and assorted weaponry. I recalled that during the war, radiant heating had been installed in the entrance hall, but I had never used it. That it would explode and destroy Christmas Eve was somehow inevitable.

Anyway, the storm in the basement requires an emergency plumber, who goes down to the crawlspace and determines that I need an emergency HVAC guy, who arrives two hours later, just ahead of Santa. God bless the plumbers and HVAC guys, who work the same hours as mythical figures and don’t get half the credit.

The HVAC guy turns off the shower in the crawlspace but tells me that the plumber has to come back, which doesn’t happen until the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, when he informs me that I have to call an emergency water-damage company or I could have a “microbial problem.”

I stop him right there. “You mean,
mold
?”

“Yes,” he answers, cringing, because now he has an hysterical homeowner on his hands.
Mold
is a word that terrifies me even more than
IRS audit
or
blind date
. Plus, no woman wants microbes in her crawlspace.

So I call the water-damage people, and they zoom over, rip out the soggy insulation, and install equipment in the basement, there to suck out the microbial water. The floor in the entrance hall is wet under the rug, so they install a major dehumidifier and an Injectidry system, which is a large black box from which emanates yellow tentacles covered with red spikes, like the sea creature that ate New Year’s Eve.

They tape the tentacles to mats all over the kitchen, family room, and entrance hall, then switch on the machines, warn me they’d be loud, and leave. Five minutes later, loud doesn’t begin to describe it. It sounds like a locomotive idling in the room, and as happy as I am that my moldy water is vanishing, I can’t take the din. It scares the cats and dogs, especially new puppy Miss Peach, who huddles against me, shaking. I cuddle them all on the couch and turn on my superbig TV, but we can’t hear the shows over the clamor.

By the way, in case you think this sounds like the most boring New Year’s Eve ever, you should know that until the pipes burst, I had been looking forward to spending the evening reading and watching the big TV with my little pets. I am the ultimate homebody. Also couchbody, TVbody, and bookbody.

Anyway, to get to the life lesson part, I endured the locomotive noise until I couldn’t stand it, then I got up and examined the dehumidifier and the scary Injectidry machine. I found the power switches, but I didn’t know if I should turn off the machines. I was worried I’d damage them, and I didn’t want to call the water-damage people and bother them further on New Year’s Eve. Bottom line, I didn’t know if I was allowed to turn them off, so at midnight, the dogs, cats, and I watched the ball drop on mute and went miserably to bed.

Happy New Year.

But on the morning of the New Year, I awoke with a new determination. Last year, I was a woman who hesitated and suffered. But in the New Year, I was wiser and older, even if by a day.

Kind reader, I went downstairs and turned off the machines.

What did I learn?

Never ask permission.

I had some excitement at the house the other night, when Daughter Francesca was home. I was getting ready to go to bed, and the cats and dogs were in their usual positions in my bedroom. Penny, Little Tony, Peach, and Ruby The Crazy Corgi were in my bed, and Mimi was curled into a black ball on the bedroom chair. Vivi was nowhere in sight, but then again, she rarely interrupts her skulking to make even a cameo appearance.

But Angie, the older golden retriever, was sitting and staring at my chest of drawers, which are built into the bedroom wall. The top drawers were partway open, with socks falling out, because I leave them that way. My drawers are a mess because I have better things to do.

“Look at that.” Francesca frowned. “That’s weird, what Angie’s doing.”

“Whatever.” I was tired. I’m always tired when I go to bed. I feel sorry for people who can’t sleep. I sleep for all of us. And when I want to go to bed, stay out of my way.

“She never does that.”

“There’s a first time for everything.” I went over to the bed and shoveled some animals aside to clear a space for my weary bones. I have a king-size bed of which I occupy six inches, surrounded on all sides by fur, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But Francesca was eyeing the drawers with concern. “Something’s there,” she said, and as if on cue, a weird scratching sound came from the chest of drawers.

Something was behind it. Only I didn’t know there was room behind it, and I didn’t know what could be behind it. Now I was awake. I got out of bed, slowly. “Maybe it’s a mouse.”

“Or a raccoon, or a squirrel.”

“Or a dragon, or a psycho killer.”

The dogs looked over, Ruby started barking, and suddenly, my socks came alive.

Francesca screamed, I screamed, and we started hugging each other, screaming while the dogs barked and barked, and my socks came spilling out of the drawer, followed by Vivi the cat, who merely yawned when she saw us hysterical.

I should have known, because of Angie.

Vivi and Angie are newly in love.

Vivi isn’t affectionate to me, and doesn’t even know me, but I keep trying to get her to love, plying her with overpriced cat food, an occasional saucer of milk, or leftover scrambled eggs. She gobbles up the food, but never looks at me in gratitude, and there’s never a thank-you note. I’d resigned myself to the fact that she didn’t like anybody in the house, except that now, out of nowhere, she has fallen in love with Angie.

Vivi spends all her time following Angie around as she goes through her day, from walking around the block, to sitting in a chair, and finally walking from her food dish to her water dish and back to her chair.

Sounds familiar.

When Angie lies down, Vivi curls up next to her, so they have trans-species spooning.

I regard that as proof that Vivi isn’t sociopathic, because before Angie, her best friend was the kitchen faucet. She used to rub her face against the faucet, so I naturally assumed that she wanted the water turned on, maybe for a drink. I would turn on the faucet, but she would just get up and walk away. Then I thought it was because I was watching, so I would turn on the faucet and walk out of the kitchen. But the same thing happened.

Then I thought she was trying to scratch her chin on the faucet, so I tried to scratch her chin for her, in the same spot. And she got up and walked away. So now she spends her time staring at the kitchen faucet, occasionally rubbing against it, and maybe fantasizing about it, for all I know.

I don’t understand Vivi at all.

You know what I mean, if you have any kind of pet. We come to know them, whatever little soul that’s in there, and also the way they think. The test is that their actions can become predictable over time, and that’s been true of all of my pets, all my life, except Vivi.

I don’t understand why she squeezes behind drawers or why she loves her faucet and Angie.

Vivi remains a mystery, even to a mystery writer.