Stair Stress We can’t start the weekend now without someone else making
our coffee. We can make it later in the
day after we’ve had some, but making coffee first thing before having some is
too much. These are the things you have
to give up when you start getting old.
That’s what we tell the kids when we run off to Peet’s.
Before quietly escaped the house of sleeping teenagers, we
left a list of work to do. The General
called from her sleepover. “I need to do
work the second I come home,” she said.
“I need money.” We noticed she
always finds a sleepover when we haven’t gone to the store for a while. She gets in these moods when she decided to work. Sometimes she actually works. We’ve come home from our long mornings
competing with each other over how many refills we can drink and she’s done
things. Some of the things she’s done
are on the list we’ve left for her.
Sometimes she does things of her own choosing and expects payment. “I couldn’t read your writing,” she says, “so
I cleaned the bathroom.”
“It wasn’t dirty, relatively speaking,” I say.
“Pay me anyway.”
I do. It keeps her in
the work force and out away from us. You
can’t spend money at home, you know.
We’ve been teasing her about entering the FICA-deducting
real work force lately. She turned
sixteen a week ago and like everyone else in this house, has to pay for her own
insurance if she wants to drive.
"Get a job,” we tell her when she looks longingly at the car
keys. “You can’t drive without
insurance. That’ll be your first adult
monetary responsibility. Get ready for a
life-long love affair with debt. You’re
going to need to, the way you spend money.”
After losing every argument, she agreed. She applied to Starbucks with a group of
friends, none of whom do anything by themselves. She expects them to call any day.
“You applied to one place?” Charlie says.
“No, I applied to eight.”
“Did you turn in any of the applications?”
“No, but I went and got them.”
“If you don’t turn them in,” Charlie asks, “how do you think
they’ll call?”
“Who are you?” she says and runs up to her room. This is her way of telling us ‘you’re right.’
This time we return from two refills’ worth of Peet’s Sierra
Dorada to a quiet house. The first thing
the General does when she comes home from her sleepover is go to sleep. This time I wanted her to look at the
list. It involves her room. Charlie goes upstairs to where the bedrooms are and says, “Get
your room ready to paint.”
She pulls the homework trump card. “I can’t now. I have to do homework.”
"It’s amazing to me how your homework is second to anything
except anything we want you to do.”
“2.67,” she says. “That’s
my grade point average. You’ve seen my
progress report.
“You have one hour,” Charlie says.
“Do I know you?”
We started our own work knowing there’d be nagging in our
future. The vegan, being picky and
careful, taped off the ceilings so I could cut in the trim. I told him what to do and he didn’t go up on
his computer for a few hours before starting the job. He took it seriously, methodically going from
one room to another, ceiling corner to ceiling corner, making sure everything
was straight. He used a roll and a half of
tape.
I started cutting in where he finished taping, using semi-gloss
instead of satin to edge. The bedrooms
and bathrooms are the same color. The
bedrooms get the eggshell finish and the bathrooms get the more durable and
shiny semi-gloss. I’d opened both cans a
while ago to put up little patches on the walls. Being me, and being distracted with the
General, I used the semi-gloss. The
weird thing is I told myself I might do this.
I don’t even listen to my own warnings.
Charlie went downstairs to work. “It’s about time I fill up the huge gaps downstairs,”
he said, “so for the first time in three years we can have a warm winter.”
He took off the French door, which was held in roughly place
with two nails, and put down concrete backerboard around the French door
interior entryway. This should have been
done before putting on the door but we were thinking of redoing the concrete
slab. Kevin, the sub downstairs, heard
us and said, “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
We respect Kevin’s judgment, so we didn’t.
Yesterday Charlie pulled off the interior door between the
unfinished downstairs and the stairway to upstairs. This made the house into a big airplane
hangar, with the cold air coming from the gaps downstairs straight to wherever
I happened to be. We’ve had the door for
over a year. We’ve moved it around from
room to room, letting it rest in almost every room in the house.
He installed the door next, eliminating the wind
tunnel. I came down to look at the door
now anchored in its proper place. “I’m
going to miss it now,” Charlie said.
“Even the subs had to move that door around.” It sat next to the TV for a full year. If you wanted to relax, you had to look at
it.
“I thought it might motivate us to do something,” Charlie
says. “But it sent us both into therapy,
or at least off to Barnes and Noble therapy.
It might have worked with normal people, but we can compartmentalize
pretty well. We live with the
General. She’s teaching us there’s an
excuse for everything.”
I’m annoyed because I finally realized I’m painting
semi-gloss instead of eggshell. I go
downstairs and make sure the door slams properly. It’s important not to take out your
frustration on your work. Charlie’s work
is not my work, so it’s okay to slam his door.
The house is quiet now except for music coming from
downstairs. Charlie borrowed one of the
General’s CDs and plays it over and over when he’s working lately. He’s played it over twenty times by now, just
today so far. It plays in my head now,
no matter where I am or what I’m doing.
“Why are you listening to that?” I ask Charlie.
“It’s mind-numbing, like its owner.”
Without warning, we heard rumblings upstairs. “Is the house sinking again?” Charlie asked.
It’s the General.
It’s coming from her room, behind her closed door. No telling what’s going on in there, except
that she’s awake and probably not doing homework.
She charges out from her room with a handful of
curtains. “Where can I put this?” she
says. She insisted on getting these so
the little neighbor kids couldn’t look into her room upstairs. With the new paint, the curtains won’t look
right. I’m assuming we’ll be soon taking
another trip to Bed, Bath
and way Beyond.
“I don’t care,” I say.
“My room. I’ll deal with it
later.”
She runs back upstairs.
“I dread whenever she cleans her room,” Charlie says. “Half the garage floor is covered with stuff
she doesn’t know what to do with. She
puts it right in the doorway, like you do.
The vegan even puts scissors right in the middle of the stairs so you
have to . . .”
“That was me,” I say.
“I’m usually carrying something, like the Shop-Vac down the
stairs. I don’t want to juggle it while
avoid tripping over scissors.”
“I put them there because I didn’t want to go upstairs. I was going to bring them up when I went up
next.”
“You’ve done that ever since I’ve known you,” he said. “You set a pile of dimes right near the
closet, how normal is that? I don’t even
know why people talk to us.”
“I had them there, so when I went downstairs I could put
them away. You don’t like my
efficiency?”
“It’s like living in a Japanese obstacle course game show,
where you have to walk through the house wearing a helmet because you’d trip
and fall over everything trying to get out.”
“I picked up the dimes.”
“In defense of not picking up my shoes, I have to say
there’s no place to put them on except for in front of the TV. I leave them there so I have a place to sit
down and put them on. You know how hard
it is to put on shoes while sitting on a mattress which is sitting on the
floor? You keep on rolling back. Are we ever going to have a bed, by the way?”
“I like putting your shoes on the stairs, so I can bring
them with me next time I go upstairs.”
“You know how hard it is to walk downstairs in the morning
before Peet’s, not awake, and not trip over my own shoes resting on the stairs?”
“I don’t want to trip over them by the TV.”
“I could understand your motive if you had a huge life
insurance policy or something, but if I die, you’re screwed.”
“I’ll have this lovely half-finished house. And the General to drop things and keep me confused
so I paint semi-gloss where there should be eggshell.”
“That’s why you came down here and slammed the door after I
just finished hammering in the last nail.
Now it’s christened.”
The General comes over and says, “Hey look.”
She points to a picture of a 4Runner she printed off
CarSoup.com and hung it up on the refrigerator.
She’s decided it’s her new car.
She kissed her hand and tapped the picture of the 4Runner.
“Get a job,” Charlie said.
She pulled another pile of Jenn’s stuff from her room and
said, “What do I do with this?”
“Put it here,” I said.
“We’ll start a Goodwill pile.”
She finds a lot of things to put in this pile. It’s filling up the kitchen and overflowing
to the stairway. I’d guess it’d irritate
Charlie if he opened his new door. He
probably won’t go anywhere for a while if he opens the door and sees this mess
blocking his way.
The General is in her room with the door shut, as
usual. Even with the door shut, she can
hear. I know this because when we’re
watching movies or TV and a car horn honks, she runs to the front door. We find this very amusing. She’s usually on her cell phone talking and
running to the door like she’s waiting for someone. We don’t tell her it’s just the TV. She figures it out after she’s embarrassed
herself.
Today, though, someone honks in our driveway and she knows
it’s not the TV. “My room’s ready,” she
says. “Bye.”
The Vegan and I run up to see what ‘ready’ means. Everything she owns which isn’t covering the stairs
and kitchen floor, the garage, and my bed is piled up in the center of her
room. You can clearly see the walls for
the first time in years. There are
hundreds of big, ugly nail holes and nails stuck up at the top of her walls.
The Vegan’s skater friends come over and hop over the crap
on the stairs. They start pulling the
nails out of the General’s wall while complaining about her. “She should be doing this,” they say. “She gets away with everything.”
“This is hard,” Speed Racer says. “I’m going to check my email.”
“I need pliers,” the Vegan says. “These nails won’t come out.”
The last skater friend sneaked out without saying a word.
I didn’t think I’d see them again but I did. The Vegan returned with a small hammer and
used that to pull nails. He grunts and
groans, telling the nails to get out if they’re stubborn. The walls are heavily dotted with holes like
a teenager with bad acne. I’m painting
around him, using the eggshell this time.
We’re working quickly for some reason.
It isn’t even his room.
“If I can’t pull out these few nails,” he asks, “can I pound
them in and spackle over them?”
“Anything,” I say. “I
want to get this done. I have goodwill
stuff to put away before Charlie will surface upstairs.”
The Vegan was really into it. He did a great job, even though his friends
were making random noises and imitating Presidential candidates.
“I’m a kick-ass President, heh heh heh!” Speed Racer said
about a hundred times.
Every now and then it’d be quiet upstairs and we’d hear
Charlie downstairs. “Holla holla holla!”
he’d yell. We didn’t know who he was
imitating.
For once, the skaters had to wait for the Vegan to finish
working. The minute he was done
spackling, they left. It was already
dark but it wasn’t raining so they borrowed Charlie’s halogen work lights and
planned to skate somewhere in the dark.
“I’m done,” Charlie said, coming upstairs. “They stole my lights. We’re kid-free so let’s order pizza and watch
Boston kick ass.”
“I’m not stopping until I repaint that semi-gloss,” I said. “I’ve got my own curse to reverse.”
“Where’s the eggshell?
I’ll help you.”
I pointed it out and we redid the room in what seemed like
minutes. Charlie even cleaned up for me
while I ordered dinner over the phone.
The pizza arrived right before the teenagers all
returned. They ran in and ran upstairs
and kept their noise up there, away from us.
It was easy to ignore them by turning up the volume.
We couldn’t ignore when the vegan fell down the stairs. He did it like he was in a move and when he
was done, he started laughing. So did
we. Then he went into the kitchen and
got whatever he came down for then went back upstairs. I know the stairs were free of the General’s
stuff, scissors and even Charlie’s shoes.
He must not be used to crap-free stairs.
Speed Racer decided to get something from the kitchen and fell
down the stairs next. He sat at the bottom
of the stairs and said, “Ow, my knee.”
We were enjoying the entertainment.
Next, the Vegan came down the stairs without incident, then tripped
and fell going back up the stairs, laughing.
We were getting used to it by now.
The General then came down the stairs trip-free. “Get my car yet?”
“Get a job yet?”
“Do I know you?” she said and ran back up.
We could hear them all upstairs teasing each other so we
turned up the TV volume a little more.
They were pretty loud, though.
“Cheyenneh, stop doing math in the bathroom!” the Vegan
said.
“You can’t do your homework in the bathroom,” Speed Racer
said.
“Sorry, I have to do my math.”
"Stop doing math in the bathroom!” the Vegan said
again. Then he turned to go downstairs
and, you guessed it, fell down the stairs.
“She’s doing math in the bathroom!” he said getting up as if
falling is normal. It is for him
tonight.
“Cheyenneh,” Charlie said to the General, “Knock it off!”
She opened the door with a very confused look on her face
and went back to her freshly painted room.
It got quiet upstairs after that.
With nothing to keep us awake, we both fell asleep on our small
texture-coated crappy couch. We didn’t
want to chance going to bed and falling down the stairs.
We’re not even thinking about making our own coffee tomorrow
morning.
9:22:39 PM 
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Monday, October 25, 2004
