Closet

“I used to ride 50, 75 miles as soon as I woke up,” my friend Vonne says.  “I had bike routes through McMinnville and all over.  If I wanted to add five miles, ten, some hills, I knew the roads so well, I could do it.  I felt like I had to earn my breakfast.”

I used to be that way.  I felt like I had to earn everything, breakfast, lunch and beyond.  Then we moved into the coastal-looking bungalow and I felt like I got what I deserved.  I didn’t wake up feeling guilty.  I didn’t owe for anything.  I lived in a rat-infested ex-rental so bad that it was rumored even the old tenants didn’t sleep inside.

Charlie and I didn’t know each other then as well as we do now.  Now we complain if there’s a hint of something to whine about, and we compete to be first.  When we lived in that coastal-looking rat hole, we’d wake up and pretend to love the challenge.  “We’re so lucky,” we’d say.  “Someone’s going to love to buy this house.”  

Secretly, we both thought it was hell and secretly we both thought we deserved it.  We could have been crippled with guilt over leaving our pathetic exes because we were now so happy.  Living there made it possible we weren’t too happy.

Even though this Kosovo-styled ranch house’s downstairs was at least as bad as tenement housing in the bad part of Panama, I didn’t feel like I deserved it when we took ownership.  I kept the door closed to that scary movie down there.  I don’t feel guilty about much anymore.  I’m too busy coughing up texture dust.

Kevin, the sub who’s given us hope and walls, cleaned up the downstairs.  He created rooms and covered over the foundation problems we took two years to correct.  Squirrels, I noticed, don’t live there anymore. 

The last thing Kevin did was to rearrange the plumbing downstairs.  To do this, the washer and dryer had to be disconnected and moved.  A few weeks before the dryer’s heating element went out.  We bought a new washer and dryer but I still hadn’t caught up with the conveyer belt of laundry.  I did eight loads and at least six of them were all Cheyenneh’s clothes.  I doubt they were dirty enough to color the water.

Three weeks later, Kevin reconnected the washer and dryer.  I washed as much as I could until Charlie moved them out again.  He needed the floor.  It’s hard to tile without it.

Wearing dirty clothes until you can stand it no longer doesn’t uplift your mood or much of anything else.  It started to bother me.  I started to feel as bad as I smelled.  It only got worse when we lost the use of our bedroom closet.  All we have to hold our clothes is a closet.  If we had bedroom furniture, it’d be ruined.  Closets don’t have to be moved.

None of the closets in this house are walk-in or even squeeze-in.  The house doesn’t have a master bedroom.  After moving so often, we don’t have that much to fill a closet with anyway.  If you know you’ll be in a different house in a year or two, you don’t hoard.  The more you have to move, the more you have to destroy.

Think of big, cheap, movable slabs of brown and you’ve visualized our old closets.  While Kevin finished up the downstairs squirrel retreat, we asked him nicely to replace the closet doors.  We had to ask him nicely.  None of the standard closet doors would fit this house.  He’d have to build up walls in every room.

Charlie wanted to do the closets himself.  He agreed to let Kevin do them, since Charlie has this job thing that takes up a lot of his time.  With Charlie having to hold back and play with his tools only on the weekend, I knew it was time to let Charlie do something, too.  I kept catching Charlie look longingly at Kevin’s carpenter tackle, asking just to touch it, please. 

I gave Kevin some money.  He took his tools and went home, leaving us with almost finished closets.  Charlie deserved to have the final fun.  As soon as he got off work, he ran off to Home Depot and picked up rods and shelves.

Charlie pulled everything out of our closet and filled up an empty one in the hallway with his stuff.  He put what couldn’t fit into the closet all over the bedroom floor, squishing it up into a corner and halfway down two walls. 

We hadn’t cleaned up from Kevin’s closet carpentry so texture, pieces of drywall, wood, and dust mixed with Charlie’s police gear, shoes and running clothes.  In the middle of the room our mattress looked like it died on the floor.  It’s hard to see where the mattress ends and the junk begins.  I’m thinking it’s time to get a real bed, something higher up creating a little distance between my nose and the construction debris currently on the floor.

I put everything I owned into a small laundry basket in the one bare corner.  I figured it’d be a day or two at the most that we’d be living like this.  I couldn’t move my stuff without sneezing from the construction dust.  Charlie moved a few tools and boards into the bedroom.  It looked like he might do something soon. 

He got interrupted so a week went by.  We stopped working nights on the house as soon as we stopped teaching Tae Kwon Do over a year ago.  As soon as our nights were free we didn’t want to fill them back up with work of any kind.  We had a lot of TV to catch up on.  We don’t want to get burned out more than we already are.

“I’m so sorry I’m making you live like this,” Charlie said.  “You don’t deserve it.”

I enjoyed the sound of this very much.  “It’s fine,” I said like a good little martyr.

The next weekend Charlie planned to work on our closet but that would mean not doing all the things I had planned.  “You sure?” he asked.  “It’s another week of breathing texture dust.”

“It’s fine.”

I wake up every morning with a thick throat and headache from seven hours of breathing texture dust and closet construction dust but I don’t tell Charlie.  I had plans.  I’m not going to stop going out with friends just because I can’t breathe.  It’s a good thing I can’t breathe – I still can’t do laundry.

“I’m doing the closets for sure this weekend,” he said the next weekend.  He didn’t.  When you’re A.D.D. and fixing up a house, you forget your promises.  Even I forgot when I saw him and the skaters breaking up sheetrock out back. 

The bedroom might be bad to us, but the back yard looks bad to the world.  More importantly, the back yard looks bad to Dolores, the neighbor behind us.  She’s already put up a Long’s Drugs gazebo and all the garden gnomes she could legally buy in the Metro area.  If she looks out her kitchen window and sees this construction debris/Superfund Site, no telling what she’ll buy to hide it.

By the end of the weekend we still had a bedroom full of texture and regular dust, getting thicker, like my head, by the minute.  Everyone was busy working somewhere so I started in on some painting I’d saved.  I hoard walls to be painted like kids hoard Halloween candy.  I don’t want to be rushed.

I know I heard noise while painting, but I’m always hearing noise.  It doesn’t mean something I requested is getting done.  Honestly, I could easily spend another week waking up with a thick throat and a headache in that bedroom. 

<>I don’t equate the mess with the state of my mind anymore.  I don’t deserve it but I am happy to live with it.  I embrace the mess.  I cherish the mess.  I won’t always have the mess; it is my time now to celebrate the mess.  The mess and I are one.  I am at peace with the mess. 

There is no mess.  “I finished,” Charlie said as he pulled the shop-vac downstairs.  “We have a closet.” 

There’s a big difference between a room covered with texture dust, construction debris and rumpled clothes lining the perimeter of the room, and a shop-vac’d room with clothes hanging in a closet, even if the bed is still a mattress on the floor.

“I’ll do the Vegan’s closet later,” he said.  “I’m tiling downstairs so someday I can wear clean underwear.”

When you do without something for a while, it feels like luxury when you get it back.  I feel richer than my relatives right now.  I can walk around and breathe in my own bedroom.  If I had clean clothes, I could hang them up.

I can wait.  I deserve a few more days of not doing laundry.

A little help? [] 6:26:43 PM