Diary of a Mad Housewife

Were here Wednesday. They installed the backsplash. supposed to come back yesterday to do the grout and finish up details. He came, tested the tiles, said they weren't dry enough, and that he'd come today. Today he called... he's stuck upstate. Will get here Monday.

This journal brought to you in bite-sized chunks.

Is here! And without prompting, he offered to knock $$ off the price of the job. Yay!

And... Buffy! Buffy was cool!

Still no word from the contractors. I've left several messages. My husband is now leaving messages. The baby is considering calling and telling them to get their butts down here. At his point, all I want is my backsplash. Hell, maybe I should install it myself. I wonder if I can rent a tile-cutting device for the day. We could put in our own knobs, cut and varnish our own shelves... hm....

Did finally show up. At 1 pm. There were a few calls throughout the morning telling me they'd be here in 'half an hour' from the time of calling. When they got here, they set out to do half a day's work and accomplished roughly half of what they set out to do.

I've noticed my contractor has a habit. Whenever I'm sort of quietly asking such questions as, "Oh, I thought you were picking up the knobs yesterday?" or, "Didn't you say the tiles would be in last week...?" he changes the subject and talks about babies. I mean, I think he earnestly likes to talk about babies, but I think it's also so much smoke screening. I can now recite all of the recent births, deaths and major life events amongst his social circle.

Friday, he says, I get my backsplash, and door knobs, and extra drawer, and... a whole host of other things. Friday.

This time I guess I won't hold my breath.

And PS, yes, my phones got fixed (I hope) yay!

My contractor just showed up. He told me "everything" would get done last Monday. Then last week he told me "everything" would get done this Monday... so he showed up right at 9am on the nose this morning and said... "everything" will get done tomorrow.

I am still optimistically hopeful that he is giving me an accurate prediction. What sort of fool am I?

Last year I woke up and Chris called me to tell me he was okay. Ten minutes later there were shouts from upstairs as my neighbors saw the second plane hit. I watched in edgy worry, feeling the baby in my belly, until the towers collapsed. Then I knew I couldn't be alone. My neighbors invited me upstairs, so I went, and spent the day with them. Like other New Yorkers, we were busy trying to locate our loved ones, finding people in downtown places to go for the night, breathing a sigh of relief at every friend and acquaintance who checked in to say they were OK.

In the weeks that followed, after the ash had settled and most of the smell had dissipated, the candles still stayed on the street corner, lit every night, renewed, with flags and peace symbols. The neighborhood still took food and donations to the local fire station (which had been one of the first on the scene).

We were a community. We looked into each others' eyes and felt our bonds through our grief. There was so much grief...

I miss them, miss Park Slope, miss my neighbors, miss the familiar faces on the street, miss the shopkeepers who had become part of my daily routine.

And missing them helps me not to think about American Express and my time there, and all the people I knew for a day or a week or a year while I was temping all over the WTC and WFC, all the people who could have been caught in the collapse or the flying debris or trapped above where the plane hit, people whose faces I saw plastered on 'Missing' ads for months every time I went to the doctor for a checkup during the pregnancy. Helps me not to think about all the tears I'd shed every time I had to use the payphone across the street from NYU, where the missing posters were plastered in an overlapping papier mache in sight of the place where the forensic teams were sorting dead body parts.

I can't make sense of any of this today. Working in those buildings, we always knew this was coming, every since the first attempt. Knew it either as a passing joke or a sick dread or a pit in our stomachs. I would think every day, "I can't keep working here; I must leave this place," and I did. I fled, leaving behind not just my fear but the disgust I felt at the swarms of faceless, grey-clad drones marching toward the subway every day. There was an old woman who stood at the exit from the overpass every day, where everyone leaving the WFC and heading into the WTC passed by. She could have been mine or anyone else's grandmother, and her incessant cry was, "Please help me, I'm so hungry." I would often stop at a fast food joint and bring her back something to eat, and she always looked dumbfounded and grateful. Not once did I see anyone else stop.

So there it all is, mixed in, unresolved, milling about in my mind and my heart and here I am, sure that it's not over, that hate isn't dead in the world, that New York is still a target. And I'm thinking, I need to get my daughter out.

The kitchen guy did show up, late. He'd gotten stuck in traffic, poor duck. I notice that I still do not have a new sink or counter top (the old sink is there, and a big, gaping void where the counter top should be.) Happily, I did not go into this process with any expectation of it being completed "in a week" as my contractor indicated.

Yesterday we drove up to the Woodstock area to visit friends for their baby's first birthday, and we met their friends. Not for the first time, I started to have pangs of wanting to move up to their area. The hills are green, the air fresh, and the hippies plentiful.

My father just called.

Yesterday, I spent the whole afternoon with him up at his house with the baby, hiding from the contractors and basically doing nothing but, well, hanging out with my father and the baby. I told him expressly I'd be trying to get some writing done this morning and I'd see him this afternoon.

It is 10 am, so of course he called, to see if perhaps I might like to come up and hang out with him. What's more he asked me in this flat, I'm-ready-for-you-to-hurt-me voice.

I gently told him no, of course. That I'd see him this afternoon, later.

Meanwhile, of course, the workmen showed up while I was in the shower and, when I answered the door, my towel swung open in back while I was standing in front of the full-length mirror in the hall.

I can't win.