How Much It Costs
for a Room
of One’s Own
Martha Stewart told me that I needed my own space.
She insisted that in a single afternoon, I could create a private and productive environment for myself by picking a spot somewhere in my house and tailoring it to fit my needs. She showed me how by transforming a mud room off her kitchen into a spectacular office, and, in a single afternoon, she painted the office, stenciled it with gold leaf, refinished the floor, and built a wooden wall unit from trees she had planted that morning.
I’m not a fool; I realize that Martha Stewart has the magic of television on her side, but in a quiet turn of contempt, I decided that I could do whatever she did. She wasn’t better than me. I could create an office in a single afternoon, too. If I felt like it, I could make window shades from twigs and canvas. If I had a chainsaw, I could also sculpt a Nativity scene from a block of ice and make a delectable strawberry shortcake out of sawdust and a pound of confectioners’ sugar.
Competition is healthy, as is jealousy to a certain extent, but it wasn’t that as much as it was Martha’s overall tone of voice. It was a tone of condescending perfection, almost to the point of mockery. She seemed concerned, but was she really? Did she really feel that it was important for me to weave a carpet from my dog’s fur, or was she just being a show-off? Would my self-esteem really rise if I rented a steamroller and paved my own driveway, or was she just being a know-it-all? Why was I watching her show, anyway?
Well, I
knew
why I was watching her show: I was out of work, and I have cable. That wasn’t the only reason, however, there was more to it than that. I was connected to her. Believe it or not, I’m almost related to her.
It’s true, by an odd and disturbing set of circumstances. You see, I have a distant cousin who was the niece of the husband of my father’s sister whom I have never met. In fact, I’m not even sure if she
is
my cousin, but it enhances the story better than if I just said “some girl I heard of.” In any case, this cousin graduated from Vassar with some degree and then became employed as Martha Stewart’s personal assistant. Now, if you think I’m about to expose some horrible disfigurement about Martha’s personality—like maybe that she picks her nose when she drives or leaves skid marks in the toilet—you’re wrong. Nope. What I’m about to expose is that this distant cousin of mine allegedly became romantically entangled with not Martha but Martha’s husband, a dead ringer for an ugly Aristotle Onassis. If that wasn’t bad enough, Martha’s husband left Martha, divorced her, and then allegedly married this distant cousin of mine, after which they honeymooned in Europe for three months.
Now, my aunt, the one who told me this story, is known to exaggerate a bit, but I’m fairly sure that it’s true. Sometimes I don’t even
care
if it’s true. I just feel lucky that I can pity Martha on some level.
And that’s what I kept in the back of my mind when I decided in a single afternoon that the former Scary Room was the perfect spot for my new office, as I tore up the shag carpeting, swept away the spiderwebs, and threw away the dead lady I had recently found in there. I slapped the first coat of periwinkle-blue paint on the wall and it splashed back into my eye, causing temporary blindness. After an hour of flushing my eye with warm water, I went back into the new office, ready to resume my work, but it was dark outside. The sun had set. The single afternoon was over. Oh well, I figured, does it really matter? So I couldn’t pull it off in a single afternoon, so what? Martha Stewart is still divorced.
The next day I finished painting and started on the floor, pouring adhesive remover gel on the concrete to eat away at the remaining carpet glue. However, what Martha didn’t mention was that it was pretty necessary to wear the proper attire, like a NASA space suit, when using such chemicals, because the remover was equally effective at dissolving flesh as it was at dissolving glue. This was apparent when I noticed, out of my remaining good eye, that the gel had eaten a quarter-sized hole in my pants and was now gnawing through my calf muscles. Oh well, so what, I figured. So what if I had chemical burns that really demanded medical attention, if not a skin graft, did it really matter? Martha Stewart was
still
divorced.
After the floor was done, I set out to find office furniture, especially a great big desk. At the first place I went to, a man with a huge scab on his head led me through a maze of warehouses filled with rusted and dusty cabinets and tables. The first desk he showed me was
it;
a huge, 1930’s golden-oak detective’s desk big enough to sleep on. I loved it, and when I voiced my concerns about fitting it through the doorway of my new office, Scab Head told me not to worry. He assured me that his delivery men were experts at this sort of thing. They could fit any
thing
any
where.
I bought the desk.
Two days later, a delivery truck pulled into my driveway, and the two “experts” got out. They didn’t look like experts to me as much as they did convicts out on work furlough. I swore I heard the theme to
Sanford and Son
drifting through the air. They unloaded the desk, grunting and moaning, and carried it to the front door, where they rammed the corner of the desk into the door jamb and gashed it.
After fifteen minutes, and with the use of pen and paper, the experts finally figured out how to get the desk through the front door. My faith in Scab Head’s men was definitely waning as they carried it down the hall and toward the new office. I already knew what was about to happen.
They turned the desk on its side and tried to slide it in. Didn’t work. They moved the desk upright and tried to bring it in at an angle. Didn’t work. They took the door off its hinges and tried to bring it in again. I knew that this maneuver wasn’t going to work when one of them asked me if I had a saw.
“Where is your second choice to put the desk?” the other one said.
I took a deep breath. “There is no second choice,” I answered. “This room is my personal space.”
“We don’t have the authorization to help you any further,” one of them said. “We don’t have the allowance from our boss.”
I was getting mad. “It was your boss that told me not to worry about this,” I mentioned. “He said you were experts.”
“Yeah, but we don’t have the authorization,” he said again, as if that explained everything.
“Oh. Well, how am I supposed to get this in there?” I asked them as they began to put the door back.
They shrugged. “See, we’d have to call and get the authorization, you know, so we could spend the extra time to get it in there, but we just don’t have it,” the expert explained to me.
“Have what?” I asked.
“The authorization,” they said together.
“Stop saying that and go. I’m giving you the authorization to get out of my house. Just go,” I almost screamed. “You know where the front door is. It’s the first big wooden thing you put a dent in.”
And they left, and I watched them go as I stood next to the desk in the hallway.
I knew what Martha would do.
I took the door back off the hinges.
I took out the drawers and used a screwdriver to pry off the top of the desk.
I turned the desk on its side and pushed and wiggled and pushed and wiggled until the desk was in my office underneath the window, and my spine was popped so far out of alignment that it nearly broke the skin.
Hunched over, I put the top back on and screwed it in place. So what if I couldn’t stand up straight? Who cared if I couldn’t walk anymore? Big deal if I was in agonizing pain.
I know what Martha would have done.
She would have bought herself a truckload of painkillers with her big, fat alimony check and drunk gin until she passed out, like any sensible divorced woman.
I wish I had an alimony check.
For the Birds
The truth was that I felt sorry for the two little girls from down the street, Casey and Staci.
I don’t know, maybe I’m a sucker; maybe I’m just too gullible. Nevertheless, I must still hold tight to the theory that a six-year-old child at my front door asking me to feed her because her mother hasn’t gotten out of bed in two days qualifies for a Sally Struthers kind of tragedy.
I had met the girls a couple of months ago when they, one of them fully dressed as a ballerina, wanted me to pay them to cut my bushes, though I politely declined. My regular gardener was a forty-year-old man who equates a properly trimmed bush to a stump, and I knew I wouldn’t have much more luck with an eight-year-old and a six-year-old.
After the bush incident, the kids started coming around in the afternoon, and, within a week of our meeting, it had become a daily ritual. The chimes would be tinkling, yet no one was visible through the front-door window. That’s when I knew the midgets, as I started to call them, were getting hungry.
But soon, feeding them simply wasn’t enough. They started bringing their dog to my house for Snausages and dinners of Kibbles and Chunks. Every time they set foot through the front door, one of them would spot something she liked, pick it up, and ask, “Can I have this when you die?”
This begging thing was obviously either a genetic trait or a habit picked up from their mother’s fourth husband. One day, while disposing of all the unnecessary items in our house, I came upon the dusty, 1973ish fakewood headboard that had belonged to my sister’s old boss. Somehow, after the boss’s father had died in the bed, we assumed possession of it. I was quite ready to get rid of it, so I dragged it out to the front yard, slapped a huge FREE sign on it, and waited for someone to pick it up.
Within a half hour, the headboard was spied by the fourth husband, whom I call “Jethro,” while en route to dropping both Casey and Staci off at their natural fathers’ homes for the weekend. He sent the midgets up to the door to tell me to take the sign off the headboard while he smoked a cigarette at the end of my driveway.
After that, I came up with a whole bunch of ideas to trick Jethro. I toyed with the idea of dragging all of my trash, lawn clippings, and broken appliances to the curb and taping free signs to them so I wouldn’t have to take them all the way to the Dumpster in the alley. Jethro, however, had beat me to the punch by hauling a plaid burlap love seat with missing cushions out to the dirt plot that was his front yard, appropriately accompanied by a broken dryer. As a matter of fact, Staci had been missing for several hours one afternoon until I saw her older brother open the door to the dryer and yank her out.
I bet, I thought to myself while driving past their house, that if I moved the dryer and the love seat to my yard and put free signs on them, the fourth husband would take them back inside the house.
I just hoped that they’d move soon, but they couldn’t have moved soon enough. Last Sunday morning, the doorbell rang, and as I peered from the hallway to the front door, no one was visible. It was the midgets, probably wanting breakfast.
Despite the fact that I was still in my pajamas, I opened the door, hoping to get rid of Casey and Staci quickly, but as I did so, I knew I had been trapped.
There they were, dressed in the same clothes as the day before, but this time, on top of Staci’s right shoulder was perched a big, fat, filthy, dirty pigeon.
I shuddered immediately. I avoid birds, I avoid them at all costs. I’ve never had a simple, noneventful encounter with a bird and never will because of karma. I killed a bird with my car several years ago, and since then, birds have been shitting on my head, getting trapped in my air-conditioning vents, and being generally bothersome. To me, seeing a bird is like seeing the Antichrist appear before my eyes.
“You’re not bringing that thing into my house,” I told them right away.
“This is Petey. He broke his wing, and we’re taking care of him. See?” Staci said, stretching out the bird’s wing so I could see just how broken it was.
“Then he needs to be at your house resting,” I said back.
“Isn’t he pretty?” Casey said, stroking the bird’s head.
“Nothing is pretty if it carries more vermin and disease than rats,” I informed them. “And that’s what pigeons are: big, fat, flying rats that shit—I mean,
poop
—on people’s heads. Now take it home, girls, and make sure you wash your hands with gasoline.”
Reluctantly and saddened, the midgets turned around and headed back down the driveway with Petey. I headed into the kitchen, ecstatic that I had successfully slipped away from a bird unscathed.
Within moments, I heard screaming from outside. As I listened closer, it was the terrified shrills of the midgets, calling my name over and over. As much as I wanted to ignore their cries for help—as much as I wanted to plead the case of “I’m Not Your Mother, So Go Drag Her Drunk Ass out of Bed”—I opened the side door and voluntarily, although quite hesitantly, surrendered myself to the Midgets’ Lair of the Filthy Pigeon.
I didn’t want to go outside.
There was danger outside.
Simply concerned that the pigeon had turned mad and had plucked out one of the girls’ eyeballs, I rushed outside to the front yard, where both girls were burrowed under the bougainvillea bush.
“Help us, Laurie, help us!” Casey screamed. “Petey got away, and he’s under the bush! We need to cut it down!”
“Uh, no, we don’t,” I replied, crouching down until I could see the bird underneath the bush, moving around and spreading his vermin about. “First of all, stop screaming. Now, one of you get on the other side and we’ll flush him out.”
Staci ran around to the other side, tunneled under her end of the bush, and immediately shrieked, “PETEY! PETEY! PETEY!” which naturally caused the bird to quickly scuttle over toward my direction. Against my better judgment, I caught it.
“Here,” I said, thrusting Petey at Casey. “Here’s your bird. Now go straight home and keep him there.”
The girls gathered him up and started home. They weren’t one step out of my driveway when they began screaming again, and I turned around just in time to see Petey, in a desperate waddle, escape out into the street.
Both girls began to cry hysterically, and their yelling became even more high-pitched when they spotted a car eight blocks away.
“AHHHH! He’s gonna die! He’s gonna die!” Staci kept yelling. “LAURIE! You have to help us! Oh, NO! He’s gonna die!”
Suddenly, there I was in the middle of my street, wearing a T-shirt and no bra, and striped pajama bottoms and barefoot, hunched over, chasing and trying to capture a filthy bird that I hated. The more the girls screamed, the faster the bird waddled until I was almost breaking into a jog behind it, my arms outstretched and my boobs flopping around, completely unharnessed.
For two blocks, I ran after the bird down the middle of the street as he desperately ran for freedom or the next best alternative, the car. I couldn’t blame him. I, too, would have gladly thrown myself in front of a speeding vehicle if my destiny rested in a shoebox located anywhere in that family’s house. Casey and Staci ran slightly behind me, hollering and howling, tears shooting down their faces.
Finally, I cut the bird off, forced it in the opposite direction and corralled it back into the yard belonging to my most dangerous neighbor, Frank.
Frank, in a pathetic attempt to deny that Christmas was indeed over, although it was now February, still retained his handcrafted holiday finery in his yard. This included a barrage of plywood Santas, Snoopys, snowmen, and elves with yellow eyes. Frank informed me that he had electrically wired his yard with enough volts to “knock a horse on its ass” in an effort to thwart potential thieves from stealing his decorations. I knew the capture had to be cautious to prevent electrocution, and I spotted Petey hiding between two gargantuan reindeer.
I made the only safe decision I could.
“There he is, girls!” I yelled, pointing. “Go get him!”
They both dove in between Donner and Blitzen, and wrestled Petey as his broken wing sadly flapped in a fluttering panic.
“We got him!” they both yelled as they jumped up.
“Good job!” I nodded. “Now take him home, quickly.
Run.
And if you ever bring another animal to my house again, I’m calling the foster care people.”
I didn’t see the girls again for a week. Then the doorbell rang; it had to be the midgets.
When I opened the door, they both looked sad, their faces long and their eyes drooping.
“What’s the matter?” I asked them. “Is Petey okay?”
“My dad said he got better and flew away,” Casey said.
And I bet you guys had “chicken” for dinner sometime this week, I thought.
“We’re moving today,” Staci said. “We’re leaving at lunchtime for our new apartment.”
“We wanted to say good-bye and give you a hug,” Casey said. “We’re going to miss you.”
If I had been premenstrual, I probably would have cried. I did feel bad, though, and I wondered what the hell was going to happen to these kids, but I already knew. Each of them was probably going to have four or more kids by different fathers by the time they were twenty, just because they didn’t know that their lives could have been any different. There was nothing I could do about it, anyway.
“My mom has a magazine with your picture in it,” Staci said. “And we’re going to keep it so we can look at you.”
“Really?” I laughed.
“Yeah, and I decided something,” Casey said. “I think I want to be a writer someday. Just like you.”
What the hell is this? I thought. Am I trapped in some
Hallmark Hall of Fame
movie? Who wrote the script for this? Danielle Steel? If God wanted to put a lump in my throat, why didn’t he just hit me in the neck with a softball or a brick instead of making little kids do his dirty work?
I had no choice but to let them in the house, where I proceeded to give them everything they asked for, even though I wasn’t dead yet. I had to get a grocery bag because they wanted so much stuff, including a dusty old seashell, smelly soaps, a can of tomato soup, and a stick of margarine.
“Thank you,” Casey said. “But we have to go now.”
“We have to get ready for the new apartment,” Staci added.
“Well, remember one thing,” I told them. “When you guys get to be twelve, and your mom asks you what you want for your birthday, you tell her you want—now, can you remember what I’m going to tell you?”
They both nodded.
“You tell her you want Norplant. Okay?”
“What’s Norplant?” they asked.
“It’s insurance,” I answered.
With their bags of my household possessions slung over their shoulders, they left for home. In three months, I knew, they wouldn’t even remember who I was.
I wish
I
was that lucky. To remember them, all I have to do is look down the street into their front yard to see the burlap couch and the dryer their fourth dad had left behind.