The bitch is back

It has been nearly three years since I signed my divorce papers. Three years is a considerable amount of time, and I have come a long way since that dreadful summer. For starters, I am no longer quite as chickenshit as I was. (I was afraid of stupid things, it turns out–things which are neither difficult nor scary, things like calling the plumber, paying the bills, filing the taxes. I can’t really feel smug about mastering them, even, because they’re such straw men–but I do remember being terrified, and I am quite thankful not to be paralyzed like that any more.) I don’t smoke cigarettes any more. I used to drink way too much, and now, for about a year, I haven’t drunk at all. I worried all the time back then, about everything, and now I worry less. And I’m not as angry as I used to be. In fact, I’m downright calm.

Oh, wait. That part is a huge lie. I am wretchedly, miserably, violently angry–more furious than I have ever been in my life.  I walk around seething with rage. I have heartburn–me, who carried two enormous babies to term with nary a digestive rumble! My formerly cast-iron stomach roils in protest every morning, before I’ve even finished dumping several cups of coffee straight down my gullet. (Normal! Coffee on an empty stomach is, for me, completely normal! The subsequent indigestion is not.) I yell at the children, bang pots and pans, fight the urge to weep–during which my throat closes up and aches, lava-like tears well and burn in my eyes, and my chest tightens so that I can hardly breathe–repeatedly during the course of the day.

First the estimate to fix the floors came in, and the less said about that the better. Then, the contractor didn’t show up. This was after a month or so–I’m a little hazy on the details, so bear with me–of having the ceiling in the living room gone, which meant that the floor above was also gone, which meant that roughly half of the house was moved into the other half, and chaos reigned. The children, who can never find anything anyway, were rendered even more incompetent at locating their baseball gloves/chemistry textbooks/cleats/pants/permission slips/piano music/other socks. “MOM! MOM! MOM!” was bellowed, desperately, as the school bus lurched away from the bus stop, several mornings in a row. I lost the car keys many times a day. I lost my cell phone. I lost the ability to communicate in complete sentences, and then I lost my mind.

I began to look forward to bedtime with unhealthy eagerness. My bedroom was a mess–several closets worth of hand-me-downs I was ostensibly sorting through carpeted the floor, as did stacks of books and papers and plastic bins and extra chairs and lamps and extension cords (on whose plugs I invariably stepped) and curtains still attached to their rods and rugs and houseplants. (But hey, at least it had a ceiling.) I’d climb into bed, pushing the laundry I hadn’t gotten around to folding over to the passenger side, pop a melatonin, and watch episode after episode of Breaking Bad. Then I’d fall asleep and dream that (for example) the children and I were escaping some terrible place on a bicycle, when suddenly we came across a school bus that had crashed, and as we slowed to help the dozens of injured children begging us to stop, I realized the injured children were actually zombies, the whole thing was a trap, and I’d better pedal a whole lot faster if I valued our lives. There were also the requisite plane-crashing, car-not-responding, teeth-falling-out dreams, with extra vivid LSD-style visuals. At least I haven’t had to betray my friends and family by moonlighting as a meth dealer, I’d think, wide awake in the dark, rubbing whichever toe I’d stubbed on the way back from the bathroom. Yet.

My sense of humor–all I had left, really–vanished completely the week after the contractor and workmen had promised (and failed) to appear. I yelled at the cat, who tried to placate me by bringing live chipmunks, a series of field mice, a titmouse, a house finch, and a robin through the cat door and into the dining room. The dining room, crammed as it was with furniture from the living room, was not an easy place in which to locate and rescue a small, wounded, terrified creature. Still, I managed it more than once, crawling around over the sofa and armchairs, reaching behind the computer–itself boxed in by three end-tables upside down on the dining room table–to try to flush some poor little thing out of the corner and into view, so I could clap a wicker basket over it, praying, as I alternated between noises meant to scare and noises meant to encourage, that it would not sink its tiny teeth into my well-meaning flesh.

I yelled at my mother, who advised taking a Tough Stance with the workmen, and then I yelled at the realtor, and then I hung up and stared angrily at the floor. The workmen showed up, and all was sweetness and light for a few hours. The following day, they failed to show. I called consoling-windows friend and yelled at her for a while, after which I attacked the overgrown forsythia bushes in front of the house with a pair of enormous loppers. Violent gardening is an excellent rage-killer, or at least it always has been. I hacked and hacked and cursed and swore and got sticks in my hair and bugs down my shirt. I kneeled in what turned out to be the cat’s secret shitting ground. I cut three fruit-laden branches of our lone blueberry bush before I realized my mistake–hundreds of fat green blueberries, god damn it, murdered in their infancy. Finally, I pissed off a pair of nesting wrens, who divebombed me until I backed out, stood up, and surveyed the damage.

Which turned out to be considerable. As I stood there, panting and sweating, the forsythia bushes cowered abjectly, hugging their few remaining branches close and avoiding eye contact. Behind me rose two piles of debris bigger than my porch. Whoops. I stomped inside and called my trusty lawn guy, who said he’d send a chipper and a truck out straightaway. And then, of course, he didn’t.

I called again. No one called back. Again the following day. No response. I called my trusty tree guy, and explained my problem to his answering machine. Meanwhile, trusty lawn guy called back and said he’d come right out, he was sorry not to have shown. Moments later (were they in cahoots?) tree guy called, and I thanked him for getting back to me, said lawn guy was on his way, apologized for taking his time, and dismissed him. You see where this is going, right? Right on schedule, lawn guy didn’t show.

I twitched a bit, then called tree guy again, revising my previous dismissal. He didn’t call back. Neither did lawn guy. So it went for about two weeks, and a delighfully relaxing two weeks they were, while the madcap workmen appeared and vanished according to their particular whim, saying things like “See you tomorrow morning!” when what they meant was “Afternoon, if you’re lucky” and I gnawed my ragged fingernails to the bone.

As the grass underneath the piles of debris yellowed and died, my psyche went septic. I stalked around like a vengeful fury, leaving scorched earth in my wake. I killed fifty dollars worth of lovely little plants by overfertilizing the windowboxes; a tire went flat; I broke a glass pitcher I actually liked by dropping it on my foot.  My boyfriend came down for the weekend and tiptoed around fixing meals and painting trim and re-caulking various seams, all the better to stay out of my way, though he did intervene as I attacked the hedges in the back yard. “Uh, that’s poison ivy, just so you know,” he said, pointing to where I stood and gently prising the shears from my clenched fist. But I was, apparently, more toxic even than poison ivy. (He got it, poor guy, all over his legs and shoulder and chest. I did not.)

I went for several rage-fueled runs, ignoring my aching foot. I swam laps in the town pool until I nearly drowned. Nothing worked.

This morning I woke up livid, stomach churning, as I do every morning these days. I left a witheringly sarcastic message for the lawn guy, threw my  phone across the bed, then chewed the inside of my cheek until it bled.  And then I called my ex-husband.

I was mad at him, too, of course. He’d been in Mexico for a week, learning to scuba dive, while I called yard men and tree men and waited for contractors not to show up. The Mexico part didn’t bother me; I would much rather have him in Mexico than nearby, and knowing he is completely out of the picture always makes it easier to cope. But suddenly a light went on in my head, and I remembered several things: One, that his contribution so far to getting the house ready has consisted of NOTHING, and two, that I’d come home the day he got back from Mexico–having run around all day buying paint and replacement windowbox plants and taking my younger son to piano lessons and picking up food for supper–to find him sitting comfortably on my porch, in my house, shooting the shit with our older son. “Oh, hi,” he said, not getting up, when I walked in with my arms full of groceries. “I wanted to see the kids, so I came over.”

So I called. I never call. I told him I had fucking had it with this bullshit, and that it was now his job to cope with the huge pile of sticks and debris, however he saw fit. I gave him the numbers of the tree guy and the yard guy. And–to my great surprise–he calmly agreed to take over.

This, I told myself, is my just reward for never crying wolf. It is, anyway, the very least he can do. (Well, not the VERY least, but close.)  “I’ve unleashed my personal asshole on the yard guys,” I told consoling-windows friend, who sighed and said, “Everyone needs a personal asshole.” But truth be told, he wasn’t an asshole to me, not this time. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll handle it,” he said, quite reasonably, and I thanked him and hung up.

And I feel a little tiny bit better. Who knew asking for help from the person who usually enrages you the most could make you feel better? The pile of sticks will still be there tomorrow, mark my words. But now, I know just whom to scream at when I wake up and discover nothing’s changed.

(Edited to add: woke this morning miserable again, the whole damned future spooling out ahead.)

 

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