Under the watchful eyes of Wally Lamb, Delores Price came undone. She had good reason – parental abandonment, accidental death, rape, obesity, romantic obsession, suicide attempts, and institutionalization, just to name a few. Events and circumstances that loom so large, so painful, so life-altering that it seems likely that no one could come through without a bit of fraying.
Me, I came undone by the Sears appliance repair people.
I was reduced to tears. Ruminated, fumed, did the grown up equivalent of stomping around the house. All the while knowing that it wasn’t a big deal. Knowing that I was, in part, using the emotion to try to broker a better solution. I was not going to be duped by Repair Person 1 – the refrigerator guy – who told his supervisors I wasn’t home when he came. He omitted two details – that he had failed to call first, and that he arrived before I had said I’d be home. Repair Person 2 – the dryer guy – was scheduled to arrive in the same 2-5 pm time slot. He called at 4:40 pm saying he was on his way. He arrived at 4:55 pm. I had been stuck at home, off work and unpaid, for three hours, when I just as easily could have come home at 4, taken my son to karate, and still been back in time to get dinner started. As it was, the dryer guy stayed until we were well into dinner.
Customer Service Agents 1, 2 and 3, as well as Clarence, the on-shift Manager with liquid smooth apologies and the offer of his personal cell phone, were unable to produce a replacement Refrigerator Guy. Each one told me, in 10 or 15 minute intervals between calling me to see what could be done, that the Repair Person had been out to the house and I wasn’t there. Each time I corrected them. Who, you might begin to wonder, is crazier – the in-house dispatch people who must endlessly hear about customers who aren’t home or the customer who comes home to find a libelous post-it note on the front door and demands justice. I wouldn’t have minded the injustice if, in the end, they’d found another Refrigerator Guy and sent him out. Or tracked down the original guy, who couldn’t have been more than 10 minutes away from my house when I called initially to report that he’d absconded with my appointment, and made him return. They did neither. And time clicked on. The shift was coming to a close. When I got the call from the Dryer Guy saying he was on his way, I realized that all my forceful assertiveness was going to do nothing about my freezer. My ice would continue to clump, moisture would continue to accumulate and form a light sheen of frost on the contents of my frost-free freezer.
They offered me a $10 credit for my inconvenience. They offered to set up another weekday appointment, for which I could take another 3 or 4 hours off of work. I’d just missed three hours of work in a hourly job that has no salary or benefits. For 7 hours of my time, they offered $10. It might be at this point that I came fully, unequivocally, unabashedly, undone.
You’d think, if you knew me, that I had a bit more reserve. I work full time, am a decently supportive wife, and am raising a basically normal kid. I am so freakin’ responsible that people who know me often joke about my extraordinary capacity to make things happen, get things done, and keep those around me on an even keel. Appointments are kept, I am on time, we run a smoothly oiled machine of a life. I am, without any boast intended, the glue that keeps the people around me “done.” In the course of my every day, every detail life, I am fastened and organized, zippers zipped, buttons buttoned. I may lose sleep, but I’m pretty darned good at maintaining my composure.
I remember back to the first year of graduate school, when the landlord of my 2 bedroom, 1 bath West Hollywood dive apartment turned out to have, as I would later learn, Alzheimer’s disease. At the time, I knew only that she was an old, white-haired lady who never forgot to collect rent checks. Her name was Ione, and my roommate dubbed her I-Own-You. One day, as all stories like this begin, the construction work in the adjacent lot created an unexpected crash – a newly erected wall fell over, hit a tree on the lot line, a large branch broke off and fell against our patio door, breaking the glass door and damaging the balcony from the weight, force and debris. I promptly called the landlord so she could start whatever kind of repair work would be needed as we now had a bit of a situation to deal with. The patio door was cracked, and a large tree limb lay precariously like an overgrown balance beam between our balcony and the yet-to-be-built housing units next door.
She wanted to know what we had done to break the patio window. A massive tree limb fell on our balcony and she blamed us.
I had no way in, around, or through to her. I usually have the basics of rational thought, balanced reason, and logic. Or can be swayed by another person using these. I was without any coping strategy, as none of these shifted her from her view that view that tenants cause things to go wrong in her rentals. I was being unfairly, illogically, crazily blamed for something so ludicrous that I’d have preferred to be secretly filmed for Candid Camera rather than fall through the worm hole where my mind, my wondrous mind, could do me no good. I crafted ever crazier narratives of how, indeed I broke the patio window with a tree. Yup, that was me, the 100 foot tall woman swinging tree limbs around my head as I warded off the alien attack. Yup, that was me, dropping construction materials with ever-growing seismic booms – for underneath my mild-mannered graduate student disguise I was really a crane operator with an unbridled need to destroy everything around me. Yup, I, the studious grad student with exactly 7 friends in my new city, hosted a wild, raucous party for hundreds of my closest friends; we danced and drank and drugged until the tree fell over, and we were so drunk we didn’t notice. Yup, yup, yup.
My roommate, an aspiring musician who sang in a makeshift music studio in his bedroom closet, was his usual nonchalant self. He found the incident humorous, but not unsettling, maintaining the aloof conviction that this, and his music career, would all work out in the end. Me, I regaled everyone I knew with my mounting hysteria, each back-and-forth communication with the landlord sending me ever closer to the edge, and at some point, right over it.
I’m exaggerating, of course. I finished my degree, never even turned in a late assignment. I have stayed firmly planted on the “just visiting” side of emotional unhinging, forever grateful that I have only music lyrics, novels and other people’s accounts to let me know what it might be like to come completely, actually, unglued. I belong to no liar’s club, have never lived in a glass castle and have never met anyone running with scissors. I’ve never had a year of thinking magically. Instead, my painful moments are mundane. I’m the Everywoman of psychic alienation and abandonment, without ever having been fully alienated nor abandoned.
As I write today, I’m back to my more usual equanimity in the face of time-consuming challenges. My ice is still clumped in the freezer and all its contents still wear a fine film of frost, after the Replacement Refrigerator Guy who arrived over the weekend found nothing wrong with the frost-free freezer. I waited today for the dryer delivery person, because my landlord didn’t want to pay for the repairs the Dryer Guy suggested. Nope, my landlord decided to replace it – so today I’m waiting for the appliance reconditioning business that doesn’t deliver on weekends. Yes, that’s right, my current landlord has purchased a replacement dryer from a place that won’t deliver appliances on weekends. I’ve taken off another afternoon of work, not even earning the lofty offer of $1.43/hour, making the most of it by carving out some time to write. The delivery men are uncharacteristically old – white hair, wiry bodies, breath thick with cigarette smoke. Where are the young muscled guys willing to drive a thinly over-painted white truck glaringly missing a company name or logo? The guys who are supposed to deliver large, heavy and unwieldy appliances? Maybe I have indeed fallen down the rabbit hole, but if I have, so have these two old men who look like they could barely carry in the groceries let alone a reconditioned Kenmore that may actually be older than the one that was emitting the burning smell that started this whole incident. A machine that, on the first load, emitted the same damned burning smell as the dryer that is now on its way to some other poor souls who live slightly further down the rabbit hole.