All Wound Up (4 page)

While the first seeds of hysteria were sown within me, my pantry was emptied, unscrewed, detached, and removed, and the gentle Sir Washie finally came through the kitchen, went out the back door, and was taken far away. I felt badly for him as I stood at the back door watching him disappear into the night. I wondered if he would be alright right before—well, right before I remembered he was an inanimate object that had no feelings and that it was really only me wracked by grief… but I was distracted from my grief process by a crisis that had begun to develop back in the kitchen.

The new washer is the same depth as Sir Washie but about four centimeters wider. This, we thought, was going to make it hard to get it downstairs, but not impossible. As I was still drying my tears, this was proving to be wrong. Even with the pantry removed (and lying in the hall) the new washer wouldn’t even clear the doorway. Joe said it was just a small part of the door frame that was the problem, which was no problem, because he could “make it work.” That little piece came off, another attempt was made to get the new washer in, and then Joe, with a zeal that was only matched by my sense of foreboding, announced that all we needed to do was remove a bigger piece of the door frame itself, and then we would be home free. He started to assemble his tools, and for some crazy reason probably related to insurance coverage, the minute he used the words “Sawzall,” “pry bar,” and “widen” the delivery guys panicked, got in their truck, and gunned it out of here.

Joe called in the forces. My brother Ian and our friend Ken came to help, and our neighbor Greg provided a variety of saws and emotional support. (He may also have been watching his back, since his house is the other half of our semidetached, and once Joe started talking about sawing anything at all near a shared wall, Greg was keenly interested.) I should have known how it was going to go down when my brother bolted through the front door with a big smile on his face and said “I’m here to help. I didn’t miss all the sawing… did I?” That was when I had my first drink.

In a flurry of sawdust and optimism, the guys removed the facing board and tried again to lower the washer. Nope. They reconsidered and hacked another board out of the frame. Still not big enough. They sawed another part of the frame out and then removed a light switch (on the theory that every centimeter counted) and with chaos and saws all around them, this time the washer cleared the door. There was much jubilation, but it was short lived.

I had my second drink as they discovered that the washer (for whom I was beginning to feel a resentment nearly matched by my longing for the departed Sir Washie) would only go down the first two steps to the basement before the team encountered another problem in the form of the main sewer line on their left, and a wall on their right. Thankfully, nobody said anything about the sewer line, but it was decided very quickly that the wall couldn’t entirely remain if the washer was going to go down. I looked at Joe talking about hacking up more of the house, and I didn’t think he looked as worried as he should. In fact, he was standing in the basement with a large saw, a sweaty brow, and a crazy, determined look in his eye, all while smiling in a really strange way and saying, “I can do it, I can do it. I have momentum!”

At this point, I completely flipped out. I called a halt to operations while I stood in the kitchen and took stock for a minute. We had removed the door, the food, the cabinet, the door frame, and the light fixtures, and we had sawed off chunks of the house. The house was trashed. The kitchen was trashed. There was a new washer mocking me from the back door, and nobody had clean clothes. I could tell that doorway would never be right again and we were a few hours from the start of the New Year while my husband delightedly planned to take out a part of our house that was in his way.

I took a deep breath and gave a thoroughly impassioned speech about how we had crossed the crazy line. Totally crossed it. I told Joe that one of the things I love best about him is his optimism. He always believes that everything is going to work out, and I could see that Joe had decided that this washer was going into the basement no matter what it took. He was on a mission. I told him that I really loved his optimism, but that this time it just wasn’t appropriate. This wasn’t going well and I didn’t think it was going to start going well and the washer was too damn big and I had changed my mind and we needed to absolutely return it right now before he sawed up anything else. We needed to return this washer and pay the extra money and get apartment-sized appliances. I had said I didn’t want them because I’d have to do a load of laundry every fourteen minutes for the rest of my life but right that minute I didn’t care because, frankly, I had hit my limit for a sawed-up house, and saws, and washers, and problems. I burst into tears, while the assembled masses looked at me like they couldn’t understand how any of this could be bothering anyone.

That is when I saw it. There was a huge scratch on the side of the washer, and I realized that it couldn’t be returned. That thing, that monstrosity that wouldn’t fit down the stairs, would belong to us forever. As that dawned on me, I was suddenly filled with an urge to hack a hole in the floor of the kitchen and just drop the bastard through to the basement, or maybe shove it onto the stairs and leap upon it with the full force of my body until it fell through, smashing whatever needed to be smashed to make it work. I took a deep breath. I poured myself a third drink, and then I told them all to put down their tools and get out.

5. It is in the basement, not the kitchen. The next day, when I had recovered sufficient will to go on, it turned out that only one small part of one old wall needed to come down, and then the washer descended to the basement with as little difficulty as a four hundred pound washer can while being moved through a very, very narrow house by men who have been moving a washer for two days and aren’t really excited about it anymore. Turns out that Joe’s optimism was not only well placed, but necessary.

4. Not to sound ungrateful for the years of service Sir Washie gave me, but it would appear that there have been some improvements in washing machines in the last thirty years. (Who knew?) For example, the interior of this front loader is so big that not only will it hold every towel in the house, but I also think I could rent it out as an apartment if we’re ever short of cash again. It holds so much stuff that if you bug your kids to do their laundry, and you finally manage to convince them to go and do it, they can do all of their laundry in one load and that means that you’re only going to have to fight with them about laundry and how people really do care how they smell once every week, not twice. I will lay down my life for anything that makes for fewer fights with my kids.

3. It makes virtually no noise. I loved Sir Washie, but the sound of him running through a cycle was something that made you nervous no matter where you were in the house, and a slightly unbalanced load (like many of us in our last months, Sir Washie was mostly unbalanced toward the end) could shake windows, scare small children, and be generally louder than a fifteen-year-old stripped of a cell phone on a Friday night just after she found out that the new boy who moved in next to her friend said that he thought her hair was “sorta nice.”

2. For weeks, we had been taking our laundry over to my mother-in-law’s. This means that you bundled up yourself and your laundry, walked over to her place in varying types of freezing precipitation and over a variety of forms of ice, washed the laundry, and walked back, freezing your arse all the way. This is a huge chunk out of one’s workday, so we tried not to dirty clothes. Finally having a washer in the house meant that the next time someone spilled coffee, I could mop it up with a towel, rather than scream “Drink it off the floor! Drink it off the floor! Are you crazy! Don’t touch that towel!” like I did three days earlier when the last clean towel in the house looked like it needed to be guarded with my life.

1. When Sir Washie finished a load (heaven bless him) he did nothing but lay there quietly, trying to recover from the effort. When the new washer finishes, it plays a song.
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Joe thinks that the purpose of the song is to tell you that the load is finished, but I don’t think so. I think it plays a song because it’s just so thrilled to be serenely fulfilling its highest purpose by doing my laundry. I think it’s trying to tell me that there is nothing else in the world that would satisfy it more than churning away so we can have clean gitch. I think it’s delighted to be in my service.

I think it’s happy here, and I hope that Sir Washie knows that, song or no, I do still miss him.

while ago I was having coffee with an acquaintance, and when I pulled out my knitting to do a few rounds, she glanced around quickly to see who was looking, and then said, “Are you really going to do that in public?” I laughed, because it wasn’t like I was picking my nose, shaving my armpits, or loudly telling sexually explicit jokes, and I struggled to figure out how knitting was even on the list of things that she would consider embarrassing to be caught at. I wanted to ask her what she was thinking, but I didn’t know her very well and, truthfully, I was worried about the answer she might give me. Obviously in her world, being a knitter was embarrassing, and doing it meant something about you that you wouldn’t want other people to know—what, I couldn’t imagine. I thought of about a hundred snappy answers to her question while I was sitting there, answers like, “No, of course I’m not really going to do this in public. I just carry yarn with me as a prop so that I can repel people who are cool and hip like you,” or even just, “Yes. I like myself and I don’t worry much about what people think, especially if it has nothing at all to do with them.” As always, none of them came out of my mouth, because I have excellent personal filters. I think that what I said instead was something like, “Oh sure. I’m already a slightly dumpy mother of three in my forties. I have nothing to lose”.

All the way home from the coffee shop, I imagined a world where, when people say something stupid to me about knitting, I just say what I’m thinking. Just let go, roll with the adage that if you ask a stupid question, you should get a stupid answer, and let it rip. I know I’d never really do it, because it’s wrong to make people feel bad, even if they deserve it, but still, when I got home I wrote a list. Even just getting it down on paper makes it more likely that I won’t ever say it out loud.

WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SAY:
Nope, doesn’t it look like it though? Really, this is a careful illusion made possible through my many years of studying enchantment and magic. In reality, I’m just sitting around like everyone else, but I make it appear as though I’m knitting to create a feeling of coziness, make me look smart, and give me a way to meet people. Hi!

WHAT I ACTUALLY SAID:
Yes.