Because that's how I thought of me and my ex-wife and our—my little girl. My child, my house, my tub. I'm alone here, despite the presence of this uninvited guest. And all the more alone because she's here, to make me say "we" and remember how empty that word is, what a nothing word, impermanent. How it evaporates and carries everything away with it.
There she was, doing situps in the hall outside the upstairs bathroom when he came up to run the water. So of course she quit and stood in the door, then at the foot of the tub as he turned on the cold water faucet.
"Oh, good, a bath," she said.
"Not till we get a hot water heater."
"Cold showers, then?"
"Whatever turns you on," he said. The faucet sputtered and knocked. Brown gunk squirted out, splashing all over his pants. She shrieked and backed up.
"It's just water and rust," he said. "You won't melt."
"How do you know I'm not the Wicked Witch of the West?"
"Because she was green."
"So's that stuff. Gross."
It was as gross as she said. Deep brown, a sickening color. Don stepped over and turned on the cold water tap in the bathroom sink. It did its own knock-and-sputter routine, and then choked out even nastier-looking gunk that splattered them both.
"Oh, this is an improvement, all right," she said, looking at her clothes.
"Nobody asked you to stand in here when I'm working."
She said nothing and he didn't look at her. The water wasn't getting any clearer in the sink or the tub. He didn't like the silence. But why should he let it make him uncomfortable? She needed to learn not to hover.
Instead of leaving, though, she broke her own silence. "You sure they didn't hook these pipes up backward?"
"It's just been standing in the pipes. Run it for a while, it'll clear out."
"Looks like the house has dysentery," she said.
"Don't use this toilet," he answered. "Look at the crack. I'm not putting water in it."
"Is there one I'm supposed to use?"
"Downstairs in the north apartment."
"Will the water look like this?"
"Till the pipes clear."
"If they ever do."
"Water heater should be hooked up tomorrow. Let it fill and heat, then we can bathe."
"Sounds indecent."
He looked sharply at her. She was joking, probably, but even so it was repugnant, having a woman so dirty and unkempt acting flirtatious. There was a reason people became homeless. In her case, it could easily be her bad taste.
He left the bathroom.
Sylvie called after him. "When do I turn this water off?"
"When it looks drinkable."
"I will never drink this!"
He was already halfway down the stairs, so he didn't bother answering. He didn't want to establish the precedent of shouting through the house. He could just imagine her screaming, "Don! Oh, Dahahn!" for the whole neighborhood to hear.
He went downstairs and turned on the toilet and sink in the bathroom he intended to use. Those and the outside hose were all he'd need, so there was no point in testing them until he had new fixtures hooked up to the plumbing. The drain in the downstairs bathroom sink was plugged up, so he did a little work opening the trap to drain into a bucket. A real stink. Wouldn't you know it. A mouse had gotten caught in the trap and drowned. But once it was cleared and reattached, the sink drained fine. Which was good, because in cold water with no soap it took three scrubbings before his hands felt clean again. He didn't put the mouse corpse in the garbage can in back—the last thing he needed was to attach that smell to anything that was going to stay around. Instead he flung it off the edge of the gully in the back yard. It flew ten yards out and twenty yards down, pitching lazily end over end as it fell, till it fetched up about halfway down the gully wall.
As he came back into the house, he knew there would be no more delaying it. He had to choose which section of the house to renovate first. Of course, ideally he would do the whole house at once. All the stripping, then all the breaking down of walls he didn't want to keep, then breaking open the rest of the walls for wiring and plumbing, phone lines, intercom, maybe lines for a computer network if he thought the money would hold out for a luxury like that. It was easier and cheaper to do each job for the whole house all at once. But that wouldn't give him a place to live while it was going on; and just as important was the fact that he needed the small payoffs of having finished this room and that room to keep him going.
Not the main floor. Couldn't do the north side upstairs, because that's the side Sylvie's apartment was on. South side upstairs, though, would be fun. Tear out the add-in walls, and it went from being two lousy bedrooms, a living/dining room, and a kitchen, to being two large bedrooms. They wouldn't do at all, of course, since they were too big to be practical and ended up wasting a lot of space. So he would open up the wall between them and put in a bathroom and two wide, deep closets. And in the back bedroom, which didn't have the fancy bay window the front one did, he'd open a ladder to a part of the attic, which he would make into a loft. In a house like this, every room should have individuality. No, more than that—it should have panache.
Armed with his prybar and a tough carpet knife, he went upstairs and began stripping the floor. It was a tough, durable carpet but it had been installed a lot of years ago, and under it the padding was a mass of decomposing filth. Dead insects made another carpet under that.
"How did all those bugs get under there?" Sylvie stood in the doorway.
Don stopped pulling the carpet. "What do you need?" he asked.
"Just curious. I've been walking on those bugs, I just wonder how they got there."
This was not science class, it was sweaty, nasty labor. What made it bearable was the trance of concentration he drifted into while his hands worked on. She had broken that, and for what? And after how many requests that she stay away from him? "I work alone," said Don.
Sylvie shrugged as if to say, Who, me? "So, I'm not trying to help you," she said.
"Exactly my point," said Don.
"All I did was ask how the bugs got there."
"The crawlers crawled, the wrigglers rigged. Now I've told you, let me work."
She looked angry for a moment, but then she backed away out of sight. Not for a moment, though, did Don imagine the struggle was over. She was a shmoozer. He was going to have to be rude to her again and again, just to get some peace, and he hated being rude for any reason. But this woman just couldn't keep a promise or follow instructions. What did he expect? If people like her had skills like that, they most likely wouldn't be homeless.
He got the carpet rolled up and tried to hoist it up onto his shoulder. He could have done a clean-and-jerk with more weight than this, but there was no good handhold on the thick carpet roll, so he ended up having to drag it. This got tricky at the door, where he had to bend it to get it out into the hall and down the stairs. For a moment he thought of calling Sylvie to help, but then realized that if he ever asked her for something, that would open the floodgate. She would be sure that he needed her and she would hover until the house was finished.
So he went back and forth from end to middle to end of the carpet, bending, pulling, bending more, pulling more, until it was finally out in the hall and headed down the stairs. From there it was a simple matter to drag it out the front door, off the porch, and out to the junkpile on the curb.
Coming back in, he glanced over at the carriagehouse. There on the porch sat Miz Evelyn and Miz Judea, eating delicate little triangles of cucumber sandwich with the crusts cut off. He imagined a huge bowl of bread crusts and cucumber peelings being carried upstairs to Gladys, who for all he knew was an omnivorous crocodile or a large fat sow, eating whatever slops came her way. They waved cheerily at him. He waved back, not cheerily.
Dismantling kitchen cabinets was always a pain. It was easiest, of course, to remove each piece as a unit, but not always possible. Though the kitchen in the south upstairs apartment was a dark, narrow, makeshift affair, whoever installed the cabinets was apparently trying to make them tornado-proof. Don crawled into the cabinets every which way, removing every screw and nail that connected the cabinets to the back wall and to each other, but still they wouldn't come out. Finally he had to resort to the wrecking bar, and even then the cabinets didn't come away clean. Someone had replaced the lath-and-plaster walls with two-by-four studs and glued the cabinets directly to them, in addition to nailing and screwing them. Fortunately, the studs weren't structural, so it didn't matter if his wrecking bar chewed them to bits. By the time he had the last cabinet detached from the wall, the upstairs kitchen looked like a tornado had struck after all. Studs were broken, gouged, or sticking out like snaggle teeth. Didn't matter. He'd be taking them all out. He would entirely take down the new wall that separated the kitchen from the parlor, rejoining them into one room; the studs between the original timbers he would replace with new ones on 12-inch centers. Don's standard of sturdiness was even higher than that of the guy who installed the cabinets.