I like to open my fourth-grade classes with a riddle. Today as I gathered them for the next school year, one of them had me stumped. So I posed it to Doug.
“If you’re swimming in the ocean and you get attacked by an alligator, what should you do?”
I’ll give you a second for your response, although I didn’t need to wait that long for Doug’s.
“I’d say, ‘Hey! What the f*ck are you doing here?’”
So much did I enjoy his Joe Pesciesque response that it’s worth fessing up. I can’t solve fourth-grade riddles.
In 1978, two bright-eyed kindergarteners pushed through the doors of East School, clutching Incredible Hulk and Muppet Show lunch boxes. The building was shiny and new, a mere two years after its grand opening.
This year, East School has closed its doors at the end of a school year for the last time.
The Torrington Board of Education has deemed it old, decrepit, and beyond repair. As Fox 61 reported, “This aging architecture is showing its wrinkles.”
Year of construction: 1976. Year I was born: 1973.
Remind me not to send a Christmas card to Fox 61 or the Torrington Board of Ed this year.
Some memorabilia on displayThe ramp leading to the music roomThe library looks exactly the same, minus Ms. Murphy.The door to Mr. Connell’s 6th grade classroom, where the year of abuse between me and Doug unfolded.To the right of Mr. Connell’s door is a computer room, which Doug immediately recognized as the former TAG room. The door was locked, and Doug was pissed that he was denied entrance once again.An outside view of our kindergarten class, where the magic began amidst dinosaur models and orange peanut butter crackers.They now have a playscape on the upper playground!Main office, minus Mrs. GrossoAbsolutely nothing changed about the gym. Felt just like being in gym class all over again. I was just waiting for a white-haired Janet Beck to appear with a whistle around her neck!The kids were not feeling as nostalgic as we were. They were too fixated on the ice cream vendor in the playground.Sixth grade…the class of ’85 (I am in front row, far right; Doug is row 4, third to the left. LOL? We could only find one stump left that wasn’t too rotted to sit on. Good-bye, East School! Lots of beautiful memories, forever.
On Thursday night, Doug and his old friend, Jimmy, went to see the Metal Gods Themselves, Judas Priest. Jimmy left his car at our house, and Doug made the 57-mile drive to the Mohegan Sun.
While getting the kids ready for school Friday morning, I asked, “So how was the show?”
“Oh, man, it was f*cking impeccable,” he said. “They played everything from to the ‘The Green Manalishi’ to ‘Saints in Hell.’ It was the most savage performance I’ve ever seen. Rob Halford is 66 years old, and he still f*cking shreds the mike. I don’t know how he still does it.” Then he started to relive the moment he got to meet Rob Halford backstage in 2005, and he started to detail the entire conversation when I reminded him I was running late for work.
After I started my car, I returned to the kitchen, where he was scrambling eggs and humming “A Touch of Evil.”
“Why is Jimmy’s car still in the driveway?” I asked.
“Oh,” Doug said while pushing the spatula around the frying pan. “I had to leave him there.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“He got all f*cked up and vanished,” he explained. “I looked around for him for about an hour, but then the Electric Eye came on the screen, and Halford started belting out ‘The Ripper.’”
“But…did you call him?”
“It’s 6:45 in the morning,” Doug said. “He’s probably still f*cked up.”
“But…how is he going to get home?”
“He’ll take a bus or something. He’ll be fine. Did you steal my coffee cup?”
His nonchalance was bewildering. I forged ahead with my interrogation. “Do you think he’s OK?”
Doug started shoveling the eggs in plates and cast an irritated glance in my direction. “Listen, he’ll call me if he needs a ride,” he said. “Didn’t you say you were late for work?”
All the way to work, I thought about how unsettling the conversation was. Then I started imagining it from a different angle, had I been the one at the concert with one of my friends. It sounded something like this:
Doug: “So how was the show?”
Me: “Oh, man, it was f*cking impeccable. Adele shredded the mike. I don’t know how she does it.”
Doug: “But why is Em Kline’s car still in the driveway?”
Me: “Oh. I had to leave her there.”
Doug: “I beg your pardon?”
Me: “Her hair got all f*cked up, and she vanished in the ladies’ room. I spent an hour looking for her, but then Adele started belting out ‘Hello.'”
Doug: “But…did you call her?”
Me: “It’s 6:45 in the morning. Her hair’s probably still all f*cked up.”
Doug: “But…how is she going to get home?”
Me: “She was wearing flats. She’ll be fine.”
Doug: “But…do you think she’s OK?”
Me: “Listen, she’ll call me if she needs a flatiron. Don’t you have eggs to scramble?”
Fast forward to 2020…
Doug: “Whatever happened to Emily? I haven’t seen her for a while.”
Me: “We’re not speaking to each other again. Some sh*t about how I abandoned her 57 miles away with no transportation at a casino. She can be so petty sometimes.”
I would have imagined far beyond 2020, but by that point I’d arrived at my school parking lot.
When I came home from work, Jimmy’s car was no longer in the driveway. Apparently, he’d ended up taking a cab home and spent the next morning battling a hangover. He called Doug for a ride back to our house, where the two exchanged memories of the show, which come to find out, they watched on opposite sides of the arena. They started making plans for Priest’s next Connecticut appearance. Then Jimmy brought his car back home.
Hello, John Gray? Call HarperCollins and tell them to stop the presses. I just rewrote the last chapter of your book.
This year for my 45th birthday, I received a most unexpected surprise.
Usually after having a certain number of children, most women find themselves with a sense of completion for their family. They say, “I am done.”
For us, there has always been someone missing—a void in our family of five that we’ve always yearned to be filled.
And that someone’s name is Svedka.
Svedka is a Swedish cook and housekeeper that we’ve been fantasizing about since 2006. She’s supposed to live in our finished basement, with its private entrance and full accommodations, and in return, she’d serve delicious home-cooked meals and complete all of our household tasks so that we could finally enjoy life to its fullest.
Doug is the one who named her. I can imagine that he had his own separate fantasy about what Svedka would look like, but I never bothered to ask.
Every time he’s stuck in the kitchen cooking dinner, he pines, “Where’s Svedka?”
When he’s up to his elbows in a sink full of dishes, he stares longingly out the window, and I know who’s starring in his daydream.
When I came home from work at 8:15 p.m. on my birthday, after a long night of parent-teacher conferences, I discovered that Svedka had finally arrived.
“She’s here! She’s here!” The children danced around me.
“Did you miss me, my babies?” I beamed.
But they weren’t talking about me. They were talking about our new robot vacuum cleaner.
She came chugging around the corner, charged directly at me, and stopped short at my feet. She sniffed around my ankles, made an about-face, and headed back for the living room.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s your birthday present!” Doug announced with pride. “It’s Svedka!”
My husband bought me a vacuum cleaner for my birthday. It doesn’t get much more Donna Reedable than that.
But the more I thought about it, it was a nice gesture. Each week, fifty-two times a year for two hours at a shot, he hears me complain about my Number One dreaded task in our house. I hate vacuuming cleaning. With three cats and a dog, you can imagine the hair that settles between the cracks of each plank in our wooden floors, which extend throughout the house. Being the obsessive personality that I can be, I vacuum each square foot of the house plank by plank, hunched over so that I can hover inches over the job and get the satisfaction of seeing every particle get sucked up into vacuum Neverland. It is back-breaking, thankless work.
Often times, gift-givers have selfish ulterior motives, and this might have been one of those times. Maybe Doug just got tired of hearing me complain. Whatever the case, Svedka could potentially add 104 hours to my year and save me from my fate as becoming the next Quasimodo. I decided to give her a chance.
The next day, I came home to discover her back at it again. All the chairs in the house were on top of the tables, all cords removed from the floor. Svedka was happily toiling along without complaint, gobbling the dirt, hair, beads, and tiny Styrofoam balls that Eva has been using to add texture to her slime, from her path. All three cats and dogs eyed her curiously, one of them gaining the courage to paw her as she dutifully strode on by.
Eventually, her motor stopped, and she poked around as though trying to reorient herself, found her way back to her charger, backed in like a car reversing into a garage, and fell asleep.
“Look at the way she just does her job, then goes back into her corner without a word,” Doug marveled.
I didn’t think he was funny. Maybe it was because I now have more time on my hands to overanalyze. Maybe I should have been counting my blessings. But something wasn’t settling right between me and Svedka. I felt like I was being replaced. Point blank, in every sense of the word, Svedka sucked.
“She missed a spot,” I pointed out. “In fact, she missed the entire kitchen.” There were bits of cardboard under the table from the cats’ scratching boards. There were tumbleweeds of fur under the heaters.
“She needs her rest,” Doug fussed, checking her position in the charger like a mother checks her baby’s breathing in a crib. “After an hour, she needs to recharge. Then she’ll finish the kitchen.”
He might as well have set up a table of hot towels and essential oils next to her charger and massaged her feet.
After a brief nap, Svedka yawned and stretched, emerged, and picked up exactly where she left off. When she was finished, there wasn’t a speck of tumbleweed or cardboard to be found.
Doug tenderly scooped the hair, dirt, cardboard bits and particles from her belly and made me look at it.
“Look at all this!” he gushed. “We’ve been breathing this stuff in for fifteen years!”
“You don’t think I’ve vacuumed the house in fifteen years?!?” I gasped so hard I’m sure I inhaled any last particle of dust that Svedka miraculously left behind.
That was on Friday. It is now Sunday morning, the time I’m normally hunched over a vacuum cleaner, peering between those wooden planks. Instead, I have a steaming cup of coffee beside my laptop, and I’m writing stories again. It’s a like my old world has been resurrected from beneath my fingertips.
Svedka is sleeping soundly at my feet. She’s kind of cute when she’s sleeping, I’ll admit. She looks like a little waffle-maker, with “CycloneForce” stamped across her face. Her indicator reads “FULL” at her chin.
Periodically, the kids pop their heads in the doorway one by one. “I’m hungry,” Eva announces. Anna follows her in. “I’m bored.” Tyler says, “Can we finish your birthday cake for breakfast?” They watch me type with impatient expectation.
All the while, Svedka sits quietly, asking for nothing.
When no one is looking, I kneel down beside her and lovingly stroke the shiny, chrome perimeter of her face. “Welcome to our family,” I whisper. “But Bitch, you better watch your step.”
She hums from her charger, ready for her next mission.
I think Svedka and I have an understanding. And we’re going to be just fine.
