Books : Approximately Heaven : Excerpts

Chapter 3

Probably I would not have been surprised by Mary's announcement that morning if I had been paying better attention to what was going on in my life. In retrospect, I can describe a couple of good reasons she had for wanting to be done with me.

First, I have already mentioned that we were remodeling. The problem was that this project had been started some time back, when we bought the house, and had dragged on ever since then so that the house was always partly torn up and unfinished.

It was an old two-story frame house in Gray, which is an unincorporated community in Washington County. The house sat on limestone blocks and had white clapboard siding, and there was a front porch that ran the length of it. There were two front doors. The windows were few and small, I suppose because the house was built by farmers who, when they wanted to see outside, just went out. I could only speculate on the need for two front doors. Like a lot of people, Mary and I had lived in rental houses and got sick of that, and wanted our own house, but never had the money. But then we saved up a little money and found this shabby place for sale by the owner, a widow named Mrs. Ott, who when we talked to her said that she had never liked living there because the house was cold and you had to have extension cords in every room, and her son was always hitting his head in the doorways, and the water ran orange after a storm, and the neighbors were idiots and had poisoned her dogs -- and Mary and I fell for the place. It was on a one-lane paved road, built right up almost beside the pavement, and it came with a couple of acres including some pasture grown up with stickers and young locust trees, and a piece of creek with tall sycamores on the banks. We did not deliberate long, but then we had difficulties getting financing and insurance because of the condition of the house and its lack of central heating. There was only a wood-and-coal stove. But anything can be financed, I found out, if you are willing to pay a high enough interest rate.

So then we were in the house. The Crumleys, our nearest neighbors, were not as bad as Mrs. Ott had indicated. Certainly they were not outgoing people. They drove fast up and down the road in their trucks with their rattletrap stock trailers and made more traffic than what one would expect out of a single-family residence, but then they had cousins, and the family put out tobacco and grew hay and so on. We did not meet them for weeks, until one day one of their cows was in the road, and I walked up to their place to tell somebody. I met the lady of the house, and she thanked me and said how glad they were that Mrs. Ott had moved on.

We learned after settling in and giving things a very close look that the house indeed needed a good deal of work done to it. Every problem was more complex than it appeared. For example, you couldn't simply paint a wall, because first some trim had to be repaired. Removing the trim you would find some water damage to the drywall along the floor, and then removing the drywall you would find the skeleton of some prehistoric kind of bat, which had to be taken out with tongs, and so forth. Also, the wiring not only was antiquated but had never been up to code, even when it was installed circa the 1950s. I tore out and replaced all of it, using commercial-grade switches and receptacles, and in some places thinwall conduit. All of this was costing money, so I kept working as much as possible trying to sock something away, and Mary also worked full-time. The renovations did not proceed as quickly as we had been telling each other they would.

It wore on Mary, and I can see why. She worked hard in her low-paying job at the public library, and she deserved to come home to a decent house. Add to this the problem of heating. The woodstove did an adequate job in the living room, where it was located, but there were five rooms downstairs and two upstairs, and the house was drafty. A heat pump would have changed the whole situation, because many things can be put up with better when you're warm. Washing dishes is an example. There is nothing like being thirty-two years old and washing the dishes in a torn-up ski jacket to make you feel that life has passed you by. And then you look at the floor and there is some exposed plumbing; and then you go into the other room and there is a hole in the wallboard and some yellow fiberglass insulation sticking out where the cat pulled it; and then you go upstairs and there is your husband sitting in the floor wrapped in a quilt, rewiring some stupid antique light fixture from a flea market and watching a show about sex on the Learning Channel.

And then, another thing that didn't help was my losing a good job remodeling a house for the Paul and Paige Fleenor family of Johnson City.

It was a giant three-story house, and it was only five years old and did not need remodeling, but Mrs. Fleenor wanted to "update" the bathroom and kitchen and so on. I call her Mrs. Fleenor even though she was somewhat younger than me -- I addressed her as Paige one morning when her husband was not there, and after that I noticed he began referring to her as Mrs. Fleenor whenever he spoke to me. In fact, I suspected that sometimes the only reason he spoke to me was in order to refer to his wife as Mrs. Fleenor.

It was easy money, even though by training I am an electrician and not a remodeler of houses. I can update a five-year-old bathroom about as painlessly as the next person. It doesn't require a genius, although there is such a thing as doing it the wrong way. Still, the Fleenors found problems. I would do some work and they would have me take the work out and put it back slightly different. I shouldn't have minded it, because it was all done on the clock, but I did mind it. And then what disturbed me more was when Mr. Fleenor would come home in the afternoon from his job at the TV station and inspect the day's effort and say, "You are doing good work there, Donald." Nobody calls me Donald, but unfortunately I was too proud to explain this to Mr. Fleenor, so I kept quiet and let it get under my skin, and it caused me to gradually think less highly of everyone involved.

This was a mistake. When possible, it's good to take your work seriously and to have some respect for yourself as the person who is doing the work. I don't mean to overinflate my importance, but it is true that a person who remodels another person's house is remembered for a long time. He'll be praised as the most trustworthy, hardworking salt of the earth, or he'll be spoken badly of. What I should have done was, first off, to explain that my name was Don, and second, I should have had some intelligent conversations with the Fleenors in which we figured out ways to get things done right the first time so I would not have to be pulling everything out and redoing it multiple times.

They were not bad people. But here's how I lost the job. I was on my way to the Fleenors' house in Johnson City one morning and I stopped to get some gas. While filling up I noticed the ice chest in the back of my truck and remembered that it had a beer in it, and I decided that I ought not to show up with a beer in the cooler because I knew that the Fleenors were very protemperance. What should I do with the beer, though? Throw it in the trash? I decided I needed to drink it.

I couldn't be seen drinking beer while driving my truck to work at seven-thirty in the morning, though, so I went inside the Exxon store to get a cup. The Styrofoam cups in the Exxon were the same price whether you bought a drink in them or not, and that was stupid, so I bought an enormous Exxon travel mug made of plastic which held thirty-two ounces and had a red lid. I went back out to my ice chest and it turned out there were two beers there, not one. I poured one into the mug and it looked pitiful, like hardly anything, so I put the other one in and it still looked like not very much. I placed the empty bottles in the trash and drove to Johnson City the long way up 36, enjoying my two pretty cold Natural Lights.

Usually two beers don't mean a whole lot to me, but I guess I'd had a light breakfast. I was about to the Fleenors' house and I thought, Look at me, I shouldn't show up this way. I'm impaired. I should call in sick. And then I thought, That Mr. Fleenor is a jerk. And then I thought, Hey I'm pretty good. Me impaired is every bit as good as the next man at the height of his powers. So I decided to go on and show up.

I was feeling friendly when I got there. I was talkative. Mrs. Fleenor seemed to notice this and enjoy it. I asked her to come into the bathroom so I could show her what I was doing and we could have a conversation about what kind of corner to use in the shower tile. She came in and was talking and cheerful, and I was standing in the shower stall yakking on and I pointed at something, and she bent in to look, and then suddenly she stood up straight and stared at me, and then she turned and left the bathroom.

At lunch that day Mr. Fleenor came home. He took me out on the deck and we had a talk. He said, "Mrs. Fleenor says that she smelled a beer on your breath this morning. Is that true, Donald?"

"No, it isn't," I said. "In reality, Mrs. Fleenor smelled two beers on my breath."

It was a grave day in the Fleenor household. Heads hung low. Everyone was disappointed.

Even I was disappointed. The Fleenors got very moralistic and told me to leave. I left, and then I proceeded to make the worst of things. Instead of calling up any number of people who had asked me to do work lately -- I could have gotten work that same day -- I drove back to the Exxon where my mug came from and I bought a cold twelve-pack. I wasn't depressed or thirsty exactly but I could sense both of those feelings coming on, and I wanted to head them off. If nothing else it would have been better for me to go home and go to bed, but instead I took the twelve-pack to Boone Lake Dam and sat in my truck and drank all but one. I left this last one on a concrete picnic table for someone else to find.

Now that I look back at that whole episode it seems as though I was looking for a reason to get drunk, and lacking one, made one. I got myself fired.

It was wrong. It wasn't evil, I don't believe, but unwise and impractical. If it was evil at all, it was only evil towards myself, and I guess towards Mary, which makes it evil through and through.

Why drink? It is fun. I like it, or as I heard a man say the other day about his Corvair that he had restored, "We like enjoying it." Really I would say there are two kinds of drinking, and one is for fun, and the other is preemptive of nonfun. When you drink out of boredom, restlessness, habit, or the feeling that you are soon going to be depressed, that is the preemptive kind.

What is "depressed"? Medically, I believe, it has to do with the heartbeat getting fainter and the eyes less bright. The reason I think this is that once we had a kitten who'd been bit by a dog, and we took him to the vet and the vet wrote on the paper that the kitten was suffering from "systemic depression" as a result of his skull being cracked. The kitten was in bad shape, but he got better. But in the nonmedical sense depression means, for me anyway, having the feeling that something you deserve has been taken away from you.

Well, not always. Sometimes you get that feeling and it just makes you angry, for example when the county-dump man wouldn't let me smash my computer. Anger is when you feel you have been robbed and you mean to do something about it. Depression is when you feel you've been robbed and you either can't do anything about it or don't have the energy to do anything about it. That's what it means to be depressed.

Beer for depressed people is a way of inducing forgetfulness, dissolving the knot, and even of taking a bit of revenge on yourself for being lazy. It is a way of both babying and punishing yourself at the same time. What power there is in this useful tool of beer. That must account for its long-standing popularity among all walks of people, all of whom are subject to feelings of depression, or the sense of having been permanently robbed of their due happiness.

And so, where was I? Things that didn't help. It didn't help when I came home drunk as a finch before dark on a Wednesday and told Mary from the stairs that I was going straight to bed because I didn't feel well, and by the way I also got fired from my good job with the Fleenors for not feeling well. She didn't lay into me then -- it was a quiet time, as I remember it. I was lying on the bed upstairs and I said, "I'm getting worse," and she asked me what was wrong with me -- the lights were off and it was kind of blue and shady and quiet upstairs, and she sat on a chair not far from the bed -- and I told her I'd had too much to drink. And then I told her Paul Fleenor had told me not to come back, and why, and then I may have gone to sleep because I remember later sitting up and thinking that Mary had left, but she was there and had the lamp on -- whether she'd left and come back or been sitting there the whole time, I didn't know. And I had no idea whether she was really mad, like butcher-knife mad, or feeling sorry for me and nice, or maybe feeling bored and only waiting around for something to happen. I reached over and found her knee. And then I remember thinking, I believe she is unhappy, but I'm too screwed up to tell.