Monday, July 18, 2005
It looks like I won’t be making money on e-Bay this week, after all. Not much anyway. While I toiled away washing windows, Saturday morning, and while my husband swept the parking lot-sized driveway and taught my son how to ride his two-wheeler, Mike and his (admittedly friendly) wife emptied out our garage of their garage-sale items. It was all stuff they really should have thrown away, and looked to me as if they possessed little, if any, emotional value: outgrown toys their son no-longer plays with; a painting of the Old Masters religious variety, complete with antiqued faux-gold frame, that you might see hanging over your great grandmother’s moth-eaten couch (and like the one of Jesus sitting on a rock contemplating Jerusalem that I persuaded my husband to leave behind when we moved out of our Stuttgart apartment last January, which had been hanging—woe is me—over our marriage bed for exactly four years and four days); broken pottery; and a whole multitude of crap you yourself would shake your head at and wonder of its significance, so unworthy was it of begging an entire garage of storage space off complete strangers.
Later that afternoon, just as we were ready to sit down to lunch after a couple hours of grueling yard work, our doorbell rang. I had just been wondering if Mike and Sandra were done taking their things away, and if they would be giving us the garage door opener personally, or leave it with our landlady. I said to my husband, “It’s our garage door opener.”
He looked at me strangely.
“What?”
“Our garage door opener. They’re done and are dropping it off now.”
Did I ever mention that I’m psychic?
My husband, having just taken a shower and was walking around in his t-shirt and underwear, as he is wont to do, told me to answer the door. So, I did. I pressed the button that unlocked the front door, and before I even made it to the stairs, Mike had come charging in, a bee definitely in his bonnet.
“Where’s your husband?” he demanded as he stormed up the stairway to the main part of the house. I stood at the top of the stairs, not moving, and he was half-way up before he remembered this isn’t his house anymore. His wife, to her credit, discreetly remained at the doorway, looking abashed. He called my husband’s name, and said, “Come down, now! I want to talk to you!”
It just so happened that before his shower, my husband had used the bathroom. You know what I mean. He used the bathroom. The bathroom is located right next to the door at the top of the stairs, and the doorway was wide open. The unmistakable odor of a man hard at work wafted into the vestibule. My husband was looking for his sweatpants and taking his sweet time about it. I went back into the hallway to warn him, “Mike’s ready to rumble, and your stink is stinking up the stairway.”
“Good,” he said, in his characteristic way, “I hope he gets it full in the face.”
My five-year-old son, in the meantime, was still at the top of the stairs, trying to compliment Mike on his hairstyle. Mike blatantly ignored him.
Finally, my husband went out to talk to them and a loud argument broke out, echoing through the vestibule, into the outer entryway of the building (imagine a glassed-in breezeway), and drifted with surety and purpose across the entire valley of our town. The gist of it was, my husband and his wife had been talking that morning. She had reassured my husband that hers was being overbearing and liked to sound his horn, indirectly apologizing for the direction things had gone between us. Somewhere down the line, Mike had found out about the conversation and wanted to get the story straight with his wife of how they came to be emptying our garage of their things, managing to twist a few facts in the retelling. My husband held his ground, and eventually Mike and his wife went away again, and we haven’t heard from them since.
The garage is not completely empty, but there is enough space to park the car, “or to play fussball,” as my husband astutely pointed out. But we still don’t have the garage door opener.
I wonder if any of what remains is salvageable enough for e-Bay? There’s only one way to find out…
