I Can't Handle the Roof

I swear, I’m starting to take it personally. Thanks to Gary, I can never go up to the roof of anything ever again, not the Rainbow Room (if they manage to bring it back again, again), not the top of Notre Dame, well, you know what I mean. And now, I can’t even stand to think about being under one, because mine sprang a leak a couple of hours ago, right over my bedroom, and the only bucket I can find to put under it is the trash can Uncle H used to keep under his desk and it’s some kind of tin or something under the fake leather and the dinging is driving me crazy. I guess I’m going to have to sleep in Uncle H’s room, which I really should be moving into anyway except it weirds me out a little bit. Not that I believe in ghosts or anything, and even if I did, I like to think he’d be friendly and watching over me. But it was his room, and I never moved his stuff out of the house, except the clothes that I gave to the Heart Association thrift store when Leonie said they’d appreciate it a lot, and the accountant said was a good idea, too. I automatically went up to the room I lived in until I quit college and that Uncle H always kept for me to stay in when I came to visit. It may be a lot smaller and the closet’s a joke, but it’s my room – my own room, and right now that means more than ever.

I guess I’m being silly. The whole house is mine, and tomorrow I’m going to have to shift a bunch of stuff around and start making it feel that way. Tonight I’ll just change the bedding. I’m going to miss my room. It’s kind of frozen in time, and it’s comforting. You know, it still has the curtains I made from this Indian bedspread I bought the first time I took the train in on my own to spend a Saturday hanging around the Village. And there’s a poster from when the Raisin played one of our first gigs at Stony Brook. You know, Jenny O made that poster. She was dating Stu back then. I swear I never thought about this until just now, but I could probably sell that poster. Not now; when thinks settle down. But I’d better take it off the wall as soon as I finish writing this (I mean, there’s a leak in that room!)

Okay, good, so I’m making some lemonade. If I didn’t have a leak, I wouldn’t be looking at my room like something that was disappearing, and I wouldn’t have thought much about the poster. I bet there’s some other stuff here in the house that could be worth something. I know there are those painting’s of Malcolm’s that Uncle H never much liked but was afraid to get rid of. Damn, I hope there aren’t more leaks over the finished part of the attic! I have a lot to do tomorrow.

If you live anywhere on the East Coast, I don’t have to tell you that today was exhausting. We had a good amount of snow, which turned into freezing rain that made layers of ice over the snow all day long until maybe a couple of hours ago when it turned into regular rain. When I first saw it, I thought it was pretty. I was getting a kick out of seeing it on the trees and all, and staying so sparkly white, much nicer than city snow and somehow…I don’t know, is it right to say “quaint” to describe how it looks cuter and tamer than snow does in Aspen or Chiesa? Then the lights flickered a couple of times and I panicked. I have no idea what to do if the power goes down. I don’t even know if there are candles except for my Fresh Sugar ones that I already burned down a lot trying to get the funky closed-up smell out of the house. Well, I’m using my computer, so you know I have power now, but it was dicey there for a while. Even the range is electric in this house, which is one of like a thousand things I wish I’d thought about changing when I still had money. What’s that they say about 20/20 hindsight? Exactly. I was trying to figure out if it would be okay to build a fire and use my Le Creuset dutch oven in it when Ed showed up at my door. Thank goodness for good friends with four-wheel drive! He said he figured I wouldn’t know how to use the generator. Use it, hell, I didn’t even know I had one! He also brought me what he said was a “welcome wagon survival kit”, which was stuff like white church candles, kitchen matches, a big yellow camping flashlight and a gallon of water, but also a couple of bottles of Green Mountain merlot and a loaf of Leonie’s special raisin bread.

Ed knows everything about this house, because his dad and Uncle Henry were best buds forever and whatever one did, the other one did. I’m going to have to call him tomorrow at a civilized hour and ask who can fix the roof. And thank Leonie for the bread, which is seriously to die for. It’s a good thing I’m going to be going up and down a lot of stairs tomorrow.

I Guess I Freaked Out

I can’t believe it’s two months. It’s like I never have a minute to think with everything that has to get done, and when I do have time, my head feels like it’s going to explode and I take the meds that Dr. W_____ said I can only have for another month and then if I can’t get myself to chill it’s regular antidepressants which always make me puff up like Oprah in between diets. Anyway, I forgot all about this til Jeff asked me the other day “whatever happened to the blog?” I promised him as soon as I unpacked the computer, I’d try it again. Because he’s right, I need someone to talk to and there isn’t anyone out here to have coffee with and except for him, my other friends get all “oh you poor thing, sorry I have to run”-ish on the phone, that is if they even take my calls.

So now I’m sitting in the kitchen out here in Arahmpett, hard to believe I know, deciding whether or not to crack open one of the mini Fatwitch brownies I got the other day when Jeff took me to Chelsea Market for a kind of bon voyage stock up. That was so sweet of him, to do that. I know I’m only a couple of hours away from the city, and there are plenty of places out east of here where I always go when we’re in Bridgehampton….Strike that. Where I used to go when we used to be out at the beach. It’s hard to wrap my head around all that being gone. It’s not just the days of gourmet food shopping that are pretty much history. If I hadn’t gone out for the weekend, to recover from the shock of that phone call from the accountant, I wouldn’t have been able to even get my personal things over to this house the way I managed to do.

I have to keep telling myself how lucky I am to have this house. People didn’t understand when I bought it for Uncle Harry back in ’79. You were supposed to blow your first big money on parties and clothes and, well, blow. If you were buying a house, you should buy something cool on a beach or a loft or something. Andy lived with his mother of course, but that was Andy. Anyone else, if you wanted to help the relatives, well, you bought them cars or fur coats so they could show the neighbors. People who knew about it laughed when I bought a kind of crummy house out by the fishermen and potato farmers, but this was where Uncle Harry’d grown up and where he wanted to stay if only he didn’t have to worry about a mortgage, and I thought it was the least I could do for all he’d done for me growing up. When he died, he willed it back to me of course. That was when Erich and I were living in Prague. There was so much going on there back then, it was all I could do to make it back for the funeral. I couldn’t hang around to sell a house. Anyway, Arahmpett’s kind of a dead zone, so I knew it wasn’t going to be so easy to unload. My lawyer said I might as well hold onto it, so I could keep a U.S. residence. And when Gary’s team was drawing up the pre-nup and insisted on keeping the Tahoe and Bridgehampton properties in his name, it helped me keep some pride to having something I was going keep in my own name, so I didn’t sell it like some of my friends said to and get a facelift, which was about how much money it was worth. Now it turns out that was a good thing, because with the apartment being in both our names, this is the only place that’s not considered “an asset of the marriage” so it’s the only place they can’t take away from me.

Okay, before I get any more depressed – like that’s even possible – I think I’m going to have that Fatwich.