Spring Break

Today’s parking adventure was pretty much split-second timing. I painted the fourth wall of my bedroom—I dithered so much over the weekend, deciding between White Satin and No. 7330, that it was dark by the time I got to the third wall, opposite the window, and I couldn’t see whether any color was going on or not. That was the White Satin. This morning, in the light, it was so pale that if I hadn't known I'd put paint on that wall I wouldn’t have been able to tell that I’d painted it at all. That was what decided me on what color to paint the fourth wall, opposite the door: definitely the deeper blue, No. 7330. It also has a name (something stupid like Blue Boy), but I think of it as Ravishing Blue. It is exactly the color I wanted, the color of pale-blue hydrangeas, and the only reason that I didn’t paint the whole room that color is that I was afraid if there was too much of it, it wouldn’t be so ravishing.

My car was in an 8:30-10 spot. I thought about moving it yesterday to a less time-consuming spot, but it would have been too time-consuming. This morning I considered going out early to see if I could score a 7:30-8 spot, but what are the chances? I even thought of moving it to the lot by the river ($15), and then going home and painting. Instead, at 7:30 I decided to attack the fourth wall. By 8:20 I had finished and dashed out in my paint clothes and moved the car to a meter (50 cents) in front of my building. I had thirty minutes to stop at the store for cat litter and skim milk (the two perennial items on my grocery list), wash and change for work, make coffee (poured half in a cup and half in a thermos), and blast back out to the car before the meter ran out, at 9:10. I got to my chosen block—the one where the violence broke out (I decided I really ought to give the block where I banged into that woman a rest)—at the optimal time: the Broom had passed and there were still a few choice places left. I took the first one I saw, of course, just west of a fire hydrant, east of the barbershop and the Chinese laundry, in front of a copy shop. There was a Mini Cooper behind me.

Finally I got to enjoy my morning coffee. (The coffee I put in the cup I never got around to drinking.) Sitting in the car for fifty minutes with the Times and a thermos of coffee might seem like a waste of time to some people, but to me, after a weekend devoted to home improvement, it felt like a much needed vacation, from paint fumes, if nothing else. It was spring weather, and I could bask in the knowledge that I'd found the perfect shade of blue. I got a lot of conflicting advice while I was choosing a color. My friend G. came over and examined paint chips with me, and after an arduous session with two hundred colors and a dozen pictures of wisteria (and a few shots of gin) we settled on Hydrangea and Naples Sunset. G. instructed me to put the darker color on the back wall: it would make the room recede and look deeper. Another friend, the Catwoman of Rockaway, told me that if I was thinking of using two colors I should put the paler shade on a wall that got the light, and the room would look bigger. My bedroom gets direct light in the winter for about twenty minutes at two in the afternoon. It hits the bed (the cats love it), never reaching the back wall. Otherwise, I get only refracted light in there, the sun bouncing off the windows in the high alley of receding buildings that is the view from my south-facing window.

Anyway, I bought a quart of Hydrangea and a quart of Naples Sunset and dabbed both shades on two walls: they were hideous. We had failed to take into account the difference between studying paint chips under a reading light in the living room and living with deep colors on whole walls of a bedroom that is already dim. It didn't help that my splashes were in the shape of huge molars. It also doesn't help that I am so susceptible to the names they give the colors. I am always evaluating the name instead of the color. Give me Billowing Clouds! Give me Spring Lilac! Blueberry Ice! Ocean Breeze! I would never have chosen Little Boy Blue, or whatever, if the name had been on the front of the sample instead of discreetly on the back.

At 9:40 a black Maxima with a Jamaica bumper sticker pulled into the space by the hydrant. The Jamaican (I assume) got out and walked back along the line of cars, judging how much space we were wasting. Jamaicans are good at conserving space. They have to be: they live on an island, and one not connected by bridge and tunnel to more spacious places. The Jamaican went from car door to car door, working like a diplomat to get everyone to back up and make room for him. In the end, he fit with ease.

Hot Water

The summer travel season is under way, as the Times puts it, which means that the winter parking season is over, and it’s cat-chauffeuring time. I moved out to the beach last Saturday, luring one reluctant cat into her box with a sprinkling of Kitty Kaviar, while the other, the Amazing Norbert, was eager to go wherever the cat food was going. I gave a ride to my friend MQ, who lets me park my car (formerly her car) in her driveway, and who lent a hand with the cats. They were quiet in the back seat, and I got them all the way to the door of the bungalow before three helicopters roared over, flying low, probably on their way back from the air show at Jones Beach, setting off every dog and car alarm on the peninsula, and incidentally terrorizing two newly arrived cats. It reminded me of the Concorde.

I had turned the water on in Rockaway earlier in the month, surprising myself with my studliness. Now it was time for the hot-water heater. Usually, my neighbor T. fires up the hot-water heater for me—a fireman’s daughter, I am a little afraid of explosions—but he and his wife, also T., were getting ready for a party, so I thought I’d try to do it myself. I got out my notes. Step 1: “Turn cock in pipe.” That’s easy enough: just take a small wrench and turn the valve on the gas pipe from horizontal to vertical, permitting the gas to get to the heater. Then, “Press down red button (2 min.).” T. has always had to fooster (my mother’s word) with this red button for quite a while before enough gas comes through for him to light the pilot. “Set top dial to Pilot”; “Set temp to off (vacation)”; “Light pilot”; “Turn up knob slowly”—“That’s so it don’t blow up in your face,” T. said.

I must have known, despite my good intentions, that I was going to end up asking T. to come over and help, because before I did anything else I cleaned up the area around the hot-water heater. It was all furry with dust. While cleaning, I noticed a phalanx of ants on maneuvers in the direction of the cat-food bowls. I attacked the ants with Windex, which is my improvement on my grandmother’s method, which was to pour boiling water on them. (I mean that it is an improvement not in the Buddhist sense of being less cruel but in the housecleaning sense of being faster and more convenient: it takes long minutes for the water to come to a boil as the ants come marching, and then your kitchen floor is awash with the corpses of parboiled ants.) Every summer there is a plague of ants, but this year, catching them early, on their way past their first redoubt at the hot-water heater, before they summitted the sink and the kitchen counters and turned the corner into the living room, I tracked them to their source: the chinks and gaps in the bathroom floor. Since you can’t spray Windex on every individual ant in creation, I set out ant traps and later bought a gel dispensed like caulking from a pump . . . but I digress.

Once the floor was relatively clean, I got my kitchen matches and my needle-nosed pliers and prostrated myself before the hot-water heater. I positioned the dials and held the red button for a long, long time, finding a use for a Pilates move called the Swan as I managed to keep the pressure on the red button with the hand holding the matchbox, strike the match with the other hand, fit it into the pliers, and stick it inside the heater, in the general direction of the pilot light, though I couldn’t actually see where the pilot light was. I repeated this exercise about six times without success, then gave up and went and got T.

“Didja press down on the red button?” he asked.

“Oh, DOWN.” I looked back at my notes, and that is exactly what it said, but for some reason I had been pulling up on the red button. I must have primed it, though, because T. had the pilot lit almost instantly. “I don’t know how hot you want it,” he said, turning the temperature dial. There was a whoosh as the fire ran around the ring, and I was in business.

I bought T. a six-pack of Budweiser, and went down to the beach. You can do a lot with cold running water—drink it, clean with it, boil it and kill ants with it—but there is nothing like a hot shower after your first dip in the Atlantic Ocean on Memorial Day Weekend.

Rite of Passage

I have always made fun of people who clean for the cleaning lady, but yesterday morning there I was. A friend had advised, “Go around in front of her, picking things up. The idea is to have her clean actual surfaces.” I started in the kitchen, doing the dishes and trying to find places to put things away. My apartment is like a Rubik’s cube: to find a place for one thing, you have to move a whole series of other things. The oven is for storage. Unfortunately, so is the dishwasher, which has never been hooked up, because the building's plumbing will not support it. Did I mention that it's a galley kitchen?

She arrived early, before 8 A.M. She's Polish. When she came in, she changed into bedroom slippers. She made two requests: small rags, which I provided, and, when she saw how low I was on cleanser, Soft Scrub, which I ran to the store and bought. She started in the kitchen (my instincts were good), then tackled the bathroom, the bedroom and the hallway, and finally the living room. Meanwhile, I did the laundry, put away clothes, cleared the desk, and paid my car-insurance bill (it went up). She charged me a hundred dollars for this one time. If I asked her to come regularly—say, once every two weeks—it would be seventy dollars (eighty with laundry). I didn’t even ask if she does windows.

She cleaned with incredible enthusiasm, finishing in three hours, and vacuuming twice. I paid her willingly, thanked her and praised her effusively. I said it would have taken me all weekend, because I’d have dragged around—I am an extremely reluctant housecleaner. “Is my profession,” she said proudly.

I thought I would feel guilty for having a cleaning lady. My mother didn’t have a cleaning lady until she was in her seventies. My grandmother WAS a cleaning lady. I looked around after my new Polish cleaning lady had left: O.K., she’d pitched my spare bottle of dishwashing detergent (what the British call “washing-up liquid”; I love that); I kept a small amount of diluted detergent in it for rinsing my eyeglasses (a household tip, ladies). And she all but ruined the cat-dancers—those wire things with sprigs of cardboard on the ends that the cats chase for exercise—by bending them severely, rather than coiling them gently, to get them out of the way (they’re hell on vacuum cleaners). And I believe she cleaned my bong, which was totally unnecessary. But I felt the opposite of guilt: a burden had been lifted from me—everything was clean.

Rain

I have this house guest who comes to me by way of Argentina, and speaks Italian, Spanish, and French, but no English. I found myself trying to explain alternate-side parking to him in my frail Italian:

“Tomorrow morning I must go out early-early to move the machine.”
“Why?”
“The men must clean the street.”
“What happens if you don’t move it?”
“I receive a ticket.”
“How much?”
“Sixty-five dollars.”
He considered whether it might not be worth sixty-five dollars not to have to go out early-early in the rain.
“Or they take it,” I added.
“They take it?”
I was not up to explaining about getting towed and having to go to the car pound to redeem your machine.

It was as miserable a day as I ever spent sitting in a car. The rain was drumming down—inches of rain at the crosswalks, currents running in the gutters. There was actually a space available when I first arrived on the block, but it got taken, at 7:30. A haggard woman in a long white terry-cloth robe, her hair held back with a white band, stepped out on the stoop to have a smoke. The little girl with the whimsical wardrobe left for school at 7:45, under a pink and blue umbrella. She had on a pink suede coat with pink fur trim and a pink backpack. She looked as if she’d grown since the last time I parked here.

I had been hoping the street sweeper would skip it this morning. His feeble squirts and rotating brushes would be ridiculous in the driving rain. But the cleaning lady in me (of which there is precious little) knows that a hard rain is actually an ideal time to sweep the street. I learned this from a Greek landlady, a clean freak if there ever was one, who saw a storm as an opportunity to get out there with her pushbroom and scrub. From her I learned a very useful housekeeping trick: Ladies, when you are expecting guests, take care to leave your brooms and mops, your Clorox and your Ajax, prominently displayed, so that people practically trip over them. This creates an impression of cleanliness that is almost as good as the real thing.

At 7:51, the street sweeper came, preceded by his honking escort, the Department of Sanitation police. Nobody fooled around: over to the right, and reverse back into position, like a military drill.

I knew what was coming when I returned home, shortly after eight. “With this rain, why do they have to clean the streets?” my house guest teased.

“I don’t know,” I said. Then I added, “I don’t do this all year.”