11/9/98

Home Alone

Some men can't hack it when their wives go on vacation. But not me.

    "Daddy, wake up!"
    "Mff."
    "C'mon, Daddy, it's 5 o'clock already."
    "G'morning."
    "No, Daddy. G'bye."
    Blimey, today's the day! The wife and kids are off to the ancestral homeland -- Jewish London -- and that means ...
    "YEEEEE-HA!"
    A month of wonderful independence. No one to decide what I can and cannot eat. No one to run my life. No one to wake me at 5 a.m.

A MONTH later, I couldn't get to sleep all night, thinking, "They're coming home today. Yeeeee-ha."
    Somehow, over the years since I married this babe, I had lost the ability to take care of matters. I'd come home from work, be told that the phone hadn't worked and Bezek had to be called, and I'd think nothing of it, because the phone now worked.
    Somehow, the gas bill got paid, like, automatically. I never thought to ask how. You know how it is: a man has so much on his mind, he doesn't come home and say to his wife, "I'm home, honey! By the way, which gas company do we use, what's their phone number, and how does the bill get paid?"
    I used to do it all myself, but that was long ago, before I got married. I used to know what had to be paid, and when, and how, who to call for what, how to run a household.
    For years now, my wife has been taking care of it all, leaving me to tend to man stuff, like, you know, winterizing the car on time, and setting the clock on the VCR.
    Thus it is quite fair to blame my wife for all that happened the past month.
    F'rinstance, I mixed up the washing machine and the dishwasher. How could I have known which was which?
    I had run out of both clean dishes and clean undies. I thought maybe I could run both piles through the cycle together, but I remembered my wife instructing me to keep the whites and darks separate, and I definitely didn't want my unmentionables ending up the same color as our earth-tone crockery. 
    So I did two loads.
    I filled the washing machine, pressed an illustrated button that seemed to depict a rack of ribs (denoting meat dishes), and let 'er go. Oh, the clattery noise it made. Silly me, I thought: I'd forgotten to add softener.
    On the other hand, my underwear came out gleaming.
    I ran into trouble on the very first day. "I'm home," I chimed, forgetting there was no one around to care, "what's for supper?" Supper was lamb chops, scalloped potatoes and a fantastic Chinese stirfry, but unfortunately, that was supper in London. For me there was a choice of salami or yogurt. 
    In all her cookbooks, I couldn't find instructions on how to cook either one.
    Think, I thought: what did you do for food in your bachelor days?
    Aha!
    I called all my old girlfriends and invited myself over for a candlelit dinner, offering to bring the candles. I became suspicious when every one of them used the same excuse: what, all of a sudden they'd all gotten married? One of them did offer me a helpful hint, though. "Go boil your head," she said.
    I had pizza instead. By sheer luck, the pizzeria had left a leaflet on my car, even providing their phone number, which was very considerate. I had pizza every day because that was the only food I could find in the city.
    After some time I called the pizzeria and asked if, in addition to home delivery, they also provide pick-up service.
    "Pick up what?" they asked.
    "The garbage."
    It had to be explained to me that empty boxes, leftover crusts and soiled napkins are non-returnable, and people generally take it out to the communal trash bin, all by themselves. This was news to me. I'll bet even my wife didn't know.
    But I'm no fool. I knew what to do. Call the family cleaning lady, what's-'er-name.
    How many married men know the name, never mind the phone number, of the cleaning lady?
    I knew she was Romanian, so I simply got out the Yellow Pages and searched for the heading "LADY, CLEANING, ROMANIAN."
    Stupid Yellow Pages. It goes from "Ladders" to "Lamination," as if there's not a single Lady, Cleaning in the entire workforce.
    My wife knew this kind of thing would happen. "I think I'd better leave you instructions," she said before leaving.
    If you know my wife, you won't be surprised that her instructions included every what-to-do-if and who-to-call-in-case, even including a complete section on "Ladders" and "Lamination," should such emergencies arise.
    Problem is, her handwriting.
    I ended up calling our rabbi, doctor, the vice mayor and the airport asking them to come clean my house, because every scrawled listing looked the same, "/\><^)(-][," which I took to be Romanian.
    But like I said, I can take care of myself. I have this capacity to think through a problem, and solve it -- snap! -- just like that.
    The obvious solution was to call my wife in London. (At least, I think it was London.)
    It was easy finding the correct number, because it had so many digits.
    But like I said, her handwriting.
    Was it 013-44-181-202-5883, or 892-HH-I6I-ZOZ-S662?
    I got through to the Queen.
    No, she said, apologizing profusely, she didn't have the number for a cleaning lady in Jerusalem.
    It soon sunk in that I was -- gasp! -- independent, left to my own devices, marooned in my own home (at least, I think it was my home; there was no person there for me to recognize, and with just furniture and a cat, it looked like any home).
     Eventually I had no need for the Romanian (or was she Nigerian?), because I figured all I have to do is cut up all the garbage into little pieces and let the garburetor take care of it, which necessitated an urgent call to the plumber, because, it turned out, we don't have a garburetor.
    I got out my wife's list, called the plumber, and got the rabbi again. Told him I was praying for a plumber, did he know one?
    When I was fired after not showing up for work two weeks straight, I explained to my boss that it wasn't my fault, my wife had abandoned me, so there was no one to wake me on time, no one to inform me if a given day was a weekend or a workday. He understood, he said: his wife was in Los Angeles for the summer, he knew what I was going through, and if I could survive such a challenge then he must have been underestimating me. He promptly retracted my dismissal and made me his assistant.
     She wasn't here to remind me to pick her up at the airport. She also failed to inform me which one. The last line on her instructions said nothing more than "ARR. >)<\-" which provided me with an arrival time I could not read, and no mention of which airport, and damned if I was going to head out to Haifa with a bouquet of flowers if she was ARR'ing at the Beersheba airport.
    Anyway, she got home just fine. I meant to buy her flowers, but the pizzeria doesn't stock any. On the bright side, I did locate the trash bin, so at least the house looked nice, because as I see it, no flowers and no garbage sort of cancel each other out.
    My wife walked through the door, dropped her luggage and, forgetting to say hello to me, went straight to her plants. She loves her plants. They were dead.
    I never even noticed we had plants.
    "And the cat?" she asked menacingly, and then panicky, "How's the cat?"
    "The cat." I knew we had one. "Yeah, the cat. I remember now. It had breakfast and then went outside to play with the other cats."
    "You mean," she gasped, "you actually remembered to feed the cat?"
    "No," I said, ג€œyou remembered to feed it, when you left." I just assumed it'd been out hunting ever since.
    Well, what was I expected to do, share my pizza with the damn thing?
    I really thought I'd be happy to see my wife back home, but the way she carried on. She even had the audacity to ask if I'd read her instructions, specifically the three pages headed "Cat."
    "You see?" she hissed, pointing an accusatory finger at her scrawl. "What does this say?"
    "(@{."
    I was not to blame, obviously, but I did feel sorry for her. I promised to find her another cat.
    She lit into me. "What, you're gonna order one from the pizzeria?"
    I could only smile, a triumphant smile, for all I'd been through in the last month, for all I'd learned about coping, honing my survival instincts, outsmarting my wife's wiliest attempts to set me up for failure. I smiled, because I was gonna show her: I knew precisely where to find her a new cat, because now I knew where the trash bin was.