11/01/2012

My mouth tastes foul. It’s six in the morning, which is dark now. Maybe I can get at my toothbrush today.

My narrow bathroom has been blocked off by a moved-aside green dresser for three days. I had to move it aside, hurriedly, so that Mom’s friend the handyman Dave would be able to use the nearly forgotten door behind it to get out to the weird space where the original builders of the house made a dusty, open-at-one-side space for a hot tub that never appeared, so that he could put a ladder under the trapdoor up into the attic and climb up… You don’t have to follow that.

Anyway, when I moved the green dresser – do you know how much stuff can have fallen down behind a dresser in ten years?

Here my room already looks like a sty that has been raped – originally it was a sty for the both of us, Gwen and me, two people overwhelmed by clutter, a room we could get by in but never a place for visitors, but then chaotically half-emptied with Gwen’s stuff cleared out so that it looks like a debris-filled war zone where wild animals might be kept from time to time, all the detritus that had been accumulating at the bottom of things now exposed… So it was a supremely awkward place to lead Dave and his helper into – my room is also where the fuse box is, which they needed to work on – but then here I am muscling the dresser aside while Dave and helper stand there awkwardly, and then kneeling and gathering up a giant armload of exposed trash, vanished deodorants, spray bottles, papers…

My bathroom, which is not blocked from view by the moved dresser, hasn’t been cleaned in a long time either. Curls of beard all over the sink from when, before I went out to New Mexico, I fixed the muttonchops that Gwen giggled at in April, and here I am with a full beard again. Thank God they can’t see further in. In this incident I have been stacking my “not my finest hour”s. You can imagine my horror when Mom told me in the morning through the door that Dave would be coming the next day to start a project that we had vaguely talked about and that he would need access to my room with the fuse box. I was loud with appalled anguish – I sounded like I had been woken with a pail of cold water dumped on me. “Tomorrow?! Mom, I’m not set up for that! I don’t have time to…!”

Not my finest hour.

I really wonder if I will have any more.

I need to get access to my toothbrush. Shower too. The dark is weighing on me, and I feel badgers in my beard.

***

I have had to stick round the house with Dave and his grandson working, so I haven’t been able to go out to see Gwen… and before that I’ve been worrying over my class, and not getting nearly enough done, and before that, ironically, Gwen’s Mom and Day came out here visiting so I was with them!, so I haven’t gotten out there in a bit except a couple of times. It hurts my heart. Every day, it does. I am going to fix that now, now that the midterm is submitted and I’ve safely either managed it or messed it up. But this was Hallowe’en, and I had a plan… I don’t think it’s strictly allowed, but I wanted to put a jack-o-lantern on her grave. Mom would drive me over in a sort of commando raid and I would leave one before dusk.

This didn’t work quite as planned. Mom brought home a very small one – not melon-sized, more like grapefruit-sized, but I didn’t see a problem at the time; I had asked for a small one. I carved it, as well as I could for my love, and made sure to have a lot of air flow because I wanted the flame to have enough oxygen in such a small space. Just for her little point of orange light out there in the lawn. But, when I got out there in the afternoon before sunset after Mom came home and Dave left, Mom stopping along the side of the cemetery roadway nearest to her grave and me jumping out… the air was damply blowsy and whickery, and the pumpkin was too small to make its own island of still air inside it and then there was all the airflow I had arranged, and I could not get the candle to light for more than half a second. I must have used twenty-five matches.

I’ll do it better next year, Gwen. So I left the jack-o-lantern on her grave anyway, though it looked almost dwarfed by blades of grass. Here it is.

Here are the rest of the crew. I could have used my carving helper. But I tried to keep Hallowe’en.

Dave and company are coming again today, but Mom will be home today so I’ll see if I can get out. I remember the chapter Gwen and I are on in the book. Time to get back to normal.

Terrible singing in my ears.