Fay and Bonnie, unplugged....
by Fay Jacobs
I knew staying home in Maryland for a weekend would come to no good.
Even though my friends whined about not seeing us and my house was falling down from lack of attention, I still thought a weekend home was radical.
But a Saturday invitation dictated our fate. Fine, I begrudged.
Little did I know I could make an ass of myself, set fire to the house and suffer rainbow withdrawal, all in 48 hours.
By 8 a.m. Saturday, Bonnie was cleaning out the garagea.k.a. the world's largest storage shed.
Meanwhile, I was in the closet, if you'll excuse the expression, filling my fourth plastic bag with clothes I fear I must have liked at one time.
Oh to Be sipping Rainforest decaf at Dream Cafe or the Coffee Mill instead of digging out the primary residence.
I left for the Goodwill drop-off center, as Bonnie dragged drywall shards, broken appliances, fossilized peat moss and unintentionally antique newspapers (I mean when did the Baltimore News American fold, anyway?) into the station wagon for a run to the dump.
When I got home and saw the empty driveway, I imagined Bonnie gleefully tossing garbage at Mt. Trashmore. When my Schnauzer wasn't at the door to greet me, I thought "She took the dog with her to the dump??"
Then I saw Max outside on the deck, shivering. She left the dog outside in the drizzle??? When he's just gotten over bronchitis?
I opened the slider and Max charged in. "She left you out there? I can't Believe she left you out there," I said, launching a self-righteous fit. "I can't believe her. That's the most irresponsible..." I continued to have an increasingly ugly hissy until I caught a glimpse of the person I'd just called irresponsible out on the deck, laughing at my shameful performance.
"You're here?" I was confused. "Where's the car? What did you do, sell it?"
"It's in the garage." she said, as if there'd always been room for a car in there.
The car was in the garage? I laughed. It never occurred to me that the car could have been in the garage. Now we were both laughing. In eight years of owning the house, no car had ever set tire in that garage.
"I told you I cleaned up," she said, smug that she caught me making an idiot of myself.
"Hrrrmph. We should be at the beach doing something constructive like hanging out by Lambda Rising," I said, "so I wouldn't have doubted you.
I apologized for my mistrust and proposed lunch as a peace offering. We're accustomed to Arena's or Iguana Grill, so mystery freezer food was a rude surprise. But unlike Rehoboth, in our neighborhood our two choices are pizza with pre-schoolers at Chuck E. Cheese or Rolling Rock with race track geezers at our local pub.
So we ate in. Then I cleaned up the kitchen and we took Max for ice cream. He enjoyed the real thing; we got a sugar-free, fat-free, single scoop of chemicals and envied his aloofness of the approach of bathing suit season.
When we got home and opened the front door we were hit with the smell of smoke.
"My God! Something's on fire!" Bonnie screamed, running around, sniffing and feeling the walls.
"Grab the photo albums!" I yelled, racing Back out to toss Max into the car.
I passed Bonnie struggling down the stairs with a leaning tower of scrapbooks as I ran to grab the two kitchen phonesseparate area codespunched 911 on both, and held the receivers to my ears, making a sandwich of my head.
"Fire and Rescue" said one, then the other.
"House fire. 8609 Jennifer. Hurry!" I barked to both, summoning battalions from two counties.
The smell was getting worse, and Bonnie, frantic for the source, unplugged every appliance in the house. Then she grabbed the bottom drawer of the desk and tossed it out the door.
Hearts pounding, we sniffed and searched like pigs rooting for truffles. Then we heard the sirens. "We better get out," I hollered fearful of smoke inhalation, but noting it was smellier than smokier.
"I picked a fine time to put a car in the garage!" Bonnie wailed, picturing Subaru flambee and diving for her keys.
Then, just as the howling fire truck and ambulance pulled up, with a second jurisdiction in hot pursuit, I saw a trail of smoke from the dishwasher.
Clawing the door open I found a smoldering lump of plastic, formerly a slotted spoon, hanging over the heating element like spew from Mt. St. Helens.
I wrenched it free and ran out the front door waving my steaming, smelly trophy overhead. Now this pretty much stopped the squad of fully out-fitted fire fighters running toward the house dead in their tracks.
"Sorry, sorry, Never mind, it's okay," I hollered, waving my blackened Olympic Torch to the honking, flashing, throngwhich included all our neighbors leaning out their front doors wondering what those crazy lesbians had done this time.
With great fanfare, the lead fire fighter barked "Attention!! Fried Tupperware. Fried Tupperware" into his walkie-talkie. "All units back in service."
"Fried Tupperware," echoed a half dozen two-way radios, "Fried Tupperware. Over and Out."
Meanwhile, dueling ambulance teams saw Bonnie, sprawled, out of breath, against the car and rushed to ask if she was okay.
"Yeah," she said. "But we gotta stop taking pictures or I have to start bench pressing photo albums."
"I'm so sorry," I said to the Fire Investigator.
"Don't be," he said. "Happens all the time. Glad it wasn't a fire. But lady, next time, call just one county and let us decide if we need a second alarm."
"Thanks," I said. "At least we know our escape plan works."
So we liberated Max and the photo albums from the car, opened every window in the house to dissipate the stink and eventually went to our partywhere we visited with lots of folks so we could put off another fun-filled Maryland Saturday for a long time.
As for Sunday, it was less dramatic but equally unsatisfying.
For two reasonably intelligent people, it took us a long time to realize that the clock radio wasn't broken, it was just unplugged. Ditto the hair dryer.
Then, we had to drive 45 minutes to meet friends for brunch, noting "at the beach we could eat at Crystal and be home by the time we find a place to park."
Later, Bonnie scraped the remains of Vesuvius the Spoon from the dishwasher, while I grew increasingly nuts changing sets of batteries in the TV remote before figuring out that the set wasduhunplugged.
And that evening we endured a Beltway standstill with the added pleasure of a trucker flipping us the bird after spying the rainbow on our bumper. All that just to eat at a restaurant where even the waiters were straight. That pretty much sent us over the edge.
"What do you say we stay home at the beach from now on?" Bonnie said.
At the word "beach" Max got off the sofa, picked up his leash in his teeth and stood at the front door.
If he'd only spoken up on Friday, we could have saved a lousy weekend, a perfectly good spoon and, as I sat down to write this story, a moment of wild panic before realizing the computer was...duh...just unplugged.
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3/28/97 Issue. Copyright 1997 by CAMP Rehoboth, Inc. All rights reserved.