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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
My husband left me and our children at least a dozen times. He was never around for the middle-of-the-night fevers or Christmas concerts. But when I needed him the most, he materialized -- with a bolt cutter.
Sep 15, 2003 | I exhausted all the other options before calling my husband.
First, I called the police in several states, the FBI, the federal highway commission, the Department of Transportation, the Better Business Bureau and the American Movers Association. Each conversation was exactly like the one before.
"You say you hired these people over the Internet? And then you just sent your house keys down to a P.O. box in Florida?"
I would sigh. "Yes."
"Well, who came to look at your things and give you the estimate?"
"No one. I did it all, um, online. There was a pdf file, a form I filled out that was supposed to calculate how much furniture I had to move."
"And you said you're a professor?" There was always a chuckle here.
"Visiting professor," I clarified. "Not full."
Eventually, each call veered back to the problem of geography. "OK, so what's happening now?" the voice on the other end of the line would ask. "Where's your stuff?"
"I have no idea. First, they told me it was in storage in Ohio. Then they said Arkansas."
A long pause.
"So how do you know they won't deliver, eventually? Maybe you're just going to have to be patient."
How to explain? It was the tone, the canned words of the person from the moving company whose accent was sometimes Middle Eastern and then something like Chinese, then moved in a rushing wave of words that grew stronger and harsher and more obscene. There was the fact that his name kept changing even though it seemed to be the same man every time. The last time we spoke, he had said, "Fuck you, lady, we got your stuff and the price is $9,000."
"They say they will. But the price keeps going up and I just don't think ..." I can lecture for an hour on a single line of prose: form, structure, syntax, metaphor. Yet I couldn't find the words to tell all the nuances of this particular story.
"So pay them. Later, you can take them to court, hash it all out there." It always came down to this, except with the woman from the highway commission. She had known plenty of other people in my situation and was curt but sympathetic. "Don't you send them a dime," she warned me. "They'll take it and then you'll be out your goods plus the money. It's how the scam works."
Finally, I dug through the papers I'd brought with me: closing papers from the house I'd sold in Iowa, bank statements I'd not had time to reconcile, two letters my husband sent me -- one from jail, the other from rehab. The divorce decree I never signed, a yellow arrow tab still pointing to the blank line. Just when I'd nearly given up, I found it toward the bottom of the file: 10 digits written on an overdue slip from the library.
I took my cellphone into the bathroom and locked the door. The children were watching MTV, sitting in a clump around the little television we'd found that morning at a yard sale; I hoped the voices of J.Lo and Eminem would drown me out.
I dialed and breathed out as I raised the phone to my ear. I'd begun crumpling the paper, anticipating the jeering automaton that would say, "The number you have reached has been disconnected," when he answered and startled me. His voice was creaky, as if he'd just awakened from a long nap.
"You're there." My heart continued its rapid hoofbeats. Odd, because talking to him again felt in most ways familiar, inevitable, like shifting a car into gear.
"Clearly." This used to thrill me: his dry, British way of speaking, so at odds with the lumberjack build. Of course, he could just as easily slip into the hillbilly twang ("gotta," "goin' to," "don't need no") that he used mostly on formal occasions: weddings, or faculty parties. Anything I dragged him to that made him uncomfortable.
I told him the story in shorthand. It all made sense now that he was on the other end of the line, interrupting only to say, "Yes," and "How much?" and "Bastards." He asked none of the questions I'd heard before. When I finished, he had only one: "Which airport is closest to you?"
