If You Were Here

“She’s right,” Kara agrees. “Sorry, Trace. Anyway, I need to get a new car, because asking them for help only serves to highlight how I can’t possibly function without a husband.” Before Tracey and I can jump in to protest, she continues, “No, no, I’m aware I function just fine on my own. Great, actually. I couldn’t be happier most of the time. But convincing Dr. and Dr. Patel I’m capable is an entirely different story.”

“Would they have given you this much shit if you’d gone to med school instead of J school?” Tracey and Kara met as grad students in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern in the early nineties.

Kara mulls over my question before answering. “Probably.”

Before we can pursue this line of conversation, we hear a loud banging upstairs, followed by what sounds like two bears wrestling, capped off with an enormous thump.

“Do I want to ask?” Tracey points to where my fantastic fleamarket-find crystal chandelier sways dangerously above us.

“Mac has proclaimed today New Toilet Day! Which will be nice, because I’m tired of coming downstairs every time I have to take a leak. Do you realize that out of seven bathrooms, we’re presently down to three?” I grouse. And then I feel a weird stab of guilt at bitching about being down to three bathrooms when I grew up in a house with five people and one full bath.

“Everything will be totally worth it when you’re done.” Funny, but the second Kara stops dwelling on her parents, she returns to her usual upbeat self. “That reminds me; I’ve got some recipes for Mac. He mentioned on Facebook that he wanted to learn to make palak paneer and lamb curry.” She pulls a couple of cards out of her bag and I dive on them like I’m protecting the room from a live grenade.

“Jesus, God, no!” I exclaim. “No, no, no! Before that man even thinks about making Indian food, we need all seven toilets operational. All of them. Trust me on this. I’ll just hang on to these,” I say, stuffing the cards into my well-worn copy of Shopaholic Takes Manhattan. “He’ll never look in here.”

We hear more crunching and cracking above us. “Everything okay up there? Do you need me to call the plumber yet?” I worry that plumbing isn’t a place to economize in our renovation process, but Mac swears he has the situation under control.

“Negative!” he calls back.

Okay, then.

“You hear any more from Vienna?” Kara asks. “Last I saw on Perez Hilton’s site, she was swearing revenge.”

I brush off the notion of impending doom. “Revenge for what? For dropping a thousand f-bombs at me on camera? For throwing a shoe at my mover? What did I do except pay my rent on time and put up with a lot of foolishness?”

I don’t mention that all the contrarian teenagers who hate Vienna and her impact on pop culture now look at me as kind of a folk hero. They’ve been snapping up my entire backlist, so how is that not win-win?

Kara leans forward in her seat. “Mia, she’s not rational. Never has been. You don’t understand — I grew up around here, and that girl has a long reputation of being vicious. In high school, my younger sister Alex⁹⁶ made the mistake of saying hi to Vienna’s boyfriend, and the next day she was kicked off poms because of some risque Myspace photos. The pictures were obviously Photoshopped, but my parents were so mortified by the whiff of scandal that they refused to fight for my sister’s spot on the squad.”

“You sure that was Vienna’s doing?” I ask.

“Yep. The work was quality, meaning Vienna paid someone to do it, but the body was Angelina Jolie’s in Tomb Raider, meaning absolutely no thought went into it. Also? Vienna bragged about it.”

I shrug. “Yeah, that sucks for Alex, but you’re not convincing me. What’s Vienna going to do, withhold my security deposit? Too late! I already got a check! Although I suspect someone who works for her sent it, as the ‘i’ in her signature was missing its trademark heart.”

“You need to check the gossip sites more often, Kara,” Tracey admonishes. “Vienna took off for the ashram in Eat, Pray, Love a week ago. She was quoted as saying she ‘wants to be more spiritual and shit.’ Deep thinker, that one. I read that she and fifteen of her closest friends flew there on her dad’s custom- built Global Express XRS.”

“Because nothing gets you down the path to enlightenment faster than a forty-million-dollar private jet.” Kara giggles.

Somewhere above us we hear an enormous crash, followed by a TMZ-worthy string of profanity, followed by. . silence. “No, really!” I shout at the ceiling. “I can call a plumber anytime you’d like.”

Mac’s response is muffled but audible. “Still fine. Not to worry.”

Ten minutes later, we’re onto the topic of Tracey’s recent breakup. She says they had “irreconcilable differences,” which we’ve interpreted as “an expired Viagra prescription.”We’re teasing Tracey about cruising senior centers for dates when we hear the first groan.

“Was that Daisy?” Tracey asks. Fair question. Were farting an Olympic sport, Daisy would easily medal.

“Ha,” I snicker. “If Daisy tooted, there’d be no confusion about it. You’d know.” Because pit bulls have shorter, wider snouts, they take in more air when they eat. And because Daisy’s plump as a pork roast, she eats an awful lot. You see where I’m going with this? Mac always says the Department of Defense could weaponize what comes out of her.

We resume our conversation, and thirty seconds later, we hear another groan, this time longer in duration and a bit more urgent. “What is that?” Kara asks.

“Eh, it’s an old house. Old houses make noise,” I reply. The main part of our home was built in 1891. I love living somewhere with a real history about it.

“So, anyway, Tracey, I’m writing about May — December affairs, and my readers want to know”— groan—“if there’s snow on the roof”—GROOOOAN—“does that mean there’s frost on the—” But before Kara can complete her thought, the groaning noise grows exponentially louder and is immediately followed by the sound of a thousand wood fibers snapping.

After that, and almost as if in slow motion, we witness my prized polished paneling begin to bow before completely giving way.

The chandelier is the first casualty. It comes down slowly, serenely, almost lyrically, with each individual crystal creating its own bit of music before swinging toward the bay window and smashing into a veritable Kristallnacht in the side yard.

Fortunately, we’re all sitting opposite from the fulcrum of broken paneling, and other than the window, there are no additional victims.

According to the entry about gravity on Wikipedia: Under an assumption of constant gravity, Newton’s law of universal gravitation simplifies to F = mg, where m is the mass of the body and g is a constant vector with an average magnitude of 9.81 m/s². The acceleration due to gravity is equal to this g. An initially stationary object which is allowed to fall freely under gravity drops a distance which is proportional to the square of the elapsed time, which is really just a fancy way of saying that pastel pink toilets fall from a hole in the ceiling pretty fucking hard.

“You guys?” I shriek. “Kara, Tracey, talk to me.” There’s so much dust I can barely see either of them. They both answer affirmatively, and a massive feeling of relief rushes through me.

Fortunately, the dogs are also fine, because they both raced out of the room after the first few groans. Funny, but animals can always sense impending danger.

Or in this case, impending stupidity.

In unison, we look up at the massive hole in the ceiling about the same time Mac peers down. “You okay down there? Oh, hey, Tracey, Kara, didn’t know you were here.”We’re all speechless, gawping back at him in stunned silence. “I think I dropped the toilet,” Mac adds helpfully.

“No shit,” I reply.⁹⁷ I survey the wreckage in my office. Aside from the gaping hole in the ceiling and the bashed window, the toilet has taken out my desk, my computer, my monitor, my chair, and has smashed into enough pieces to make Humpty Dumpty, all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men look like a bunch of rank amateurs.

“I guess I needed a plumber after all. Possibly a carpenter, too,” Mac admits sheepishly, causing a whole bunch of blood vessels in my brain to spontaneously burst.

“Hey, Mia?” Kara prods me gently. “Looks like the bourbon survived.”