Andrea Langworthy

Cracked about carpet

Christina — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:39:16 +0000

When the UPS driver set the package inside the door, I had a hard time remembering what I’d ordered. Later, I asked my husband to check it out. “Tiny squares of carpet,” he said. Oh, no.

Last spring, I bought new interior rugs for the front door and the one leading to the garage. A friend was coming for a week-long visit and the old mats were ratty. I’d searched a long time to find two that said, “Nice house.” Gold, deep red and green Jacobean-patterned, these would surely do the trick. My friend cancelled her trip but I was still happy to have such elegant rugs. Especially, since they were from a home improvement chain store and hadn’t been pricey.

Right after Thanksgiving, three weeks before we were to host a neighborhood party, I noticed the great room carpet had some dark streaks. Then, red squiggly lines started to appear and multiply alongside the dining room table. Thinking my eyes were playing tricks on me or my glasses had picked up reflections from a light fixture, I also worried I might be going crazy. A carpet cleaning technician (who didn’t dispute the crazy theory) and I determined that once we had snow outside, the vibrant colors from the new rugs bled and transferred to the bottoms of wet shoes — and the socks of those kind enough to remove their shoes — and were then smeared through the rooms. Which explains why there were fewer marks the farther you got from the doors. Try as he might, the carpet cleaner could only lighten the stains a bit. The owner of the company came out to give it another try. No luck. We bought boring beige rugs to put in front of the doors, threw out the offenders, and dimmed the lights for the party. Our guests pretended they didn’t notice.

We made it through the holidays but now, the days are longer and the late afternoon sun shines on the floor, highlighting the dozens of stains. By summer, the floor covering will look like a Jackson Pollard print. I got moving on Operation Carpet. One store offered to send samples of Fresia which we have throughout the house and I hope to match. I didn’t ask for an estimate. Money for carpet seems like a waste. Fancy kitchen countertops or shiny new stainless appliances would make a statement. But carpet? And beige carpet at that?

My husband pulled the package from the closet last week and we set a dozen or so pieces on my desk. Who knew there were that many variations of tan? Beige with a hint of grey. Pinky-beige. Burnished beige. Tan with a yellow cast. Tawny taupe. Light latte. Pale caramel. Hints of green. “Where should I put the others?” my husband asked as he looked around the room. I shrugged my shoulders in defeat, scooped up the samples, and dumped them back in the box.

“Call me crazy,” I said. “For now, let’s just close the window blinds and hand out dark glasses to anyone who comes to the door. This is bigger than both of us.”

Two hundred squiggles and counting

Christina — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:29:37 +0000

Last week, I watched a television show about nuns. Lisa Ling, a correspondent for The Oprah Show, was allowed inside a convent to get the scoop on how these women live. Why they’d eschew marriage and raising children for a vocation requiring vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Educated and disciplined by the sisters throughout grade school and high school, I was never allowed inside their living quarters and until I saw the show, didn’t realize there are over 60,000 nuns in this country. That’s a lot of rulers.

I was in grade school back in the 1950s and 60s. Almost daily, a schoolmate who talked in class or daydreamed would have a hand whacked by Sister’s ruler. A student who glanced at another’s test paper would be grabbed by the ear, yanked from his desk, and pulled by that same ear into the corridor to be reprimanded. Pity the poor child found picking his nose and wiping it on the underside of the desk. He’d have to stay after school to write 100 times on the blackboard, “I will not pick my nose and wipe it on my desk.”

I was in seventh grade when Sister Joseph Something-or-Other heard me laugh at another student’s whispered joke during study time. Sister moved towards me, a scowl on her face. I feared a form of public corporal punishment but she surprised me by saying, “Follow me.” I found myself in the tiny supply closet down the hall. Sister closed the door behind us and began to lecture me on wasting time, not working up to my potential, disappointing my dear parents, and on and on … I began to count the black squiggles in the linoleum until she asked in that sharp nun voice, “Do you?” I’d been lost in my tally and didn’t know what the question had been. I took a chance and answered, “Yes, Sister.” Whew! She opened the door saying she would expect better behavior from me.

Five years later, the day of my high school graduation, I faced a similar situation. Hours before our parents would arrive at our boarding school, friends and I walked down the long road leading from school towards the highway. We took turns being the lookout while the others smoked. Then, we headed back to finish packing and get ready for the ceremony. Trudging up the hill from the road, we met one of the nuns. She said we smelled of cigarette smoke and asked the question with no possible answer: “Have you been doing this all along or did you smoke today because we can’t punish you?” In unison, we answered, “No, Sister.” She told us to get out of her sight.

You can probably understand my anxiety when, 25 years later, classmates decided we should return to the school for our reunion. Many of our teachers were still there. Would they hold my old trouble-making behavior against me? I worried. Grab me by the ear and order me out of their sight? Whether they’d softened or I’d finally lived up to my potential, I’m not sure but they smiled at me. I was relieved that most had traded in their long, flowing habits with the deep sleeves in favor of tailored suits that couldn’t hide a ruler. I felt safe.

Required reading

Christina — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 23:28:55 +0000

Every summer, Barnes & Noble has a table stacked with books local high schools require their students to read during summer vacation. It always tickles me to see The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger on the high schools’ lists. This is the book a nun mailed to my father with a note that said she didn’t feel it was suitable reading material. At the time, I was a sophomore at a Catholic boarding school for girls. Located between Red Wing and Lake City, in the tiny town of Frontenac, the school was as provincial as the sisters who taught us. My father felt sorry for this group of women forced to rein in a bunch of “high-spirited” girls. But when it came to literature, he and Sister were on opposite pages. It didn’t take long for Dad to send back the book saying he didn’t care what I read so long as I read something. In fact, it was Dad who often encouraged us kids to read cereal boxes at the breakfast table and introduced us to the Minneapolis morning newspaper and its afternoon counterpart. I was reminded of this last month when J.D. Salinger passed away at the age of 91. Salinger’s work — he’d also had books of short stories and novellas published — was last seen in print in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965, just weeks after I graduated from high school. By then, I’d read almost everything he’d written. Salinger hated being famous after The Catcher in the Rye put him in the literary limelight but he never stopped writing. Saying he was “in this world but not of it,” he moved from Manhattan to New Hampshire, fenced in his home and, according to a farewell piece in People, wrote for two hours a day. But not for publication. A former girlfriend said he disliked the intimacy of publishing and thought it was like “walking down Madison Avenue with your pants down.” I don’t know what the nuns would think of that but they certainly weren’t keen on Salinger’s story of 17-year-old Holden Caulfield who’d been expelled from an elite boarding school. Which may be just why I liked him. I, too, had been asked to “not come back” to a boarding school near St. Cloud after my freshman year. Which is how I landed on the opposite side of the Twin Cities the next school year with a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in my hands. Like Caulfield, I suffered from the malaise known as teen-aged disenchantment and didn’t have a lot of confidence in adults, either. I found Caulfield’s stream of rough language, something I couldn’t get away with, dangerously intoxicating. Whether Dad knew about the swear words or not, I’m happy he returned the book to Sister with permission for me to read it. Many decades later, when my husband passed by it one summer as it sat on a bookstore table, he picked up a copy and said he’d never read it. “But you must,” I said. “It’s a classic.”

Something borrowed, something blue

Christina — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:02:10 +0000

My former husband and I married 44 years ago this week. Every year on what would be our anniversary, I take a moment to reflect on that day. I was a U of M freshman who shared an apartment with friends. He lived in a dorm at a prestigious Indiana college. Love-struck teenagers, we decided when he returned to school after winter break, I’d go along so we could marry in a Michigan town just miles from his school. The age of consent was 18 there; we wouldn’t need the approval of his parents who’d forbidden us to even go steady. Once there, we learned about required blood tests. About the three-day waiting period for a marriage license. The cost of wedding rings.

The morning of the big day, I donned the baby blue mohair suit and navy pumps I’d “borrowed” from my sister’s closet. Gave my hair a last-minute look to make sure it had a perfect flip and waited for my groom in the lobby of the hotel where I’d been staying. We rode the bus to City Hall for our appointment with the Justice of the Peace and waited our turn on a wooden bench in a marble-floored hallway as government workers passed by. A woman with the longest reptilian handbag I’d ever seen prompted me to whisper the childhood refrain, “In came the doctor, in came the nurse, in came the lady with the alligator purse.” My hubby-to-be shushed me.

A secretary motioned us to the justice’s office. She asked about witnesses. We didn’t have any so she rounded up a man in a grey suit and Buddy Holly-style glasses. And the woman who still carried her alligator purse. After we said “I do,” the woman gave me a hug. The secretary gave us a small piece of paper with the eight beatitudes of marriage typed on it. “Blessed are the …” I read as we ate a wedding lunch of burgers and chips at the Mayflower cafe around the corner. We waited for the bus inside the Christian Science reading room. The woman behind the desk looked up as we entered. I told her we’d just gotten married and held out my left hand as proof.

When we returned to the hotel, my husband asked the clerk for the bridal suite. The man looked skeptical until we showed him the marriage license. We followed him to the room where he pointed out the double-sized bed and claw-footed bath tub. Not long after, there was a knock on the door. College buddies of my husband with beer, Fritos, and a wedding card with 60 crumpled one-dollar bills inside. Some of the boys plopped on the bottom of the chenille-covered bed and the mattress gave way, landing on the floor. Jokes and guffaws ensued. I ran into the bathroom in tears. A bit later, my groom knocked on the door, said they were gone. The bed had bed put back in order.

What happened next, I don’t remember. I doubt we’d planned that far ahead. We were just two love-struck kids who wanted to be together forever. Who — for some reason or many reasons — weren’t able keep it together until happily ever after.