Too Pregnant for Mice or Men

Week 32: Plumbers

The three plumbers are pine tree thin, and the shortest one scowls as his colleagues force him into the smallest, dustiest crawlspaces. He heads into the gas exhaust pipe on the side of the house. “Why the fuck is it always me crawling in these tiny shitholes?” he mutters to himself, but loud enough for everyone to hear.

The woman, who is 32 weeks into her pregnancy, looks nervously at her husband. He just shakes his head.

“Aww, hell,” the plumber says. “I found a dead sparrow. Damn it, I actually like sparrows. Everyone thinks they’re a nuisance bird. Not me. They fight for their turf. I like that in a bird.”

The husband says, “I like sparrows too, especially those that are alive.”

The kitchen remodel is a pricey job for the young couple. The husband is adamant that all the gas lines be removed from the house. For months he has ranted about houses blowing up, shredding homes to the size of toothpicks. “You don’t even recognize the dead people after they blow up,” he tells his wife.

“How do you know the dead aren’t recognizable?” she asks.

“Because I’ve seen this shit firsthand.”

She knows he’s lying about having witnessed a blown-up house with dead bodies but doesn’t feel like arguing. She’s too damn pregnant for wasting energy on an argument she should win but won’t.

 She thinks about how this exhaust pipe must have been a warm tunnel for critters on a cold day and how she’s always cold inside their house in the winter. She remembers hearing scratches in that metal pipe last winter and being mildly annoyed but not annoyed enough to move from her cozy armchair where she was wrapped in a down blanket. The couple have cats and dogs. Let them deal with the noisy critters in the pipes.

The couple wants the kitchen remodel to be finished before the baby arrives. They argue about the cost of kitchen sinks, faucets, cabinet handles, tiles, lights, doors, and a place for their endless cookbooks. She thought this would be a more romantic domestic project, but it’s turning into a hellish nightmare. The old house is falling apart, so everything costs way more than expected. One night they are out for pizza with another couple, talking about their kitchen saga. Their friend shakes his head and says, “Carpenters always say couples start these big remodel jobs, feeling all sappy about their future dream house, and by the time the job is done, they’ve filed for divorce.” He laughs, but no one else joins him.

Week 35: Masons

Over their morning coffee, the couple jokes about the masons arriving wearing white aprons and fancy jewelry but instead they are wearing shirts that say “Mason Lyfe.” The husband leaves for work. The pregnant wife hates always being the one left behind to make sure the dogs stay in the fenced yard and the cats stay locked upstairs. Sometimes, when the dogs are antsy from being in the backyard for too long, they’ll pry the wooden posts off of the fence and escape to roam about the neighborhood. The last thing she wants to do at 35 weeks pregnant is chase up and down the streets, yelling after them. Instead of fretting about the dogs escaping, she grades her freshman composition essays and frets about this baby kicking the inside of her belly.

The masons don’t take long to pull up the kitchen’s subfloor. Immediately afterwards, the pregnant woman hears the men yell, “Damn! Look at these mice!”

She feels sickened sitting in her cozy chair. More mice.

“There’s gotta be a hundred of them,” a mason says loudly. To ensure she hears, she thinks. He seems to want the pregnant woman to respond, to own up to the dead mice beneath the kitchen, to confess something.

With great reluctance, the woman walks to the kitchen. The men look at her.

“Usually the cats kill the mice,” she says.

“And do your cats bury them beneath the kitchen? Lady, that’s a lot of dead mice.”

“We don’t use chemicals. We’re very organic. Maybe they’re like old dogs who search for a place out in the woods to die alone.”       
“Maybe,” the largest mason grunts, “But these organic mice didn’t die alone. There’re hundreds of them!” He looks pale.

The woman tries to change the subject. “My neighbor is hoping you’ll find the previous owner’s ruby ring down there. Let me know if you find that, okay?”

“Sure, lady. We’re treasure hunters,” the largest man says.

“And exterminators,” the oldest man adds.

“This job is killing me,” the largest man grunts.

The woman returns to her comfy chair and opens Pinterest, gazes at a board filled with images of sunny, bright kitchens with oak cabinets and white granite countertops. No kitchens filled with corpses. She fantasizes about hanging plate racks and windowsills wide enough to cool strawberry pies and showcase herbs growing in cute pots. Imagines a dream house their new son will remember as being homey, just like the homes in his favorite story books. Not a ghoulish house filled with dead critters in the closets, walls, basement, bedrooms, and bathrooms. She’s aghast as she thinks about all the places she’s seen dead animals. Once, a mouse crawled on her mother’s lap while her mother sat on their couch in the living room. The pregnant woman found this quite funny at the time. She laughed when her cat killed the mouse and instructed her mother to just toss the mouse outside for their chickens. Back then, she was a different woman. She wasn’t 35 weeks pregnant, worrying about a disease-ridden mouse crawling into her baby’s crib. 

The masons stomp through the living room on their way out for a lunch break. They see her grading papers, and they joke about how much they hated their high school English classes.

“If I’d done better in my English classes, I might not be pulling dead mice out of a pregnant lady’s house,” the youngest mason says before heading out the door.

“If Mrs. Smarty-pants knew about mouse traps, we wouldn’t be hauling their dead mice out of their crawlspace,” the oldest mason grunts.

Week 38: Plumbers, Again

The kitchen is beginning to look like how they had imagined their dream kitchen: floor-to-ceiling oak cabinets with soft-close hinges on the doors, a giant pantry, stainless steel appliances, and ceramic floor tiles with a retro floral print. The husband, who decided to save money by installing their new faucet himself, messages with Mohammad in Morocco, the Etsy seller who sold them their beautiful new oil-rubbed bronze bridge faucet. The husband hoped that installing the faucet would be a quick, simple task, but the Moroccan hoses aren’t lining up with the holes of their Etsy Timbuktu sink. This is not the first time the husband has messaged Mohammad. Every time the husband messages for help, Mohammad responds with the same instruction manual, insisting that the husband will be able to figure it out. The husband gets increasingly angry, yanking the hoses out of the sink as stale kitchen water drips onto his face.

“This was a huge mistake. We should have just gotten a faucet and sink from Ferguson Plumbing Supply,” the husband grumbles, throwing his phone across the room. Finally, the husband gives in, calls the plumber and waits for him to arrive. By the time the plumber arrives, the husband has spent hours trying to hook up the faucet to the farmhouse kitchen sink. When the plumber walks into the kitchen and sees the Etsy nightmare, he feels a sense of dread. 

“I tried everything, but I can’t get these hoses hooked up,” the husband explains, while the plumber just stares at him. The plumber remembers telling them not to buy anything from Etsy. Buy from the local plumbing store, he’d said. “Etsy, what’s that? Etsy sounds shady. Very fishy. I’m telling you, buy American-made from our town. Ferguson Plumbing Supply. Plumbers go there. No one goes to Itchy.”

“This faucet will never work. Ever,” the plumber says, trying not to sound as angry as he’s feeling. A mouse runs across the kitchen floor, the cats trailing it, and the woman bursts into tears. The husband feels chagrined, retrieves his phone from across the room, and tells Google to look up how to return a faucet from Morocco. He discovers it will cost three hundred dollars.  He screams, “I have PTSD from this damn sink!” Then he also bursts into tears. The plumber wonders how long this marriage will last. He points out another mouse coming up from the basement.

The faucet and sink were two things the couple both agreed on, ignoring the advice of the plumber, because the bronze faucet, which would patina perfectly with wear over the years, was so damn cute in the pictures on Etsy. None of their friends would ever have a sink as cute as theirs. It didn’t matter that their house was across the street from a strip mall, miles away from a farm. They wanted their kitchen to look like a modern farmhouse kitchen. They imagined this beautiful sink next to the window that would one day be surrounded by large sunflowers to admire as they washed dishes. They talked about the canning jars lined up perfectly on the counter, which they would fill with tomato sauce from tomatoes they’d grow. Their son tossing the tomato seeds onto the soil, then later pulling the weeds. The dogs sunning their stomachs, rolling on the sprouted cover crops. A family who doesn’t depend on grocery stores, a self-sufficient family with the cutest sink in town.

Week 39: The Electrician

The electrician doesn’t speak to the wife except to ask her to call her husband at work so he can ask him a question. He is visibly uncomfortable around such a pregnant woman. She wonders if he thinks she’ll go into labor while he’s updating the electricity in their old house. He keeps his distance from her and their big dogs. He takes frequent breaks to smoke in his van parked on the street with the other guy, who seems to be learning the trade from him. She knows they are mocking her and her husband when they smoke in the van, making fun of their expensive heat pumps that won’t work. They make wisecracks in the van. “Did you see those gallons of paint and the tools lying on the floor in the baby’s room?” the older electrician says to his apprentice. “That woman just sits around playing on her laptop all day long. My wife knew how to make a baby room cute.”

After the house is finally hers again, no workers banging and pounding, treating her like she’s an idiot, the pregnant woman stands on the porch, away from the dust accumulating inside, and the fetus inside her uterus moves ever so slightly. She wonders if this remodel will be finished before the baby’s arrival, or if she’ll soon be trying to soothe him to a cacophony of hammering and wafts of cigarette smells. She thinks about how tired the men in their kitchen look after a long day of labor at her house,which they call a “job site,” their bodies sweaty, dusty, and sometimes bloody when they drive back to their own homes at the end of the day. She’s tired of feeling sympathetic toward those messy men, tromping through their house with their filth, starting each morning wondering what dead rodents they’ll find today, or worse, what live ones will be crawling into their toolboxes.

Enough about the workers.

She tries to imagine the labor that she’ll be going through in a couple of weeks, but it’s unimaginable. She knows the baby room won’t be ready, but hopefully this expensive new kitchen where they’ll gather at the brand new nook for their family meals, where they’ll laugh over odd behaviors of their colleagues, will be finished. She imagines that by six months, the baby will be so happy to eat his mother’s delicious food in this spacious kitchen, and the cats will wonder why there are no more mice to chase inside the house and will grow bored with each other and frustrated about the new baby, while the dogs sit by his high chair, waiting for food to drop into the floor. After dinner, she’ll plop the baby into the farmhouse kitchen sink for a bath while the cats jump on the counter to splash the water and while the dogs stand by her side as she bathes the baby in this wonderful kitchen.

Enough daydreaming.

Week 40: The Husband

She hears the cats knock something over upstairs and hauls her heavy body up the creaking staircase as the baby kicks her repeatedly from inside the womb. He’s getting antsy in there, and his repeated kicks feel like a morse code announcing his imminent arrival. With one hand on the railing and another rubbing her stomach, she mutters unpleasantries to the cats who dart down the stairs between her feet, fighting over a nearly dead mouse. She notices the Tear Drop Blue paint can knocked on its side, a slow trickle escaping from a gap in the lid. She grabs  the damp rag and bends over to wipe up the paint, groaning as she has to crouch down, leaning over her huge stomach to wipe the wood floor. She stands up and scrutinizes the walls she just finished painting during what she hopes is her last week of pregnancy, deciding to touch up spots here and there with a thin brush, determined to have one room finished in the house.

When the husband comes home from work and doesn’t see the wife in the living room on the recliner, where he often finds her after work, he calls out her name and heads up the stairs.

“You decided to paint the baby room today?  How are you feeling?” he says.

“It wasn’t like you were ever going to paint his room.”

“I was going to do it this weekend.”

“This weekend?” She sighs.

He tries to change the direction of this conversation. “You picked a nice color. The walls look good.”

“I was hoping you’d paint the ceiling.” 

He doesn’t respond immediately. Instead, he walks around the room, inspecting her paint job. He stops at the windowsill, which she did not paint, and rubs his fingers across the ledge. He inspects his finger. Then he says, “Um, honey? I think this old paint has lead in it.”

Mr. I-know-about-gas-lines-toothpicks-and-everything-but-kitchen-sinks suddenly declares the baby room unsafe. He whisks his wife out of the room, as if there’s a tornado approaching.  “We’ll have to hire professionals to remove the lead, and honestly, honey, I know you don’t want to hear this, but if there’s lead upstairs, there’s probably lead downstairs, too,” he declares.

“Now you think there’s lead throughout the house? You want to bring more men into the house??” 

“Honey. This is our first house. There’s a learning curve. The next house will be easier.”

“But our baby is due any minute now,” the woman says.

She pictures them coming home from the hospital, baby in tow, to a house wrapped in caution tape. Men in hazmat suits traipsing in and out of their front door, for all the neighbors to see.

She lowers herself to the staircase and wails.