Mirror, Mirror, on the — Hey!

A few nights ago, I lay awake in bed and itched my knee. My knee felt so itchy that I decided I’d better go downstairs to put some cortisone on it. Most people would have considered this odd behavior, occurring as it was at 3 or 4 in the morning, but since I have trouble sleeping nearly every night, getting up for cortisone at this hour seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

Once downstairs, I opened the mirrored cupboard above the bathroom sink and applied the cortisone to my knee. As I was putting the cortisone back in the cupboard, it happened.

I started to shut the mirrored door and felt something catch at the bottom. I knew immediately what had happened, as this had occurred twice already in the past, but I was still hoping I was wrong. As I eased the door open again, I saw the hinge at the bottom of the mirrored door spring out of its latch.

Holding the mirror up with both hands, I considered my dilemma and evaluated my options.

Option 1: I could stand here holding the mirror until Chris’s alarm woke him up a mere four hours from now.

Cons of Option 1: Disregarding whether or not I was physically capable of standing for that long, my hunger or my bladder would undoubtedly get the better of me.

Option 2: I could leave the mirror dangling by two quarter-inch screws while I sprinted for the screwdriver.

Cons of Option 2: Given that the mirror was so heavy that I had to use both hands to hold it up, I felt that two quarter-inch screws might not be up to the job. Plus, the screwdriver might not be where I thought it was. And even if I could find the screwdriver, I still wouldn’t have grown the third hand necessary to work it.

Option 3: Wake up Chris.

Cons of Option 3:

1. I didn’t like to wake up Chris. Granted, he fell asleep far easier than I did, but I didn’t want him to get into the habit of thinking it was okay to wake a sleeping spouse (namely, the spouse with insomnia) for domestic repairs.
2. He might not actually wake up. Last week when I brought my car in to get new tires and found out that the waiting time was 4 hours instead of the 45 minutes I’d expected, I tried to call him to ask him to pick me up.

   We don’t have a phone in our bedroom and Chris doesn’t usually bring his cell phone upstairs, but my work phone is just on the floor below. Moreover, the work phone always sets off Stanley, who howls when we don’t answer the phone within two rings. And when Stanley howls, Paco decides he’d better cry too, and then Mina has to bark to get everyone to shut up. The resulting cacaphony is enough to wake anyone. Or so I thought.

   I called my work phone and his cell phone repeatedly, but Chris was not answering any phone at all. As a last resort, I called the 11-year-old kid down the street who lets the dogs out for us on occasion.

   “Do you think you could knock on our door and tell Chris to call me?” I asked her. “I’ll pay you the same as if you took the dogs out.”

   She hesitated, as if she thought Chris might get mad at her for waking him up.

   “Don’t worry,” I said, “Just tell him that I said to wake him up. But you can’t just ring the bell–keep banging on the door until he gets up!”

   “You don’t have to pay me for that,” she said, a little reluctantly. I could tell it was hurting her to even say it.

   “No, it’s okay,” I assured her. “I’m going to make Chris pay you because I’m mad at him!”

   She agreed, and five minutes later, Chris called my cell phone.

   “You know, there’s not much point in calling my cell phone five times when my cell phone’s downstairs,” he said.

   I tried not to lose my temper. I reminded myself that I had promised to be with this man for better or for worse, even if no one had mentioned in the vows that he would sleep like the dead while the sun beat down on me and tried to give me cancer.

   “Darling,” I said. “I’ve been calling the work phone for half an hour straight now.”

   “You were?” he said.

   “Yes. Didn’t the dogs yell?”

   “Yeah, but they always yell, so I just ignored them.”

   I let that slide. “Did the kid wake you up?”

   “Yup,” he said. “Actually, I heard the bell ring and the dogs yell, and I was going to ignore that too, but she just kept banging on the door until I got up.”

   “I told her to keep knocking on the door,” I said approvingly.

   “She was actually very polite about the whole thing,” he continued. “She said, ‘Did I wake you up?’ and I said, ‘Well, yeah, kinda,’ and she said, ‘Jane told me to wake you up. You need to call her.’”

   “Yeah, you’re going to have to pay her for this visit,” I said.

I stared at the mirror, and tentatively called out, “Chris?” On the one hand, I had to yell loud enough to wake him up. On the other hand, I didn’t want to wake up the dogs. And on the third hand, I still didn’t have that third hand.

There was no response from Chris, so I tried again, a bit louder.

“Chris?”

“Huh-wha!” he yelled suddenly.

I interpreted that correctly as a request for more information.

“Sorry to wake you up, but the mirror fell off the hinge again,” I called up to him. “Do you think you could help me?”

“That’s a good reason to wake me up,” he said agreeably, once again demonstrating one of the many vast differences between us. (Sample response from Jane in similar situation: “Well, why’d you have to wake me up? You couldn’t hold that thing up for four more hours?!”)

He trotted downstairs and past me, returning soon with the screwdriver from the kitchen, which I had put there specifically for those occasions, such as last week when the mirror had again fallen off the hinge, when we couldn’t find his electric screwdriver. (Another of the differences between us — he can’t find his stuff, I can find my stuff, and sometimes I even find his stuff.)

While I held the mirror up, Chris fixed the hinge and I closed the mirrored door carefully. But I made sure to leave the cortisone on the counter. Maybe our counter was getting cluttered, but I wasn’t taking any more chances.

Posted by: ssjane | August 23, 2006 | 11:18 pm
Posted in: This Life