I bought a drill, my own drill, and now I am unstoppable.
Unstoppable, Manning? Because you have a cordless drill?
Yes.
And so now you have to flip off the whole world?
Aw, hell, it’s nothing personal but, yeah, I kind of do somehow. My very deepest-down insides are all, FUCK YOU, WORLD, and I absolutely delight in the fact that the thing is fully charged when I take it out of the box. What a beautiful whir it makes when I depress the trigger! I feel like a million self-sufficient bucks, and it takes me back a few years to when I first moved out of the big house–
The big house.
The big house is my name for the house I owned with Ex for about 15 years. He doesn’t like that I call it that, but here’s my first memory of that place: sitting with him on the hardwood floor of the open front room — two expansive rooms in one, really — getting all giddy about the possibility of, together, becoming homeowners for the first time. There was no furniture, just sunlight streaming in the windows and dancing from wall to wall, lilting from the planks of the hardwood floor to the high ceiling. We sat where we imagined we’d put a couch one day, and our view out the window opposite was of treetops. We sat right next to each other even though there was all this airy space, and everything felt so goddamn big that our hearts were full to bursting.
And sure enough. We already had two kids when we moved in; we had two more by 2004, making us a family of six. Over the years we had good friends live with us when they needed a place to stay — whole families, sometimes, for months at a time. Our best friends and our kids’ best friends were always welcome, we never even locked the door. We hosted — well, actually, “hosting” sounds weird. We embraced parties; celebrations seemed to spring up organically at the big house. Not Martha Stewart-y parties, but chaotic, messy affairs with lots of food and lots of drink and lots of music.
Music. There were guitars everywhere — Ex played and so did my bro and eventually so did #1 son and his best friend. (I tried but was outdone by a trillion miles.) There were amps and mics and songbooks and a piano nobody really played. Eventually there was even a drum kit in the living room.
So see? It was big. It was wonderfully big in so many ways.
Maybe Ex thinks “big house” is code for how I came to feel so confined there, and maybe that not-so-subtle other meaning is something I need to dull the sting of giving up/losing that home of mine. But still. “Big house” is too accurate of a name for me to call it anything else, and so…
Anyway. Brandishing my new drill brings me back to when I first moved out of the big house, when I borrowed Ex’s drill (borrowed? wasn’t it, and everything else I left behind there, half mine?) and — by myself — hung this million-pound mirror in the little upstairs bedroom of the small cottage my mom and I would be renting together for a while.
~~~~~
It was last Sunday that I bought my new drill, a Hitachi DS18DSAL, and just holding it in my hand made me feel fiercely capable, the same way I feel when my backpack is loaded with everything I need and I’m about to shut down my phone and head into the backcountry all by myself. Good, good, good, right? But I was nervous, too, because I’d gotten busy on Chair #2 the day before and quickly run into a problem. The wood was falling apart, splintered more than Chair #1, and while some of the joints came apart easily, the bolts holding the arms to the legs of the seat were stuck fast.
My plan was to force a bit into the head of the bolt and reverse drill it out. Like the guy in the YouTube video had done with a bit and an extension and a ratcheting socket wrench.
But what happened when I tried that? I stripped the goddamn bolt, of course. I stripped the fucking bolt. And then maybe I panicked a little, and in my stupid, impatient, pathetic desperation to get the goddamn chair apart I thought, Ooh, what if I just rotate the whole side of the chair? The leverage will turn that stupid rusty bolt, right? Right?
And I found myself turning it before I could even answer my own question. Found myself bracing the body of the chair with my feet and turning the side of the chair, thinking that would unscrew the bolt, daring to hope but oh, god!
I should have imagined, maybe, that this might happen, but I didn’t: the piece it was screwed into, the side piece of the seat, began to crack. The sound was sickening — it made me want to throw up, or cry, or both — and yet I kept turning, in short, sharp bursts. With one hand I held the wood of the seat-piece together where it was cracking, and with the other I made a few last, futile attempts.
And then I went limp. Slumped there on the floor of the deck, I wiped my sweaty, dirty brow with the back of my hand and absorbed the defeat. It was already mid-afternoon, and I had plans for the afternoon/evening/night, which meant I needed to shower and get my ass out the door.
The shower. Where I do way too much thinking all the fucking time. And so I left poor Chair #2 and stripped naked and turned the water on full blast and stepped into the tub.
Fail. Fail. Fail.
Fuck everyone, I thought. Fuck me.
Maybe I should have wondered who could advise me, who might help. A or Badore or my bro or my brilliant engineer sister-in-law or my fucking amazing rocket scientist (ish) wife-if-I-were-a-lesbian. But no. Like most of my life fails it just made me want to shut out everyone and/or run away to the mountains. Kick things. Abandon shit. Set out alone and fail and fail and fail and fail but survive.
And I thought of Hayduke, of course, because at times like this I always do. Hayduke and canyons and deserts and being thirsty and hungry and hot and cold and filthy but surviving. Hayduke and also beds, beds as big as oceans. That bed in that hotel room in SoCal that I hate, its crisp white sheets all tightly tucked. That generic hallway, geometric pattern of the carpet and the loneliness of the goddamn elevator. Book club that one time in that lame chain restaurant next to the dumb hotel, Kazantzakis and McCarthy and that married guy who likes poetry.
Beds as big as oceans, they’re so stupid. I want my tiny tent and a solo journey into the wilderness.
My Tiny Tent, big enough for EXACTLY ONLY ME.
Why does that make me want to cry fierce hot tears? I love my tiny tent. I love carrying it and setting it up and sleeping in it under the stars out in the middle of this beautiful universe and tearing it down at sunrise and continuing on, solo. Love, truly love. So what is there to be sad about?
Its antithesis / this big bed and he says can you scooch over a little? And I don’t know why or how but suddenly I’m on the far edge of the bed, a million miles away. I hang an arm over the edge, dangle a foot. And I hate this but it’s undeniable: not-touching reminds me of Joe, of the heartrending contrast between nights when we’d sleep all night in each others’ arms, deeply and well — and nights when Joe wasn’t touching me. Because when Joe wasn’t touching me, it was with full intent. It was punishment doled out with icy precision.
“Goodnight, Karen,” he’d say.
His ex-wife’s name.
And he’d sleep like a baby freshly sated while I lay awake burning, staring wild-eyed at the ceiling and saying to myself, Just leave, Bethy, just go home.
But I never did.
Whereas, Ex.
Those years, the waning years. I wouldn’t say it was a roller coaster, because the highs and lows weren’t split-second thrills, they were long, slow, bone-deep goodness and then also long, slow, bone-deep depletion, often overlapping.
There was so much unspoken.
But when our bed felt ocean-big, when we were at odds or out of sync, when I felt on the brink of knowing we’d never be whole again, sometimes I’d manage, just barely, to say, Can you just put a hand on me?
And he would.
He would.
He always would.
On my bare shoulder or my back or my hip, he would lay a hand on me, and every time, every time, I would feel comforted and grateful and profoundly bound. Which was sometimes a happy feeling and sometimes so bittersweet I wanted to die.
His hands, they were an exact, particular size I still know.
And he wore his wedding band for months after I’d stopped wearing mine.
When I asked him to put a hand on me and he did, sometimes I’d just want to sink into the ground and be forever buried under cool, fragrant soil — me in those ages old baggy plaid pajama pants he absolutely hated.
He wasn’t perfect by any stretch and I’m not saying everything was my fault, but fuck me, you guys, in some ways I was a real asshole.
I never meant to be, and he thinks I’m not sorry but I am.
God. I never would have imagined that at FORTY-FUCKING-EIGHT I’d have so much left to figure out. But look at me, wanting nothing from anyone and then again wanting the fucking world. Look at me brandishing my drill and flipping everyone off and drinking hard and asking for more than my fair share of love. Look at me stripping screws in my impatience and making the wood crack and leaving it all for another day, too fucking stubborn to give up but too lost to figure out the best, right way and just do it.
Sometimes I think I need a horse and a border to cross, but I’m not sure. Sometimes I think I need Billy Parham or a certain sort of Jesus Christ.
But the things I know I need, the things I’m sure of, they’re pretty fucking simple.
I need my kids like I need air.
I need some penetrating oil, and maybe a screw extractor, and some solid sunshine to renew my diligence.
I need cold water on my bedside table, and I need to hear my own, whole name.
And sometimes I need my tiny tent.
And sometimes I need a hand on me.
Philosophy of Rebuilding 
Thank you
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