Onely.Org

Onely Gets Stood Up, Resorts to Machinery June 18, 2012

My mom set us up, so I should have known the date wouldn’t turn out well. To be fair to my mom, I did ask her to find me someone. And when she described Robin over the phone, Robin sounded amazing and I couldn’t wait to meet her. The whole week my stomach filled with happy butterflies I looked forward to Saturday at 2 pm.

Saturday arrives. At 1:50 I move my car so Robin can pull up right in front of house when she arrives. At 1:55 I start to pace by the window. At 2:00 I make sure the ringer on my phone is on in case she tries to call to say she’s running late. By 2:15 I’m pacing faster, in ever more erratic circles. By 2:30 I begin to worry: Do I really want a relationship with this woman if she can’t even call to say she’s running late? Is she a chronic late person? Because I could never be with a chronic late person. My butterflies settle into the pit of my stomach, a soggy cocoon of disappointment.

At 2:45 I call her.  “Oh I’m so sorry,” she says. She doesn’t sound sorry. She sounds distracted. “I’m in Silver Spring.” This is a forty minute drive from me. She says, “I got caught up and didn’t realize the time.”

I’m opening my mouth to tell her not to bother coming now, when she says, “My longtime client had a fire in her nursing home and I’m trying to clean that up. Smoke damage. Can we reschedule our consultation?”

“Oh,” I say. “That’s too bad. Of course we can.” But I’m really thinking, Oh, the old fire-in-the-nursing-home-excuse. What about *my* estimate for a vacuuming job? What about the tumblefurs flying across my hardwood floors, clinging to the feet of my chairs, and sticking to my newly-moisturized face?

Robin lives in my neighborhood, so she says, “I’ll be home around six. Call me tonight and I’ll come over and give you an estimate for your vaccuuming.” She seems unfazed about having missed our 2pm date, and I wonder whether she would have even called me if I hadn’t called her first. That’s how it always is for me in relationships–I give, give, give and the other person takes, takes, takes. I curl up for a nap and rock myself to sleep through the tears.

At 7pm I wake up and call Robin. When her machine picks up I try to sound breezy, as if I don’t need her desperately. “Hi Robin, it’s Christina. Just wanted to see if you were around to come over and give me that estimate for vaccuming services.” I repeat my number twice, and then I wait.

Copious Readers, she didn’t call. Not that night, not the next, not the next.

As I slumped around my house I occasionally picked up one of the slower tumblefurs and rolled it between my fingers into a hard little hairball. I discovered if I did this enough times I could clean up at least one of my Afghani throw rugs, but the overall effect was still not quite the same as with a vacuum.

Then one day my neighbor said, “You know, you could just get one of those hand-held devices.”

“You mean. . . ” I looked at her, aghast. “You mean I should just vaccuum by myself?”

“It’s not a big deal,” she said. “I use mine all the time. It has a whirly brush.”

Partly because my neighbor recommended it, and partly as a snub to Robin (wherever and whomever she was cleaning nowadays) I went and bought my own handheld vaccum with a whirly brush. It was love at first suck.

As fate would have it, Robin called the next day. I let my machine pick up. “Hi Christina,” she said, breezy. “Just wanted to see when you could schedule that consultation for the estimate.” She wasn’t fake-breezy like me, but actual breezy, as if she were totally unaware of all the hurt that had passed between us. “I’m free today so if you call me I can swing by.”

As if she just expects me to be free because she is, I thought. I hugged my new love to my chest and turned away from the phone.

Lessons learned:

1) The emotionally rich and educational dramas we attribute solely to romantic relationships can actually also be found in everyday life.

2) You can score in the 99th %ile on your verbal SATs and still not be able to f&*king spell vaccuum.

–Christina

Photo credit: efectoembudo