For once, Helen had no plans. This Saturday, there were no appointments, no dates with friends, no visiting relatives. She could, finally, fill the day with back-burner projects and domestic to-dos.

She got up early, ate her raisin bran and fed the turtles. She watched them gobble their pellets as she considered her tasks.

Her rented house was a steal — less than a thousand for the whole summer — but it needed some help. Though cozy, it had the air of a place inhabited by distracted, pushed people. Indeed, the owner, Lisa, inherited the house too early from her mother who’d recently succumbed to lung cancer. Lisa fled to a seasonal job on Martha’s Vineyard soon after the funeral, leaving an empty house perfectly suited for Helen’s needs.

But here was the kitchen. Its cabinets were splattered with years of grime, the refrigerator was full of food gone bad, and the counters were covered with the debris of neglect: broken rubber bands, spilled flower pots, yellowed junk mail.

As soon as Helen’d seen it, she’d been itching to attack it.







“Here are the keys to the cellar,” Lisa had told her the day she went to the Vineyard. She pushed a lanyard into Helen’s hands and flew across the room, throwing things into boxes and bags. “Stack the mail in the hall and try to remember to water the jade,” she added.

“Ok” Helen said, self-consciously useless in the frenzy.

Lisa threw the last duffle into her Jetta. She turned to the driver’s seat and climbed in.

“Lisa?” Helen asked.

Lisa stopped. “Yeah?”

“Should I clean at all?”

A pause.

“Clean?” Lisa asked, incredulous. “Clean what?”

“Oh I don’t know… I thought it might help you out if I sorted through the kitchen or maybe the den. You know, so you won’t have to do it when you get back.”

“Oh,” Lisa said, puzzled. Why would anyone ask that? “Yeah, sure, knock yourself out.”

She shut the car door, waved, and reversed.

Yesss, Helen thought. That was all the permission she needed.





It was the summer of playing house. Three weeks ago, she’d been finishing up the semester, clueless about where to go or what to do after her last final. But, thanks to a series of very fortunate events, she lined up an internship, connected with Lisa, and found a used car in the course of three days. Now, she was living a typical (if temporary) suburban life: commuting to the city and coming back to her little house every night. Oh, and the house was 10 minutes away from the house where Jackie, her girlfriend, lived.

It all made her very happy. For a nineteen-year-old, she was exceptionally content with the routine and pace of adult life. Binge drinking didn’t really do it for her, but running errands kind of did. And now she had a whole house to herself, one that needed care and attention, which she was happy to give.





She began with the cabinets, rearranging cookware and sweeping out debris. She found broken egg beaters, torn Tupperware and moldy cupcake papers. She fed it all to a fattened trash bag, anchored to the middle of the linoleum floor. When the cabinets were done, she started on the counters, finding sugar jars and teapots underneath the months (or years?) of collected refuse. Junk, junk, save, junk, drawer, junk, junk, she thought to herself, happily restoring the room back to order.

She was in the middle of hosing down the refrigerator’s drawers in the driveway when she heard a car pull up. A red S.U.V.: Jackie. Turning off the spigot, she walked up to her girlfriend’s window.

“You look busy,” Jackie said with a grin, taking in Helen’s chore uniform.

“I am! You should see the kitchen. And I’m not even done yet,” she answered.

Jackie climbed down from the driver’s seat and they walked up to the house. They climbed up the concrete stairs. Jackie’s Keds scraped the pavement. A pebble flew into the hedge. As Helen watched it go, she blinked and her eyes stayed shut.

This was their house. They’re returning from an errand. Tonight she’ll make dinner. There are curtains and couches and a cat or two aching to be cared for just inside. It was for them. Their house.

She faltered as the passing thought escaped her; a step tripped her.

“You alright?” Jackie asked, scooping up Helen’s elbow.

She looked ahead.

“Yeah, yeah I’m fine. Probably just hungry,” she said, recovering.

They walked into the shade of the porch and through the door.

The kitchen, almost tidy, lay before them. Jackie inspected Helen’s handiwork.

“Look at you, being all domestic,” she said, giving Helen a nudge and a kiss as she took in the room. “It’s way better than the last time I saw it, that’s for sure.”

Pleased, Helen started back in on her project, tying off a garbage bag and beginning again on the refrigerator.





“So, no farm today?” she asked; most days, Jackie manned a register at a farmstand.

“Nah, they let me off. They got some cousins or nieces to cover or something like that. Anyways, no work for me,” she said, reaching over Helen’s head for some lemonade. “This good?” she asked.

“Yeah. I already threw out the bad stuff,” Helen said.

Jackie took a seat on a stool at the kitchen island. Helen watched her watch the turtles swim around. Jackie sipped her lemonade and smiled. The door to the back porch let a gust of summer scent into the kitchen. The distant sound of cicadas mixed with the rumble of a neighbor bothering with a lawnmower.

“Perfect day, huh,” Helen said.

“Yeah, it really is. Too bad I spent a lot of it sitting in front of my computer,” she said, bothered.

“What was so interesting on your computer?” Helen asked, returning to her scrubbing.

“To be honest, I kind of got sucked into this essay about the whole bank thing” Jackie said. “Weird, right?”

Helen paused. “Bank thing? What do you mean? Like those banks that closed? Frannie something?”

“Frannie Mae and Freddie Mac?” Jackie said with a laugh. “You know, for a journalism student, you don’t know much about what’s going on.”

“Hey, it’s the summer, ok? Can’t I have a few months in my little house where I don’t have to read blogs every day?” she asked, smiling. Jackie was right though: she’d fallen way behind on news.

“Yeah, yeah. Well anyways, this essay — I guess it was a column? — was actually talking about the housing market and loans. Well, more like people and their houses,” she said, getting into her storytelling mode.

“What do you mean? You said it was about the banks,” Helen asked, closing the refrigerator and starting on the windows.

“Well, yeah, but that’s the whole thing. I mean, that’s why the banks are failing. ‘Cause they were giving out all these really bad loans to people for houses they couldn’t afford. And it totally backfired,” she said.

“Oh. Oh, I didn’t really know that’s what the problem was,” she said. “It couldn’t have been just that though, right?”

“Well, I mean, it sounds like that was a big part of it. This guy who wrote the column says that the housing market is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. And apparently it’s getting really hard for people to get mortgage loans,” she said. “In any case, it doesn’t look good at all. He said this could be like…Depression-level bad pretty soon.”

Helen considered it. She sprayed cleaner on her rag and brought it to the grimy window. She wiped carefully left to right, leaving no streaks or bubbles. Depression? she thought. How could there be another Depression? Didn’t they safeguard against all that?

The clean window let more clear afternoon light in. The newly-clean sink shown in it’s beam and the yellow counter reflected Helen’s mood.

“Sounds depressing.” Helen said, turning around towards Jackie again. “Wanna make dinner tonight? I was thinking chicken and pasta. Hell, I’ve got a clean stove, we might as well use it,” she said.

“Yeah, I don’t think my parents will mind,” Jackie said. “Let’s play house.”

In a major deviation from my usual Saturday night routine, I found myself at a Dave Matthews Band concert at Shea Stadium. As a casual DMB fan (if those exist), I never thought I’d be part of the oft-mocked throngs of young men and old stoners who venture to these things. But, the tickets were free and, well, Shea has a Shake Shack.

In any case, I kind of loved it. The music wasn’t spectacular and the weather was way out of line for an outdoor venue, but what I couldn’t get enough of was the bros. Oh man! I started a plaid short count and completely lost track. Ditto for popped-collar polos.

But when the lights came down, I totally lost the ability to snark. Why? Because those bros were jamming.

Perhaps I should have expected this from the audience of one of the Great Jam Bands of Our Time. But what I didn’t expect was the level of into-it-ness these frat boys achieved. As soon as the music started, they didn’t just go for the obligatory swaying and grooving. No —these bros went nuts. I spent much of the concert watching a particularly fervent bro dance wildly in the middle of the aisle, oblivious to anyone around him, singing every single goddamn word, not matter how obscure the song. By the end of the set, his polo and plaid shorts were soaked through by his own joyful bro sweat.

Pleasantly jammed by osmosis, I went home from the concert content and didn’t think much about it for several days.

But then I saw Christina Aguilera’s newest single.

Damn you, Xtina, for forcing me to overanalyze!

Here goes: For those who haven’t seen or heard this video/song, titled “I’m Not Myself Tonight,” don’t bother; it’s a cheap knock-off of Madonna, Lady Gaga and Christina Aguilera circa 2002. But the basics are: Aguilera sings that she is “not herself tonight” and that she’s “not the same girl.” The “girl” she’s talking about here, I assume, is the girl she usually is in normal life …at a lame office job, perhaps. But in the song, she is not boring or lame. No sir. She is a sex kitten! (And in the video, an S&M sex kitten!)

Whatever. Regardless of Aguilera’s artistic choices, one thing is for sure: These lyrics will do splendidly to encourage lots of women to go “totally KRA-ZAY” at nightclubs for the next few months.

Though this thought makes the insufferable Liz Lemon part of me go into rant mode for lots of reasons, the idea mostly makes me sad. What gets to me is that this song implies, as many pop songs do, that people need a song/nightclub/outfit/whatever to get themselves loosened up. In short, they need to not be themselves tonight.

I know that people need to have fun. As a certified poor person who works too much, I often find myself in serious need of repair on my one day off. For me, it usually involves Netflix, spooning, some tortellini, or all three. For a lot of people, it means going kra-zay.

So I suppose that’s why I loved the DMB bros. They were out on a Saturday night going nuts like a million other people. But what made it fantastic to see was that they were exactly themselves. In fact, they were so much themselves that it almost hurt to watch. They pumped their fists, ignored their less-into-it girlfriends and danced so hard they dropped their Solo cups.

I think that if Christina Aguilera were on their radar, they wouldn’t get her new song. I think they’d toss it off as girl-speak and continue jamming. Which is probably what we should all do.

So here’s to you, bros. Thanks for letting me look in on your moment of bliss. And thanks for being yourselves tonight.

[Written for Alvin's Writing Club. Week one. Theme: "repair"]