In The Terrible Cold

Yesterday, when it was still raining, before the terrible cold and frost blew over Ohio, I had Serendipity towed to a mechanic.

The Lost Girl‘s uncle couldn’t come and fix the car anyway, because they all came down with that terrible influenza strain that was going around, but a friend sent money for a tow. I hoped it would just take a few hours, but they said the car needed a battery as well as an alternator and it was going to have to be there overnight.

That night, the cold came in.

I went to bed after comforting the Lost Girl in a text message, because her mother was in the hospital on oxygen. Her flu was so severe, they were going to put her in an induced coma in the morning if she didn’t improve. Meanwhile, her children were all sick and lethargic in that tiny rowhouse. She herself was throwing up. She hadn’t even bought Christmas dinner yet. I tried to tell her that everything would be all right somehow, even if Christmas couldn’t happen until the next week. Then I put away my phone and went to sleep.

I woke up several times as the windstorm shook our drafty house, rattling the windows and rippling the plastic we’d stapled over the gaps in the frames. It sounded like I was in the hold of a sailing ship, creaking and rocking its way across the Atlantic. At some point, Adrienne got in bed with me and covered us both with the electric blanket and then a fluffy comforter. At some point, I heard the chunk chunk chunk of Michael sticking plastic over another drafty place with the stapler. I didn’t sleep deeply.

In the morning, the whole world was glare white and bone dry.  Adrienne was nested in a tight roll of quilts. Michael came in and ripped the ancient, broken Venetian blind off the window near the bed. We keep those blinds perpetually closed, because of the stalking neighbor, but she hasn’t bothered us in months. As he was unrolling and cutting the heavy duty plastic sheet from the hardware store, to staple over the window frame for drafts, I gazed at the mosaic of feathery ice covering the glass. It looked like a work of art.

I got on my phone, and found the temperature was negative one.

Holly the Witch had posted photos of her beautiful chickens, locked in the garage with straw and a warm brooder plate, puffed up against the cold. She posted a video of her cat, Mister Moon, yowling to go out and then running right back in. And then she posted that internet was out due to the storm, and that electricity was down through most of her neighborhood, and got off her phone to save data.

I felt more alone than ever, just knowing that friends couldn’t get online.

The temperature went down to negative five, and stayed there.

With the heat turned up to 75, the house remained chilly. We put on two layers of socks and cuddled under blankets. The guinea pig sulked in his terrycloth warming tent, barely sticking his head out to eat. I worried about how I’d pick up the car and finish paying for it. Last I knew, not only was the alternator dead, the battery was totally drained and both would need a replacement. I worried that he would say that he couldn’t keep the car over Christmas for me, if I couldn’t go out in the sub-zero temperatures and retrieve it. I didn’t think to worry about anything else.

Finally, the phone rang. It was the mechanic.

He did not say we could pick up the car and quote us the final price.

Instead, he asked how long we’d been driving it, and if we bought it from a dealership or a friend.

I said we got it in PA, and we’d been driving it for almost exactly two months. I’d just paid the sales tax on it and gotten the real metal plate.

He asked if we had had any problems with it prior to this.

I said the accelerator was loud and every once in awhile I thought I smelled exhaust coming through the vents.

He said that Serendipity had significant issues they couldn’t fix. Yes, the battery was totally drained and the alternator was dead, but it also had a “junkyard motor” and botched wiring that was all totally melted and fused. For all they knew there was more, but that’s what they found when they tried to put in the alternator. It would need careful work from a real dealer before I could drive it. “Maybe your insurance can help.”

I only have basic coverage insurance. It was all we could afford.

I asked if he’d be open tomorrow, and he said he would. I said I’d figure out where to tow the car next and call him then.

A bone-chilling wind rattled the house from one end to the other.

I opened the door to get a comically long package off the porch: a fishing pole someone had sent, as a gift for Adrienne.

How are we going to use a fishing pole if we can’t drive to the lake?

I put it upstairs with the new guinea pig cage we’re wrapping. A friend rushed it to us, when she heard we’re saving up to get a companion for Lady McFluff from a guinea pig rescue. Adrienne is going to be thrilled when she sees it. She wants a second guinea pig more than anything else. She would rather spoil Lady McFluff and pamper a new pig, then have presents for herself.

The guinea pig rescue is two hours away. How are we going to get a companion for the guinea pig if we can’t drive there?

How am I going to get away to visit dear friends in Columbus or go for a hike in the woods or go for a long drive to clear my head without a car?

What are my mother who hates me and my grandmother who disowned me for being a bad Catholic and my pestering Aunt Tyrant going to say, when they find out I got cheated by a used car dealer and bought a piece of junk twice in three years? Two black Nissans the same age, both of them garbage? They’re going to laugh. They’re going to say it just goes to show that “Mare” with her funny brain disorder is as helpless as they thought I was. I lose, they win. I’m a failure.

Why does every panic attack always crescendo with wondering what people who hate me would say?

Why do the self-loathing voices that antagonize me always bring up people who will never, ever see me as anything but an embarrassment? The aunt who informed me “know you’re loved, we love you, there’s always a place for you in Hagerstown” while in the same communication berating and mocking me, taunting me that the help they’re sending will be withdrawn at their whim without warning? The mother who called me “r*t*rded” and “autistic” as a pejorative and mocked me for my weight until I was bent over a toilet hating myself that my hand was too puffy to properly fit down my throat? Why are they the demons who dance in the frozen ninth layer of hell, when my mind drags me there? Why them and nobody else?

The wind blew a gust so severe, I thought it would break the windows.

I took a hot bath to try to get warm, but the house was so cold that I just got a chill.

The Lost Girl sent me a Facebook message, offering to have Serendipity towed to her house for the time being. She has to be out by mid-January or they evict, but I can use the parking space until then. She said that mechanics sometimes exaggerate to get more money, and I shouldn’t give up hope. Maybe her uncle could put in the used alternator and a new set of wires and see if it would run.

She is always trying to help. She is a kind person. She’d like to go to nursing school if she can get her GED, so she can help people for a living and provide for her children.

I can relate to that. All I ever wanted was to help people.

Deep below the Catholic guilt and the apocalyptic terror, all I really wanted was to find a way to live a normal life and be reasonably comfortable and help other people be normal and reasonably comfortable at the same time. I wanted to find a community of people who all regarded their good as my good and mine as theirs, helping each other, loving each other, praying together. That’s what Christianity is supposed to be. That’s what a family is supposed to be. That’s what love is supposed to be.

All I wanted was to be loved.

Somehow life got in the way, and I became Mary Pezzulo instead.

All I can think is that I don’t know what to do next.

All I can think of is the Holy Family journeying to Bethlehem, loved by no one, in the freezing cold of a desert winter, at the worst possible time.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.