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closet smell like the latrines at camp?” And she was right — it was beginning to smell like that. And her bathroom tact reminded me that the second floor bathroom is right above the closet and made me wonder about the plumbing. I started to remove tiles in the basement ceiling to check for any leakage. There was no leakage and no smell. In fact, the main waste pipe looked quite clean, its lead solder still shining like silver. But if it isn’t the plumbing, I thought, it must be something else in the walls. And coming to this conclusion, off I went to the Township Engineer’s office to look for our house plans. Ours is a Township Building where everyone just has to know your business and anything pertaining to house plans means an opportunity to raise your real estate taxes. “House plans?" someone asked. “Are you planning an addition?” “Oh, no," I replied. “Something just smells funny.” “A bad odor?” the office clerk with an Edgar Allen Poe look in his eyes. As he put down the newspaper he had been reading, I saw the front page headline — BODY FOUND IN CELLAR. "We have to send an inspector to check it out,” he said. My total embarrassment was now tinted with fear. Not only was I going to get our taxes raised, but I might be investigated for murder. The day after my visit to the Township office, the inspector came with a clip board in hand, ready to snoop and sniff around the house. His luck was as good as mine. He found nothing inside the house and began to inspect outside. He was poking around the front entrance, looking behind the low bushes near the front steps, knocking on the wooden wall paneling that framed the doorway. "Nice house,” he said. “They don’t make entrance ways like this anymore.” Oh, great, I thought Up goes the real estate tax and the place stinks. Then he saw the hole, right by the cornerstone of the front steps. It was a deep hole, and wide — about five inches in diameter. “O.K.,” he said “Something got in here and when it got into the house, it died.” The possum, I thought to myself. It’s still a body, but at last they can’t prosecute me for the murder of a possum. When my husband came home that night, I told him about the possum in the closet wall. He was not a friend to the possum. In fact, he had threatened to kill it for eating up his whole cabbage patch the previous fall. But this closet business was weird to him. I opened the closet door and asked him to smell for himself. Then I told him that the building inspector had instructed me to take down the closet wall and remove the possum. My husband thundered. “The building inspector! Do you want them to raise our taxes!" I tried to calm him down by reassuring him that nothing had been said about taxes, only that we need to remove the dead pos sum before it became a health hazard. My husband was silent, breathing through his nostrils like a dragon. Before going to bed that night he broke the silence only once. “Like I have nothing better to do but clean your closet — a dead possum, take down the wall indeed.” The Sweet had fallen out of my Home Sweet Home. The next day, Saturday, I addressed the wall remo val project all by myself as my husband looked on. Being short, I had a special system of storing things in that closet — items which I used most Were stored on the lower shelves; the least used items were stored on the very high top shelves. I used the same system in removing everything from the closet. As I worked, my husband watched, beginning to realize that I was serious about taking down the closet wall. It would come down by means of a hammer and crowbar that very morning. There would be plaster board rubble all over the hall by the afternoon. His dragon breathing grew louder, ready to turn to flame. He raised his hands in the air as if pray ing for Divine intervention to stop the wall from coming down. I was now on the step ladder, reaching for the soup tureen which was on the very top shelf, wondering why I kept things I hardly ever used. And as I lifted the lid of the tureen, the smell almost knocked me off the ladder. The skeleton in the closet was the Thanksgiving Day mushrooms or what used to be mushrooms. “The wall, the wall,” I heard my husband bellow. “She was going to take down the ****** wall.” He stood in the center of the hall with a look that erased forever the GOOD HOUSEKEEPING SEAL OF APPROVAL I had earned over the last thirty-five years. I took the tureen out to the back yard and rinsed it with a hose. I then poured into it a gallon of bleach, knowing I was going to throw it out, but determined that it would be clean when I threw it out. I was destroyed, a homemaker no more, and if my husband said “wall” or “mushrooms” one more time I would leave him forever. That night I called my daugh ter for some pity and it was my daughter who saved my life and restored my selj-esteem. My darling daughter, who nonchalantly explained her role in the destruction of my domestic pride. “Oh, the tureen” she said. “Remember you had help for that party, that new girl from so and so service. She asked me where to put the tureen and I told her — the top shelf of the closet.” 24 ’’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ЧЕРВЕНЬ 1996 Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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