Here Comes the Flood

So here’s how it goes:

I come home from The Company on Friday, all ready to slap on my Tiara of Truth and tell it like it is about the life of the working girl. (And that’s the working girl, not the “working girl”.) As soon as I walk through the front door of my parents’ house, my mother says, “Oh, the basement flooded last night, and a bunch of your boxes got wet. You might want to check them.”

Of course, I instantly go into denial, O’Brien Style. Because the basement can’t possibly have flooded when I had the foresight to call home from work to ask the Ps to go to the basement and check if the sump pump is working. And there’s just no way all of my worldly goods could be sitting in a puddle of water all day long, while I’m obliviously sitting at a desk, slinging invoices and flipping phone lines. How could that happen? It couldn’t happen. Because it just doesn’t make sense.

Unfortunately, my denial only lasts about 12 minutes. And then I start to sob like the world has come to an end. Curiously, Great Big Girl is silent during all of this. Could it be that her powers are neutralized by water? Or just that Irresistible Persuasion Beams cannot, in fact, persuade a flood away? Could floods be her kryptonite?

So I go down to survey the damage, and it is not pretty. And since I really wasn’t supposed to be living at home in the first place, all my stuff had been relegated to the basement, so all the stuff that got destroyed is mine. I know it’s totally gauche to talk money, but we’re talking some serious money. At press time, I’ve lost over a couple thousand dollars worth of books alone, and I’m still working on the mess.

I am devastated. Devastated. So I’m hauling stuff up from the basement and just bawling the big boo-hoo, trying to rescue things but trying even harder not to get more and more upset by each new item I find destroyed by the flood: My hand-written (and only) script for the original version of Body of Knowledge. Hard copies of all the gorgeous e-mails you sent me. The rough-draft scribblings of a poem I wrote for you during a union meeting. Everything I wrote before the age of 24, just a soaking mass of wood pulp and runny ink.

And really, the most important things in my life are all little scraps of paper: the pictures of us trimming the tree back when I was living at Tart Central. My souvenir from that time we went to House on the Rock—a little paper prediction from the Automaton Fortune Teller, warning me to stay away from a dark-haired man who wears a lot of jewelry. The opening-night card you gave me that’s really a 30th anniversary card. The flowchart I drew up to predict your behavior at my Prohibition Party—the one I never gave to you because I was afraid you’d think I was too nerdy and childish. The Queen of Hearts playing cards I randomly find on the ground—always in my immediate path, always the Queen of Hearts, like a sign from the Universe.

Gone.

So I call up Trudie. (Again, it’s really easy—it’s just like Trudy-with-a-y, only you use an “ie” instead.) And I leave an uber-casual message, like I always do when I ring someone up in a panic, only to get hugely embarrassed about my panic once I hit a voice mail recording. Trudie calls me back, and I give her the scoop, and she’s really good about it and lets me rant:

“I just need one Good Thing to happen—just one Good Thing to give me some kind of hope—between the Faculty Job Search and the Living at Home and the Living in the Suburbs and the Being Completely Broke and the Alleged Video Camera in the Ladies’ Toilets at The Company (yeah, more about that later) and now a FLOOD?!?! I just need. One. Good. Thing.”

And while I’m pitching my little fit, I’m also rifling through my rescue piles, and I reach into a bag of performance art supplies (no, really)—in this case, mainly packages of colored tissue paper that have somehow resisted the water. And out of the bag I pull a full-sized Almond Joy candy bar, completely dry and, judging by the date I bought the tissue paper, approximately eight months old.

And yes, I ate it.

Could it be that Hope has a creamy, coconut center?