Darin just left. Deirdre and Greg went downstairs to the Mercedes to wait for him, leaving us a chance to say goodbye. I'd been feeling increasingly sad as the weekend ticked by, but I finally burst into tears right then. Darin and I went into the bedroom -- the only room so far to have comfortable furniture in it -- and sat down. He held me for a while and reassured me that everything was going to be okay, not that that was going to do any good. I'm much more scared than I realized. I can't just say "Fuck it" and go home now, because at the very least home is several hours away.
Most people go through this at eighteen. It doesn't get any easier with age. It may get harder, because you know better. You have a life that you've invested in that you're leaving.
Darin waved to me as he walked out of the building towards the car. He was smiling. I think he was doing that because to do anything else would have me strapping myself to the roof of the car and begging to go home with him. "I'll probably call you before we get home," he said.
If I ever had any doubts that my stomach troubles are somehow related to stress, they've been dispelled. As soon as Darin reached the car and said, "Okay, time to go," I started retching and heaving. Even now I can't seem to stop. This next week is going to be the hardest, I think.
The U-Haul corporation has a really unfortunate slogan -- "Adventure in Moving." If there is one time in your life you absolutely, positively do not want an adventure, it's when you're moving.
Deirdre left a message on the answering machine, asking what time they were coming back on Sunday, because she and Greg had "to run a few errands." I remember thinking this was weird, because what kind of errands can you run on a Sunday? I called her back and she said that Greg's sister had invited them to dinner and would they be back in time for dinner?
Why a little warning flag didn't go off right then, I don't know. Probably because she said "Dinner" and not a specific time.
I said, "That'll probably be okay."
I invited a whole bunch of people over Thursday night for a little going-away party consisting of them watching The Manchurian Candidate and Deirdre and me packing. (Exciting, I know.) I actually most everything packed or at least near the box it was travelling in. However, I tend to toss everything in, shut the lid, sit on the case, and then lock it, hoping it doesn't explode.
In retrospect, having a whole bunch of people over was a mistake. I was running around trying to get ready to move and there were a hundred and three or so people in the living room having a good time. Darin, of course, acting as gregarious host. He asked me later on why I had invited our friends over; as with so many other things I've been doing of late -- like moving to LA -- it seemed like a good idea at the time.
One nice thing with having ten extra people around was that there were that many people to carry my boxes and cases out of the house and down to the two cars we were taking to LA. So everything was ready to go early on.
I couldn't sleep. I woke up early.
So did Darin, Deirdre, and Greg actually. We would have been on the road extra-early except we decided to stop at the Pancake Place for breakfast. Still, we made it from San Jose to LA in less than six hours, including two stops and without violating the speed limit by more than five miles an hour.
I knocked on the manager's door at 3pm, ready to sign all the papers and do the walk-through. Darin and I had called Fernando from the car phone and he met us at the apartment complex. He spirited Darin away to buy a bed for the apartment. The paper signing took longer than I planned because I needed a cashier's cheque for the first and deposit instead of being able to write a cheque. So I had to go find a branch of my bank, wait in line -- a looooooong line -- and get back.
Once everything was done there, Deirdre and Greg and I unloaded the cars and brought everything up to the apartment using some supermarket carts that were in the garage. After that we drove around looking for a Circuit City, which we found in downtown Burbank. I bought a TV (20-inch) and a refrigerator (white). Pretty exciting stuff. Then we went to Orchard Supply (ooooo) and I got a couple of lamps and copies of my apartment keys.
Once we were back in the apartment the three of us decided we were really hungry and we were wondering what happened to Darin and Fernando. A few minutes later Darin called from Fernando's car: they were coming back from dinner! They got to the apartment and the five of us headed out in Darin's car to the Gaucho Grill, where Deirdre, Greg, and I ate and the other two had drinks.
Fernando's wife, Nancy, was feeling a little sick, but she said yes when Fernando called and asked if the four of us could stay at their house that night. So we packed up the bare necessities at the apartment and went to Fernando's house. Deirdre and Greg got the guest room, I got the couch, and Darin got the bed chair, which was shorter but much wider than the couch. Darin could have slept on either, but I can fall asleep only when I'm on my back with my arms by my sides, whereas Darin could probably sleep in the lotus position while sitting on a bed nails and Chinese gongs sounded off around him. So I stretched out on the couch, whereas Darin curled up on the bed chair with Blackie the cat.
We all woke up incredibly early and left Fernando and Nancy's house. Deirdre wanted to go to Starbucks so I went to the only one I knew of, which was on Riverside in Burbank. Then we raced back to the apartment to wait for the Cable Guy.
When Greg left to get the maps from the car and Darin was still in the bathroom, Deirdre turned to me and said, "You know, Greg and I don't get paid when we take off time for work, and we helped you get everything down here and move in, and the least you could have done is buy dinner for us last night. I guess I was hurt. No, I definitely was hurt."
Welcome to Diane's neuroses: I had no idea what to say. Something sure bothered me about that, but I couldn't put what I thought into words.
So I said, "Okay," turned away, and went back to what I was doing.
Greg returned with the maps and they went over their trip for the day, which involved driving (my car) over to Venice Beach and (possibly) meeting up with one of Greg's friends. They took off.
Darin and I went out to run errands, like return one of the torchiere lamps to Orchard Supply and do some furniture shopping at IKEA. I told Darin about what Deirdre said as we were driving to downtown Burbank.
He went Defcon 4.
Which is probably why Deirdre didn't say it in front of him.
"She said that? Jesus, what is this, all about her? First, she wants to take the Mercedes because it's more comfortable. Then we're supposed to leave early on Sunday so that they can get back here in time for dinner. She got the bed last night. Did you mention to her that we had friends who were willing to come down here and help out and didn't ask what they'd get for it?"
(Which is true: Rob and Laura asked if we needed them to come down Saturday with a shipment of stuff.)
We shopped at IKEA, which is evidently Swedish for "impulse buy." If you have never been to IKEA, you owe it to yourself to try it. You follow a one-way path through various furniture displays and you either mark down where the item is located, or you find a checker and get a slip saying you want this item. Then you get to the ground level, where you went through lots and lots of displays of knick-knacks and household items that you might just want to pick up -- I got wastebaskets and a lamp for the bedroom -- before getting to the warehouse storage of the objects you marked down before.
It's pretty wild.
I got a dining room table, 4 chairs, a table to use as a desk, a TV table, and the other stuff I picked up as we were working our way to the cashier.
We loaded up the car with everything except the box containing the dining room table, went back to the apartment and started assembling. Sweaty work.
Midway through, Darin took a break to go get us some lunch, and I let the guys who were delivering the bed in. They set it up quickly and I was putting the sheets on when Darin walked in with our lunch. He asked if I liked the bed, and I said, Yes, definitely. It's big and comfy -- the nicest bed I've had in a long time. There's this new style of bed these days that has padding sewn on to both sides of the mattress, so the bed stands really high. "Any higher and I'll need a springboard to do a flip into it," I said.
After putting together more furniture, we called it quits and went over to The Boys. The Boys are Darin's friends from college who still live in a house together, playing video games and doing computer tech stuff. Darin likes hanging out at their place, and so do I, mostly because they have computers all over the place and I can play to my heart's content. We left a note for Deirdre and Greg on the TV before leaving.
Greg called us at The Boys'. I thought this was odd to begin with -- if Greg was there, Deirdre was there, and why wouldn't she have called?
He said that they were back but were going out again, and they were going to stay the night at his friend's place. Also, would it be possible to be back by 5pm Sunday evening?
I said no, absolutely not. Or something like that. I felt really pissed off.
A few minutes later Deirdre called. Could they be back in the Bay Area between 5 and 6pm?
I really lost it.
"No, I would like to have lunch with Darin tomorrow. After he leaves tomorrow I'm not going to see him for a week and a half, and I have no idea when I'm going to see him after that. And I have to be in the apartment between 8 and 12 for the furniture to be delivered."
"Does he have to be there too?"
I said that yes, he did, and we hung up. I went to Darin, on the verge of hysteria, and asked him to take care of it, because he's so much more calm and controlled about stuff like this. So he did, and their conversation went something like this:
"I am staying as long as it takes so that Diane and I can have lunch together. This is non-negotiable. Now, what do we have to do to get your needs met?"
Deirdre said something like, "We'll discuss this tomorrow," (I can even hear the snippy tone in her voice), and Darin said, "No, tomorrow is too late to discuss this. Obviously this is causing a problem, so let's discuss it now."
He's so wonderful. I want to learn how to do this from him, rather than becoming upset and unbalanced when something like this happens.
When he hung up he said, "No problem, it's all worked out," but the whole thing grated on me all night. Darin told me I can't let Deirdre and her bossiness get to me, but it's hard not to after thirty years of training.
While all of this was going on, there was also an informal party of sorts happening. In addition to the three guys who live at The Boys (Al, Harry, and Mike), Brent and Therese were there with Bunchkin, and a co-worker of Therese's was there with her teenaged son. Harry made taco fixin's for everyone (where everyone includes the American Military Forces) and we pigged out on tacos, guacamole, and really smooth tequila.
Al, Harry, and the teenager played Tekken on the PlayStation for a long time. Then around midnight, we settled down to watch Army of Darkness, but it was pretty late by that point and Darin and I left before the end. We went home and went straight to sleep in our new bed. Well, Darin went straight to sleep; I lay awake and exhausted, furious at my inability to talk back to Deirdre.
We both woke up early (again) and Darin went out to finish the furniture, only this time he had a power drill he borrowed from Harry.
Never buy furniture you have to put together yourself if you don't have a power drill.
He had it all finished before I finally roused myself and tiptoed out to join him.
We showered, dressed, and headed out to get some breakfast before 9am after leaving another note saying that we went out and we left the cell phone number. We ended up driving up Ventura Boulevard almost to Ventura, mostly just to see what we could see. I started to whine about being hungry, and because we were so far west at this point, we decided to go to our favorite really-bad-for-you food place, Cinnabon, in Northridge. First we had to find Northridge without benefit of map, and we actually did it too.
Then we headed back towards Burbank, so I could return another torchiere lamp to Orchard Supply (sigh) and a chair to IKEA. We got horribly lost and disoriented at the north end of Burbank, and we spent so much time trying to get our bearings that we had to go back to my apartment rather than return anything. So I have more duties this week. Uck. It was much more fun to do these kinds of things with Darin.
We got back and Deirdre and Greg had just walked in the door. After a little dilly-dallying (despite Darin's assuring me that everything was okay, I still felt uncomfortable) the four of us went to the Daily Grill for lunch. Darin raced in to get us a table, but the place was pretty empty. He told the waiter that we were in kind of a hurry (because I had to wait for the refrigerator to arrive between 1:10 and 3:10). We sat down, we ordered.
The waiter must have been waiting for us with just these dishes, because he immediately appeared with our food. When I wanted to wrap up my sandwich (which is spoiling on my counter -- it's 4:05pm, and that damn fridge is still nto here), he whisked it away, wrapped it up, and put the mustard and au jus in little containers for me. Amazing. Darin gave him a 20% tip but he wondered if he should have given more.
We came back here and after everyone got ready for the trip home (i.e., made a potty stop) Deirdre and Greg left us and I went on my crying jag.
Darin just called from the car -- they're already half the way home. Zipping right along. I hate being without him. Already I'm lonely, even though we're going to chat all the time and send e-mail back and forth and generally be as close as we can be without seeing one another every day and every night. With the exception of about three or four weeks total, we've spent every day for the past four and a half years together. And now for some reason I'm off at graduate school, having thought that that was a good idea at the time.
I'd better stop it. I'll start crying again.
That's been my weekend. How was yours?