Building a Home with My Husband (11 page)

“Wait,” Hal says. “I don’t think my cell phone
is
in the bedroom.”

I tear downstairs—he
did
leave it in the living room. Then I have the amazing good fortune of finding a phone book. I dial a locksmith. A woman answers. I explain the riddle of the stuck door. “I’ll have him call you,” she says.

“Aren’t
you
the locksmith?”

“This is the answering service, ma’am. Can I have your number for a call back?”

“Uh, how soon?”

“Sometime after nine.”

Already knowing the futility of a call that late, I read off Hal’s phone number, then notice that his battery is running on fumes.

“Where’s your recharger?” I call upstairs as I hang up.

“In the bedroom,” Hal says.

I’ve always wondered what I might do if, in my on-the-road life, a similar mishap occurs. Infrequent travelers might suspect that the worst fate is a missed plane connection, but I find doors to be far more fearsome. On every trip, I think about tales of travelers who step outside their hotel rooms in their underthings to retrieve the complimentary copy of
USA Today
only to hear the door swing shut behind them.

Then I remember that, thanks to my paranoia about planning, when I printed out the information for my talk this morning, I set a copy in my car—and when I did, I happened to notice that my host, Dr. Charlie Pohl, doesn’t live in Philadelphia, but
right here in Delaware.

“Hal,” I call upstairs, “maybe Dr. Pohl can drive me in! Where are your car keys?”

As usual, even though we’ve just moved, his keys are in the wicker duck in the dining room, and they include the extra key for my car. If only my driver’s license weren’t locked in the bedroom, or I were reckless enough to drive without a license. But still, progress might be at hand. I run outside. Yes! There are the numbers. I run back in and dial.

“Everything’s fine,” I lie when Dr. Pohl picks up, “but,” and I explain.

He listens with the sensitive bedside manner befitting of a physician. “Unfortunately,” he says, “I’m already halfway to Philadelphia. But maybe my wife, Janice, can bring you to the train station. She has a meeting this morning, but I can see if she can work this in.”

“Well, I do have the slight problem of getting more appropriate clothes.”

“I’m sure someone in my office has something you can wear.”

I ask him if anyone there is five feet tall. He pauses. “I don’t know about that . . .”

I hang up, and collapse to the sofa—or I would, if it weren’t sagging beneath boxes.

Get a ladder from the other house
. There’s no time.
Call a neighbor for help
. I don’t know anyone around here.
Call Natalie.
She’s on her morning walk, and I need a solution
now.

I hear the wire hangers in Hal’s closet upstairs chime against each other as he finishes getting dressed for work, and the tide of self-pity starts to rush in. This is it, I think. It’s all over.

But then I turn myself toward a different thought, or perhaps it manages to turn toward me. It is a memory of one of those serendipitous conversations I favor, this time at a disability conference in Denver. Dan Wilkins, an activist who became a quadriplegic after a car accident, told me, over a table of his thought-provoking T-shirts, something he’d learned after becoming disabled. “It isn’t life on autopilot anymore. If you want to figure out how to do something, you give it a shot, and if Plan A doesn’t work, you go to Plan B, and then Plan C, and then Plan D. You’re not locked into the whole fixedness of life. You come to understand that there’s no wrong answer—except thinking that there’s only
one
answer.”

I can’t imagine why I think of Dan Wilkins at this desperate moment. Do memories rotate back to the front of one’s mind because of the divine latchset of the universe? Or do I think what I think and do what I do because of the ordinary chaos of me?

I hear Hal go into the bathroom for the final step in his routine, a quick brushing through his hair. The radio is still playing, and he shuts it off. It’s all over, I think, except for Plan D, whatever that is. And then, as easily as a reader turns a page in a book, the solution is there.

At eleven o’clock, Dr. Pohl delivers my introduction. I stride to the front of the lecture hall and look up at the students. I am fresh off the train, the ticket paid by his wife, Janice. I am also freshly made-up, my cosmetics courtesy of Janice. But most important, I am dressed.

Quickly—Hal had to leave within minutes—we went into his studio where, two days before, we’d hung his clothes. Hal is seven inches taller than me, but long ago, when we were fooling around in that way that people do when they’re newly in love, I’d tried on his pants and found that they sort of fit. “Try these,” he said to my request this morning, and I heaved on the white jeans in his hands. Although they kept sliding down and ended way below my sneakers, they did the job. An hour later, Janice loaned me a cardigan to cover my tank top. Then Dr. Pohl’s assistant Joyce gave me a scarf, which I knotted around my waist to hold up the pants.

The medical students look at me. One part Hal, one part Janice, one part Joyce, one part me, I tell these doctors-to-be about my morning. “Whatever personal struggles you’re having as you move on in life,” I say, citing the lesson I learned from Dan Wilkins, “there is always Plan D.” We share a laugh, and I continue with my talk. But later, when I make my way back to Delaware as a patchwork self, amazed at discovering a three-dimensional facility I’d had little inkling I possessed, and then when I wait for the locksmiths, who will take two hours to break into the room, I feel much more than mirth. Yes, first mornings might be cursed. But at the same time, on first mornings, I also have the opportunity to unlock the fixedness in myself, and discover something new about me.

That night, as I step inside the newly opened room, and turn around and around, gratefully taking in everything that was waiting all day just beyond my reach, I ask myself, Who will I be by the end of this renovation, so many first mornings from now? What limitations— or new abilities—will I find in myself? I stop turning, and as I look at the door, now gutted of its entire knob assembly, a small historical anecdote awakens inside me. It is not a first morning from my own history, but from the archeologist who’d spent years and years seeking King Tutankhamun’s tomb. The story goes that when he finally discovered what he believed to be the site, he found himself facing a sealed door. With shaking hands, he drilled a peephole into the door, and as hot ancient air from inside the tomb sighed out, stirring the Egyptian sands in the chamber, the archeologist leaned close to the hole with a candle to take the first look. Behind him his benefactor asked, “Can you see anything?” The archeologist strained to see within, the candle flickering as golden treasures emerged from the mist. His expedition in suspense, his life about to change in ways he could not possibly predict, it was all he could do to find the words. “Yes,” he replied at last. “Wonderful things.”

THE JOB STARTS

D·E·M·O·L·I·T·I·O·N

“
T
hey’ve started the demo,” Hal says as he unlocks the door to our house. “Be careful. You never know what might come loose—you could easily step on a nail.”

A week after we left, we walk through the vestibule into the living room, and I take in the very first phase of the job. The wooden floor stretches before me, revealing that the golden brown hue I’d never noticed is graffitied with stains and rug shadows. The mantle mirror is playing truant. The refrigerator, draped in protective plastic like a ghostly trick-or-treater, is hanging out by the fireplace. Catcher’s mitts of dust wait open-palmed in the corners.

I wasn’t expecting that the job would start with such small but noticeable changes. Nor was I expecting that it would feel vaguely unreal, as if we’d passed through a portal into a counterclock land, where the time is running backward and only a single survivor remains. I want to tell Hal how strange this feels. But when I glance at him, he seems to be carrying himself differently, as if he’s gone through a portal, too, transforming from the-husband-who’s-an-architect to the-architect-who’s-a-husband. I just ask, “What’s been happening?”

“They’ve started by removing the doors and trim.” He gestures toward the hobbit-sized closet under the stairs, now doorless and trim-free. “Soon all the kitchen appliances will come out, then the dining room pantry will go, then the interior walls will get erased, and finally they’ll take down the exterior kitchen wall.”

“So basically a lot of the house is going to disappear.”

“That’s demolition.”

“How long will it all take?”

“It’d be really fast if we didn’t care about preserving the floors or the plaster walls. But we do, so they’re being careful, which means it’ll move forward steadily but not swiftly.”

“How much do you think will change during my visit to my father and Theresa?”

He looks at me, knowing that in the past few days, my father’s been calling a lot about a possible medical crisis that Theresa’s facing. I’ve been shaken, but now I try to act calm. “Since that’s a few days off,” he says, pretending not to worry along with me, “and you’ll be gone only a day, just a little. But believe me, before you know it, the place’ll look really different.”

“Well,” I say, “it’s funny timing. Having so much coming down in the house when—”

“Rae, you don’t know that the worst is going to happen.”

“Theresa did have cancer before.”

“We won’t even know if she’ll need a biopsy until she sees the oncologist next week.”

“But my father’s scared, and . . . and . . . I just think about what could happen . . .”

“I’m concerned, too. But all we can do is wait.” He gives me a hug, and I feel his love wrap around me. “Let’s look at the rest of the house.”

We walk forward. The graceless stair railing has vanished, rooms have shed doors, and in my former study, the only second-floor room that will keep its walls, the mantel mirror sits in the closet. All that Dan plans to reuse—doors, moulding, trim—is piled up like kindling.

I look at Hal, and he’s beaming.

“Nice moment for the architect, huh?” I say.

“The ship has set sail!” he replies.

“Yeah,” I say. “Too bad we might run into sea monsters.”

“Ah, not to worry, matey,” he says in pirate-speak. “I have a cutlass!” I smile, not reassured, but amused. “I might end up with a patch on my eye and going
Arrr, Arrr
at Dan and we might limp into port—just like so many ships I’ve steered. But by golly, I’ll get us there!”

We walk back into the hallway, and Hal, now openly excited, begins to elaborate on the imminent removal of the corridor and bedroom walls. The air is memory-scented, as if the taking apart of the house has uncorked the past, and as he speaks, I imagine I see into last week, as he’s bouncing a cat toy down this hall for leaping feline Zeebee and I’m cheering them on. Then I see into four years ago, as I emerge from my study in my wedding gown, and Hal bursts into tears at the sight. Still in the reverse flow of years, I envision Eldridge Waters and his wife saying good night to their children in this hall, and before them, stretching back to 1905, babies crawling to mothers in this doorway, children dressing in these rooms for school, widows entering the bathroom to weep. I haven’t thought of these people before, and now I almost wish I knew something about them, even their names. Because they’ve probably all died, and very soon the house as they knew it—the last physical witness to their memory—will be no more, too.

And as I’m thinking this and listening to Hal and wondering how my father and Theresa are holding up, the oddest phase that’s happened so far in my renovation journey—the one I’ll find most embarrassing to admit, the one that will revive an inner duel I thought I’d settled in a draw—begins: I realize that since we walked in the front door, I’ve been experiencing an unsettling emptiness. It’s making me feel queasy and off-balance, roughly like the car sickness I can be prone to, and it’s intensified with each step. I try to identify the cause. Discomfort about being so out of place? Apprehension about Theresa? Plaintiveness for generations no longer alive? Whatever it is, I do know this: compared to Hal’s enthusiasm, it is contrary to reason.

Hal, looking at me, says, “I know, it’s hard to concentrate on all this right now.”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t say everything’s going to work out,” he says. “But whatever happens, I’ll be here.” He takes my hand and we walk down the stairs.

 

Maybe it’s just fear of change.

That’s what I tell myself three days later, when I drive to see my father and Theresa, and, as always when I head to that part of Pennsylvania, Beth. I haven’t mentioned the unsettled feeling to Hal, but it hasn’t taken leave of me, and in fact it sits more heavily inside me now. It even reminds me so much of car sickness that I’ve named it house sickness. But I tell myself as I cruise through the hilly country-side that if it
is
only fear of change, everything will be all right. Not that I welcome change any more than anyone else, but all I have to do is look at the people I’m about to visit and I’ve got proof that change isn’t synonymous with misery.

For a long time, for instance, there was tension between Theresa and me. A childless English professor as in love with my father as he was with her, Theresa had neither expected nor wanted to live with children. But when my mother melted down, Theresa’s romantic dinners with my father became family disputes at the dinner table. This wasn’t because I, or any of us kids, resented her for not being our mother—our feelings about our mother were too tangled for that. We just felt no affinity for her churchgoing, gourmet-cooking, and reserved nature, and she seemed to find our juvenile worldviews, love of pretzels, and adolescent self-discoveries inexplicable. For years we kept spearing ourselves on the edges of one another’s personalities, even after we left the house for adulthood.