Building a Home with My Husband (23 page)

“You don’t have to do it. I can finish alone.”

“There’s still a pallet and a half at the curb.”

“I’ll be fine. Go back to sleep. I’ll see you later.”

He gets up, and as he showers I lie there, thinking of Susan and Jim and the wheelbarrow lender. Then I think of Knucklehead. Well, that’s another satisfaction that’s come from the wall, I think as I set my feet on the floor. I have a better sense of who I really am.

We return to the house. One hour passes, two, three. The pain in my body gets so acute that I go into a state of numbness, which also has the effect of letting my mind fly free. Of course, most of my thoughts concern my mother, only this time I seem able to find the tiny cracks in her long unhappiness, and come upon not only good memories, but good memories that I shared. She is reading to us from picture books. She is showing us art in Manhattan galleries. After our reconnection, she is taking me to see the Salvador Dalí Museum, to tour a college designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, to walk through parks. She is telling me stories about her childhood. I remember now that even though every one of those stories ended with her feeling forlorn, I liked when she told them to me. They made me feel that she was letting me stand beside her old self, at seven or ten or fourteen, and that my listening really mattered. It’s too bad that as her memory fades, these oldest stories will probably be the last ones to go.

But now I realize that maybe, by spending all those years listening to her stories, I
have
somersaulted back in time with her. I wasn’t able to change the circumstances of her youth. But I was able to be inside that apartment with her, and witness the truth of her life, and maybe just my being there made the truth hurt a little less. I might wish I could repair the deterioration in my mother’s mind. I might wish I could give her decades of happiness. But maybe when all that is left are her memories in that apartment, she will feel less pain than she once did.

And thinking this, I finally feel grief about her illness. Here I’ve been having regret for the life that Rosalie will not live. But now I feel regret for the life that
we
will not live. Our opportunity to keep mending our relationship is coming to an end. Those few good memories of museums and walks might be the only ones I’ll get, and the only ones I’ll give.

Does anyone, in the secret club or not, know what emotions to pack for this frontier?

I don’t think I’ll ever know. But around the time the sun begins its arc into midafternoon, as I near the bottom of the third pallet, something of an answer comes to me. To my astonishment, I start to feel my labor getting easier. I’m sure I’m imagining it, or have just grown so used to my scorched muscles that I’ve ceased feeling them. Yet it really does seem as if the agony, the numbness, all of it, has lifted. Might Hal’s mystical-schmystical stuff be true: that by staying with my task and being at one with the pain, I am transcending suffering?

It is in this state, a state that is almost like bliss, that I recall another good memory. It was the one time that we went to a circus, just Rosalie and Laura and me. Laura was in second grade, I in kindergarten, and although we found the circus smelly and dirty, we were awed by the trapeze artists sailing back and forth through the air in their spangled costumes, until one let go of her swing and got caught by the other and they grasped hands and swung back and forth high above the net together. When we got home, I told Rosalie that I wanted to learn how to do what they could do, and she said, “Then let’s write them a letter and ask for advice.” I was too young to write, so I dictated it to her. Then I waited for their reply, and waited some more. When we moved a few years later, I knew I wouldn’t ever hear back. But I think now about the way I reached out for Rosalie when I met her again, about Harriet reaching out for me when I lost Hal, about Laura and me reaching out for each other. That letter from the trapeze artists
did
find its way to me. It just wasn’t written in words.

Right before sunset, Hal and I set the last stone step into place, then sit down. Our bodies are wrecked, but we feel light with accomplishment, as gravity holds our new wall together.

“To Jackson,” he says, making a toast with bottled juice.

“To bed,” I say, clinking his juice against mine.

We drain our libations and he howls, “Ow-wow-wow-owf!” and we slump triumphantly against each other.

 

“Ta da,” Hal says, throwing open the front door of the old house.

“Oh my goodness.”

It is two weeks later, and I am delivered into a dazzling new world. The insulation is in, the drywall installed, and sunlight pours through glorious new floor-to-ceiling windows in the back of the house, setting the rooms aglow. As I walk from one room to the next—the bones and veins of the walls at last covered by skin—I feel enchanted. I’m finally in a
house
.
My
house. A house that will protect me, and inspire my pride. Most of the windows, Hal says as I enter my study, are now new, with the rest to be installed in the next few days. Soon the hardwood floor throughout the house will get sanded and sealed; appliances, fixtures, linoleum, and tile will appear in the bathroom and kitchen; trim and doors will return; and paint will adorn our walls. I turn around and around, envisioning a real room. Thanksgiving is four days off; by Christmas, he says, we should be back in. Yesterday our landlady, Natalie, found a buyer for the rented house. Tonight Hal and I will finish selecting our paint colors. So the timing is perfect. I feel myself rise as high as the walls, higher than the ceiling—finally savoring the pleasure of change.

But we haven’t come to the house just so I could see the walls and the windows.

We go outside, and I help Hal lift the potted baby tree out of the car. It’s called a fringe tree because of its feathery blossoms, though since it’s late November, its blossoms are long gone and its leaves have browned. “People sometimes think their fringe trees have died over the winter,” Hal told me when we went to the nursery this morning, “because it’s always the last to leaf.” At five feet tall—the same height as my mother, the same height as me—our baby fringe tree is heavy, and together we carry it down the alley to the backyard. Then we dig a hole beyond the new stone wall. “It might grow as tall as twenty-five feet,” Hal says, lowering the tree into the hole. I watch it go in, shaking my head at the metamorphosis. “It’s amazing,” I say over and over. “It’s a real backyard now.” Then I remember something my mother told me long ago, when we looked out my childhood window at the tall trees in our backyard, and she said that it wasn’t our family who had planted them. “You don’t plant a tree for yourself. You plant it for the people who come later. Someone else did this for us.” Hal presses the soles of his shoes on the dirt around the tree, tamping down the soil. We step back and admire our new tree, our new wall, our new yard, our new windows, our new house. Tonight, a fraction of an inch of tree growth from now, I will get a call from Laura, and the news will be no better. My mother will surely be gone in twenty-five feet. Hal and I might be, too. But I think I can already feel them now: the tree’s roots reaching deep inside the soil, opening their grasp toward the future.

THE JOB STOPS

D·I·S·A·S·T·E·R

W
e are not in the house when the explosion occurs.

It is a windy, slate-colored November afternoon, two days before Thanksgiving, two days after we planted our tree. On site are a couple of HVAC mechanics, who are installing our new heating and air-conditioning system in the basement; a team of drywallers, who are taping up seams on the second floor; and a carpenter, who has just returned from lunch. There is no reason to think that our job will not continue flowing toward completion—until, at an indeterminate moment before 12:20 p.m., someone opens a valve on the natural gas line.

Days will pass before we ferret out the details. All we know at first is that once the valve has been opened, the gas line—a slender silver pipe running behind the new drywall in the kitchen, which possesses an end point that resembles the sneering face of a snake—begins to leak natural gas. For a period that might last minutes or mere seconds, gas climbs up the western wall, prowling skyward under the house’s skin, then rolls across the kitchen ceiling, and then descends within the soffits on the eastern wall, unfurling along the entire length of the dining room-kitchen. But gas, a wily intruder, cannot be contained by anything porous, so it escapes the sheathing of the drywall through the minute cracks common in all walls and enters the oxygen-rich room. Natural gas reaches an explosive mixture when it becomes five to fifteen percent of the air, and as the gas envelopes the room, it achieves that mixture. The only missing element is a source of ignition.

And at 12:20 p.m., one of the mechanics prepares to solder a line in the basement. He pulls out his welding torch, and turns it on.

“It felt like an earthquake!” a neighbor tells us later.

Susan and Jim add, “Our dishes fell right off the wall!”

The lady with the wheelbarrow says, “I saw a guy blow out of the back of the house!”

The explosion tears the new drywall off the walls and ceiling in the dining room-kitchen, shoving the eastern wall until it bulges into the alley. It bursts through the new floor-to-ceiling windows along the back wall. It ruptures the wooden floor above, propelling huge nails backward into my new study. As it continues on, ripping up drywall and plaster on the second floor, it sends concussive waves across the entire house, hurling cracks through the front rooms, shattering windows too young to have lived a week, rattling masonry outside. In the backyard, our baby tree gets buried beneath debris.

Soon fire trucks are screaming toward the house. Evacuation orders are put in place. The street is roped off. The mechanics are whisked to the hospital.

 

Two hours later and a hundred miles away, I’m running across a concrete plaza, hurrying toward the high-rise where I have a meeting five minutes from now, when I pull out my cell phone to check my voice mail. “It’s me,” Hal says, his voice distressed. I stop moving the instant I hear his tone and as wind lashes through my hair I listen to him say, “There was a gas explosion at our house.” I stop breathing. “Nobody’s clear on what happened. I don’t know how much damage has been done. I’m headed over there now.”

Desperately, I dial him, but like me, Hal keeps his cell phone off when he’s not making a call. I’m dumped into his voice mail, where I beg him to call me right away.

I hang up and look at the gloom-stained sky. The timing could not be worse. I spin toward the parking garage, debating a leap back to my car, then I one-eighty back toward the high-rise. Then I just reel around and around, a weather vane in a tornado. How can I decide what to do? In a matter of seconds, our carefully set plans have been swept off the table, taking rhyme and reason tumbling down with them.

Go home now.
How can I not fly back down the highway to Delaware, screech up to the remains—whatever they are; Hal didn’t say—of our house, rocket out of my car, throw my arms around my husband, console him as he sobs about the collapse of his proud job, and then weep into his arms if he tells me that anyone was hurt?

Go to this meeting.
And how can I not do that? Beth is bouncing on a bus seat only blocks from here, telling the driver that she’s having dinner with me tonight. That’s why I’m in this plaza in the first place: I’m meeting Beth’s new case manager, after which I’ll pick her up for dinner. I can’t let her down. Yet I can’t let my husband down. I thought I’d worked out the balance between all of my loyalties ages ago. I thought I’d mastered how to make rudimentary decisions like these with aplomb. But both choices are right, and everything else has gone wrong. Isn’t there someone out there who can tell me what to do?

Finally I conclude that since I can’t reach Hal
or
Beth, I should just carry on with the responsibility in front of me. So I pivot toward the building, set one foot in front of the other, and get through that meeting, then dinner. It’s hard to keep this disaster sealed inside myself, but I have no desire to introduce worry into my sister’s life, especially since my mind is its own scramble. What could have gone wrong? How much of our house was destroyed? Was anyone injured? Where will we find the bars of gold to cover the damages? And—oh, no—Natalie’s house just sold! We told her we’d be out by Christmas! How can we wedge ourselves, two cats, and a houseful of boxes inside two compact cars? Will we be homeless? Has this torpedoed Hal’s Buddhist serenity? Sense of humor? His deliciously infectious joie de vivre?

By the time I take Beth home, my panic is full-throttle. I drive down dark roads, sticking to my arrangement to spend the night at my father’s, pulling over every two minutes to try Hal. But he doesn’t pick up. So I just drive, looking out to bare trees. In the gust of the night they are flailing about, a class crying out for a teacher.

 

As soon as I reach my father’s, Theresa says, “Hal just called. His cell phone is on.”

I run to a room where I can be alone.

When he picks up, he tells me that he’s walking the streets of Philadelphia. Although he sometimes jaunts the twenty-five miles north to that city, he never does so spontaneously, and never on cold nights. His voice sounds pained, and compassion aches in my chest.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“Well, we still have a house.”

“How much of a house?”

“The rooms are all there. But the more I looked, the more damage I could see.”

“Oh, no.”

“But no one was seriously hurt. The mechanics had singed hair, but the hospital’s released them.”

“Thank goodness.”

“There’s a lot to be thankful for. The first thing Dan said when I got to the house was ‘I’m going to take care of everything. This is all on me.’ ”