Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (5 page)

“So,” I say, “how soon will you be ready to sell?”

“Oh, any time, I expect. Only thing is,” he says, trying poorly to conceal a wry grin, “there’s this Oriental girl come by the other day.”

We’re in the kitchen again and he’s leaning against the wood-veneered cabinets. He strokes the warped, brass-colored plastic trim on the counter. It is so obvious that he is messing with me. Just because Stanley uses recycled nails doesn’t mean they don’t have points on them. He can see his plan coming together, but not without a little value-added service.

“This woman?” he says. “She’s real innerested. Even says she’s got some ideas for putting a refrigerator in where these cabinets are. Came by and checked it out with a tape measure and everything.” He shakes his head. “Oriental woman with a tape measure,” he says. “What’s next?”

Sounds like a beautiful, if racist, still life to me, but I don’t have time to dwell on it.

He shows me out to the front porch and we shake hands as we did when we met, only now he’s on the porch and I’m on the steps, and he’s clearly selling, and I am clearly buying.

SHE SAID YES!

I squeezed the nicest ring my credit card could accommodate and down I went on one knee. And when I got back up, we were engaged. The next summer, hitched we were, with Bruce and Emma, Bryan and Sarah among our wedding party. We were all so close they made our hometown friends and family seem like intruders. Bruce and Bryan got me—for real—a shotgun as a gift, but nobody needed it to motivate me that day. Jenae, radiant in a dress she made herself, walked down the aisle that hot August afternoon like my own sweet epiphany. To quote “Brown Penny,” the Yeats poem we assigned a reluctant Bryan to read at the ceremony, I was “looped in the loops of her hair.”

For a while, we were the happiest people we knew. Bruce and Emma, Bryan and Sarah, Jenae and I. We were having the time of our lives. Before long, Bryan and Sarah had a beautiful little son, and Bruce and Emma and Jenae and I were the godparents. He felt like our commune baby. It was ridiculous. All our sweet spaniels, and now a baby to boot.

It was such a joyous time, but not an infinite one. None of us could stay. Bryan got into a doctoral program in Missouri. Emma got into law school in Boston. Within three months they were all gone. Jenae and I were alone with each other—married to be sure, but stuck was what it felt like.

I got a job teaching an hour away, in Newark, Ohio, whose most prominent feature is the Longaberger headquarters, shaped like a sixteen-story picnic basket. Jenae quit the nonprofit to try her hand at fashion design, but the woman she worked for was as charming as a shiv and had an unfortunate tendency toward DUIs and bounced checks. We were both out of school, on our own, and not doing very well at being adults. We were drinking more, talking less. I began hiding myself in the attic, playing guitar, chain-smoking, and experimenting with facial hair. She got a rescue cat and cable TV and worked on a quilt for someone else’s baby.

It wasn’t so much that we were
un
happy. We just weren’t
happy
happy as we’d been. When you don’t have anything else to do but worry about whether you’re happy or not, well, you do.

And then, just as we were circling our own drain, my dad was diagnosed with what looked to be double pneumonia.

I called him Dad, but he was my mom’s second husband, twenty years her senior, nearly fifty years older than me. They married when I was seven, my biological father having been out of the picture practically from the moment I was born. My adoptive father fought in the Second World War and played big league baseball for the St. Louis Browns in the early fifties, and he still loved the game. He had developed type 2 diabetes and his eyesight was failing, so when I was a kid and we played catch on summer evenings he’d end up with bruises all over his stomach and chest.

Then, after he and my mom grew apart and themselves divorced, I saw him only a few times a year, though he remained beatific in his kindness. To me, to Jenae (whose name he always remembered despite its eccentric spelling and his failing health), to everyone. When I went to Madison to visit him in the hospital, I realized I wouldn’t be going back to Columbus until there was a funeral. I called Jenae, and without balking she got on the next flight.

When she arrived, Dad was basically unconscious, but he roused as though he’d only been taking a catnap. “Hey there, Jenae,” he said. “Thanks for coming. You gotta be tired from traveling.” He patted the bed next to him. “Come and sit down, sweetheart.”

Throughout this time, I couldn’t help but feel a bit like an outsider. After all, this was in Madison, where his daughters from his first marriage lived. They were all kind and generous with me, but they were also anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five years older than I was. And since they were sisters, they had their own language. Without Dad to bring me into the middle, I was lost.

Jenae ignored all that. She hugged and held everybody, wiped their snotty faces, pulled hair from their eyes, laughed at their runny makeup. She joked with their recalcitrant spouses and made their children feel cheeky and talented. She made us eat frozen custard and bought clean socks at a grocery store for everybody. She slept on the floor of Dad’s hospice room, neither asking for nor needing permission, and she sat with me on his last night, holding my hand while I held his.

When we got back to Ohio, however, things felt empty. I hated where I was teaching. I had an hourlong commute, and had recently taken on a four-hour round-trip once a week to teach an extra class on business writing to inmates at a prison. Jenae had just begun doing event management for a man who wore untrustworthily tight pants. We needed something new, but we didn’t know what. Columbus had become as useful and beautiful as a swollen appendix, and we needed to get out before something burst.

My grandparents had moved to Wisconsin to be closer to my mom when my grandmother’s health began to deteriorate. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s and a host of thyroid-related afflictions. They had only just finished building their dream house, across the street from the country club in Pekin, when it became apparent that they couldn’t be four hours away from my mom. After they moved into their condo in Waukesha, five minutes from my mom’s place, Gram started to slip irrevocably away.

At the same time, during a routine checkup doctors found a strange mass in my mom’s abdomen and immediately scheduled her for surgery. No one knew what to think or do, especially because she was so calm about it.

Meanwhile, I had applied to PhD programs in hopes of making something substantive happen with my career. Jenae was reasonably opposed. She was afraid that I would devolve again, leaving her to support me for another four years of prolonged malfeasance. I had a shot at programs in Florida, Texas, Missouri, Ohio, and Utah, and the Utah one looked particularly appealing. Pretty much all we knew about Utah was that it had mountains and Mormons, both austere and in good supply, and that my former teacher and our dear friend Melanie Rae Thon lived there. She was as kind and calming a person as she was sublime a short story writer and novelist. She was my literary Joan of Arc. If anybody could help us, it was she.

It felt wrong even to think about it, but it also felt grim and fatalistic to pass up the opportunity to get a PhD, which might lead to an actual job and, I hoped, some long-term stability. My grandparents were thrilled at the prospect of having another doctor in the family, even if nobody would consider me a
real
doctor.

Thankfully, my mom’s abdominal surgery went well, and the night she recovered in the hospital, I brought her a card my inmate students had signed, and I read
The Little Prince
to her, trying to calm and soothe us both. The mass was miraculously benign and no complications loomed, but it made everything feel fragile and my future plans all the more despicable.

I never thought I’d really get into any of the programs, but I did. And, well, we left for Utah.

We found a reasonably nice apartment in a part of Salt Lake City called The Avenues. School began for me, and Jenae got a job doing events for a swanky hotel, and things should have been looking up, but they weren’t.

Gram’s health got worse and worse as her present was lost to her past, and by the time spring came around, she couldn’t tell us from her nurses’ aides and almost all she knew for sure was her own childhood, de-tasseling corn and picking weeds in the bean fields. We lost more and more of her as she lost us, until finally she died, one month before Mother’s Day.

A couple of weeks later, Bruce called, and it wasn’t just to see how I was holding up. He and Emma had a few months ago given birth to a baby boy, and they were moving from Massachusetts back to Texas.

“What’s up?” I asked. “You guys back in the big funky yet?”

I was driving back from school and took a detour through Federal Heights, just below the foothills. From Chandler Drive the entire Salt Lake Valley shimmered like a flammable mirage.

“Well, Matty boy,” Bruce said, “I bet I got you trumped for bad news today.” He exhaled smoke loudly into the phone. “Emma found out.”

“Found out about what?” But as the words came out of my mouth, I knew. He’d been talking more and more over the past year about how batshit crazy everything was and how he didn’t know if he could survive it for much longer. I knew he was miserable. What I didn’t know was that he was, as he said then, “in pure-D love with another woman.”

I felt deeply sorry and happy for him at the same time, but a little worried about what it might mean for Jenae and me. Bryan and Sarah, we would soon learn, were similarly heading toward divorce, and it was beginning to seem as if everything we once could count on was now made of lint.

“Bruce,” I said. My compass had lost its points.

“Yeah,” he said. “Shitfire.”

Something needed to be done, and it wasn’t going to do it by itself.

The way Jenae guided me through the darkness of my dad’s and then Gram’s death, I learned for good what I almost forgot: I
loved
my wife. It was time to really, not just ceremonially, do right by her.

So we decided to buy a house. I wanted her to have some outward sign of stability and thanks for all she’d done and endured over the years. But like getting married, deciding you are going to buy a house and actually buying a house are two very different endeavors.

Initially, things looked perfect. Interest rates were at an all-time low. The economy was in the gutter, and Alan Greenspan sent the APR down deep to buck things up. We did some quick computing and found that, at the best interest rates, we could own a nicer house than anyone we knew and pay less per month than we were currently paying in rent.

But between the banks’ promises of immediate approval and the hours spent on hold listening to the Muzak version of “Don’t Stop Believin’,” something was wrong. Our credit was shit.

Mother’s Day was fast approaching, and since Gram died my mom had been crying herself blind, working at her flower shop fourteen hours a day on arrangements for other people’s mothers, so we decided to have Grandpa come out for the weekend. He had been strange and diffident with my mom, and she couldn’t handle her grief, him, and the shop at the same time.

We thought we’d show Gramps the mountains, eat a steak or two, have a good cry, toast Gram with a glass of Dewar’s (the only Scotch she’d drink), then pack him back on the plane after Mother’s Day was over so we could all limp forward.

When he arrived, he was the last person off the plane. He didn’t bother with a hug and started shuffling toward the exit. “Christ,” he said, “do I need a drink.”

It was only ten in the morning, so we drove up a foggy Emigration Canyon to Ruth’s Diner and ordered bloody marys and waited for each other to say something inspiring.

Being with my grandfather is a bit like spending time with a retired colonel who had managed to escape great loss and infamy, as well as fame and recognition, during his years of service. And now that he’s retired there is nothing left to do but soak up the impending sense of time left and great deeds undone. He had been a radiologist and a professor of medicine, and though I’m sure he has a passel of former patients and students who remain obliged to him, they aren’t exactly hustling to finish up his bust for the Mayo Clinic.

To those who are not his grandson, my grandfather makes people nervous. He seems exacting and draconian. When he orders his drink, Gin-on-the-rocks-with-an-olive, all as one word, and you repeat it just to double-check, he barks back,
Gin-on-the-rocks-with-an-olive!
Mad, fast, and annoyed. He is a man who expects you to be incapable, ingratiating, and, in general, hungry for his money. You may bobble in your simpering, for example, and say, Yes sir, Mr. Tucker, but all he’ll have heard was the grave omission of “Dr.,” and you shall never be forgiven. After his cocktail, he is temporarily a changed man. He will want to know your name and where you are from and what your golf handicap is and what you think of black golfers and oversize drivers. But he’ll tire of your response before you can stammer out the first phoneme of your name. If I were you, I’d give the table away the next time he comes in. He’s a crappy tipper too.

When it’s just Grandpa and me, however, things are different. Sometimes I get the sense that I am the one man in the world he feels he can talk to. Everyone else works for him or wants to or is afraid to. Me, I’m just a screw-up English major who can’t keep himself straight without his help. I am his only grandson, after all, and more or less the son he always wanted. I’ve inherited his wavy hair. His preference for manual-transmission cars. His skeptic’s furrowed brow. His way of radiating disapproval and judgment without word or gesture. His predilection for good, honest books and his general disdain for ones that tend to garner all the conspicuous prizes. His sadistic joy in teaching. His aversion to bullshit. His inherent, endemic loneliness.