Building a Home with My Husband Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PRECONSTRUCTION

  S·I·T·E S·E·L·E·C·T·I·O·N - House

  D·E·S·I·G·N P·H·A·S·E - Love

  MOBILIZATION

  P·A·C·K·I·N·G - Friends

  M·O·V·I·N·G D·A·Y - Family

  F·I·R·S·T M·O·R·N·I·N·G·S - Self

  THE JOB STARTS

  D·E·M·O·L·I·T·I·O·N - Children

  R·O·U·G·H·I·N·G-I·N - Brothers and Sisters

  K·I·T·C·H·E·N C·A·B·I·N·E·T·S - Kindred Spirits

  I·N·S·U·L·A·T·I·O·N A·N·D· W·A·L·L·S - Mothers

  THE JOB STOPS

  D·I·S·A·S·T·E·R - Students

  R·E·P·A·I·R - Allies

  CLOSING IN

  I·N·S·U·L·A·T·I·O·N A·N·D W·A·L·L·S, A·G·A·I·N - Time

  F·I·N·I·S·H·E·S - Commitment

  W·R·A·P·P·I·N·G U·P - Purpose

  OCCUPANCY

  L·A·N·D·S·C·A·P·I·N·G - Home

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY RACHEL SIMON

  Little Nightmares, Little Dreams

  The Magic Touch

  The Writer’s Survival Guide

  Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

  DUTTON

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, June 2009

  Copyright © 2009 by Rachel Simon

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Simon, Rachel.

  Building a home with my husband: a journey through the

  renovation of love / by Rachel Simon.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-04650-0

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  For Hal—

  Husband, Architect, Court Jester

  PRECONSTRUCTION

  S·I·T·E S·E·L·E·C·T·I·O·N

  House

  Finally, we get married. After nineteen years of one of the most ridiculous courtships in the history of love, I move back in with Hal, and five days later, on a sunny May afternoon, I put on my wedding gown, he dons a suit, and we walk hand-in-hand through the city streets until we reach the justice of the peace. Hal is forty-nine, I am forty-one. Having survived every phase of dating, cohabiting, breaking up, and renewing, we are more in love when we say “I do” than I’ve ever believed possible. For the next three years we savor laughter and relief, conversation and contentment. This is it, I think, I finally understand love, and I want this to last forever.

  But then one January afternoon, the next phase of our journey suddenly begins.

  I do not know this when I step onto the front porch of our row house that day and pull the wooden door shut behind me. The sun is bright as it reflects off the snowdrifts on either side of our quiet, tree-lined street, so I keep my gaze down as I cross the single lane to my car, my thoughts on the flight I’m about to catch. This is why I will never know if I am alone on the block that afternoon, or if, as I unlock my car, I am being watched.

  But when I look back on this moment, I realize that eyes must have been hiding in the shadows of one of the slender alleys on our street, listening to the beep beep beep of our house’s security system, following my actions as I lower my suitcases into my trunk. Maybe they even scoped out my routine over the last many months, so they’re aware that I’m a writer about to fly across the country for a speaking engagement. Of course, it’s possible they’ve only canvassed our street since this morning but still saw Hal leave for work, blueprints in his bag. However long they’ve spied, some premeditation must have been necessary. After all, ours isn’t just a neighborhood of nine-to-fivers, but also in-the-home artists, blue collars sleeping off the night shift, and retirees watching TV. And although I find our house unbearably snug, its two-and-a-half stories, with basement, bath, and seven tiny rooms have lodged large families over its hundred-year life. There’s no way of assuming that once we’ve departed, the house will be empty.

  Yet my spy remains a puzzle. Hal and I live on a lightly traveled block of row houses in the small city of Wilmington, Delaware. Pedestrians and vehicles pass only occasionally, except for rush hour, when the thirteen households come and go, and the banking and credit card professionals who work in the nearby skyscrapers deposit or retrieve their cars at the unmetered curb. But there is a delay of an hour after I drive off. Is the wait because the little boy across the street is making a snowman on the sidewalk? Are the many neighborhood dog walkers enjoying impromptu chats at the corner? Or does the course of our lives get rerouted not by design, but whim?

  All we know is that at two thirty, while my bags are being screened by airport security, he—and I will take the liberty of assigning a gender and a solitary status—leaps out of his life and lands on our sidewalk. Immediately he rejects a hustle up our seven steps to the wooden front door with its beveled glass window, sure it’ll be deadbolted. He dismisses a dash down the alley along the western side of the house, rightly knowing the rickety back door is locked, too.

  Why bother, when there’s a ragged basement door in the front?

  He darts down the three steps from the sidewalk. The door is splintered, peeling, wiggly in its frame. He gives a hard shove. The rotted casing gives way, and he’
s in.

  Beep beep beep. The security system starts counting: forty-five seconds until the alarm.

  He tears past basement storage and a dank laundry room, up steep angled steps, into the kitchen. He takes in the decrepit stove, caramel-sticky cabinets, floor the color of tooth decay.

  He scrambles through a doorway into the dining room. Nothing but a table piled with newspapers, walls lined with Ikea cabinets, the kind of organ found in old chapels.

  He scurries ahead to the living room. A motley assemblage of used furniture, bricked-up fireplace, massive collection of CDs, library of books, a sitar, a turntable, a bulky TV. Models of buses on the mantel. Figurines from The Wizard of Oz. Would this junk even sell on eBay?

  Up the stairs he flies. To the left is a pitiful-looking bathroom tiled in hazard-sign black and yellow. He barrels through the hall, throwing open a door halfway down. The room’s crammed with more books, records—records!—exercise machines, laundry. What a mess. The door for the back bedroom opens to an unmade bed, two cats quivering beneath. Hand-me-down cabinets. No jewelry box, no fur, no designer labels, no flashy knickknacks. Of all the houses he could’ve hit, why’d he pick this loser? One more possibility on this floor. Feet sprinting over the crappy green carpet back down the hall, he throws himself into the front bedroom. Only—it’s a home office. Jammed to the ceiling with shelves, file cabinets, storage units, desks, copier—and a laptop!

  Bbbbrrrraaaannnnnkkkkkkk.

  The sound comes up: ear-splitting, heart-wrenching, security-company alerting. Out, get out. No: take a peek at the third floor. He whips around the corner, up the stairs. It’s one room, bright with windows, crammed with electric guitars, bass guitars, weirdo guitarlike instruments, computers, amplifiers, homemade electric drum set, microphones. Way too much to unplug.

  Laptop in hand, he tears down two flights of stairs, hurls through the living room, dining room, kitchen, dives into the basement, laughs with victory as he reaches the open door—

  And sees a workshop. Table saw, power drill, plywood. Lookie here: a new router.

  Router in one hand, laptop in the other, he rockets outside. Down the alley, into the backyard, over the fence, onto the street. The alarm shrieking in vain behind him.

  I’m not thinking of alarms as I race toward my connecting flight. I’m only congratulating myself on how much lighter my carry-on is than usual. For the past year, I’ve lugged my laptop on my trips, only to find that it grew heavier with each airport. This time I finally left it home.

  Even so, I’m sweating when I take my seat. My layover required a breathless dash across Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, and now, overhead bins slamming shut above me, I have only a few minutes to check my voice mail. There’s one message. Expecting nothing important, I shuck off my coat while I press the code to listen. “It’s me,” Hal says, his voice serious. He never sounds like this, and I freeze as he continues: “Call me as soon as you get this.” The message ends so quickly, it barely seems to exist.

  I dial him with shaking hands. It’s already nighttime back in Delaware—anything could have happened. Has someone I love been in a car accident? Had a heart attack? Please, not my sister Beth. Not my father. Friends. Even my mother. Please, please, please—it can’t be Hal.

  Immediately upon answering, Hal says, “Did you take your laptop to San Diego?”

  My confusion at his question overwhelms my relief that he’s alive. “What?”

  “Your laptop. Where is it?”

  “In my study at home.”

  “No it’s not.” He sighs, and explains what happened. “I’m sorry, Baboo,” he says.

  I try to speak, but the shake that was in my hands is radiating through my body. Though hardly as catastrophic as a flatlining monitor in an intensive care unit, losing a laptop means losing everything I’ve done for months. I do have copies of my recent writing, but when I backed up last week, I once again neglected my address book. I add names so often that I keep postponing this chore.

  My hand reflexively covers my mouth. How could I have been so reckless? I, of all people, who measure my wealth by those I care about and those who care about me? Who, having endured a supernova of a childhood, grieves every loss, and has pursued the most impossible revivals? Yet my procrastination has lost me enough people to fill ten airplanes, and unlike Hal, and Beth, and my mother—each gone from my life for many years, then returned—I’ll never get those lost friends back.

  “Rae?” Hal says.

  “What did the police say?” I croak.

  “They didn’t get any fingerprints.”

  “So that’s it?”

  “They said they’d investigate. But I think we can kiss that laptop good-bye.”

  Now we both sigh, and, again, I can’t find words. But this time it’s for a reason other than shock, and Hal knows exactly what it is. No two people can live entwined for years and not come to read whole Rosetta stones in the silences, glances, and head tilts that outsiders wouldn’t even register. Hal and I generally delight in this phenomenon, and have even jokingly given it names—Friendship Wi-Fi, The Collective Consciousness of Kin, Marriage Mind Meld. But neither of us is amused now. Our relationship clairvoyance has moved on from the burglary to our one huge problem. A seventeen hundred square foot problem that isn’t going away.

  Finally Hal says, “I’m going out tonight to get a replacement for the basement door. It’ll be secure by the time you get home.”

  “Thanks. But—” Don’t say it, I tell myself, as the flight attendants check that the passengers’ seat belts are buckled. Hold your tongue. But the shake in my body is now coursing so mightily in the opposite direction that my mouth just won’t stop. “I mean, there are so many other things I haven’t liked,” I say. “Now I won’t even feel safe in that house.”

  Then I lock my lips, and without a word we go through it all over again. The house. The one quarrel we’ve had since he carried me over its threshold. It’s ironic, because the house—or, really, any house—is such an unlikely dispute for us. When we met, I was twenty-three, he thirty, and neither of us thought about owning a house. An aspiring writer with low-paying jobs that meant little to me, I was content scribbling stories in libraries. Hal, in the apprenticeship of his architectural career, and at his own low-paying jobs, spent his off-hours at home practicing guitar. Home ownership was as absurd as time travel—and not only because of our callings or income.

  The truth was that I couldn’t commit to him. I loved him, he loved me, we were utterly compatible, but something I had yet to understand kept me from saying that he was The One. Nonetheless, we so enjoyed being together that after a year of spending every night in his or my dumpy Philadelphia apartment, we moved into our own dumpy Philadelphia apartment together. Five years later, after savoring everything from our vegetarianism to our fondness for offbeat films and modern art, we rented a modest house in the suburbs. But I felt no closer to what I wanted to feel. I groped toward advice, but each friend contradicted the last, and therapists mostly said, “Tell me more about your family.” Hal grew aloof, sometimes patronizing; I burrowed into writing and friends. Eventually the highlight of our time together was zoning out before the TV, numbing ourselves with pizza. When I was alone, thoughts assaulted me: I have to leave! But he’s so funny and caring and smart. I have to find The One! But how can I hurt him? My head felt caught between two crashing cymbals. I developed rashes. I ground my teeth in my sleep. And finally, after thirteen years—I know, thirteen years—we called it quits. For the next six years, I lived in rented rooms, over garages, in basements. I dated a little, but mostly I was alone. Hal was so convinced he’d failed at love that he didn’t even try to date. He took up Buddhism and environmental sustainability and eventually became a first-time homeowner—of the very house we’re not talking about now.

  He says, “We’ll deal with the house when you get back.”

  “Right,” I say, as my brain sends him an instant message: This is the final strike.
r />   “We’ll work it out.”

  “I know.” The time to move has come.

  “Turn off all electronic devices,” I hear overhead.

  I don’t want to end our call like this: stunned about the burglary, agitated about the loss, angry about the house, longing to comfort each other. In the moment we have left, Hal and I hold each other’s gaze through the phone. “Love you,” he whispers. “Me, too,” I say. And, remembering how much easier it is for him to say those words—and how accepting he is of why I find love so hard to express—I feel tears come. That’s when we hang up.

  Then the plane is accelerating down the runway, and I suddenly realize that this moment has launched me into a new leg of my life’s journey. I don’t want it to. I don’t want to have anything to do with whatever awaits: expenditures of time and money to replace the laptop, the return of our debate about moving, and, heaven help us, if we decide to stay and finally renovate, possibly even our hard-won solidarity going up in smoke. I cannot guess that in the end all this will indeed happen, and some of it will be a great trial, though not in any of the ways that I fear, and not only with him. In fact, it will blow open the tight seal around everything I think I know about myself, about family, about the misunderstandings and resilience of love; and all my memories and aspirations and regrets and joys will come bursting out, some old beliefs disintegrating, others surviving transformed. But it’s only a house, people will tell me, and, with Hal demystifying for me how construction proceeds, step by step, I will not refute that it is. Yet the lessons I get in the physical world of building will, at the same time, deliver so much more: locked rooms leading to the depths of myself, forgotten closets brimming with wrinkled relationships, falling walls exposing conflicts of the past, sudden calamities enlightening my spirit, newborn windows opening their eyes and looking out into the future.