Building a Home with My Husband Read online

  And there in that park, maybe just to prove my indignant side wrong, I pushed those very words out of my mouth. To my surprise, Hal listened. Then he asked a question, and listened some more. By the time we reached Edward the great blue heron, my jaw was no longer pinched, the resentful voice inside me had shut up, and the urge to run had vanished.

  So this is commitment, I realized, as we walked up the hill toward our house. Pressing myself to admit my feelings aloud, and how they arose—even when I’m so convinced that he did something wrong that I’m on the verge of running. Of course, commitment requires that the other person must love and respect me enough to want to hear, and I must love and respect him enough to speak words he can hear. But assuming that is the case, then this is commitment: valuing our unity over my pride, the whole of our us rather than the sum of my righteousness.

  Not only did I have the love thing all wrong, I thought as we reached our house. I was also wrong about commitment. Love is not just a feeling, and commitment is not just a decision. They, when intertwined, are action. Love and commitment move, and touch, and listen, and speak. They are deeds that sacrifice individual pride. Their goal is not just happiness, but mutual vulnerability.

  But gee, sometimes it’s just so hard to do. Tonight, for instance. After painting two hours without a word, I can’t possibly talk. The hinges in my jaw have rusted shut.

  Finally at nine, Kevin leaves, and I set down my brush and manage to pry my mouth open. “I think I’m heading home,” I say, my voice coming out like a bent nail.

  Hal turns from the wall. “Why?”

  “I’m tired and hungry, and I didn’t pack enough food for a whole dinner.”

  “I’m tired and hungry, too.”

  “You have to get up early tomorrow. Why don’t you come back with me?”

  “I still have another coat of paint.”

  “You can’t get it all done tonight.”

  “I’m going to try.”

  “What are you going to eat for dinner?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I can pick you up something when I leave and bring it back.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “It’s not a bother. I’ll go to the Japanese place—”

  “No.”

  “Oookkkaayy.” I say this with uncertainty, hoping he’ll change his mind. But he just asks me to leave the brush on its can, and goes back to his painting.

  Well, I think, pausing in my new study, I guess love and commitment require timing, as well as speaking and listening. There is value in waiting for better moments to talk, and the moment between two coats of paint isn’t one of them.

  “Bye!” I call back up the stairs. He doesn’t respond.

  See? He cares more about being right than he cares about you.

  I step outside and get in my car. So what that the lining of my coat is getting even more paint on it? So what that it’s so cold my nose is running? I might as well get my dinner at 7-Eleven. They have my number-one comfort food: pretzels. I can drown myself in crunchy saltiness.

  It is bitingly cold. I raise my hood as I pull out. I angle for the turn to the next block—

  Thump thump.

  My breath catches in my throat. Someone’s banging on my car!

  Thump thump thump.

  I see nothing out the windshield, through the rearview, on the passenger side. But a carjacker must be trying to blast into my car—and I can’t even see him! I look around wildly.

  “Hey!” I hear from outside the driver’s window.

  Hal is beside my car in his painting clothes, without a coat—of course without a coat. “Are you okay?” he says.

  I roll down the window. “No! I thought someone was about to carjack me!”

  “I don’t mean now. I mean when you left the house.”

  “No, I—yes, I was fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

  “I thought I heard a crash.”

  “You heard the front door close behind me.”

  “That’s it?”

  “As far as I know. I can’t imagine what crashed.”

  He looks at me. I feel so sad for him, out in the cold without his coat. “When I stop off at 7-Eleven to get pretzels”—he laughs, knowing my weakness—“do you want anything?”

  “You coming back?”

  “I can.”

  “You weren’t coming back.”

  “I can, if you’re hungry. I can even go to the Japanese place if you’re hungry.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “I’ll go there right now.”

  “Okay,” he says. “That would be nice.”

  Late that night, after we eat dinner standing up, not talking about our fight, just speaking cautiously about banalities, I return to the rented house while he stays to paint. I have long been asleep when the bedroom door opens. “I found it,” he says, and tosses something on the blanket.

  I reach over. “Your winter coat! Where was it?”

  “I guess a few days ago I stuck it on the bathroom sink so it wouldn’t get paint on it. Then I forgot about it.”

  “I’m so glad you found it. Maybe everything will be good from here on in.”

  He says nothing. I push myself across the bed toward him. “Can we talk about what happened?” I say, too tired to argue myself back into silence. “So it doesn’t happen again?”

  He pauses, then says, “When you say the same thing over and over, it makes me crazy.”

  I say, “I understand. You still don’t need to snap at me.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “And when you feel the urge to lose your patience with me saying the same thing over and over, I’d like it if you asked why it’s so important to me.”

  He hesitates, a shadow beside the bed. “I’ll try,” he says.

  “I’ll try, too.”

  This resolution is just one step, and it took all night. No—it’s been taking weeks. The house holds layers of history, and now it holds ours, too. I’m glad the walls can’t speak.

  A few nights later, after the wooden floors have been sealed and covered with protective paper, I return for another coat of paint. I’ve barely seen Hal for days. I’m teaching, I’m packing, he’s at work, he’s at Teacher’s Lane, and the clock makes another rotation.

  I arrive with Hal’s work clothes in a bag, as well as a take-out dinner. He greets me pleasantly but quickly, and as we stand in the empty living room, strategizing about the order in which we’ll accomplish our tasks this evening, we hear a knock on the window.

  It’s our neighbor Jim, waving to us from under a Russian-style hat. “Come in,” I say. “See the house.” I’m surprised I want to show it, because Hal and I are still feeling tentative around each other, and when I look around, I don’t see a whole house, only parts—like the toilet and the light fixtures, just put in—and everything that’s not right. Jim jumps at the chance to go through, and as Hal peels off to work on the third floor and I begin the tour, Jim keeps saying, “It’s beautiful.” I almost mention the tile flaw in the bathroom, then stop. He might not even notice. He doesn’t.

  When we reach the still-in-progress third floor, I see that Hal has, thankfully, painted over the green railing. Now it’s red with plum spindles. He’s also added a sponged red to the lavender accent wall, a swirl that looks like a basement from the 1970s where a local band is having their debut. “I’m doing this to learn how to tone down the Pepto-Bismol wall in the dining room,” he says. “It’s cool,” Jim says, then asks, “Do you feel great in here?” Hal doesn’t answer, and of course I haven’t felt great at all. But seeing it through Jim’s eyes, imagining myself as unaware of our quarrel as I am of the history of every person who has lived in this house, I look around and see things that are indeed lovely. “I’m beginning to,” I say. “Well, being here,” he says, “it just lifts the spirit up,” and he raises his palms toward the sky.

  Jim and I return downstairs, and I see that it is a nice house. Yes, it’s easy to dwell on all t
hat failed to be born, like the third-floor addition that would have become my study. I can also stand in the dining room-kitchen and superimpose the image of the skeletal room, with me looking up to the rafters of the second floor. But if I blink all that away, I see a hundred-year-old house with our quirky stamp on it—sustainable, colorful, eclectic: crystal doorknobs on the second floor to go with the old transoms above the doors, retro light fixture in the dining room to go with the diner-esque glass block windows, bohemian accent walls of purple and marigold and vermillion. It is ours, because it reflects our personalities. It is also not ours, because it existed before and it will exist after, and we are just passing through, as all of us do through time itself.

  After I say bye to Jim, I change back into Hal’s clothes—now with thermal underwear beneath, both for warmth and to keep the pants up. Then I get to work. Hal’s left the radio off entirely, and the room heaves with silence. Maybe that’s good. I’ll just keep my opinions to myself and go about as I’ve been instructed, painting one more white coat on the walls.

  But I’m using a roller for the first time since my terrible paint job when I was fifteen, and I’m still terrible. It keeps leaving lavender and red dots on the white wall, and dripping onto the already painted baseboards. Then I am asked to do another coat of plum on the baseboards to cover up my error. But even with a brush I’m inept. “I can’t keep to a clean line,” I say.

  “Just do your best,” he replies, without his usual warmth.

  Crouching here, gracelessly pantomiming a baseboard paint job, I consider slipping out to Susan and Jim’s house, though I fear I’d break down sobbing in their living room.

  So I’m not looking forward to a stand-up dinner in our empty living room an hour later, and I guess Hal isn’t either, because after I hand him the salad I brought and we start eating, neither of us speaks. After a few minutes, I feel too awkward to keep saying nothing, and with no desire to arouse more tension, I attempt levity. “This is bringing out my inner oaf,” I say.

  Hal just forks up another piece of lettuce.

  Maybe I just have to say something funnier to get him to react. I search my thoughts to come up with additional self-deprecation, but something else slips between my lips instead.

  “You know,” I say, “you’ve become a different person yourself in the last few weeks.”

  “How?” he says, taken aback.

  I guess I have to follow up now. Love and commitment, after all, speak. “You’re not smiling much. You’re actually being quite stern.”

  He eats his salad.

  I say, “Maybe this is just how you are when you’re at the office, so I’ve never seen this part of you and I just need to get used to it.”

  “I don’t paint for a living.”

  “You work with deadlines and the physical world. Maybe you need to be stern for that.”

  He takes another bite of salad. I look at my food, and feel as if I barely fit into my body. I say, “Jim talked about the place lifting him up. It is nice—I realized that when he was over. It’s fun being here. Do you feel that way?”

  “It stopped being fun for me long ago. At this point I just want it to be over.”

  Time to give up this line of conversation. I ask him to fill me in on his day.

  He tells me, wearily, that his office was required to attend a special seminar, one of those occasional workplace requirements devoted to making office life better.

  “What was the topic?” I say, pulling teeth.

  “Conflict resolution.”

  I laugh and say, “That’s what you and I need.”

  He looks away. “The fact is that I’m stressed out and I’m not handling it well.”

  I wonder if he means the skipped meals, the lack of sleep. I say, “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not treating you as well as I should be, and that’s what matters.”

  Suddenly we’re folding into each other’s arms and leaning in to each other. And as our breathing moves together again, his chest in to mine and mine in to his, I know that, although these walls can’t speak, many other fights must have happened right in this room. If only this house could tell us all that it’s seen. If only we could learn the ways of love and commitment that those before us worked out through their own lives then we might not stumble so hard, and so long, and so many times. I know the stories are right here, all around us. If only we were able to listen.

  I pull out of the hug and say, “I’m terrible at painting. At anything with building.”

  “It’s true. You are.”

  “But I want to help. I want to take away some of your stress.”

  “So stop painting.”

  “Will that be less stressful to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But what else can I do?”

  “Bring me dinner while I’m here every night, and bring my work clothes.”

  “But I don’t cook. I toss salad.”

  “Just make me canned soup and salad. That’ll be fine.”

  “It seems like such a meager contribution.”

  “Why not just say we’re a great team? I’ll do what I’m good at, and you’ll do what you’re good at. You can bring food and clothes—and iron my shirts back at the rented house.”

  “I’m not good at ironing, either.”

  “But you’re not terrible at it.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “So you do what you’re not terrible at, I’ll do what I’m good at, and it will work.”

  He’s right. This formula—taking actions that not only respect our differences, but accept our different proficiencies—succeeds. Over the next week, while Hal lays a cork floor on the third story, I bring dinner. While I iron twenty-seven of his shirts in the rented house, he builds shelves. While I go to the supermarket and stock up on his favorite soups, he corrects the paint I applied poorly. While he has a final job meeting with Dan, I pick up his evening coffee.

  That weekend, our last before the move, on the morning before what the news predicts will be the biggest snowstorm of the season, I paint once more on the third floor. It is something I can’t mess up: rolling white over the failed experiment of the red-sponged lavender. This time, Hal bought a new roller, so the color spots are gone. This time, too, the radio is playing Beatles love songs, in honor of the upcoming Valentine’s Day. And while Hal sands and drills and whistles harmony, I sing. At dusk, I produce a thermos of hot lentil soup and the nicest salad I can put together. We stand in the empty living room eating and talking and laughing, friends and allies once again; and I glance toward the stairs. There lies his winter coat, which was lost in plain view, and will now keep him warm in the storm. “Here it comes,” he says, pointing. I turn toward the hundred-year-old window frames, which have witnessed untold friendships and romances and marriages and communities as they’ve splintered apart, and maybe, if they were lucky and willing, constructed ways to come back together. I wish the windows could tell me what they’ve seen, and how, two by two, we can make the world a more agreeable place. We need all the good ideas we can get. But the windows can give only a reflection of us, doing what each of us does well, or at least doesn’t do terribly—and enjoying each other again. I look past the reflection into the outside. Single crystals of snow are drifting down. It won’t be long until they thicken, and fall closer together, and white out the blackness of the sky.

  W·R·A·P·P·I·N·G U·P

  Purpose

  Tuesday, February 14

  2:00 P.M.:

  Three days until the renovation is complete, and I have become a feral monster. I hate everyone, except Hal.

  I hate Verizon, the megacorporation that provides our phone and Internet service. I’ve made at least eight calls to them over the last month to transfer service from the rented house to Teacher’s Lane, with each call lasting nearly an hour, some disconnecting without warning. Today—my last day before my trip to Orlando—I pour two hours into more calls until I finally shriek that they shoul
d just kill the phone and Internet service at the rented house now. So my phone will go dead in the next few minutes, while I’m in the middle of a frenzy of renovation-related calls and Hal needs to reach me and I’m working out my itinerary with the university in Orlando.

  I hate our cats. Zeebee and Peach are agitated, leaping into and out of boxes, knocking things over, attacking each other, requiring attention I have no time to give.

  I hate the people I’m speaking for in Orlando. They didn’t even start making my flight arrangements and scheduling my class visits until a week ago. So I don’t have a guaranteed seat on my flight down—or time during my all-day campus visit for meals.

  I hate Sparky and Torch, for igniting the delay that made us move this week instead of at the far more convenient time of Christmas.

  I hate the burglar who kicked this whole thing into action in the first place.

  I hate human frailty because yesterday, Rosalie called to say that the cold Gordon has been fighting since Christmas is still holding on, so they won’t come to see me while I’m down there and I can’t come to see them. After all I went through with Hal and that lighthouse, I won’t even see her. I only wish that last week, when I’d called to make sure that everything was still on track before my hosts made my flight reservations, and I suggested that Gordon might feel better if we skipped it and I didn’t fly in a day early after all, Rosalie hadn’t insisted that we not only stick to our plan but also that I take the earliest flight possible so we could have even more time together. I only wish that when she called to cancel, she’d made some tiny acknowledgment that tomorrow, on a day when Hal would much prefer me to be here, I’ll be rising at five thirty a.m. to catch a flight with no guaranteed seat to reach Orlando a day early to see no one.

  I hate myself for hating everyone, especially my mother, who is old and in decline. I hate myself for wasting my life as a writer rather than becoming a lawyer or dermatologist or someone with a real income who could therefore have faced the payments for this once-in-a-lifetime renovation without them adding up to apoplexy. But instead the cost has grown by another $11,000 and Hal has made a list of other must-haves that come to $5,000, for a grand sum of $187,000, and now that we have the total we definitely have to refinance the house to keep from breaking open our IRAs, and it is the refinance guy I’m waiting to hear from. I don’t want a bigger mortgage for thirty years, but what choice do we have when I am teaching students I love at a college that won’t hire me full-time yet I put in full-time hours and even graded papers today and anyway if they did pay me full-time wages it still would take years to replenish our bank account and how the heck are we going to pay off a house with a mortgage double the size of the mortgage we have now and not be done until Hal’s eighty-four?