Building a Home with My Husband Read online

  And Hal? I don’t hate Hal because I don’t see Hal. He’s working constantly on the house. Well, yes, I hate Hal, too, because I realized a whole week ago, before it had gone in, that the vestibule floor should not be the red linoleum he specced, but the blue we have in the bathroom, so it won’t clash with the berry-purple door. He agreed, and said he’d bring it up with Dan, but kept forgetting, because Dan’s workers and all the subs are swarming the house at this point, making sure everything gets done by Friday, February 17—when, a few hours before our moving van pulls up, the inspector is scheduled to give, or deny, the Certificate of Occupancy—and there were just so many details for Hal to think about, along with the third floor, etc., that by the time he finally remembered to leave a note for Dan about the floor, Kevin had already laid the red, and now the tiny vestibule is a phone booth of color.

  I hate myself, again, for hating Hal for being too overwhelmed to tell Dan to do something as trivial as change the color of a floor.

  I say all this hatred in a scream. I am screaming into the phone at a friend who had the temerity to call minutes before Verizon sends my phone into a coma, and got thanked for her effort by getting trapped in my anger pyre.

  Then I pack. Last summer I gently sorted out the necessities from the mementos. Now I hurl everything into boxes. There’s no time for thought. The universe is conspiring to deprive me of my senses. Renovation is not renewal. It is annihilation.

  5:30 P.M.:

  Late in the day, leaving our temporary neighborhood for one last trip to bring Hal his work clothes and dinner, I see one of the neighbors from a few houses down. She waves to me on the street, and as she crosses a mound of snow to ask how we’re doing, I show my gratitude by sounding off. She listens with an odd smile, then says, “Maybe some good will come out of this.” I have no patience for Swedenborgian piffle, so I say, “I bet it will,” and then sound off some more. Finally she says, “Well, I think it means something.” “It means nothing,” I respond. She says, “I think it means that this neighborhood doesn’t want to let you go.”

  The thought is so sweet and giving in the face of my rant that I laugh. “That’s nice,” I say, almost crying as she waves good-bye.

  The spell is broken. I drive to the house. The monster has returned me to me.

  Wednesday, February 15

  12:30 P.M.:

  My plane lands in sunny Orlando, and as I retrieve my carry-on from the overhead bin, I remember the early hours this morning. I rose at five thirty in the dark. Hal got up then, too, neither of us having slept much, as we have not for weeks. We can’t—either because of a deficit of time or a surplus of anxiety. We, like Dan’s crew, are going constantly: as I showered today, Hal resumed packing; as I ate breakfast and he showered, I labeled more boxes with color-coded dots. It’s a failed system, though. We have too few colors for the number of rooms in the old house, and anyway, we keep forgetting which colors mean what. Is pink my study or his studio? Blue the kitchen or bathroom? I affixed dots anyway. Meaninglessness was not enough reason to stop.

  Outside, in the snowdrifts left from the weekend storm, Hal helped me load my bags into my car. He was in a suit, ready for an important meeting at the office today, which, because he took off tomorrow and Friday for the move, is his final day in the office for the week, so he’ll be frantically tying up loose ends until the moment he leaves. Then, late this afternoon, he’ll race home, hastily change into work clothes, and, with half his team off to the minor leagues, probably not sleep for two days. We were polite as we closed my trunk, but were so worn out from exhaustion, obligation, and the determination to make our move-in deadline that we did not speak. Finally, employing a term that, I hoped, would show me to be attuned to the same stresses as he, I asked, “Do you think we’ll get the Certificate of Occupancy?” “Dan says we will,” Hal said. “But do you think we’ll make it?” “I can’t think about it at all. That’s his job,” he said.

  Now, on the outdoor shuttle at the airport in Orlando—“The happiest place in the world,” the pilot announced when we landed—and looking out the windows at the blue sky and palm trees, I think of our good-bye kiss in the snow. I was standing beside the driver’s door, and we came toward each other. But unlike some recent mornings, it was not quick, as I’d expected. It was long and close, our arms around each other, our bodies instantly relaxing. How much it meant to me: an oasis of touch in the midst of turmoil.

  I press my fingers to my lips. I do not hate him. I do not hate my mother, my cats, my hosts in Orlando, myself, or Verizon. I hate human imperfection, and how impossible it is to escape.

  9:30 P.M.:

  I am at dinner with my hosts in Orlando: teachers from the English department and sales representatives from a textbook company. Everyone is congenial and forthcoming. At my request, each shares her life story, and we form a fast, if temporary, bond over our stir-fry, commiserating over tales of families that disappointed and marriages that failed, cheering over moments of forgiveness and well-matched pairings. I usually savor such opportunities to make friends in faraway places. But behind my laughter and requests for more tea is the sense that it is wrong that I am here.

  Thursday, February 16

  8:00 A.M.:

  I find this out later: Hal sleeps only four hours between last night and today. Then he races around the rented house packing, and, jumping back and forth over a patch of snow, fills his car to transport yet another load of boxes to the old house. Only when he powers up the car does he see that, for the first time in his car’s young life, one of its tires has gone flat.

  1:45 P.M.:

  I stand in front of a class of English students, all dressed in climate-appropriate T-shirts and sandals, and answer questions about writing. Then I’m escorted past tropical plantings to the campus bookstore, where I shake professors’ hands. I feel drawn to my hosts, all warm and fun people, and I enjoy our brief but continual exchanges. But I do not let myself forget where I should be, and what I’m not doing.

  Then I return to the hotel for a brief break. The hotel is luxurious. I want to stand gazing out the window at downtown Orlando, but instead I stare at the pitiful sums in my most recent brokerage statement. If the refinancing doesn’t work out, our gooses are cooked. Even if it does, we’ll be living much closer to the bone.

  I call Hal, but his cell phone is off, and I leave a message. Then I pull out hotel stationery and try to add up the money I’ll make this year so we can start prepaying the prodigious mortgage we’ll owe after the refinancing. But it is more productive to add up air.

  Maybe I should try Beth. To add to my guilt about Hal, I feel guilty about my sister—we haven’t spoken for a week, and for the whole last month I’ve kept our calls short. Fortunately she picks up. I tell her that I’m calling from Orlando, and we’re moving back to the old house tomorrow, but she doesn’t grasp that this means major anxiety, and I don’t tell her. Instead, she tells me that a bus driver who was once a hair stylist invited her over last weekend and gave her a cut and color of her own choosing. She chose blond. Although when I see a picture later I’ll think of Billy Idol, she says it looks spectacular, or, as she pronounces it, “Specacklur.” This is one of the new words another bus driver taught her recently—words which he said describe her. I, using another, say, “I bet it’s exuberant, too.” “Thaz me,” she says, and then, using her own pronunciation again, adds, “Zoomin’ Beth,” and her giddiness helps me smile.

  As soon as we hang up, Hal calls back. Verizon, I learn, fumbled their instructions again, but we’re too worn down to get angry. Hal is also undistractable. He updates me in less than sixty seconds and then has to go. There’s not enough time for me to wish him a zoomin’ evening before he speeds back to his labors.

  8:30 P.M.:

  I am standing in the outdoor amphitheater that seats one thousand, giving my talk. Although I was told that the date of this trip was immutable because this space had been reserved and hordes were expected, most professors w
ere never informed that an author was coming, and the few flyers that were posted around campus got taken down for reasons unknown, so I am speaking to a teeming mass of fifty students, half of whom are on their cell phones. It’s clear, as I trudge through my talk, dressed in a coat and gloves and scarf because Orlando nights in February are actually chilly, that Hal didn’t have to be alone right now, and I didn’t have to feel guilty. How will we ever recover from this? Will it break us apart, like what happened when Hal backed the U-Haul into the neighbor’s car? Isn’t renovation about coming back to life, not sending each other to ruin?

  Friday, February 17

  8:15 A.M.:

  It’s our infamous moving day, and I am on a treadmill at the hotel gym in Orlando. Outside the window, the Florida sun beams down, and flowers smile toward the sky. I look at the TV on the wall and learn that it is pouring and forty-five degrees in Delaware. I pound harder on the machine and close my eyes. It’s the happiest place in the world.

  10:20 A.M.:

  After I pass through Security in Orlando International Airport, I call my father. He says he’s been trying to leave me a message at home, but my voice mail isn’t working. I bemoan the long litany of errors, Verizon’s and everyone else’s. He says, with a joke in his voice, “Every life must have some calamity. It just so happens that you’re lucky.” “How’s that?” I say. He says, “You’re getting it all at once, so you shouldn’t have any more for a while.” He gets me to laugh.

  Just in case Hal has left his cell phone on, I call him. Amazingly, he picks up. But he says, “The movers are here. I can’t stay on the phone.” He hangs up.

  So I don’t call an hour later to tell him the pathetic coincidence that happens as the plane backs out of the gate: the plane’s wheel malfunctions, eerily echoing Hal’s flat tire yesterday. I am also unable to tell him that the plane returns to the gate for maintenance, delaying our departure even more.

  I don’t expect perfection. By now, I don’t even expect competence. Just get me home.

  Whatever that means.

  1:15 P.M.:

  As the plane rises into the sky, I look down from the window at the thousands, then millions of houses running up the eastern sea-board, and marvel that anything ever works out. Renovation is messy, unpredictable, maybe even out of control. It crawls forward through one phase after another, nurtured by the nimble-handed and the stumble-prone and the dream-thwarted, consuming far more time and going through many more compromises than anyone would imagine, until finally it matures into a house that still, for all the preparation and hope that went into it, has shortcomings. And then we move inside this flawed house, and over time, we either come to rely on its ability to protect us, and commit ourselves to protecting it, and let ourselves grow charmed by its idiosyncrasies, and learn how to conduct ourselves when its deficiencies arise—or we leave. Just as we do with love.

  Clouds come between me and the topography below. But I keep my face pressed to the window, and as my watch ticks into an afternoon when Dan might or might not have received the Certificate of Occupancy, and Hal might or might not be resenting my absence, I think back to all we’ve been through: all the aggravation and grief and confusion and excitement and curiosity and friction and negotiation. Then I think about how, at the far end of this epic journey, having asked enough questions to fill a concrete mixer, I still don’t have the answer to one of the most pressing questions I started with. What do I want to do with the rest of my life? I made it this far and this is all I really know:

  I want to be an ally. I want to keep learning from my fellow students in life. I want to be a good wife, and good sister, and good daughter, and good neighbor, and good stranger. And, while I’m at it, I might as well add that I want to keep my anger pyre from burning anyone down.

  That’s still not telling me whether to take up microbiology or humanitarian relief. But I bet if I tell this to Hal later tonight, he’ll laugh. “Do you really need to figure out anything more? That list sounds ambitious enough to me.”

  4:30 P.M.:

  In the van that’s shuttling me to the parking lot outside Philadelphia International Airport, I call Hal on his cell phone. Thank goodness: it’s on.

  “Oh, hi!” he says, his voice buoyant.

  “You sound in good spirits.”

  “I shouldn’t.” He laughs.

  “Why?”

  “I’m toast, man!” He laughs more. “And I’m misdirecting the movers all over the place. But we’re three-quarters through the move. There’s a lot to go, but we’re getting there.”

  “Which house are you at?”

  “The old one. I mean, the new one. I mean, our house.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m great.”

  “I’m so glad to hear that.”

  “I’m so glad to feel it.”

  The van bumps down potholed Essington Avenue, and I think, The spell has broken for us both. The monster has returned him to him, too.

  I look out the van window, and as Hal and I camouflage our relief as small talk, I see a house under renovation. What camaraderie I now feel for those people. Yes, renovation is a journey of bathroom fixtures and contractor haggling. But it’s also an odyssey through multiple battles—permanence versus change, perfection versus imperfection, judgment versus compassion, material desire versus internal transcendence. I know, too, that our renovation is leaving me with much that I never expected: a hoarse voice from sleeping too little, a longing for hugs, and the realization that I just might play a part in things infinitely greater than I will ever be: the mending of family, the honoring of friendship, the togetherness of community, the celebration of kindred spirits, the mystery of the long education that carves the course of every life, the unbalanced duet of love. I still don’t know how I would define design, but I’m enormously glad that I’m in the thick of it.

  5:30 P.M.:

  I park on Teacher’s Lane, where early dusk is descending with midwinter swiftness. Two moving vans are sitting in front of our house, and when I get out of my car, I put my mind to living here again. Despite all that’s happened, it’s easy to envision. Actually, it’s not the inside of the house I picture, as I wheel my suitcase over the sidewalk. It’s these sycamores, against this pink sky. It’s being able to say: I’m finally home.

  Hal comes running down the porch steps toward me, smiling the way he did when he approached me twenty-four years ago on a Philadelphia street, and I think about forever. I want my life here to last that long, or as close to forever as humans can imagine ourselves to be.

  8:45 P.M.:

  The movers gone, I use the sparkling new bathroom for the first time.

  “The faucets don’t work,” I tell Hal when I emerge.

  Collapsed on the bed, he opens one eye. “You mean you didn’t get any water from them?”

  “Right.”

  “Foot pedals,” he reminds me.

  Oh, yes. Sustainable Hal speced foot-controlled sinks to save water—and a two-drawer dishwasher, high-performance furnace, super-efficient insulation. He told me about all these environmentally responsible decisions when he was drawing the plans two years ago. One zoning variance, two moves, seven movers, twenty fights, fifty disappointments, a hundred epiphanies, one explosion, and five thousand nails ago.

  I return to the bathroom and press the foot pedal. The water flows.

  We cook dinner catatonically. When we’re cleaning up, we discover that, when one of us is using the foot pedal for the kitchen sink, which Hal asked to be installed at the middle of the baseboard below, the other of us can’t open the cabinet to reach the trash can inside. “That’s something I’ll do differently next time,” Hal says. “Next time?” I ask.

  We fall into bed. The streetlight from outside the house spills fully into the room. We have no blinds up yet, because, having lost his notebook, Hal had to remeasure the windows, a task he completed only last week. So the streetlight shoots long rectangles across the ceiling, and I can s
ee the whole room. In one glance it is revealed as unfamiliar, in the next as deja vu. We sleep heavily and wake several times, confused about what time period we’re in.

  Saturday, February 18

  7:00 A.M.:

  I sit up. The ceiling rises way above my head. The windows are taller than I. As sunlight streams in, the Butterfield accent wall makes the room feel elegant yet playful. The marbleized texture of the light globe, beneath the maple-bladed ceiling fan, adds an artsy aura. The wooden floor stretches out like a welcoming beach. I set my feet on the floor, then cross the hall and enter my new study. It basks in southern light, which bounces off the red wall and golden light fixture as if creating an indoor dawn. Although the heights of the ceilings and windows haven’t changed, the proportions altered by the removal of the walls, the warmth added by new insulation, the moods created by the application of color, the sense of care evident in each decorative element, have transformed the atmosphere entirely.