House Lessons

by Erica Bauermeister

  * * *

  —

  I’VE ALWAYS DREAMED OF having an orchard—a leafy green world of reading spots and hiding places. Old orchards are best; as the trees grow toward each other, the air becomes rich with their conversations. Their branches crook and grow lichen, and yet they still bloom. I’d always said I would rather save an old orchard than plant a new one, but as I’d never owned any sort of orchard before, it made the claim easier to make. Now, I had to put my muscles where my mouth was.

  Ours was not a particularly big orchard—maybe some four or five trees; it was hard to tell. Considering the density of the ivy in the lower yard, it was amazing the trees were still alive at all. The vines spread across the ground and spiraled their way up the trunks, turning the trees into burly, shaggy beasts. When the ivy reached the top branches, it stretched across the spaces toward the nearby evergreens.

  You could almost hear the ivy whispering—these trees are mine.

  The hell they are, I thought, and I grabbed the nearest vine and pulled.

  * * *

  —

  ON MY DAYS BACK in Seattle, I had begun seeing the therapist my friend had recommended. The almost-fire had been a wake-up call in many ways. Up to that point, I had hoped that by simple good intentions I could let go of old ways of parenting, passed down to me through generations. I would forge a new path, allow my children to live their own lives, love them unconditionally. But it was clear that intentions were not strong enough, and so I went to Camille, a tranquil and deeply intelligent psychologist.

  For fifty minutes at a time, I would sit in her office and find my way through as she listened, her mind awake, intent. Once, as a shorthand explanation of my childhood, I’d told her about my mother receiving flowers one afternoon when I was about eight years old, and my surprise when she’d said they were from my father.

  “He misses me,” my mother had said, and I’d asked why.

  “Because he’s working in DC now. He’s waiting for us to sell the house and go join him,” she’d replied, as if it should be obvious.

  He’d been gone three months, apparently. I’d thought he was just on another business trip.

  I told that to Camille as a story, a joke almost—we were still in the debriefing stage of therapy. I didn’t mention my mother’s reaction when she finally grasped my confusion, the mixture of shock and sadness on her face.

  “That’s interesting,” Camille noted, “the way you told me that.” And I could almost feel the tug on something deep within me, bringing it out into the light.

  * * *

  —

  THERE ARE SEVERAL WAYS to get rid of ivy, none of them easy or guaranteed. Cutting the vines is to be avoided, as it can spur on additional growth. Experts suggest using herbicides, slicing into the thicker roots during the growing season and applying toxins directly into the nutritional main line. Some even recommend blowtorches. Most agree, however—the only way to gain the upper hand on ivy is to use both of your own and pull it out, year after year.

  It is not a simple matter of unwinding the vines, following their sinuous trails up around the trunks and branches. Ivy latches on, using thousands of tiny hairlike suckers. When the vines are young and pliable, detaching them is a bit like removing a piece of duct tape, but as they grow and thicken, they achieve the tenacity of octopus arms. Once removed, they still leave marks behind, navigational scars for future generations—a reminder that you will be back again if you want to win this battle.

  George had let me borrow Marge the dump truck yet again; I was going to have to start paying rent on the thing, he joked sometimes, but he never charged me. And a big truck was necessary—the ivy rose fifteen feet above my head, higher when it had a taller tree to climb. I worked my way up the first tree I could get to, yanking down whole sections of leaves and vines, which fell like vast green umbrellas on my head, scattering years’ worth of accumulated dust. Over the hours, the tree emerged—branches reaching upward stiffly, aiming for the sky. It would take a while before they would relax; they were so used to battling for the light. When the pile behind me threatened to block my way out, I would carry great armloads to the truck, where I’d climb in and stomp them down.

  By the end of the day, I had filled Marge to the brim of her wooden side panels. From my vantage point high on top of the pile, I looked back at the orchard. One small section was cleared. We had measured trash by the ton; it appeared that landscaping would be by the truckload. Weeding on the grandest of scales.

  * * *

  —

  FINALLY, IN EARLY AUGUST, the city approved our foundation. Ours would be the first house in the city to use pin piles, so green-lighting the engineering of it had taken longer, they said. Now, we just had to locate the kind of pipe they’d specified—which apparently was nowhere to be found.

  In the meantime, George and his crew, frustrated by the lack of forward momentum, had taken to working on the house even though it was still sitting in the air—higher now, as Joe had raised it almost ten feet to make the future pin-pile work easier. One day, as I was down in the orchard, I heard Rourke, a big, rangy guy who was generally even-keeled, curse, long and loud. I looked up and saw him standing under the southeast corner of the house, a two-by-six held vertically in his hands.

  “Sorry,” he said when he saw me.

  “What is it?”

  He pointed up at the house hovering over us, at the area we’d come to refer to as Trouble Central. That was where the downspout went missing, the corner with the chimney with no footing as well as the biggest of the foundation cracks. Our own little vipers’ nest of problems.

  Jim, a sweet man who tended to play jazz radio on the site, was up the ladder above both of our heads. As I looked closer, it appeared they were trying to prop the house up from below with the two-by-six.

  I raised my eyebrows in question.

  “We started to take out that southeast window,” Rourke explained.

  “And the whole house started to sink,” Jim added.

  “About three-quarters of an inch,” Rourke said, sounding impressed.

  “Wait, the window frame was holding up that corner?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Never seen that before.”

  The hole where the chimney used to be now gave a good view of the supporting beam, which looked distinctly like a sponge.

  “Don’t worry,” Jim said, angling the two-by-six into place while Rourke cranked on the jack below it. As the pressure on the jack began to rise, I heard cracking noises.

  “It’ll be fine,” Rourke called out. “Just wait until you see it with clean wood.” He paused. “You weren’t thinking of working inside the house today, were you?”

  I fled to the garden.

  * * *

  —

  SLOWLY, OVER THE WEEKS, the orchard emerged: three cherry trees, an apple, and a plum, as well as a bank of lilacs, which had been twisted into sculptural shapes by the accumulated weight of the ivy. There were times when I was oddly grateful for the ivy’s age. In places, its branches were as thick as my arm, and I climbed them to get to the upper reaches, making the ivy an accomplice in its own destruction—an irony I relished by that point.

  And still we waited for the pipe.

  One afternoon in late August, as I was finally getting the upper hand on the ivy, I noticed what appeared to be the knobby black twigs of another apple tree, just visible at eye height through a rampantly tall wall of blackberries at the far end of the orchard. The blackberries were so thick I had ignored them, finding even ivy to be a more plausible opponent. Now I looked closer. It seemed impossible that a whole tree was in there—it would have been easier to hide an elephant. Intrigued, however, I began hacking my way in.

  They didn’t go down easy, those blackberries, scratching at my face, untying my shoelaces with their thorny vines, clinging to my legs in one last gasp of revenge, but inch by inch, I made progress. Four feet off to my right, I spied the round green curve of an appl
e. I kept slashing away, revealing more and more tree branches. When I stopped—finished would in no way be the right word in this case—my arms were tattooed, my hair wild. The area around me looked like the aftermath of a giant catfight. But through the space I’d cleared in the blackberries, I could discern the outline of not one or two, but six additional apple trees. A whole world we hadn’t known existed.

  * * *

  —

  “TELL ME MORE ABOUT your father,” my therapist, Camille, said one day as I sat in her office.

  When I was young, I wasn’t sure what to think of my father. He could lecture for hours at the dinner table on the intricacies of rocket science, or sit at the piano in our living room, the notes rolling out of him—songs that he’d written for each of us when we were born. But in everyday life, he didn’t say much, liked quiet. Liked order. If, in the mad dash of childhood, you disrupted that order, he would say your name, just once, but the shortness of it always made me stop in my tracks, alert as a hunting dog. There was so much waiting there behind the three syllables of my name. I didn’t understand what I had done that could generate that much emotion, held in so tight.

  I was in my late thirties when my mother told me that she and my father had watched The Prince of Tides and he had broken down, told her that his mother used to beat him when he was a child. My parents had been married for more than four decades at that point, and he’d never said a thing. Although perhaps we might have suspected if we’d known how to look.

  I remember so many things from that moment when my mother told me. The deep and utter sadness I felt for my father. The sudden clarity of understanding. The realization that all those years the thing he’d been fighting when he said my name was not me. He was fighting not to do what had been done to him.

  * * *

  —

  THE ORDER FOR THE pipe was lost not once, but twice, and when the pipe was finally in the ground—pounded in so deep we joked you could hear people speaking Chinese through it—it still was not right. The inspector came out and insisted that it pass a particular test: one man leaning on a ninety-pound jackhammer should move a pipe no more than one inch in sixty seconds. If that seems impossible to you, you’d be right. Most of them failed the test, sinking down deeper into the fill dirt.

  “This is crazy,” George said after the inspector had left. “I tested those pipes with the Bobcat at ten thousand pounds per pipe—that’s three times the tolerance we need. Now the city wants something different.” He paced the site.

  But the engineering inspection is a fact of life, much like catching a ferry or parenting. When you fail, you fail. You have no choice but to try again.

  * * *

  —

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I arrived at the site to the ear-pounding sound of the air compressor. Down in the shadows between the cribs, I could see George and Rourke gripping a bucking red jackhammer, half the size of either one of them. Rourke had both hands on the handles and was pushing hard; George bore down on the base of the jackhammer with his foot. The jackhammer fought them, jerking back and forth like a giant swordfish.

  The pipe under the jackhammer seemed not to be moving at all, despite the force being exerted upon it—thirty seconds, forty-five. Then just before sixty seconds, it sank smoothly and rapidly into the ground, as if it were being eaten by the earth. When the top of the pipe reached ground level, Rourke turned the jackhammer off. George looked up and saw me, and then shook his head.

  They added a connector, more pipe, and then the whole process began again. Every once in a while, a pipe held—and stayed. At that, George yanked up the jackhammer and moved on to the next pipe. In one corner, Jim cut new lengths of pipe on a steel chop saw, orange sparks flying out near the rim of his round straw hat. It looked like our own little Dante’s inferno down there.

  After a while, they took a break. George walked over to me. His face was sweating and red; his eyes looked tired.

  “We’re almost done,” he said. “We got in sixty-five yesterday.”

  It had taken fifteen minutes to put in one pipe. Sixty-five in a day seemed like a feat truly worthy of Mike Mulligan.

  “This is nuts,” I said. And then, “How deep do property rights go, anyway?”

  “I think you’re talking mineral rights at this point,” said George. But he smiled when he said it, which I found just short of miraculous. Then he went back, picked up a new pipe, and turned on the jackhammer again.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE END OF AUGUST, Camille and I had made some progress. I was learning to acknowledge and say what I thought, at least occasionally. One morning, we circled back to the almost-fire one more time.

  “The Seattle house was your safe place,” she said, holding my gaze with her own. “Now, you have to make one inside yourself. That’s how we grow up.”

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS ALMOST SEPTEMBER by the time the pipes were set and the crew was ready to move the house into its new position. On the day of the event, Ben was out of town and Kate, already deep in anticipation of her eighth-grade year, had decided to spend the day with a friend. She and I were finding our way back to each other, but slowly, one gesture or word at a time—an offer to help cook, a moment of respect—so I had let her make the decision for herself. Ry was excited at the prospect of moving a house, however, and thus he and I set off early that morning. No chance of missing the ferry this time.

  The idea that our house might be transported by something as clean as Ivory soap came close to perfect irony. The removal of the asbestos shingles had left the house looking like a mangy cat, and what grass there was in the front yard had been tilled under by the repeated trips of the Bobcat, carrying out loads of old concrete and dirt. Dust swirled up in the gusts of wind, coating the fronds of the beleaguered palm trees. A day on the site left your skin parched, your hair stiff.

  There was a regular truck convention in front of the house when Ry and I arrived. Men were moving about the site, intent upon their work. Not wanting to disturb them, we walked around the side of the house, looking for clues as to how it would all work. A few feet beyond the southern edge of the house, we discovered a new row of cribs made of freshly cut lumber. A series of heavy steel beams extended out from under the house to rest on top of the new cribs. The house hung in the air, waiting.

  I pointed to the new beams. “I think the house will slide across on those,” I said, “and end up on the new cribs.”

  Joe moved into position on a beam above us and started scrubbing it like a tanner working a skin, long strokes up and down. We saw something white in his hand.

  “Is that the soap?” Ry asked.

  “Yeah,” Joe called down. “It helps the house move. It’ll glide right along.”

  I must have looked concerned.

  “We stop the soap a few feet from the end, though,” he added.

  “Why?” Ry asked.

  “Well, that way, if the house starts to go too far, the friction will keep it from sliding off the end.” Joe grinned.

  He wasn’t leaving much room for error, I noticed. I pictured the house, starting to move after so many years of being locked in place, building up momentum, flying off the ends of the beams and over the tops of the fruit trees below.

  “Don’t worry—it’s never happened yet,” Joe said.

  I wanted to believe him, but in a contest between a thirty-five-ton house and three feet of friction, I had my own ideas of which might win.

  * * *

  —

  AS WE GOT CLOSER to moving time, a crowd started to assemble—George and his crew, as well as the usual assortment of neighbors and townsfolk.

  “Don’t you just love physics?” Roman had walked up, holding a camera. “By the way, you’ll get the best view from the side,” he advised.

  A truck motor started, and the crowd shifted in anticipation.

  Ry and I walked out into the street, where we could see Joe maneuvering his shiny white
pickup truck until it was poised to ram nose-first into the north wall. Then he pulled a long cable from the winch under the front bumper of the truck and quickly ran it back and forth between the truck, a Bobcat on the south side, and the house. A cat’s cradle of cable. At last, he got back in the truck and revved the motor twice. After that, all I heard was the whirring of the winch. I waited but saw nothing.

  “Look!” Ry said after a moment, pointing at the house. “It’s moving!”

  I stared. I couldn’t see a thing. Or hear it, for that matter. If it was moving, where was the crackling and creaking, the moaning of the house?

  “Look at the south edge of the house, Mom,” Ry said. “See?”

  Suddenly, I did. Slowly, gracefully, the house was moving toward the orchard, traveling by us like some huge decrepit Rose Parade float.

  “It’s hit the soap!” George called out. “Now it’ll speed up.”

  Then the house simply slid along the beams—as if all that weight meant nothing, a shrug of the shoulders, a toss of the head.

  The house maintained its stately progress, but in the process, something extraordinary began to happen. As the distance between the house and the road increased, the house shed its ominous, looming appearance. It continued to move, slower now, the friction finally kicking in, its southern corners nestling into the spreading branches of a pair of huge English walnut trees, as if they had been planted for that very purpose.

  The movement stopped, and the house settled into its new home. I couldn’t stop looking. In the space of five minutes, with a distance of six feet, the house had gained a new personality, a sense of belonging that had never been apparent before. I remembered Herzog’s theory of how beauty could give a building firmitas. Maybe moving a building through the air could give it roots.