House Lessons

by Erica Bauermeister

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  IF YOU THINK ABOUT all that can happen during building construction, it seems almost logical that there are so many rituals and superstitions connected to it. If you are lifting a thirty-five-ton house above your head, it only makes sense not to shave if you have even the slightest belief that not shaving will bring you luck. And if following a certain route keeps your heart from pounding for an entire two-hour drive, well then I say, do it.

  Most building rituals happen at a pivotal moment in the process, as a way of fending off harm or celebrating completion. The idea of placing objects under the first stone set in a foundation can be found in cultures all around the world. Often the object is a coin, but herbs, charms, the relics of saints, and sometimes even time capsules can find their way into the structure. I remember when our house was being lowered back down, I saw Roman slip a dollar bill onto the top of the concrete foundation just before the house settled into place. I asked him what he was doing, and he just smiled.

  The history of building rituals was not always so benign, however. Superstitions run deep during times when life seems perilous. The coin or herb at a cornerstone harks back to the days of ritual sacrifice given to appease the spirit of a place. There are ancient legends in Japan of “human pillars”—maidens buried alive in or near a building to protect it from attack. Animals have been sacrificed as well: some traditions call for a cat to be buried underneath the floorboards, or the blood of a chicken poured across a threshold. In a truly creative attempt to avoid violence, builders would try to capture the shape of a shadow, or the “measure of a man,” and put it underneath the foundation stone, instead of an actual body. The guilt here is only deferred, however, as it was believed that any man whose shadow was caught in this way would die within a year.

  These days, we’re more inclined to record and promote, and a cornerstone of major buildings is often something quite visible, with the name and date carved in it for all to see. But the building traditions still continue, changing and shifting as rituals often do.

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  THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF SUPERSTITIONS, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, first published in 1903, relates a Bulgarian belief concerning a house spirit—an entity created during the construction process, which watches over the house “as long as it stands.” If any house could make me believe it had a spirit, it was ours in Port Townsend. Ever since we became the owners, things had happened that couldn’t quite be explained. There was the delicate antique woman’s watch that inexplicably fell out of the living room ceiling the day after I’d lost my sturdy workman’s version to the ivy. The forty-year-old Father’s Day card that appeared in the kitchen, months after we’d cleaned out all the trash. The tree pruner who arrived unannounced at the front door just as I was contemplating the unkempt branches of our now-ivyless orchard.

  For that matter, there was no reason we should have found the house at all. We’d just set out, driven two blocks up a hill, and there it was. As simple as that. Over and over, it’s felt as if the house was watching out for us.

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  ON THAT SEPTEMBER 12, I spent a lot of time standing outside, staring at the house. The world still felt unreal, but more than ever I felt the need to take care of this structure. I couldn’t put the planes back in the sky, but I could try to save this one thing, to make it whole and beautiful once again.

  For months, we’d been debating what should replace the asbestos shingles that were by now almost completely gone. We wanted to re-create the original house as much as possible, but in its current condition there was no way of knowing what the exterior siding had once been, and we hadn’t been able to find any photos. I’d even gone down to the local history museum and plowed my way through album after album of pictures. Nothing.

  “We need to make a decision soon,” George told me as we were leaving at the end of the day. “You’ll just have to go with your gut, I guess.” My gut told me wood shingles, but Ben suggested that was mostly because I loved old beach houses.

  I got in the car and started the drive home, no more decisive than when I’d arrived—but halfway out of town, I realized I’d left my notebook behind, so I turned around. As I pulled back up to the house, I saw a white-haired man standing in our front yard, looking up at the roof.

  “Can I help you?” I asked. It was not unusual for people to stop and stare; we were still quite the sight.

  “My father used to live here when he was a boy,” the man said. “I’ve got photos. Would you like to see them?”

  He showed them to me, a series of sepia-toned moments. In them, the house rises up, its walls straight and strong—and covered in wood shingles.

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  MR. KING ENDED UP being a delightful man, and his photos provided a different, gentler chapter in the house’s story. Talking to him helped mitigate the slight feeling of creepiness that had lingered even after all the trash was cleared out. It wasn’t the house itself that felt that way. Sometimes possessions can leave ghosts behind even after they’re gone, and I, for one, wanted to be rid of them.

  In fact, when we’d decided to move the upstairs bathroom into the northeast corner, there had been more to it for me than practicality. The bedroom there had contained some of the most disturbing objects in the house, and even with the trash gone, the feeling in the room persisted. It felt like it still needed cleansing, and I liked the idea of water running through that space, washing everything away.

  A couple weeks after I’d met Mr. King, I got a call from George. I’d stayed home in Seattle that day; since 9/11, I’d found myself doing that more often, wanting to be near the kids. I told myself that things had slowed on the site again anyway as we continued to wait for the roofers. I was hoping George was calling to tell me that they were finally coming, but his voice sounded odd, not celebratory at all.

  “Something happened,” he said.

  My heart dropped. My mind went into overdrive, all the horrible scenarios I’d ever imagined, playing in fast-forward through my mind.

  “We were pressure-testing the plumbing,” George continued, “and the cap on the upstairs toilet just blew. I’ve never had that happen before, I swear. Anyway, all this water came pouring out, and it went down the front stairway and out the door.”

  “That’s weird,” I said. “I was just thinking about how the house needed a good washing out.”

  “Well, stop thinking,” George said sternly. “Because it’s happened twice now.”

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  THREE WEEKS, FOUR, FIVE. No roofers. Winter was on the horizon, the skies grey and wet, day after day. The schedule George had written on the wall was now a daily rebuke, dates slipping one after another. At times, it seemed we’d be lucky to have a roof by Thanksgiving.

  Back at home in Seattle, things were quieting, becoming peaceful. We’d all had a major reset in perspective that fall. In addition, the breaks that Kate and I had had from each other had given us room to breathe, and without his mother always there, ready to do everything for him, Ry was growing into himself. I was growing into myself, too. In a bout of homesickness for Italy, I had taken a cooking class one night. As I’d stood with the rest of the students, our hands deep in ingredients we would soon feed one another, I looked around that kitchen and wondered: What would happen to a group of strangers if they continued doing that intimate activity of cooking together?

  And just like that, an idea for a book fell into my head, and in the weeks that followed, after decades of trying and failing to write, I suddenly had characters showing up in my mind, one after another. I didn’t write them down yet—I still had a house to renovate—but at night when I couldn’t sleep, instead of imagining catastrophes, I thought of those characters, and the dark, still hours turned into something beautiful.

  Perhaps that is what rituals and stories really are—another place to put our anxious minds. A safe space
inside yourself in a world that doesn’t always make sense, that can terrify you or break your heart. Faced with such a world, I created a cooking school in my imagination. Our architect believed in an alternate universe where humans were monitored by a more intelligent species. In Japan, at the end of framing, workers sometimes shoot an arrow northwest, to send away the evil spirits. Our thoughts, our worries, go with those arrows, with those stories, carried away by myths of our own making.

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  THE CREW HAD DONE all they could; framing, plumbing, and windows were all in. Choices had been made for everything from appliances to faucets. All we needed was two or three days of good weather, and roofers—one little push and we could fly toward the finish.

  “We gotta catch a break sometime,” George said. But it didn’t happen.

  One afternoon, I found myself in the house alone. The days were rapidly getting shorter, and the sky was almost dark at five o’clock. I stood there in my water-washed house. Although the house had felt better since the plumbing tsunami, there was still something that wasn’t quite right. Perhaps it sounds strange, but it felt as if the house was waiting for something, and that nothing would go forward until that happened.

  I walked through the house, hearing the sound of my footsteps against the wooden floor. When I got to the front door, I listened for a moment. Everything was quiet.

  “What do you want?” I asked the house. “Why won’t you let the roofers come?”

  I looked around at the framed-in walls that were waiting for the insulation and drywall that couldn’t happen without a roof—and then suddenly I remembered. When we were taking down the plaster and lath, I’d promised the house that I would put a note inside the walls for whoever would come after us. And I hadn’t.

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  AS LONG AS THERE have been walls, people have put objects inside them—love letters, shoes, board games. Bottles filled with hair and nail clippings and red thread, created to keep a witch at bay. A hidden doorframe for a future room. George told me about one house he’d worked on that had been insulated entirely with first-edition books—not so valuable at the time of construction, but worth more than the house itself when they were discovered one hundred years later. One lucky soul found a figurine of a former Russian czar, which was later auctioned for $5 million.

  We put things in walls because we are scared, because we have secrets, because we have the basic human need to communicate with people we may never meet. People who will open a wall in the future and understand that we were once here.

  I knew what I needed to do then, but I didn’t want to just jot a quick note. I wanted my contribution to our walls to mean something to whoever found it later, but also to mean something to us now. So I went home and gathered photos of our family that showed us in every place we had lived and been happy, and I brought them back to Port Townsend.

  I stood in the living room, near the framed-in wall by the front door. I took the note I had written, welcoming whoever found it, and put it in an envelope. Then I carefully added the photos, one after another. I looked at the story they told, the family in them, the four of us with our arms around each other. The kids growing up—in Seattle, in Italy, but always with us. And that was when I understood.

  In the year and a half that it had taken to negotiate with the heirs, to get the house cleaned out, the foundation in, the renovation even to this point, more had changed than the house. When we’d first discovered it, we had been in the turmoil of relocation, casting about for roots. But in the time since, roots had grown. For Ben and the kids, that had meant in Seattle. They’d rediscovered friends and found routines that brought them joy and a sense of belonging. Their lives had a structure, located in a place that was not here.

  It was about to get even trickier. We had recently gotten word that a new Seattle public high school would be opening, a school that was small, urban, experimental. The opportunity it presented was like nothing we could find in Port Townsend at that time, and exactly the kind of thing that Kate would love. Through the luck of a lottery, she had the opportunity to go the next year, and I saw her excitement at the prospect. Conceivably, we could have had her live with friends while we moved out to Port Townsend—I had done that myself for a period of time during one of my family’s relocations. But I didn’t want that. The distance away from my daughter had taught me how much I wanted to be with her.

  And our son, who hated transitions more than just about anything, was finally happy again. Fully landed in his own country. I thought of all the times my parents had moved me as a child. The wrench of it, and the years it had taken me to find myself again each time. Living in Italy had been worth that cost, but suddenly I didn’t know how to justify this one.

  We had gotten this house to make roots. In the process of working on it, I had found them. My roots were my kids, my husband—and they were in Seattle.

  I looked up and around me. This was not the story I had imagined. Ben and I had fallen in love with this house back when it was ugly and beaten and sad. In that storybook of my childhood, we would save the house and bring it a family to love.

  But real life is not stories. Sometimes in real life, the endings are not what you expect. Sometimes, home is not a place.

  “Really?” I said. “That’s what I’m supposed to do?”

  The house waited, patient.

  I took the envelope and nailed it to the interior of the wall.

  “I’ll come back,” I said. “I promise.”

  The roofers arrived the next day.

  Part IV:

  DOMUS

  THE EMPTY NEST

  Each one of us has, somewhere in his heart, the dream to make a living world, a universe.

  —Christopher Alexander

  THERE IS A POINT in the crossing between Edmonds and Kingston where the two ferries pass going in opposite directions. Bright white and green, they stand out in crisp contrast to the silvers and blues of the water and sky, the dark slopes of islands that surround you like the backs of great, solemn whales. The ferries glide by one another, mirror images, and it is like occupying two spaces at the same time. It always makes me wonder: What if there is another me on that other boat, having an opposite life?

  Scientists theorize about parallel universes, alternate realities. There is not yet any definitive proof, but what I know is that when I am looking at a mirror ferry, it feels like a recognition of an alternate possibility that makes me ponder all of them. Who would I have been if we hadn’t found that house in Port Townsend? Who would I have been if we’d decided to stay there?

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  IN QUANTUM MECHANICS, PARALLEL universes are divided by a single event. I always think that to be a quantum event in a person’s life, the occurrence must come out of the blue, unplanned except at the most subliminal level—the blast of a cue ball hitting an impossible-angle shot, sending your life hurtling off in a new direction.

  My first real quantum event happened at the end of my senior year in college, when I ran into Ben on a set of stairs. It was not a meet-cute love-at-first-sight thing—life is generally more complicated than that. Ben and I had known each other for almost a year at that point. He ran the telephone switchboard for the dormitory in which I was the head resident, which meant he spent a good portion of his time right outside my apartment door. He was, in many ways, my best friend, there as I’d worked my way through one strange romance after another that year and made my plans for the future. He was firmly ensconced in a relationship of his own, with a woman who could have been his twin. He was younger than me, my height, an artist who was full of adventure and grand schemes—while I tended to go for diplomats in training and tall guys who made me feel safe. Absolutely not guys who had girlfriends. Still, it seemed as if Ben and I talked about anything and everything during those long evenings around the switchboard.

  On the night of the quantum event, I’d been crying. I was leaving a party, at
the end of a Dickensian Christmas Carol kind of night that had included encounters with just about every bad boyfriend I’d ever had. I just wanted to go back to my room and sleep, and then I wanted to graduate and get the heck out of Dodge.

  But there was Ben at the base of the steps. He walked me back to the dorm. We talked for the entire weekend, and at the end of it we kissed. The ancient Romans said that domus meant both person and place, but I believe a person can be a place, too. In that moment, Ben became my home, and he has been ever since.

  Two decades, two children, and two relocations later, we found the house in Port Townsend—another unexpected event. Leaving it behind had been a choice between lives, between homes.

  But now I was on the ferry, going back.

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  IT HAD BEEN SIX years since we’d finished the renovation. Once the roof went on, the rest had flowed remarkably smoothly—drywall, paint, trim, shingles—each one a step both toward and away from the house. By the spring of 2002 we were done. We found renters, good ones, and I gave them the keys I thought I would hold. I had thought it would break my heart, but as I drove off that last day, what I felt was an extraordinary gratitude. Even if I wasn’t able to live in it, that house had brought me home. And I knew, too, that I would do whatever it took to keep it, so I could come back someday.

  I returned to the city and my family. We made a life, a good one. Ben got a new job, and the kids clattered their way through high school, growing tall and independent. Fledging, our friends called it, and indeed our children were like birds, flapping away from us, all wings and bright eyes.