Building a Home with My Husband

by Rachel Simon

  That’s the kind of moving day memory I’d like—frolicsome, picturesque. But in fact, the move I made at sixteen, which happened to be my next move, is the very one I would not wish on anybody. Not only is it a moment in my family’s history that is so extreme that it hardly seems real, but whenever I unscrew the lid on my remembering to tell the story, the old ice storm comes alive so ferociously in my chest that I get the telling over with as fast as I can.

  So: I am sixteen, and it is a sleeting February afternoon, and Max and I are in our mother’s driveway, shoving our things into our father’s car. In the five years since we moved to this house—the house on the lake—my mother’s insecurities and loneliness have led her through a succession of testy boyfriends, each more kid-allergic than the last. As she drifted more fully into their arms, we four kids spun our aches into sarcasm, our longings into contentiousness. My father moved back to Pennsylvania, where he’d begun living with Theresa, though the animosity between him and our mother became so severe that we saw him only every few months. Even today, as we are leaving her house, he will not step inside.

  Four weeks ago, my mother met an ex-con in a roadside bar. A drinker and smoker of Dionysian proportions, as flinty-eyed as Rasputin, he sweet-talked her into believing that he was a secret agent leading a life of excitement, and that, if she ditched her children, he’d give her the adventure of a lifetime. Astoundingly, my mother, a non-drinking, nonsmoking librarian, bought into this. Two weeks later, he moved into our house. Two weeks after that, on this very morning, Laura, Max, and I were told to leave. Beth can stay—my mother still feels affection for her. Laura quickly departed for a rented room, though she will soon resettle at our father’s, which is where Max is going tonight and where Ringo will end up, too. I’m being placed in a boarding school—right now. Yesterday, we were just an excessively messed-up family. Now, as Max and I get in the car and look through the cascading sleet to the front door and see Beth holding Ringo and waving good-bye, we are a family in ruins. Whatever family means.

  The next morning, I sit down in a phone booth at the boarding school and call my mother collect. I want to tell her I’m all right, but she refuses the charges. I go cold with disbelief, which only gets worse when, two weeks later, my mother marries the ex-con, takes Beth on her honeymoon, and disappears. Our grandmother sells the house, as well as whatever belongings hadn’t made it into my father’s car. My insides are a blizzard. For the first time I taste hatred.

  Even when Beth is returned to us four months later, my hatred remains. Because then we find out that my mother has been living a life on the run, and that her new husband, who’s violent, paranoid, and heedless of social conventions, had them living in hotels, riding buses across the Southwest, squandering my mother’s savings, running from skipped bills. The whole last night before my mother put Beth on a plane to my father, Rasputin held a gun on my sister.

  Drunk on my hatred, I tell friends that I don’t care about my mother, I don’t believe in maternal instinct, I loathe every schoolbook and TV show and charming suburb that perpetuates the propaganda we call family. What in the blazes is family? A bunch of fractured selves yoked together by blood. I’m not going to think about family again. Each person, sure, I’ll think about Laura and Beth and Max and my father and Theresa, but only one at a time, as I try my best to get along with each. But don’t you dare call them my family. In the deep freeze that has become my soul, family is the most piercing word there is.

  Could I have imagined myself now, thirty years later? Calmly driving through a city in Delaware on a moving day? Being so ordinary that I’m about to start a home renovation? Savoring marriage to a man who can easily say “I love you”—yet who understands why, even when I’m feeling a rush of romance so great it alchemizes distress into merriment, I cannot?

  This is what happened a few minutes ago, when Hal came upstairs and found me at the window, watching the movers. Seeing no value in my standing there, beset, as he knew, by memories, he suggested that I go on to the new house, have lunch, and wait for him and the movers to show up. Then, with the trucks blocking our street, and my never having mastered driving in reverse, he backed my car out to the adjacent block. “I love you,” he said, kissing me when he rose out of the driver’s seat, then ran back to the house before my usual awkward reply.

  So, cruising down the road toward this next lock in our moving day canal, I accelerate through the memories, taking them up to just before we met.

  After that fate-bending February day when I was sixteen, there followed many moves, from boarding school to my father’s during the summers, from my father’s to college, from college into a house in Philadelphia with two friends. On the rare occasions when my mother came up in conversation, I would cut it off by saying that she’d disappeared, which, for all intents and purposes, she had. But in fact I had learned where she was. One day, my father happened to see her name in the local newspaper among the public notices of bankruptcies. It couldn’t possibly be her—she’d never been to that part of Pennsylvania. But when Laura and Beth drove to the address, there was our mother, living only half an hour away. It was a short, tense visit. She told them where she worked, and that she was no longer with the ex-con, but expressed no interest in us. Furious and confused, they left, and we heard nothing for years.

  Of course, once hatred has coursed down your throat and entered your veins and soaked your bones, it seduces you. It has so much to recommend it—its flair for absolutism simplifies decisions, its fervor incites self-importance, its potency generates arrogance. Besotted with hatred, I felt new selves deploying inside me: incisive, disdainful, battle-ready.

  Except that they failed to crush my now prodigious self-doubt. Otherwise, why would I have selected college boyfriends who were hostile to relationships? Why would I have felt breathless with envy when friends talked lightheartedly about their families? Why, when a therapist dared suggest that someday I should track my mother down, did I not slam out of his office? Apparently hatred, for all its bluster and might, hadn’t utterly overpowered me.

  Perhaps that’s why, the spring before I graduated, I did look up the number of the library where my mother had said she worked. Not that I was going to call, as the therapist had urged. I was just going to . . . carry her number around. I did this for a year until, at a particularly despairing moment during my first job after college, I pulled it out and my fingers dialed the number and I kept the phone to my mouth and asked for her department. It was six years after I’d left the house on the lake—the same amount of time I would later be apart from Hal. My mother picked up. I said who I was. Instantly, she started crying, thanking me for calling, gushing her desire to see me. I was speechless. Why, in all this time, hadn’t she called us? Wasn’t she the parent?

  I didn’t get my answer until I saw her face-to-face soon after, when we arranged to meet for dinner. Hatred roared inside me as we sat down and ordered our meal, yet I kept it to myself, surprised to see that she carried herself with the same old meekness and lack of self-regard. And when I contained myself enough to ask why she hadn’t called, I was just as surprised at her answer: “Because I thought you’d reject me.” Wait, I wanted to say, you’ve got the whole thing wrong! Instead, I was so taken aback that I went to collect myself in the ladies’ room.

  I stood in front of the restroom mirror, and let the hatred surge through me. Leave right now, it demanded. Dump her. But when I stepped back into the restaurant and looked at her from afar, I saw a little, forlorn, gray-haired woman who was so unable to see how family was supposed to work that she thought her children had authority over her. Why she was this way—what storms she’d weathered in her own childhood—I had yet to discover, and I didn’t ask myself that now. Rather, standing in the restaurant watching her, I felt something unfamiliar rise inside me. I had heard the word for it before—“forgiveness”—but having viewed it as the realm of the gullible and small-minded, I’d never considered it pertaining to me. But there it was,
and it said to me, You have a choice. You can keep on hating her, or you can decide to forgive her, and as accustomed as you are to the lures of hatred, it has not done well by you.

  I walked back to the table, sat back down, and, without saying a word about what had just happened, committed myself to forgiveness. It was not easy then or for a long time, and it never intoxicated me like hatred. But it stilled the storm. Over the next three years, I helped Laura, then Max, then Beth come back to my mother, and as I did I said to myself that maybe family isn’t propaganda any more than forgiveness is. Maybe I just have to recognize that, behind the storybooks and TV shows and every door in every house is indeed a bunch of fractured selves. Just like me. Taken over by hatred, too, or hatred’s cronies: rage, sanctimoniousness, judgmentalism, self-loathing. But I knew now how awful all of that felt. I knew, too, as I came to understand my mother’s story, that she had acted not out of malice, but weakness. That she had not schemed to make me feel shattered by her actions, but had just felt so compelled by her own misery that she couldn’t help herself. This, I now knew, was what most of us do all our lives. Or until we find ourselves standing in the back of a restaurant, making a choice we’d never known was there to make.

  Leaving behind hatred and my narrow view of family, I never sought out either again.

  Look at how ahead of schedule we already are! We thought the movers would get to the rented house at one, but it’s only noon. Might we escape unscathed? Don’t hope too hard, I think, as they take the opportunity of the halfway mark to break for lunch, and Hal goes into the kitchen to nibble on leftover pizza. But I try to influence fate. I plug in fans to cool the house down. I find the checkbook. Then I run out of things to do, and perch on a box and fidget.

  It’s just not like me to sit around. It’s sure not like me to keep to myself. So, despite the risk of annoying Hal, I find a jug of water, go out to the boiling driveway, walk up to the movers standing in their truck, and ask, “You guys want something to drink?”

  “That’s all right,” Jimmy says, wiping his brow with the back of his hand.

  “We picked up Gatorade when we dropped the second truck off on our way here,” Melvin adds. He lifts a bottle to show me.

  “This whole thing must be brutal,” I say. “Just keeping going. The heat.”

  Jimmy says, “Yeah, it’s rough.”

  I could just walk off and find some shade, and if Hal were out here, perhaps I would. But as I learned whenever I moved, every single person is so filled with stories that all I have to do is strike up a conversation with genuine curiosity and a patient ear. Then the weightiest of concerns will make way for new fascinations, and soon my discomfort will lift. Or, as I’ve always seen it, moving, more than anything else, is how I learned to speak to strangers.

  I dive in. How did they come to work for Dinkins & Sons? Jimmy, an electrician, has had trouble finding work in his field. Melvin, a mechanic, is earning money to open a garage. Albert, the only one who sees himself as a moving professional, is studying for a degree in business before his body gives out. Each story, brief though it is, moves me, as Jimmy and Albert become more expressive, and Melvin’s liveliness is further fueled by his ambition.

  What is a good move? I ask myself as I listen. I’ve always thought it meant that nothing gets broken. But might it also be a move where something unexpected is gained?

  The move into the house begins. While Albert and Jimmy hoist the sofa and Melvin tackles the IKEA panels, I linger on the front yard, examining this building that I will soon call my home. A two-story brick twin, it resembles the house that Hal and I rented after our first five years of living together. We remarked on this to each other when we came here to decide if we wanted to rent, but we didn’t talk about it at length. Although we have fond memories of that other twin, we associate it with the two lowest times of our previous relationship, which were, predictably enough in this chronicle of ill-fated moves, the day we moved in and the day we moved out. I rarely mention these occasions to friends, since anyone who already knows about my family would think, Surely the girl’s hit her Stuff Happens quota by now. But if life had any regard for quotas, then when two people leave their families of birth and enter their family of maturity, they’d arrive with the most resplendent of personal traits rather than such a huge sack of ragged old junk that they don’t even know what they’re carrying.

  Our move into that other twin took place on a steamy August day just like this one. I was twenty-nine, Hal thirty-six, but unlike today, we’d enlisted friends rather than movers. That morning, while Hal went to U-Haul to get the truck, I stood in front of our Philadelphia apartment, waiting for our friends. I was concerned about parking—the street was almost as narrow as Teacher’s Lane—but after all our friends arrived, there was still a vacant space right across from the house. Then Hal returned, steering the enormous U-Haul up the street. He pulled the truck up to the space and threw it into reverse, and, as I stood watching with our friends from the front stoop, Hal misjudged the angle and demolished a neighbor’s parked car.

  I wish I could say the crash was the worst of it. But then Hal lowered his head to the steering wheel. “Are you okay?” I asked, running over. Our neighbor emerged from his house, more shocked than angry. “My new car,” he kept saying, dazed. “Are you okay?” I repeated to Hal. He raised his head and stared straight ahead. I asked again. He opened the driver’s door. I stepped out of the way and, without meeting my eyes, he crossed the street and said to our gaping friends, “Let’s get going.” “Wait,” I said. But he had become mechanical. He took no breaks, spoke to and looked at no one. He’s become another person, I thought, and as our friends pretended nothing was amiss, I worked beside him as he appeared to prefer: a pair of hands no more intimate than a stranger’s. Finally I cornered him in a room where, too hurt and selfish to offer solace, I let other considerations take over my mouth. “The insurance will cover it, right?” I said. Eyes on a chest of drawers, he said, “I didn’t buy insurance at the U-Haul.” I gasped. “How much would it have cost?” “Fourteen dollars,” he said. We didn’t speak for the next ten hours, then ended the day not at the thank-you dinner we bought everyone at a Chinese restaurant, but on the curb while they ate inside, screaming at each other like banshees.

  Hal and I eventually resumed conversation after our old neighbor presented us with an eight-thousand-dollar bill. But that moving day, with its eruption of selves we’d never seen in each other, crowded our table and bed, convincing me even more that we were destined to part. When we moved again seven years later, we moved separately, I leaving first. That move, which he and I packed on one end, friends and I emptied on the other, was oddly, for two people breaking up, as tender and cooperative as the other was not. After we wedged everything in place, we kissed good-bye. Then I drove off, and in seconds it was just as bad as Naomi, and Beth. I pulled off the road and Hal buckled against our door, and we each crumbled, alone, in tears.

  With the truck almost empty, I peek into the smallest bedroom—now my study—and the medium-sized bedroom, aka Hal’s studio. Everything’s in place. I’m not ready to say that this was a good move—bad luck could still lie in wait. But I can almost let myself think it.

  I poke my head into the master bedroom, assuming I’ll see Albert and Jimmy shifting furniture. But they are kneeling on the floor, the bed frame a square around them.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making the bed,” Albert says, screwing the metal pieces together.

  “You’re kidding me. I’ve never seen movers make the bed.”

  “It’s part of the job,” Jimmy says.

  “It’s the last thing we do,” Albert says.

  Melvin, coming out of my study, adds, “The last thing we do here, that is.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask—at the very moment as I hear Hal ask the same.

  I turn as he comes upstairs, and our gazes meet. I expect him to be irritated for my chatting up the movers, but his eyes
are filled with respect. It’s a look I did not see much during the years in the other brick twin, nor did he see it much on me. I guess that, when we first met, we saw only the traits that most appealed and either did not know about or looked past all the rest. But over the years, inevitably, stuff happens. And even though I emerged from my family with a few priceless nuggets of awareness, when it came to adulthood—to making a new family with another fragmented self—there was an enormous amount to learn.

  Such as what I see right now, as Hal turns to Melvin and says, “You mean it’s not the last thing you do because you do something else after you leave here?”

  “Yeah,” Melvin says. He gestures toward Hal’s studio. “I play music, like you.”

  “What instrument?” Hal asks.

  “Accordion,” Melvin says. When we express happy surprise, he adds, “A lot of people think it’s weird.”

  “The accordion can be very cool,” Hal says.

  “You really think so?”

  Hal says, “Sure. Do you know about Guy Klucevsek?”

  They start talking about avant-garde accordion music, and I shake my head. Some people cannot drive in reverse. No one, no matter how desirous of a lost time, can reverse history. But successful reverses abound, if you know where to look. A pessimist can become an optimist, a hater can become a forgiver, a man who once shushed his girlfriend can become as outgoing as his now-wife. Yes, we all cart our fractured selves along as we move through our lives. But we can choose whether we keep plodding along the same rutted road, or take a turn we’d never thought was ours to take.