Building a Home with My Husband

by Rachel Simon

  Hal keeps talking, but we’re smiling at each other. This is, I now know, a good move.

  There was another good move.

  After our last kiss at the other twin, we went into separate lives. The disaster of that August move seven years before remained in our memories, yet as time passed we came to realize that we could not forget the many selves that were strewn about inside each other, most of them praiseworthy, a few flawed, an uncountable number still undiscovered. And because of Hal’s Buddhist teacher and my bus rides with Beth, we spent those years trying to learn how to embrace the mysterious sum of other people, including the selves we might have found fault with or misunderstood. Traveling similar paths separately, we worked hard to see the whole of another person, and to hold it, shortcomings and all, in esteem. Finally I moved one more time, into Hal’s house to marry him.

  Now as I tear the check off the pad and we shake hands with the movers, a light is on in all their eyes. We know them at this point, though not as intimately as friends—I do not know about the misery in their families or the crashes in their romances. They do not know that this past spring, Naomi saw an ad for the movie of my book and knew it was me and tracked me down on the Internet and we wept at being together again. But Hal and I know our movers about as well as they, having carried our desks and treadmill and bed, know us. And as they walk out the front door, I answer my question. A good move is not a move where nothing you own gets broken, but a break where you own up to who you’ve been, and move a little closer to good.

  “Why don’t you call the vet?” Hal asks. I can barely hear him, with the movers backing the truck down the driveway. Speaking louder, he says, “We can get the cats tonight.”

  “Great idea,” I say. I find the phone, raise it to my face—and the dial tone cuts off dead.

  I no longer hear the truck.

  We open the front door. The movers have stopped the truck. Apparently they drove into a low-hanging wire on the way to the curb and severed the phone line for our house.

  They emerge, effusive with apologies. Dinkins & Sons, they say, will make good on any costs to fix the line, but it’s our first day in our new house and now we won’t have phone service and they feel terrible. They seem as shaken as I was my first night in boarding school, and as Hal was when he smashed the neighbor’s car. This time, though, a calm Hal goes inside to call the phone company on his cell phone, and an angerless me walks up to the movers and says, “We’re not upset, guys. Stuff happens. It’s okay.” And as I now know, it is. The hot day will cool down tonight. The box-filled house will get unpacked. The snapped wire will get fixed.

  In the silky pink light at the end of moving day, we flop on our bed. It faces a view into our new backyard, and a sky that is melting into dusk. Zeebee and Peach, freshly sprung a night ahead of time, poke inquisitively around the house. I take in the bedroom, and although I see this moment right now, this final lock in the moving day canal, I also see another dusk, one that fell right at the end of my six years away from Hal, when we sat on this very bed, talking about whether we should marry. I was worried at all that could go wrong—because, once before, it had gone wrong. “But we don’t have to live that relationship,” Hal had said. “Now we’re in this one.” “I know,” I said, “but what if stuff happens?” “Stuff will always happen,” Hal said, putting into words what I was finally understanding about every kind of love, “but that doesn’t mean that the universe is against us or that we’ll never get over it or that we’ve received some sign that we’re doomed.” “Then what does it mean?” I asked. “Not a darn thing,” he’d said, and I’d laughed. Now, night takes over the sky, and as Hal’s sleep starts becoming mine, the less celebrated law of moving day makes itself clear to me at last: repair can happen, too.

  F·I·R·S·T M·O·R·N·I·N·G·S

  Self

  “But have you been trying the doorknob?” Hal calls into the hall from his shower.

  “I am trying!” I shout back from outside the bedroom door, twisting for all I’m worth.

  “We haven’t had any trouble with these doors since we moved in. Did you lock it?”

  “There aren’t locks on these doors!”

  “Then it should open.”

  “I know!” I stick my head into the steamy bathroom. “But the knob’s not turning at all!”

  “That’s impossible,” he says from behind the shower curtain.

  “It sure is. But—” I jump back into the hallway and seize the bedroom knob with both hands, “this stupid thing isn’t rotating an inch!”

  “Ah, Simon, once again it’s that darned third dimen—”

  “It better be. Because if the problem’s not me—if the problem’s the door itself—then I’m in big trouble.”

  “Don’t panic.”

  “Who’s panicking! I’m not someone who panics! I just need to get into this room!”

  “Well, hang on,” he says. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  I scowl at the bathroom, leave him to the blather of Morning Edition on the sink radio, and keep trying to prove to the Lord of All Matter that I’m capable of opening a door.

  How swiftly I went from zero to spin-out. At sunrise on this, our second morning in the rented house, I got up with my customary cheerful grogginess. In the fifteen minutes since, while Hal went into his studio to select his clothes for the day and headed into the bathroom, I threw on the outfit I’d tossed on the bedroom floor last night (green shorts, aqua tank top, sneakers), stumbled out of the bedroom, closed the door behind me to keep out the cats, downed a quick breakfast, hauled myself back upstairs—and discovered that the knob was stuck.

  No, not today. Hal went back to work yesterday, but my out-of-the-house responsibilities don’t resume until eleven this morning, when I’m giving the keynote speech for an incoming class of two hundred medical students. That’s four hours from now. And it’s in Philadelphia—an hour away. Yet here I stand on the far side of a wooden door, with my suit, pumps, stockings, make-up, wallet, driver’s license, car keys, cell phone, and host’s contact information sealed off like the tomb of King Tutankhamun a mere two feet from my reach.

  I try to rattle the knob. I try to pull the knob toward me. I shove my shoulder against the wood. But the door’s new identity is a wall.

  Okay, be rational. Only overly manipulated fictions contain such critically timed impasses. This is real life, which is so insistently chaotic that it makes a mockery of well-calibrated plots. Besides, this door-and-knob did yeoman’s duty for Natalie’s mother for years. What could possibly have caused them to abandon their station today?

  The radio moves on to the next news story, and I tell myself to concentrate on how this morning will be saved. It will be—it has to be—even if the hero isn’t me, chronic stumbler through the space-time continuum that I am. I’m just fine with it being monk-mannered Hal. I even try to envision it: within moments, my husband will burst forth from the shampoo-scented bathroom transformed into the barrel-chested 3-D Man that he really is, apply his ground-penetrating radar to the innards of the latchset, hone in on the single part worn to a nub, flick his wrist with exactitude, and vanquish the knob and its accomplice.

  Or if he doesn’t, then at least, with his clothes in his studio, he’ll be spared.

  I sink to the floor and hug my knees, a damsel in distress.

  This should not be happening. After all, I learned my lesson about first mornings when I was nine and my mother moved us to the apartment in New Jersey. It just so happened that we arrived the night before I began fourth grade. Too tired to be functional, we kids unpacked little more than our school clothes and shoes before we fell into bed. In the morning I remembered that I still needed socks. Opting not to wake Laura and Beth in our darkened bedroom by putting on the light, I felt my way through boxes until I retrieved two anklets. Then I left for my new school, and soon enough filed into my classroom, wondering if I’d still be the person my teachers had told me I was: a good student, someone who m
ade friends easily. A half hour later, as the teacher was discussing the routines of our day, I heard snickering behind me. I turned. “Why are you wearing different colored socks?” a girl asked as her friends giggled. I looked. Sure enough, one anklet was yellow, one blue. I blushed, crossed my feet—and laughed. “I just moved.” I shrugged sheepishly. I described the dark room and the box, and they smiled. By milk-and-cookies time, I felt an ease developing with my new classmates. Walking home from school, I still didn’t know whether I would remain a good student or an easy friend maker. But I knew that I didn’t take myself too seriously, and that was a nice surprise to me.

  That incident bequeathed in me a dread of the curse of first mornings, which has led me ever since to plan in advance. It’s why I write my syllabi for the fall as soon as school ends in the spring, and calculate my April 15th taxes at Christmastime. For this move, I strategized for weeks, mindful that a medical school talk would call for a well-put-together image. I even pressed the suit and stored it in the bedroom days ago, a fact I revealed with pride last night to Hal. He laughed when he saw my ensemble waiting in the closet. “That’s so you,” he said.

  “All right,” 3-D Man says, appearing beside me in his underwear. “Let’s take a look.”

  I rise from my moping and watch. He jiggles the knob and joggles the knob. He bobbles the door and parries the door. He kicks the door. “Yup,” he says. “It’s stuck.”

  “Would a screwdriver help?”

  “The spring latch inside the spindle doesn’t seem to work. A screwdriver won’t help.”

  “What will?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “This can’t happen! Natalie’s mother lived here for eight years and it dies on us today?”

  “Blame the machinations of a malevolent universe? Cosmic whim?”

  “I want a superhero, not a philosopher.”

  He shrugs. “I guess it’s a two-for-one deal.”

  “What about taking off the hinges?”

  He points. “There aren’t any hinges outside this door. They’re all inside the room.”

  “What if we unscrew the part of the knob that’s screwed to the door?”

  “The spindle will still be stuck. And I have to leave for work in ten minutes.”

  “You can’t leave now!”

  “I’m sorry, but I have a big meeting this morning. I can’t even be late.”

  “There has to be a way out of this.”

  “Call your host at the medical college and tell him what’s up.”

  “I can’t call anyone, remember? The movers severed the phone line.”

  “Oh, right. What about your cell phone?”

  “It’s in the bedroom, along with yours.”

  “Hmm. It’s a right pickle, I’d say.”

  “How can you be so laid-back? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Just bend gently like a reed, Grasshopper.”

  “I won’t get upset. I won’t get upset. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t—”

  “There’s always the train. An hour’s ride right up to Philadelphia.”

  “The station’s miles away, and you don’t have time to drive me there before you leave—I haven’t showered, and I can’t give a talk in a tank top and shorts. Argh! What can I do?”

  This is the point where, in a sci-fi blockbuster, Keanu Hal would take the red pill, learn the truth about the permeable quality of the door, and in the world’s first noncinematic use of bullet time, foot-bang the blasted thing open. Or, in a fantasy epic, Hermione Simon would revolve her time-turning necklace back half an hour, get out of bed all over again, and leave the door ajar. But as 3-D Man stares at me with his early-morning stubble and I frown back without the hint of a plan in my head, it’s blazingly apparent that we—mere ordinary folk—are powerless in the face of the fiendish plot twists of the universe.

  “Wait,” Hal says. “I don’t think my cell phone is in the bedroom.”

  I tear downstairs—he did leave it in the living room. Then I have the amazing good fortune of finding a phone book. I dial a locksmith. A woman answers. I explain the riddle of the stuck door. “I’ll have him call you,” she says.

  “Aren’t you the locksmith?”

  “This is the answering service, ma’am. Can I have your number for a call back?”

  “Uh, how soon?”

  “Sometime after nine.”

  Already knowing the futility of a call that late, I read off Hal’s phone number, then notice that his battery is running on fumes.

  “Where’s your recharger?” I call upstairs as I hang up.

  “In the bedroom,” Hal says.

  I’ve always wondered what I might do if, in my on-the-road life, a similar mishap occurs. Infrequent travelers might suspect that the worst fate is a missed plane connection, but I find doors to be far more fearsome. On every trip, I think about tales of travelers who step outside their hotel rooms in their underthings to retrieve the complimentary copy of USA Today only to hear the door swing shut behind them.

  Then I remember that, thanks to my paranoia about planning, when I printed out the information for my talk this morning, I set a copy in my car—and when I did, I happened to notice that my host, Dr. Charlie Pohl, doesn’t live in Philadelphia, but right here in Delaware.

  “Hal,” I call upstairs, “maybe Dr. Pohl can drive me in! Where are your car keys?”

  As usual, even though we’ve just moved, his keys are in the wicker duck in the dining room, and they include the extra key for my car. If only my driver’s license weren’t locked in the bedroom, or I were reckless enough to drive without a license. But still, progress might be at hand. I run outside. Yes! There are the numbers. I run back in and dial.

  “Everything’s fine,” I lie when Dr. Pohl picks up, “but,” and I explain.

  He listens with the sensitive bedside manner befitting of a physician. “Unfortunately,” he says, “I’m already halfway to Philadelphia. But maybe my wife, Janice, can bring you to the train station. She has a meeting this morning, but I can see if she can work this in.”

  “Well, I do have the slight problem of getting more appropriate clothes.”

  “I’m sure someone in my office has something you can wear.”

  I ask him if anyone there is five feet tall. He pauses. “I don’t know about that . . .”

  I hang up, and collapse to the sofa—or I would, if it weren’t sagging beneath boxes.

  Get a ladder from the other house. There’s no time. Call a neighbor for help. I don’t know anyone around here. Call Natalie. She’s on her morning walk, and I need a solution now.

  I hear the wire hangers in Hal’s closet upstairs chime against each other as he finishes getting dressed for work, and the tide of self-pity starts to rush in. This is it, I think. It’s all over.

  But then I turn myself toward a different thought, or perhaps it manages to turn toward me. It is a memory of one of those serendipitous conversations I favor, this time at a disability conference in Denver. Dan Wilkins, an activist who became a quadriplegic after a car accident, told me, over a table of his thought-provoking T-shirts, something he’d learned after becoming disabled. “It isn’t life on autopilot anymore. If you want to figure out how to do something, you give it a shot, and if Plan A doesn’t work, you go to Plan B, and then Plan C, and then Plan D. You’re not locked into the whole fixedness of life. You come to understand that there’s no wrong answer—except thinking that there’s only one answer.”

  I can’t imagine why I think of Dan Wilkins at this desperate moment. Do memories rotate back to the front of one’s mind because of the divine latchset of the universe? Or do I think what I think and do what I do because of the ordinary chaos of me?

  I hear Hal go into the bathroom for the final step in his routine, a quick brushing through his hair. The radio is still playing, and he shuts it off. It’s all over, I think, except for Plan D, whatever that is. And then, as easily as a reader turns a page in a book, the solution is there
.

  At eleven o’clock, Dr. Pohl delivers my introduction. I stride to the front of the lecture hall and look up at the students. I am fresh off the train, the ticket paid by his wife, Janice. I am also freshly made-up, my cosmetics courtesy of Janice. But most important, I am dressed.

  Quickly—Hal had to leave within minutes—we went into his studio where, two days before, we’d hung his clothes. Hal is seven inches taller than me, but long ago, when we were fooling around in that way that people do when they’re newly in love, I’d tried on his pants and found that they sort of fit. “Try these,” he said to my request this morning, and I heaved on the white jeans in his hands. Although they kept sliding down and ended way below my sneakers, they did the job. An hour later, Janice loaned me a cardigan to cover my tank top. Then Dr. Pohl’s assistant Joyce gave me a scarf, which I knotted around my waist to hold up the pants.

  The medical students look at me. One part Hal, one part Janice, one part Joyce, one part me, I tell these doctors-to-be about my morning. “Whatever personal struggles you’re having as you move on in life,” I say, citing the lesson I learned from Dan Wilkins, “there is always Plan D.” We share a laugh, and I continue with my talk. But later, when I make my way back to Delaware as a patchwork self, amazed at discovering a three-dimensional facility I’d had little inkling I possessed, and then when I wait for the locksmiths, who will take two hours to break into the room, I feel much more than mirth. Yes, first mornings might be cursed. But at the same time, on first mornings, I also have the opportunity to unlock the fixedness in myself, and discover something new about me.

  That night, as I step inside the newly opened room, and turn around and around, gratefully taking in everything that was waiting all day just beyond my reach, I ask myself, Who will I be by the end of this renovation, so many first mornings from now? What limitations— or new abilities—will I find in myself? I stop turning, and as I look at the door, now gutted of its entire knob assembly, a small historical anecdote awakens inside me. It is not a first morning from my own history, but from the archeologist who’d spent years and years seeking King Tutankhamun’s tomb. The story goes that when he finally discovered what he believed to be the site, he found himself facing a sealed door. With shaking hands, he drilled a peephole into the door, and as hot ancient air from inside the tomb sighed out, stirring the Egyptian sands in the chamber, the archeologist leaned close to the hole with a candle to take the first look. Behind him his benefactor asked, “Can you see anything?” The archeologist strained to see within, the candle flickering as golden treasures emerged from the mist. His expedition in suspense, his life about to change in ways he could not possibly predict, it was all he could do to find the words. “Yes,” he replied at last. “Wonderful things.”