Building a Home with My Husband

by Rachel Simon

  THE JOB STARTS

  D·E·M·O·L·I·T·I·O·N

  Children

  “They’ve started the demo,” Hal says as he unlocks the door to our house. “Be careful. You never know what might come loose—you could easily step on a nail.”

  A week after we left, we walk through the vestibule into the living room, and I take in the very first phase of the job. The wooden floor stretches before me, revealing that the golden brown hue I’d never noticed is graffitied with stains and rug shadows. The mantle mirror is playing truant. The refrigerator, draped in protective plastic like a ghostly trick-or-treater, is hanging out by the fireplace. Catcher’s mitts of dust wait open-palmed in the corners.

  I wasn’t expecting that the job would start with such small but noticeable changes. Nor was I expecting that it would feel vaguely unreal, as if we’d passed through a portal into a counterclock land, where the time is running backward and only a single survivor remains. I want to tell Hal how strange this feels. But when I glance at him, he seems to be carrying himself differently, as if he’s gone through a portal, too, transforming from the-husband-who’s-an-architect to the-architect-who’s-a-husband. I just ask, “What’s been happening?”

  “They’ve started by removing the doors and trim.” He gestures toward the hobbit-sized closet under the stairs, now doorless and trim-free. “Soon all the kitchen appliances will come out, then the dining room pantry will go, then the interior walls will get erased, and finally they’ll take down the exterior kitchen wall.”

  “So basically a lot of the house is going to disappear.”

  “That’s demolition.”

  “How long will it all take?”

  “It’d be really fast if we didn’t care about preserving the floors or the plaster walls. But we do, so they’re being careful, which means it’ll move forward steadily but not swiftly.”

  “How much do you think will change during my visit to my father and Theresa?”

  He looks at me, knowing that in the past few days, my father’s been calling a lot about a possible medical crisis that Theresa’s facing. I’ve been shaken, but now I try to act calm. “Since that’s a few days off,” he says, pretending not to worry along with me, “and you’ll be gone only a day, just a little. But believe me, before you know it, the place’ll look really different.”

  “Well,” I say, “it’s funny timing. Having so much coming down in the house when—”

  “Rae, you don’t know that the worst is going to happen.”

  “Theresa did have cancer before.”

  “We won’t even know if she’ll need a biopsy until she sees the oncologist next week.”

  “But my father’s scared, and . . . and . . . I just think about what could happen . . .”

  “I’m concerned, too. But all we can do is wait.” He gives me a hug, and I feel his love wrap around me. “Let’s look at the rest of the house.”

  We walk forward. The graceless stair railing has vanished, rooms have shed doors, and in my former study, the only second-floor room that will keep its walls, the mantel mirror sits in the closet. All that Dan plans to reuse—doors, moulding, trim—is piled up like kindling.

  I look at Hal, and he’s beaming.

  “Nice moment for the architect, huh?” I say.

  “The ship has set sail!” he replies.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Too bad we might run into sea monsters.”

  “Ah, not to worry, matey,” he says in pirate-speak. “I have a cutlass!” I smile, not reassured, but amused. “I might end up with a patch on my eye and going Arrr, Arrr at Dan and we might limp into port—just like so many ships I’ve steered. But by golly, I’ll get us there!”

  We walk back into the hallway, and Hal, now openly excited, begins to elaborate on the imminent removal of the corridor and bedroom walls. The air is memory-scented, as if the taking apart of the house has uncorked the past, and as he speaks, I imagine I see into last week, as he’s bouncing a cat toy down this hall for leaping feline Zeebee and I’m cheering them on. Then I see into four years ago, as I emerge from my study in my wedding gown, and Hal bursts into tears at the sight. Still in the reverse flow of years, I envision Eldridge Waters and his wife saying good night to their children in this hall, and before them, stretching back to 1905, babies crawling to mothers in this doorway, children dressing in these rooms for school, widows entering the bathroom to weep. I haven’t thought of these people before, and now I almost wish I knew something about them, even their names. Because they’ve probably all died, and very soon the house as they knew it—the last physical witness to their memory—will be no more, too.

  And as I’m thinking this and listening to Hal and wondering how my father and Theresa are holding up, the oddest phase that’s happened so far in my renovation journey—the one I’ll find most embarrassing to admit, the one that will revive an inner duel I thought I’d settled in a draw—begins: I realize that since we walked in the front door, I’ve been experiencing an unsettling emptiness. It’s making me feel queasy and off-balance, roughly like the car sickness I can be prone to, and it’s intensified with each step. I try to identify the cause. Discomfort about being so out of place? Apprehension about Theresa? Plaintiveness for generations no longer alive? Whatever it is, I do know this: compared to Hal’s enthusiasm, it is contrary to reason.

  Hal, looking at me, says, “I know, it’s hard to concentrate on all this right now.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t say everything’s going to work out,” he says. “But whatever happens, I’ll be here.” He takes my hand and we walk down the stairs.

  Maybe it’s just fear of change.

  That’s what I tell myself three days later, when I drive to see my father and Theresa, and, as always when I head to that part of Pennsylvania, Beth. I haven’t mentioned the unsettled feeling to Hal, but it hasn’t taken leave of me, and in fact it sits more heavily inside me now. It even reminds me so much of car sickness that I’ve named it house sickness. But I tell myself as I cruise through the hilly country-side that if it is only fear of change, everything will be all right. Not that I welcome change any more than anyone else, but all I have to do is look at the people I’m about to visit and I’ve got proof that change isn’t synonymous with misery.

  For a long time, for instance, there was tension between Theresa and me. A childless English professor as in love with my father as he was with her, Theresa had neither expected nor wanted to live with children. But when my mother melted down, Theresa’s romantic dinners with my father became family disputes at the dinner table. This wasn’t because I, or any of us kids, resented her for not being our mother—our feelings about our mother were too tangled for that. We just felt no affinity for her churchgoing, gourmet-cooking, and reserved nature, and she seemed to find our juvenile worldviews, love of pretzels, and adolescent self-discoveries inexplicable. For years we kept spearing ourselves on the edges of one another’s personalities, even after we left the house for adulthood.

  My relationship with Theresa changed maybe twenty years later. I wish it could have happened sooner, but the key to this change, compassion, was a latecomer in my life. It arrived only after my choice to forgive my mother, when I realized that compassion was the fruit that sustained forgiveness. Even then, however, it did not come easily, or consistently. Then Hal and I broke up, and when we got back together, we often found ourselves talking about compassion, and what he’d learned about it through Buddhism—how it was both the opening of one’s heart toward others and the selfless desire to alleviate their suffering, and how it was important to have a “soft heart” toward all. He’d even say, “Have compassion for yourself.” Slowly then, I tried to be compassionate with Theresa. I stitched together enough scraps of her past to grasp her own disappointments and needs. I asked her about her present-day life. I opened myself to appreciating her interests. And in time our tension dismantled—but even better, in its place came something else: the love for which I’d
waited twenty years. It is not the heart-thumping admiration I’ve always felt for my father, nor the guarded love I now feel for my mother, nor the chummy love I have for my stepfather, Gordon. My love for Theresa is a respectful and conscious love. But it is love all the same.

  I spot my exit, the one that will take me to Beth—whose relationship with me also attests to the rewards of change. When Beth lived with my father and Theresa, I used to visit everyone at the same time. This was seldom a jolly occasion because, aside from the conflicts we all felt when together, Beth and I often locked horns. In Beth’s late twenties, she moved into a group home half an hour from their house, so although my trips then consisted of two separate visits, they became easier. Not that she and I were spared friction. In fact, things actually worsened between us five years later when she moved to her own apartment and developed her fascination with bus riding, a lifestyle choice with which I could not abide. But when I eventually rode the buses, my judgment of her gave way to acceptance, and the proud, playful love I’d always felt for her surged anew. I can’t say that we’ve achieved perfection in our relationship, but I need only think of Beth—and the chest-swelling affection I’ve always felt in her presence—to remember that while change can bring little to mind but subtraction, it can also transform into addition.

  If my house sickness is arising from fear of change, I can handle that. I just hope that’s all it is.

  Minutes later, I pull up to the bus station. I still feel heavy-hearted, but then Beth bursts out and hustles over to my car, talking about her current favorite driver and asking me to take her to Target. Nothing’s changed here, I laugh to myself, because now that I’m no longer riding her buses, we often go shopping, and she carpets our time together with stories about her drivers. Today, Cool Beth, as she calls herself, wants to hunt for a DVD of Scooby-Doo. By the time we park at Target, I expect a copy of all our past expeditions: she’ll rocket across the lot, fly through the store, and leave me wandering the aisles searching for her.

  But as Beth is dashing across the lot, everything about this ordinary visit ends.

  A hundred yards away, an older woman collapses on the sidewalk and tumbles off the curb. “What’s happening?” Beth says, stopping. “I don’t know,” I say, catching up to her as a younger woman cries out, drops to her knees, and takes the older woman in her arms.

  Beth and I hurry over. The young woman is saying, “Oh, Mom, oh, Mom.” Her mother remains where she fell, eyes glassy, her shorts stained with blood.

  I ask, “Do you have a cell phone?”

  The distraught young woman shakes her head no.

  “You can use mine,” I say.

  “Iz in your car,” Beth reminds me.

  I turn to retrieve it. Beth needn’t accompany me, but I get exasperated by losing track of her in stores, and I’d really like her to offer solace while I rush off. However, Beth is generally as given to helping strangers as the drivers and pedestrians roaring past us right now, so I keep my mouth shut and race across the lot.

  By the time I return, a passerby is calling an ambulance from his own phone, rendering my trek unnecessary. Beth is, of course, gone. I could run into the store, but I feel more needed here, so I lower myself to my knees beside these women and use my body to block traffic.

  Medical help comes quickly and unexpectedly. A shopper with a cart laden with curtains: “I’m a nurse,” she says. A woman about to enter the store: “Do you need help?” and adds, “I’m a nurse.” Soon four out-of-uniform nurses are working on the fallen woman. “Do we have something for a splint?” “I’ll get ice.” “Anyone have rubber gloves?”

  I remain at their side, wishing I knew what to do like everyone else. But I can receive the daughter’s regret without judgment, pay silent witness to their suffering. So I do, and get caught up in caring, and my house sickness fades.

  Through that afternoon, as I am sitting at the old family dinner table, and my father is munching on a matzah, and Theresa is paging through a catalog, I feel it return. I am answering their questions about the state of the renovation when it happens, and I immediately decide not to say anything about house sickness. When I said I’d be coming to visit, my father asked me not to bring up the appointment tomorrow—when they’ll find out if a new growth in Theresa’s breast requires a biopsy. Talking about my own enigmatic affliction, not to mention the strokelike event I just encountered at Target, only seems cruel.

  “How’s the place you’re renting?” my father asks, keeping the conversation going.

  “It does the job, though it doesn’t feel like we really live there.” A minor observation, but to indulge him, I go on about the sense of dislocation, sounding more dramatic than I feel, until, hoping to show that I haven’t lost my perspective, I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind—which is, regrettably, “But it’s nothing compared to what you’re facing tomorrow.”

  My father shoots me a look.

  Theresa glances up from her catalog. “I’m sure it’s still unpleasant,” she says.

  I’m blushing. I can’t believe I said that—but I also can’t seem to stop. “Yeah, but it’s a really trivial concern, given what you’re dealing with.”

  “I’m not dealing with anything,” Theresa says, flipping the catalog page with a snap. “All I’m doing is seeing the oncologist. I honestly don’t think it’s anything.”

  “I hope not,” I say, stealing a glance at my father, who has dread in his eyes.

  “You two are making much more out of this than you need to,” she says, kindly but sharply. “I really am not worried.” She closes the catalog and reaches for another.

  A few hours later, my father walks me to my car. To my eyes, he still looks to be in his mid-twenties, his age when I first held him in my gaze and he lifted me from my crib and danced me around on the top of his shoes. Teacher of American history, champion of unions and civil rights, possessor of a hearty laugh, he could tell stories like nobody else, and whenever I was with him, I felt a rushing between us of giddiness and trust and enchantment. He was, as fathers can be for daughters, my first love, and despite all the mistaken turns he took as parent and I as child, I still feel that love today. But as I look at him now, his face taken over by vulnerability, I see him as he is: a bald seventy-five-year-old with white eyebrows and pleats in his neck. How much longer will he have with Theresa? How much longer will we have with him?

  He stares at me, frightened in a way I’ve never seen, and says, “I’ve been thinking.”

  I wait. Then I understand that he’s not intending to state what he’s been thinking, though I know it’s some jumble of thoughts about mortality.

  I wish I knew the right thing to say, but I feel as unsure of myself as I felt beside the fallen woman and her daughter. All I can think to do is say, “Call me, will you?”

  “She’s always around. I can’t talk with her right there.”

  “Call me when she’s at work, like you’ve been doing.”

  Theresa comes out the front door then, her spirits no different than two hours ago. My father’s eyes bulge with worry. I hug him, I hug her. “Let me know how the test goes, okay?”

  I wave as I back out, and look in the rearview mirror. She is smiling; he is not. I want to be there when they fall, I think. Yet I know that even if we pull through this time, someday—maybe far too soon—Theresa will be gone. Then, his heart crushed, my father will be gone. Eventually, my mother and Gordon will be gone, too. Just like all the generations that once inhabited my house. And when they are all gone, what will I do with all my love? I cannot mourn my parents while hugging my children. I cannot immortalize my parents by raising my children. I cannot even look into the backseat and console my children.

  I do not have children.

  Where did that come from? I snap at myself. I thought I came to terms with that one long ago.

  I force my eyes toward the road, the house sickness swelling like a cobra.

  When I get back to the rented house th
at night, Hal’s saying with glee, “They’ve started taking down the pantry!” He’s shaking turmeric into a pan, moving breezily along to Tal Farlow on the stereo. “It’s happening, man!”

  Gee, I think. I don’t feel the way he does at all. I feel like I could cry.

  Over a late dinner, he fills me in on what they’ve been doing, but I’m barely able to hear. Maybe this creepy emptiness started because of the disappearing house, along with the coincidence of Theresa’s situation and thoughts of deceased people I never knew. Maybe that’s where it would have stayed, one big psychic mush that amounted to fear of change. But then I came upon the suffering of a desperate daughter, and listened to the suffering of an anxious father, and this house sickness advanced to a whole new stage.

  I don’t want to admit what it’s becoming. I’ve never felt it before. But I know what it is.