by Rachel Simon
“You haven’t mentioned a back beam before.”
“The existing back wall’s a bearing wall, so we have to replace the bearing. The new beam will rest on posts and support the joists in the ceiling.”
“Is that how it works? If you trash a bearing wall, you compensate in a major way?”
“I wouldn’t call it compensation. The bearing’s just happening in a different way.”
During the time when Dan is working on the beam, I don’t go to the house. Instead, I talk with friends who have children, asking them how they feel about their choice. Some are rhapsodic. Others say, “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.” Some surmise my dilemma. Maybe, one says, Hal will have a change of heart, or I could arrange to have an “accident.” Another says that by never having made up my mind, I made up my mind. I listen to everyone and have no response. Incredibly, after so much house sickness, I feel no more decisive than I did before the demolition began—and I still feel low. Will this awful feeling ever go away?
And then I go to the lighting store.
I’ve always been a pushover for glass and light, so I arrive before I’m supposed to meet Hal. I tell myself that this is so I can narrow down our choices, but as soon as I see the Tiffanies and chandeliers and torchères glowing like an orchard of incandescent trees, I am drawn deep inside the aisles. There, bathed in heat, I ignore my duties as a shopper, and lift the seal on the pivotal memory. At last I am in the hospital with Beth, moving toward another kind of light.
The memory is from four years ago—a month before Hal and I are set to get married. For a long time, Beth’s doctors have been expressing concern about her worsening medical conditions. Her eye doctor, who performed two surgeries for a rare malady, says she needs one more. Her dentist says she needs serious work, though her insurance won’t cover the anesthesia. Her gynecologist says that Beth’s uterine fibroids are nearing the point where a laparoscopic hysterectomy is in order. Since I’ve become the family member most involved with Beth’s medical care, I make a flurry of calls—and learn that if we can coordinate the doctors, Beth can have triple surgery. Yes, three surgeries in one day. Not only will this take care of the dental anesthesia, but Beth loves the idea of getting it all over with. But the prospect of three surgeries is daunting. I ask, “Will it help if I stay in a bed in your hospital room?” “Yes!” she says. Thus, a month before Hal and I will stand before the justice of the peace—after I’ve said yes but am still wondering if I’ll ever resolve my ambivalence about children—Beth and I check in to the hospital.
At first I give little thought to where they put us, which is the maternity ward. I have too much else to think about as I sit in the waiting room, conferring with one doctor after another throughout the day. Each surgery is successful, but I am tense. I spend the day calling Hal and my father, buying lunch for Beth’s boyfriend, Jesse, and trying to concentrate on my students’ papers. The sun is beginning to set as Beth is wheeled back into the room.
It is hard to see her. She has bandages over her eyes, cotton in her mouth. She’s woozy, and I stand over her and whisper, “It’ll be okay.” She mumbles something about not wanting to wear these stupid bandages, but soon she sleeps. Jesse leaves when visiting hours end, and then nurses come in to check on her. I get into my pajamas, turn off the light, and climb into my bed.
But I can’t sleep. I’m too anxious, and my feelings for her are pushing hard against my chest. Plus, she’s on some machine that keeps clicking and wheezing, and I can hear voices down the hall. After a few hours I give up on sleeping and get up and go into the hallway.
It is the middle of the night, and all the patient rooms are dark. The hallway is dim, but a peculiar light of some kind is glowing around a bend in the corridor. It isn’t an ordinary light—it almost seems like a light from an aquarium. I can’t imagine what it could be, but since it also seems to be where the voices are, I shuffle that way, and when I turn the corner, I see the nurses’ station, positioned near a glass wall. The strange light is coming from this wall. It is blue.
The two nurses at the desk look up. They’re friendly nurses whom I already met in Beth’s room. I ask them about the light beyond the glass. “That’s for the preemies,” one of them says. She walks me over, and I look into a room that’s decorated like a nursery at home, except for a few incubators. A nurse is in a rocking chair holding a baby smaller than her hand, and I remember what Sandy wrote me in her letter years before. She still hasn’t had children, and although she’s beginning to get her life together, she doesn’t think she’ll change her mind. But at last I know how she felt when she stood at the nursery window and looked in. My breath just stops at the sight of such fragility, of such miniscule heads and quivering hands, of a person who could be anyone but is already, in ways yet to be revealed, someone. I stand here, my heart soft. I can still change my mind about marrying Hal. Yet moments later, when I return down the hall and look at my sister, who is also fragile, and who I have nurtured and fought and accepted, and who has become a someone who will, I hope, prevail every day of her life, I feel just as moved as I did with the babies—though in a different way. In a lifelong, frustrated, dedicated, chest-melting Beth way. As the night drags on and I read my students’ stories, and chat with the nurses, and think about my father and Theresa and Hal and Jesse, and watch the preemies, I feel moved again and again. The truth, as I come to see in the blue light, is that I feel many kinds of love in this world, and I enjoy them all. There is one love I cannot call my own, but over the course of that night, I do not ache to do so. By morning I know I can marry a man who does not want the one love I am missing.
Now, in the lighting store, I hear my name. Hal has just walked through the entrance, and he’s waving across the shimmering lamps at me. I look at him and feel the same longing and respect and even, despite my house sickness, merriment that I always feel. And I know that I will not blame Hal for what I still haven’t felt in myself.
Amazingly, this realization does not pitch me deeper into sorrow, because it occurs to me that as a passerby without a child at her side, I felt no need to rush past the fallen woman and her daughter, and that as a woman whose first loyalty is not to her children, I can be available for Beth, and my students, and my parents, and even nurses in the middle of the night. Of course, maybe I’d have been a better passerby or sister or teacher if I’d had children. I’ll never know. But I do know, as I wind my way through the lamps toward Hal—who once told me, “Have compassion for yourself”—that I will go back to the house and look at the woman in the mirror, and try to soften my heart toward her. Because I now understand that my house sickness hasn’t been about the desire to have a child. It’s been about the long-delayed grief that I won’t.
Two days later, my phone rings. An electronic voice says, “Collect call from Theresa.”
I accept the charges. “What happened?”
Theresa says, “It’s benign.”
I put my hand to my chest. “Thank God.” I hear my father on the boardwalk beside her, his relief filling the ocean.
At my next visit to Beth, the day after the demolition is done, I do not tell her about Theresa’s ordeal. Nor do I tell her about the lump in my throat, or that it disappeared yesterday, when I had a transcendent moment during a trip to the house.
Instead, after we go shopping for a DVD of The Little Mermaid, we get ice cream. Our visit is easy and fun, with nothing memorable except the absence of anyone falling. I don’t even feel a twang when she tells me about a bus driver who’s having a baby. Having survived the upheaval of demolition, I’ve come to suspect that I might never feel closure about being childless, but since yesterday, I also know something else, something I think about now, as Beth spoons up her chocolate chip mint beside me, and we hear a song we both like on the car radio.“Turn it up,” she says, and I do. In the end, I will have loved no one like a child. But I will have loved many someones, and maybe someone will still love me. When the woman fell at Target, she wa
s ringed by nurses. When numerous teenagers have felt unrecognized or adrift, they took a class with me. I remember something an older friend told me over the last few days. “My son died young. My daughter is crazy. But you never stop making friends. The people who go through life with you are the ones who want to be with you.”
Yesterday Hal and I drove to the house. Demolition was over, he said—the back kitchen wall had at last been taken down. At first, standing in the living room, seeing the single space of the dining room and kitchen expand beneath the new beam, into the backyard, out to the neighbor’s lot beyond, and on into the sky, I could barely move. “And check this out,” Hal said, leading me to the back edge of the first floor. Just beyond our feet was the new plywood subfloor, over what used to be five feet of our backyard.
This is the moment that I will not tell Beth—or my father and Theresa, or even Hal, but that in some way I will share with them all, and with every student I ever teach and every friend I ever make: with Hal watching, I placed one toe carefully on the plywood, testing out this new floor that I had failed to see from the spot where I’d just been standing. It was the same spot where I’d once washed dishes at the sink. The sink that was now gone. Below a window that was no more. Next to a back porch that had been deleted from the face of the earth. I lowered my weight onto a floor that had not existed until now and drew the other foot up to meet its companion. Eyes on my feet, I planted myself firmly. Then I lifted my head, and my chest surged with fullness, and a view that I’d never seen in quite this way opened up right before me.
R·O·U·G·H·I·N·G-I·N
Brothers and Sisters
The next Saturday, when I’m returning from a walk and Hal is backing his car out of the driveway, he says out of the window in his Cookie Monster best, “Coffee. Need coffee.”
“See you when you get back.”
“Need wife to get coffee.”
“I know you’ll be checking out the old house afterward, so I’ll skip the whole thing.”
Returning to Hal-speak, he says, “A lot’s changed since you saw it. You might like it.”
“Anyway, I have that call in a few hours. The one with Craig.”
“Ah, yes. Dr. Craig, Sibling Whisperer.”
“He doesn’t call himself that. He’s not even a doctor. He’s a social worker.”
“Just come. We’ll be efficient. You’ll get back in time. Plus”—and Hal breaks into Cheapo Commercial Voiceover—“if you take advantage of this special offer, you won’t need to go back for weeks.”
“Why would that be?”
“Can’t tell you. But the sale ends today.”
“I don’t know,” I say, but I’m beginning to smile.
“Ah! Got you to smile again.”
“Again? I haven’t been smiling for this whole dumb conversation.”
“You haven’t smiled for weeks.”
I look at him. “I haven’t?”
“Not since the demo started.”
I kick at a pebble on the ground. “I didn’t think you knew.”
“Sure I did. I don’t know what bugged you about it, but I can promise you that this phase will be a lot better.” He reaches out the window and touches my hand. “So come.”
I’m still tentative when I get in the car. He looks over at me with his most caring smile. “I’m sorry I’ve been too wrapped up to be available. Let me be your wife whisperer again.”
By the time we leave the café for Teacher’s Lane, I feel less alone, having shared my descent into house sickness. I also feel less resistant, because Hal assured me that this new phase will have no overlap with my personal struggles. In fact, he said, although it’s an exacting time for builders, it will be imperceptibly dramatic for me. “Your risk of psychic turmoil is zilch.”
But as I walk inside, the change couldn’t seem more dramatic. “Wow. This is lovely.”
I’m not referring to the living room, which hasn’t altered at all, nor the open back of the first floor, now covered with plywood. I mean the other walls in the dining room-kitchen: shorn of their plaster, they’re now exposed brick, granting the house a timeless, earthen elegance.
“I hate to break this to you,” Hal says, “but it won’t be staying like this.”
“Why not?”
“None of these is a party wall. If you take the plaster down on a wall that you don’t share with your neighbors, where are you going to put the insulation?”
“Hmm. Good point. Then why remove the plaster?”
“For the roughing-in. That’s the phase in the job when all the individual trades converge on the house to install the inner workings—the plumbing, the electrical, the ductwork for heating and air-conditioning. What you’re seeing here is the masonry that was beneath the plaster—the inner wythe. It’ll get covered by drywall later.”
“Too bad.”
“I understand that an interior brick wall has a certain charm. But insulation’s more important. Though I suppose there is a small disadvantage.”
“What?”
“I’ll show you.” He leads me upstairs. I’m relieved to feel no trace of my previous despondency. I can pass the hollowed-out bathroom without a glance, and when I see that my new study—as spacious as the dining room-kitchen immediately below—also has exposed brick, I’m free to feel chic and sophisticated.
But the room isn’t quite the same as the one beneath. Parallel to each of the walls stand structures made of lumber. Hal, predicting my question, says, “That’s the framing.”
“Oh. That’s what you see”—and I flash back to being eight and goofing around with my brother and sisters in the development to which we’d just moved, where we watched construction underway for the first time—“when a house is going up.”
“Well, the framing for a tract house, like what you played around in as a kid”—I smile at how quickly he grabbed on to my unspoken memory—“is both the structure of the house and space for utilities and insulation. This framing is just for the utilities and insulation. And that’s the disadvantage. We’ll lose a bit of square footage.”
“Our tiny house will get tinier?”
“You have to give up something to get something.” When I frown, he adds, “But remember—one of the cost-saving measures was not to do this in the front rooms on both floors. We’re keeping those plaster walls, so those rooms won’t shrink. When we do the insulation, we’ll just use a hose to spray behind the plaster.”
I look around. Even though the finished house won’t retain this trendy appearance, I’m impressed by how it looks.
“Roughing-in takes time,” Hal adds. “There’ll be a good stretch ahead when you won’t see a difference. If you don’t want to come back for a while, you won’t be missing much.”
This is convenient, because I have a heavy schedule of talks over the next few months. I’ve taken off the semester to limit my stress, but I’ll still be flying all over the country. “In case I take you up on that, tell me in advance what sea monsters we might encounter in this phase.”
His smile gives way to seriousness. He holds up three fingers. “One: unforeseen conditions. Two: poor coordination by the general contractor. Three: people not getting along.”
“Yikes. Them’s serious perils.”
“Well, unforeseen conditions are part and parcel of working with existing construction, so that’s the one that seems most likely. Poor coordination is less so, since Dan seems like a good general contractor, and part of a good g.c. is his coordination of the work.”
“What about people not getting along?”
“This is definitely a major time in a job when people have to cooperate. Everybody’s got to stay out of everybody’s way while considering everybody else. Like if the mechanical guy installs ductwork without thinking about the other trades, then the plumber comes in and says, ‘The toilet goes here, the drain here, and I have nowhere to put it,’ you’re in trouble.”
I feel my face get tight. “So one sub’s self-absorpti
on could mess us up?”
“Self-absorption, arrogance, irresponsibility, frustration with life, you name it. Construction is just another theater in which the human condition with all its nonsense can strut about on the stage.”
“Doesn’t that worry you?”
“No. I think even with all their foibles, most people get along most of the time.” When my expression apparently doesn’t change, he adds, “Look, this is how I think most people see it. Whether they’re electricians, plumbers, or mechanical guys, every job works a whole lot better if we act like family when we’re on the job.”
I say, sarcastically, “So you mean everyone should just behave like brothers and sisters when they’re under the same roof?”
“Yeah, you could say that,” he says with a shrug.
Could he possibly have said something that would have given me more anxiety?
I don’t say this as we drive back to the house so I can call Craig—a social worker who has, in a series of phone sessions over the last few months, helped me address recent problems in my relationship with Beth. After all, I hear similar phrasing all the time about the importance of acting like family—or, more specifically, brothers and sisters— as politicians, pastors, union leaders, social justice groups, and others make appeals for some kind of unity. But as everyone who’s actually had a sibling must know—and as my own experience has shown me over and over—flesh-and-blood brothers and sisters, no matter how hard they try, and no matter how much they remember that they’re family—can be rather far from united.
It’s not that my relationships with my brother and sisters didn’t start out well. Raised under one roof, Laura, Beth, Max, and I were one another’s earliest and most frequent playmates, entertaining ourselves from sandboxes to school blacktops, sharing games and witticisms and eye-rolling irritations and, as we still find out by uttering identical words with identical inflections at the same moment, mental circuitry. Most important, we loved as well as liked one another. For instance, the year we lived in a development under construction, the four of us would roam in full camaraderie along our street, watching backhoes digging and foundations getting poured, and then, when the workers left for the day, we’d clamber up to a just-framed house, dart through the ribs of wood, and scramble from one nascent room to the next, giggling with familiar jokes and secret language. I can still see us then: high-spirited, enjoying one another. With the hindsight of adulthood, I can also see, well, the inner workings that my eight-year-old eyes, unskilled in discerning the sources of mood changes or distinguishing bravado from insecurity, failed to detect: Laura, alternating between giddy and pensive, feeling an approval-starved loneliness and spunk-crushing responsibility; me, cheerful with siblings and schoolmates and newly minted pen pals, but cut to the quick by my parents’ ill-expressed agonies; Beth, gleeful with us and bored when alone, relishing the spotlight of my mother’s scant energies while puzzling over my father’s departure; wise guy Max, disguising his lost-in-the-crowd distress with constant sardonic humor. In my child-scopic world, I did not miss that we were distinct, but I did miss my siblings’ inner strife. Perhaps this was due to my youthful self-absorption, which didn’t permit me to see behind the walls we were all carefully erecting. Perhaps, though, it was because we had, at least in my mind, a playscape so engaging that our aches mattered less than our fellowship. Certainly we fought, but our resentments perished quickly. One babysitter seemed almost annoyed at how immediately we got on after fights.
