by Rachel Simon
That morning was the first time I began to feel that something meaningful might lie beyond the agony of my breakup with Hal. Although good did not appear immediately in my life, and did not take any shape I could possibly have envisioned on that sunny morning, eventually, as I stepped into the next day and the next opportunity, it did.
It is a cliché to say that as we walk through life we enter a succession of classrooms, and that each one offers us new lessons. Yet I’ve gone down many unplanned corridors that have led, after much darkness, to precious truths, either because, as with Rosalie, I’ve been forced to counsel myself, or because I’ve had the good fortune to encounter someone like Lisa, who became my teacher at just the moment I needed one. So as I look in the glass door at the ruined kitchen, I tell myself that as freak an accident as this was, and as displaced and glum as I feel, maybe the best approach I can take is to see myself as a student again. Whether I’m now going to be reevaluating my attitude toward others, or trying to weave something good from so much that’s bad, I don’t know. I also don’t know whether I’ll be lucky enough to find someone like Lisa, who will say something that will light my way. After all, part of the definition of a student is someone who does not know what she does not know. But I do know that like my own students, I can enter this new classroom with humility or hostility. I can press on or give up. I can allow myself to transform or smolder that my time has been wasted.
I slip back under the police tape. Yes, I know: an exploded house is a pitiful classroom, and this is the time for me to be a wife and sister and, soon, a teacher. How can I also be a student? But a misfortune came to pass and here I am, groping down the alley in the dark.
When I finally get back to the rented house, Hal and I throw our arms around each other and don’t let go for what seems like hours. Then, since we’re keeping the heat down to funnel all our money toward the renovation, we get under the covers and keep on holding.
“The situation isn’t good,” Hal says, and proceeds to tell me about visiting the house today to assess the damage. Dan will have to take down much of what remains inside, layer by layer, stopping only when he reaches a layer untouched by the explosion. Only then will we know the extent of the repairs.
“It’s a sorry sight,” I say, my teeth chattering in the chilly bedroom.
“It is,” he says. “For a while last night I kept asking myself, ‘Why me?’ ”
“I was so worried about you. You sounded so bereft when I finally reached you.”
“I’d gone to Philly to calm myself by going to record stores. But I couldn’t concentrate. My mind was all over the place. I’d been feeling so good about the job, and then . . .”
“I guess no one’s immune from bad things happening.”
“Yeah. Not even a fool like me.”
“A fool? What makes you a fool?”
“ ’Cause when I did the drawings, I didn’t say, ‘Don’t open gas line and light torch.’ ”
We let a laugh slip out, and our muscles loosen. He says, “But talking to you helped.”
“It did?”
“I was concerned that you’d say, Oh, my God! But you were level-headed, and you were there for me. Standing in that cold, hearing your voice in my ear. That helped a lot.”
“I didn’t know I did anything.”
“Well, you did. You were okay, and that helped me regain my perspective. Our house is still standing. No one was seriously hurt. And you’re with me.”
“Two fools together.”
“Why are you a fool?”
“Because I’ve entertained the idea of getting angry about this. You could even say that I want to be angry about this. As soon as I figure out who to be angry with.”
“Maybe that’s only human.”
“But you’re not angry.”
“No. I’m sad.”
“I am, too.”
“But we’re sad together. That’s what matters. We’ll get through this.”
“Even if I do get angry?”
“Whatever you feel—whatever I feel—as long as we feel it together, we’ll be okay.”
His words are so comforting, I stop wanting to feel angry, at least for now. But anticipating that I’ll have this same desire for anger again, I ask, “Did you come to an answer for ‘Why me?’ ”
He’s quiet for a minute. “I think there’s only one answer, and that’s, ‘Why not me?’ None of us is so special that we can avoid suffering.”
The house is still a wreck and our future uncertain, but here, under the covers, students together, this cold night has come to feel warm.
For the next several days, we both go about doing what needs to be done. Hal attends meetings with the insurance adjuster, the structural engineer, and Dan. I review my syllabus for my return to teaching. Hal does not mope, and I stay level-headed.
Fortunately, none of this is difficult because good things are already occurring. The insurance adjuster does not haggle. Nor does he deny compensation to neighbors whose masonry was cracked by the explosion. Dan lets his job supervisor, Henry, go, seeing a connection between the disaster and Henry’s inattentiveness to detail, and starts running the job himself. Also, one day at the rented house, I happen to mention to a couple of our neighbors that we’re apprehensive about what to do after Natalie finalizes the sale, and one of them replies, “Did you know that the new owner is my cousin?”
I say, “You’re joking.”
“She might not need the place immediately. I’ll talk to her for you.”
“We’d like it if you could stay longer,” the other neighbor adds.
“I’d love it,” Ginny says that day when I stop off at her house for a visit.
I really like these people, I think, as Ginny and I watch a video and eat pretzels. Now, because of the explosion, I might have more time with them. Swedenborg was a wise man.
Perhaps this is why I feel none of the indignation I’d have expected when, the next day, Hal pieces together what happened. It was the two mechanics who opened the valve to the gas line. They hadn’t known that the valve was for the gas line, nor that the line hadn’t been capped. Why they turned it on is unclear, as is why the line, which fed the oven until it was removed at demolition, was never capped. But it seems that the fault lay in a series of poor decisions, and the culprits, one of whom was blown out the back when the explosion occurred, must have been scared out of their wits.
Both of us feel bad for them, but when Hal adds that Dan’s crew has nicknamed these guys Sparky and Torch, we indulge in a long laugh. If there’s any lesson to be learned from this, I don’t think we’ve found it yet.
A week and a half after the explosion, on a Sunday whitened by the first snowfall of the season, Hal and I lift the police tape for my first walk-through the house since the disaster.
It’s freezing in here, and as I take in the living room, I feel cold inside, too. The wall between the stairs and dining room is nothing but framing. Plywood still substitutes for windows. Drywall and plaster have been stripped away from almost all the walls as well as the ceilings. Insulation hangs loose, vents have worked free of ductwork, joists are split.
“Would you believe,” Hal says, as we move toward the back of the kitchen, “that this is the only evidence of flame?” He points to the snake-face of the gas pipe, which I see for the first time. The insulation that surrounds it isn’t the beige of the rest of the house, but orange. I later learn that in a natural gas explosion, there’s only a quick blast of fire and heat. It is the concussive waves that cause the damage. Typically, the roof rises and the walls either bulge out or fall in. Gasoline explosions can create total destruction. Natural gas explosions end in rubble.
“I want to show you something else,” Hal says, leading me up to my study.
As with downstairs, the room is shorn of its drywall and plaster, and the insulation is exposed. The windows are still intact, but the wooden floor has split as if it were the bottom of a boat impaled by—and I don’t laugh as I
think this—a sea monster. We walk carefully around the long hole, with me gaping at everything. The worst has happened, I’m at last letting myself think. If there were a time when anger would be justified, this is it. For a moment I want to indulge, but then tell myself to resist the temptation. This isn’t hard—the sight before me is so desolate, I almost feel numb.
Then Hal asks, “Do you see what I was talking about?”
“No,” I say.
“Look at the back wall.”
I turn to the southern wall, which overlooks the backyard. “What am I looking at?”
“You can see directly to the studs that were behind the plaster.”
“Yes, that’s what I’m seeing.”
“You shouldn’t be able to do that.”
“Why not?”
“They insulated the house, remember?”
Sure enough, on the other walls, there’s insulation. Above our heads, there’s insulation. But not on the southern wall. “Why isn’t it here?”
He says with a laugh, “Because the insulators didn’t install it like they were supposed to.”
“What?”
He looks at me with a wry smile. “And we would never have found out had there been no explosion. Only because the plaster came down have we seen the places they missed.”
“Or skipped.”
“Whichever.”
And blam: all the anger that I haven’t been feeling erupts. “So you’re saying they were trying to rip us off?”
“What’s the point in being angry about it?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Nah.”
“Why aren’t you?”
“I learned long ago that a temper is a liability in this field.”
“But we paid them to do something that they didn’t do!”
“Right. But this is nothing compared to the enormity of the work to be done. This is a reason to be glad. Something good came out of this. Now we can make sure they do it right.”
“Are you kidding me?” I stare at him. “How can you not be angry at such greed?”
“You know what someone in my office says? ‘Never ascribe to malevolence what you can just as easily chalk up to incompetence.’ I don’t know if this happened because of greed. People in construction are the same as all of us—they can be greedy, lazy, careless, distracted, arrogant.”
I want to say something back, but before I can find any words in my boiling anger—which suddenly isn’t boiling as intensely—he walks toward the window, then turns around and, leaning against the sill, says, “I’ve always seen the construction process as a microcosm of the larger human experience. This is a human endeavor, where people are motivated by the same things that motivate humans everywhere, good, bad, and indifferent. You can guess, but you rarely know what those motivations are.
“In this case,” he continues, “the insulation guys thought they were going to be here for one day, and it became four. By the fourth day, they were probably in a hurry, and because this was one of the plaster walls, they couldn’t see if the work had been done. Maybe they just forgot about it, or thought no one would notice if they skipped it. I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
Now I’m more startled than angry. “You don’t care?”
“After twenty-five years in this field, I know that construction is not something where perfection is easy to achieve. Hey, if you’re an architect and you think you can do a flawless set of drawings, you’ve got another thing coming. It’s virtually inevitable that something will go wrong somewhere in the construction process, or compromises will be made. I’m just glad we found out about the insulation. Now it can be fixed.”
I look down at the hole in the floor. I feel so sad, seeing the fragility of this house. But amazingly, I don’t feel angry anymore. I wait a moment for it to rear up again, but it seems as if it flashed high inside me and then, doused by Hal’s logic, dissipated.
I walk over to him and say, my voice back to normal, “I’ve been wondering if I might learn something from this disaster. I didn’t think I would. But I think I just did.”
He says, “You know, I’ve learned something, too.” He pauses. “I learned that I was wrong about you.”
“About me?”
“If I’d had to predict how you’d take something like this, I would have imagined the reaction you just had to the insulation, only times a hundred. But you’ve been very calm and thoughtful through the whole thing. You just accepted it, and dealt with it, and were there for me. And that helped get me back on my feet right away.”
I smile, already forgetting the tension that just gripped my face. “But we still have a long way to go. The new owner hasn’t said whether we can stay in the house past Christmas. Dan hasn’t gotten to the bottom of the damage. There are still other chances for me to lose my cool.”
“I know,” he says. “But I think we’re over the worst.”
We put our arms around each other and look out the window. The yard has been cleared, but it is not empty. There still stands our baby tree.
The next day, Hal sends me an e-mail from work:Just talked to the structural engineer. He and I are on the same page about how to do the repairs . . . and that does NOT involve wholesale replacement of any masonry walls. The SE corner needs to be anchored to the joists. Sections of that wythe need to be taken apart and put back together in line with the surrounding wall. But the scope of repair is sufficiently small that we can have high hopes that they’ll go quickly.
I shut off my computer and look outside. It is the second snowfall of the year, and I was planning to go to the library. But with Hal’s message fresh in my head, when I get in my car, that is not where I go.
I still feel like a student, I think as I drive, struggling to learn what I can from this mess. But I know something now that I didn’t before I checked my voice mail as I ran across the windy plaza ten days ago. This new classroom—and maybe every classroom that I’ll ever be in—isn’t only a classroom for me. Classrooms, even those that lack teachers, even those where we lack the wisdom to instruct ourselves, contain other students, and we can turn toward one another, and we can help one another—even without knowing we’re doing so.
And that, I suppose, is how, along with being wives and husbands, sisters and brothers, teachers and architects, we can, when called to do so, become students—and, indeed, welcome the chance. Because a student is not only someone who does not know what she does not know. She might also be someone who knows more than she realizes, and can make more of a difference than she can know.
I park at the house. It is dusk again, and nothing has changed in the front. But as I hurry down the alley and snowflakes whiten the narrow walk in front of me, I can finally see my feet.
Then I go into the yard.
“I thought the fringe tree had died,” I said to Hal when we stood looking out the window yesterday. I was surprised to see the little tree, now free of the smashed window frames and shattered glass, still pointing toward the sky.
Hal said, “When the windows blew out, some of the bark got stripped.”
“But look. It’s standing.”
“I know. But it needs the bark to protect it through the winter. Whether it can survive with damage to its bark, we’ll find out.”
That was a whole day ago. Snow is still falling, and the tree is still here. I climb above our stone wall and come as close as I can to the tree. It is bent from its injuries, but my breath coats its branches. We just might make it until spring.
R·E·P·A·I·R
Allies
And then, a series of awakenings start happening within me.
The first makes itself known one morning in early December, as Hal is getting ready to leave for a job meeting and I find these words leaving my mouth: “Can I come with you?”
He puts his hands on my head and says in a Captain Kirk voice, “Bones, can you get over here right away? An alien life force is invading my crew.”
Laughing, I throw his hands off,
despite being as surprised as he, and keep talking. “Well, you said the house looks really different with them peeling so much back for repairs.”
He raises an eyebrow Spock-style, and says in his Vulcan best, “I fail to see the logic, Captain. We could easily visit the house tonight.”
“I, you know, just figured I could go now, with you driving there anyway.”
Making a determined Scottie face, he says, “I’ll get us there, Captain. But you just got to tell me—why in the blazes are you changing course now?”
I try to puzzle it out. At a job meeting I could watch Hal doing on-site work, which I’ve never observed. Come to think of it, I don’t actually know what happens in a job meeting—and, well, I’ve never wanted to find out firsthand, lest I reveal my ignorance to someone less forgiving than my husband. And right here over my morning tea, I have my first awakening: that my time-honored indifference has actually been unease—and that the explosion has finally blown it off, exposing the curiosity underneath. “I guess,” I say, “I want to know your world.”
