Immature behavior comes up a lot, such as the carpenter who tells me, “The silliest and most childish things can bring on problems. Like a mis-cut of an eighth of an inch. It could actually come to blows. I’ve seen it—jail time over something like that! Dude, grow up.” Another frequent grievance is self-absorption, or, as a different carpenter says, “You got footer people, and all they do is pour footers and they’re out of there. They don’t care where the dirt got piled, they don’t care about no mess they’re leaving. The attitude is, ‘I ain’t never working here no more so whadda I care about anyone else.’ ” Other common difficulties might be summed up as attitudes that are arrogant or rigid, illustrated by stories about bosses who refuse to listen to ideas from their employees, highly skilled craftsmen who see no point in hiding their impatience with less proficient workers, and plumbers who are so fixed on laying their pipes one way that they hack away at brand-new construction to do the installation. The top lament, though, is rudeness. This covers a lot of ground, from the contractor who’s brusque when a client expresses anxiety to the roofer who dumps materials into a neighbor’s yard to the temperamental worker who snaps at anyone around him. One painter put it this way: “You need to be courteous to everyone. Corporate employees might object to the fumes and get confrontational. You don’t want to talk back to them—they have good reason to feel the way they do. Homeowners don’t want anyone scraggly and smelly. Take showers, don’t bring your dirty clothes inside. Don’t even be rude to a beggar asking for a handout. That’s his neighborhood. And you never know. He just might come down the street later and kick the ladder out from under you.”
I enjoy listening to the insights of people who work with their hands. Certainly they have a lot to say about how to trowel on plaster or hang a door, but now that I’m really paying attention, I see that they’re also perceptive about people. Hal was right. Construction isn’t just the act of building—it really
is
a microcosm of the larger human experience.
Right after New Year’s, when we return for a job meeting, I see that repairs have begun.
Nothing seems different when we enter the still-unheated living room, holiday cookies in hand. But as we continue into the kitchen, looking for Dan, we pass sawhorses, a power saw, a ladder, a shovel, a work belt. The soffits are now framed. Above our heads, a subfloor has been installed for the second story, and just below it, metal rods run between the west and east walls, a form of repair that will tie them together structurally.
The back door is open. I set the cookies on the ladder, and we continue outside.
In the alley, Dan and Victor, one of his carpenters, are standing on scaffolding. Victor is patching around the metal rods I saw in the kitchen, which extend outside the masonry. Once he’s finished, he’ll weld metal plates to the ends of the rods. I didn’t know this before, but I do now, and the knowledge makes this land feel less strange, and me less of a stranger.
Not that I understand every detail of the meeting, which begins when Dan climbs down from the scaffolding. But I can follow it.
“What’s the schedule for the insulation?”
“After the inspection, which is today.”
“The replacement windows still on schedule?”
“Yes. And we’ll be installing the new floor on the second story next week.”
“If kitchen cabinets are here two weeks from now, is that okay?”
“Should be fine.”
Then Hal unfolds an oversized sheet on which he’s printed a schedule of everything that remains to be done. He says, “So what’s your estimate for the move-in date?”
Dan says, “I think we can get the Certificate of Occupancy by the end of February.”
Oh, no. We need to be out by late January. No, no, no, no.
I try not to look at Hal.
Hal says, “Could we do it any sooner?”
“Well . . .” Dan looks at Hal’s schedule. “Friday, February 17,” he says.
“You sure?”
“It’ll be tight. But we can do it.”
I shoot a look at Hal, but he keeps his eyes on Dan and the notebook.
They keep talking, and I tell myself that it’s all going to work out. I’m not so sure I believe it, but remembering the good graces of the neighbors who helped when we were building this stone wall, I know that we have people to turn to. Maybe Jim and Susan will know someone in their church with an extra room. Maybe the insurance agent will know of some hotel where we could live for two weeks. I won’t worry. We have allies.
As the meeting breaks up, and Dan walks us toward the front door, I think about how Dan’s career is not at all his Life Purpose. He never reached the great pinnacle he dreamt of when he was a boy. Yet he is a good man, and he does a good job, and he has been an exemplary ally to Hal.
And at this incredibly banal moment, as Hal and Dan are talking about when we need to pick up our light fixtures from the store, I have my fourth, and final, awakening. Hal has long suggested to me that the whole question of Life Purpose is silly. I still don’t want to think that, but I do see, looking at Dan, that just as important as anyone’s purpose is his character—and maybe even more.
It’s a quiet thought. No trumpets blare, no dancers leap from the walls. In fact, no one notices, because at that very moment, Hal and Dan are having a tiny exchange.
“Hey,” Hal says, nodding toward a windowsill in the living room, “nice job with the Dutchman.”
“I thought you’d like it,” Dan says, smiling.
“What are you talking about?” I ask, no longer afraid to speak up.
“When something’s rotted or broken,” Hal says, “you cut out the rotted stuff and make an even perimeter, then cut a new piece and patch it in. The patch”—he points to a patch I now see in the windowsill—“is called a Dutchman.”
We can’t always figure out the big questions, I think, as Hal and I continue out the door. But until we do—and even if we don’t—there are still the small things we can do. We can be sisters. We can be Dutchmen. We can give, and receive, repair.
We head down the porch steps, now freed of its police tape. Victor calls after us, “Thanks for the cookies.”
I am waking up, and the house is coming back to life. Maybe there is nothing left to fear.
CLOSING IN
I·N·S·U·L·A·T·I·O·N A·N·D W·A·L·L·S, A·G·A·I·N
Time
“
B
y the way,” I say to Hal one evening in mid-January, as we stack the dishwasher in the rented house, “you know how we’re supposed to move back to the house on February 17?”
He freezes, a dirty plate in his hands. “There’s a problem?”
“Well, I kind of have a talk on February 16. At seven in the evening. In Florida.”
“
Florida
?”
“Sorry.”
“It would be a good idea if you got out of it.”
“I tried all day today. But it’s for a university. They’ve already advertised the date.”
“So?”
“They made my book required reading for the entire freshman class, which is thousands of students, and they’ve already secured an amphitheater for a large audience.”
“But we’re moving the next morning.”
“I know. But my publisher set up the event, and the head honcho there called me today and said that it would be really, really bad if I pulled out. Like it could ruin their business account with the university for years.”
He lowers the plate to the dishwasher, his motions controlled. “Why did you tell them you could do it
then
?”
“We discussed dates last fall. I asked for one after New Year’s, since I thought we’d be back in the house by then, and we settled on February 16. How was I supposed to know it would turn out to be a terrible time for a trip?”
He pours in way too much dishwashing powder. “Well,” he says, “that’s great.”
I decide it would be unwise to indicate that this news is only half of what I want to say. While Hal’s demeanor generally vacillates between playfulness and composure, he also has the capacity to grow aloof. I tend to forget this side of him during the long stretches when it vanishes from the scene, which has been the case throughout most of our marriage as well as this entire renovation. But after the last job meeting, I began to detect its return. First came a few tense nights as he strategized about how to ask Natalie to extend our stay until February 17. Fortunately, he found a way to present our case and Natalie has a big heart, but she also emphasized that, come what may, our move-out could be nudged no farther down the calendar. At that point, as I became jittery about whether Dan would be able to get everything done on time, Hal lost his joviality. This was not only because he had to be on-site all the more and step up his efforts with such dreary tasks as pestering the lighting store for still-undelivered fixtures. It was also because it was time to turn his attention toward finishing the third floor—himself. I’d forgotten this, too: one of the compromises Hal made to get Dan’s estimate down was that he himself would handle the walls and floor and paint in his studio. And it is this combination of pressures that appears to have darkened his spirit.
It took me many years to accept the variations in the ways we endure stress. I prefer to ponder, and, whenever possible, make light of the situation. Hal usually does, too, which perhaps accounts for my forgetfulness about the occasions when he does not. But every so often, he will instead sink into what I call his moodiness, when he’ll engage in little joking, few smiles, no light banter, maybe no conversation at all. When this happened in our first relationship, I took it personally. I’d launch into direct questioning about what he was feeling and why he was feeling it, then get annoyed when he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer—all of which only made matters worse. Time, however, can be love’s friend. After Hal and I began our second relationship, I came to see that part of the pact of loving another person is both learning to accept the more mystifying aspects of his character, and finding ways to conduct oneself when they arise. Although I’ve hardly mastered the latter with Hal, I do know that if I refrain from direct questioning, stay upbeat, and steer conversation toward other things on my mind, he usually resolves whatever prompted his moodiness on his own. It might not happen immediately, but time has also taught me the value of patience. This has been my approach for the past week.
But then, a few days ago, I received an e-mail from the university in Florida, saying how happy they were that I was coming February 16. It had been months since they’d been in touch, which had allowed me to entertain many I-guess-I’m-off-the-hook scenarios—and say nothing about it to Hal. Upon receiving this bombshell, though, I begged them to change the date. I explained the renovation, the explosion, the tight schedule. Unthinkable, they replied. How could they have a thousand students show up at an amphitheater without an author on the stage?
“And Florida
again
,” Hal says, throwing the dishwasher on with a hard shove.
“Orlando, even,” I add.
I don’t laugh, though my sense of absurdity makes me want to. This trip to Orlando is actually the parenthetical mate to another inconvenient talk, also in Orlando, days before the renovation began. I hadn’t wanted to do that one, either. I hate steamy heat, and that’s what Florida is in July. But when that invitation was extended—before Dan had determined our starting date—I had a very good reason to say yes: my mother lives directly across the state from Orlando, and after months of fretting with Laura about Rosalie’s encroaching forgetfulness, an all-paid trip to a city two hours away seemed like a gift. Plus, Rosalie and Gordon had driven to Orlando when I’d had business there years before, and we’d had a nice lunch together. So I’d agreed to that talk, and only then did we learn that we needed to move out four days later. Just as belatedly, I discovered that the whole trip was pointless: Rosalie and Gordon were going to be out of state that month, motor-homing across the country for yet another of their lighthouse tours. Thus, I’d left Hal on his own, packing boxes and breaking Ikea mirrors, while I boiled away in Florida. Now, here we are again—with Hal knowing full well what I’m not yet saying.
“Orlando,” he says curtly. “So you’ll want to go a day early to visit with Rosalie.”
“No.” My voice is a squeaky-high lie.
“It would be much better if you were up
here
that day early.”
“But now that you mention it”—I recover my regular tone—“it
does
make sense for me to fly down a day early. What if it snows the day I’m due down there and I’m stuck up here?”
He leans against the roaring dishwasher and crosses his arms.
I say, “When we moved in here, the movers did everything—I was useless. I can just come back the afternoon of the 17th. It’s not like you’ll need me that morning.”
I start wiping a counter. There’s no need to look up when I can easily envision his face.
“Oh, do what you want,” he says. “I know that’s what you want, so just do it.”
He walks upstairs.
Secretly, waiting until after Hal leaves for the office the next morning, I call Rosalie.
“Oh, hello, dear!” she says in her stunned-to-have-a-daughter way. But she’s whispering.
“Why are you whispering?”
“I just went back to bed.”
“You’re whispering because you’re in bed?”
“No, no. We didn’t get the birds up yet”—the two cockatiels that she and Gordon have doted on for fifteen years, and the reason they vacation across the country in a motor home and not on airplanes—“and I don’t want them to know I’m awake and start making a fuss.”
“Are you okay? Why’d you go back to bed?”
“Oh, I’m fine. I’m just lying here to let the eye drops work.”
“Eye drops?”
“From the eye surgery.”
Yes, that’s right. I’ve been so preoccupied with her waning brain cells, and so thrown by disjointed exchanges like the one we’re having right now, that I’ve forgotten about her recent medical miracle. Since she was a little girl, my mother has worn glasses. I’ve never even known her to misplace them because, except to shower and sleep, she never takes them off. To me, glasses are simply part of my mother’s face. Then a few years ago, her eye doctor detected cataracts and glaucoma. He waited until both conditions had advanced far enough to warrant surgery, then offered to perform an additional service at the same time. “After one operation for the left eye, and another for the right, and then a treatment of eye drops,” Rosalie had said, “I shouldn’t need glasses at all.” “How amazing,” I’d replied, though I thought, How strange. It will be like having a different mother.