by Matthew Batt
I hear a little beep, and around comes my mom in her minivan, the FLRLDY license plate smiling ahead.
Before I know it she pops out and shouts, “Hi, turkey leg!” She gives me a big hug and kiss and tells me I look great. It is about four degrees Fahrenheit and the wind is blowing in off Lake Michigan, making it feel dangerously colder. “Grandpa’s with me,” she says. She gestures toward a quilt-swaddled figure in the back seat. “We have to take him back, but he really wanted to come.” She holds my face in her hands. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she says. “What a treat!”
Before I put my bags in the back, I check the license plate to make sure I’m getting into the right vehicle. She seems perky and chipper—more so than she ever was over Christmas or, for that matter, any time over the past year.
Grandpa opens his door and teeters out. He is wearing a bathrobe underneath the extra-large topcoat I gave him for Christmas. I actually bought the coat for myself at, of all places, a J. Peterman sale a while back. It was what they used to call a greatcoat. It was the kind of coat a father would pass down to his son. I loved the coat so much I considered gaining weight just to fit into it. It is jarring, to say the least, to find my grandfather, dressed otherwise like a hospital patient, infirm and trembling from cold and atrophy, wearing my greatcoat.
“Hi, Grandpa,” I say.
He starts crying.
I am worried that this will be the beginning of another devastating trip, but my mom is humming “On the Street Where You Live” from My Fair Lady, and off we go for some cocoa and then to tuck Grandpa into bed.
I only stay through the weekend, because I have to, and can, leave. I have the nicest visit with my mom, because for the first time in a very long time we don’t have to cater to Grandpa’s mercurial tempers or earsplitting TV volumes. We pick him up at lunch and take him to Culver’s for butterburgers, onion rings, and a little frozen custard, and then back to the nursing home he goes. It isn’t exactly fun, but it isn’t anywhere near as bad as it had been a month ago at Christmas. By the time we get home it’s nighttime, so I cook up some pork chops and mashed potatoes for Mom and Bob, and because I use half a stick of butter per person, Bob is happy as can be. He’s in bed by eight, as is his wont, and then my mom and I sit up and drink gimlets and watch Meg Ryan movies (except the freaky one where she’s an abusive alcoholic—a little too close to home) and talk about how it wasn’t supposed to be like this, but it is, and we’re just dealing with it as best we can. We cue up When Harry Met Sally, back to that funny fight about the wagon wheel coffee table.
They figure that Grandpa will be able to live on his own again before too long, though he will have to endure months of physical therapy.
My mom and I have mixed feelings. Of course we don’t want him to be sick or to suffer. But neither do we want him tearing it up again in Las Vegas or cavorting around greater Milwaukee with his charm school dropouts. The facts remain: he is too old to behave like this; he is legally blind in one eye and can’t see well enough to drive; he is burning through his retirement money quicker than if he literally set it on fire; he dreads our company but can’t stand to be alone when he isn’t with Tonya.
Then in April, when he’s nearly back to full strength, and on the one-year anniversary of Gram’s death, comes the big solution: Grandpa is going to move in with my mom and Bob.
Grandpa thinks it is his master plan that’s going to solve all the problems. He will cut his expenses in half and probably do the same for Mom and Bob. He’ll pay rent, and chip in for groceries and utilities and so forth, and thereby everybody will save money. Grandpa won’t be tempted to see Tonya anymore because there’s no way Tonya is coming to my mom’s house, leaving her sooty butt prints everywhere. To boot, they’ll probably make a killing by selling all his furniture and whatnot from the condo.
The only thing Grandpa overlooked was the fact that he hates Bob, and Bob hates him back. Nothing more than a civil “Robert,” “Robert” exchange has passed between them in years. What could be a better idea than to put them under the same roof in a two-bedroom condo? On top of that, Fairway and Grandpa’s cat are both so old and recalcitrant that there’s no way those two can live together in any state but, well, like dogs and cats.
But it never comes to that. Shortly after Grandpa begins packing, his cat goes missing. The next morning, a neighbor finds her on Racine Avenue, directly behind Grandpa’s condo, dead in the middle of the road. A good portent it does not make.
In Defense of Dilettantes
ONE WAY I DO NOT like to wake up is to my dog barking her Emergency! Intruder! Alert! bark. Maggie does not bark this bark often, as is her meek spaniel way, but when she does it’s usually because I have overslept and someone is knocking at the door. That someone, of course, might have been scheduled to arrive, but he might have shown up early. Today that not-so-hypothetical someone is Steve, a kind of construction renaissance man whose latest medium happens to be cement. He’s pouring our concrete countertop this morning, and apparently that means a good time to Steve. So good a time that he shows up nearly an hour earlier than we arranged, on Presidents’ Day, the best Monday of the year to sleep in for students, teachers, bankers, federal employees—everyone.
Aside from rousing me from a weird dream about my grandfather, an ice cream truck, and a jazz concert featuring Julian “Cannonball” Adderley and me, what Steve has done is bring to light the fact that no matter what I pretend to know after six months of home improvementing, I’m still every bit a dilettante. He’s disgusted, I can tell, that I am not already awake at nine o’clock, that I have started my week thusly, that I made him wait outside a locked door like a common peddler or a missionary.
“Oh, hey, I didn’t hear you—”
“Surprise,” he says and pushes past me with a bucket of tools.
My friend Bryan used to call me a dilettante whenever I ran out of tobacco. We both rolled our own Gauloises (if we couldn’t be French or Frank O’Hara, at least we could smoke like them), but Bryan was a professional and always had plenty of papers and tobacco, his Zippo gassed up and ready to go. I’ve smoked for a few years, basically aligned with my tenure as a grad student, and I’ve never smoked more than a dozen cigarettes a day. Lately I’ve settled down to three or four. Mostly I’m in it for the accoutrements. Bryan’s right: I am ever the dilettante. If he only knew how long it takes me to make one small cut with a Skil saw.
On the home improvement front—or should I say the manhood front, because being able to work on and maintain your home has, as far as conventional wisdom goes, everything to do with being a man—today Steve continues to delineate the field.
Real men rise early and have big breakfasts that involve cast-iron skillets, sausage cut from a tube, and as many cracked eggs as you can coerce from the henhouse. You don’t wear work clothes unless they’re worn and threadbare at the knees and thighs, but still look new around the butt, because if they’re worn there, they have been mostly sat in. You drive cars that are somehow inappropriate to their job. They’re either too small—like Steve’s Reagan-era Subaru, on which he straps everything, including a sandwich of four-by-eight sheets of plywood, some two-by-fours, and a bunch of angle irons—or they’re grotesquely ’roided-up four-by-four pickups with sixty-inch lift kits and glasspack exhaust systems that can disintegrate kidney stones. You never admit to needing help. You “might could use a hand” every now and then, but only in an if-you’re-just-gonna-sit-there-and-be-an-embarrassment kind of way. You never have anybody do for you what you should be able to do for yourself. That’s about as golden a rule as it gets in this testosterone-addled field. Do it yourself, motherfucker. I can hear Bryan now, cigarette in hand, waiting to be licked finished. What’s the matter? Pussy hurt?
A few jobs, however, are not worth doing. Jobs treated with almost universal disdain even in the hallowed Halls of Balls. Sheetrocking, for instance. Stripping paint. Insulating. All such jobs are levied to the recently paroled, habitually reci
divist, newly immigrated, or woefully undocumented. They’re uniquely back-breaking, nut-busting tasks that require a very specific skill set, but not much in the way of organizational wherewithal or industry credentials. The type of work men pass on as soon as they can. I mean, you could do it if you had to, but there’s a kind of glory in being able to put some jobs beneath you. Besides, how many times does a guy really need his intestines to pop through his abdomenal wall?
And it’s not all about money. To subcontract drywallers, for example, is expensive. But the difference between that and, say, laying your own plumbing is that there’s pride and distinction to be had in exemplary plumbing. I mean, instant, plentiful hot water. Clear drains. Drip-free faucets. Rapidly vacating flushes. It’s inconspicuously miraculous work. You’ve done that which had been unimaginable for all but the last few ticks of human history. You’ve diverted the river, tamed it, ushered it right into the house without washing the foundation away. The plumber, after all—not the physician or the politician—is responsible for the rise of civilization.
Put that up against drywalling. It doesn’t matter that hanging a good wall requires perhaps as much in the way of skill and artistry as making a mosaic. It doesn’t matter that drywalling demands patience and devotion approaching orthodoxy. A good team of drywallers can rough-in a house in an afternoon, but to turn a bunch of sheets of raw material screwed to two-by-fours into smooth, right-angled, crisp-cornered walls takes days of taping, mudding, plastering, and sanding, none of which can be done on the same day because each layer needs its own time to dry. It’s so intensive and tedious you’d never think drywall is the descendant of the clay and wattle of the mud hut. Sadly, to most people none of that matters. Just about any wall is a good wall unless it has a hole in it, never mind that it took the better part of a hundred man-hours to get it right. If Jesus were alive today, I don’t think he’d be a carpenter. Carpentry is too glamorous for the only son of the Lord. Jesus, he’d be a drywaller.
Incidentally, Michael, our old archangel neighbor, is a plasterer—essentially the Old Testament version of a drywaller. Though little new construction calls for plaster walls, there are lots to patch and repair, including ours. When Michael stopped by one day to check the place out, I asked him what he thought I should do to repair the wall where Stanley had glued yards of faux paneling. When we took it off, chunks of the old plaster came with it, and the only thing I could think to do was to get new paneling.
“That hose work out front?” Michael asked. In under five minutes he whipped up a batch of plaster and spread it on the wall smoother than frosting on a wedding cake. It was perfect. It was a new wall. It was miraculous.
“You’re a healer, Michael,” I said. “I can’t believe it. What do I owe you?”
Michael quietly scraped off his trowel. “Hey, it’s what I do. Call it a housewarming present.”
He was an artist and a saint.
Now, installing a kitchen countertop is not a job you want left to just anyone. A countertop is one of those household jewels that people use as a selling point. Frank Lloyd Wright design. Wooded lot. Radiant-heat floors. Fill-in-the-blank countertop. As though any of those things couldn’t occur in a double-wide just as easily as in an estate home. But of course we buy and sell via synecdoche. You can’t advertise the whole house (. . . you’ll notice the lovely slate kitchen floor, which was fabricated using primarily Indian and Chinese slate, laid atop properly spaced old-growth quarter-sawn oak joists on Georgia-harvested three-quarter-inch pine pulp plywood, half-inch backerboard made with pride by the men and women of Hickory, North by-God Carolina . . .). You just can’t tell it all, so you push the finer points. Connect the dots. As in Joyce’s Dubliners story “Araby,” where we get Mangan’s sister with a swinging dress and a soft rope of hair, and instead of fearing her a victim of hanging, we are as smitten as eight-year-old seminary students. Same thing with real estate, where we take “stainless steel,” “skylights,” and “vaulted ceilings” and think not of a Scranton rivet factory but a Scarsdale country mansion.
But just because countertops are focal selling points of a house, they don’t necessarily equal a do-it-yourself project. After all, we’re talking about beaucoup de work here. And if you mess this up, well, your wife will ever be reminded of the pathetic little bedwetter she married instead of the Harley-throttling stud she should have, because the evidence is right there in the middle of your kitchen. It’s the first thing guests see in the room; it’s where you put down your car keys and your grocery bags; it’s where you chop your broccoli and pour your wine and scramble your eggs; and when you have a party, it’s where everyone puts down their Harvey Wallbangers and absent-mindedly caresses the smooth, hard, cold surface. Nowhere else does your house get such concentrated tactile attention. It had damned well better be good.
We were hoping to do as much work on the house ourselves as possible, but there was some stuff we couldn’t or wouldn’t do. To help assuage my self-imposed guilt, I convinced myself that the best countertops are solid stone or manufactured materials. That is, they’re one big freaking piece fabricated in a quarry in Brazil or a factory in Taipei. Where’s a workingman supposed to fit himself in?
Countertops are like poetry according to Yeats: if you can see evidence of the work, all the stitching and unstitching is for naught. A countertop shouldn’t look like it was the first one you made and installed. There’s no room for a learning curve here. Countertops are supposed to appear as though they were created just for your kitchen—as though no other place in the world could possibly have the same one. Countertops must not, however, show any evidence of manufacture. A countertop must simply be. If a craftsman wants attention, he can build the cabinets that stand above. He can router the maple doors or craft glass panes with images of dainty fairies whispering each to each, but the countertop itself will never garner any accolades for your labors. Unless you’re Steve.
Driving down to meet Steve in his house in Orem, Utah, we had no idea what to expect. All we knew of Steve was that Jenae’s friend’s husband, Mattson, knew him growing up. Shortly after Steve had built his first countertop—his own—he did Mattson’s mom’s. Mattson thought he had probably done a couple more. It felt as if we were investing in some sketchy venture that might involve ritual scarification. He lived in Orem, after all. If Provo is the Vatican City of the Mormon culture, then Orem would be whatever Italian city lies outside those holy gates. Except that city is probably something lovely and, at the very least, Italian. This city is Orem. Like Oreo but with an m, and not so sweet or racially diverse as the cookie. All I wanted to know about Orem I learned from their billboards for “Hot LDS Singles,” a Mormon movie called The Singles Ward about cheery but awkward virgins, and a Mr. Mac suit store that outfits “more missionaries than anyone!” It’s also the city that Gary Gilmore made infamous via a double murder—the story behind Norman Mailer’s book The Executioner’s Song. That they don’t have on a billboard.
Inside Steve’s house we found our Orem doppelgänger. The outside looked as boxy and modest as a cigar cutter’s hut, but inside everything was bright and warm, light and cool, with muted colors and clever antiques. It was like going from some drab abscess of a night into a cheery pottery gallery with mulled cider and fresh sugar cookies. It didn’t hurt that his wife had in fact just made mulled cider and sugar cookies. They had refinished hardwood floors, earthy tile in their kitchen, colors that reminded me of a child’s sock drawer, and salvaged, galvanized grain bins serving as coffee tables, replete with tumbled-glass bottles that looked as though they’d delivered a hundred desert-island epistles each.
Also, they had no TV. It made the room oddly, though comfortably, square. Whereas in most American homes, including ours, living rooms are three-walled theaters with all attention drawn toward the pretty blue talking box, Steve’s felt like a place where, at any minute, we could have one of those “conversations.” But as tends to come with the TV-free of our breed, I also sensed a sl
ight air of superiority. Not in a pompous, lording way. Not even in an aggro Kill Your Television bumper sticker way. It was an understated, modest superiority. His home lacked what anchored every room in the house I grew up in. In my mom’s condo, for example, there’s nary a spot where you can escape the stare of a TV—not even the bathroom. If all her TVs were cameras, it’d be supermax-prison secure. Steve’s house was little, quaint, cheery, homey, and unplugged.
Steve, I was learning, is the kind of guy who wears the same Carhartt pants, threadbare T-shirt, and hiking boots everywhere he goes. That singular an identity, that comfortable a home, all that confident simplicity . . . I didn’t merely look up to him; I wanted to be him. At the very least, I wanted him to make our countertop.
Every decision he had made in his life seemed to have a deliberate, thoughtful, independent feel to it. The countertop in his house was the only one we had to see, though I doubt we actually had to see it. It was Steve we wanted. Hiring Steve was the opposite of picking up some subcontractor/hooker from Home Depot. It was an antidote to the thugs who wore their tool belts like varsity jackets and stuffed logs of soppressata down their pants. It was as though he was a friend of ours. Or someone we wished was our friend. Someone who undoubtedly was good at playing chess, identifying and naming conifers, making unusual but irresistible shish kebobs. Never mind that the countertop in his house looked like hardened chocolate pudding. Never mind that his rates were the same as a licensed concrete countertop company in Ogden. Never mind that Steve had probably been to one of Mattson’s disturbing parties, which purportedly feature naked people somehow sliming around inside a forty-gallon drum with the aid of a huge sheet of Mylar and five or six quarts of Wesson oil. Never mind all of that. Steve was, at least for the time being, who we wanted.