by Matthew Batt
A bonus to the whole proposal was that Steve was something of a dilettante himself. While he never actually said how many countertops he’d made, he kept mentioning the same two over and over again: his, the first, and Mattson’s mom’s, the second. In some obvious ways that made him a liability, but in others it made him an asset. For one thing, we were paying by the square foot, not by the hour.
The best part for me was that he was going to let me help him. I don’t know if “let me” is exactly the way to put it. After all, the existing countertop was a hundred-pound pain in the ass, the approximate size and portability of an L from the HOLLYWOOD sign. I’m sure he could have managed it on his own, but I don’t think he would have liked it.
My biological father, on the other hand—a carpenter in Alaska—once told someone he charged twenty-five dollars an hour to do a job alone, fifty if the homeowner wanted to watch. And if the guy wanted to help, the rate was one hundred bucks an hour.
From the beginning, Jenae and I wanted unique stuff, but I wanted unique-on-the-cheap and she wanted, well, boutique-unique. The kitchen, in particular, had at one time included plans for a ten-thousand-dollar commercial Wolf range that could roast a flock of Cornish hens, an eight-thousand-dollar, artificially intelligent Sub-Zero refrigerator, a fifty-dollar-per-square-foot hand-harvested Indian slate floor, a Creamsicle-colored Italian marble countertop, two five-hundred-dollar steampunk ceiling fans, and three-hundred-dollar-apiece schoolhouse pendant lights that we would fit with hand-blown lightbulbs made by (based on the price) Edison himself. By and large, the issue of financing the dream kitchen made my case the more viable one, but hers remained the compass for our design.
While the compromises we made in scratch-and-dent appliances and cheap-but-still-exotic slate floors were invisible to everyone but us, the countertop could not look as if we got a deal on it. To a certain way of thinking, it would be like asking your dearly beloved to marry you and then putting a ring on her finger crafted out of a Hamm’s beer can pop-top by some dude hawking his stuff outside a Stuckey’s truck stop. But, of course, that’s not quite right. Fixing up a house is not like proposing marriage or getting married, both of which are ceremonies, not actual relationships. If it didn’t work out, shitty ring/countertop or not, we’d still be married. We were just running the risk of letting everybody know that the most conspicuous and arguably the most important ornament of our devotion to each other and our mutual institution—literally, figuratively, a rock—was a piece of shit. It’d take a lot of Power of Positive Thinking tapes to get us through that kind of fuckup. It wasn’t exactly a foregone conclusion. You try explaining to your grandfather/benefactor why he should front a bunch of cash to an otherwise unemployed “artisan concrete worker.”
“Concrete?” my grandfather said. “In your what? I hope you know what the hell you’re talking about because I, for one, do not.”
Predictably, I was of little help. I thought I might have been, because I had once spent a summer month working with my biological father in Alaska when he invited me up to get to know me. We laid concrete foundations for Coast Guard housing, and I thought that might translate into an impressive skill set as far as Steve was concerned, but that concrete and this concrete were two altogether different critters. In Alaska we were mostly gatekeepers, building plywood forms for somebody else to put the concrete in. And then, after it dried, we’d strip the plywood, set it up again fifty feet away, and repeat, ad nauseam.
What Steve did, however, was a minor work of art, albeit of the domestic cement variety. The second he showed up I knew I would be of little help. I knew it from the way he looked me square in the forehead like a boxer or a serial killer. I knew it from the fact that his tools were inherited, all older than both of us combined. I knew it too when he walked into my house for the first time and ten minutes later walked out with my big old L-shaped countertop all by himself.
My help consisted of making coffee (for myself—he was from Utah, after all) and keeping the radio tuned to the appropriate public radio station.
As a culture, we don’t usually associate cement work with art, but maybe we should reconsider. Once our old countertop was removed, we were left with cabinets without lids. About twenty square feet of topless boxes. A kitchen without a countertop is like a garage without a driveway or a chair without legs. The space is essentially the same, but it’s rendered useless. Without the countertop, the place looked plain wrong. Some things are better left unexperienced. To see a job in the middle of completion is like channel surfing and getting accidentally stuck on the Surgery Channel.
Steve saw not simply what was, but rather what could be. He imagined the final product and constructed the form that would render it possible. In effect, through three-quarter-inch plywood, angle iron, and custom-cut steel, Steve created a negative from which he could pour a positive. He took the negative space around what his imagination drew and used it to make the concrete manifest. It was a revelation.
The end result was glorious, concrete-y perfection. It was solid, smooth, and cool, and depending on the light, looked either like a rich, rare brown granite or like highly burnished English leather. Also like firmly set chocolate pudding, as feared, but not in ways Jenae and I regretted. Nobody had seen anything like it. It was the best thing we did for the house. It was cheap, beautiful, and unique, and neither my bride nor I had to lift a finger.
In a couple of months, Steve and his wife and their newborn were going to move down to central Utah, where his father-in-law had some fifty acres of land, to see if they could live off the grid and raise produce and chickens and such all by themselves. Like Thoreau, apparently, Steve didn’t want to make countertop art for the sake of turning it and thereby himself into an industry. He did it because it was something he wanted to do for himself and maybe for a few other people, so he would know what it takes to do it right.
The compulsion to repeat gratifying acts is so hard-wired in our brains that to find someone who is willing to give up something like this is truly befuddling. Then again, we’re not talking about paper airplanes or peach cobbler. The fabrication of a concrete countertop is far from a Sunday-afternoon project, nor is it one a person undertakes so that he can kill a little time. It’s as heavy duty as a project can get without involving front-end loaders or backhoes. If nothing else, a smart guy like Steve would have to know it’s only a matter of time before one of those damned things would end up on his foot.
Behind the Confectionery
PREDICTABLY, A MONTH after Grandpa had moved in with my mom and Bob, I flew back to Wisconsin to help move him back out and into a new apartment. We decided to make it a “fun” trip for my mom and drive up together to Door County, Wisconsin’s modest answer to Cape Cod. She hadn’t had anything that resembled a break other than Grandpa’s brief stay in the nursing home, and it had been a long and devastating year for all of us, but foremost for her. After we moved him into his place in downtown Waukesha—about two miles from my mom’s condo—Mom and I couldn’t wait to head up north, do a little golfing, and enjoy a few moments away from anyone named Bob.
We did not get our wish.
Despite the fact that Grandpa was as sick of Mom as he was of Bob, he felt left out and lonely as soon as he closed the door of his new apartment, and he said he was afraid he would go running to Tonya if left to his own devices for a whole weekend. So we were stuck. If we said no, we’d basically be begging him to get back with Tonya.
“I’ll buy us all a nice dinner,” he said.
Theoretically, change was possible.
We weren’t ten miles north of Milwaukee when Grandpa’s cell phone rang. No one has his number except my mom and Tonya. He’s as good with his cell phone as a lobster with a hand grenade. It takes what seems like minutes for him to get it out of his coat pocket, and by then it stops ringing.
He catches me glaring at him in the mirror.
“I’d be happy to drive, Matt,” he says, “if that’s what’s got you u
pset.”
In the past year, he had torn his bumper off on a large rock in his condo subdivision, and then, shortly after he got new sunglasses and couldn’t see, paradoxically, “because of the glare,” he rear-ended a stopped car at forty miles per hour on Coffee Road. He’d had other accidents too, which he never told us about. All we know is that his car is as often as not in the body shop. Because of Grandpa’s macular degeneration, cataracts, and glaucoma, we had hoped he would simply fail his license renewal test. But he passed. He doesn’t have to get another vision test for seven years. Until he’s nearly ninety.
“That’s fine,” I say. “I like to drive.”
Crawling through traffic, up the coast of Wisconsin toward the Door County peninsula, feels like a long, elaborate walking of the plank. We’re just north of Grafton now, the town where I spent my kindergarten and preschool years, about thirty miles north of Milwaukee. We still have a long drive ahead, and apparently nobody is going to reminisce with me.
Not too far from here, when I was a young boy, I fell out of my mom’s VW van. Grandpa was driving. He was helping us move from an apartment on the north side of Milwaukee to a house in Grafton. We rolled up to a stop sign on a country road and the next thing I knew, I was on the pavement. The van had not quite stopped. My mom and grandma were driving behind us. Mom says it still wakes her up sometimes.
“I said I’d be happy to drive, Matt,” Grandpa says.
“Thanks,” I say, “Grandpa.”
We all know, Grandpa included, that this is his fault. He and he alone is the occasion for our anger and unhappiness. Most semi-sentient creatures would understand when they are profoundly not wanted. Not my grandfather. He has never had a problem with enemies. It’s friends and family he has never known what to do with.
“I am a licensed driver in the great state of Wisconsin,” he says. “Maybe if you didn’t make me move up here from Illinois you wouldn’t have this problem. No way I would have passed their vision test.”
“We didn’t make you move to Wisconsin, Dad,” my mom says. “And, Christ, that was two years ago. Mom was sick and you didn’t want to pay for a full-time nurse and I couldn’t quit my job and move down there and you didn’t exactly have lots of friends to help out—”
“I know, I know.” My grandfather laughs. “Jesus Christ.”
He’s jolly with meanness. It seems as though it’s the last sure impact he can have on us. Tonya and her daughter can stroke his ego and God knows what else and let him pretend he’s their sweet sugar daddy. My mom and I are bound to him in ways that remind me of Cronus, the Greek god who ate his children to prevent them from overthrowing him.
We’re going about a hundred miles an hour before I realize it. I slow down to eighty. “How about some music?” I say, turning on the stereo.
“Good idea,” my mom says. “I’ve got that new Alan Jackson album.”
“One of Tonya’s favorites,” Grandpa says.
My mom turns off the stereo.
It’s dark by the time we reach Door County. The drive takes about four hours, and most of it is on the freeway, but the last hour is on Highway 57 or 42, depending on whether you want to travel up the Green Bay or the Lake Michigan side. The peninsula itself is about eighty miles long. At its base, it’s probably thirty miles wide, but it narrows as it moves north, so by the time you reach Valmy or Jacksonport, it’s only about ten miles from shore to shore. We’re not going that far, however. Cherry Hills is our destination. It’s just a few miles outside Sturgeon Bay, right in the middle of Door County.
When we arrive, however, the resort looks deserted. There are no lights on in the dining room, and the main door to the reception area is locked.
My mom and I peer through the glass door, our hands cupped around our eyes. Grandpa teeters up and says, “What are you waiting for?”
“It’s locked, Dad,” my mom says.
“It’s locked?” he says.
“Locked,” I say. “As in not unlocked.”
He’s a little winded from the walk from the car. It’s clear he has not fully recovered from his stroke—or, for that matter, his age. He just turned eighty-two. It is not nothing that he’s outlived his wife by a year. No matter how complicated their life together must have been behind closed doors, she’s still gone and he’s still left, more or less alone, to deal with the fact that death came for the one we all thought should live forever.
“Well, did you make a reservation?” he says.
Try as I might to have pity for him, I don’t. There’s an after-hours phone number on the door, and I dial it on my cell phone and walk away. I realize simultaneously that this is what I do. To both of them, my mom and grandpa. They get worked up and I walk away. I am not proud, but neither am I turning around. Sometimes, I tell myself, I get to be the son and grandson before I have to be the man.
My mom and Bob used to own a condo in Sister Bay, right behind Al Johnson’s restaurant—the one with the grass roof and the goats on it, across the street from the marina. When I was in college, I went up every chance I could. I liked going there alone, to read, write, and take pictures with my old manual Nikon FM2. After Christmas of my junior year, I went by myself for a day and a night. I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and was convinced I was reading my own autobiography. I didn’t realize at the time that this made me a first-class wanker. I guess I still haven’t. I’d rather read Dubliners than anything I’ve ever written or plan on writing. Even “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” whatever the hell that’s about, but mostly “Araby,” “The Sisters,” and “The Dead.” Oh, that perpetually soggy, dying Michael Fury and that never fully alive Gabriel. If only somebody could have gotten them together for Nora’s sake. The day after I finished Portrait, I walked around in the clear bright cold air, taking pictures of coiled rope and a dead fish frozen on a pier that would be locked in ice for the next four months, hoping that if I put the image first, the meaning would follow. It was one of the coldest and best days of my life, not that I have the slightest clue what that fish meant.
At Cherry Hills, Grandpa and mom and I finally get our keys and go to our rooms to settle in, have a little nap and/or a cocktail before dinner. Mom and I are going to share a room and Grandpa is going to stay in the adjoining room. Under different circumstances—such as “normal” circumstances—it would have been more natural for me to stay with Grandpa. But it wasn’t even a question. In fact, he said so himself: “Can’t hardly sleep through the night. No sense in having us both be up all hours.”
As soon as the door is shut between our rooms, I go to get ice, come back, and mix a gimlet for my mom and a Scotch for myself—the last of Gram’s once-formidable stash. We’re just getting ready to toast our “vacation” when Grandpa knocks. He decided that he can’t sleep at night because he takes too many naps during the day, so maybe he had better stay up and have a cocktail with us. Afterward, we can all go to dinner and then he’ll turn in early. I mix him a vodka on the rocks, and we sit on the beds facing different directions, not talking, not toasting to anything.
“Well, this is fun,” he says.
“Yes, Dad, it sure was nice that you could come,” my mom says.
He sighs, rattles the ice in his glass, and makes a big show of slugging back the rest of his vodka.
“I’m on vacation,” he says. “May as well have another.”
This is never a good idea. But seeing as how his favorite target, Bob, isn’t here, maybe it’ll help bring us all a little closer to wherever it is we need to be.
Grandpa’s phone rings, and this time he manages to retrieve it from his pocket while it’s still ringing. “Excuse me,” he says. He goes into his room and announces officiously: “Bob Tucker!”
He doesn’t manage to shut the door all the way behind him. “Just fine, fine,” he says. He’s talking higher, wimpier. “And how are you? I wish to Christ I could be there with you guys.”
I get up and close the door, a little louder than I mea
n to.
“Makes me sick,” my mom says.
I refill our drinks and we stare at the dark patio window as the sunset is replaced by our reflections.
“You know,” she says, “fuck it.” I’m shocked, but only as shocked as I can be given the circumstances. “If he wants to make her a part of this trip by being a sullen sonofabitch and always screwing around with his phone, fine.”
Anything will be better than how things are going, I think. I wonder what she has in mind.
On the way to dinner, my mom says, “So, Dad, how’s Tonya?”
I’m driving. We’re headed north, practically to the tip of the thumb, as they call it, to a new restaurant in Ellison Bay.
“I didn’t think you cared,” he says.
“Well, I don’t,” my mom says, “but if you’re going to be with us and always playing with your phone, pining away for her, you may as well talk about it.”
This is as close as my mother has ever come to sarcasm.
“Well, fine,” Grandpa says. “To tell you the truth, I miss the hell out of her and I wish I was with her.”
The countryside we pass through is black. There is no traffic, no streetlights, no moon.
“Then why aren’t you?” my mom says. “It’s not like you’re blessing us with your cheery mood and pleasant conversation.”
I can feel my pulse behind my eyes. I know if I say anything we’ll all blow up. I wring the steering wheel and try not to think about what would happen if I jerked it hard and took us into a steep ditch. I know just the place, a couple of miles south of Fish Creek. I can do something about all this, I realize. Dark, I admit. But some volition’s better than nothing sometimes.