House Lessons

by Erica Bauermeister

  Yes, I would reply. You can say that now because nothing happened.

  And so we went, back and forth, me protecting the kids too much, Ben stepping in and giving them more slack. Our new parenting arrangement had only made the difference between us more obvious. Up until recently, Ben had mostly been a Saturday–Sunday parent, at the office during the week. Now with him working from home, and me often in Port Townsend, the lid was coming off the box.

  * * *

  —

  BEN WAS OUTSIDE REMOVING the asbestos shingles, while Ry and I were inside on the second floor getting ready to demo the chimney. I was holding a power chisel that George had lent me, a compact machine with a three-foot-long piece of metal that ended in a wicked triangle, the whole thing connected by a hose to a bright-blue air compressor the size of a large Rottweiler. The phallic implications were unmistakable. But then again, most of construction, and certainly the vast majority of demolition, carries the distinct whiff of testosterone.

  In the past, that might have given me pause, but I was finding I liked the feel of the new muscles in my arms, the knowledge that I could heft a sledgehammer and make a wall disappear. When I looked in the rearview mirror of the car before heading home, some days I’d barely recognize myself, covered in dust. And I was just fine with that.

  * * *

  —

  WITH RY AT MY side, I aimed the chisel blade into the interior brick of the chimney and depressed the lever. The chisel jumped in my hands, and I bore it into the dry mush of mortar, focusing its energy. The destruction came in long bursts, a bang-bang-bang that popped a brick free in one quick volley before I moved on to the next, while Ry dutifully stacked them on the other side of the room. The speed and power of the machine was exhilarating. After weeks of hammering at walls, finally there was progress you could really see, as fast as you could move.

  “Mom, can I try?” Ry said every time I turned off the chisel.

  I think using an air-powered chisel is the closest a pacifist can get to firing a semiautomatic weapon. I had never even let my children have toy guns, and I wasn’t sure I wanted my son near this thing. But there was another, selfish, aspect to my decision here—I knew how much faster the task would go if I was doing the work. And the amount of work we had left to do was a looming thing, ever-present, the list never satisfied, never completed, our deadline two days away.

  “Hold on, buddy. You’ll get a turn in a minute.”

  An hour later, Ry was fading fast. The chimney was coming down, but so was his mood. I looked out the window and saw Ben rounding the corner, carrying a stack of asbestos shingles.

  “Mom, can I try?” Ry asked again.

  I looked at my son and the pile of bricks he had made. Stacking bricks is mind-numbing work, especially for a kid who really wants to be using power tools. I thought of how the past few weeks had taught me to see myself as someone strong and capable. I thought of how much it meant that Ben believed in my ability to do this job—and what it might mean for Ry if I gave him that same gift. Then I thought of what would happen if that chisel slipped in my son’s hands just once.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN RY WAS A baby, he loved to perch in a pack on my back as I cooked, his toes pushing against the rail of the pack so he could stand, craning his head over my shoulder to watch what I was doing. I would breathe in his baby smell, along with the scent of garlic, or chocolate, or scrambled eggs. I would describe each step of what I was doing in a language he did not yet understand, and he would respond in a language I never would.

  He was my baby, the shy one, whose blue eyes were startling and full of wonder. I wanted to hold him close forever, and so I did, for far too long.

  The previous summer, as our family had stood on a rocky beach around a bonfire, Ry asked if anyone would go out in the canoe with him. Ben told him he was old enough to go by himself now and explained what he needed to know in order to manage the boat on his own. I stood on the sidelines, chewing the inside of my mouth. I didn’t want my ten-year-old son to go out there alone in our only boat. Even in summer, the water in Puget Sound is deadly cold, and a tipped canoe is no small matter.

  I watched as our son pushed off and paddled to the middle of the bay. Then he sat for a long time, looking down into the water, up at the evening sky. Being only himself.

  It was time to let him grow up.

  * * *

  —

  “OKAY,” I SAID TO Ry now, and handed him the chisel. “Aim for the mortar, not the brick.”

  “Don’t you think I’ve been watching?” he asked. But he smiled.

  The jump-back of the motor startled him, but he gripped the machine with determination. His eyes scanned the chimney, figuring out places of weakness before he aimed. The first brick came out easily, then another and another. He made it through the brick to the open flue, and beyond it, to the other side. There, the lines of mortar were less distinct, weaving around the irregular shapes of the stones. Ry loosened the mortar several stones down, then worked his way up both sides of a chunk of six or so. When it seemed ready to give, we yelled to make sure Ben was out of the way below, and then we pushed with both hands and all our weight.

  The chunk let go and plummeted twenty feet to the ground. A patch of sky entered the room. I looked down at the scattered stones.

  Someday, I will do something with them, I promised the house, although I had no idea what that might be.

  Ry was jubilant, grinning at the hole in the chimney. “Yes!” he crowed. “We’re doing it!”

  I looked at my son, standing there dusty and triumphant, bursting with confidence.

  It’s all right, I told myself. You can let him go. You can let the lid off the box; it’ll be okay.

  I could feel the house starting to shift, adjusting, as the weight of the rocks and bricks left it, stretching like a bear coming out of hibernation. I wanted to stop and listen, to feel what was happening and watch my son’s exuberance, but there was so much left to do. We were twelve feet down in the chimney; we had twenty-three to go. Ben hadn’t even started to cut off the kitchen. We’d never get it done that weekend, I thought. Ben or I would have to stay and keep going until it was finished.

  “Good job, bud,” I said. “Back to work.”

  * * *

  —

  AS RY GOT READY to turn on the chisel again, I heard my cell phone ringing, deep in my pocket. I dug it out and saw Kate’s name on the screen. I clicked through.

  “Mom? Don’t worry. It’s all okay now.”

  “What’s okay? Are you all right?” Adrenaline blasted through my body.

  “Don’t worry. Rebecca’s mom is here, and it’s not burning anymore—I just wanted you to know.”

  “What’s not burning?”

  “The house—well, no, just the carpet, really. Rebecca and I were playing with the lizard before we went over to her house. We put him back, but I guess we forgot the heat lamp.”

  “You left it on the carpet?” There was steel in my voice. It did not sound loving, even though I could feel every molecule of my body trying to transport itself to her side.

  “Yeah, I know. Anyway, we went for a walk, but we came back—we did. I just had this feeling. And it’s not a big hole in the carpet, I mean, it’s down to the wood and stuff, but Rebecca’s mom soaked it really well. We’re going to her house now.”

  I was having trouble focusing; I grabbed at the most concrete thought in my head. “Turn off everything electrical before you leave, okay? And check the stove.”

  “I already did, Mom. Don’t worry.” Her voice was practical. “See you on Sunday.” She hung up.

  “What happened, Mom?” Ry was watching my face.

  “Everything’s fine. Why don’t you go find your dad and tell him it’s time for lunch.”

  Ben came up the stairs a few minutes later.

  “Ry said there was something with Kate?”

  I was sitting on the floor with my back propped against th
e wall, staring at the ruins of our chimney.

  “You left her to close up the house.” My voice was made of stones.

  Ben immediately went on the defensive. “You wanted me and Ry out here quick. She wasn’t ready to go to Rebecca’s, so I told her she could lock up. She’s almost fourteen.”

  “She almost burned it down.”

  It was a horrible way to tell him, and I wasn’t proud of it. But I was so angry. I was furious with him for breaking a rule that wasn’t even his, angry at him for leaving our daughter in a situation where the ramifications could have been so huge. And I was mad at my daughter for not putting the damn heat lamp back on the top of the cage. For being a teenager. For being human. But mostly, I was scared, in a way I had never been before.

  Every time I left the house in Port Townsend, I would think about all the things that could happen to it while we were gone. A windstorm, vandals, fire. There were so many options at least it kept my nightmares from repeating themselves. But in all those scenarios, the house in Seattle was okay; my children were okay. The Port Townsend project was a risk, but it was a contained one, separate geographically and psychologically from my family. Now, suddenly, it wasn’t.

  I couldn’t look at Ben. I knew he was standing there as exhausted as I was. I understood that he had just been trying to give our daughter a sense of independence and responsibility, the kind his family had given him. But I was so angry—it was hot and cold, and filled every inch of me. And Ben and I didn’t know how to fight. We’d both grown up the peacemakers of our families, and now we avoided conflict like electricians do a live wire. We had no tools for this.

  Once again, we had done this to ourselves. We’d taken on an impossible deadline, gone at it with the energy it takes to build a company, get up a mountain. But we were trying to build a family, and that is a different thing.

  “Mom,” Ry yelled from downstairs. “Are we getting lunch? I’m starving.”

  “Coming,” I called back. I hoisted myself from the floor and walked past Ben without speaking.

  As I approached the open front door, I saw George coming up the porch stairs.

  “Hey,” he said. “I thought you’d want to know. The lift job before yours just got pushed out. You’ve got another three weeks for demo now.”

  I didn’t know if I wanted to punch him or hug him.

  Part III:

  DIGGING IN

  FOUNDATION

  Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.

  —Saint Augustine

  A HEARTH MAY BE THE HEART of a home, but a builder knows that the most important element is the foundation. A foundation calls forth no nostalgia and is rarely featured in the glossy design magazines, but without one, nothing else matters. The moment it cracks, things start to shift.

  In the weeks that followed our almost-fire, I seemed incapable of either straightforwardly reprimanding my daughter or reassuring her that I loved her, my mixed emotions coming at her in brief asides like poisoned darts, light but deadly. It was a way I had never wanted to parent, and yet that was my fallback whenever things got tense. I couldn’t say what I wanted, couldn’t be angry out loud—but like water, anger will always find a way to escape. Kate apologized, over and over, and I would say it was okay, but I couldn’t let it go. And I still couldn’t talk about it with Ben, who had retreated into an inner sanctum of defensiveness. We threw ourselves into work instead. We pounded and hauled, ignoring what was right in front of us. The fact that every night in Seattle I would go upstairs and see the round singed hole in the carpet didn’t help matters. I covered it with a book.

  “Are you doing okay?” a friend asked me over coffee.

  “I don’t think so, actually.” I told her what was going on, and she listened, her face intent. When I was done, she nodded and wrote a name and number on a piece of paper.

  “Here,” she said, handing it to me. “This is my therapist. She’s a gift.”

  * * *

  —

  BUT I HAD OTHER THINGS to worry about first. We were about to embark on the big-ticket items for the house in Port Townsend, with the foundation as the biggest one.

  We had known from the get-go that the current foundation was shot. During the inspection, Ron had found a three-foot-long diagonal crack in the southeast corner. He’d explained, ever optimistic, that a crack in and of itself was not a guarantee of structural demise. One that shows no sign of recent growth may, in fact, be an indicator that movement has ceased, and the gap may simply be patched—a comforting prospect. Unfortunately, this theory relates only to fissures up to a sixteenth of an inch. As the saying goes, if you can fit your checkbook inside, you might as well leave it there. Ours could have easily fit two.

  There was more to it, however. Ron had dug down a bit next to the wall and discovered that we had no footings. A footing is a horizontal layer that lies below the vertical foundation walls, allowing the downward pressure to displace over a wider area. Those who have worn high heels can grasp this concept quickly. We know how it feels to take those precarious shoes off, the sudden feeling of balance and stability. A house is not that different from a human in that regard. You can stay on heels for only so long before things start to go sideways.

  “Well,” Ron had said, wiping his hands on his jeans, “the good thing about a new foundation is that you know what you’ve got.”

  And that was that.

  * * *

  —

  AT THIS POINT, WE’D been working for months to get the house ready to be raised up for its new foundation, but I had yet to meet the man who was going to do the heavy lifting. I was beginning to wonder if his elusiveness was a bad sign, but according to the locals there was only one person for the job.

  “Do you have Joe Mitchell?” everyone asked. Apparently you didn’t hire Joe so much as receive him, too, like a gift.

  “Why don’t you come to the Baxter house with me tomorrow?” George suggested. “Joe’s going to raise it. You could meet him and see how they lift a house.”

  So early the next morning, George and I pulled up to the Baxter house, a one-story bungalow surrounded by a meticulously landscaped yard. Cherry trees and daffodils appeared frozen in horror at the invasion of trucks, and yet I noticed not a single broken branch, not a footprint in the flower beds, even though the trucks were huge and men with heavy boots were flowing in and out underneath the house like ants.

  It wasn’t until I looked in through the entry that had been cut in the old foundation that I comprehended the extent of what had already happened. Peering into the dark underbelly of the house, I could see what looked like seven-foot-tall Lincoln Log towers interspersed throughout the space, like toys left behind by giant children. Heavy steel beams ran from tower to tower, and then out through holes that had been cut in the sides of the house.

  “Those are called cribs.” George nodded in the direction of the towers. “The jacks go on top, and they raise the house.”

  He looked about. “There’s Joe,” he said, pointing over to where a tall, thin man was circling the cribs, hands in his pockets, head cocked to one side, seeming to listen as much as look. As he moved, he ducked automatically under the steel beams, bobbing up and down like a hungry heron. George called him over.

  “This is your next customer,” he told Joe, introducing me.

  Joe grinned and shook my hand, then put his hands back in his pockets, raising his shoulders and ducking his head. He wore a green-and-turquoise fleece hat with earflaps; under his sheepskin-lined jean jacket, faded almost to white, I saw a sweatshirt that sported the saying in cartoon bubble letters I HAVE BEEN CHOSEN.

  “I see you still haven’t shaved,” George commented.

  “Oh no.” Joe’s eyes started dancing.

  “It’s a superstition,” George informed me. “Don’t shave until the job is done.”

  “Hey,” said Joe, a bit defensively, “it’s true. Last
time I shaved, we dropped a dolly in the power ditch within the first five minutes.”

  He turned to me. “It wasn’t a big deal, but you do have to be careful about that sort of thing.” He went off to check another part of the house.

  George pointed to a shiny red box the size of a steamer trunk, covered in knobs, standing near the opening to the basement. “That’s a unified hydraulic jack system,” he said. “Before they had those machines, they used a team of guys to raise a house, one on each jack. Raise one part of the house an inch or so, then another. It wasn’t very precise, though. These machines work all the jacks at the same time and take the guesswork out of it.”

  “We’re ready,” Joe called out, and we scuttled out from underneath the house as the red machine started to growl. Neighbors and workers gathered in a circle around the machine, as if to watch the lighting of an enormous bonfire—an unsettling image.

  “Okay,” yelled Joe. “Go!”

  At first there was only the growling noise of the machine, but then I heard a deep-seated creak and a crackling like fireworks in a far-off town. The indicator on the side of the machine slowly started to move—2, 4. The thinnest of cracks began to show between the shingles and the foundation as the structure lifted, inch by inch, making snapping noises. The meter moved up to 8, 10. The house rose, slowly, ponderously, movements so subtle they were barely visible, and yet the cumulative effect was immense. A house, tons upon tons of weight, raised by twelve jacks the size of jugs of cheap wine.

  The machines stopped at fourteen inches, and the house sat perched like a Victorian lady holding up her skirts at the sight of a mouse. The men scurried in and out with more pieces of cribbing.