by Vikki Warner
The first time I felt this, I was absolutely certain that it was a mild earthquake. I ran to my computer to check Facebook and the local news. No corroboration. I looked outside. No commotion; no one streaming into the street. Nothing at all out of the ordinary. So, then, I had to accept that the shaking was limited to my own house. Must’ve been a fluke, I thought: A crew is working on something underground down the street, and it’s vibrating houses blocks away.
But it didn’t stop. The next time it happened, I froze, panicked, suddenly wondering what it would look like to be in this room when the house collapsed. How exactly would the physics of such a thing order themselves? What would move first? Would I know what was happening before I fell through the floor? How many seconds would it take? What would it sound like? My previous stress dream of chewing my own teeth was replaced by an exotic new offering in which the floors cracked horrendously, and, still encased in my bed, I tumbled through a menacing hole straight into molten earth, followed by enormous chunks of the walls and a selection of my earthly effects.
Eventually that shaky feeling lodged itself in my brain and made me worry about the structural viability of the house. In hopes of fixing the problem, I sought out a contractor to take on the undesirable job of repairing the foundation of the house.
The first guy who came to take a look said he had some ideas, but thought it best to “wait until your husband gets home” to discuss them in detail. Wouldn’t want to stress the delicate little wifey by talking dollars and cents, I guess. I croaked, “You’re going to be waiting a long time,” and dismissed him.
The second guy didn’t speculate on my marital status, but his proposal was to cover the deteriorating bricks with a skim coat of mortar, and then a sealant. Considering there was little more than dust for the mortar to hold on to, this seemed a bit too simplistic to really fix the problem.
The third guy, Nathaniel, was smart and fearless, an old-school New Englander with a square body and a funny, good-naturedly crass attitude. He was just what I needed: a wiseass who couldn’t have cared less about my personal particulars. He was the house’s savior at that moment, an old house whisperer who unquestioningly understood my efforts to keep the house largely as it was. I hired him, and the poor guy spent the best days of the summer in the damp, dusty underground of PennHenge, excising brick after rotted brick until there was something solid to build on, restoring sections of walls, and even shoring up one part, cracked top to bottom, with another cinder block interior wall “just to be safe.” He rebuilt parts of the chimney, jacking it up temporarily and risking serious hurt to replace the pulverized bricks at the bottom. Nathaniel did a fantastic, even heroic job, in exchange for $9,000, a.k.a., the very bottom of my recently rebuilt savings account, plus further payments to him as my paychecks straggled through. The bill was scary, but I figured any job that lasts an entire summer and carries a very real risk of being crushed by a chimney should pay at least that much.
Alas, the shaking continued unabated. I’d spent some very real money to fix a phantom problem. Hell, the basement certainly looked better, and pieces no longer came off in my hands at the slightest provocation, so all was not lost. When he came back to collect a payment, I asked Nathaniel what might be going on, and he wisely counseled me, “It’s probably just that one of the couples downstairs is on a schedule. You get me?”
I spent $9,000 to counter the motion in someone’s ocean. And I lost.
Safety. So much of what we do is a search for it. The structures we build—physical and emotional—are aimed at keeping us warm and dry and ignorant of the fact that others are having sex directly below us.
By now, Johnny the body piercer had left the first floor due to financial troubles; he’d been replaced in brief turns by a couple of Elvin’s girlfriends (one at a time) and then a sulky red-haired couple with a dopey red-haired dog. When they left, Elvin’s best friend Kenny moved in, and these two have lived in harmonious platonic manly bliss ever since.
I love Kenny. Everyone loves Kenny. He’s charming, he’s loyal, he’s a joker, he knows how to have a conversation. People like being around him. However, Kenny is a big man with big hands that seem to inadvertently crush everything they touch. He’s a bartender and restaurant manager and never comes home before 3:00 a.m.; after a few beers, usually very late at night, he can rip a doorknob clear off or break a window without even noticing it, leaving the damage behind until I happen upon it the next morning and confusedly clean it up. He once parked his Toyota behind my car, and proceeded to leave its headlights on and go to bed—in the morning he had a dead battery but was so deeply asleep that he couldn’t be roused to help push his dead car out to the street. Another time he broke the glass in the house’s main entry door; in the morning, as I swept up the jagged bits, I seized upon a stinky container of takeout food with Kenny’s name written on it, a full can of beer right next to it, as if he were preemptively claiming responsibility and stating the cause of his mistake.
These two may be happy living together, but over their years of cohabitating, they’ve forgotten what it means to clean things, to maintain their living space in even the simplest of ways.
I learned just how far it had gone when there was a plumbing emergency in their apartment. Kenny took a predawn shower, then discovered he couldn’t turn off the water. He went to the basement and started turning off valves to try to cut off the water flow to his bathroom. When that didn’t stop the deluge, my phone dinged with his text. I only flipped over and hugged my pillow. Upon the second ding, I started to drift slightly out of sleep. After a few minutes of groggily willing myself to stumble the six feet over to my phone’s charging perch, I managed to put my feet on the floor. The text read, Sorry to get you so late, the shower won’t stop running, I tried shutting off all the valves in the basement but to no avail. Learning of the problem in a nearly somnambulant state, my yearning to go back to bed overtaking all worldly considerations, I texted back: That’s a weird one. Nothing we can do about it now. I’ll call plumber in a few hours.
I flopped back into bed and stubbornly closed my eyes. A minute later, they popped open again as I gained enough consciousness to figure out that this problem was not to be slept through. I shut off the main water intake to the house—by then my classic fix-all for any plumbing issue—and then went back to sleep.
A few hours later, the plumber arrived. His face, not exactly a picture of workplace enthusiasm, only sagged further when he saw Elvin and Kenny’s apartment. This was the furthest I’d ventured into the apartment in half a decade, and it was alarmingly worse than I expected. The plumber and I stood inelegantly in the tiny bathroom, the smell of caked-on urine rising from a crusty toilet; the shower seemed never to have seen a scrub. As we spoke, my eyes darted out to the kitchen, where literal piles of dank trash lay on the floor. There was a layer of dirt on every surface and a general staleness that suggested everything had been permeated by smoke, despite the many overtures I’d made about smoking outside. Blankets covered some of the windows, leaving the place dark and stifling. Show posters and pieces of art masked every wall, overlapping each other in a crowded mass. The scene reminded me of the punk squats and underground art and music venues I’ve visited, made and managed by a variety of dissident visionaries. But those spaces were full of energy, bursting with a thrilling, playful spirit of fun and ingenuity. This apartment was still and stagnant, as if it were decomposing a little each day.
The plumber was still talking, but my brain stem wandered off, currently engaged as it was in an inner monologue that had taken over the minute I stepped into the apartment: Holy shit. I really haven’t been on top of checking this place over, have I? I’ve avoided dropping in on these guys, but I thought I could . . . trust them? I mean, garbage piles? Is this a frat house? I have to do something. I have to ask them to leave. The place needs to be gutted, cleaned, overhauled—and rented again, but to whom? A nice couple with office jobs and sensible desires?
The monologue
freezes at that point, shorts out, starts over. I extricate myself from the plumbing discussion and try to shake off the surprise of what I’ve just seen. I know I can’t allow these guys to continue to unintentionally ruin the only thing of value that I own, the object of a decade-plus of my love and dismay. In a way, I hate them for putting me in this position, for showing so little respect. But I’ve let it fall into a serious rut; I’ve been so hands-off as to suggest I am unconcerned with getting the place up to the lowest standards.
For perspective, I check out apartment listings—NEWLY RENOVATED!—and I’m repulsed by the cheap sameness. Every kitchen has the same faux fancy tile; the same bland cabinetry. This is what the landlords of the world consider nice and modern, what they seek higher and higher rents for these days. I can’t turn the ruined first-floor apartment into a clean facade with no soul, a Home Depot ad of generic splendor; I can’t scrub the grime so hard that I discover there’s nothing of substance here. I am no longer interested in channeling upmarket aspirations through PennHenge.
What I really want is to release all the anxiety I have stored up in the house over these years, to let it combust in a colossal fireball of the mind. To untangle all the means by which PennHenge has been a vessel for my larger fears.
On a warm spring day, inspired by the purchase of a few flats of seedlings, Seth and I built new raised garden beds to replace the ones Dean and I had put in six or so years prior, which were no longer holding together. We removed the rotted wood frames and bracketed new wood together, driving the new structures into the footprints left in the dark soil, nestling them in with hilled-up dirt. The garden was just perking up again after the hard freeze of winter, the first green nubs beginning to overtake the soil. It was a lovely day, but our conversation was unusually terse, and the task illogically grim. Our celebratory high-five was limp. I couldn’t reverse his malaise with even my best-intentioned jokes or stories or affection. I felt a twinge at the periphery of my consciousness, and I promptly squeezed my eyes shut to blot it away.
But the axis had shifted, and the shift had come so fast as to stupefy me. The next morning, as we lounged in bed, Seth was quiet. I prodded him to tell me what was wrong, meanwhile assuring myself that it had nothing to do with me, when he said, “I just keep wondering if we might be better as friends.”
I launched directly into a panic attack.
In six years, this was the first time he had ever voiced such a thought.
What could I do with this new information?
How could I not have seen this coming?
In that moment I was filled with new, unwelcome knowledge. I knew then that I would never have a child—although I’d never really pictured myself as a mother, the suddenness of the thought was painful. I knew in a flash that I had tricked myself, and I was filled with grief for the ill-defined union we had divined.
I was angry at him for withholding so much, and I was afraid of being without him.
Only fleetingly in the first few years did I worry about a “future.” We never wanted to judge our thing by our parents’ yardstick; we just wanted to have fun. We admired each other deeply; we contained the same ratio of cynical versus dreamy; our affinities matched. While I stayed silent on naming what we had, all was well. But lately I’d been trying to get him to quantify it, select words for it. Once or twice, I had obliquely hinted that he might want to move in with me—frowning, he blurted, “I don’t want to live here. This is your place.” I’d been tiptoeing around the big questions in our relationship, not asking for much because I feared those point-blank answers.
I had been attempting to coerce a long lifespan for us. After six years together, I started to think I could ask for that. But I discovered that even after that long, there were still many things I could not say to him.
Still, I tried to hold on. That summer was a sad exercise in groveling. I made myself as appealing as possible: I was cute, I made no demands. In the fall, after hovering in a frustrating stasis for several months, we spent a miserable couple of days in coastal Maine. Again and again, I tried to lighten the mood, and again he would frown, sigh, refuse to be touched. When we got back to town, I dropped him off at his place. I called him a few minutes later and asked, “Are we breaking up?”
“I don’t know,” he said, but the bleakness in his tone contained the answer.
Still, I didn’t let go. I chased his affection; if I got it once or twice, I quickly assumed that the trouble had passed and we could resume a fully devoted relationship, only to reinjure myself when I learned it was only a momentary reprieve.
All this time I’d thought it was magical that he only told me he loved me in the middle of the night, when he would stir momentarily, murmur the words in my ear, and gather me up in his arms, falling away again and leaving me wide awake and unsettled. He didn’t seem to remember it in the morning. Once, during my second post-breakup groveling period, I mentioned these utterings, and he turned red, chuckled, and said only, “Oh.”
I only told him I loved him after we broke up. I blabbered the words through tears and spit and let the snot run down my face as I erupted with the devotion and fear I’d been afraid to acknowledge in our years together.
Sometimes I put the blame on PennHenge, for being a tether, for holding me down. If only I didn’t have the house, I’d think, then he’d want to live with me, even marry me. I didn’t allow myself to believe that these things were simply not for us to do together.
In my singlehood, the house became a welcome burden. It received my renewed attention. I found plenty of time to clean it, paint it, make my apartment a calming force, rearrange furniture as an exercise in moving on. It was my old friend; it hugged me in its warmth when I came home from a day or two away, and it silently remained where I left it, a needle poised over a record, waiting for something to play. All that winter, I abandoned my usual frugality and cranked the heat, because it got cold in the old house at night.
Settling into forced winter solitude, I spent a lot of time baldly assessing my body and my mind, and I decided that both were pretty sound, despite the circumstances. Most crucially, I had discovered what it’s like not to live with illness every day. My troubles didn’t exactly vanish overnight when I went gluten-free—I had a lot of healing to do, and it took so long I thought maybe my digestive system was a lost cause. But that poor, ravaged pit did rebuild itself. I felt a momentous joy upon realizing—a full three years after my celiac diagnosis—that I was not destined to a life that revolved around unpleasant toilet experiences. I would no longer be imprisoned by my own shit, at least not in a literal sense.
Celiac had caused a web of complications in my body. Daily leg and foot cramps. Skin problems. Bizarre, rapid-onset headaches that felt like a bloom in my skull. I had no idea these were connected to my larger illness until they receded completely as my digestive hassles diminished.
If you’re considering a chronic autoimmune disease—they’re big these days—may I recommend celiac? Aside from a longing for beer, bread, and elaborate desserts, it’s been all right for me. I fixed it without drugs or protracted hospitalization. And now I know how it feels to steal my life back from that dark force. The disease had diminished me; a foggy horizon once closed in, obscuring so much of me. It almost had me, but I escaped.
Baby Grand
One morning, I heard a lot of noise downstairs—sounds of furniture being moved, stuff being dropped, dudes living in a dudely way. I shrugged it off, as I have become adept at doing. A few minutes later, though, my phone buzzed. The text message, from Eric, read, In case you’re wondering, Colin has decided to bring his piano to Penn St. Piano movers and all.
Colin, the newest recruit in Eric’s cavalcade of roommates, had just arrived in the house. We hadn’t had a proper conversation yet, though I had tried. He moved in under the guise of a very short sublet, but then decided to stay. I would run into him in the hall or on the driveway, and I’d attempt to welcome him or ask a question, but halfway throu
gh the first sentence, I would falter to a stop because he appeared to be absolutely terrified of me. He stared at me, ashen, slack-jawed, eyes locked wide. He answered with a stilted word or two, and we both hurried away. Our relationship having started thusly, I was a bit unsure of his presence, but as usual I figured it would all work out fine. Then: the piano text.
This was one of those rare times when I would have to confront an interpersonal situation in progress. Exploiting my bubbling adrenaline, I took a look down the front stairwell to check out the scene. Colin stood, hands in pockets, watching four grunting gentlemen try to hoist a massive object up the narrow, winding staircase.
Blinking, clearing my throat, I said something like, “Hey, how’s it goin’? What’s going on here?”
Colin explained nervously that he was having his piano moved in. “It’s a baby grand.”
“I can see that, yeah,” I said. “You gonna just . . . put it in your room here?” The open door to Colin’s bedroom revealed that a baby grand-sized space had been cleared.
“Yeah, right here in my room.”
“Okay, huh. Well, I wish you’d mentioned it before the fact,” I said.
“Oh. I’m really sorry, yeah, I probably should have,” Colin said.
At this point I unearthed a little speech that I bring out whenever someone in the house has done something implausible: “Listen, I really want you to enjoy living here. I want all of us to enjoy living here. That sort of means we all have to respect each other, y’know? We’re in close quarters here, and we have to keep in mind how we’re affecting other people.”
“I’m really sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have talked to you,” Colin said.
This conversation went on a little longer, as the four movers continued their brave struggle, one man getting underneath the piano and crawling up the stairs with it balanced on his back, the others guiding and lifting it as much as they could. Colin, who shares his surname with an old-money New England family, seemed totally unfazed by this feat of manual labor, and I started to get the feeling he’d been waited on a lot in his young life. Irritated by Colin’s obstinacy—he just stood there—I went back into my apartment and shut the door. Turned out, they couldn’t get the piano all the way up the stairs after all, though they did leave a few giant gouges in the wall, requiring an additional trip for purposes of patching. I would have gladly accepted the holes in the wall not to have to listen to this guy play the piano all day and night, and then move out in a few months, at which point this hulking thing would have to be borne back out of the house by some further act of heroic strength.