Tenemental

by Vikki Warner

  “We’re . . . getting married in six days?” I sputter, as if that might grant us a reprieve.

  “Aw, man, yeah, I’m sorry, that’s tough. We’ll get it fixed. Well, see you guys,” he says, hoists his toolbox and is gone.

  Dave and I begin our investigation, monkeying with every faucet in the house, unscrewing various pieces of plumbing, turning knobs, jiggling anything that can jiggle. Dave calls friends for advice. They too are stumped. We are worked into a lather, picturing the shitstorm that will commence when this repair job gets going, and the cartoonish bill we’ll get: will it be five thousand dollars? Ten thousand? Not to mention that we have no water on two floors of the house and are soon leaving for a week to have a super romantic no-stress wedding time!

  I’m palpitating in this manner when Dave says, “Let me just look around one more time.” We head back to the basement; he searches for unturned stones. He flips a blue lever near the ceiling, and I hear the triumphant song of water rushing back into the pipes throughout the house. There was no blockage; there will be no tearing apart of any portion of the house; best of all, there will be no gigantic red-inked bill.

  Flipping that lever should have been the first thing Matteo did after finishing the repair. He’s a plumber. He knows this shit. He was too busy delivering his fearful screed to think straight. Dave and I got so thrown off that we too almost missed the simplest solution imaginable. If we needed a practical reminder that fear and hate are eternally bad for the soul, bad for the mind, even bad for business, here it was.

  Compulsively engaging with people is a tricky game—sometimes they test out their most despicable stuff from out of nowhere. I’m trying to get better at reacting thoughtfully, calmly, and firmly, especially when the person in question is being paid by me, yet tries to control me in my own home.

  Having restored order, recounted Matteo’s professional ineptitudes to the plumbing company, secured a partial refund, and escaped the awful world of pipes and drywall for a minute, Dave and I embark on a final, frantic stage of wedding prep. We assign bulky items like giant speakers, turntables, and coolers to friends to be brought to Maine. Thinking fondly of Angelo, I make jam from his precious grapes to give away as wedding favors; I gather a foothill-sized amount of vegetables from my friends’ farm. Dave pulls an all-nighter making mixtapes of dinner music. We check with his parents, and mine, to make sure their cars are packed and any required items are on board. We pack our clothes and our hiking boots and our bathing suits. I wrangle all the stuff I’d been setting aside for weeks: dessert plates, silverware, tablecloths, candles, extension cords, the rings, the marriage license. We check with our officiant, the company renting us tables and chairs plus a lone porta-potty, and our friend who lives a few minutes from the wedding site. The guest list is tightly nailed down at forty people, but arranging food, drinks, and music for even that small a crowd is foreign to me.

  It takes us five hours to pack the car, which has us antsy, mentally overheated. But as soon as we get on the highway, we start squealing. We’ve dodged doom in our domicile, we’re en route to the coast of Maine, and we’re going to ignore America’s impending ruin—it’s less than two months before the 2016 election—for an entire week because we’re about to get wicked marital in one of the most relaxing places on earth, where the Wi-Fi is spotty and iPhones seem sort of ridiculous.

  We arrive in Sedgwick, Maine very late at night and take a moonlit look around the place where we’ll be fully nuptialized in a few days. The water in the nearby harbor twinkles under a just-shy-of-full moon; the grounds are leafy; the dense flora rustle with the sounds of nocturnal animals. The grass is thick and wet. The house—a stout, white, mildly creepy-looking home built in 1817—glimmers an inky blue under the night’s light. We chose this location sight unseen, via FaceTime with the help of my friend Caitlin, a local, who came to tour it on a rainy day in July.

  “Yeah, I think this is gonna work out,” we yell to each other from various spots in the moonshadow. I can’t see Dave, but I can hear his smile.

  We unload the crucial stuff from the car and gingerly enter the house. We walk around turning on lights, checking out rooms; one of the lights turns itself off. We both see it happen. Dave and I verbally make note of it, but don’t discuss it any further; meanwhile, he is sure of a spirit presence, and I’m leaning toward an electrical problem. My position on the matter is determined mainly by a need to stay calm, to not freak out. I would rather not fixate on the image of a haunted wedding, so I decide to ignore it as we settle in for the night.

  As it went, if any spirit visited us, it was a detail-oriented one, and definitely female—a helpful apparition who fully grasped the length of our to-do list. Two days before the wedding, our parents and friends begin to arrive; wearing giant smiles and beaming forth love and calm, they set up tables and chairs, string up lights, pick flowers. By the time Saturday rolls up, I feel the expected stress, but I’m also floating around, grinning, confident that the crew will make sure everything gets done. “What a great group of friends you have,” our parents all say independently of one another.

  And then, in a flash, we are married. As my mom likes to note, very few bits of our ceremony are copied and pasted from elsewhere. “If you’re looking for traditional, you’ve got the wrong girl,” she says. “There was no ‘Here Comes the Bride,’ no ‘Till death do us part,’ no ‘I do.’ Made me nervous.” Instead, a psych band—new friends from Maine whose music we’d connected with—play beautifully for the occasion, before and after the ceremony. Dave and I wear ornate masks made out of flowers and leaves, which we remove at the start of the ceremony in the spirit of coming to one another fully engaged and unguarded, having cast off our various preconceptions. I blubber uncouthly through the entirety of my vows. At the end of the ceremony, we ask the guests to circle up, hold hands, and chant with us: “Let our light harmonize with the universe!”

  And we did beam our light that night—if not throughout the universe, at least around a sleepy town on the coast of Maine.

  Closing the Circle

  My family has always been three. Being the sole child of two people together for life is a pretty intense thing—you get the intimacy of being one-third of the whole deal, but you also get the intimacy of being one-third of the whole deal. You’re a lynchpin of sorts, a barometer of the relationship and the focus of much parental energy. Dave’s an only child too; when we learned that about one another, it became obvious why we get along so well. (We have dibs on the name Only Child for our forthcoming sappy/mystical space jam band.) Dave’s parents married in 1969; mine in 1971. Both couples are still together, still doing most things in tandem.

  Their marriages, though, were built in a different time than the one Dave and I have just embarked on. It is unfathomable to Dave and I that any relationship begun in one’s twenties could hold up for fifty years, but they’ve done it. I know it was difficult for our parents to watch us both make some wayward love choices, starting up and then breaking up over and over, while they thought of that process as the dominion of teenagers, wondered when we would get over that already. But there is value in having one’s heart trampled once or twice or fifty times. There is a degree of pleasure in flailing and being lovelorn at various moments in life.

  Dave entered my life without hesitation, made his aims known. For the first time I was able to unabashedly let my parents observe the goodness of my relationship. Dave’s positive energy, newly added to the family, forces fresh air between me and my parents. I knew I had never fully transformed my role from child to adult; where once I found that reassuring, as if nothing would change and no one would get old if I kept playing the part of the freckle-faced kid, I saw it now as holding us back. I’d long obscured the full truth of my life in hopes of avoiding difficult conversations, being judged, or causing worry.

  Does it take only children a little longer to grow up? Maybe so. The cultural slogan is that we’re selfish, sheltered, bad at empathy, introvert
ed. That must be a conspiracy started by the multi-baby-family lobby, because in my travels it’s not true. If there’s a quality that I can say runs through every only child I know, to some degree, it’s the tendency to be a late bloomer: to take a lot of time to figure out our place in the world. We don’t have siblings to band with, who might prod us into having adult opinions or conversations as we get older. The family dynamic stays fairly static. We don’t have an equal in the family, whether ally or enemy: all input is parental. Our households are generally quiet, meditative affairs, begetting careful, purposeful children. We have significant private time in which to ruminate, pick our way through the thorns of childhood existence, and come up with some real doozies that we believe until age and experience tells us otherwise.*

  I’m twentysomething years past the point of getting by on innocence and my own nutball brand of logic, thank the goddess. I’ve staked out a good life. My parents seem to grasp that I am content to make decisions that fall a little outside the norm, and put no pressure on me to do anything differently. Without one critical piece, though, I know we can’t move on from the pleasant but restrained communication style we’ve adopted.

  They have to see PennHenge.

  So I make the required overtures.

  Dave and I are visiting my parents, perhaps a month after the wedding. We’re in the post-dinner phase, all four of us occupying our own chair in their small living room in front of their enormous TV, a baseball game on mute. The conversation goes quiet for a minute, and then another minute, and I think, Go for it, dude. It’s never going to be easier than it is right now. I should have warned Dave, but it’s too late for that.

  I employ a conversational tactic that helps me to broach challenging topics: I imagine I’m acting in a movie and these are my lines. I take myself out of it, just for the first couple of sentences, until I’m barreling through, reluctance forgotten.

  Dave’s face, eyebrows up, displays his intrigued surprise as I get started. My tongue trips once or twice, but I finally succeed in requesting their presence at a tour of PennHenge. Why did I wait so long? You’d think it’s an invitation to Buckingham Palace the way I’m formalizing it. My mom is initially defensive, as if by mentioning the extraordinary amount of time that has passed without a visit (or even a mention of one) I’m accusing her of not caring. But I know that’s not the case, and I tell her: the real culprit is something less concrete than that, something to do with keeping the peace, even at the expense of inhabiting our relationship in full. It takes some assurances, but they agree to the visit.

  As the day of their arrival approaches, I hold myself back from cleaning every crevice of the house. It’s my instinct to do just that—to scrub the place into respectability—but I want them to see our actual state of being. I need to be honest about the way we live. So I do the basics—make the bed, do the dishes, a quick lap with the vacuum cleaner—and I leave it at that.

  Of course, the event itself is without incident, a molehill that I’d long since mountainized. They arrive ten minutes late due to directional challenges. I go out to meet them as they pull up out front; we saunter around the house while I rapid-fire talk them through. They check out the late-season garden and the legendary grapevines. After ten minutes, we go inside and they slowly climb the stairs to our third floor. They politely avoid comment on the cache of records that lives on the landing outside the apartment, though I can’t resist commenting on them just to say they’re “slowly but surely” going to the store to be sold. (It’s true, sort of, but Shut up already, I think, remember your mantra about them just seeing the place how it is.) They do the barest inspection possible, not focusing 100 percent on any given area, clearly not wanting to pry or appear too critical. I run around showing them things, speaking maybe a little louder than is necessary. We don’t run into any tenants; the street is quiet; the weed and cat poop bouquet in the hallway is mercifully subdued that day.

  For all my fear and avoidance of this moment, they don’t seem to judge. They are respectful; they ask questions, we laugh; all the stories they’ve heard gain concreteness. They don’t go around peering into cupboards or checking for dust. They enjoy their fifteen-minute tour, and then we all go out for a nice lunch, because why not reward ourselves for defeating inertia and closing this gap? All through the meal, I’m giddy: the intention of the day is realized. They now know the physical reality of my life; they know not only whom I’ve chosen to live with, but where and what. The why may never be clear.

  I doubt these two suburbanites will be hankering for weekly visits to PennHenge. But it doesn’t matter: I know the limits of such things, and I’m proud of all of us. This isn’t to be a bombshell dropped on our relationship; none of us is looking for radical change. But I hope it makes them see that I’m trying to bring them closer.

  When it comes to the house, I still tend to speak of the future as “I” and not “we.” I bought this place, I’ve kept the lights on and the roof 95 percent free from caving in for almost a decade and a half, and I alone own both the hardships and the benefits of this daft experiment. When Dave first moved in, I felt a defensive need to keep all of that to myself, to block him from paying bills, fixing stuff, and being tough with customer service reps on my behalf. I’d gotten used to it being my thing, no help needed, thanks. But now I have this excellent human being in my life who wants to help—and who should be free to help—because he is my partner, emotionally, legally, financially, in all things. He has a stake in PennHenge, and a say in its future, just as he is affording me with his business.

  Governing this house is the only tangible power I’ve ever believed I had; as reluctant as I was to take that power at first, now I’m reluctant to give a little of it away. But I’m starting an alliance with Dave, sharing that power with someone who responds with reason and understanding. It is freeing; no crisis comes when he takes on new responsibilities! Other adults in the world are capable of good decision-making! I’m getting over myself!

  Now that we’re married, confronting a life spent at PennHenge and considering what that might require of us, it’s time for a reckoning with this place. At the least, we have to examine where we are, if we want to stay and/or could afford to leave. We think about this often, but the conversation is usually circular. Some days we’re convinced that aging any further in this apartment might sap us of our good humor, our motivation. Then we step outside and have a great conversation with a neighbor, the birds singing in the trees above our heads, and leaving the neighborhood becomes unthinkable. Maybe we should be enacting a plan to start anew, but PennHenge is at its core a complicated home, and it’s not letting us go easily.

  Taking stock of my earthly property doesn’t simplify the matter: Okay, let’s see, we’ve got one trashed, darkened hovel that smells like stale pee and cigarettes (first floor); one fully restyled, millennial-friendly tech dome complete with multicolored iPhone-controlled LED lights and chandeliers (second floor); and one charming but outdated apartment heated by a single gas stove and painted in all the colors of a basket of Easter eggs (third floor). Plus a basement that looks like it has hosted several criminal enterprises. We’re spanning several eras, and not gracefully. Who’s going to buy this? These parts do not look at all like they belong to the same whole (or hole). For all my fixing and maintaining, I may only have made the place less desirable, unless I can find some freak like me to buy it.

  Dave and I talk about renting out our third-floor apartment, moving down to the first floor, gutting that apartment, and bringing it back to basic livability as a long-term stopover on a distant journey to moving out of PennHenge. But that means we’d have to boot Elvin and Kenny (and Elvin’s new ladyfriend, who has recently moved in with them). Elvin and Kenny haven’t exactly treated the place with the utmost care over the years, but I don’t relish the idea of laying this news on them, of giving them a deadline to GTFO after all this time. They are dug in; they’ll never leave if I don’t tell them they have to. But enacting su
ch a deadline brings up other questions: I don’t know if they could afford to get another apartment in the neighborhood, and as someone who complains about the gentrification and prettifying of these streets, that idea distresses me. What are my obligations to them after more than a decade? What are their obligations to me? There’s no lease. Conversations are scarce. They slip their rent checks under my door in the middle of the night. It’s amazing that we can live in the same little building and so rarely see one another.

  Maybe they’d yell at me if I asked them to leave. Maybe they’d be sad. Or maybe they’d be relieved to end what they see as an obligation to me. Maybe they’d be happy to be forced to start fresh.

  Had they kept the space about as nice as they’d found it—admittedly, even then, not that nice—I’d accept them staying on indefinitely. But their standards have slipped pretty far. I’m sure they no longer see the dirt and smell the nicotine, the same way I overlook the paint cans and stacks of books upstairs.

  It’s not like I’ve never tried to make rules—I have definitely laid down some kind of law regarding chain-smoking in the house; breaking stuff and silently hoping it will fix itself; turning the driveway into a junkyard; bad parking etiquette. But I’ve failed to adequately internalize that I have to repeat them over and over, even if I’m talking to the same old tenants I reminded last time. There’s no institutional memory in this joint. The longer I do this job, the less enthused I am about reciting and repeating the policies of PennHenge. The guys on the first floor are slowly annihilating their apartment, while Colin, unchecked, creates his showplace, unearthing his drill and hammer every night just as Dave and I are settling in to watch Stephen Colbert on The Late Show.