“I thought there might be some good stuff in the barn,” I said.
I’d hoped to incorporate some of the exotic wood stacked along the back wall of his workshop. He had some pieces of wormy chestnut that I secretly coveted. And I knew there were some cherry planks left from his milled tree. This was partly a connoisseur’s instinct for unique lumber, and part selfish desire for recompense—I’d donated some of my very best barn planking to my brother’s bar, after all. An atonement was in order.
“There’s not enough of any one kind to make it,” he said. “We can make it interesting, though. I have some ideas.”
With his pencil, he roughed out a pattern showing how we could strap together plain boards with red oak insets, to give the sides some visual texture, kind of like racing stripes. Then he sketched an interwoven L shape to demonstrate how we could join the corners.
“I’d like to do a finger dovetail,” he said, drawing a quick model, “but it would be tricky with pieces this big. If we do a butt joint, we can cheat.”
“Butt joint,” I repeated dryly, emphasizing the “butt.”
He smirked. A basic truth: All men, having once been thirteen-year-old boys, will forever after be thirteen-year-old boys. I knew a guy who, in his fifties, broke a hip trying a skateboard move. Instead of accepting this as a cautionary tale, I’d adopted it as a benchmark for my own behavior as my fiftieth year approached.
He continued to sketch his way through the idea, adding a decorative cap to the corner. Then he paused with his pencil against the paper, pulled it away, and looked at what had taken shape there, nodding as though he’d reached a revelation.
“You know what?” he said. “It’s just a box.”
2: ROOMS OF OUR OWN
* * *
I’d come to this pursuit honestly, which is a nice way of saying it was my father’s fault. The house he and my mother raised us in, the house that in many ways made me, was a needy thing, big-boned and drafty, built in the thirties, with a steam boiler in the basement whose humors and balances my dad learned just well enough, which is to say he could maintain it but not tame it. There is some danger in knowing just enough.
Hot iron pipes clanked violently, like baby hurricanes in the walls. All winter, radiators hissed and whistled and bled like hot stigmatas. My mom kept the thermostat high, and the radiator in my brother’s and my shared attic bedroom was often searing enough to burn skin. After sledding sometimes, we’d dry our clothes by draping them over the iron monsters, and when they were done, they were rigid and rough and had molded precisely to the shape of the spines. We’d put our sweatshirts back on and fight each other, using the hardened sleeves as clubs.
My father was forever working on that house, repairing and improving, scheming, planning, battling, and lamenting. He enclosed a front porch, creating a room my mother called “The Solarium,” the article and caps offering a sort of unearned regality, a room whose sunniness was at tragic odds with its psychedelic shag carpet and its chief resident—a not entirely domesticated green Amazon parrot that screeched like a freeway pileup every morning at dawn. My mother, a lover of words and a devoted crossword puzzler, gave names to everything, each one carefully formulated; language was her version of world order. The parrot was named Mr. Blifil, after the deceitful villain in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Upstairs, she laid claim to a spare room, which she dubbed “The White Bedroom,” and kept the door closed and locked. In shadowy glimpses, I saw piles of shoeboxes and clothing in plastic cleaners’ bags, and stacks and stacks of books: Ragtime; Victory Over Japan; Valley of the Dolls. Her names covered everything. The basement cat was named Bette Davis Eyes, after the Kim Carnes song, and we had a kitchen island called the Jableebla, for God only knows what reason. Dad made the rooms, and she performed the naming ceremonies. My dad redid the living room top to bottom and gutted the kitchen. Then he blew out a wall to build an ambitious addition onto the back of the house, with a window-filled breakfast room that opened into a two-story porch whose ornate wooden railings he designed and manufactured himself, thick spindles with round decorations in a wave pattern, a style that might be called Victorian Seuss. This spilled outward onto a patio he’d built from repurposed brick and stone, continuing into his sprawling gardens.
It was through his basement workshop that I understood my father best. It was not so much a room as the deliberate staking of a claim. As the White Bedroom was to my mother, the workshop was the room of his own.
The basement was divided into two halves. The first was a rec room, a term needing no further explanation to American survivors of the seventies. Fake wood paneling. Half-assed bar with a shelf for displaying ceramic steins and novelty cans—Olde Frothingslosh and Billy Beer. Speckled linoleum floor. Benches with storage underneath for Risk and Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots. Trim painted in that particular shade of “green.”
The other half was the real guts of the place: raw old-house basement with interior decorating by Joe Stalin. Paint-spattered concrete floor. Pipes cased in asbestos. Metal-framed foldout windows that didn’t work properly and served primarily as inspiration for the glass-block industry. An iron-doored incinerator built into the wall. Sweaty red-tile foundation. Bette Davis Eyes lurking in the corners. A stained, bulbous auxiliary refrigerator idled at the far end, exclusively for Thanksgiving leftovers and beer. My father bought longneck Blatz by the case.
To my young perspective, this half of the basement seemed to extend forever. At the far distant end was that beer fridge, the household laundry operation, and a wall-mounted dial telephone with a black receiver and distressed rubber cord, where every private conversation was held. Whenever I think of courting Gina as a young college student, I think of sitting atop the dryer, twirling my fingers through Ma Bell’s black coils, trying to make myself sound interesting.
At the farthest terminus from the laundry was my father’s room, which housed his tools and workbench. It had an old wooden door made of tongue-and-groove pine, painted white, with an antique Suffolk latch and a poster of Cheryl Ladd in a blue satin negligee featuring nine miles of cleavage. My dad was not the kind of guy who would hang a poster of one of Charlie’s Angels on his workshop door, but he was the kind of guy who would receive such a poster as a birthday gag gift, as well as the kind of guy who threw nothing away. He put the poster in a place that seemed correct: not hidden, which would imply secret lust, but not exactly public, which would imply ungentlemanliness. He is, above all things, a gentleman.
Cheryl Ladd, then, served as a paper gatekeeper into a room that defined the man as I knew him to be: a highly ordered whimsy. It contained shelves and shelves of labeled cans and jars, nuts and screws and bolts and cotter pins, categorized by size and type; and half-cans of paint lined up like a regiment of spotted knaves, gallons and quarts and pints and spray cans, the dried lapping on their sides offering a rainbow retrospective of rooms and baseboards and fences and chairs; a jelly jar containing three porcupine quills and a bullet shell casing, a preserved legend of his youth; and a large jar of white powder with a handwritten label, “Plaster of Paris,” accompanied by a caricature of the Eiffel Tower. Midwestern exotica.
And of course it contained all manner of tools—every imaginable size and configuration of screwdriver (including one that worked sideways!) and saws (including a two-handled crosscut deal that looked like it fell off Paul Bunyan’s hay wagon) and hammers upon hammers, but only one true favorite, a black-handled number with a dulled chrome neck and a claw that curved like a shark’s fin.
The man owned an actual anvil. Who owns an anvil? Wile E. Coyote, the village blacksmith, and my dad.
I guess this is how I knew my parents—by their effects. I think I understood my mother more through her little crossword table and its accompanying, wild-ranging reference book stack than from any conversation we ever had. My father revealed himself through a generous body of evidence. He became for me a fearless ski jumper, which I knew because I’d seen the trophy, and a man who’
d owned a Karmann Ghia convertible, which I knew because I’d seen the photograph, and a man who had dated a Playboy Bunny, which I knew because I’d seen the photo (wow), and who could make smoke come out of his ear and always wore a hat and apparently once shot a porcupine.
I understood my father best when I could enter that space that was uniquely his and, for instance, take up his awl to punch a hole in a piece of leather. I loved to linger there, to find ways to keep myself busy, to sort through his artifacts. In so doing, I began to learn skills allowed by the tools in that room. I could tap out a stripped bolt, solder copper pipe, turn a lathe. I learned the best oil for drilling steel, the best oil for a bicycle chain, the best oil for unfreezing a rusted nut. I used his red draftsman’s pencils to mimic the unmistakable script of the engineer: block letters, all caps, straight and square, a penmanship I took up as my own.
When I was ten or so, I established temporary residence in the workshop and built something between a Soap Box Derby racer and the contraptions the Little Rascals were always crashing at the bottoms of hills. It was an elaborate unbalanced thing, a long plank set on axles of my own design, with a rope steering mechanism and a little latched storage space behind the seat. It set my imagination afire, waking me in the wee hours with ideas for improvements and puzzles to solve. I found myself calculating the length of threaded rod I’d need for the axles, figuring the width of the mismatched wheels—which I’d salvaged from a couple of old tricycles—and the washers and bolts. Math I didn’t think I knew was coming to me with uncanny clarity.
And so one summer day when I was around twelve, I was exploring the alley behind a short retail strip near my house and came across a stack of discarded plywood sheets, painted ugly green and riddled with staples, chipped and battered, leaning against a Dumpster. They were small enough for me to carry, each one four feet long and a foot wide. That single fact was enough to set my burgeoning machinery into motion. I awoke that night with the moon shining through the attic window and fervently schemed a floor plan whose symmetry fit the perfect math of forty-eight and twelve, the length and width of the boards, the size of my boards. I knew the stack of pine studs I could steal from in the basement—my framing. I knew the door that I wanted to use, a heavy antique bathroom door inset with a beveled mirror, leaning against a stack of lumber scraps near the washtub, its surface covered with a wild psychedelia of paint—my dad used it to wipe out his brushes before cleaning them. I had everything I needed. I was ready for a room of my own. I could already hear the ring of my hammer.
The next morning I was back at the Dumpster, knowing the boards would still be there because every boy knows the trash pickup schedules within earshot of his home. I made trip after trip until they were all stacked near the washtub at the opposite end of the basement from my father’s room. I worked all day in secret, stopping before my parents got home from work. Within a week, it was done—a slapped-together framework sheathed in green walls, with the doorway carefully measured and framed. Inside, I’d tacked up a board where I planned to mount hooks to hang my few tools. I hadn’t hung the door yet because I didn’t know exactly how to do that, but I knew my father would know and we could do this part together.
I invited my parents down for the grand unveiling. They saw things quite differently. What they saw is that I’d blocked the path to the laundry, that even my small self had to squeeze between the green plywood and the old lead-covered washtub to get to the washing machine, that a laundry basket couldn’t even fit through. They saw that I’d built one wall along the edge of the furnace, blocking access to the pilot light. They saw all the limits of my calculation.
They made me tear it down. I was hurt and bitter. But I was set that day on a path: to build my own version of my father’s room.
3: ARGUMENT
* * *
I never wanted a coffin in the first place.
I suppose nobody wants a coffin. But I had, for a number of years, built a case against one day being buried in an expensive upholstered Ethan Allen curio cabinet. I developed what passed for an actual position on this matter. I stated my objection with something like passion. Since I came from an old-school Catholic family, the only tradition I knew (and therefore the one I resisted) was the missionary position of American funerals: regiments of bouquets on wire stands, their stink of lavender; address books scrawled with the names of dutiful mourners; Mother Mary prayer cards slid into the pockets of ill-fitting suits. The caskets I’d experienced always seemed so . . . not “me.” Too formal. Too shiny. Too old-fogy.
I had determined that these standard mainstream caskets were frumpy symbols of an overpuffed custom that for too long had been allowed to perpetuate without any proper scrutiny, like the first six hours of the Super Bowl pregame or pleats in men’s khakis. I’d decided that their style was too JCPenney and not enough Urban Outfitters. I’d decided, apparently, that commercial coffins were not cool.
I will admit that I’d never given much thought to the obvious question: What exactly would constitute a “cool” coffin?
All of this obviously says a lot more about my own superficiality than it does about the deficiency of tradition. It also suggests a significant loss of connection with the zeitgeist. In middle age, my style instinct seemed to be on a downhill slide from Coachella to the funeral parlor.
In the Egyptian tradition, the sarcophagus is elaborately decorated with images of the achievements and persona of the deceased, a visual memoir, which seems like exactly the right thing to do but also far too unhumble for the traditional American sentiment. And so we play a constant middle of the postmortem—eulogies that gild and idealize traits like humility and selflessness; insanely expensive newspaper obituaries that read as column-length pathways into paradise. And caskets that are buffed to outshine a Father’s Day show car, marketed with hyperbolic model names that sound like political campaign buzzwords—“Heritage,” “Legacy,” “Defender”—yet at the same time are so generic and devoid of any specific personality that they say nothing at all.
* * *
For me, it began right after my father-in-law died. I accompanied Gina, the youngest of his seven children, to the funeral home to help with the arrangements. Her dad, Augustus Owsley Hall (his Kentucky family had a tradition of taking the sons’ names from the standing governor, providing he was a Democrat), was a proud World War II navy veteran who attended regular reunions of the crew of the USS Essex, an aircraft carrier he called home for four years. For all the satisfactions of his working-class life and the seven children he and his wife of sixty-three years raised, that was his narrative. The Essex. So the themes of service and patriotism were at the forefront as we sat together in the sterile, glossed conference room. This particular funeral home had a showroom, with floor models of its casket line displayed with their hoods raised, like Corollas and Tundras at a Toyota dealership. We were ushered in for a tour.
Augustus Owsley was a simple man, a child of the Great Depression, easy to please, and charmingly unfashionable. He wore the same hat every day: a blue USS Essex ball cap. When he moved into an assisted care facility near the end of his life and discovered that the cafeteria offered ice cream and beer every afternoon, he knew right then that he would die a happy man. That was all he wanted or needed.
So I couldn’t help wondering what he would make of this endeavor. He had no personal style, at least not one that could be channeled directly into one of these wood and steel bed/boxes. He was frugal above all things—his wardrobe consisted almost entirely of yard-sale sweaters and Father’s Day gifts. The price tags would be of far greater concern to him than the quality of wood or the gauge of steel. Whenever I heard him asked his opinion of anything, the answer was always, “Just fine.” Once, when asked his favorite kind of beer, he responded, “The cheap kind.”
As the family listened intently, I eased away from the group. I was curious, though not sure what about. I was looking. For something. And I discovered, at the fringes, a corpse-size cardbo
ard box. My bargain-hunting radar went haywire. Seventy-five dollars! And, strangely, it made a statement. It had its own style. The cardboard box, amid all this polish and ostentation, had more presence than any other coffin in the place. It was humble. It was organic. It was rough. It was real. It was muted and impermanent and imperfect and so much more like life. It was a Tom Waits song. It was a relief. It had soul. And it was cheap. So cheap.
I moved over to where Gina was grouped with her family. “C’mere,” I said, more with facial expression than with words, employing the domestic superpower of marital telepathy.
She casually separated herself from the group and followed.
“There it is,” I said. “That’s what I want to be buried in.”
“You are. Not. Going. To be. Buried. In a Card. Board. Box. Absolutely not happening.”
Which was the worst thing she could have done. Like many husbands, I am a passive-aggressive contrarian. My strongest convictions are those that animate from an opposing opinion. As soon as I was told that I was not allowed to be buried in a cardboard box, I became absolutely certain that was what I wanted. I knew right then that I would never waver. I spontaneously composed an internal Declaration of Postmortem Independence.
“I am going to be buried in that box right there. You cannot deny me my final wish.”
“Your final wish? You’re forty-five years old. You’re not even sick.”
“When I die, I’m going to be buried in that box right there.”
“You won’t have a say in the matter.”
“I’ve already told you. It’s done. You can’t just pretend you don’t already know exactly what I want. Because I’ve told you. I want to be buried in a cardboard box. It costs seventy-five dollars.”
“Fine. Then I’m just going to put it inside the biggest, most expensive gold vault I can find.”
Furnishing Eternity Page 2