Building a Home with My Husband

by Rachel Simon

  But of course I do not know any of this as the plane tilts up into the sky. I simply feel stiff with anxiety, and envision quarrels stirring beyond the horizon. How different I might feel if I could see past the dust, and glimpse the gems that this journey will reveal.

  Two days later, I drive home from the airport, determined to press my case to move.

  It’s not that I don’t appreciate Hal’s affection for the house. That’s been clear to me since we reconnected after the breakup. I think about that time now, as I grip the steering wheel, dreading the dispute that awaits. Soon after Hal bought the house, we reestablished a friendship, one that neither of us thought would blossom into a romance. For a while after that we visited through casual phone calls and the occasional meal out, and that’s where I expected things to stay. But then Hal began waging a gentle campaign to win me over.

  First he invited me to the wedding of a friend, where I was reminded of traits I’d forgotten, such as Hal’s sense of humor and easy affection toward his friends. Then our calls began growing longer and more frequent, often occurring while we lay in our separate beds in our separate homes, late into a weekend morning. Our dinners out became more relaxed, too, and went from monthly to weekly to twice a week. Slowly I saw that I was no longer focusing on all that he was not, but was letting myself see what he actually was: a man with a rare combination of dependability and playfulness, likeability and intelligence, humility and confidence, vulnerability and strength. Still, I didn’t think that anything more would happen until he invited me along on a business trip and suggested we share a room—“as friends,” he clarified when I asked. Yet it was there, in a nondescript hotel along a highway in Pennsylvania, that our friendship turned into romance, and by the time the weekend was over, I realized that he was a man cuter than I’d ever acknowledged, with angular cheekbones and hazel-green eyes and hair so fine that the gray he’d acquired now simply shimmered in the blond. Such a contrast to me, with my dark curls and brown eyes. Yet we were both slim and short-statured, and we both smiled easily, he playing the court jester, me laughing merrily at his silliness. We do fit, I thought, numb with amazement. After nineteen years, we actually fit.

  A few days after our transformation in the hotel, he invited me to dinner at his house. I’d been there a few times before, but this time, I realized, I’d be seeing it with different eyes, just as I was now seeing him.

  On the appointed day I drove from my apartment in Pennsylvania to Wilmington, Delaware. There, after turning off the main road into a grid of one-way streets, I made my way down a slope of hundred-year-old row houses, which were sandwiched between the downtown office towers at the hill’s peak and a genteel park at the hill’s bottom. Although the neighborhood bumped up against a major hospital and was close to an interstate, when I parked I enjoyed an uncommon quiet, one I hadn’t noticed before.

  Hal ran down the street from his house and hugged me hello. Then we proceeded to walk down his block, a tucked-away haven one lane wide and one block long. I was struck, as I’d previously been, by the majestic sycamores, then by the surreal way that several of the trees displayed the remnants of NO PARKING ANYTIME signs—rectangles of metal that had been affixed to the trunks so long ago, the bark had grown over all four edges, swallowing most of the words, leaving nothing but TIME on one sign, the biblical fragment ARK on another. I laughed at how appropriately symbolic the signs were for us, and Hal said they were one of several things he loved about living here. There was also the sociable atmosphere in the neighborhood, which I witnessed moments later, when he exchanged warm words with a little boy and his mother who were sitting on a porch across the street from Hal’s house. Hal reminded me also that the block was informally known as Teacher’s Lane, because once upon a time it lodged several prominent educators, one of whom, Eldridge Waters, had sold Hal his house. Then Hal and I turned toward his house. He ushered me up the steps, we crossed the terra-cotta porch, he opened the heavy oak door, and we were in.

  Instantly, the pleasure he took in the hardwood floors, deep baseboards, plaster walls, and operating transoms—and the promise he saw in the rundown kitchen and bathroom, the cramped bedrooms, the paucity of closets, even the miniscule backyard—endeared him to me even more. I already knew what everything looked like, yet now every detail seemed important and interesting. I felt different, too: as we emerged from the stairs into his third-floor music studio, where sycamore leaves were draping one set of windows and sunlight was streaming through the other, and he tentatively reached out to hold my hand, it seemed as if we were in a glass ship sailing down a river of row houses and trees, embarking on a voyage that transcended our failed past. As we stood with the sun pouring in from the south, it occurred to me that if this man could see so much that was worthy in such an unexceptional dwelling—and make me see it, too—then his heart was more generous than I’d realized. If, with all of its imperfections, he could say, “I love this and want to stay forever,” he could say the same to me. A few months later, he did.

  But soon after we walked home from the justice of the peace, I learned that the third floor was also bone-chilling in winter and suffocating in summer. It lacked insulation, as did the entire house, which also sported no central air. The kitchen cabinets were laminated with a sticky veneer that no amount of scrubbing would clean. The kitchen window looked out to a decrepit aluminum porch. The bathroom was tiled in bumblebee black and yellow, its pipes clogging so frequently we had them replaced, leaving a gaping hole in the ceiling below. Without funds to repair the hole, we then had a porthole between the bathroom and the dining room. It leaked, too: when we showered, water dripped onto the first floor. Electrical outlets were meager in number, and the wiring was knob and tube. The furnace was old, the stove ancient, the windows with aged, wavy panes failed to stop drafts. Transom glass was missing. Hardwood floors bore the blemishes of decades of rotting carpets. The banister was an ugly metal railing. In heavy rain, puddles speckled the basement.

  I tactfully admitted to Hal that I lacked his enthusiasm for the house. But I hardly commanded the resources to move to a place more to my liking, like a sunny, ample-sized, detached house, preferably in a suburb with generous yards and garages. You mean, Hal would respond, a place with the kind of muscular mortgage that would kick sand in the face of our scrawny payments? He’d go on. Small, attached houses are more energy-efficient, we can walk to do most errands, and we enjoy long strolls along the Brandywine Creek in the park. I still protested. “Okay, then,” he’d say, “where and what would your dream house be?”

  Up until now, this was where my thoughts—and our quarrels—stopped. I’d lived in all kinds of places as a kid: apartments and houses, cities, rural areas, and suburbs. But perhaps because I was more concerned with the crumbling foundation of my parents’ marriage, and then, after my father left, with my mother’s ability to function, and then, after she went off the deep end and disappeared from the face of the earth, with the resumption of my life with my father as well as living at a boarding school, I came to feel no attachment to any kind of housing. I like historic homes for their curbside appeal and idiosyncratic crannies, but I like youthful town houses for their brawny plumbing and vigorous heating and windows distinguishable from rice paper. I like the urban ease of being able to walk to the dry cleaner, but I like the elbow room of the suburbs. I like the way a small footprint permits me to blast through whatever housework I care to do, but I like spacious rooms and multiple baths and broad views. It seemed that I was just as commitment-phobic about my housing preferences as I’d been about marriage.

  It became even more difficult to focus on the house after a book I wrote, about my sister Beth, came out a year after we married. Beth has developmental disabilities, and it turned out that my account of our lives together struck a chord among many people who had family members with disabilities. She also has an unusual passion—she rides city buses all day, every day. I joined her in this lifestyle for a year—and my chronicle of that
experience caught the eye of celebrities, who started talking about making a movie. By the time I celebrated my second anniversary with Hal (known in that book as Sam), I was being deluged by calls from all over the country, as people in the disability field and public transit industry invited me to give talks at conferences, fund-raising dinners, award ceremonies. I found it exhilarating to advocate for the rights of people with disabilities and their families, so I seldom declined. But my trips had become so ceaseless, it was all I could do to keep up with my marriage and a part-time job teaching writing. I had no spare moments in which to make up my mind about where to move, much less convince Hal.

  Now, as I park before our house for the first time since a burglar brought matters to a head, Hal runs out to greet me, and our hug is far longer and closer than any I thought possible during the six years apart. Then he kisses me, and his body makes abundantly clear what his voice has yet to speak: yes, we can at last leave this woeful house behind, without any more argument from him. “Well, that was easy,” I say, giggling inside our kiss. “Marriage Mind Meld’s awfully efficient,” he says.

  “Okay,” I say the next night, as we sit in front of my new laptop. “Let’s see what houses are selling for around here.”

  We click on some sites. Recent sales are in the ballpark of $175,000, which would give us a huge profit on the $95,000 that Hal paid. “That’s terrific,” he says.

  Then we remind ourselves that we can’t approach a real estate agent without remodeling the kitchen and bathroom, which would reduce our profit to—

  “What do you think those projects would cost?” I ask.

  “Some architects have a better handle on costs. I’m among those who don’t.”

  “So how can we figure out what we’d have left over for another house?”

  “We just have to estimate.”

  “But certainty would be much more to my liking.”

  “One order of certainty, hold the mayo,” he says in the phony voice of a short-order cook. “Aw, you’re outta luck, lady. Certainty ain’t on the menu.”

  “Fine. Let’s just look at what houses are going for.” We tool around online, checking out towns between the college where Hal manages construction projects and the college where I teach. Then we plug in three bedrooms and one bath. I want to add proximity to the airport, plus an accessible entrance, since I’m friends with many wheelchair users. Aside from being green, Hal must have a design that’s not so gauche that it would call into question his architectural creds. But the search lacks these parameters. So we click on “No maximum price.”

  Sixty-three options appear, but only on the final screen do we find affordable possibilities—and every one is hideous, ramshackle, adjacent to sewage treatment plants, on four-lane commercial strips, in areas oft-cited in the police reports, or too snug for our sofa.

  Hal lifts a bottle of water off my desk and holds it to his mouth like a microphone. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s true,” he intones in a radio announcer’s stentorian voice. “There is no hope for our two heroes.”

  “Other people find ways to move,” I say, slumping in my chair. “We could, too, if only we’d started saving in our twenties, instead of being artists.”

  “For our two pauper heroes,” he amends. “For them, there is only doom.”

  January eases into February. We debate our house all the time. I’m adamant about moving and Hal’s completely cooperative, but real estate prices remain uncooperative. We do get an unexpected shot of hope when we learn that my book is going to be adapted for a television movie, but then realize that the funds won’t be nearly enough to rescue us from the final screen on the real estate sites. To make matters worse, at one of our many neighborhood parties, when I’m sounding off about our burglary, a former resident who’s back to see old friends says, “I moved away because I wanted to be in the suburbs. The day after we moved, we were robbed. Everyone in our neighborhood has been robbed. It can happen anywhere.”

  “Yes,” say other people at the party. “My pocket was picked in Princeton.” “Our car was broken into in Cherry Hill.”

  “Nowhere is safe,” I say to Hal as we walk home from the party.

  “We could stay,” he suggests.

  We reach the house. The local planning office says it’s “of a vernacular Second Empire style.” I prefer to think of it as Forgettable Flawed.

  “We could,” he repeats.

  “You hate mansard roofs. This has a mansard roof.”

  “A Victorian one, so that makes it more bearable.”

  “And the downspout doesn’t work,” I say.

  Spring advances. Buds dot the sycamores outside our windows, then open like the relaxing of fists. Neighbors sweep winter off their steps, let their children ride tricycles without coats, hang Japanese lanterns on porches. The park fills with daffodils and ducklings.

  So it is that on a glorious April day, we’re out for a stroll in the park. We’ve just cracked jokes with a dog walker we know from neighborhood parties, and as we resume our loop around the Brandywine Creek, I mention how much I like the friends we’ve made in our neighborhood.

  “You know, we like a lot of people here,” Hal says. He directs my gaze. Nearby is a picnic table where a red-haired mother draws pictures with her red-haired daughter. He gestures toward a man collecting seed pods along the cobblestone road, Monkey Hill, that slopes up from the park zoo. He nods toward a couple jogging past the fountain with classical statues. We know all their names. We have spoken with them in shorts and bad hair, in down coats and good spirits, with groceries in our hands and worries on their minds, in front of the mural a resident artist painted on his wall and beside the toy truck the little boy plays with across the street. Newcomers or old-timers, black or white, gay or straight, corporate or Bohemian, they are talkative and open. “We live in a great place,” Hal adds.

  As we cross the nineteenth-century stucco bridge over the Brandywine, then continue beside the river until the small dam at the bottom of the steep street that leads to our neighborhood, I think, for the first time, about how our house, boring and decayed though it is, is right in the middle of the very characteristic that everyone seeks but that’s never a parameter on real estate Web sites: an actual community. I’ve never even thought about community when I’ve conjured up my fantasy smorgasbord of housing possibilities, but I sure am glad we have it.

  Is it possible that I’m beginning to see less of what isn’t and more of what is?

  We turn toward the river. There, in the shallow water beneath the dam, stands a great blue heron, the same one we saw last summer and the summer before. We’ve even named him. “Look,” Hal says. “It’s Edward, back for the season.”

  “Hi, Edward,” we call out, as we always do.

  Hal turns to me. “Please. Let’s fix it up and stay.”

  “No, no, no, no. It’ll be hugely expensive.”

  “We can get a home equity loan, add in the money from the movie, and make up the difference with our savings.”

  “But you’re fifty-three! Our savings are already nowhere near what we’ll need if you’re ever going to retire!”

  “So we’ll just use some savings, and if we need to, refinance the house when we’re done.”

  “But it’ll be so much work!”

  “This is what I do for a living.”

  “What if things go wrong? I hear all the time about the terrible things that can happen. What if they happen to us?”

  He shrugs. “They just did.”

  I laugh. “I guess so.”

  “And we lived to tell the tale.”

  “We did.”

  “So?”

  I can resist. I can spend the next year hoping to stumble upon a just-listed suburban charmer that miraculously pleases us both. But frankly, I don’t want to take the time—and the petals are opening, and Edward is here again, and Hal is looking at me with his big green eyes.

  “I ask you, Professor Simon,” he says. “Aren’t we
already on Teacher’s Lane?”

  Yes, somehow, by a twisting route that took me from love to doubt to anguish to loneliness to regret to searching to reconnection to standing here with my husband as he waits for my answer by this river, I am a teacher, and I have come to live on Teacher’s Lane. And somehow, like the parking signs and their trees—and like Hal and me—I have come to be part of this neighborhood, and it a part of me. Maybe our destinies are already growing together.

  “All . . . right,” I say.

  “Ow-wow-wow-owf!” Hal calls out, and he lifts me up and twirls me around. Then he takes my hand, we wave at Edward, and head up the hill toward home.

  D·E·S·I·G·N P·H·A·S·E

  Love

  Hal wants to start off small. The smallest room in the house, actually. “It’ll ease us into the process,” he says, as he parks before the bath and kitchen store. “Get you acquainted with renovation before we start the bigger changes.” That sounds like a wise plan, though when we walk inside and come face-to-face with the maze of tubs, sinks, toilets, and cabinetry zigzagging on into infinity, I suspect that the only thing his plan will end up doing is acquainting the client with her accommodating architect, and the architect with his clueless client.

  We venture into angled aisles. “Tell me what you like,” he says, clipboard in hand.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Look. Look around you. Look at these displays. The cabinets are all different. The fixtures. What appeals to you?”

  “They’re all fine.”

  “Fine?”

  “They’re all nice. Nice store displays. But I can’t see myself living in a store display.”