Building a Home with My Husband

by Rachel Simon

  He sighs, then perks back up. “Okay, contestants. It is now time for Final Jeopardy.”

  I turn to the cats. “See what I have to put up with?”

  He continues in his best Alex Trebek voice. “Excessive exposure to take-out meals, Porta Potties, and thermal underwear.” Then he hums the Jeopardy jingle: “Do do do do, do do do.”

  “I have no idea what you’re getting at.”

  “Ehnnk.” He makes the sound of the cut-off buzzer. “The question is, What happens when Dan’s guys gut the bathroom and kitchen and shut off the heat?”

  “All of that’s going to happen?”

  He raises a brow and nods.

  “At the same time?”

  “Well, we could pay them for an extra year of work.”

  I remember something a friend told me when I visited during her renovation and watched her husband and son almost come to blows. “I once saw a cartoon,” she said as her son slammed into his room. “The devil is standing before two doors. One door leads to hell with all the flames. The other one is living in your house while it’s being renovated.”

  “Okay,” I say to Hal. “We’ll move.”

  The night we make this decision, I walk into my study—and almost collapse in despair. Like probably ninety percent of the world, I dread packing. This is not, though, because I get overwhelmed by the prospect of organizing. The problem is far more seismic than that. Actually, the problem is many layers of problems, with each one going deeper than the last until you hit the molten core at the center of them all.

  The most obvious layer—the one that stops me right off the bat—is the sheer volume of my belongings, most of which are crammed into this room. I’ve moved over twenty times in my life, the last when we married, at which point I felt buoyed by the certainty that I’d reached my final destination. Then I learned that the house, with its four closets and miserly square footage, was unfit for forty years of possessions. Within a week of our honeymoon, my belongings were straining every drawer, shelf, and cabinet. We added storage units in the only available room, my study, going right up to the nine-foot ceiling. But after three more years, the dam burst, overflowing even the chairs, windowsills, and rug.

  Aside from not being able to walk into my study without wading through recent flotsam—souvenirs from my travels, paperwork from my classes, correspondence from friends (I’m a devotee of handwritten letters), newly laundered clothes, books, mugs—there’s the peril of the enormous amount of furniture wedged in here, some of it jutting way out into the room. A seven-and-a-half-foot IKEA wardrobe. A dresser we rescued from an abandoned house twenty years ago. A chest of drawers I shared with Laura in elementary school. A quirky end table from my grandmother. Wooden crates that were Hal’s first design-build project.

  Now we’re approaching the real issue. I’m still not all the way there, but just knowing I’m getting warmer makes my knees weak. Because the next layer to the problem is that every item in here has a story behind it. Some, like Hal’s wooden crates, tell vignettes, whereas others that are strewn around the room add up to novels. But regardless of how extensive the narrative, each item captures a particular story with a particular person. Some of these relationships are ongoing. Some survived interruptions. And some were with individuals I will never see again.

  The end table from my grandmother, for instance. She’s been gone for twenty years. The finger cymbals from the year I studied belly dancing, where I met Amina, a beautician with a strong shimmy who shaped my unruly mop into a flattering cut, then passed out of my life following our final performance. The Tupperware container I once borrowed from Frankie, the hot dog-eating bookkeeper at my food cooperative. When he began dying from AIDS, I visited him every week at home, relieving his partner from duty, and as Frankie and I grew closer the container grew more important until I couldn’t bear the thought of returning it.

  Those stories all ended without regret or ill will. But I have keep-sakes from more complicated pairings. The Monty Python album I listened to with my teenage boyfriend before he ended our romance and I cried for months. The crystal night light I kept on during calls with my friend Ethan, whose despair over having married a woman who was not his soul mate ended when he left her, and, to my shock and sorrow, stopped calling me. The scarves I wore as a college student to visit my friend Marie in her dorm room, where she would strum her guitar while we sang Beatles songs—a habit we indulged in, on and off, until our thirties, when one day on a phone call, she insisted that I had to have children right now, as she had, even though Hal and I had just broken up and I was too depressed to think straight; in mere seconds, my affection for her drained away. The single earrings from pairs I shared with Sandy, my best friend from fifth grade, who went through many inner trials, which we discussed in letters for decades.

  Usually I forget that I’m surrounded by relics—after all, I rarely use most of them. Then a pen rolls under my grandmother’s table, or I’ll open a drawer and find a box of old letters, and that’s all it will take to put me in a memento trance. I’ll recall how, after I first learned Monty Python routines with that boyfriend, we went outside to a wintry golf course and kissed in the moonlight. A Chinese silk jacket will return me to dancing with Marie at a friend’s wedding reception. The stained glass I bought because it reminded me of Sandy’s love of the shore will take me back to a summer day on a boardwalk when I realized that drugs were ruling her life.

  So I stand here, knowing that as soon as I start to pack, I’ll be at my mementos’ mercy. Every story I’ve ever lived through—some essential to the person I am now—will return to me, possibly leaving residues of remorse about compassion that arrived too late, resentment about apologies never offered, or wistfulness about vanished affinities. Yet I must pack, and since our four closets will drop to two after the renovation, I have to exile some of these belongings. But how can I leave the many persons I once was, and the many people who once loved me, for good? And how can I face the innermost problem with packing, the one even deeper than these?

  I shut the door and walk away.

  Dan sets a starting date of August 8. The first order of business isn’t packing, but finding a temporary home. I expect this task to prove daunting, but I’ve always been someone who makes friends wherever I’ve lived, worked, visited, shopped, exercised, even dined. In fact, one of my goals in life has been to meet everyone in the world, and it so happens that in June, Natalie, a gracious Delawarean and new friend who once hosted me at her book group, moves her mother out of a twin fifteen minutes from our house. With the market so robust that she’s in no rush to sell, she offers to rent it to Hal and me. We drive over, find it acceptable, and say yes.

  Thus able to set a moving date of August 1, I finally return to my study. It’s already late June, but I feel emboldened. Not only has an unexpected generosity saved the day, but the stress surrounding the film made from my book is over, Hal’s negotiations with Dan are behind us, and ahead lies only the future. This isn’t to say that I’ve come to any conclusions about that future. In fact, with more time to mull over my Search for Life Purpose 2.0, the quandary has worsened. I can’t pursue a cure for cancer or a career as a psychotherapist, as I have no aptitude for science, and our compromised savings prohibit a return to school. Nor, since I want to keep waking up with Hal and am not especially adventurous, will I be joining the Peace Corps. Founding a beneficent nonprofit briefly enticed me, but then I acknowledged that I had no single-minded vision, zero funding, and just enough wherewithal to know how little I know. The truth is that every idea that’s come to mind is so impractical or at odds with my personality that I’m as aimless as I was months ago.

  So packing feels like a superlative diversion, and I’m able to commence with vigor.

  In the first few days, I energetically thumb through all my clothes, decide which ones are inconsistent with my current tastes or have never complemented my physique, bag them up, and toss them into bins at Goodwill. Equally brisk is the w
eeding out of books that I will never reread. Thousands of dollars at cash registers disappear into donations at the library.

  But come July, I pry open cabinets and wardrobes—and there they are, my mementos, each item a page in my book of life. Immediately my momentum comes to a complete halt, and all moments rush inside this one. I pick up the Tupperware container. Behind it, I’m surprised to find, I stored my old bottle of sandlewood cologne. I dab a dot of fragrance behind each ear, and then Frankie is resurrected before my eyes. He’s in his bed, singing along with a video of Bette Midler on his big screen TV, and I am entering his room for a visit. Even though I don’t make a sound, and he recently became blind, he turns toward me. “Umm,” he says, “I love your perfume,” and I go toward him, both of us laughing again. I push the Tupperware to the side. There is the Maxfield Parrish address book I bought a few years ago because it reminded me of Marie’s classic beauty. Inside, I secured pages of song lyrics, each in her writing, and as I flip through, I am again sitting with Marie’s family on a steamy July Fourth, and she and her brother are trying to one-up each other on their guitars, and we are all singing these songs to the high heavens. In the next drawer is the crystal night light. I plug it in, and hear Ethan again, over the phone, reading me the bedtime story that he wrote for his little daughter, and that inspired me to buy a pop-up Alice in Wonderland book. Oh, and on this shelf is the green dress I wore to Sandy’s wedding, and I am again at the reception with Hal, watching Sandy dance with her groom. “Maybe she’ll be okay,” I’d whispered to Hal, and we’d exchanged looks of guarded hope.

  Then it is all at once: the phone call where Frankie’s partner tells me that Frankie died moments ago, my stagger away from my office desk after Marie tells me how to live my life, the long hug with Sandy at her father’s funeral, where she is hiding the depths of her addiction from me, as well as her then ex-husband.

  Knowing I’ll never finish packing at this rate, I force myself to move to another cabinet. But when I open that door, I discover photo albums, as well as one unfinished task. Having been advised by a lab tech years ago that photos deteriorate when improperly stored, I’ve long wanted to remove my pictures from the sticky-back Woolworth albums where they’ve lived for decades. Look: on a shelf beneath the albums are archival boxes, waiting for this very opportunity.

  It’ll go quickly, I tell myself, and I might as well get it done. But as soon as I open the first album, I see friends and family marching me through time. It’s as if the novels strewn about the room had been collected into these albums. I must pack! No, I must read. I lower myself to the floor and set the first album in my lap and become even more ensnared in timelessness.

  So many people long gone, some to a less earthly existence like my grandmother, others, like, for a while, my mother, to paths beyond our personal intersections. I cared for them all, even those whose words caused me to back away, or who, due to my own lapses in judgment, would never receive me with open arms again. And looking at Sandy laughing in the schoolyard in fifth grade, I remember the great revelation of my adolescence: family is different from friends. I’d certainly been told when I was a child that you can choose your friends but not your family, but when I was a teenager I discovered another distinction. Family was the very house in which my thoughts had come into being, and they remained around and inside me all the time. Plus, family was a they—all I had to do was start talking with Beth about our mother, Laura about our grandmother, and the conversation would ignite everyone’s presence all around us. But friends? In the house of me, my friends were the rooms themselves, each a private haven where I could be a different version of myself, as could they, each decorated by our unique camaraderie. That, I remember thinking when I was a teenager, was what friends were—two people who so delight in each other’s company, they make their own sanctuary from everyone else, including (maybe especially including) family. What a sanctuary it was, too: a place of songs only you sing together, of earrings only the two of you share. This is why, when the teenage me had a falling out with a friend, it was never I who encouraged the termination. I couldn’t imagine ending a friendship. Each of those private rooms was far too precious to me.

  I reach for the next album. My twenties. Here is my mother the night I saw her again, at age twenty-two. Here I am with Hal, who entered my life a month later. Here are so many others, some still traveling through time with me, others so long past that I wonder if they remember my name. Here, for instance, is Marie, smiling in my college room, and as I once again feel that gut-punch from knowing that our friendship was over, I remember a new understanding that I learned in that decade of life: friendship requires more than delight in the friend’s company. It also requires trust, depth, and the ability to contend with history, and if it lacks those, it might not be in my best interest. That moment with Marie, for instance, slammed me into a mistrust that I knew I’d never shake. Belly-dancing Amina and I lacked the depth for continued effort. And when I looked up my teenage boyfriend when I was thirty-one and we met for dinner, I thought that if we were meeting now, we’d be friends—but I also knew that our history made any friendship impossible.

  The photo albums move into my thirties. Author readings for my first books. The breakup with Hal. Running events in a bookstore. Starting to teach. Riding the bus with Beth. There is Ethan, right before he left his wife. Although I remain baffled and saddened by being left behind, I feel the aperture of my heart open when I see this picture—and I remember that in my thirties, I came to yet another conclusion about friends. Though I might have no understanding of why someone moved out of a friendship, or find the stated reasons cowardly or frivolous, I need to grant them the same right to act in their own best interest that I grant myself. Besides, I still think of my former friends with a full heart. Maybe they do the same with me.

  Now, my forties. Look at Hal, back in my life after long loss. Look at Beth and my mother and recently even Laura, with whom the same is true. Oh, and look at Sandy: sober at last, living in a house at the shore. Taking in all these faces—moments in stories still being written—I know something new. That only by going the long haul with these people, forgiving them their errors as they forgave mine, did I learn that each individual is so much more than a single foolish action or ill-considered word or self-centered time in life. Believing I can fix someone conclusively, as in these photos, as in each object, strains rationality. I can no more pin a person down than I can pin sand to the wall. This is why my friends are still with me, even if our friendships have ended. This is why my resentment of a rejection is accompanied by affection. And this is the core of why packing can be so daunting. It is a reliving of how all that once was slowly became all that is now. It is a lamenting of all that is no more—and gratitude for all that’s survived. It is, I’m stunned to admit, grieving.

  In the kitchen, Hal, unplagued by even the slightest trace of grief, is whistling a made-up tune as he rolls up our glasses in newspaper. I reach for a glass, thinking I’ll distract myself by being useful. But something about me—the swirl of memories on my face, the scent of sandalwood behind my ear—awakens his Marriage Mind Meld. “What’s up, Simon?” he asks.

  “Nothing,” I say in a telltale lying falsetto.

  “It’s so nothing you look like you’re about to fall over. Have it out.”

  I slump in a chair and tell him what I’ve been doing. Or haven’t been doing.

  He says, “Lots of people can’t get rid of things, probably for these same reasons. Maybe that’s part of why the square footage of new houses keeps growing, and the self-storage industry’s booming. But we can’t put in more closets and we’re not renting extra space.”

  “I thought you architects were space magicians.”

  “Ah, foolish lass, now you see the folly of your thinking.”

  “So what can I do?”

  He thinks a minute. “When a building loses its original purpose, like a factory goes out of business or a church closes, Americans tend
to take one of two approaches: they neglect the building for years, then tear it down and build something new, or they regard it as a precious gem that has to be kept precisely as it is. But in recent years we’ve been finding ways to do what’s called adaptive reuse, which is more like what the Europeans have been doing for a long time—turning the factory into a school, the church an office. It’s funny. We have a tendency to see only two options—throw it away or preserve it with awe. They allow for a middle ground.”

  Pyrex bowl in his hands—a gift from Beth—I say, “But how do you adaptively reuse objects that mean so much to you?”

  “Beats me,” he says. “Maybe an epiphany will strike in your sleep. Aren’t you the Girl from Epiphanema?” Then, grinning, he sings lyrics he’s made up to go with the tune: “Short and cute and smart and lovely, the Girl from Epiphanema goes asking, and then she’s musing, it’s quite amusing, then—Pow!”

  I make a small smile. “Nice try. Except I don’t feel any Pow.”

  “I know you,” he says. “You will.”

  And he’s right—by the next morning, I know what to do. But it didn’t come to me in my sleep, and it didn’t hit with a pow. It came while I was talking with Hal in our bed, late into the night. There, our conversation lit by the turtle lamp I bought when we were apart, listening to a CD of Portuguese guitar music he found at the same time, thinking beyond the most obvious options, we came to the solution with ease.

  Now I return to my study, dig out the Maxfield Parrish address book, and set it aside to give to the amiable receptionist at my chiropractor’s office. I reach for a box, insert the crystal night light, and label it for my sister Laura. I run through my date book for the last few years, looking for new friends. Marni, the jewelry maker I met in Boulder, will love the single earrings. Bonnie, the author who answers my e-mail when I’m on the road, will love the pop-up Alice. When I am outside later in the day, I wave to my neighbor Susan as she walks down the street. An education director at a church, she’s a new friend I already feel will continue through my life with me, so I immediately tell her the story about Sandy, and that I have a stained glass panel that I love but that holds a memory I need not keep. Does she want it? She almost weeps as she says yes. In the next days, as I send out packages to one friend after another, I start to think of myself as a story giver: here is how this Chinese jacket, Tupperware container, pair of belly-dancing cymbals, came to me. Now I am giving them to you.