Building a Home with My Husband

by Rachel Simon

  I am not regifting, but spreading memories. Nor am I demolishing my past. I am adapting it for the future.

  Finally, the night before the movers arrive, my closets are empty. My steps unburdened, my spirits revived, I walk through the house, ready for tomorrow. But now I am also ready in another way. I am at last realizing a truth I have suspected but resisted all along: that although nothing in this life is fixed—not friendships, not houses, not kisses, not perfumes, not whirling belly dances, not even a fifth grader’s laughter—we can still, every day, make some mark on another person’s page. We can sing a song together. We can share a wave on the street. We can give each other a story.

  M·O·V·I·N·G D·A·Y

  Family

  This is how our moving day begins:

  “I should tell you something,” Hal says as we stir awake. “Your huge IKEA wardrobe?”

  I rub my eyes. “What about it?”

  “I, uh, I broke one of the mirrored doors.”

  “But I saw the doors last night. They’re leaning against a wall downstairs.”

  “No, you saw a healthy door. I turned the broken one so the glass faces the wall.”

  “You hid it?”

  “Not exactly. I just sort of . . . delayed its discovery.”

  “You’re telling me now? On moving day?”

  He hurries through the details. Four nights ago, hoping to shave a few minutes off the movers’ bill, Hal began hauling everything he could carry down to the first floor. But as he was maneuvering the towering mirrored door down the stairs, he slipped. The mirror canted out of his grasp, skied down the stairs, and slammed into a wall.

  “Why didn’t you tell me when this happened?”

  “You were at that talk in Orlando.”

  “And when I got home the demands of packing conveniently postponed this confession?”

  “You could say that.”

  I turn toward the ceiling with a loud sigh and feel him bracing for my reaction. There are so many possibilities. An exasperated What in heaven’s name were you thinking? A guilt-inducing Moving day disaster always finds me. Me! An icy I’m getting dressed now. But I discard all these options, because only one response truly encapsulates what I feel.

  “Well,” I say, turning back, “stuff happens.”

  He smiles. “Exactly.”

  “Maybe the broken door will get us off the hook. Maybe this’ll be a good move.”

  “Whatever that is.”

  “Hey, you can’t be the pessimist today. That’s my job. You need to be the optimist.”

  “On moving day, anything can happen.”

  Knowing just how true those words can be, we laugh, memories brimming in our eyes.

  “So no truck accidents?” I say.

  “This time,” he replies in a Beatle accent, “we’ll pass the audition.”

  He looks at me with hope, I respond with trepidation. And so our moving day begins.

  Stuff Happens. Almost anyone who’s U-Hauled, Mayflowered, or just lugged their worldly goods from one home to another is acquainted with this unwritten law of moving. The language is sometimes coarser when first imparted by a wizened sage, typically outside a dorm while a thunderstorm is pounding sage, siblings, and overpacked boxes into misery. Sometimes, too, it’s dismissed as cynicism, especially by those fortunate enough to have emerged sound of body and mind from a move. But for veteran movers like me, for whom Stuff sure did Happen on moving days past, all we can think when we wake up on moving day morning is: Please, God, spare me anything unexpected. Let no Stuff Happen again.

  Stripping the bed as Hal jumps in the shower, I think about my first exposure to this harsh wisdom. I was a month shy of the end of second grade, and although my family had relocated from a city apartment to a suburban house when I was a year old, this was essentially my first move. Indeed, until that day, enjoying what I now regard as the most carefree period in my childhood, I’d had little experience with change. Every day bloomed into a cheerful routine: a welcoming school, a neighborhood teeming with kids, a generous heap of freedom. Plus, I felt much like everyone else in our New Jersey town: Jewish, with a working father, stay-at-home mother, and kids close in age (Laura, the oldest, was nine, Max, the youngest, four, Beth and I in between). It never occurred to me that moving would bring the curtain down on this all.

  Perhaps if I hadn’t been seven, I might have acknowledged that in the bedroom across the hall from mine there was evidence that the unexpected does occur. But as a sibling, I didn’t view Beth’s disability as bringing anything unexpected to my family. Sure, I knew the story: right after my first birthday, when Beth was five weeks old, my mother noticed that my sister was not responding to anything, from other people’s smiles to her own hunger. Only after months of rising dread did my parents learn the diagnosis of mental retardation (or what would now be called an intellectual disability). Where had it come from? They didn’t know. What should we do? Consider an institution. But my father, who’d grown up in an orphanage, knew firsthand about the despair of institutional life, so my parents kept Beth at home. By seven, I’d certainly noticed that the families in schoolbooks and on TV and along our street included no children with disabilities, but since Beth was completely stitched into our everyday life, I didn’t find this omission notable, nor think about the unanticipated issues that disability brought into a family. I knew Beth had a disability—she was slow to speak, sit on her own, and move on from diapers. But she laughed boisterously, was sneaky and willful, and was fun to play with. My parents made clear that all of us were to protect her from the world’s cruelties, though this also seemed unremarkable. Families stand up for each other, I believed. That’s simply what families do.

  But Beth’s disability was not the only evidence of the unexpected that I might have seen in my family. Laura, with her fourth-grade eyes, was beginning to observe something else, which she would whisper about in our bedroom at night. Our mother was smiling less, struggling to keep up with the four of us, Beth’s extra needs, housework, and classes for a master’s degree. Some days she just started crying. Our father—the only father on our block who worked four jobs—seemed more delighted by us kids than his wife. But our parents never fought in front of us, so it was easy for me to refute what was already vivid to Laura. Easy to refute, but not ignore; one night I had a dream in which my father was stoking the fire in our fireplace when the flames leapt out and encircled him. As they rose higher I screamed at him to jump to safety, but he calmly replied, “I can’t, Rachie. I’m stuck.”

  Then my father got a job in Pennsylvania, four hours away. I was distantly aware that through the winter and spring, our house was being sold, a new house was being bought, movers were being hired, boxes were being packed. But I kept playing with my siblings and neighbors, especially my best friend, Naomi, a sweet blond girl who lived next door. I knew moving day was approaching, but with all the contentments of dandelions and bicycles and Naomi’s mother’s tuna fish and watching Let’s Make a Deal, moving felt as otherworldly as college.

  Then moving day arrived. A truck longer than our school hallway pulled up in front of the house. Naomi and I kept going from her lawn to ours, watching. Laura did the same with her best friend, Lucy, who lived across the street. A crowd of neighborhood playmates gathered as movers carted each room, piece by piece, into the truck. Then our parents called Laura, Beth, Max, and me inside to “say good-bye to the house,” and things started to get strange. Walking through the rooms was like seeing someone naked for the first time. The house was too large and inhospitable to be the house we knew. It even talked back, echoing our voices. A feeling of unease began engraving itself on our faces.

  My parents said it was time to go. Max and Beth sat in the middle of the station wagon while Laura and I settled in the rear, taking the seat that faced backward. All of our friends—most prominently Naomi and Lucy—planted themselves at the fender of our car. “Bye,” they said in a civilized way. “Write to us.” We giggled a
t how serious we were being. Then my father swung the door closed, and our loyal companions burst into tears. The car pulled away and Laura and I bawled our eyes out as the wailing group ran after us, reaching out their arms.

  We drove crying toward the rural Pennsylvania area where my father was helping start a community college, and that night we stayed in a hotel. Hotels had always been a delicious treat, but I couldn’t even doze off. Is this what moving was? Something that yanks you out of your place in the world? That carves moods no one understands and thoughts no one wants onto your brother’s and sisters’ faces—and deep inside of you? The next day, the movers carried our furniture into the new house. We stood taking in the neighborhood, a desolate subdivision of muddy lots, backhoes, and just-built split levels, and when no kids materialized, we knew that here we’d just have each other. The movers drove off, and when we went inside we noticed that our glass coffee table was missing. “Where is it?” I asked. “The movers dropped it,” my mother said, and my father added, “It broke.” “But we love that table!” Laura said, and Beth and Max and I agreed. “Stuff happens.” My father shrugged. “You have to expect that when you move.”

  With our first round of chores out of the way and half an hour until the movers arrive, Hal and I now have to deal with our pets.

  “Okay,” Hal says. “You hold Zeebee upstairs while I cage up Peach.”

  I herd the younger of our two cats into the room with the exercise machines, now unscrewed down to their skeletons. Black-and-white Zeebee, who has not been through a move, has been bounding around the cardboard playground springing up in the house. But orange-and-white Peach, a seasoned mover, has been hiding under the bed. This is why we’re separating them now, lest Peach’s distress at the sight of the carrier lead Zeebee to catch on and panic.

  I sit on the floor and stroke Zeebee, but I can see by the worried confusion in her eyes that our strategy is foundering. I wish I could reassure her that her imminent captivity is only for a trip to the vet’s so she won’t be underfoot during the move, and that when we pick her up tomorrow, she’ll have a new home with sunny windows that she’ll grow fond of. But I’m no pet communicator. Even if I were, how do you reassure anyone when you yourself are on edge?

  Of course, I remind myself, not all pets suffer at moves. Dogs in particular can be comforting or even adventurous, especially if they sense that their owners are eager to fold their cards on one round of their lives and try their hand at the next. Or so I learned on the second move of my life, which happened precipitously after the first.

  Laura and my dream had been right. Three months after my family moved to that friendless subdivision in Pennsylvania, my mother got a job as a librarian in the community college where my father was working. But it failed to usher in whatever spark she was lacking in her spirit, and his new job failed to extinguish his discontent with her. Two months later, he packed a suitcase, called Laura and me into their bedroom, and told us, as my mother sobbed on the bed, that he was moving out. We would still see him, but he needed to go. Would we be strong for Beth and Max? We promised. Then we walked him downstairs as our mother stayed in their room, hugged him with stunned desperation, and watched his car leave.

  But even as melancholy came down on each of us, snow on the frost that had never melted from the move, all was not grim. Laura was turning ten, and for her birthday, my mother said she could get a dog. So a month after my father moved out, my mother picked herself off the bed and drove us to a house where our new puppy lived with his dog family. We brought him home, and soon we became his family and he ours. A small black dog with tan paws, he was named Ringo, for the Beatle who wore rings. What uncompromising happiness he brought us. We ran around with him in the houses under construction. We slept with him in our beds. And when our mother decided she needed to lean on her own mother, we spent our first, and only, winter in that house driving back and forth the four hours to New Jersey, my mother seeking a respite from her pain, the four of us playing word games, Ringo entertaining us all.

  When we moved back to New Jersey at the end of that summer, we embraced the change. I’d made friends only at school, and wasn’t as close to them as to the few kids from our old house who wrote me letters, which, sadly, did not include my blond friend Naomi. A new home might mean new friends, and also that our mother might stop crying. Plus, my father, in a new job, was already living near the apartment we’d be renting. Maybe he’d even come back. We could be a family again. We cuddled Ringo, following the moving van, singing to the radio.

  Now Hal says, “I’m ready.” I open the door, we wrestle Zeebee into the carrier, and while Hal waits for the movers, I secure the cats at the vet.

  “They were due ten minutes ago,” Hal snaps, unearthing his inner pessimist.

  The dormant optimist in me replies, “I’m sure they’ll be here soon.”

  In the already sweltering heat, we stand on the front porch, waiting.

  “Well, if they’re not here at nine o’clock,” Hal says, “I’m calling the main office.”

  “A lot of our neighbors like them,” I say. “Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.”

  Were any neighbors outside—and there are not, because the rates for Dinkins & Sons are lowest on weekdays, so we picked a Monday for this move—Hal and I would appear to have swapped our roles. I suppose we have, but as he well knows, I’m saying these words as much to crank up my hope as to reassure him. Late movers were the next Stuff that Happened in my growing up, and optimism, however misplaced, was all I had left to cling to.

  The day we moved on from the apartment in New Jersey the movers came egregiously late—just as I was hoping they would. I was eleven by then, and for two years I’d hungered for my father’s return. At the same time, I knew that moving brought so much newness into a life that it almost seemed to sow new selves inside the original self. In the past two years, the four of us had acquired a darker humor and a mistrust of our own lovability, and my mother had begun wearing a hangdog face. So what if we were moving to a house on a pretty lake in another part of New Jersey? All I could think as we waited for the truck to show up that morning, then afternoon, then evening, was that if it never arrived, history would have only one move to reverse. Then there’d still be a chance to restore the personalities—and family—we’d been.

  Finally, after dinner, the movers showed. “How could you do this?” my mother wailed. We hit the road at ten, reached the new house at eleven, and at two a.m., the movers finished. My mother’s expression grew even more powerless. My hope was unmasked as naïveté.

  “You’re right,” I say to Hal on the porch. “We should call the home office now.”

  “Let’s not worry just yet. It’s only quarter to nine.”

  Cicadas thrum in the humidity. Our roles have switched again. We wait.

  “I’m Albert,” says the lead mover. “This is Jimmy and Melvin.”

  Tall and muscular, they have two moving trucks, which they parked in the center of the street, right beneath the leafy sycamores. I am glad that they’ll be shaded as they work.

  Albert, a Montel Williams look-alike, has a no-nonsense persistence that the ninety-three degrees and ninety-eight percent humidity do not shake. Trim, gangly Jimmy seems cut from the same cloth: efficient and serious. Melvin smiles—and jokes, and goofs off, and carries the lightest pieces of furniture, one per trip. Melvin’s clothes are the most colorful, and his eyes are lit with a sense of play. Under other circumstances, like an office cubicle we shared, I’d adore the jovial atmosphere in our foxhole. But now, when he’s manipulating the giant wooden desktop out of my study and saying, “Sure is a big desk,” I simply say, “Yeah,” suspecting that Hal would be irked if he knew I were chatting with someone on the clock.

  Of course, Melvin, who hasn’t the faintest idea about our history, can’t possibly know that Hal often found my inclination to talk with strangers disruptive in our first relationship, as brief exchanges with waiters, postal workers, even telemarketers
turned into animated social affairs, and he waited beside me, steaming. By the time we split up, I knew that when I was around him, judiciousness was called for. Even now, if Hal and I are out for a walk, I’ll try to assess his tolerance level before a nod to a stranger watering her lawn becomes an hour-long garden party. And today is undoubtedly not a tolerant day.

  “There’s always one who doesn’t keep up with the others,” Hal says, coming up to me when I’m standing in my study, watching the movers from the window.

  “Yeah, but Melvin lends comic relief.”

  “I’m not paying for them to take time doing their job.”

  I guess it’s wise that I’m keeping my mouth shut—this sure won’t be a good move if we start fighting. Though I wish Hal would be more zen about this, more like the Master Thich Nhat Hanh I have just become. He’s probably wishing I would be more vigilant, more the eagle-eyed worrier he has just become. It seems we have reversed ourselves yet again.

  Too bad we can’t trade our memories, too, I think, as Hal heads downstairs to keep an eye on the movers and I stay at the window. Until adulthood, he was a charter member of that elite group of people whose moves were harmless. He was familiar with the logistics; along with his parents and little sister, he moved three times around the suburbs of Washington, D.C. But each transition was unexceptional, and his family was stable, so he remembers nothing of those moves. The ones he does recall were on an ocean liner, at the start and finish of two years in London, where his father had gotten a job. On the way, fourteen-year-old Hal was repeatedly chided for unbecoming behavior at state dinners, but on the way back, at sixteen, he had a grand time running around the twisting passageways with his sister, infiltrating the first-class decks.