by Rachel Simon
But a few years ago, the pattern changed. It became evident that Laura was no longer taking offense as easily as she once had, nor did she seem to hold on to anger toward me. When I eventually asked what happened, she admitted that she’d felt so lonely and burdened and unattended to in her childhood that she’d long had difficulty trusting anyone in the family. She told me, too, about a few incidents from our early adulthood that loomed large for her but that I had forgotten, moments when I had let her down, thus reinforcing her mistrust. She’d never said anything at those times, so neither the apology that might have lightened her pain nor the self-reflection that she might have inspired in me came to pass. Ten years went by. Twenty-five. Finally, she dated some men who, for all their flaws, loved her with the wholeheartedness she deserved. She also saw a counselor who offered her specific guidance. And she began to value those cards and calls from me. Little by little, her mistrust ceased, which in turn made the sparks between us cease. We began speaking more often—to offer support, give each other reality checks about our family, celebrate each other’s victories, comfort each other’s pain. Whatever liking we’d lost over the years fell back into step with our love.
Max, on the other hand, has become inscrutable to me. Sometime, maybe after he got married, maybe after his children were born, he grew inconsistent about responding to my calls and e-mails. He seemed disinclined to see me, too, and the few times we did felt awkward. I tried to understand what had soured him, but he insisted that nothing had. For several years now, I almost never hear from him, and since he seldom responds to my efforts, it appears that our relationship is simply fading to black. I agonize over this. Did I do something that was searing to him, but that, as with Laura, I’ve forgotten? Is his pain from the family just so great that he cannot bear to be around us, or at least me? Does his silence have nothing to do with me? “You can’t know,” Hal has said more times than I can enumerate. “Any more than you could with Laura, or Beth, or Jesse. Until he tells you, you just can’t know.”
I don’t want to tell Ginny about Max—it hurts too much. So I’m even gladder than I would otherwise be when Eliza interrupts our conversation to show us her artwork, and then sing us a song, and then demonstrate her gymnastic moves on the floor. By the time I remember that I’m avoiding saying something, I’m crossing the street back to the rented house.
I stop at my curb and look at the houses along this cul-de-sac, some with neighbors who open their hearts and lives to me, some with neighbors who appear not to care that they live beside other people. If actual brothers and sisters can’t sustain a relationship, and neighbors fail to value harmony, then what’s the likelihood that the workers in our house will get along? The sky hovers over the street, cloud-smudged and gray, and I let myself inside with no answer.
Then one afternoon in mid-October, Hal and I go for a walk, and a very different kind of surprise occurs.
In a way, the walk itself is a surprise. Despite the effort we made at the beginning of the roughing-in to be fully back with each other, Hal and I are finding it harder and harder to spend time together. I’m traveling, and he’s working full-time at his job, then going to meetings with Henry and Dan, or doing drawings for the kitchen cabinets, or researching online options for energy-efficient dishwashers. So this walk would have been notable anyway, simply because we’ve been taking so few.
Perhaps that’s why, when we leave the subdivision, we head in a direction I haven’t taken before. Because this part of the state is very established, we expect to see only fifty-year-old subdivisions, so we’re taken aback when our wanderings lead us to a tucked-away plot of land where new houses are under construction. Unlike the houses going up when I was eight, these are close to finished. In fact, as we stroll along, we notice that a few are already occupied. One door is ajar, and when we glance toward it, we see two little girls framed by the storm door, playing in the front hallway. They’re seated on some oversized balls and are bouncing around, so caught up with each other that they don’t see us.
What a funny switch. Here I am, out in the construction, looking inside to children. I flash again to the image of myself with my siblings when we were little, playing around the just-framed houses. It makes me smile, remembering that time. Even if we’ve all grown up now, and might never play together again.
“So,” I say to Hal, “have we hit Problem Number Three yet? People not getting along?”
He smiles. “Actually, I think we’ve just had a shining example of people getting along splendidly.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Do you remember that my drawings weren’t highly detailed about the ductwork? Well, everybody just came together so we could figure out what to do. The mechanical contractor had ideas about the ductwork, so did the engineers I brought in; Dan brought ideas about how to frame things, so did I. And we’re making it happen.”
“Wow. What did you do right?”
“We persevered.”
“Is that it?”
He thinks about this. “We were imaginative. We were flexible. Everyone pitched in. We trusted that we could work it out, and then we put our attention to doing so.”
“Do you think that’s what it takes for people to get along?”
He smiles. “I’m not sure about that. But it gets a house built.”
We laugh as we look back at the kids in the doorway. They’re peering out at us now, and when they see us looking, they wave. I wish I could share this insight with them. I wish I could tell them that when they get older and fight and misunderstand and grow apart, they should remember this moment, when a silly older woman on their sidewalk told them a small story about what it takes for people to get along. Then they might be spared a bus ride, or twenty-five years of tense conversation, or a slow fade to black. But I can only smile across the sidewalk, and the construction, and the generations, and raise my hand and wave back.
“Oh, come on,” I say to Hal at sunset on Halloween. “It’ll be fun.”
“But who’ll hand out the candy at our house?”
“Ginny says the tradition here is that you just leave it in a bowl on your front porch, turn on your light, and then kids know to take it when they come to the door.”
When the sun descends beyond the horizon, we come onto our lawn. From throughout our subdivision, children and parents have gathered at Ginny’s house, and as the children, all in costume, surge down the street, we join the adults meandering behind. “Do we go to every house?” I ask, knowing that I did when I was a child. Ginny says, “Only houses where the light is on. That’s the sign that they want to participate.” That accounts for about half of the neighborhood, Hal and I notice. We notice too that adults don’t accompany their children to the doors unless it’s to sneak a look inside, usually to see household improvements. Were we on Teacher’s Lane tonight, handing out candy in the big block party that our neighborhood makes of Halloween, and the chaperoning parents wanted to peek inside our house, they still wouldn’t see much besides wires and framing—but soon that will change, Hal says now, because the roughing-in is just about behind us. Hearing this, I find that I’m a little sad that the job is moving along, because the adults flanking us are chatting about their own homes, and families, and careers, and hopes—and I feel so welcomed into the fold that I realize I will miss them when our house is done. From what I hear as we traipse from door to door, the neighbors here are caring toward the children and respectful toward one another. It is, despite the two difficult households, a lovely place to live. Hal and I look at each other and squeeze our hands together. We like being in this community. We like keeping the lights on.
After we complete the subdivision, we gather on a neighbor’s lawn, where she’s set up chairs and is roasting marshmallows over a portable fireplace. The children, using the front porch as a stage, dance and sing as if in a variety show. Everyone laughs and eats and applauds, and I think, Yes, there have been periods in my life when I’ve been apart from each one of my siblings, a
nd only when there has been mutual perseverance, imagination, and flexibility have we come together again. And yes, the human condition with all its nonsense might never be easy to understand, no matter the job site or neighborhood or bloodline. But there are also playful, enveloping moments like these, moments that happen when we aren’t expecting them, with people who share no roof with us besides the ceiling of the sky. Then even if we’re hurting from losing someone we love, we might remember belonging. I do now, standing here with Ginny and Eliza and so many other new neighbors, the cold air between us growing warm with laughter, the darkness of the night feeling luminous with hope.
K·I·T·C·H·E·N C·A·B·I·N·E·T·S
Kindred Spirits
“How would you define design?” I ask Hal on my cell phone.
“What kind of question is that?” he says with a laugh.
“Humor me.”
“Just look it up.”
“I’m in a car in Detroit on my way to the airport.” I glance at the board member who’s driving me, then back at the highway. “I can’t look it up.”
“Why are you asking?”
“Because when I told someone after my talk last night that we’re renovating our house and you’re the architect, she asked about your design sensibility. I didn’t have an answer, aside from you being into sustainable design. And it made me wonder what ‘design’ really means.”
“That’s it? You called me at eight thirty in the morning to ask that?”
“Well, no. Because then the conversation turned around to the story of how we met—”
“—a-huh, I get it now—”
“—and after I told her about how we were total strangers—”
“—and ended up getting married—”
“Right. So of course she got a starry look in her eyes, and she said, ‘It kind of makes you wonder whether life’s all one big design.’ ”
“The implication being that there’s some Grand Pooh-Bah designing the universe?”
“Sure. And, well, what I’m wondering is: what do you think?”
“I think we need to deal with the kitchen cabinets.”
“That’s not the right answer. That’s not any answer.”
“But that’s the question. Will you be ready to go to the store to look at kitchen cabinets when you get home tonight?”
“Can’t you just wax poetic for one tiny minute about design?”
“I can define design, but as for how we met, I’m perfectly content not to ascribe it to some master planner in the sky. But we need to pick out the kitchen cabinets.”
“Isn’t the roughing-in just ending? We’re not ready to put in the cabinets now, are we?”
“No. We need to order them now.”
My silent and accommodating driver indicates that we’re nearing the airport.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll go to the store under one condition. Tell me how you define design.”
“Blackmail.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, your scheme has an inherent flaw. I can’t answer you now—I’m at work.”
“I’m patient. A Buddhist blackmailer, you might even say. Answer me tonight.”
“Aye, aye, Cap’n Rachie. Your crew’ll be reporting for duty, unless we mutiny first.”
Laughing, I hang up. My kindly companion gives me a weird look.
But I can deal with weird looks, I think as I check in at the airport. I might have received an even weirder one if I’d disclosed why I’d asked to get here so far ahead of my flight. I didn’t even reveal it to Hal, though he’d have understood the merits of allowing extra time to savor an architectural experience. But given Hal’s design sensibility, why say anything that would get him groaning about gigantic carbon footprints?
It takes me a moment to get my bearings after I pass through security. Then I see the crowd surging toward a down escalator. I remember it from yesterday, when I flew into this airport and found myself ushered into an extraordinary place. This is why I’ve arrived early today—so I could see it again without being in a rush. I grab the handrail, and begin my descent.
Within moments, I am enveloped by the same electronic melody I heard yesterday, which is sailing up the escalator to greet me. Soon I see the same colored lights reflecting on the polished floor. Then I reach the ground, and the eight-hundred-foot-long pedestrian tunnel that dazzled me yesterday becomes visible again, and as I step off the escalator, I am in this phantasmagoric world once more, with LED displays of violet and magenta and emerald and turquoise pulsing down the curved glass walls, vaulting across the rounded ceiling, and encasing, like the body of a wildly oversized airplane, the hundreds of travelers who are walking within.
The trance that overcame me before, but that I’d had to wrest myself out of so I could get to my talk, returns. Now, with a premeditated half hour in which to indulge myself, I back up against a column, away from the river of strangers, and do something I never would have contemplated before knowing Hal: I surrender myself to a physical space.
Entering a designed world, I learned from him, can be like entering another person’s dream. I did not realize this as a child, when I mounted the steps to my schoolhouse or passed through revolving doors into my father’s office building. I was simply going somewhere to do something. Yet I was also aware, on a level deeper than my own heartbeat, that when my eighth grade class passed into the shadowed embrace of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., I felt possessed by a word-stilling reverence for human dignity. When my mother took us to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City and we spiraled down the long ramp leading from the sky-brightened ceiling to the ground, I felt unbound from gravity and expectation. But not until Hal took me by the hand and walked me through the streets of Philadelphia did I permit myself to acknowledge the mood-sculpting, thought-revising power of design.
I was twenty-three when my awareness began. My new boyfriend Hal was walking me to dinner, both of us unspooling stories about our lives, when—“Oh,” he said, as a modern-looking house came into view. “I just love this place.” We stopped and looked, and I did not understand. Weren’t buildings just old, which meant they were attractive, or modern, which meant they were ugly? But something about him—perhaps the same mysterious something that had drawn me to this one person out of so many—made me feel respected and safe. So when he prodded to find out what I thought, I mumbled that I didn’t think anything, because, though I’d passed that house before, I hadn’t actually seen it. We walked on, and I realized aloud that most of the towns where I’d grown up had consisted of houses so dull and homogeneous, and public planning so senseless or nonexistent, that I’d been living in a state of not-seeing. Could he tell me what appealed to him about that building? Or the others that had taken his breath away in the blocks we’d traversed since? Evincing none of the condescension that I’d previously accepted as a requisite of romance, Hal pointed to buildings around us, describing such elements as scale, proportion, materials, relation to the site, ornament, and features for which I’d never known there were words: pilasters, dormers, corbels, turrets, cupolas, cornices, gables, Flemish bond, Palladian windows. As we moved on to the next block, and the next dinner, and the next week, we prowled around historic neighborhoods like Society Hill and Rittenhouse Square, entered the structures of famous architects like Frank Furness and landmark achievements like the PSFS Building, and marveled at the success of William Penn’s eighteenth-century plan for the city. Gazing at what I’d ignored, I now admired more than I’d known existed. So we kept walking, month after month, my hand fitting perfectly into his, Eve learning from Adam about the garden.
Thus did I come to understand that Henry Bacon had designed the Lincoln Memorial precisely to usher me into a dream of nobility and honor. Frank Lloyd Wright had designed the Guggenheim to create, as he once wrote, “an uninterrupted, beautiful symphony such as never existed in the World of Art before.” Even the basic school, office building—or house—had evolved into desig
ns that fostered a sense of order and authority, or austerity and commerce, or domesticity and privacy. Although the creators of every space I’d ever encountered hadn’t known me, and although often their ideas were constrained by economic reality, their work on what I now knew to call “the built environment” was intended to evoke a certain reaction in me, regardless of whether I was just going about my business in a state of oblivion.
Yet even the basic idea that I lived within the creations of others took another seven years to stick, and then it hit me in a single moment. I was thirty then, and on a month’s retreat at an artist’s colony. Coincidentally, Hal’s first professional position had been at this same artist’s colony ten years earlier, where he’d redesigned a barn for an artist’s studio, and, despite his inexperience, supervised an unskilled construction crew (“of louts and criminals,” he added). I’d obtained no more detail from him before I boarded the train for my stay at the colony, where I spent the next two weeks writing, not being conscious of the built environment, even to register a frequent annoyance: every time I reached for a particular door handle in the residence hall, I’d lose my grip. Why am I such an oaf? I would unconsciously castigate myself. I can’t even open a door! Then Hal drove down from Philadelphia for a visit. I ran from my studio to the residential hall and threw myself into his arms. We walked toward my room, quickly catching up, and soon reached the door with the hateful handle. Hal watched as I lifted and, of course, lost my grip. And as I cursed myself, Hal muttered, “I can’t believe they still haven’t fixed this.” “What are you talking about?” I asked. He said, “They installed that darned door handle upside down.” I looked. He was right. Here I’d been blaming myself for my own clumsiness instead of considering that I was in a space created by someone, and built by others—whose goals, or execution, might sometimes be, as he put it, “really stinking bad.” Pay attention, I told myself then. Look around. See all that you don’t let yourself see.