Building a Home with My Husband

by Rachel Simon

  At last I was offered a new job. I was not excited about becoming a secretary, but I accepted the offer, knowing that it would remove me from the void of purpose I felt at the law firm. There was, though, one significant problem: my soon-to-be employer was located in my neighborhood, so my morning walks down the Parkway were about to come to an end.

  For the two weeks before I left the law firm, I grieved all that I would lose: the distinguished museums, the towering trees, the man with the tender eyes. Though we’d never said more than hello, I had long since accepted that we’d never met before. He looked familiar, but there was no logical reason why. I did not even know his name.

  On the morning of my second to last day at the law firm, I stopped him. In the middle of the sidewalk, as crowds flowed past, I told him that tomorrow was my final day at that office, and I asked his name. Hal, he said. I told him mine. Then, mindful of our time sheets, we thanked each other for adding a lift to our mornings, and continued on our separate ways.

  The entire day I kicked myself. How could I not have asked for his phone number?

  The next morning—my final morning at that job—I timed everything carefully to ensure that I’d see him. I walked at just the right pace. I crossed early to the Hal-side of the Parkway.

  Then, just as I was passing the Art Museum, something happened that had never happened before: a car pulled up beside me. I looked over at the smiling woman inside. It was a friend from college! Exactly the sort of connection I’d been longing for seven months ago, but which now felt very much in the way. “Hey, want a ride?” she asked.

  Not wanting to be rude, I got into her car. But as she pulled into traffic and cruised down the Parkway—“I’ll take you right to your office”—I felt I was betraying myself. So I finally, and hastily, revealed my secret to another person. As she looked at me in mild horror, I let her know that today was my last opportunity to do more with this Hal than have a sweet little memory. She started filling me in on her life, but my eyes were on the sidewalks. At last, near the heart of the downtown, I saw my good morning man at the far end of a block. I seized her steering wheel and yelled out, “Stop here!” and almost stomped over the gear shift to the brake.

  I jumped out of her car, and she roared off. Hal approached from the far end of the block, a broad smile on his face. How will I ask him? I thought. How can I just say, Hey, who are you? As he neared he whipped out a little black book. “May I be so brazen as to take your phone number?” he asked.

  Now, after I return from Detroit, with Hal as my husband of four years, we stride into a home improvement store. I am still thinking about whether there is a grand architect who brought us together. Hal is still thinking about acceptable kitchen cabinets.

  “I can’t imagine that the cabinets here are sustainable,” I say.

  “They aren’t.”

  “Then why are we doing this?”

  “You were right when you said we should go shopping. We just can’t wait.”

  Still, he winces as we walk around the displays. Not only will these cabinets off-gas formaldehyde, and not only is the wood probably from a clear-cut forest, but they’re ugly. Also, when Hal opens some drawers to see how they’re constructed, he says, “Man, this is really cheap. It’s butt-jointed, see? It won’t last. Also, the hinges are weak.” He pulls out a shelf. “Look at this—the underside is unfinished. That’s really the sign of junk.”

  “All of these cabinets? Even the ones Dan recommended?”

  “Yup. Plus, they’re all costing way more than they’re worth.”

  I lean against a display stove. “It would be stupid to buy these.”

  “But the Woodstalk’s been discontinued.”

  “Was that the only option?”

  “There is a similar product, Primeboard. But look how long it took to set everything up with the Woodstalk. There’s not enough time for all that before Dan needs the cabinets.”

  “So we buy something that we consider inadequate—and that doesn’t have your careful, made-for-us design—just to accommodate the calendar?”

  “It’s that, or we finish the house without kitchen cabinets.”

  “So?”

  He pauses. “So?”

  I realize from the look on his face that I’m saying something completely outlandish. I guess it’s almost as weird as going to an airport early just to stand in a pedestrian tunnel, or finding your husband in a mass of strangers on a city street.

  I say, “So what if we finish the house without the kitchen cabinets?”

  He blinks, then smiles. “As long as we have a place for the dishes, a cardboard box or something, then the cabinets could be installed later. We could do it.”

  “Then we could use your design,” I say.

  “That would be so nice,” he says, his eyes gleaming.

  “Then let’s,” I say.

  “I’ll call Dan in the morning and tell him to take the cabinets out of the job.”

  We walk outside, holding hands, swinging our arms. The sun is setting, and Hal’s inventing some pirate skit on the spot, and I’m laughing at his bad jokes. It’s the kind of love I longed for in the house with the shag carpet. The kind of love that, in all those years of watching him sink into despair about his career, I never believed we could have. The kind of love that makes me wonder if there is a Listener of Prayers.

  The next day my sister Laura says, “I can’t think of anyone who would agree to move into an unfinished kitchen and use cardboard boxes for their dishes.”

  “It’s not really a big deal,” I say.

  “It would be to most people. You two are lucky you found each other,” she says.

  I am just about to leave the tunnel for my plane when I see her: a woman, positioned hundreds of feet away, her back to a column. She is fiftyish and wearing an opal pendant and earth-toned scarf, and she, too, is doing nothing but watching the colorful cascade. Thousands of pedestrians have passed through the tunnel in the time I had been here, and except for a few snaps of cell phone cameras, not one person has stopped. But she has settled in.

  It’s too late for me to approach her—I have a plane to catch. I grab my carry-on and roll it toward the escalator, and as I do, I notice that she is hoisting her bag to her shoulder and moving toward the escalator as well. I step on, and then she gets right behind me, and as we begin our ascent, I turn. She isn’t staring into space, or preoccupied with an iPod. She’s looking at me.

  Should I say something? Should I find out if we were in the trance together?

  I gesture behind us to the tunnel. “Isn’t it beautiful?” I say.

  “I love it,” she says—the words I’ve wanted to hear. “I travel through this airport just to see this tunnel. I think it’s the most extraordinary work of public art that I’ve ever seen.”

  We are beaming now, strangers brought together by design.

  I say, “I’ve been watching, and I’m amazed that no one else seems to notice.”

  “I saw you when I came down. I went back to the other end of the tunnel and returned, just to see if you were still there, and when you were, and you were watching so intently and happily, I knew you had to be a kindred spirit. So I was waiting to talk to you.”

  “I’m so glad.”

  “It’s nice to know you’re not alone,” she says. “I think that’s important. To know someone else is looking, too.”

  After Hal and I return to the rented house from the store, aglow in a feeling of closeness, I decide to take the risk. I say, “Can I show you something online?”

  As we sit at my desk and I type possibilities into Google, he says, “You probably want my definition, right? Of design?”

  “Sure,” I say, clicking on Web sites.

  “It’s matching to human need or desire the function of objects and the means of production, and doing so as economically and elegantly as possible. For instance, the design for a drinking glass is about fitting it to a hand and having it make sense for manufacturing and making
sure it’s durable and making it pleasing to the eye and taking the production of the materials and end use of the product into account. All of that’s important, though each designer might emphasize one of those aspects over the others.”

  I look from the screen to him. “Users might emphasize one aspect, too, right? Like, you might drink from that glass while thinking of whether it was made from recycled materials. I might think about my friends with mobility impairments and if they’d find the surface slippery.”

  “Right. But ideally, the designer wants all the aspects of design to work, even the ones the user isn’t noticing.”

  “It could go the other way, too. The user might perceive some aspect of design that isn’t actually there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I sit back. “It’s very romantic, thinking that you and I were somehow brought together by a grand architect in the sky. A lot of people who hear the story think they see divine intent. I often do, too. I mean, it was such a miracle. But at the same time, it’s a mystery. How much does design rule our lives, and how much do we design our lives ourselves?”

  “It’s impossible to answer.”

  “I know.”

  “Also, there’s evidence that our meeting might have been influenced by a human kind of design, the kind you can measure. Look at the field of environmental behavioral research.”

  “What’s that?”

  “People like Jane Jacobs and William Whyte actually watched interactions in public spaces and discovered basic principles of how the built environment affects social interaction. Like Whyte found that on city sidewalks, people tend to stop and talk in the busiest places.”

  “The way we met on the catwalk.”

  “Yes. They also looked at the metrics of human interaction—the distance where you can clearly see another person. That’s why, say, four hundred feet is the ideal width of a plaza.”

  That’s about how far away, I think, the woman in the tunnel was when she spotted me.

  I reach for the mouse and scroll down the screen. “But where’s the mystery in that?”

  “Just because our behavior might have been influenced by the built environment so we would meet didn’t mean that we’d be right for each other.”

  “Ah. So there’s the mystery.”

  “There’s nineteen years of mystery.”

  “What kind of design would you call that?”

  “Really bad design.”

  “Really stinking bad design,” I add.

  I finally find a link and click. The screen fills with a video of the tunnel in the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. It actually has a name: the McNamara Tunnel. I say, “This is where I was today.”

  I flick off the desk lamp, and in my dark study, the colors flash onto Hal’s face. He says nothing for a long time, so, bracing myself, I say, “I know, I know, it uses a ton of energy.”

  “I’m sure it does,” he says. “But it’s also beautiful.”

  I almost fall off my chair. “You think so?”

  “If we can’t build a few things like this, it would really be a shame.”

  I turn to him and smile.

  “Maybe someday we should fly to Detroit,” he says, “just to visit the airport together.”

  That night, lying in bed, gazing at my husband as he sleeps, I ask myself again about how kindred spirits come together. Do we just observe something in each other—tenderness in the eyes, an attraction to the same sights—and then say hello? I’d like to think that’s all it is, but it seems there must be more to it, because if either person feels encumbered by disapproval, or constrained by a schedule, or too mistrustful to think, Hey, who are you?, greetings will not be offered, or heard. So what gets us to recognize and speak to others who rhyme with us? Hal refuses to speculate one way or another. I have spent a lifetime unable to make up my mind.

  Though tonight, as I think back to the woman in the SUV, and the woman in the airport, and so many dream-sharing strangers I have met in so many unlikely ways over the course of my life, I wonder: do I actually need to make up my mind? I might wish I could. But the fact that each of us, no matter who we are, can find kindred spirits in the vastness of humanity—and therefore know that none of us really is alone in the universe—feels almost as important. It’s not a fact that answers my question. It’s an answer to a different question. But on days when I long to know if anyone is listening, it might be the answer that I need.

  Hal smiles in his sleep, and I remember him walking toward me on that spring morning, now so long ago. There we were, the two of us, drunk from the taste of something larger. I will probably never decide what that something was. I might never really understand the forces that orchestrate love. But as I look at his face in the dark of our bedroom, starlight pouring through the window, I know that, no matter how lonely I might get, no matter how meaningless my life might feel, there is always one thing I can do. Just keep paying attention. Look around. See all that you don’t let yourself see.

  I·N·S·U·L·A·T·I·O·N A·N·D· W·A·L·L·S

  Mothers

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Hal says as we’re out for a walk in early November. “I’m going to build a wall.”

  “A what?”

  “Not a wall wall.”

  “What other kind of wall is there?”

  “You’re thinking of exterior walls and interior walls, like our masonry outside, or the plaster finishes inside. What I’m talking about is”—he clears his throat—“our garden wall.”

  “We don’t have a garden wall.”

  “We will. In the backyard. A nice dry stone retaining wall.”

  “May I kindly suggest that you tack this nice stone wall onto Dan’s schedule?”

  “May I kindly ask you to remember how unforeseen conditions have added to our costs?”

  “And when are you planning to build this nice garden wall?”

  “Any day now.”

  “But it’s November. It might be warm today, but it rains in November. It gets cold.”

  “So I’ll get wet and cold. Look, farmers in this part of the country built walls for centuries, using stones from their fields. Their walls ran the length of huge properties.”

  “Farmers,” I say under my breath, “no doubt recruited their wives.”

  “This farmer can do it himself.”

  “It’ll be backbreaking work. I’m sure you’ll need help.”

  “The Buddha does say that there is an interdependence of all things.”

  “Yeah, well, what did he say to depend on when you don’t have stones in your field?”

  “I went to a quarry. They’ll be delivering three and a half tons right to our front curb.”

  “Excuse me, but it takes serious strength to lay a stone wall. How much do you weigh?”

  “One thirty-five.”

  “When’s the last time you buffed up those pecs in a weight room?”

  “Ye of little faith.”

  “And I’m even more of a weakling than you. This’ll be an interesting episode,” I say.

  It’s also going to happen concurrently with two other episodes: the next phase of the renovation, when we’ll be getting insulation, windows, and drywall; and, far more notably, the moment when I become definite that my mother has crossed into a terrible frontier. I realize it seemed as if I were facing a similar passage when Theresa was awaiting her biopsy results, but when it was benign, we were able to turn back. This time, despite the word the doctors have not yet said, I feel certain that there will be no retreat.

  When Hal and I return from our walk, I plunge right in and dial my sister Laura. Days away from flying across the country to visit our mother so one of us can see the situation firsthand, Laura has been far more decisive about what clothing she should pack than what emotions she will need. We know it would be wise if she could wedge patience, kindness, and acceptance into her suitcase, though we’re aware that space will be limited, given the well-worn disappointments and annoyances
, and so many still-in-the-package fears.

  As soon as Laura picks up, she says, “She keeps asking why I’m bothering to come.”

  “She knows why you’re coming.”

  “As far as she and Gordon are concerned, nothing’s wrong.”

  “Denial,” we both say at the same moment, and then we sigh in stereo.

  Last spring, our mother, who we’ve long called by her first name, Rosalie, began to behave differently. For lack of a better word, and for fear of what, for a retiree of seventy-one, that word would almost certainly be, we called her new behavior “forgetful,” though not because we’d never thought that it—that years-long, progressively-mind-obliterating It—could happen in our family. We’d always known that brain cells could be degenerating inside a relative for ages before symptoms revealed themselves, but we’d assumed that the relative would be our father, since his father had become, as we used to put it, “senile.” So actually saying the word would be to admit we’d been duped by an awful stage trick: look while I juggle the green balls over here, the magician says, thus deceiving us into ignoring the orange balls over there.

  Laura and I, the two siblings who’d maintained the most contact with Rosalie, wanted to see the situation for ourselves. But Rosalie and Gordon live in Florida, a thousand miles from me and twice as far from Laura in Arizona. With my speaking commitments and the burgeoning costs of our renovation, Laura’s work schedule, and Rosalie and Gordon sticking to their usual long vacations, the opportunity for a visit, even if only from one of us, even if only for a weekend, hasn’t arrived until now.