by Rachel Simon
“To Jackson,” he says, making a toast with bottled juice.
“To bed,” I say, clinking his juice against mine.
We drain our libations and he howls, “Ow-wow-wow-owf!” and we slump triumphantly against each other.
“Ta da,” Hal says, throwing open the front door of the old house.
“Oh my goodness.”
It is two weeks later, and I am delivered into a dazzling new world. The insulation is in, the drywall installed, and sunlight pours through glorious new floor-to-ceiling windows in the back of the house, setting the rooms aglow. As I walk from one room to the next—the bones and veins of the walls at last covered by skin—I feel enchanted. I’m finally in a house. My house. A house that will protect me, and inspire my pride. Most of the windows, Hal says as I enter my study, are now new, with the rest to be installed in the next few days. Soon the hardwood floor throughout the house will get sanded and sealed; appliances, fixtures, linoleum, and tile will appear in the bathroom and kitchen; trim and doors will return; and paint will adorn our walls. I turn around and around, envisioning a real room. Thanksgiving is four days off; by Christmas, he says, we should be back in. Yesterday our landlady, Natalie, found a buyer for the rented house. Tonight Hal and I will finish selecting our paint colors. So the timing is perfect. I feel myself rise as high as the walls, higher than the ceiling—finally savoring the pleasure of change.
But we haven’t come to the house just so I could see the walls and the windows.
We go outside, and I help Hal lift the potted baby tree out of the car. It’s called a fringe tree because of its feathery blossoms, though since it’s late November, its blossoms are long gone and its leaves have browned. “People sometimes think their fringe trees have died over the winter,” Hal told me when we went to the nursery this morning, “because it’s always the last to leaf.” At five feet tall—the same height as my mother, the same height as me—our baby fringe tree is heavy, and together we carry it down the alley to the backyard. Then we dig a hole beyond the new stone wall. “It might grow as tall as twenty-five feet,” Hal says, lowering the tree into the hole. I watch it go in, shaking my head at the metamorphosis. “It’s amazing,” I say over and over. “It’s a real backyard now.” Then I remember something my mother told me long ago, when we looked out my childhood window at the tall trees in our backyard, and she said that it wasn’t our family who had planted them. “You don’t plant a tree for yourself. You plant it for the people who come later. Someone else did this for us.” Hal presses the soles of his shoes on the dirt around the tree, tamping down the soil. We step back and admire our new tree, our new wall, our new yard, our new windows, our new house. Tonight, a fraction of an inch of tree growth from now, I will get a call from Laura, and the news will be no better. My mother will surely be gone in twenty-five feet. Hal and I might be, too. But I think I can already feel them now: the tree’s roots reaching deep inside the soil, opening their grasp toward the future.
THE JOB STOPS
D·I·S·A·S·T·E·R
Students
We are not in the house when the explosion occurs.
It is a windy, slate-colored November afternoon, two days before Thanksgiving, two days after we planted our tree. On site are a couple of HVAC mechanics, who are installing our new heating and air-conditioning system in the basement; a team of drywallers, who are taping up seams on the second floor; and a carpenter, who has just returned from lunch. There is no reason to think that our job will not continue flowing toward completion—until, at an indeterminate moment before 12:20 p.m., someone opens a valve on the natural gas line.
Days will pass before we ferret out the details. All we know at first is that once the valve has been opened, the gas line—a slender silver pipe running behind the new drywall in the kitchen, which possesses an end point that resembles the sneering face of a snake—begins to leak natural gas. For a period that might last minutes or mere seconds, gas climbs up the western wall, prowling skyward under the house’s skin, then rolls across the kitchen ceiling, and then descends within the soffits on the eastern wall, unfurling along the entire length of the dining room-kitchen. But gas, a wily intruder, cannot be contained by anything porous, so it escapes the sheathing of the drywall through the minute cracks common in all walls and enters the oxygen-rich room. Natural gas reaches an explosive mixture when it becomes five to fifteen percent of the air, and as the gas envelopes the room, it achieves that mixture. The only missing element is a source of ignition.
And at 12:20 p.m., one of the mechanics prepares to solder a line in the basement. He pulls out his welding torch, and turns it on.
“It felt like an earthquake!” a neighbor tells us later.
Susan and Jim add, “Our dishes fell right off the wall!”
The lady with the wheelbarrow says, “I saw a guy blow out of the back of the house!”
The explosion tears the new drywall off the walls and ceiling in the dining room-kitchen, shoving the eastern wall until it bulges into the alley. It bursts through the new floor-to-ceiling windows along the back wall. It ruptures the wooden floor above, propelling huge nails backward into my new study. As it continues on, ripping up drywall and plaster on the second floor, it sends concussive waves across the entire house, hurling cracks through the front rooms, shattering windows too young to have lived a week, rattling masonry outside. In the backyard, our baby tree gets buried beneath debris.
Soon fire trucks are screaming toward the house. Evacuation orders are put in place. The street is roped off. The mechanics are whisked to the hospital.
Two hours later and a hundred miles away, I’m running across a concrete plaza, hurrying toward the high-rise where I have a meeting five minutes from now, when I pull out my cell phone to check my voice mail. “It’s me,” Hal says, his voice distressed. I stop moving the instant I hear his tone and as wind lashes through my hair I listen to him say, “There was a gas explosion at our house.” I stop breathing. “Nobody’s clear on what happened. I don’t know how much damage has been done. I’m headed over there now.”
Desperately, I dial him, but like me, Hal keeps his cell phone off when he’s not making a call. I’m dumped into his voice mail, where I beg him to call me right away.
I hang up and look at the gloom-stained sky. The timing could not be worse. I spin toward the parking garage, debating a leap back to my car, then I one-eighty back toward the high-rise. Then I just reel around and around, a weather vane in a tornado. How can I decide what to do? In a matter of seconds, our carefully set plans have been swept off the table, taking rhyme and reason tumbling down with them.
Go home now. How can I not fly back down the highway to Delaware, screech up to the remains—whatever they are; Hal didn’t say—of our house, rocket out of my car, throw my arms around my husband, console him as he sobs about the collapse of his proud job, and then weep into his arms if he tells me that anyone was hurt?
Go to this meeting. And how can I not do that? Beth is bouncing on a bus seat only blocks from here, telling the driver that she’s having dinner with me tonight. That’s why I’m in this plaza in the first place: I’m meeting Beth’s new case manager, after which I’ll pick her up for dinner. I can’t let her down. Yet I can’t let my husband down. I thought I’d worked out the balance between all of my loyalties ages ago. I thought I’d mastered how to make rudimentary decisions like these with aplomb. But both choices are right, and everything else has gone wrong. Isn’t there someone out there who can tell me what to do?
Finally I conclude that since I can’t reach Hal or Beth, I should just carry on with the responsibility in front of me. So I pivot toward the building, set one foot in front of the other, and get through that meeting, then dinner. It’s hard to keep this disaster sealed inside myself, but I have no desire to introduce worry into my sister’s life, especially since my mind is its own scramble. What could have gone wrong? How much of our house was destroyed? Was anyone injured? Where will we find
the bars of gold to cover the damages? And—oh, no—Natalie’s house just sold! We told her we’d be out by Christmas! How can we wedge ourselves, two cats, and a houseful of boxes inside two compact cars? Will we be homeless? Has this torpedoed Hal’s Buddhist serenity? Sense of humor? His deliciously infectious joie de vivre?
By the time I take Beth home, my panic is full-throttle. I drive down dark roads, sticking to my arrangement to spend the night at my father’s, pulling over every two minutes to try Hal. But he doesn’t pick up. So I just drive, looking out to bare trees. In the gust of the night they are flailing about, a class crying out for a teacher.
As soon as I reach my father’s, Theresa says, “Hal just called. His cell phone is on.”
I run to a room where I can be alone.
When he picks up, he tells me that he’s walking the streets of Philadelphia. Although he sometimes jaunts the twenty-five miles north to that city, he never does so spontaneously, and never on cold nights. His voice sounds pained, and compassion aches in my chest.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Well, we still have a house.”
“How much of a house?”
“The rooms are all there. But the more I looked, the more damage I could see.”
“Oh, no.”
“But no one was seriously hurt. The mechanics had singed hair, but the hospital’s released them.”
“Thank goodness.”
“There’s a lot to be thankful for. The first thing Dan said when I got to the house was ‘I’m going to take care of everything. This is all on me.’ ”
“What did he mean?”
“He’s fully insured, and he said he’ll make up anything they don’t cover.”
“That’s incredible. That’s a huge reason for gratitude.”
“We’re lucky.”
“But what’s going to happen to the house?”
“We don’t know how bad the damage is, and the job’s shut down until we do. Tomorrow the insurance adjuster and a structural engineer are coming by to make decisions.”
“We were going to move back in less than four weeks.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“But Natalie’s house just sold.”
“Well, until we know more, let’s not worry. Let’s just say we’re in limbo.”
“How did this happen? Who’s responsible?”
“The fire marshal will be investigating. We just have to wait to learn more.”
He sounds matter-of-fact, but his voice seems small—so small, I have no interest in saying that the anxiety I’ve felt throughout the renovation now seems like premonition. He knows that anyway, and really, only one thing matters now: I say, “I’m worried about you.”
“You know, there’re some miracles about all this,” he says, conspicuously taking the focus off himself, and he elaborates. The carpenter smelled the gas as it began to leak. To play it safe he opened the front and back doors of the house, which meant that the concussive waves had voids in their pathways, which spared many lives. Coincidentally, no one was in the kitchen, where the blast was worst, thus minimizing injuries. The timing was favorable in other respects: the carpenter was ten minutes away from climbing a ladder on the patio, so he wasn’t on the front line of bursting windows, and because we’d just repaired the crumbling brick inside the dining room wall, it remained standing—thus keeping the house upright, too.
“As disasters go,” I say, “I guess we’re not doing so badly.”
“That’s true.”
“But are you okay?”
“Are you?”
I hesitate, and realize that my pulse isn’t beating nearly as wildly as it was when I was with Beth. This conversation has nudged away quite a bit of the panic, if not the shock. “You know, I’m all right,” I say, and hear the surprise in my voice. But I know from his voice that he’s not all right at all. “Please, tell me how you are.”
He says, “It was my job, and everything was going well, and that felt great. Now . . .”
I hear the chatter of shoppers as he enters a store to get warm. I want to say something comforting, but can’t think of what. So I just listen to us both breathe. Finally, he breaks the silence with, “Look, there’s nothing more to say. We can talk tomorrow.”
“Take care, all right?”
“Yeah,” he says, his voice half-hearted, and adds, “You too, Baboo,” and at that word, I tear up. But by the time I think to ask if I should drive home tonight, he’s turned off his phone.
It is a night of no sleep.
After a sober review of the facts with my father and Theresa, who are as stunned as they are sympathetic, I make up their extra bed, though I already know that a stubborn awakeness will light my path all the way to morning. Yes, Hal relayed much about luck and miracles, and that has provided a measure of relief. But I feel as defenseless and needy as a child, and the riot of thoughts that began this afternoon has grown more cacophonous and plentiful.
Of course, I’m still castigating myself for not being on the road to Delaware. However, the storm that lurked all day is now battering the windows, and Beth is expecting to see me again tomorrow, and I know that Hal wouldn’t want me to scythe through this downfall, let alone stand my sister up. Our imminent housing quandary is also firing through my brain. Might my father let us live here? He might, but it wouldn’t matter. This place is too far from Hal’s job, as well as, once my semester off ends in January, the college where I teach. What about cheap hotels? We don’t have the money. Someone’s living room? How could we do that to a friend? My body tightens as I browse through all the options and see that we don’t have any.
But flickering among these regrets and dreads is a disturbing new concern. As I look out to the days, weeks, or, heaven help us, months of disarray that lie ahead, I know that this disaster will, in some way, change me—and I worry about what that change will look like. Will I come to incubate an anger I don’t yet feel, but that will run so deeply through my veins that it will blacken my disposition? If so, will it lead me to travel such a separate emotional journey from Hal that we will fall out of sync? Will I come to cast Dan, the workers, even the entire building industry, as enemies worthy of rancor? Will I dive into the bog of attorneys and paranoia and monitoring everything I say about every business transaction to the end of time? Right now, I can’t say I feel anything other than dazed. But I’ve seen other people forever changed in just these ways after fate dealt them a blow. Who, after I make it to the end of this misfortune, will I be?
I shouldn’t add to my insomnia, but the possibility of hardening my heart worries me. As rain drums against the glass and I watch sparkling shadows on the wall, I remember how, when Rosalie disappeared, it took me six years of aiming my rage and pain at her before I understood that my emotions had been curving back to strike me. That was one of the most important lessons I learned in the long educational process that I’ve come to call my life: although other people might create havoc for me, the more I seethe toward them, the more I make myself suffer. Since that realization, I’ve tried to resist acid feelings.
The problem is that I haven’t always succeeded. I’ve griped about inexplicable colleagues, used caustic names for imperious physicians, and wished harm on politicians who peddled poorly thought-out policies. Each time I’ll try to hold myself to my own standard, but thinking ill of others can, unfortunately, give a rush of pleasure. Also, anger, judgment, and their ilk roam through so much of American culture that sometimes when I take a charitable approach toward someone who’s done me, or others, a bad turn, I wonder if I’m just unsophisticated. Were I more worldly, I’ll think, especially after seeing ads and hearing radio shows and watching movies and reading books that portray the mind-boggling stupidity and shallowness of other people, I would finally come to my senses.
And it is this pull—between lessons I’ve already learned and lessons I hope to avoid—that is really to blame for me lying awake all night. I keep considering who I might b
ecome, and if I’d really want to know that person.
Late the next day, when I get back to Delaware, I decide to visit the wreckage first.
I park in the gathering dusk, and as soon as I see the house, my heart feels heavy in my chest. Yellow police tape seals off the front steps, and the windows—new only a few days ago—are boarded up. I walk carefully down the unlit alley, unable to see my footing. The backyard is heaped high with empty window frames, which are further squashing our fringe tree. The floor-to-ceiling windows are boarded up and roped off. But the new glass door, which was open at the moment of the blast, survived. I slip under the tape and peek through.
What a sight. The dining room-kitchen is knee-high in the drywall and plaster and insulation that blew off the walls, exposing chunks of framing and brick. Higher up, the ceiling is ripped in half like paper. Apparently, the whole back two-thirds of the house was ravaged. Only two days ago, I felt so happy at how alive the house was. Now I just want to cry.
I gape at the sight, shivering. Turn around and get out of here, I tell myself. No. Give in to this sorrow and grieve. I try to figure out what to do in the brittle November twilight, but before the answer presents itself, a memory that has nothing to do with explosions or anger returns to me. It is a memory of a lesson different from the one I learned about Rosalie, and I often call it to mind when something seems impossibly bleak.
It happened during the summer after Hal and I broke up. I was living in a friend’s attic—depressed, jobless, and destitute. All that sustained me were sleepover visits I kept paying to friends like Harriet or Sandy, where late-night conversations helped distract me from my hopelessness. One night I stayed with Lisa, a friend with a deeply spiritual core who made her living translating the writings of the seventeenth-century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. For hours, I asked Lisa over and over what possible reason there could be for why things had gone so wrong in my life. Just before I curled up on her sofa to fall asleep, she said, “Maybe there is no reason,” which made me feel even more dismal. But in the morning, after Lisa drove me back to the house where I was living, just as I was leaving her car, she said, “Actually, Swedenborg does address what you were asking about, but he doesn’t say that things happen for a reason.” Then, paraphrasing Swedenborg, she said, “There is nothing that happens out of which good cannot occur.” I stood beside her car in the summer sun. Some lessons take their time to seep in, but this one struck suddenly and fully with the force of a revelation: what mattered was not what had gone wrong in my life, or even how horribly wrong it had gone, but that something had delivered me to a new shore, and now I had a choice about whether I would embrace the new land or stay right where I was, resenting the ferry that had carried me.