Building a Home with My Husband

by Rachel Simon

  He lowers the plate to the dishwasher, his motions controlled. “Why did you tell them you could do it then?”

  “We discussed dates last fall. I asked for one after New Year’s, since I thought we’d be back in the house by then, and we settled on February 16. How was I supposed to know it would turn out to be a terrible time for a trip?”

  He pours in way too much dishwashing powder. “Well,” he says, “that’s great.”

  I decide it would be unwise to indicate that this news is only half of what I want to say. While Hal’s demeanor generally vacillates between playfulness and composure, he also has the capacity to grow aloof. I tend to forget this side of him during the long stretches when it vanishes from the scene, which has been the case throughout most of our marriage as well as this entire renovation. But after the last job meeting, I began to detect its return. First came a few tense nights as he strategized about how to ask Natalie to extend our stay until February 17. Fortunately, he found a way to present our case and Natalie has a big heart, but she also emphasized that, come what may, our move-out could be nudged no farther down the calendar. At that point, as I became jittery about whether Dan would be able to get everything done on time, Hal lost his joviality. This was not only because he had to be on-site all the more and step up his efforts with such dreary tasks as pestering the lighting store for still-undelivered fixtures. It was also because it was time to turn his attention toward finishing the third floor—himself. I’d forgotten this, too: one of the compromises Hal made to get Dan’s estimate down was that he himself would handle the walls and floor and paint in his studio. And it is this combination of pressures that appears to have darkened his spirit.

  It took me many years to accept the variations in the ways we endure stress. I prefer to ponder, and, whenever possible, make light of the situation. Hal usually does, too, which perhaps accounts for my forgetfulness about the occasions when he does not. But every so often, he will instead sink into what I call his moodiness, when he’ll engage in little joking, few smiles, no light banter, maybe no conversation at all. When this happened in our first relationship, I took it personally. I’d launch into direct questioning about what he was feeling and why he was feeling it, then get annoyed when he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer—all of which only made matters worse. Time, however, can be love’s friend. After Hal and I began our second relationship, I came to see that part of the pact of loving another person is both learning to accept the more mystifying aspects of his character, and finding ways to conduct oneself when they arise. Although I’ve hardly mastered the latter with Hal, I do know that if I refrain from direct questioning, stay upbeat, and steer conversation toward other things on my mind, he usually resolves whatever prompted his moodiness on his own. It might not happen immediately, but time has also taught me the value of patience. This has been my approach for the past week.

  But then, a few days ago, I received an e-mail from the university in Florida, saying how happy they were that I was coming February 16. It had been months since they’d been in touch, which had allowed me to entertain many I-guess-I’m-off-the-hook scenarios—and say nothing about it to Hal. Upon receiving this bombshell, though, I begged them to change the date. I explained the renovation, the explosion, the tight schedule. Unthinkable, they replied. How could they have a thousand students show up at an amphitheater without an author on the stage?

  “And Florida again,” Hal says, throwing the dishwasher on with a hard shove.

  “Orlando, even,” I add.

  I don’t laugh, though my sense of absurdity makes me want to. This trip to Orlando is actually the parenthetical mate to another inconvenient talk, also in Orlando, days before the renovation began. I hadn’t wanted to do that one, either. I hate steamy heat, and that’s what Florida is in July. But when that invitation was extended—before Dan had determined our starting date—I had a very good reason to say yes: my mother lives directly across the state from Orlando, and after months of fretting with Laura about Rosalie’s encroaching forgetfulness, an all-paid trip to a city two hours away seemed like a gift. Plus, Rosalie and Gordon had driven to Orlando when I’d had business there years before, and we’d had a nice lunch together. So I’d agreed to that talk, and only then did we learn that we needed to move out four days later. Just as belatedly, I discovered that the whole trip was pointless: Rosalie and Gordon were going to be out of state that month, motor-homing across the country for yet another of their lighthouse tours. Thus, I’d left Hal on his own, packing boxes and breaking Ikea mirrors, while I boiled away in Florida. Now, here we are again—with Hal knowing full well what I’m not yet saying.

  “Orlando,” he says curtly. “So you’ll want to go a day early to visit with Rosalie.”

  “No.” My voice is a squeaky-high lie.

  “It would be much better if you were up here that day early.”

  “But now that you mention it”—I recover my regular tone—“it does make sense for me to fly down a day early. What if it snows the day I’m due down there and I’m stuck up here?”

  He leans against the roaring dishwasher and crosses his arms.

  I say, “When we moved in here, the movers did everything—I was useless. I can just come back the afternoon of the 17th. It’s not like you’ll need me that morning.”

  I start wiping a counter. There’s no need to look up when I can easily envision his face.

  “Oh, do what you want,” he says. “I know that’s what you want, so just do it.”

  He walks upstairs.

  Secretly, waiting until after Hal leaves for the office the next morning, I call Rosalie.

  “Oh, hello, dear!” she says in her stunned-to-have-a-daughter way. But she’s whispering.

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “I just went back to bed.”

  “You’re whispering because you’re in bed?”

  “No, no. We didn’t get the birds up yet”—the two cockatiels that she and Gordon have doted on for fifteen years, and the reason they vacation across the country in a motor home and not on airplanes—“and I don’t want them to know I’m awake and start making a fuss.”

  “Are you okay? Why’d you go back to bed?”

  “Oh, I’m fine. I’m just lying here to let the eye drops work.”

  “Eye drops?”

  “From the eye surgery.”

  Yes, that’s right. I’ve been so preoccupied with her waning brain cells, and so thrown by disjointed exchanges like the one we’re having right now, that I’ve forgotten about her recent medical miracle. Since she was a little girl, my mother has worn glasses. I’ve never even known her to misplace them because, except to shower and sleep, she never takes them off. To me, glasses are simply part of my mother’s face. Then a few years ago, her eye doctor detected cataracts and glaucoma. He waited until both conditions had advanced far enough to warrant surgery, then offered to perform an additional service at the same time. “After one operation for the left eye, and another for the right, and then a treatment of eye drops,” Rosalie had said, “I shouldn’t need glasses at all.” “How amazing,” I’d replied, though I thought, How strange. It will be like having a different mother.

  “How are your eyes?” I ask.

  “Very good.”

  “Are you glasses-free yet?”

  “My last bottle of drops runs out soon. The doctor says I should be able to throw away my glasses by, well, I guess, mid-February.”

  The timing startles me, and I almost interpret it as a cosmic confirmation of my scheme to visit her, despite Hal’s irritation. Trying to sound nonchalant, I say, “I’m just curious. Where will you be then? In the middle of February?”

  “Why? Will you be down here?”

  “I, uh, I might. It’s a possibility. I’m still working it out.”

  “Oh! That would be marvelous. When?”

  “Well, hmm . . .” Do I commit now? Or stay unresolved until I’ve found a way to win Hal over? I stall with, “Will you
put Gordon on the other line? And ask him to bring a calendar?”

  This request, while diversionary, also marks a milestone. When Rosalie’s doctor told her a few months ago, “It’s not nothing, but it’s not yet something,” Laura and I debated when we should begin including Gordon in any important discussions with Rosalie. Laura started immediately, but my conversations with my mother have been inconsequential until now.

  “Yello,” Gordon says as he gets on. A cheerful seventy-five-year-old, Gordon worked two decades in the factory down the street from his childhood home in Pennsylvania until it relocated to France. Then, losing none of his chipper optimism, he went back to school to learn landscaping. He’s been retired for years—they both have, which is why they’ve seen a considerable number of lighthouses by now—and when they’re home, he spends his time tending to their yard. Though for the last few weeks, he says now, he’s stayed indoors. Rosalie, still on the line, tells me that he’s had a head cold since Christmas, so he’s taking things easy.

  I explain the fantasy logistics of my trip, four weeks from now. I will try to work my schedule so I can arrive on February 15, and if they drive to see me, or I rent a car to reach them, we can spend the day together. They, or I, will then go home that night, I’ll give my talk on the 16th, fly home the morning of the 17th, and race to Hal’s side. Voilà: I can be a good daughter and good wife at the same time. “That sounds wonderful,” Rosalie keeps saying, though she slips from one date to another, as if time is becoming fluid. She also keeps thinking that they can stay in the hotel with me, maybe for several days. Gordon calmly corrects her, and we work the specifics out—though I don’t tell them everything depends on Hal’s reaction.

  After Gordon gets off his line to wake the birds for their breakfast, I ask my mother, as offhandedly as possible, how things are going with her memory.

  “Fine, fine. Of course, Gordon might not agree.” She laughs her short hee-hee laugh, which often seems to convey self-deprecation rather than humor.

  “Are you still taking the memory medicine?”

  “Yes, but it’s not doing anything.”

  “When will you know more?”

  “Gordon, when’s that next appointment?”

  “He got off the phone, Rosalie.”

  “Right. I see the doctor in . . . February or March.” Then she adds, sotto voce, “The doctor won’t tell me which kind of dementia it is.”

  “I thought he said it was senile dementia.”

  “Now he says there are three possibilities: senile dementia, Alzheimer’s, and one other I don’t remember. He doesn’t want to make a decision about what I have, but at this next visit I want to get it pinned down. I’m hoping it’s senile dementia. I dread Alzheimer’s. Everyone dreads Alzheimer’s. And we need to know so we can decide whether to do the next trip.”

  “When’s that?”

  “In the fall. We’re going to see lighthouses in Seattle. When is that trip, Gordon?”

  “Gordon’s not on the phone.”

  “Oh, yes. Well, it’s sometime this fall.” She makes her laugh. “My memory permitting.”

  Fall seems a long way off, given the fog in the harbor today.

  Late that afternoon, as dusk is falling, I ask Hal if we can make a run to Teacher’s Lane. Things are moving faster now that the missing insulation has been installed, and since tonight is the last night before he’ll begin working on the third floor and I return to the classroom, I’m hoping I can reel him back to his usual spirits before we both get absorbed.

  “Be careful,” Hal says as we mount the porch steps. “They just poured the concrete to repair the cracks in this landing yesterday, and it might not be completely dry.”

  “I didn’t know that concrete took that long to set.”

  “It doesn’t, if you use an accelerator. But I didn’t want to, because it creates other problems.”

  We jump up to the tiled porch. Hal unlocks the door and we walk in.

  Immediately we feel that the heat is finally on. A moment later, we see that the new drywall is up. I almost feel, once again, as if this place is actually our house—that we have a house—and relief rises in me, inspiring a confidence that I’ll be able to draw Hal out of himself while we’re in here. But the replacement windows encountered a delay, so plywood still covers the old windows, and when we fail to find the light switch for the one working bulb in the living room, which is also the one working bulb in the house, Hal says, “We’ll just have to do this in the dark,” and my hopeful feelings fade.

  In the almost disappeared light of the day, we walk through the house, two silhouettes, one behind the other. Specks of streetlight dapple the drywall, which is shiny between the newly applied joint compound. We feel our way through the dimness, hands on the walls, silent as mimes. The bathroom now has its sink and tub. My study has regained its floor and ceiling. I think we will turn back here, but Hal continues up to the third floor, perhaps to survey it one more time before he launches his labors. I do not ask, as there is no indication that he’s interested in conversation. When we reach the third floor, I just follow as he makes his way to the windows on the northern side. Then we stand there, looking out above the rooftops, across the Brandywine Creek Park, and through the dots of streetlights farther beyond.

  I want to say something, but not about his mood or my call to Rosalie this morning. In fact, this would be a poor moment to mention anything that might ratchet up the tension. Then I realize that these two concerns—and this whole phase of the renovation—have something in common. Something I never thought about in the halcyon days before now.

  “You know,” I say, “time scares me these days.”

  “Now there’s a non sequitur.”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, what do you mean?”

  I pause, trying to find the language. What I want to say is that time has turned from friend to foe. No longer instructing me on such slowly accrued lessons as compassion or patience, the clock is now dominating all the time. When will the concrete set? When will the new windows come in? When will Hal return to himself? When can I persuade him to agree—without resentment—to my going to Orlando early to see my mother? When will my mother find out if she will remain who she is or become a different person? Every concern seems attached to these questions: how can I find enough time—and how much time do I have?

  “Time just seems such a big concern right now,” I say.

  “Or our lack of control over it.”

  “Yes. That’s what it is.”

  “I know. You think I like spending my lunch hour calling the kitchen cabinet manufacturer to find out when they’ll be finished?”

  “I know you hate it. I hate it.”

  “You’re not spending half your life on it.”

  “That’s true. But it’s making us get short with each other, and I hate that. And you seem unhappy. I haven’t seen you dance with the cats in a week.”

  “It’ll pass. It’s just a brief period in our lives.”

  “I know.”

  “Like our six years apart.”

  “I know.”

  Side by side, in our own thoughts, we look out the window. I do not know what he is thinking, but I am remembering a phone call with my mother during those years apart from Hal. I said to her, “There are so many things I miss about my relationship with him. I feel terrible that I might never find them again with another person.” She said, “You might not.” I said, “That’s so painful to consider.” “It is,” she agreed. “When your father and I got divorced, I felt sick over the things I might never have again, and I never did get them again, and I’m very sad about that. But I got other things, and even though they’re different, they turned out to be good, too.”

  I knew she meant Gordon. He’s not the kind of educated, dynamic guy my father is, but he’s smart and personable in all the ways she needs. He’s devoted to her, and easy to be around, and as soon as I met him, shortly after I re-met her, I liked him. Unlike
the catastrophe of her second husband, Gordon does not drink or smoke or exude a surplus of testosterone or suffer from fugues of paranoia or want to gamble away her life savings or encourage her to sever her ties to her children. Gordon is not someone with the kind of charm or magnetism or striking looks that attract admiring hoards at a party, but he’s the person you’re relieved to spend time with once you happen across him at the punch bowl. Gordon listens well. He has unusual interests, like airplane shows. He’s husband, not boyfriend, material. And I knew, as I held the phone, years past my relationship with Hal, that in his all-around good-guyness, Gordon resembled Hal. I said to my mother, “Gordon’s so wonderful, but he’s so unlike the guys you saw when I was living with you. Do you think you would have given him the time of day if you’d met him back then?” “Not at all,” she said. I asked her why not, and the harsh regret in her voice stunned me. “Because I was an ass,” she said.

  I remember thinking, I don’t want to be an ass. But believing my time with Hal was already long over, I hung up the phone feeling worse than before.

  “What are you thinking?” Hal says now.

  Although I long to tell him about my call with Rosalie this morning, I also make a decision, in that split-second way that’s familiar to any spouse who’s ever weighed the risks of blurting out what’s really on her mind against the benefits of calming the waters, to talk about that other call. He’s heard my memories, but one of his many virtues, as I’ve seen over the years, is that he doesn’t mind hearing stories over and over, and as he listens now, and I look at him in the streetlight coming through the windows, I can see the strain loosening from his face.

  “Your mother sure knows how to pick up your spirits,” Hal says, shaking his head.

  “You can say that again,” I say.

  He does not know, and I do not indicate, that my response is not entirely in line with his. Some years into her marriage with Gordon, their lighthouse trips started to last as long as three or four months. I would like to say that I know a lot about these trips, that we spoke often from pay phones (Rosalie, like my father, resists cell phones), and that I charted her adventures at a distance, climbing lighthouses vicariously. But the truth is we seldom spoke during her trips, and when we did, I asked her nothing about the sights she’d taken in. I viewed Rosalie and Gordon’s interest in lighthouses as eye-rollingly dull. Counting sheep seemed less tedious than looking at one tall white tower after another. And doing it year after year? To the point where lighthouses came to bear such importance that her trips took precedence over visits with her own children? It’s not fun playing second fiddle to a stack of bricks.