All My Relations

by Christopher McIlroy

  Driving home, Annie lolls across the front seat, one foot on my thigh, head halfway out the window, reminiscing. Either her father had once borrowed her belt for a tie or she his tie for a belt. “I can’t remember which. I know the tie was striped and the belt was pink. How you let me blather,” she says.

  “I like your stories.”

  Suddenly, though the road bends away from the sun, I can’t remove my shades. The harm I’ve done to Annie would be exposed in my face.

  As the pickup scuffs through the desert, banging the washboard road, nauseating emptiness rushes in me. How easily I could say, “Let me tell you about Lou. This is what we did with each other ____________” Annie’s face would contort—“shit”—her fist ripping the dashboard, plastic fragments rising. In an instant our union would be gone, we alone in the dark, with only our need for each other. Where I always wanted us.

  But this idea, like Lou, is past. Though stuck close to me it is slipping behind like a shadow. I must wait myself out that much longer.

  BUILDERS

  The closest three weeks of the Terrys’ marriage had been spent vacationing in China, when their son Marco was an infant. Euphoric new parents, Dominic and Ella were traveling in a land whose strangeness was perpetually revelatory. Trivialities such as intestinal parasites and missed trains were powerless against each routine daily miracle.

  In search of an historic temple they had hiked a valley whose river bent through rolling hills, forested ridges intersecting plots of ochre, buff, and emerald. Terraces ascended distant purple mountains, hung with cloud. The trail ended abruptly; above them, cocked on a slope, the temple seemed ready to break into a stately, comical dance. They were still. Marco stopped shifting in Dominic’s pack. As Dominic and Ella contemplated the building, it became a Chinese guardian lion, the bristling roof its mane and flaring eyes, the arched portal a roaring mouth. They saw it exactly the same way at the same time.

  “We have just been blessed,” Dominic said.

  Eight years later, lulled by this memory, Dominic was routing the site for his family’s new house, preparatory to laying the foundation, when the tractor blade struck a subterranean boulder. The machine hopped, throwing him clear except for a hand and foot still gripping the seat. Lurching right, the tractor was sliding down the property’s steepest grade, toward the ravine, blade spewing sawed-off prickly pear and cholla. The engine’s stuttering roar, the torn roots and glittering mica rushing by his face, were an overturned world in which he was alone, his family beyond reach.

  As Ella sprinted downhill, the bare ground tilted up toward her like a smothering hand while the runaway machine shrank to a Dinky toy. Then Dominic’s broad back and black smudge of hair were centered over the controls again, the tractor veered up a slope, halted. Marco, eight years old, sobbed behind Ella.

  “If I’d thought I was going to die,” Dominic said later, “I’d’ve jumped off.” He gave what Ella called his “pillaging Tartar” grin, upswept mustache over big white teeth.

  Ella grabbed his collar and dug her head into his chest. “I used to like that peppy male talk,” she said. “It gave me a thrill. Now I just think of the big hole in me that you’d leave behind.”

  Dominic averted his face sternly from this remark, hiding his pleasure in it.

  Ella’s dash had brought back to her a night just weeks before, when she’d been in bed with the flu. Dominic had scheduled a critical business meeting. After putting Marco to bed, he kissed her good-bye, waking her from a horrible dream. The door closing behind him panicked her, and in slippers and bathrobe she chased his car down the street. He turned the car around, phoned apologies to his colleagues, and played cards with her all evening. Not once did he complain or tease her.

  The boulder was solid granite, twelve feet in diameter. Already $90,000 deep into the house—the lot mortgage plus loans to cover fees, materials, equipment rentals, contractors—the Terrys paid a demolition man $2,000 to blast it.

  Dominic had insomnia. Budgets and time lines could not be reconciled, no matter how his calculations chattered on, degenerating into nonsense, arriving at a ruinous panic sale or foreclosure. “I’m sorry,” he whispered to Ella as she slept. He felt like bursting from the house, never facing her or Marco again. Abruptly he padded into Marco’s room and lay beside him. The boy’s fingers curled into the sheet as if holding it down against a strong wind. His skin was warm. Cuddling Marco’s shoulder, Dominic let the child’s regular breathing scatter his thoughts, until the solution came to him, and he dozed.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking,” Dominic said the next morning, over breakfast. Grandpa Harry would lend them his Airstream. Giving up their rented home and moving onto the lot would save $850 a month, plus putting the work site at their front door. “It would be just a little while. Like camping.”

  “Cool,” Marco said. Dominic was touched by his implicit trust.

  “We can do scientific explorations in the desert,” Ella told Marco.

  The tightness left Dominic’s shoulders.

  Eighty-thou-a-year Okies, what a stitch, Ella thought, as Dominic and Marco bounded down the hall on all fours, playing dinosaur rodeo. She was contented enough with the rental, its tall shade trees ringing the pool, and the years of accumulated furniture and knickknacks inside. But for Dominic’s sake she’d talked up the new house. She decided to consider the Airstream an adventure. Anyway, it probably was inescapable.

  Since Marco’s entering first grade two years before, Ella had taught in the child-care program at his school, her first job since he was born. She marveled at the way her equable, deliberate sense of play kept the class ordered and happy. But the pay was poor.

  When Ella had questioned the “gaudiness” of Dominic’s plans—the expensive architect had been hired less to consult than to ratify—he replied, “Because we can afford it.”

  A 2,800-square-foot rectangle provided mass. Airiness was evoked by the steeply pitched roof ending in drolly flipped-up eaves. Centered beneath, the peaked porch roof risked clutter, the architect said, but successfully. Dominic was serenely loyal to his design; he had dreamed it, waking to scribble the plans in a notebook.

  In fact, they couldn’t afford it. Dominic’s salary as a sales rep for high-tech medical equipment was pegged to a year-long market plan, his earnings increasing as goals were met. Dependent on big-ticket items such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which sold for as much as $2 million, his income could range from the mid-five digits into the solid six. But a citizens’ initiative to cap health-care costs had paralyzed hospital investment in Dominic’s territory, southern Arizona and part of Phoenix. Meanwhile, it was September, the house two months behind schedule. Because the Terrys themselves, not licensed contractors, were doing most of the construction, banks refused to lend more money.

  Moving halted construction again. The night they occupied the tiny Airstream, Dominic bought champagne. “We’re a race of giants,” he said. “Our elbows and heads could go right through the wall.”

  The cement mixer rumbled up their hilltop site like a determined insect, inched backward to insert its long chute into the footing forms, and deposited eight yards of wet concrete, a shallow moat around the bare plot. Grim with delight, Dominic stormed up and down the trenches, directing and exhorting, raking the gray pudding into corners, smoothing it with a two-by-four.

  Harry, Dominic’s father, slapped the board aside. “Enough diddling the gravel. Gravel in your concrete’s got to stay distributed even.”

  Though late October, it was hot. Sweat stung Dominic’s eyes. The rhythm of his work absorbed sound; the mixer’s steady clunk, the crew’s shouts, the footsteps and scraping of tools were swallowed by the silence of his movement. In disorderly unison the Terrys wielded rakes and trowels, Marco flailing, Ella a lean angle, Harry prancing on spindly legs. Dominic’s bulky shadow circulated among them.

  When Dominic thought back to this moment, it existed outside time, in perfect balance like the bubbl
e in a level.

  “I want to punch Harry, the way he talks to you,” Ella said later that afternoon. “At least when your mother was alive there was a courtliness to him.”

  They were sharing a jug of water in the Airstream’s alleged kitchen, Dominic wedged between the formica table and the meagerly upholstered bench, knees spread wide.

  “You’re referring to the incident of the rebar,” he responded.

  “That. The two-by-four today. All the time.”

  Unknown to Harry, Dominic had purchased rebar for the footings cut-rate from a construction site. Days before, while laying the metal sticks in the trench, Harry had noticed powdery rust. He’d scorched Dominic for that one, but said let the inspection go through anyway; the contamination was almost imperceptible. The inspector, if he even looked that closely, should let it pass, at worst have Dominic wire-brush it.

  Instead, the inspector ordered Dominic to rip out the entire rebar job—two parallel circuits of half-inch steel, twenty-foot lengths wired together, vertical sticks every four feet—and replace it. Though Dominic was itching to hurl each stick into the gulley, the presence of his family made him stack them in maniacally neat piles. He’d torn out the east side when Harry arrived.

  “What in this fucking world of shit are you doing?” Harry asked calmly.

  Dominic told him. “Nice call on the inspection.”

  “Oh my God, he got you.” Laughing, Harry flung his cap to the ground and did a frisky goat-dance on it. “That inspector’s playing with you. He knows you don’t know shit. Half a day, a blaster cleans off that rust, nobody can say nothing. Don’t you see? You bent over for him today, he’s going to ream your ass twice as hard next time. You’re his toy now.”

  Dominic’s straight-arm to Harry’s chest wilted into a grab of the old man’s shirt front. “My family doesn’t have to hear this sewer mouth,” he said raggedly, releasing Harry, who stumbled backward.

  Harry turned to Ella and Marco. His face fell. “I’m sorry. I’m way out of line.” He walked with Dominic, muttering, “Geez, Dom, I’m a falling-apart old crazy.” Harry rented the blaster out of his own pocket. The rebar passed.

  “It’s the dialect of the American builder,” Dominic explained to Ella. “I call it Fuckshitfaggot.”

  “It’s personal. It’s vicious.”

  “Man, I just blow it off. I go somewhere in my head, I don’t hear it. I make twice as much in a bad year as he did in his best. And with Mom gone he’s alone, and meanwhile look at us together, building this house.”

  Spraying the concrete with “monkey blood” sealer, Dominic and Harry tramped over a freshly-poured slab that for the first time defined the space as a house.

  “Not bad for a fat-ass hustler and his broken-down dad who hasn’t lifted a finger to a house in thirty years,” Harry said. He’d worked construction two decades before buying the Quick Spot deli, later incorporated into a shopping center, outside Passaic.

  Rooms sprang up under Dominic’s feet. He called over Ella and Marco. “Look.” He paced off the den. “Breakfast nook,” a wall of glass block. “Fireplace. Marco, your room. The Roman baths,” he intoned to Ella—a huge sunken tub. The Terrys stopped still. They heard birds. The mountains were immovable, and the only purpose of the white clouds steaming over their peaks was to cast quiet and awe.

  “Mom, your bottom wiggles sometimes even when you’re standing still,” Marco observed. Ella was fluffing her hair at the mirror, in a short nightshirt.

  “Don’t I know,” Dominic said, rolling the hem between his fingers.

  Ella leaned her chin on his shoulder. In bed she used everything, nails, knees. Yet during sex her dominant sensation was peace. The louder she grunted, straining with him, the more tranquility enveloped her.

  Dominic could say his marriage was beginning to stand alongside that of his parents, Harry and Bernice. They had remained passionate toward each other until Bernice’s death two years before, when Harry left Jersey and followed Dominic to Tucson. “My mom and dad had the greatest love,” Dominic said. Still, as he now discussed with his brothers and sister, the children at times had felt incidental to this central marital drama. The master bedroom, for instance, had been off limits to them except through knocking and waiting, if then.

  In contrast, Dominic and Ella never closed their door, their bedroom the hub of weekend mornings where breakfast was eaten, the newspaper dawdled over while Marco’s plastic dinosaurs played baseball, Jurassic versus Cretaceous.

  In Dominic’s floor plan for the new house, Marco’s bedroom still adjoined theirs. When they’d completed the house, another child was possible. Ella was thirty-five, Dominic forty-one. They’d been married nine years.

  December was the wettest on record. As Dominic made a two-week circuit of Phoenix, then Yuma, finally a Tohono O’odham reservation medical complex, the few spindles of framing the Terrys had erected gently warped.

  Though eager for his homecomings, Dominic sabotaged them, as if Ella were to blame for his absence. They were celebrating his arrival with lunch at Denny’s. “Occupational hazard,” Dominic murmured as the waitress’s straining bosom almost dipped into their soup. Ella was small-breasted. “What ‘lungs’,” Dominic breathed reverentially when the girl had retreated. “Chairwoman of the American Lung Association. Only a titular post, of course.”

  “Don’t you go and be a cliché, hon. Oogle women with wooden legs or something,” Ella drawled. Talking Southern warned Dominic with her dangerous past. Drooping eyelids, full lips, and a gap between her top front teeth gave her a look of guilty carnality. Seven years she’d partied toward her degree at the University of Virginia. Once a man she’d met on the train took her to New Orleans during finals week. He was bisexual, with a big, black lover who was the mayor’s chief of staff. Years before AIDS, thank God, Ella thought.

  That night Dominic curled toward Ella and stroked her thigh. His backside hung into space; the Airstream’s bed wasn’t designed for big people.

  From Marco’s bed, the kitchen bench a few feet away, Dominic and Ella heard his pages turning, the crackle as sharp as if it were between them.

  “It’s too gruesome perverse,” Ella whispered. “He’s not a baby any more.” Dominic’s hand dropped away.

  Hurt and resentful since lunch, Ella took satisfaction in denying him but then couldn’t sleep for wanting him.

  Their first month in the Airstream, Dominic’s internal clock had faithfully awakened him around midnight so they could make love. But after two weeks on the road, he knew he’d sleep through. Failing to make love for too long made them crabby with each other.

  Felling the warped two-by-fours and toenailing new studs to the sole-plate, all Saturday and Sunday, they caved in against together at nightfall, unconscious.

  Monday morning they attempted sex standing up in the coffin-sized shower stall, nozzle spraying (what passed for) full blast. “Houdini wasn’t much,” Dominic panted. “All he did was get out.” The pounded, groaning metal brought Marco running.

  By mid-week Dominic and Ella were barely speaking.

  Ella’s day in the school portable had glided like a canoe, a flick of the paddle here, corrective drag there propelling a total of forty-two children, four aides, and six activity centers toward the sated contentment she believed was the entitlement of every soul on this earth. Marco joined her after 2:30, another reason the job was indispensable.

  As a climax Ella was offering Messy Media, a potpourri of gluey pasta, mud, paints, papier-mâché, food coloring, and shaving cream. Swabbing purple suds from Marco’s jaw, she found Harry at her elbow.

  “I was too excited to wait, I had to tell you,” Harry said, touching her arm. “Can you come?”

  His presence thoroughly disoriented her. Harry, who had never visited the school, was scarcely taller than some of the sixth graders, though leather-skinned, with glinty gray eyes.

  “Grandpa!” Displaying his shaving cream whale, Marco left purple handprints on Harry�
��s leather tool belt.

  Harry waved off Ella’s rag. “It’s fine, it’s an improvement,” he said, lifting Marco into his arms. Leaving her aide to supervise cleanup, Ella followed them to the parking lot, where a trailer stacked with fragrant lumber was hitched to Harry’s ten-year-old silver Continental.

  “Get a load of your new kitchen,” Harry said. “By the time Himself is back from the wars, we’ve framed the sucker. You and me.” Once again Dominic was in Phoenix, trying to close on the most promising lead in weeks, a cardiac lab.

  “I know Dominic wants to be here for every minute of this house,” Ella objected, cheered by her firm declaration. The past weeks she’d felt so removed from Dominic, she’d be hard put to say what he did want—sardines in his cereal? A trip to Lithuania? A girlfriend of another race?

  “What a burden,” Harry said. “Not to mention, if he’s gone all the time breaking his neck to make money for the house, when does the house get built? Just my opinion, but Himself could use a happy surprise, for a change, instead of the other kind.”

  The thought of building Dominic a gift made Ella almost tearful, her first acknowledgment of loneliness. Saturday morning found her deforming nails and cramping her arm with lunging hammer blows while Harry chalked off stud spacing and sawed the lumber, which Marco brought to Ella.

  The duet of Ella’s sporadic rapping, “like a retarded woodpecker,” she said, punctuated by whining bursts from Harry’s saw, was unexpectedly pleasing. And when she and Harry actually raised a section of wall, nailing and bracing it in place, Ella felt a quickening of triumph. The city, yellowed by smog, sprawled well below. Thickets of saguaro and palo verde separated the imposing dimensions of their emerging house from the nearest neighbor. The Terrys were a foothills family.

  Rejecting the emotion as unfitting, Ella returned quickly to work, to dispel it.

  “I know how you love Dom,” she began carefully, over lunch. Between the cold, gradually numbing when she sat still, and the stiffness from hammering, her fingers barely could hold the sandwich. “Why do you treat him the way you do?”