“Bernice”—Harry’s voice still dipped huskily, speaking his wife’s name—“Bernice and me agreed on most things, and one was that Dom needed pegging down. He gets swellheaded. He was the only one of us went to college, you know—I sent him. I was proud of him. We all were. But he had to set himself apart. That was the cost.” While the other boys and even their sister helped out at the Quick Spot deli, weekends and after school, “not Himself.”
“Studying.”
“He was studying, yes.” Harry laughed. “And going to the movies. Or taking the train to New York. I guess Bernice and me invented Tough Love before there was a name for it. Course I go too far. Parents always like to believe they do everything for a reason, in the children’s best interest.” Harry looked down. Ella thought he would have said more, but Marco returned from his explorations with a snakeskin wrapped around his head, and in the uproar and subsequent laughter the conversation was lost.
With Dominic due home Sunday evening, Harry and Ella had enclosed the kitchen in its timber skeleton with hours to spare. Harry smoothed Ella’s hammering stroke, perched over her shoulder, hand alongside hers on the shaft, but without so much as grazing her. These attentions made Ella feel amorphously voluptuous. She was reminded of the Gibson girl in batting stance, frilly bustled behind tilted skyward as she leaned across home plate, whose picture had hung over her hometown soda fountain.
The reaction scared her, and in the next moment made her grateful it was only Harry who had provoked it.
Arriving jubilant with a sale, Dominic was furious at the kitchen. “Are you out of your mind? He’s seventy-one.”
Marco immediately took a stroll to collect colored rocks.
Guiltily, Ella extolled Harry’s stamina. “He’s the only way out. Not to mention converting me into something a lick useful, finally.”
“I don’t want him building my house,” Dominic said. “He won’t follow the plans. He’ll cut corners, tinker with his innovations, leave surprises everywhere.”
“How much longer am I supposed to live in this tin can?” Ella said. “Teaching, keeping up with Marco—who’s been great—putting all my spare time ha ha into this house that might, might shelter a living body by the year 2000. Fighting off the creeps at the laundromat. Never seeing you.”
Those last three words arrived like a rescue party. Dominic took Ella in his arms. It was such a relief and pleasure for both of them, not wanting to let go.
Although completing the house himself would have required the intervention of sorcery, Dominic slammed into the timber as if months could be alchemized into his spare hours. He framed before each workday and after dinner until midnight, by floodlight. On a Saturday morning, the cold breaking with the beginning of February, Marco joined him and Ella. Dominic was inserting blocking, chunks of two-by-four, at a corner post.
“Dad, I’m thirsty,” Marco said.
“Just a minute.” Dominic’s hammering had found a rhythm. Three quick strikes played an ascending scale, like an African thumb piano, before the final whack buried the nail.
“I’ve been out here all day,” Marco said. It was mid-morning.
Dominic was riding his efficiency with exuberant fury. “The jug’s out,” he panted. “Use the hose.”
“That water tastes brown, and it’s not cold. Let’s get a slush at Circle K.”
Dominic understood. They hadn’t played a minute together since he’d been home. “Just two more to go,” he said. Nails between his teeth, he centered the blocking with his left hand and drove one, two, three. Audacious with petulance and faith, Marco covered the protruding nailhead with his hand. The hammer, already on its downward arc, plunged through the nest of bones.
At Emergency the doctor set five fractures and hid the purple mass in a cast.
“I couldn’t pull the hammer back” was what Dominic had repeated, packing the hand in ice, driving, briefing the admitting nurse. Sitting on the edge of the hospital bed, he explained to Marco, “I tried. I think I even managed to slow it down.”
Marco’s dark face was small in the expanse of linen. In an ethereal painkiller voice, he said, “I only wanted a drink.”
The Terrys discovered the concept of overlapping time—the condition of living simultaneously within a project’s schedule and its actual duration, the latter invariably longer despite allowances for the unexpected, which routinely surpassed expectations.
Thus, on a given Saturday Dominic mentally had completed framing an end wall, as promised by his timetable. Mentally, he was driving off the site to buy joist hangers for the ceiling, grab lunch with a friend, and pop into the mall for a gelato before lugging two-by-fours up the scaffolding.
In reality, however, having forgotten the window opening, Dominic was knocking a stud out of the end wall, then nailing the windowsill and header to cripple studs—while salivating at the taste of imagined hazelnut gelato, fantasizing conversations with his friend, so that he forgot to plumb as he went along, and eventually ripped out the lumber again.
This temporal incongruity could not be resolved. It was like the flawed porch corner, two floor joists refusing to meet square until Dominic finally hid them under decking. March passed. Occupying the house by summer, as originally planned, was inconceivable. Dominic borrowed from Harry to pay the roofer, plumber, and electrician. Marco’s third-grade teacher tactfully omitted his penmanship grade from the report card. Whether Dominic took Marco to the zoo or squatted beside him under the kitchen table, animating the plastic dinosaurs, the boy awarded him the same sorrowful courtesy. He had never been better behaved.
An opportunity presented itself. The Denver rep suffered an apparent breakdown. If the company allowed him to commute, Dominic agreed to plug in immediately while keeping his inert Arizona territory on maintenance. The call came on a Thursday; Monday he could be in Denver. “Score some bucks, jump-start this shack,” he said.
Dominic’s plane vanished into the blue. Ella called Harry. “We have to finish this house,” she began in a dry, tight voice, and was unable to continue.
“I don’t hold myself above anybody,” Harry said. “When Bernice and I were building our place, we were at each other’s throats.” He could spring for a contractor to stucco the exterior, but then they were on their own. “You’ve squeezed me dry, woman,” he said. “I mean financially speaking.”
Extending his legs into the roominess of the jet’s first-class compartment, Dominic sipped his after-dinner liqueur. The past weekend he, Ella, and Harry had stood around superfluously, gaping as a crew armed with spray guns encased their house in gray glop.
Now he was recalling his prizewinning science project in eleventh grade, a waterproof synthetic fiber. After the awards assembly, Dominic had celebrated with a socially precocious classmate who served martinis in his own apartment. The friend drove him home past dusk, so late for dinner that the house was locked against him. Through the window he saw his family eating, heads bobbing, forks glinting. The rattle of the front door as Dominic shook the knob swiveled the heads around momentarily before they bent to their plates. Perhaps it was the wide dining table heaped with food, the interior lighting festive orange against the darkened house, that reminded Dominic of a parade float, his parents as Homecoming King and Queen with entourage.
Dominic walked the three miles to his friend’s, where he spent the night. The following day his parents hunted him down in class. As they upbraided him in the hall, Harry and Bernice’s hands joined convulsively, inching up each other’s palms. Dominic begged forgiveness.
“Now that we’ve packed your dad off to Colorado,” Harry said, “we’re doing some building. Feed these to Mom.” He passed Marco a bag of drywall nails. “Your dad has a brain the size of a battleship, but his common sense you could hold in your fist,” he said, making one.
“He’s got more common sense than that,” Marco snapped. “It’s as big as a watermelon. Bigger. His common sense could crush your whole car.”
“Good kid
.” Harry nodded.
Ella enforced Dominic’s one condition, that Harry be banned from physical labor. Instead he’d assembled and was attempting to supervise a drywall crew from Manpower. Diligent but inept, they sank nailheads deep in the gypsum, tearing the face paper. The line of installed Sheetrock zigzagged subtly. Mounted on scaffolding, Ella used her head to prop a four-by-twelve panel against the ceiling, thrusting with her neck, while a partner hammered. He slipped, dropping his end. As the panel spun Ella backwards, she instinctively collapsed her knees and crumpled to the plank, the Sheetrock fracturing thunderously below.
“Just the sky falling,” Ella said as workmen stampeded in from every direction.
Week’s end, Harry fired the lot.
Even hours past sundown, the captive June heat drove Ella and Marco from the Airstream. Crickets wound their little springs. Flooded with moonrise, the whitened hulk of the house was an absence, a subtraction from the landscape. When Ella peered inside, the empty latticework of framing gleamed like ivory, room after room. The random, isolated Sheetrock panels appeared as errors, stuck keys in this hymn to openness.
“When it was winter, I wished it was summer. Now I wish it was winter,” Marco said.
“I know, sweetie. I’ll get the fan tomorrow.” Like everything else they possessed, it was in storage. Ella let Marco stay up and watch the snowy, rippling TV. School was out, the summer program just a few hours a day. After putting him to bed, she couldn’t sleep. Those empty timber rectangles marched on and on like months.
She’d read the few used mysteries—her preferred genre—that she’d bought since moving into the trailer. Newsweek presumably waited in the P.O. box. Midway through Letterman, Marco came in. “I can’t get comfortable. It’s too hot,” he said. He was looking at the floor, his tactic to keep from crying. Ella motioned him beside her on the bed. “Is Dad really coming back?” he said.
Ella explained that Dominic was working very hard so they could have a house again, one which would be almost too beautiful to believe.
“Some dads go off and don’t even pay child support. It’s like they forget,” Marco said.
“Dad hasn’t forgotten us,” Ella said. She caressed him with a damp cloth until he slept.
In desperation Ella opened one of Dominic’s professional journals. Though the text was chilly, impervious, she achieved a longing for him. She summoned the memory of the China vacation, the climb to the temple at—Hedong, that was the place. Dominic’s sturdy calves and deep breath had led her, the cloud masses above breaking into the shapes of birds. The bundle of Marco swayed on Dominic’s back. Ella reached to touch Dominic’s hip, and almost fainted with love for him. The temple thrust up before them, its angles resolving themselves immediately into the lion’s face.
Stunned, Ella recognized that temple in their own house, the symmetry of peaks and upswept corners of the roof, descending to the slightly busy porch overhang. She wondered if Dominic knew what he had designed. Three A.M. be damned, she would have called his hotel if they’d had a phone.
The next afternoon, as Ella napped, Harry knocked on the Airstream. “I could sit in the dirt and draw flowers on my toes,” he said, “while my colleague attempts to hang ninety-pound Sheetrock all by herself. Or we could kick some bootie.”
Until dusk Harry taught Ella how to dimple the face paper with a final hammer blow, leaving room for joint compound; how to snap-cut the Sheetrock with a utility knife and kick of the knee. They took turns bracing ceiling panels while the other nailed. One-handed, Marco stuffed insulation batts into wall cavities.
Ella’s right arm was mush, and she had a crick in her neck, but the master bedroom ceiling was enclosed.
“Buy you a drink?” Despite his sweating, reddened face, Harry’s body moved with the same loose economy as when they’d begun.
Presumptuous weasel!—Ella thought, instantly alert. But her retort slumped inside her. Having violated her promise to Dominic, allowing Harry to advance the house further than five men had the previous day, she couldn’t be so puny as to refuse.
At a sports bar and grill, Harry dispatched Marco to the video games with a handful of quarters. Over pitchers he told tales of the Jersey construction industry, inspectors bribed, office towers sinking into the mud. Through every mob hit and union hall bombing, Harry scampered unscathed.
Ella even found herself chirping a verse of the Virility Fan Club song: “Harry, I don’t know where you get your get-up-and-go. Here I am thirty-six, a teenager really, and you’ll have to peel me out of this chair.”
If there was any doctrine common to her mystery novels, Ella thought, beerily despondent, it was this: after committing your first murder, the next ones don’t mean a thing.
Dominic, too, was revisiting the trip to China. Before catching the flight to Tucson, he bought a glazed ceramic lion in an Oriental import shop.
Ashamed and defiant when she met him at the airport, Ella hugged him perfunctorily. “God,” she exclaimed. “My back. I forgot. Always sore.”
“Welcome to the Bataan Death March,” Dominic said, more harshly than he’d intended. Marco’s right arm was still in a sling, a precaution. “My dad smashed it with a hammer, but it was an accident,” Marco explained to a porter.
Flying in over the mountains north of Tucson, Dominic had scanned the foothills eagerly, as if he could distinguish the one white pinprick that was his house. Arriving on the lot, Ella’s grudging embrace lingering on him like an ill-fitting shirt, he felt curiously disconnected. After Denver’s bigness—his blue-glass office tower, huge hotel, acres of medical facilities, even the airport like a fortified island—he seemed to have disembarked in a Third World country. Ella and Marco were the rustic locals, he, in his gray suit, satchel in hand, the foreign dignitary dispensing the needed but resented aid package.
With scarcely a second glance at the house, Dominic was about to pop the trunk for his baggage when Ella took his hand. Pointing with it, she wordlessly traced the outline of the lion emerging from the rough framing. The Chinese figurine tucked in his suitcase, Dominic caught on instantly.
The anticipation of what was about to occur was so delicious that he lingered in it, approaching the suitcase with soft, floating steps.
Unwrapping the lion statuette, Ella threw herself on him, sucking, biting his neck and chest.
Long past midnight, when Dominic and Ella tiptoed from the Airstream, the moon had set. The lawn chairs cooled their bare skin. Ella rubbed her arm back and forth on his. He lifted her hand and held it against his cheek. He went inside and brought out Marco, still sleeping, to sit on his lap. But then, when he felt he should be most contented, he was disquieting himself. Did Marco, he wondered, love him for particularly Dominic qualities, or simply as father? Could someone else have stepped in and been just as much father? Or more father? And even Ella. Had she, at some point, just lowered her head doggedly and decided to love?
If he proved to be the wrong man, Dominic thought, at least his wife and son would have the house.
“Feed the lion” was Dominic’s call to work the next morning, a full hour before overseer Harry, wearing a new straw boater with red band, settled himself in a folding chair, with a thermos of iced tea.
“My wife, the journeyman drywaller. She’s teaching me to do arches,” Dominic said.
“We can pick ’em, Dom. Women,” Harry said. He steadied the gypsum panel while Dominic scored the back with a utility knife, preparatory to bending the curve.
After a while Dominic said, “It was awful for Mom to go so slowly, but thank God it gave us all a chance to be there.” He remembered her shrunken, bright-eyed face still pleading and directing: Buy her a slip that didn’t make her thighs sweat. Hold hands. The family obeyed. They surrounded the bed as if it were a palanquin that presently they would raise and transport to a delightful, refreshing spot.
Dominic remembered finding Harry crouched at the foot of the bed, in the dark, a mound barely larger than their German shephe
rd.
He set down the knife and gripped Harry’s shoulder. The two men paused a few seconds, then resumed cutting the board.
“Grandpa Harry took us to a bar,” Marco said as his parents were putting him to bed. He felt bad ratting on his mother, but the continued silence about Harry’s activities gave him a sick churning in his stomach.
“Barhopping with the old man?” Dominic said.
“It wasn’t worth mentioning, but I was going to tell you,” Ella said. “My real crime is he’s been hanging Sheetrock. I can’t set a bodyguard on him. I’m gone hours a day.”
“Let’s get him the hell away from here,” Dominic broke out. “Send him to Cancun. Money’s coming in. A few weeks, we’ll be contracting out this shit.”
“Honey, I can’t take any more ‘few weeks.’ I’ll quit the school. We’ll hire us some men, I’ll be out here all day with a bullwhip over them. I’ll tie ol’ Harry to a saguaro.”
“You love that job,” Dominic said, stricken.
“I love you. I love our family being together.”
“You’re punishing yourself for letting Harry work.”
“Would you mind not interpreting everything by your piddling rules, even if you’re right?”
Dominic grinned tightly at the numbness settling over his heart, in the place occupied by his house.
Harry culled Manpower for potential drywallers, Ella’s assistants. The most competent, a Mexican carpenter, was deported by the INS after a week. Harry saber-sawed cutouts for electrical boxes. And Harry hung Sheetrock—but only when Marco was in school, at Ella’s insistence. “Bad enough I lie without making the boy a liar for me,” she said. She dug a trench for the backyard wall. Eighteen inches beneath the surface, her shovel struck caliche, which she’d break apart with an iron bar. Ella’s formerly soft white arms were browned and lumpy with muscle like old mesquite pods.
For his part, Marco kept his mouth shut whatever his suspicions about Harry, an intuitively pragmatic choice. He and his mother depended on each other to get through the day, while his father inhabited the air, terminal-hopping between Tucson, Denver, and Phoenix.
All My Relations Page 17