Building a Home with My Husband (15 page)

“What?”

“I’ll show you.” He leads me upstairs. I’m relieved to feel no trace of my previous despondency. I can pass the hollowed-out bathroom without a glance, and when I see that my new study—as spacious as the dining room-kitchen immediately below—also has exposed brick, I’m free to feel chic and sophisticated.

But the room isn’t quite the same as the one beneath. Parallel to each of the walls stand structures made of lumber. Hal, predicting my question, says, “That’s the framing.”

“Oh. That’s what you see”—and I flash back to being eight and goofing around with my brother and sisters in the development to which we’d just moved, where we watched construction underway for the first time—“when a house is going up.”

“Well, the framing for a tract house, like what you played around in as a kid”—I smile at how quickly he grabbed on to my unspoken memory—“is both the structure of the house and space for utilities and insulation. This framing is
just
for the utilities and insulation. And that’s the disadvantage. We’ll lose a bit of square footage.”

“Our tiny house will get tinier?”

“You have to give up something to get something.” When I frown, he adds, “But remember—one of the cost-saving measures was not to do this in the front rooms on both floors. We’re keeping those plaster walls, so those rooms won’t shrink. When we do the insulation, we’ll just use a hose to spray behind the plaster.”

I look around. Even though the finished house won’t retain this trendy appearance, I’m impressed by how it looks.

“Roughing-in takes time,” Hal adds. “There’ll be a good stretch ahead when you won’t see a difference. If you don’t want to come back for a while, you won’t be missing much.”

This is convenient, because I have a heavy schedule of talks over the next few months. I’ve taken off the semester to limit my stress, but I’ll still be flying all over the country. “In case I take you up on that, tell me in advance what sea monsters we might encounter in this phase.”

His smile gives way to seriousness. He holds up three fingers. “One: unforeseen conditions. Two: poor coordination by the general contractor. Three: people not getting along.”

“Yikes. Them’s serious perils.”

“Well, unforeseen conditions are part and parcel of working with existing construction, so that’s the one that seems most likely. Poor coordination is less so, since Dan seems like a good general contractor, and part of a good g.c. is his coordination of the work.”

“What about people not getting along?”

“This is definitely a major time in a job when people have to cooperate. Everybody’s got to stay out of everybody’s way while considering everybody else. Like if the mechanical guy installs ductwork without thinking about the other trades, then the plumber comes in and says, ‘The toilet goes here, the drain here, and I have nowhere to put it,’ you’re in trouble.”

I feel my face get tight. “So one sub’s self-absorption could mess us up?”

“Self-absorption, arrogance, irresponsibility, frustration with life, you name it. Construction is just another theater in which the human condition with all its nonsense can strut about on the stage.”

“Doesn’t that worry you?”

“No. I think even with all their foibles, most people get along most of the time.” When my expression apparently doesn’t change, he adds, “Look, this is how I think most people see it. Whether they’re electricians, plumbers, or mechanical guys, every job works a whole lot better if we act like family when we’re on the job.”

I say, sarcastically, “So you mean everyone should just behave like brothers and sisters when they’re under the same roof?”

“Yeah, you could say that,” he says with a shrug.

 

Could he possibly have said something that would have given me more anxiety?

I don’t say this as we drive back to the house so I can call Craig—a social worker who has, in a series of phone sessions over the last few months, helped me address recent problems in my relationship with Beth. After all, I hear similar phrasing all the time about the importance of acting like family—or, more specifically, brothers and sisters— as politicians, pastors, union leaders, social justice groups, and others make appeals for some kind of unity. But as everyone who’s actually had a sibling must know—and as my own experience has shown me over and over—flesh-and-blood brothers and sisters, no matter how hard they try, and no matter how much they remember that they’re family—can be rather far from united.

It’s not that my relationships with my brother and sisters didn’t start out well. Raised under one roof, Laura, Beth, Max, and I were one another’s earliest and most frequent playmates, entertaining ourselves from sandboxes to school blacktops, sharing games and witticisms and eye-rolling irritations and, as we still find out by uttering identical words with identical inflections at the same moment, mental circuitry. Most important, we loved as well as liked one another. For instance, the year we lived in a development under construction, the four of us would roam in full camaraderie along our street, watching backhoes digging and foundations getting poured, and then, when the workers left for the day, we’d clamber up to a just-framed house, dart through the ribs of wood, and scramble from one nascent room to the next, giggling with familiar jokes and secret language. I can still see us then: high-spirited, enjoying one another. With the hindsight of adulthood, I can also see, well, the inner workings that my eight-year-old eyes, unskilled in discerning the sources of mood changes or distinguishing bravado from insecurity, failed to detect: Laura, alternating between giddy and pensive, feeling an approval-starved loneliness and spunk-crushing responsibility; me, cheerful with siblings and schoolmates and newly minted pen pals, but cut to the quick by my parents’ ill-expressed agonies; Beth, gleeful with us and bored when alone, relishing the spotlight of my mother’s scant energies while puzzling over my father’s departure; wise guy Max, disguising his lost-in-the-crowd distress with constant sardonic humor. In my child-scopic world, I did not miss that we were distinct, but I did miss my siblings’ inner strife. Perhaps this was due to my youthful self-absorption, which didn’t permit me to see behind the walls we were all carefully erecting. Perhaps, though, it was because we had, at least in my mind, a playscape so engaging that our aches mattered less than our fellowship. Certainly we fought, but our resentments perished quickly. One babysitter seemed almost annoyed at how immediately we got on after fights.

If only that were the way siblings remained as they progressed through the slow, muddy currents of time. But as almost anyone who’s been a brother or a sister knows, sometimes the bonds between siblings weaken. With us, our parents’ struggles, both between each other and within themselves, might have initiated the process. We were not unaware of this as it was occurring. We knew that, as their divorce molted into finger-jabbing, decibel-shattering showdowns when our father came to see us, our parents’ antipathy toward each other was instructing us in the ways of polarity and provocation, along with the impermanence of truce. But we did not understand that by the time our parents were no longer able to set foot in the same building, their feelings toward each other had seeped into their actions with us. My father expressed dismay when our habits reminded him of our mother’s less favorable qualities. My mother expressed despair that our presence frustrated her pursuit of a new man. Watching this, we would hunker down in each other’s rooms, trying to make sense of what was happening. But even as we sought to console one another, even as we observed the pain on the others’ faces and felt it in our own, even as we shared fears about the larger world of which we were uneasily becoming a part, we could not resist a pull toward competitiveness, mistrust, rash acts wrought by misaimed anger. Soon we developed into ever-shifting factions. We defined ourselves in opposition to the others. Our love ceased walking with our like.

Even among siblings who are spared such chaos, difficulties might still arise in their relationships, and the reasons are not hard to understand. Due to many details that vary right at each sibling’s birth, from order of arrival to time in a parent’s emotional life to the family’s fortunes, none of us
is
raised under the same roof. Each of us grows up in a house so unique it might as well have been designed by a different architect. Thus, as I framed my own rooms where I retreated with friends, so did Laura and Beth and Max, and there, whether our friends were school buddies or teenybopper magazines, solitary book-reading or lone bicycle-riding, ambition for careers or numbness about tomorrow, we grew into adulthood.

And that, as Hal and I have concluded many times, is why siblings—the very people who might be expected to be like-minded—don’t always get along. Despite all the overlaps that brothers and sisters have with each other, we also have such complicated affections and such separate histories that the most essential parts of ourselves—why we do what we do, how we believe people ought to behave, and what we want most out of life—might not overlap at all.

I wonder: what does it take for brothers and sisters to get along? Not just in the years soon after the cradle, but through all the decades that follow?

 

Barely a week after the rough-in begins, I find out that the first of our sea monsters has appeared.

Hal breaks the news when we’re in a discount warehouse for large appliances. As we amble up and down aisles looking for a stove, he happens to let slip something he’s failed to mention until now: we have encountered the infamous “unforeseen conditions.”

Two, actually. “Someone years ago cut a channel into the brickwork on the eastern wall of the dining room to run the drain line from the bathroom and ductwork to the second floor, and the remaining masonry crumbled a bit around those utilities. So that section of wall needs to be rebuilt. Plus, the bottoms of the joists above the dining room-kitchen aren’t level, so we have to fur them down to create a level plane for the installation of the ceiling.”

“Will this cost us anything?”

“A few extra thousand.”

“Geez.”

“That’s fair. None of this is Dan’s fault.”

“It isn’t ours, either.”

“I’m just glad we caught it. An uneven ceiling is an eyesore, but a major wall with a hole in the masonry might make the house structurally unsound.”

“We’ve been living in a place that could have fallen down around us?”

“People live with all kinds of things they don’t know about until they renovate.”

“This worries me.”

“You wouldn’t be you if it didn’t.”

“But I don’t only mean about the wall. I mean—”

“They might be the only problems we encounter.”

“I hope they are.”

“I won’t be surprised if they are.”

“That’s good to know.”

“But I won’t be surprised if they’re not.”

 

I shouldn’t worry, but life is well-stocked with surprises, as I’m reminded when I head out for a walk the next morning. Sometimes, of course, they’re pleasing, such as what happened soon after we moved last month to the rented house, when, knowing that we’d be leaving in four to six months, I was content to remain detached from our surroundings. But soon neighbors began crossing their lawns to initiate welcoming chats. I learned that this has long been a friendly corner of Delaware, a place where people settled in for decades and looked after one another, and before I knew it, I was coming to enjoy exchanging hellos. This, in turn, made a second and less heartening surprise easier to bear. A little after we arrived, two other households also moved onto the block, both of whom began indulging in behavior that the established residents, and Hal and I, found distressing: letting their dogs bark endlessly, parking cars on the lawn, blasting music. All of this rattled me, but because I was feeling a warm association with the old-timers, I felt hopeful that harmony would return to the street. It hasn’t yet, but here’s one more nice surprise. A few days ago, I found myself falling into a lengthy conversation with Ginny, who lives across the street, and discovered that we had much in common. She teaches special education. She and her five-year-old love books and the arts. Despite challenges in the past, she’s close to her family. And I started to make a real friend.

So stop worrying about the renovation, I tell myself, as my walk carries me into an adjoining neighborhood. Not all surprises are miserable, and the bad ones might be offset by the good. Besides, with Hal on the lookout, nothing truly terrible is going to happen.

Yet it’s hard to believe that fully. I know all too well that sometimes surprises of knee-buckling magnitude come bursting out of nowhere. I think about the conversation I had just last night with Ginny, when we were hanging out in her living room, her daughter Eliza drawing pictures, us eating snacks. Ginny asked me about Beth, and I told her that if I’d been asked as a young adult to peer into the future and describe my relationships with my siblings, I would have said that I’d be close to Max, distant from Laura, and besieged by guilt about my discord with Beth. That’s how things were then, so that’s how I imagined they’d stay. I sure did have it wrong with Max and Laura. Beth, too, actually, because in my late thirties I rode the buses and we came together.

This is where my discussions about Beth have concluded for years: at the plateau where she knows she can call whenever she wants, I embrace her right to make choices, and we enjoy a guilt-free, easygoing rapport. But last night I risked telling Ginny a bit more. I wasn’t sure I should, but with one troubling neighbor to her left and another to her right, our conversation kept returning to the topic of people not getting along, so it didn’t seem out of place. Not that I was detailed. I just joked, “But sometimes sibling relationships encounter unforeseen conditions,” and then I gave only the broad sweep. It’s not that I didn’t want to say more, but I knew I’d get overwrought if I did.