Building a Home with My Husband (29 page)

“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.

But today, as I was on the phone with my mother, acutely concerned with dates for moving and deadlines for diagnoses and how much time we had, I suddenly fathomed that these lighthouse trips must have upset me more than I’d realized. Why else would I have never asked my mother what appeals to her about lighthouses—a question I would have asked anyone else? Why wouldn’t I want to know? Didn’t I find that when I pushed myself to understand Beth’s ardor for riding city buses—a far more unusual indulgence—I also bridged the distance between us? Have I not been trying to do that right now with Hal?

A few years ago, soon after I’d joined Beth on her buses, I attended a lecture by a man named William Stillman, who has the form of autism known as Asperger’s Syndrome. For an entire day he shared an insider’s understanding of how people with autism experience the world. Among the things he discussed is the tendency of people with autism to have a specific passion, which can range from traffic lights to trains to, in his case,
The Wizard of Oz
. He noted that people who do not have autism often refer to these passions as “obsessions,” and sometimes try to put a stop to them. His own parents tried when he was a teenager, sitting him down every night for a “talk,” until finally, in tears, he agreed to move his Oz memorabilia into the attic and take up athletics in school. He told the audience, “I would have preferred that they’d cut off my hand.” Then he explained that the way to reach a person is to
enter
his passion, not try to kill it off. How much closer he would have been to his parents had they tried to enjoy Oz with him.

At the end of William Stillman’s talk, I thought about Beth, and how, although she has not been diagnosed with autism, she has a passion—and that I reached her by entering it. Then I thought about other people, and I saw that almost everyone, with a disability or not, has some kind of passion. William Stillman was speaking a universal truth.

I knew all that. Yet it took me until this renovation to learn about Hal’s world. And it took me until today, when my mother mentioned her next lighthouse trip this fall, to question my tendency of looking down my nose at her passion. As I did, it occurred to me that what I’ve felt is not boredom, but envy. How could she love lighthouses as much as, or even more than, she loves me?

So in the call this morning that I am not telling Hal about, I finally asked Rosalie, “What do you like about lighthouses?”

“Oh, lighthouses are fascinating!” she said, and in a rush, she continued. “They’re a living history.” She told me how the keepers and their families lived in almost total isolation. The wives grew the food, sewed the clothing, schooled the children. The keeper had to work hard, too: twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, he had to keep the lantern lit, which often meant dragging coal up many steps to the lantern room. But lighthouses were the only warning system that protected ships from hitting the shoals and sinking. Fishermen, travelers—the family never knew when someone might be out there. “That’s what I like. Lighthouses are whole families that protect others from tragedy.”