Building a Home with My Husband (32 page)

“You’re not?”

“Go wash the brush. Just stop.”

“You’re not going through with the green?”

“Didn’t I just say that?”

“No.”

“Well, we’re not.”

“When did you decide that?”

“A while ago.”

“When were you going to tell me?”

“Look, we’re wasting time. Just wash the brush, and start doing the baseboards.”

Oh, no, I think, returning downstairs only minutes after I traversed Kevin’s ladder bridge, it’s happening to us. All the stories I’ve heard about couples during renovation: the bickering, the criticizing, the snapping, the whining, the not listening. I’ve even begun to see articles about it. Renovation dissension. Even though we haven’t lived on the job site, we liked our contractor, our contractor made good after our disaster, our budget has swelled by only a few thousand, one of us is a professional, one of us has been invisible. Still, we have not escaped.

Avoiding eye contact with Kevin, I hurry to the basement, my cheeks tight. The water in the sink is so cold, even through the gloves it hurts my hands. I wash the brush, my nose and eyes running, my wet gloves finding a used tissue in my sweatshirt. I feel like a rainy drop cloth. I want to go back to the rented house. I want to get on a plane. I want to run away to the moon.

Back upstairs, I’m too upset to speak. Hal smiles as if nothing’s wrong, his way, I know, of drawing me back to a place of unity. He tells me I should do a second coat of Breathtaking while he turns his attention toward the white. Then we paint in silence.

A half hour passes, then an hour. I don’t know what he’s thinking, and it’s all I can do to fight the impulse to bolt from the third floor and go cry in my car. But I keep reminding myself: I do not just love my husband, and I am not just committed to him. I also need to act on my commitment. These are not the same thing, which I came to appreciate only after Hal and I got married. I would like to think that I could have absorbed such basic concepts by, say, voting age, and perhaps that’s the case for some people. Not until I was living with Hal in my twenties, however, did I realize that I had little understanding of the connection between love and commitment. This happened when I watched friends defect from the single life into marriage and I beseeched them to explain how they’d become decisive. They said they’d finally felt ready to commit. But what did that mean? Had they found such true love that the desire to flee was eradicated? I didn’t think so. They seemed to love their betrothed, but not swooningly so. Then Hal and I broke up, and my idea of true love was revealed as delusion. Oh, I thought, as I spoke with Robin, and Harriet, and struggled to learn the lessons of love, I guess that when people love their partner—not as a soul mate, but as a down-to-earth romantic friend and lifelong ally—they just decide to stay. That must be what commitment is. This is the thought I carried with me when Hal and I strolled in our wedding finery through the streets of Wilmington to the justice of the peace. But even as our two witnesses threw rose petals when we left the county building that day, I still did not understand that deciding to commit was different from acting on commitment.

My epiphany came two days later, on a seasonable May afternoon when Hal and I were walking in the Brandywine Creek Park. During a conversation whose content has long faded from memory, Hal used a tone of voice that I interpreted as patronizing. Hurt, I reacted as I had when I’d taken exception to similar slights in our first thirteen years: I ceased being able to speak, and could think only of running away. We continued walking, him unaware of my jaw tensing because we were both facing forward, me thinking,
Leave! Get out of here now!

But this time I fell into an inner dialogue, and talked back to myself in my head.

Wait a minute, I thought. I can’t leave. I just got married.

Sure you can,
my steaming thoughts responded
. The wedding was just two days ago. You haven’t been married long enough for it to really count. And look at how he just talked to you!

He probably doesn’t even know what he sounded like.

What kind of resolution is that?

But if I go off by myself, he’ll get confused and I’ll get angrier and the relationship will feel even worse than it feels right now. What if I just, well, talk to him?

Maybe I should just force myself.

I’ll say, “Hal, the way you just said that comment you made? It hurt me.”

And there in that park, maybe just to prove my indignant side wrong, I pushed those very words out of my mouth. To my surprise, Hal listened. Then he asked a question, and listened some more. By the time we reached Edward the great blue heron, my jaw was no longer pinched, the resentful voice inside me had shut up, and the urge to run had vanished.

So this is commitment, I realized, as we walked up the hill toward our house. Pressing myself to admit my feelings aloud, and how they arose—even when I’m so convinced that he did something wrong that I’m on the verge of running. Of course, commitment requires that the other person must love and respect me enough to want to hear, and I must love and respect him enough to speak words he
can
hear. But assuming that is the case, then this is commitment: valuing our unity over my pride, the whole of our us rather than the sum of my righteousness.

Not only did I have the love thing all wrong, I thought as we reached our house. I was also wrong about commitment. Love is not just a feeling, and commitment is not just a decision. They, when intertwined, are action. Love and commitment move, and touch, and listen, and speak. They are deeds that sacrifice individual pride. Their goal is not just happiness, but mutual vulnerability.

 

But gee, sometimes it’s just so hard to do. Tonight, for instance. After painting two hours without a word, I can’t possibly talk. The hinges in my jaw have rusted shut.

Finally at nine, Kevin leaves, and I set down my brush and manage to pry my mouth open. “I think I’m heading home,” I say, my voice coming out like a bent nail.

Hal turns from the wall. “Why?”

“I’m tired and hungry, and I didn’t pack enough food for a whole dinner.”

“I’m tired and hungry, too.”

“You have to get up early tomorrow. Why don’t you come back with me?”

“I still have another coat of paint.”

“You can’t get it all done tonight.”

“I’m going to try.”

“What are you going to eat for dinner?”

“Nothing.”

“I can pick you up something when I leave and bring it back.”

“Don’t bother.”

“It’s not a bother. I’ll go to the Japanese place—”

“No.”

“Oookkkaayy.” I say this with uncertainty, hoping he’ll change his mind. But he just asks me to leave the brush on its can, and goes back to his painting.

Well, I think, pausing in my new study, I guess love and commitment require timing, as well as speaking and listening. There is value in waiting for better moments to talk, and the moment between two coats of paint isn’t one of them.

“Bye!” I call back up the stairs. He doesn’t respond.

I step outside and get in my car. So what that the lining of my coat is getting even more paint on it? So what that it’s so cold my nose is running? I might as well get my dinner at 7-Eleven. They have my number-one comfort food: pretzels. I can drown myself in crunchy saltiness.

It is bitingly cold. I raise my hood as I pull out. I angle for the turn to the next block—

Thump thump.

My breath catches in my throat. Someone’s banging on my car!

Thump thump thump.

I see nothing out the windshield, through the rearview, on the passenger side. But a carjacker must be trying to blast into my car—and I can’t even see him! I look around wildly.

“Hey!” I hear from outside the driver’s window.

Hal is beside my car in his painting clothes, without a coat—of course without a coat. “Are you okay?” he says.

I roll down the window. “No! I thought someone was about to carjack me!”

“I don’t mean now. I mean when you left the house.”

“No, I—yes, I was fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

“I thought I heard a crash.”

“You heard the front door close behind me.”

“That’s it?”

“As far as I know. I can’t imagine what crashed.”

He looks at me. I feel so sad for him, out in the cold without his coat. “When I stop off at 7-Eleven to get pretzels”—he laughs, knowing my weakness—“do you want anything?”

“You coming back?”

“I can.”

“You weren’t coming back.”

“I can, if you’re hungry. I can even go to the Japanese place if you’re hungry.”

“You’d do that?”

“I’ll go there right now.”

“Okay,” he says. “That would be nice.”

 

Late that night, after we eat dinner standing up, not talking about our fight, just speaking cautiously about banalities, I return to the rented house while he stays to paint. I have long been asleep when the bedroom door opens. “I found it,” he says, and tosses something on the blanket.

I reach over. “Your winter coat! Where was it?”

“I guess a few days ago I stuck it on the bathroom sink so it wouldn’t get paint on it. Then I forgot about it.”

“I’m so glad you found it. Maybe everything will be good from here on in.”

He says nothing. I push myself across the bed toward him. “Can we talk about what happened?” I say, too tired to argue myself back into silence. “So it doesn’t happen again?”

He pauses, then says, “When you say the same thing over and over, it makes me crazy.”

I say, “I understand. You still don’t need to snap at me.”

“Fair enough.”

“And when you feel the urge to lose your patience with me saying the same thing over and over, I’d like it if you asked why it’s so important to me.”

He hesitates, a shadow beside the bed. “I’ll try,” he says.

“I’ll try, too.”

This resolution is just one step, and it took all night. No—it’s been taking weeks. The house holds layers of history, and now it holds ours, too. I’m glad the walls can’t speak.

 

A few nights later, after the wooden floors have been sealed and covered with protective paper, I return for another coat of paint. I’ve barely seen Hal for days. I’m teaching, I’m packing, he’s at work, he’s at Teacher’s Lane, and the clock makes another rotation.

I arrive with Hal’s work clothes in a bag, as well as a take-out dinner. He greets me pleasantly but quickly, and as we stand in the empty living room, strategizing about the order in which we’ll accomplish our tasks this evening, we hear a knock on the window.

It’s our neighbor Jim, waving to us from under a Russian-style hat. “Come in,” I say. “See the house.” I’m surprised I want to show it, because Hal and I are still feeling tentative around each other, and when I look around, I don’t see a whole house, only parts—like the toilet and the light fixtures, just put in—and everything that’s not right. Jim jumps at the chance to go through, and as Hal peels off to work on the third floor and I begin the tour, Jim keeps saying, “It’s beautiful.” I almost mention the tile flaw in the bathroom, then stop. He might not even notice. He doesn’t.

When we reach the still-in-progress third floor, I see that Hal has, thankfully, painted over the green railing. Now it’s red with plum spindles. He’s also added a sponged red to the lavender accent wall, a swirl that looks like a basement from the 1970s where a local band is having their debut. “I’m doing this to learn how to tone down the Pepto-Bismol wall in the dining room,” he says. “It’s cool,” Jim says, then asks, “Do you feel great in here?” Hal doesn’t answer, and of course I haven’t felt great at all. But seeing it through Jim’s eyes, imagining myself as unaware of our quarrel as I am of the history of every person who has lived in this house, I look around and see things that are indeed lovely. “I’m beginning to,” I say. “Well, being here,” he says, “it just lifts the spirit up,” and he raises his palms toward the sky.

Jim and I return downstairs, and I see that it
is
a nice house. Yes, it’s easy to dwell on all that failed to be born, like the third-floor addition that would have become my study. I can also stand in the dining room-kitchen and superimpose the image of the skeletal room, with me looking up to the rafters of the second floor. But if I blink all that away, I see a hundred-year-old house with our quirky stamp on it—sustainable, colorful, eclectic: crystal doorknobs on the second floor to go with the old transoms above the doors, retro light fixture in the dining room to go with the diner-esque glass block windows, bohemian accent walls of purple and marigold and vermillion. It is ours, because it reflects our personalities. It is also not ours, because it existed before and it will exist after, and we are just passing through, as all of us do through time itself.