Building a Home with My Husband (7 page)

Then it is all at once: the phone call where Frankie’s partner tells me that Frankie died moments ago, my stagger away from my office desk after Marie tells me how to live my life, the long hug with Sandy at her father’s funeral, where she is hiding the depths of her addiction from me, as well as her then ex-husband.

Knowing I’ll never finish packing at this rate, I force myself to move to another cabinet. But when I open that door, I discover photo albums, as well as one unfinished task. Having been advised by a lab tech years ago that photos deteriorate when improperly stored, I’ve long wanted to remove my pictures from the sticky-back Woolworth albums where they’ve lived for decades. Look: on a shelf beneath the albums are archival boxes, waiting for this very opportunity.

It’ll go quickly, I tell myself, and I might as well get it done. But as soon as I open the first album, I see friends and family marching me through time. It’s as if the novels strewn about the room had been collected into these albums. I must pack! No, I must read. I lower myself to the floor and set the first album in my lap and become even more ensnared in timelessness.

So many people long gone, some to a less earthly existence like my grandmother, others, like, for a while, my mother, to paths beyond our personal intersections. I cared for them all, even those whose words caused me to back away, or who, due to my own lapses in judgment, would never receive me with open arms again. And looking at Sandy laughing in the schoolyard in fifth grade, I remember the great revelation of my adolescence: family is different from friends. I’d certainly been told when I was a child that you can choose your friends but not your family, but when I was a teenager I discovered another distinction. Family was the very house in which my thoughts had come into being, and they remained around and inside me all the time. Plus, family was a
they
—all I had to do was start talking with Beth about our mother, Laura about our grandmother, and the conversation would ignite everyone’s presence all around us. But friends? In the house of me, my friends were the rooms themselves, each a private haven where I could be a different version of myself, as could they, each decorated by our unique camaraderie. That, I remember thinking when I was a teenager, was what friends were—two people who so delight in each other’s company, they make their own sanctuary from everyone else, including (maybe especially including) family. What a sanctuary it was, too: a place of songs only you sing together, of earrings only the two of you share. This is why, when the teenage me had a falling out with a friend, it was never I who encouraged the termination. I couldn’t imagine ending a friendship. Each of those private rooms was far too precious to me.

I reach for the next album. My twenties. Here is my mother the night I saw her again, at age twenty-two. Here I am with Hal, who entered my life a month later. Here are so many others, some still traveling through time with me, others so long past that I wonder if they remember my name. Here, for instance, is Marie, smiling in my college room, and as I once again feel that gut-punch from knowing that our friendship was over, I remember a new understanding that I learned in that decade of life: friendship requires more than delight in the friend’s company. It also requires trust, depth, and the ability to contend with history, and if it lacks those, it might not be in my best interest. That moment with Marie, for instance, slammed me into a mistrust that I knew I’d never shake. Belly-dancing Amina and I lacked the depth for continued effort. And when I looked up my teenage boyfriend when I was thirty-one and we met for dinner, I thought that if we were meeting now, we’d be friends—but I also knew that our history made any friendship impossible.

The photo albums move into my thirties. Author readings for my first books. The breakup with Hal. Running events in a bookstore. Starting to teach. Riding the bus with Beth. There is Ethan, right before he left his wife. Although I remain baffled and saddened by being left behind, I feel the aperture of my heart open when I see this picture—and I remember that in my thirties, I came to yet another conclusion about friends. Though I might have no understanding of why someone moved out of a friendship, or find the stated reasons cowardly or frivolous, I need to grant them the same right to act in their own best interest that I grant myself. Besides, I still think of my former friends with a full heart. Maybe they do the same with me.

Now, my forties. Look at Hal, back in my life after long loss. Look at Beth and my mother and recently even Laura, with whom the same is true. Oh, and look at Sandy: sober at last, living in a house at the shore. Taking in all these faces—moments in stories still being written—I know something new. That only by going the long haul with these people, forgiving them their errors as they forgave mine, did I learn that each individual is so much more than a single foolish action or ill-considered word or self-centered time in life. Believing I can fix someone conclusively, as in these photos, as in each object, strains rationality. I can no more pin a person down than I can pin sand to the wall. This is why my friends are still with me, even if our friendships have ended. This is why my resentment of a rejection is accompanied by affection. And this is the core of why packing can be so daunting. It is a reliving of how all that once was slowly became all that is now. It is a lamenting of all that is no more—and gratitude for all that’s survived. It is, I’m stunned to admit, grieving.

 

In the kitchen, Hal, unplagued by even the slightest trace of grief, is whistling a made-up tune as he rolls up our glasses in newspaper. I reach for a glass, thinking I’ll distract myself by being useful. But something about me—the swirl of memories on my face, the scent of sandalwood behind my ear—awakens his Marriage Mind Meld. “What’s up, Simon?” he asks.

“Nothing,” I say in a telltale lying falsetto.

“It’s so nothing you look like you’re about to fall over. Have it out.”

I slump in a chair and tell him what I’ve been doing. Or haven’t been doing.

He says, “Lots of people can’t get rid of things, probably for these same reasons. Maybe that’s part of why the square footage of new houses keeps growing, and the self-storage industry’s booming. But we can’t put in more closets and we’re not renting extra space.”

“I thought you architects were space magicians.”

“Ah, foolish lass, now you see the folly of your thinking.”

“So what can I do?”

He thinks a minute. “When a building loses its original purpose, like a factory goes out of business or a church closes, Americans tend to take one of two approaches: they neglect the building for years, then tear it down and build something new, or they regard it as a precious gem that has to be kept precisely as it is. But in recent years we’ve been finding ways to do what’s called adaptive reuse, which is more like what the Europeans have been doing for a long time—turning the factory into a school, the church an office. It’s funny. We have a tendency to see only two options—throw it away or preserve it with awe. They allow for a middle ground.”

Pyrex bowl in his hands—a gift from Beth—I say, “But how do you adaptively reuse objects that mean so much to you?”

“Beats me,” he says. “Maybe an epiphany will strike in your sleep. Aren’t you the Girl from Epiphanema?” Then, grinning, he sings lyrics he’s made up to go with the tune: “Short and cute and smart and lovely, the Girl from Epiphanema goes asking, and then she’s musing, it’s quite amusing, then—Pow!”

I make a small smile. “Nice try. Except I don’t feel any Pow.”

“I know you,” he says. “You will.”

 

And he’s right—by the next morning, I know what to do. But it didn’t come to me in my sleep, and it didn’t hit with a
pow
. It came while I was talking with Hal in our bed, late into the night. There, our conversation lit by the turtle lamp I bought when we were apart, listening to a CD of Portuguese guitar music he found at the same time, thinking beyond the most obvious options, we came to the solution with ease.

Now I return to my study, dig out the Maxfield Parrish address book, and set it aside to give to the amiable receptionist at my chiropractor’s office. I reach for a box, insert the crystal night light, and label it for my sister Laura. I run through my date book for the last few years, looking for new friends. Marni, the jewelry maker I met in Boulder, will love the single earrings. Bonnie, the author who answers my e-mail when I’m on the road, will love the pop-up Alice. When I am outside later in the day, I wave to my neighbor Susan as she walks down the street. An education director at a church, she’s a new friend I already feel will continue through my life with me, so I immediately tell her the story about Sandy, and that I have a stained glass panel that I love but that holds a memory I need not keep. Does she want it? She almost weeps as she says yes. In the next days, as I send out packages to one friend after another, I start to think of myself as a story giver: here is how this Chinese jacket, Tupperware container, pair of belly-dancing cymbals, came to me. Now I am giving them to you.

I am not regifting, but spreading memories. Nor am I demolishing my past. I am adapting it for the future.

Finally, the night before the movers arrive, my closets are empty. My steps unburdened, my spirits revived, I walk through the house, ready for tomorrow. But now I am also ready in another way. I am at last realizing a truth I have suspected but resisted all along: that although nothing in this life is fixed—not friendships, not houses, not kisses, not perfumes, not whirling belly dances, not even a fifth grader’s laughter—we can still, every day, make some mark on another person’s page. We can sing a song together. We can share a wave on the street. We can give each other a story.

M·O·V·I·N·G D·A·Y

T
his is how our moving day begins:

“I should tell you something,” Hal says as we stir awake. “Your huge IKEA wardrobe?”

I rub my eyes. “What about it?”

“I, uh, I broke one of the mirrored doors.”

“But I saw the doors last night. They’re leaning against a wall downstairs.”

“No, you saw a healthy door. I turned the broken one so the glass faces the wall.”

“You
hid
it?”

“Not exactly. I just sort of . . . delayed its discovery.”

“You’re telling me
now
? On
moving day
?”

He hurries through the details. Four nights ago, hoping to shave a few minutes off the movers’ bill, Hal began hauling everything he could carry down to the first floor. But as he was maneuvering the towering mirrored door down the stairs, he slipped. The mirror canted out of his grasp, skied down the stairs, and slammed into a wall.

“Why didn’t you tell me when this happened?”

“You were at that talk in Orlando.”

“And when I got home the demands of packing conveniently postponed this confession?”

“You could say that.”

I turn toward the ceiling with a loud sigh and feel him bracing for my reaction. There are so many possibilities. An exasperated
What in heaven’s name were you thinking?
A guilt-inducing
Moving day disaster always finds me. Me!
An icy
I’m getting dressed now.
But I discard all these options, because only one response truly encapsulates what I feel.

“Well,” I say, turning back, “stuff happens.”

He smiles. “Exactly.”

“Maybe the broken door will get us off the hook. Maybe this’ll be a good move.”

“Whatever that is.”

“Hey, you can’t be the pessimist today. That’s my job. You need to be the optimist.”

“On moving day, anything can happen.”

Knowing just how true those words can be, we laugh, memories brimming in our eyes.

“So no truck accidents?” I say.

“This time,” he replies in a Beatle accent, “we’ll pass the audition.”

He looks at me with hope, I respond with trepidation. And so our moving day begins.

 

Stuff Happens. Almost anyone who’s U-Hauled, Mayflowered, or just lugged their worldly goods from one home to another is acquainted with this unwritten law of moving. The language is sometimes coarser when first imparted by a wizened sage, typically outside a dorm while a thunderstorm is pounding sage, siblings, and overpacked boxes into misery. Sometimes, too, it’s dismissed as cynicism, especially by those fortunate enough to have emerged sound of body and mind from a move. But for veteran movers like me, for whom Stuff sure did Happen on moving days past, all we can think when we wake up on moving day morning is: Please, God, spare me anything unexpected. Let no Stuff Happen again.

Stripping the bed as Hal jumps in the shower, I think about my first exposure to this harsh wisdom. I was a month shy of the end of second grade, and although my family had relocated from a city apartment to a suburban house when I was a year old, this was essentially my first move. Indeed, until that day, enjoying what I now regard as the most carefree period in my childhood, I’d had little experience with change. Every day bloomed into a cheerful routine: a welcoming school, a neighborhood teeming with kids, a generous heap of freedom. Plus, I felt much like everyone else in our New Jersey town: Jewish, with a working father, stay-at-home mother, and kids close in age (Laura, the oldest, was nine, Max, the youngest, four, Beth and I in between). It never occurred to me that moving would bring the curtain down on this all.

Perhaps if I hadn’t been seven, I might have acknowledged that in the bedroom across the hall from mine there was evidence that the unexpected does occur. But as a sibling, I didn’t view Beth’s disability as bringing anything unexpected to my family. Sure, I knew the story: right after my first birthday, when Beth was five weeks old, my mother noticed that my sister was not responding to anything, from other people’s smiles to her own hunger. Only after months of rising dread did my parents learn the diagnosis of mental retardation (or what would now be called an intellectual disability). Where had it come from? They didn’t know. What should we do? Consider an institution. But my father, who’d grown up in an orphanage, knew firsthand about the despair of institutional life, so my parents kept Beth at home. By seven, I’d certainly noticed that the families in schoolbooks and on TV and along our street included no children with disabilities, but since Beth was completely stitched into our everyday life, I didn’t find this omission notable, nor think about the unanticipated issues that disability brought into a family. I knew Beth
had
a disability—she was slow to speak, sit on her own, and move on from diapers. But she laughed boisterously, was sneaky and willful, and was fun to play with. My parents made clear that all of us were to protect her from the world’s cruelties, though this also seemed unremarkable. Families stand up for each other, I believed. That’s simply what families
do
.