Building a Home with My Husband (20 page)

“What do you mean?”

I sit back. “It’s very romantic, thinking that you and I were somehow brought together by a grand architect in the sky. A lot of people who hear the story think they see divine intent. I often do, too. I mean, it was such a miracle. But at the same time, it’s a mystery. How much does design rule our lives, and how much do we design our lives ourselves?”

“It’s impossible to answer.”

“I know.”

“Also, there’s evidence that our meeting might have been influenced by a human kind of design, the kind you
can
measure. Look at the field of environmental behavioral research.”

“What’s that?”

“People like Jane Jacobs and William Whyte actually watched interactions in public spaces and discovered basic principles of how the built environment affects social interaction. Like Whyte found that on city sidewalks, people tend to stop and talk in the busiest places.”

“The way we met on the catwalk.”

“Yes. They also looked at the metrics of human interaction—the distance where you can clearly see another person. That’s why, say, four hundred feet is the ideal width of a plaza.”

That’s about how far away, I think, the woman in the tunnel was when she spotted me.

I reach for the mouse and scroll down the screen. “But where’s the mystery in that?”

“Just because our behavior might have been influenced by the built environment so we would meet didn’t mean that we’d be right for each other.”

“Ah. So
there’s
the mystery.”

“There’s nineteen
years
of mystery.”

“What kind of design would you call that?”

“Really bad design.”

“Really
stinking
bad design,” I add.

I finally find a link and click. The screen fills with a video of the tunnel in the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. It actually has a name: the McNamara Tunnel. I say, “This is where I was today.”

I flick off the desk lamp, and in my dark study, the colors flash onto Hal’s face. He says nothing for a long time, so, bracing myself, I say, “I know, I know, it uses a ton of energy.”

“I’m sure it does,” he says. “But it’s also beautiful.”

I almost fall off my chair. “You think so?”

“If we can’t build a few things like this, it would really be a shame.”

I turn to him and smile.

“Maybe someday we should fly to Detroit,” he says, “just to visit the airport together.”

 

That night, lying in bed, gazing at my husband as he sleeps, I ask myself again about how kindred spirits come together. Do we just observe something in each other—tenderness in the eyes, an attraction to the same sights—and then say hello? I’d like to think that’s all it is, but it seems there must be more to it, because if either person feels encumbered by disapproval, or constrained by a schedule, or too mistrustful to think,
Hey, who are you
?, greetings will not be offered, or heard. So what gets us to recognize
and
speak to others who rhyme with us? Hal refuses to speculate one way or another. I have spent a lifetime unable to make up my mind.

Though tonight, as I think back to the woman in the SUV, and the woman in the airport, and so many dream-sharing strangers I have met in so many unlikely ways over the course of my life, I wonder: do I actually
need
to make up my mind? I might wish I could. But the fact that each of us, no matter who we are, can find kindred spirits in the vastness of humanity—and therefore know that none of us really
is
alone in the universe—feels almost as important. It’s not a fact that answers my question. It’s an answer to a different question. But on days when I long to know if anyone is listening, it might be the answer that I need.

Hal smiles in his sleep, and I remember him walking toward me on that spring morning, now so long ago. There we were, the two of us, drunk from the taste of something larger. I will probably never decide what that something was. I might never really understand the forces that orchestrate love. But as I look at his face in the dark of our bedroom, starlight pouring through the window, I know that, no matter how lonely I might get, no matter how meaningless my life might feel, there is always one thing I can do.
Just keep paying attention. Look around. See all that you don’t let yourself see.

I·N·S·U·L·A·T·I·O·N A·N·D· W·A·L·L·S

“
I
’ve been meaning to tell you,” Hal says as we’re out for a walk in early November. “I’m going to build a wall.”

“A
what
?”

“Not a wall wall.”

“What other kind of wall is there?”

“You’re thinking of exterior walls and interior walls, like our masonry outside, or the plaster finishes inside. What I’m talking about is”—he clears his throat—“our garden wall.”

“We don’t
have
a garden wall.”

“We will. In the backyard. A nice dry stone retaining wall.”

“May I kindly suggest that you tack this nice stone wall onto Dan’s schedule?”

“May I kindly ask you to remember how unforeseen conditions have added to our costs?”

“And when are you planning to build this nice garden wall?”

“Any day now.”

“But it’s November. It might be warm today, but it rains in November. It gets cold.”

“So I’ll get wet and cold. Look, farmers in this part of the country built walls for centuries, using stones from their fields. Their walls ran the length of huge properties.”

“Farmers,” I say under my breath, “no doubt recruited their wives.”

“This farmer can do it himself.”

“It’ll be backbreaking work. I’m sure you’ll need help.”

“The Buddha does say that there is an interdependence of all things.”

“Yeah, well, what did he say to depend on when you don’t have stones in your field?”

“I went to a quarry. They’ll be delivering three and a half tons right to our front curb.”

“Excuse me, but it takes serious strength to lay a stone wall. How much do you weigh?”

“One thirty-five.”

“When’s the last time you buffed up those pecs in a weight room?”

“Ye of little faith.”

“And I’m even more of a weakling than you. This’ll be an interesting episode,” I say.

 

It’s also going to happen concurrently with two other episodes: the next phase of the renovation, when we’ll be getting insulation, windows, and drywall; and, far more notably, the moment when I become definite that my mother has crossed into a terrible frontier. I realize it seemed as if I were facing a similar passage when Theresa was awaiting her biopsy results, but when it was benign, we were able to turn back. This time, despite the word the doctors have not yet said, I feel certain that there will be no retreat.

When Hal and I return from our walk, I plunge right in and dial my sister Laura. Days away from flying across the country to visit our mother so one of us can see the situation firsthand, Laura has been far more decisive about what clothing she should pack than what emotions she will need. We know it would be wise if she could wedge patience, kindness, and acceptance into her suitcase, though we’re aware that space will be limited, given the well-worn disappointments and annoyances, and so many still-in-the-package fears.

As soon as Laura picks up, she says, “She keeps asking why I’m bothering to come.”

“She knows why you’re coming.”

“As far as she and Gordon are concerned, nothing’s wrong.”

“Denial,” we both say at the same moment, and then we sigh in stereo.

Last spring, our mother, who we’ve long called by her first name, Rosalie, began to behave differently. For lack of a better word, and for fear of what, for a retiree of seventy-one, that word would almost certainly be, we called her new behavior “forgetful,” though not because we’d never thought that it—that years-long, progressively-mind-obliterating It—could happen in our family. We’d always known that brain cells could be degenerating inside a relative for ages before symptoms revealed themselves, but we’d assumed that the relative would be our father, since his father had become, as we used to put it, “senile.” So actually saying the word would be to admit we’d been duped by an awful stage trick: look while I juggle the green balls over here, the magician says, thus deceiving us into ignoring the orange balls over there.

Laura and I, the two siblings who’d maintained the most contact with Rosalie, wanted to see the situation for ourselves. But Rosalie and Gordon live in Florida, a thousand miles from me and twice as far from Laura in Arizona. With my speaking commitments and the burgeoning costs of our renovation, Laura’s work schedule, and Rosalie and Gordon sticking to their usual long vacations, the opportunity for a visit, even if only from one of us, even if only for a weekend, hasn’t arrived until now.

“Rosalie and Gordon
know
something’s wrong,” I say.

“They think we’re just being overly protective.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I said . . . I said I was coming because I simply wanted to see her.”

Since Rosalie has begun these lapses, we’ve tried not to speak too insistently about our concern, because there have been moments when we’ve had just enough doubt ourselves. Although Rosalie’s career as a librarian required constant interaction with the public, she’s always fallen short when it comes to social skills. She’s never mastered the conventions of staying on topic, avoiding excruciating detail, picking up cues that a conversation is ending, or gauging the appropriateness of, say, revealing intestinal problems to waiters. So we have indeed wondered if her forgetfulness is just age redrawing character as caricature.

But we don’t think so. Neither do other confidants with whom I’ve been sharing the evidence. Hal says that although we haven’t spent our adult years seeing our mother with the regularity that comes from a more favorable history, we’ve remained in sufficient contact to know that she is indeed stepping beyond the far edge of her personality. My father thinks so, too, though, not having spoken with Rosalie for thirty years, he’s basing his assessment on our reports. I could dismiss this confirmation—Hal and my father have excessive proximity to the matter—but I keep hearing the same from my friend Harriet, who’s the same age as my mother. For years now, since I met Harriet while we were taking out books at a library, she’s offered the nurturing gestures that I might have sought from my own mother on the occasions when I’ve needed mothering, like when Hal and I broke up and Harriet had me sleep over every week to comfort me. Or when Hal and I got married and Harriet took me shopping for wedding day accessories. Or now, as hints are adding up about my mother. “It sounds like the way things began with the husband of a friend of mine,” Harriet said. “But oh, honey, I hope it’s not.”

I do, too, even though my relationship with my mother is far from a typical mother-child relationship. And even though the likelihood of her decline, while alarming, has yet to kindle the emotions that I only wish I could feel.

Laura shares my wish for those feelings, to the point where our thoughts about Rosalie are interchangeable. Fortunately, Hal, my father, and Harriet also understand why I lack what most children would feel, so they express no disapproval when I give them the latest update and fail to add, “My heart is breaking,” or “How will I live without her?” It’s possible that other friends could do the same, say,
I do not judge you for having a steamer trunk of emotions that children are not supposed to feel, and for leaving behind a whole house of emotions that you ought to have brought along.
After all, over the years I’ve learned that a significant number of friends are also members of this secret club, the one into which we were drafted when our mothers strayed far from what a mother is supposed to be. It’s a club of adult children who question the concept of maternal instinct, feel no sentimentality toward mom clichés like apple pie, and greet every May with grimness, as the quest for a not-too-honest Mother’s Day card rolls around again. But I generally avoid talking about being in that club—it requires too much explanation, and runs the risk that I’ll be viewed as callous. So mostly I’ve revealed Rosalie’s forgetfulness to only these intimates, which has proven easy. Everyone knows I’m deep into a renovation. Who’d have thought that one of the virtues of renovation is how conveniently it monopolizes conversation?

“How did Rosalie reply,” I ask Laura, “when you said you just wanted to see her? It sounds so . . . like a regular daughter.”

“She sounded surprised,” Laura says.

I laugh. “That’s it?”

“No. She hasn’t forgotten that none of us has been there for years.”

“That’s heartening. At least her long-term memory’s intact.”

“Yeah, it was a good sign. But the best part is that she was happy that I was coming.”

“That’s good.”

“It helps me not to dread this trip,” Laura says. “Just knowing she’ll be glad to see me.”

 

That evening, Hal and I attend a party down the street from Teacher’s Lane. As soon as we walk in the door and see our old neighbors, my inner chatter about Laura’s impending visit subsides to a whisper. I hadn’t realized how omnipresent it had become, but as we catch up with friends, I feel a relief I hadn’t known I’d needed. So at the end of the night, Hal suggests that we delay our departure by visiting the old house. Then he can show me—and our neighbor Susan, who asks to accompany us—all the recent developments.

The door squeaks as Hal enters, flashlight in hand. Susan says, “I can’t see anything,” and as I follow her in, I understand why. Since the electricity is off and the demoed back wall is still covered by plywood, there’s no illumination except the streetlight coming in the front and side windows. But it’s weak, so all we really have is the flashlight’s diameter.

“What are those?” Susan asks. She points to the top of a plaster wall in the living room.