Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved (12 page)

Katrina is an unlikely helper for this garden-moving project. Aside from the glamour-girl image that she projects on a daily basis, she has a deathly fear of earthworms. It is not so surprising that a certified hypnotherapist has never been able to conquer a small but deep phobia, but what astonishes me is that Katrina is absolutely fearless in the face of giant snakes. She has danced in Egypt with two live cobras wrapped around her torso, but she is afraid to encounter the tiny worms in the damp April earth. I too embrace the symbol of feminine power that the snake represents. I wear a ring with two little serpents intertwined, but I could never dance with even a single cobra. As for earthworms, I try not to disturb them, but I welcome their presence in my garden, a sign of healthy dirt.

When she arrives, Katrina is dressed for a farm-girl photo shoot. She’s wearing blue denim overalls with a cinched waistline and a lace-up bodice. “I got them from the Victoria’s Secret catalogue years ago, but I’ve hardly ever worn them.”

“You look the part,” I tell her, laughing. “Though I’m not sure that farmers wear eyeliner.” I show her the equipment we will use, and I give her a pair of little flowered garden gloves. “These are yours to keep, to promote your gardening inclinations in the future, and they will also protect you so you can’t touch an earthworm by accident.” Involuntarily she shivers at the thought. “Don’t worry, I’ll be right next to you all day long. And Harry and Tony will be nearby.” I mean this as additional reassurance, though I am not sure exactly what the Bog Boys would do in the event of a worm-related incident.

We talk about men to keep Katrina’s mind off the creatures in the dirt.

“He was too self-absorbed anyway,” she says of my most recent prospect. “All he thought about was his work.”

“You’re right.”

“You weren’t interested anyway, were you? I mean you weren’t attracted to him physically—were you?” Katrina believes in love at first sight. I believe love comes on tiptoes, often in the dark. How can you see to know?

“Well, we met under awkward circumstances. It’s so hard to know when it’s a fix-up. I was willing to give it a few more dates.”

“Forget him,” she says, and I assure her that it will not be difficult.

The subject changes to dancing, to the next Evening in Egypt, a monthly event of Middle Eastern dance and music. It’s Katrina’s invention, and a showcase for student performers. My solo debut was a year ago August, and I am a regular now. I love the dance, the control and concentration that it requires, the freedom of expression that it allows, and I love the costumes, all sequins and beads and glitter and gloves. I remember once, when Katrina was asking my opinion on a costume, saying to her, “It looks great, but what will you wear for jewelry?”

She looked in the mirror at her black-and-gold costume with gold beaded fringe, the gold sequined finger-sandals, the veil that she had in one hand. “Does this woman need jewelry?” she asked, striking a pose.

“Of course!” I said. “You look practically naked.”

In the garden now, she asks me about my costume for our next event. “Are you going to wear your turquoise?”

It’s raining now, a steady drizzle. The men are pounding the stakes into the hay bales with the new fifty-pound sledge-hammer I bought this morning. We are kneeling in the wet earth, the hoods up on our slickers. We speak of silk veils and finger cymbals and I describe my pale turquoise handless gloves with little swirls of seed pearls that move when I do. We relocate plants and more plants, and we set aside a small lilac, a forsythia, and some purple coneflowers, primroses, lilies, and daffodils for Katrina to take home: the beginning of her garden.

The beginning of my garden can be credited to Barbara. “I need to thin these daffodils in the back. Why don’t you come up and dig some out?” I learned that day—on my knees in Barbara’s backyard—that there was a link between the flowers and my home builder. “My father planted the daffodils on the side over there,” she said, gesturing to a mass planting on the hillside facing my front yard. “He was the gardener.” Barbara paused. I kept digging. The daffodil bulbs were entangled with the irises, and little roses were trailing all through the garden. It was tough going, and I was a novice.

“He planted them one fall, and we didn’t even know he’d done it—until the next spring when they bloomed.” She paused again. “He died that winter, so it was like the daffodils had come from God.”

Daffodils from God, a reminder of a gardening-father. I stopped my digging, stared hard at what must have been hundreds of thriving daffodils on that hillside, blooming years and years later, the man who buried the bulbs long deceased. I contemplated the weigela, planted by Barbara’s back door, and the azalea between the side windows, the white lilac blooming by the cellar door, and the tough-to-dig irises interlaced with what Barbara told me was a rose that came to Cape Cod on a ship with her first American ancestor.

As I give the offspring of Barbara’s bulbs to Katrina, I want to share some bit of gardening wisdom. Maybe tell her that one day the earthworms in the ground will seem a happy reassurance of the richness of her soil, a sign that all is well, an omen of buds and blooms to come. But then I think of Barbara. Her gardening tips were always of the moment. “A little lime will help those lilacs to bloom,” she told me when I moved some of her father’s plantings from the shade to the sun. “Miracid is what you want to feed those rhododendrons. Azaleas like it too. Acid. The lilac needs alkaline. Don’t plant them near each other, or they’ll be fighting over the soil.” I consider that a changed relationship with worms is far, far into Katrina’s gardening future. I focus on the present with my advice.

“You might want to add a little bulb booster when you plant those daffodils,” I tell Katrina now. “Remind me to give you some before you go.”*

*
A MINI-EXCAVATOR
is parked outside my bedroom window; there are three men conferring on what used to be my patio; and my cat is scratching madly at the window because he thinks the safest place to be is outside, far away from this heavy loud yellow machine that could eat him at any moment.

We are under way.

I have a feeling that these days of digging and heavy equipment will be the worst, especially for Egypt, who has moved, tail down, out to the kitchen for a better view of the yellow threat. I reassure him, remind him that I have permitted this, that I am calm in the face of the men and monsters outside our window; and while I am hoping my calm will be contagious, he seems certain it is only another symptom of my declining sanity. Why else would I invite this disruption into our perfect space? The windows rattle and the floor shakes beneath his sure cat feet. Giant roaring beasts could invade our home at any moment.
Listen to me,
he is saying as he pounds, paw over paw, on the kitchen door.
We need to get out of here.

I join him at the door and regard the scene. Brian is operating the orange-and-white Bobcat, John the yellow mini-excavator. Ed, just back from Florida, is manning the Dunkin’ Donuts station he has improvised on top of my barrel of good dirt out back by the shed. It’s raining, still, and the colors of the men and the machines stand out all the more. Ed in bright blue slicker and hat, John in a tan coverall and an orange watch cap that matches the Bobcat, Brian more subdued in a navy blue windbreaker with the white seal of the Hyannis Fire Department over his heart. His baseball cap also advertises his affiliation, and when I mention that he is almost in uniform, he laughs. “Always wear this cap on a job in case I need to ask a favor. Like your neighbors and their driveway. They aren’t likely to say no when a firefighter asks for a favor.”

“They think it’s an emergency?”

“That too,” he says, grinning. “But mostly, they want me to remember where their house is.”

Finally I get it. It’s firefighter humor, an imitation of intimidation. Brian, like John, works for the Fire Department in Hyannis. It is the same department that came to my rescue ten years ago when I had a very serious, very sudden, very scary asthma attack. I’d dropped my car off that morning for repairs and had walked over to the mall where a bus would take me home. It was bitter-cold, in the single digits, with a hard wind that whipped across the empty parking lot. The cold took my breath and I could not regain it. The only open entrance was at the far end of the mall. I struggled to get to it, stopping and starting, turning my face from the wind, sitting on a bench, rising. My inhalers weren’t working. The coughing was uncontrollable; my lungs felt squeezed shut. I finally scaled the door, flagged down an incoming mall walker. “Asthma,” I rasped, for to speak in sentences was more than I could do. “Bad. Hospital.” She understood.

“Don’t try to talk,” she advised. “I’ll be right back.” I watched her, my mouth open, sucking in the air my body refused to process, as she headed for the bank of black pay phones, and then returned to sit with me, murmuring reassurances. She was wearing a pale green warm-up suit and sneakers. “They’re here,” she told me, as the siren screamed toward us, only moments after her call. “They’ll take care of you.”

And they did. They gave me oxygen and medicine to breathe and one of them held my hand. They asked no questions because they knew I could not speak, and they moved quietly, efficiently in their tiny mobile hospital. I fought for consciousness, even as I felt a part of me preparing for departure.
Look at everything in this truck. Memorize every shiny surface, every bottle and syringe. Pay attention. Pay attention.
I listened as one of them called the hospital, speaking of me, and I felt only a mild interest in learning that I was turning blue.
Bottles, syringes, shiny metal boxes, the sting of an IV needle.
A comforting voice without, a stern voice within.
Pay attention, pay attention.

Years later, I remember only the feeling of surrender to capable hands; hours later I could not even place the faces of the men who owned those hands. There were two in the back of the truck with me. One tall, older, and one very young—shorter, wiry, like John—with a tenor voice like John’s. I wonder. I wonder as I deliver hot coffee to the backyard and coax John and Brian off their tractors, as we laugh at Brian’s impersonation of a firefighting Mafioso, as Ed tells a story and John empties his mug, refuses my offer of a second cup. I wonder, but I don’t say a word. I wonder if I ever will.*

*
LAST NIGHT MR. HAYDEN CALLED
and told me he probably won’t be able to move the cottage and put it into place on the same day. That means it needs a resting place, a place where it can spend the night. He suggested the parking lot at 4 Seas Ice Cream. “Call Dick Warren,” he told me. Four Seas has world-renowned homemade ice cream, and Mr. Warren staffs the place with smiling high school kids. He has an advantage in hiring; until he retired a few years ago, he worked as a guidance counselor. Once the shop opens, there will be no room in his parking lot, which is actually two parking lots because they need at least that many to accommodate the endless stream of customers between mid-May and early September.

As long as the cottage moves before Mr. Warren opens up, he might be willing to lend us his lot, but I couldn’t get to sleep last night thinking of all the possible things that could happen to my cottage, sitting on a trailer in full view for an afternoon and an overnight. I call Mr. Hayden back this morning and find him in at 7:35. He cuts me off mid-sentence. “Just call Dick Warren.” Instead, I call Harry, who offers to sleep in the cottage, to protect it from the cottage raiders of my imagination. By the time we say good-bye, he is planning his camping trip.

“Thanks for calling Bog Boys Security,” he says as we hang up, and he promises Tony will sleep there, too.

But the more I think of the cottage in that parking lot, even if it were protected by Bog Boys, the less I like the idea. It occurs to me that a business owner, even a kindly, community-minded business owner, wouldn’t let me just leave a cottage on his property without worrying about his own liability. I don’t want to ask Mr. Warren. I want the cottage to come here. No stop-overs, no sleepovers. I leave a message on Scott’s machine and he stops by on his way home with an extra long tape measure. If he prunes back the oak branches and pulls out the midnight broom, we decide, the cottage will fit at the bottom of the circle, without interfering with my neighbors’ right of way. It gives me great satisfaction to call Mr. Hayden with this bit of news.

“The cottage can stay here,” I tell him when he answers the next morning at 7:25.

“Where?” he asks me.

“The bottom of my driveway. We figured out a way to make room.” I spare him the details.

“You measured it?” His only question.

“Uh-huh.”

“Fine.”*

*
FOR SEVERAL DAYS,
the men and the machines deconstruct my yard. The cold never lets up, nor does the rain. When Brian has to work a shift at the firehouse, John takes over the Bobcat and cedes the yellow mini-excavator to his father. I snap pictures when the rain slows to drizzle, and I watch the hole that used to be my hillside grow deeper and deeper.

When I look out my bedroom window, I have the feeling I am living on the second floor. There is no going out the kitchen door anymore, and no going out at all for Egypt, who is displeased but now more curious than worried. He seems to be adapting. Every night when the machines are quiet, we go out together and explore the yard. We have to take the long way around the excavation site, across mud mountains in the backyard, to reach the sand pit where the patio used to be. One late afternoon, the sun breaks through, the sand sparkles, and Egypt rolls, belly up, scratching his back with the crystalline earth.
Maybe tearing up the grass wasn’t such a bad idea. You can have a much more satisfying roll in the dirt.

I haven’t climbed into the hole myself, not wanting to give my cat any ideas, but John is scampering up and down the sand walls routinely as the week wears on. He holds a giant measuring stick that rises well above his head. Ed sights him through the surveyor’s box that sits on a tripod in the midst of the relocated daffodils, and thus determines the depth of the hole. More of the digging is by hand now, and another man, whose name I have not learned, has joined the crew. “I’m the oldest guy here,” he notes on a day when Ed is absent. “How come I’m the only one with a shovel?”