Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved (16 page)

“Shall we go in? Do you have a stepladder?” Erika asks. I get it from the shed. One by one we climb up and in through the side door, a little worried about the weight of us all. We survey the small rooms, the green-walled kitchen, the purple bedroom. An army of hangers in the bedroom closet, the hole in the wall by the hot water heater.

I am again admiring the Mexican tiles over the kitchen sink when I notice it. “The soap!” They all turn to me. I point to the half-used bar of yellow soap, sitting kitty-corner on the left edge of the sink top. “This soap was in this exact position when the cottage left Harwich Port. And look”—I lift it—“it isn’t attached or stuck in any way. But it is in the same exact place, after riding twenty-eight miles in a cottage hitched to a truck!”

This seems essentially marvelous to me, the very definition of a marvel. I begin laughing, almost hysterically. Then I notice the paint cans, also in the same place where they began their journey, and the little jelly-jar light cover, still upside down on the lower counter. “I meant to take those paint cans out in Harwich Port,” I say, “because I was afraid they’d roll around and dent the floors, and the light cover—I was worried that might break. But nothing’s moved!” It’s almost spooky. We decide to take the paint cans and the lamp glass out before the house-lifting the next day. But we leave the soap, exactly as it is and was. Harry got my speech on video, and now he zooms in on the soap. I get a shot as well, documenting its precise location—almost but not quite touching the strip of stainless steel that surrounds the kitchen sink.

One by one we file out of the cottage, close it up. Erika and Sara refuse our invitation for Chinese food, so Harry and Bruce and I set off for our delayed lunch. We are starving. For once, I am not crabby, the way I usually get when I am hungry. But I am lightheaded and silly, and find it hard to contain my giggling in the back seat. The cottage is in my driveway! At the restaurant, we mug with the camera as if we are tourists. We eat well and review the high points of the day. “I think I had more fun today than I have had in my entire life,” I say, and although it seems hyperbole, I realize in that moment it is true.

Harry looks at me to determine whether I am kidding, and when he realizes I am not, he says, “It was an awfully good time.”*

*
WE HEAD BACK HOME,
where we introduce the cat to the cottage. Egypt peers in the window and looks back at me. “Yes,” I admit to him, “I am the one responsible for this.” He rolls his eyes, jumps down, and sits with his back to me. Cats always prefer the status quo.

Bruce goes on his way, bus to ferry to the island. He has to work in the morning. He wishes he could stay for the lifting, but it is not to be. Back at the house, Harry and I hang out in the living room, chatting. I answer the phone periodically, exclaim over my day to friends who are checking in. While I am on the telephone, Harry spends time looking at the video on the camera’s tiny screen.

“Do you want to see it?” he asks when I come back into the room.

“Not yet,” I say. No, not yet. Right now, I want to hold the day still, unmoving, a series of impressions, not yet memories. A red truck, gray-white skies, blue lights, a pink azalea in perfect bloom, yellow cones in the road, a strip of red caution tape, my last name in light orange chalk, printed vertically on a cottage trim board, and a pale yellow oval resting on the edge of a white porcelain sink.

“I FEEL LIKE
I carried that cottage all the way on my back,” I tell Harry. “I am so beat.” He’s already been up and out, and the futon is folded back into a couch. When I stumble into the living room, he is sipping coffee from Donut Works and reading the
Boston Globe.

“I got you a honey-dipped,” he offers. I eat donuts only in the company of Harry or Tony, and I eat only honey-dipped. I regret the act of eating them—always—later in the day, but Harry knows I find it difficult to resist a perfectly glazed donut when it is presented to me.

“Did you sleep?” Harry inquires, and I admit that I did not sleep well, or more accurately, that I did not dream well. For weeks, I’ve been plagued with anxiety dreams about the cottage. I share the latest in this series. The cottage requires a special traveling lane, and I am charged with making it. This means I must jackhammer the asphalt, take up a portion of every road to expose the dirt beneath the pavement. It is backbreaking work, and the cottage-movers must wait for me to clear the path. As we near my house, I realize that I will have to put all the roads back to their original condition, and I am overwhelmed by both the necessity to repair the roads and the fact that I have not thought of it earlier. In the dream, it becomes evident that the project will cost me thousands and thousands more than I had anticipated. As I think about the day ahead, the warning that Hayden gave me yesterday about my “challenging site,” and the waiting foundation that has cost about three times our original estimate, I suspect that my dream-self may be onto something.

The dream loses some of its power in the telling, and the soothing effects of the honey-dipped begin to set in. I am looking forward to the day. It is a lovely morning; yesterday’s rain has disappeared and the air is warm when we step outside to check on the cottage at the base of the driveway. It’s a good day for liftoff, I think. The sun will do its work this morning, and by afternoon, cottage, crane, and foundation will be baked dry. No slippery equipment or wet surfaces to concern us. The image of that house in Osterville falling apart does haunt me, but I know this cottage is sturdy, well built, and in excellent shape. “It will be fine,” Harry says, sensing my new worry as we climb into the cottage, and for the moment, I choose to believe he is right.

My exhaustion doesn’t lift, however, and my anxiety reasserts itself as the morning unfolds. To distract myself, I call friends and neighbors to let them know the timing of the great event. The crane is due to arrive around noon. We expect liftoff by two. One neighbor says he might just cut out of work to come watch, and another tells me her grandchildren will be watching from her backyard. “Come on down,” I say to her, sounding like the host of
The Price Is Right.
I’m hoping for a landing party, but the only definites are my mom, Erika, her sister, and Harry. And Egypt, who this morning can tell that something is up. He follows us to the cottage, but he refuses to come inside. He sits by the lilacs and waits for us to emerge before he leads us back to the house, to the kitchen, to his dish. He has a little bite before he slips into my bedroom closet for a long morning nap.

Egypt wakes around twelve-thirty to the loud, insistent beeps announcing the arrival of the crane. He is annoyed when I explain to him he must stay put, that he will be safer inside, away from all this heavy equipment. But he’s come to appreciate and respect heavy equipment. He’ll be fine. This he tells me with a certain angle of his chin. “There will be houses flying around,” I say finally. “You just have to stay put.” He gives in, turns his back on me, and jumps onto the living room windowsill to watch. I make a quick exit, trailing Harry in the direction of the big red crane.

It is big, and it is red. Immediately, this crane takes a place in my heart alongside those Cape Cod lighthouse cement mixers. It says “Baxter” in white block letters on the boom, which for the moment is settled into the side of the truck. I am struck by the scale of the crane, which takes up the full width of the driveway; even with the boom tucked in, it is tall and imposing. The driver emerges from the cab, introduces himself as Rick, smiles. Instant infatuation. Perhaps because I haven’t been in a relationship for awhile, I am lately reverting to schoolgirl behavior in the romance department. I take a minute to figure out the source of my attraction. Rick is handsome in a clean-cut kind of way that usually escapes my notice, but he has a great smile, and a friendliness around the eyes. Not to mention that he has arrived in the crane that will deliver my cottage to its resting place. And it is springtime, after all. In the excitement of house-moving, perhaps I am a little extra susceptible.

I lead Rick down the driveway, explain what has to happen. Of course he knows he’s here to lift a cottage, but Rick is clearly a little surprised by how tight it is. He paces the section of the driveway where he plans to park the crane, and I hang back, giving him space to ponder, to plan. I feel a little nervous that we’re starting all over again, that John Baxter with his binder and his pencil and his ratios has shared none of his February calculations with the man he sent to do the job in May. While Rick does his rendition of Rodin’s
The Thinker
in motion, some of Hayden’s guys show up. I tell Glen that I’m worried that John Baxter isn’t here himself. “Be glad,” Glen says. “He sent the best man for the job. He’ll figure it out.”

After several more minutes of pacing, Rick has figured it out. Because we’ve had so much rain this spring, he doesn’t feel confident that the bank on the bog will hold up. He wants to pull in close to the hillside so the crane, even with its pads extended, will be on the firm ground of the driveway. That means we need to move the hay bales aside, take down a small scrub pine and a couple of sapling oaks, then dig into the hillside to make a flat surface for the pads to rest. Hayden’s guys get right on it. A chainsaw is produced and three trees—sickly, skinny, vine-strangled trees—are out of the way in minutes. They pull up the stakes on the hay bales and shove them aside and start digging. Amidst this activity, Bob Hayden arrives and confers briefly with Rick before he grabs a shovel himself.

I’m thinking of the Conservation hearing, Mr. Van Buren on the dais, glasses in hand, speaking into the microphone. I hope he’s busy scaring someone else right now. I don’t think we’re doing anything we didn’t say we’d do, and we did make it clear we would be working outside the hay bale line on the day we moved the cottage. But I worry about those hay bales tossed aside, the fence gone, the digging into the hillside. I have a feeling Mr. Van Buren and his commissioners would be a bit dismayed by the activity. I imagine myself in front of them again, having to answer for this day. But there is a cottage sitting in my driveway that needs to land on this foundation, I would tell them. We can’t stop now.

As if he were reading my thoughts, Hayden pauses in his shoveling, shields his eyes with his hand, looks up the hill to find me. “Kate,” he yells. “You sure you want to do this?” He’s smirking, leaning on the handle of his spade.

“Positive!” I shout. “We can’t stop now!”

“Okay,” he says. “Just checking.” He turns back to the driveway. “I think we’re ready for you, Rick.” I run down to meet the crane, stopping to say hi to my mother. She’s stationed herself on the Adirondack loveseat in the front yard, where she has a view of the approach. She arrived just about the same time as Mr. Hayden. Erika and Sara are just coming up the driveway now, a digital camera dangling from Sara’s hand. This has to be the most documented house move in the history of Cape Cod. That reminds me that I’m not sure where Harry is. He’s the videographer today, and he’s been occupied finding the right angles to shoot the actual lifting.

“Harry!” He’s back by the shed. “Come on—we want to get the crane coming down the driveway!” He makes his way down the hill and shoots the crane head-on. I join him with my camera after I get a few shots of Rick raising the boom. “This is really happening,” I say to Harry. I’m nervous. It doesn’t feel the same as yesterday. Yesterday, I felt carefree, certain the cottage would make the journey well. Today, any number of things could go wrong. I try not to list them in my head, focus instead on imagining a smooth landing, a cottage sitting firmly on a foundation that is exactly the right size, a cottage resting comfortably alongside its new neighbor, my house.*

*
ONCE THE CRANE
is in position and Rick is satisfied that he is on level ground, Hayden and his crew begin the business of backing the cottage down the driveway. They hitch the house trailer to the truck, and yesterday’s driver climbs into the cab. They don’t have their high-tech headsets to communicate today, so there is a lot of shouting.

“That’s it. Now cut to the left!”

“What about that tree?”

The driveway is narrow, and bordered by trees and brush. The big ones must be avoided. For the smaller ones, Hayden has no mercy. “Don’t worry about that tree. You’re bigger than it. Just keep comin’ back.”

“Hey! Stop!”

“Stop!”

“Cut left—hard!”

“What?”

“Left!”

“Left!”

“You’re going over the bank—cut hard!”

Ovah. Hahd.
I try to focus on the distinctly dropped
r
’s that characterize the speech of the true natives of Massachusetts. This exercise helps me avoid panic as I watch the cottage and its trailer list conspicuously to the left—in the direction of the bog.

“Stop! Just stop!” Hayden is speaking now. He stoops down to have a look at the situation under the trailer.

The men walk around the trailer, the truck. I get a little closer, see that the right back tire of the truck is deep in the mud of the driveway, stuck in it the way you can get stuck in a snow bank. The left rear tire is precariously close to being in the ditch that defines the bog. The left side of the attached trailer is leaning into the soft bank of the bog, which appears to be melting under the weight of the trailer and the cottage.

“Try rocking it.” I notice they aren’t shouting anymore.

The driver obliges, in an attempt to free the right rear tire. If they get that tire onto level ground, there is some hope of righting the load. As he rocks, the tire sinks deeper into the mud. An exact half circle of rubber is above ground now.

Rick has climbed out of his cab and is standing next to me. “You know the house has to be set down facing in exactly the opposite direction as it is sitting on the trailer?” I’ve reminded Hayden already, but I want to make sure I’ve said it out loud to the guy who has to do the work. Now’s as good a time as any.

“180?” Rick asks.