Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved (32 page)

When Cindy heads out for some last-minute errands, Drew and Brooke and I gravitate to the yellow room, where Brooke shows off her kitten. Snuggle, smuggled in past the Cat-in-Charge, is an easy-going baby, with dark stripes and a loud purr. She doesn’t mind being passed from person to person, and she is only vaguely curious about her new surroundings. They tell me she was very good on the trip, that she slept most of the way, that she hardly cried at all.

We squeeze side by side onto the little futon, ready to begin what is becoming our annual tradition: Christmas charades. There is something about the three of us together, the way that two of us work to guess the answer while the actor pantomimes his concept, that warms relations between Drew and Brooke. We laugh a lot, at ourselves and at each other. We act out Christmas concepts: Stockings, Trees, Angels, Reindeer, and Carols—“Silent Night,” “Jingle Bells”—before we move on to other categories: Things in the Kitchen, Jungle Animals. You name it. Between turns, we pass the kitty around.

Cindy returns, and we move to the living room to open presents. She has given me a guest book with a picture of a house on the cover. “It’s so everyone can write their impressions of your beautiful new home,” Cindy tells me, and I love the idea. “We’ll begin.” And so the first entry in my house book is in Cindy’s familiar hand, the handwriting I have known for twenty-seven years. Brooke and Drew are next, mature in their observations, childlike in their handwriting, creative in their spelling. It is a beautiful gift.

That night, they fold themselves back into Cindy’s truck, crammed full of suitcases and Christmas presents, to head to Cindy’s mother’s house for the holiday. I know Cindy will be up all night baking, that her holiday will be anything but restful. “Take it easy,” I say to my friend as I give her an extra-long hug good-bye. She squeezes me back, but she does not agree to my demand.*

*
FOR CHRISTMAS,
I make a complicated Algerian lamb stew from a recipe I clipped out of the Williams-Sonoma catalogue. The recipe was included to help them sell a big expensive pot, and as the pile of chopped vegetables grows, I understand why a giant pot is required. But I make do, cramming everything into a something that is almost big enough. It will work. The array of spices is complex, and so is the flavor when my mother and I sit down to dinner in midafternoon. We eat in the newly arranged living-dining room, at the big round table that is now by the windows. My mother approves of the new layout, the openness of the room now that many of the bookcases have been taken out. “There were too many books in this room,” she declares, as if my English-teacher mother were in no way instrumental in my affinity for reading objects. “It felt heavy.” I quell my objections. Can there ever be too many books? I know she is right about the heaviness and the openness. It is easier on the digestion to eat in the open space, with the view of the birds at the feeder. I suspect I will use this room more now, that I will consume fewer meals hunched over the kitchen counter.

We enjoy our meal, and open our presents before two friends of my mother’s arrive for dessert. I have made brownies and some odd little goat cheese desserts inspired by a cheese-course recipe in
On Rue Tatin,
a wonderful combination cookbook-memoir by Susan Herrmann Loomis that I devoured in the fall. I blended soft goat cheese with a little raspberry jam and, lacking molds, packed the mixture into rinsed-out scallop shells and put them in the fridge to firm. It wasn’t easy getting the treats out of the shells without losing some of the ribbing, but I got better at it as I progressed through the tray. I dribbled warm lavender honey on top of each and served them rib-side up. I think the shell shapes look elegant on the blue glass plate, and I am proud of myself for making them, but my mom’s friends are simply polite about the goat cheese creations, each eating exactly one. The brownies, gooey, chewy, and stuffed with chocolate chips, are a hit.

On the second tour of the day, I show off the progress in the cottage bathroom to my mother and her friends: The floor is mostly tiled—pale, pale blue-green and creamy white, arranged in a checkerboard pattern—unfinished because we ran out of my remnant tiles. I have to hunt down some more this week. The toilet arrived only yesterday, and the shower is not yet operational. We have to order a custom-made enclosure because there is nothing standard that will fit in this odd little space. Thanks to the burst pipes in the cottage, the bathroom has turned into a major project. I comfort myself with my bargain floor, as my guests admire the full-price tiles I have chosen for the shower: shiny white, with two rows of small blue-green accent tiles. The clear glass enclosure will show off the design, and the blue matches the bathroom walls perfectly. “I want to come sleep over,” my mother announces, “just so I can use this bathroom. When it’s all done,” she adds.*

*
ON NEW YEAR’S EVE,
Bruce and Tina and I gather at the round table for another big meal: pork tenderloin, hopping john, bitter greens. For dessert, two more recipes from the pages of
On Rue Tatin:
a simple marble yogurt cake and a more complex, egg-yolk-laden Breton butter cake. “I guess I am missing France,” I say to Tina, and she assures me my new obsession is a worthy substitute for an overseas trip.

My thoughts drift to the start of this year, to the Millennium Party. My friends are scattered this New Year’s Eve. Tony and Anna, now married, are in Italy, visiting Anna’s parents. I wonder if they will break the news on this trip. Katrina and Ruben are having a romantic dinner alone. Bill and Erika are at Bill’s sister’s house.

That leaves Harry and Tina, no longer an item. Tina isn’t ready for what Harry wants right now. It is a time for her to be light in relationships, and a time when he is looking for solidity, permanence. Neither of my friends seems to have been hurt in this discovery, and I am glad for their brief connection. In her time with Harry, Tina reopened her sweet, sad heart.

Harry, meanwhile, is seeing someone new, and they are celebrating this New Year with her friends. I suspect this one might turn serious—if it hasn’t already. I have met his new sweetheart only once, but she and Harry seem in sync. They laugh a lot together, and I take that as an excellent sign.

In lieu of a big New Year’s celebration, I plan to gather friends to welcome spring. The family Christmas, postponed by snow, will wait for springtime, too. In my mind, I see a warm day in May; a big crowd on my deck, grab gifts in the center of a family circle, joking all around.

At midnight, our toast is quieter; our gathering is smaller than last year’s, but the company is excellent, and the house is warm. The next morning, we breakfast on the Breton butter cake and we finish off the leftover Christmas stew for lunch. We take Bruce to the ferry at Woods Hole. We joke about starting the New Year with a serious intention to eat when Tina and I stop for a bite on the way back. There’s no time for dessert before Tina boards the bus, so I send her home to Boston with two kinds of cake.*

*
ON THE FIRST NIGHT
of the New Year, Egypt and I patrol our new house, complete, or close to it. We move from house to hallway. With the smooth wooden floors and the vaulted ceilings, this space is gorgeous and a little frightening. Feng shui would dictate that I slow down the energy here; indeed, there is a sense we might be carried right out of the house on an invisible inner wind. “I’ve ordered a couple of rugs,” I tell Egypt, “and I’ll hang some pictures.” He doesn’t seem to mind, as he races down the hall, and at the last minute turns into his skid, landing on the rug in my office. I’ve noticed he never merely steps into the cottage; king of his expanded castle, he
arrives.

I unscrew the clear bulbs on each of the five Christmas candles in the cottage windows, and shut down the computer after one last e-mail check. Back down the hallway to the house, seven more lights to unscrew, turn down the heat, flip the switch on the fairy lights climbing up the ivy on the outdoor lamppost. It’s time for bed.

The darkness in my bedroom is interrupted by the nearly full moon. The moonlight travels through the skylight in the hallway, shadowed by the white mullions on the two new windows over my bed. The rectangular patterns of silver light play on the center of the pale blue pillowcase next to me. When Egypt claims that very spot, he draws the moonlight into his fur until it disappears.

I HAVE NOTICED
that when an established couple, especially a married couple, looks back on their courtship, they are able to identify specific, chronological phases in their relationship. The beginning: Was it love at first sight, or a long friendship that one day turned inexplicably romantic? And the middle: It may have been a little rocky then, the time when some couples discover that their respective beloveds are not always entirely lovable. But those couples who push through the so-called disillusionment period reclaim their love, hold fast, and decide to stay for the ride. They marry.

Ever since Ed first said to me, “We will marry the houses together,” I have held this image, this metaphor in my head. I laugh, thinking I am the yenta who spotted the lonely cottage and brought it to my very eligible home.

As is often the case in human courtship, preparation was essential. In this case: clearing trees, moving gardens, digging holes, and generally making a large mess of the place. And then the cottage came, ably transported by a crew of three men, escorted by state troopers, followed by friends. It didn’t approach the house that first night, but instead was nestled beneath the pines in the bottom circle of the driveway. Still, I imagine that the house knew that it had a new neighbor. They sensed each other, as fated couples can, before they have even met. The next day, when the cottage was lifted into place, they were at last within sight of one another. And through each day of the next two months, they sat side by side. I felt they were eyeing each other.

In my ritual walks from house to cottage, the reverse circle that was the longest distance and the only way to get from house to cottage during that time, I was tracing some invisible line, some pulse of energy, electricity, connection. Then, Vito made the foundation wall, and I thought—first date? And the skeleton of the hallway: certainly progress, a more consistent connection. Next the roof, which connected them fully, irrevocably. Each roof changed a bit in this design; the new roofline was elegant, perfect, and a little unpredictable. I had thought that the roof connection would be the marriage, but as the project progressed, I realized, no—we were not married yet. I joked with Ed, “The houses aren’t married, but I think they are dating exclusively.” On the weekend that Harry and Tony and I took down the exterior shingles that were then inside the hallway, I felt another turning point, as the houses revealed something of their original tongue-and-groove construction. They were stripped bare, each in the face of the other.

Just a few days before, Ed and Howard had moved the window in the cottage, and that weekend we could slide in and out of the cottage through a narrow slot in the wall where half the window used to be. Soon afterward, more of the wall came down, the header was installed, and the opening to the cottage was complete. “They are engaged now,” I told Katrina when she came over for a visit. She suggested I might be taking this metaphor a little too seriously. I laughed with her. But the truth was—and is—that these two small houses are real to me, distinct and with their own personalities.

Sandy, the Jungian psychotherapist who cat-sat in October, saw the marriage metaphor immediately, before I said a thing about it. She went even one step further in her anthropomorphic thinking: “Which is the female, do you think?” Indeed, I had thought about this, and in a moment of gender bias, I cast the cottage as the feminine; “she” let down her walls first. By the time Sandy arrived, the house had yielded its kitchen wall: another major opening, encompassing the first stretch of hallway as part of the kitchen, expanded to meet the cottage. Are they married yet? I wondered. And I realized I was entirely unsure. I thought that perhaps the marriage would come with the moving in, the full integration of house to house. Then, I thought that perhaps the marrying moment would be the completion of the hall floor, the laying of beautiful birch boards, the moment when Egypt and I could walk indoors across a smooth floor to reach our new addition.

And now, I am at a small distance, and the houses are most nearly one. Still, sometimes, when asked where something is, I say, “Oh, that’s in the cottage.” Or I call it “the other side,” even sometimes calling the original the “main house” as if my three original rooms and 750 square feet were a mansion of much larger proportions. It seems to me now that I might have reached that point—the way couples do—where I can identify the progress in hindsight, to point to that first moment, that first movement of love that led to marriage. But I can’t. I have the sneaking suspicion that the houses have married secretly. Just as they quietly eyed each other that night before the lift and landing, sending signals through the trees, just as they sat quietly, companionably, side by side, communicating in a language I could not understand, now they are quiet in their married ways. They are as mysterious to me as human married couples, speaking in a code I have never been able to crack.*

*
I HAVE NEVER MARRIED,
and this is a fact more puzzling to me at age forty-two than it has ever been. I have hoped for a partner, and I still do. I’ve been in significant and long-term relationships. I have loved and been loved. But I remain unattached, almost eerily so at this juncture. Sometimes I think I was born into this world lacking the marriage chromosome, and—who knows—perhaps some day, genetic engineers will be able to predict our mating patterns as surely as they predict our propensity for illness and health. I look around me at the predominance of married persons in my age and demographic group, and I don’t know what to make of what seems to me to be a random pattern of coupling. I watch couples in public places and I try not to stare, obsessed as I have become in unraveling how they have landed together, wed, happily or not. I have the single, never-married person’s curious combination of idealistic and cynical beliefs about all this. How does this wonderful man end up with this critical, impatient woman? Why does such a remarkable woman put up with such a possessive boor of a man? I contemplate all this rather dispassionately while the inner princess still hopes her knight will arrive before she gets
really
old.