Building a Home with My Husband (12 page)

My relationship with Theresa changed maybe twenty years later. I wish it could have happened sooner, but the key to this change, compassion, was a latecomer in my life. It arrived only after my choice to forgive my mother, when I realized that compassion was the fruit that sustained forgiveness. Even then, however, it did not come easily, or consistently. Then Hal and I broke up, and when we got back together, we often found ourselves talking about compassion, and what he’d learned about it through Buddhism—how it was both the opening of one’s heart toward others and the selfless desire to alleviate their suffering, and how it was important to have a “soft heart” toward all. He’d even say, “Have compassion for yourself.” Slowly then, I tried to be compassionate with Theresa. I stitched together enough scraps of her past to grasp her own disappointments and needs. I asked her about her present-day life. I opened myself to appreciating her interests. And in time our tension dismantled—but even better, in its place came something else: the love for which I’d waited twenty years. It is not the heart-thumping admiration I’ve always felt for my father, nor the guarded love I now feel for my mother, nor the chummy love I have for my stepfather, Gordon. My love for Theresa is a respectful and conscious love. But it is love all the same.

I spot my exit, the one that will take me to Beth—whose relationship with me also attests to the rewards of change. When Beth lived with my father and Theresa, I used to visit everyone at the same time. This was seldom a jolly occasion because, aside from the conflicts we all felt when together, Beth and I often locked horns. In Beth’s late twenties, she moved into a group home half an hour from their house, so although my trips then consisted of two separate visits, they became easier. Not that she and I were spared friction. In fact, things actually worsened between us five years later when she moved to her own apartment and developed her fascination with bus riding, a lifestyle choice with which I could not abide. But when I eventually rode the buses, my judgment of her gave way to acceptance, and the proud, playful love I’d always felt for her surged anew. I can’t say that we’ve achieved perfection in our relationship, but I need only think of Beth—and the chest-swelling affection I’ve always felt in her presence—to remember that while change can bring little to mind but subtraction, it can also transform into addition.

If my house sickness is arising from fear of change, I can handle that. I just hope that’s all it is.

 

Minutes later, I pull up to the bus station. I still feel heavy-hearted, but then Beth bursts out and hustles over to my car, talking about her current favorite driver and asking me to take her to Target.
Nothing’s changed here,
I laugh to myself, because now that I’m no longer riding her buses, we often go shopping, and she carpets our time together with stories about her drivers. Today, Cool Beth, as she calls herself, wants to hunt for a DVD of
Scooby-Doo
. By the time we park at Target, I expect a copy of all our past expeditions: she’ll rocket across the lot, fly through the store, and leave me wandering the aisles searching for her.

But as Beth is dashing across the lot, everything about this ordinary visit ends.

A hundred yards away, an older woman collapses on the sidewalk and tumbles off the curb. “What’s happening?” Beth says, stopping. “I don’t know,” I say, catching up to her as a younger woman cries out, drops to her knees, and takes the older woman in her arms.

Beth and I hurry over. The young woman is saying, “Oh, Mom, oh, Mom.” Her mother remains where she fell, eyes glassy, her shorts stained with blood.

I ask, “Do you have a cell phone?”

The distraught young woman shakes her head no.

“You can use mine,” I say.

“Iz in your car,” Beth reminds me.

I turn to retrieve it. Beth needn’t accompany me, but I get exasperated by losing track of her in stores, and I’d really like her to offer solace while I rush off. However, Beth is generally as given to helping strangers as the drivers and pedestrians roaring past us right now, so I keep my mouth shut and race across the lot.

By the time I return, a passerby is calling an ambulance from his own phone, rendering my trek unnecessary. Beth is, of course, gone. I could run into the store, but I feel more needed here, so I lower myself to my knees beside these women and use my body to block traffic.

Medical help comes quickly and unexpectedly. A shopper with a cart laden with curtains: “I’m a nurse,” she says. A woman about to enter the store: “Do you need help?” and adds, “I’m a nurse.” Soon four out-of-uniform nurses are working on the fallen woman. “Do we have something for a splint?” “I’ll get ice.” “Anyone have rubber gloves?”

I remain at their side, wishing I knew what to do like everyone else. But I can receive the daughter’s regret without judgment, pay silent witness to their suffering. So I do, and get caught up in caring, and my house sickness fades.

 

Through that afternoon, as I am sitting at the old family dinner table, and my father is munching on a matzah, and Theresa is paging through a catalog, I feel it return. I am answering their questions about the state of the renovation when it happens, and I immediately decide not to say anything about house sickness. When I said I’d be coming to visit, my father asked me not to bring up the appointment tomorrow—when they’ll find out if a new growth in Theresa’s breast requires a biopsy. Talking about my own enigmatic affliction, not to mention the strokelike event I just encountered at Target, only seems cruel.

“How’s the place you’re renting?” my father asks, keeping the conversation going.

“It does the job, though it doesn’t feel like we really live there.” A minor observation, but to indulge him, I go on about the sense of dislocation, sounding more dramatic than I feel, until, hoping to show that I haven’t lost my perspective, I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind—which is, regrettably, “But it’s nothing compared to what you’re facing tomorrow.”

My father shoots me a look.

Theresa glances up from her catalog. “I’m sure it’s still unpleasant,” she says.

I’m blushing. I can’t believe I said that—but I also can’t seem to stop. “Yeah, but it’s a really trivial concern, given what you’re dealing with.”

“I’m not dealing with anything,” Theresa says, flipping the catalog page with a snap. “All I’m doing is seeing the oncologist. I honestly don’t think it’s anything.”

“I hope not,” I say, stealing a glance at my father, who has dread in his eyes.

“You two are making much more out of this than you need to,” she says, kindly but sharply. “I really am not worried.” She closes the catalog and reaches for another.

A few hours later, my father walks me to my car. To my eyes, he still looks to be in his mid-twenties, his age when I first held him in my gaze and he lifted me from my crib and danced me around on the top of his shoes. Teacher of American history, champion of unions and civil rights, possessor of a hearty laugh, he could tell stories like nobody else, and whenever I was with him, I felt a rushing between us of giddiness and trust and enchantment. He was, as fathers can be for daughters, my first love, and despite all the mistaken turns he took as parent and I as child, I still feel that love today. But as I look at him now, his face taken over by vulnerability, I see him as he is: a bald seventy-five-year-old with white eyebrows and pleats in his neck. How much longer will he have with Theresa? How much longer will we have with him?

He stares at me, frightened in a way I’ve never seen, and says, “I’ve been thinking.”

I wait. Then I understand that he’s not intending to state
what
he’s been thinking, though I know it’s some jumble of thoughts about mortality.

I wish I knew the right thing to say, but I feel as unsure of myself as I felt beside the fallen woman and her daughter. All I can think to do is say, “Call me, will you?”

“She’s always around. I can’t talk with her right there.”

“Call me when she’s at work, like you’ve been doing.”

Theresa comes out the front door then, her spirits no different than two hours ago. My father’s eyes bulge with worry. I hug him, I hug her. “Let me know how the test goes, okay?”

I wave as I back out, and look in the rearview mirror. She is smiling; he is not. I want to be there when they fall, I think. Yet I know that even if we pull through this time, someday—maybe far too soon—Theresa will be gone. Then, his heart crushed, my father will be gone. Eventually, my mother and Gordon will be gone, too. Just like all the generations that once inhabited my house. And when they are all gone, what will I do with all my love? I cannot mourn my parents while hugging my children. I cannot immortalize my parents by raising my children. I cannot even look into the backseat and console my children.

I do not have children.

Where did
that
come from? I snap at myself. I thought I came to terms with that one long ago.

I force my eyes toward the road, the house sickness swelling like a cobra.

 

When I get back to the rented house that night, Hal’s saying with glee, “They’ve started taking down the pantry!” He’s shaking turmeric into a pan, moving breezily along to Tal Farlow on the stereo. “It’s happening, man!”

Gee, I think. I don’t feel the way he does at all. I feel like I could cry.

Over a late dinner, he fills me in on what they’ve been doing, but I’m barely able to hear. Maybe this creepy emptiness started because of the disappearing house, along with the coincidence of Theresa’s situation and thoughts of deceased people I never knew. Maybe that’s where it would have stayed, one big psychic mush that amounted to fear of change. But then I came upon the suffering of a desperate daughter, and listened to the suffering of an anxious father, and this house sickness advanced to a whole new stage.

I don’t want to admit what it’s becoming. I’ve never felt it before. But I know what it is.

 

The next morning, a Saturday, with Hal sleeping late and the workers off for the weekend, I go to the house. I can’t say why, except that when I lay awake all night, tormenting myself, I thought I might be able to blunt this feeling if I return to the scene of the crime.

Alone in the demolition, I close the door behind me. The living room floor is now talcumed with dust, the air smells of wood and plaster. It’s so quiet that I hear myself breathing. I step forward, unconcerned about nails and splinters, unclear on what I’m seeking, feeling ridiculous. Hal was right—the dining room pantry has been torn down, exposing dingy wallpaper. In the kitchen, the cabinets, sink, and stove have been carted off, their silhouettes remaining like photo negatives on the floor. I go upstairs. Nothing has changed in the hall or my old study, except that the mantle mirror is now mummified in plastic and marked with the grandiosely misspelled “FAGILE.” A large mirror, it leans against the back of the closet and reflects my entire body. With so much plastic, I can make out only a generic womanly shape staring back at me. Perhaps that is why, as I confront her, I let the house sickness finally speak.

The first voice I hear is my old belly-dancing friend Amina. She is in a memory where we are changing into our costumes for a class, and she turns and asks, “Do you want children?”

I am in my early twenties, on the verge of living with Hal, and I give her the only answer I have. “I don’t know.”

“I always wanted kids,” Amina says. Then she looks at me, and sees something—confusion, doubt, maybe fear. “Haven’t you felt that way?”

“Not really.”

“But you like kids. My kids like you. And you’ve got a great boyfriend. He’ll want kids.”

“Actually, he hasn’t said that.”

“What has he said?”

“It hasn’t really come up.”

“Maybe he’s afraid. That’s typical of men. Once you’re ready, he’ll go along.”

“What makes you so sure I’ll be ready?”

“Do your parents bug you about giving them grandchildren?”

“They don’t even expect me to be married. They have a liberal view of adulthood.”

“So wait. Someday you’ll just feel you’re ready, and then you’ll do it.”

That’s a relief, I think, as we take our places in the dance studio and fix our eyes on our veiled images in the mirror. I feel too young and unknowing even to think about children. None of my siblings has begun doing so, either. Only Hal’s sister has had a child, a gorgeous boy who is endlessly entertaining. But he’d been colicky, and Hal’s sister spent every night of his first months driving him all over town, the rumble of the car quieting him. How could I handle
that
? Or bullies? Puberty? College tuition? I have enough trouble believing in myself and making ends meet. Besides, there are all those Beth issues. I assume that any child of mine will have a disability, not because Beth’s condition is genetic, but because, as her sister, I know that things don’t always go as planned. Also, my parents have always expected that Beth will live with one of us, a fate that has come to feel like a prison sentence when compared with my friends’ freewheeling ways. Why, if I can possibly get a pardon, would I volunteer for lifelong duty?

My question ushers in the next memory.

This time I’m with my friend Ethan from college, and we are having lunch together. We’re nearing our mid-thirties, and he and his wife have recently had a little girl. “Having kids is great,” he says.

I guess it might be, if you’re not, as I am, on the verge of breaking up with your boyfriend. I say, “You’re lucky. You’re just a natural dad.”

“For the record, I think you’d make a wonderful mother.”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s not like your mother was such a good role model.”

“I don’t blame her. I don’t blame anyone. I just don’t really, really want a kid, and it seems you should really, really want a kid if you’re going to have one.”