Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved (14 page)

Part Two of the two-part foundation will require another set of footings, four more walls, two more visits from the concrete truck. The weather is not cooperating; we need a clear day to pour the concrete. Otherwise, the mix could be diluted by rainwater. On the first sunny day we have, I expect to see Ronny and his crew. But I am not at the front of the line, and another three days pass before they arrive. The strongman is with him, but the boss is a man I don’t recognize. He hasn’t been on this job before, but he tells me he’s sure he can pour (rather than pump) the upper footings. I have my doubts about this, as he attempts to angle the chute through the window openings in the basement. Sure enough, it goes badly. Very badly. There is concrete all over the side yard. There is concrete atop the hay bale fence, which is halfway destroyed by the attempt to get the truck into a better position. There is concrete on my neighbor’s driveway. And all this concrete dumping has occurred while I stepped inside to take a business call. When I come outside again, the guys are long gone. I waver between outrage and fear. The already-hardening puddles of cement, I am sure, violate every conservation regulation in the book. Not to mention the fact that I wasn’t planning on concrete as a prominent landscape element. (Involuntarily, the bookseller in me performs free association:
The Cement Garden,
Ian McEwan; grim book, great writer.)

“Ed,” I say, when he answers my page. “The yard’s a mess. There’s concrete everywhere.”

“Oh, they always spill a little,” he starts to reassure me.

“No, this is not a little. This is a lot. And if Ronny thinks I am paying for this trip, he’s crazy. And they wrecked the fence, didn’t even put it back. And there’s concrete in my neighbor’s driveway. It’s all getting hard. It’s a mess. I’m sorry—but can you come over?” I wonder if he can tell I am on the verge of tears.

“Don’t worry,” he tells me. “It’s okay if it hardens. We can hack it up and take it away easier. And we’ll just use some of it as fill. Remember we have to backfill all around the foundation. I’ll come over just as soon as I can finish up here—say, around four o’clock—is that okay?”

“Yes.” I’m afraid to say anything else, because I know I will start crying.

“I’ll take care of it with Ronny,” he says. “Just don’t worry.”

But I am worried. I shoot an entire roll of the spills, a photojournalist documenting an unnatural disaster, and I go to work on sweeping up my neighbor’s driveway. When Ed arrives, he takes over the driveway cleanup, and he reassembles the fence. He assures me the pools of concrete on the hillside will not be that hard to break up, that concrete spills are common, that all will be well. I don’t know whether to believe him, but I bask in Ed’s soft-spoken reassurances, in his blue eyes, silver white hair, the redness in his face that tells you he needs to watch his cholesterol. His upward inflections and his south-of-Boston accent. His competent, easygoing presence. Maybe Ed is right. Maybe everything will be okay.*

*
RAIN AND MORE RAIN
slows down the foundation work, but the following week, the pump truck arrives again. At the end of the job, the driver comes up the hill to see me. “Who did this?” asks a man who introduces himself as Jeff. He is surveying the concrete on the hillside. “Wasn’t my guys.”

“It’s a mess, isn’t it?”

“It is a mess. What happened?”

“They tried to pour instead of using a pump truck.”

“Stupid,” he says, shaking his head. “This hill is way too steep. At least they could have cleaned it up.”

“That’s what I thought. How hard is it going to be to clean up, do you think?”

“Oh, it will clean up fine. You can break it up with a sledgehammer, use some of it for fill.” He echoes Ed’s words. “But it shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

I am grateful for his sympathy, his mild outrage on my behalf. Over the past several days, one man after another has told me not to worry, that it was no big deal. Even my neighbor, when I explained to him what happened, said, “Oh, that kind of thing happens on every job.” Despite these assurances of normalcy, I haven’t been able to muster the required nonchalance. In continuing to feel upset, I have come to realize that I am not a full-fledged member of the club I’ve been trying to join. Not only have I been reminded that I am the homeowner, I have been reminded that I am female—in subtle ways, an inflection, a shrug. As much as I want to be one of the guys on this project, I will never really cross over. I feel some sense of loss in this realization, and a feeling of inadequacy—as if in responding with tears and anger, I have shown myself to be unworthy of the crew. And so I am relieved when Jeff, a concrete professional—a guy, with credentials—tells me this is not normal; this is not acceptable; and yes, this is one big mess of concrete.*

*
IN A FEW DAYS
, the second set of walls is revealed, dark and solid. The original foreman returns to set the forms, the one who told me that the rocks make the foundation strong. I want to ask him why he wasn’t here last week, why his esteemed colleague made such a bad call, and why they haven’t offered to clean it all up. But I keep the peace. I watch him set the forms and later I watch his colleague, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, as he wrestles with the hose. I decide it is another occasion for me to learn when to keep my mouth shut. Besides, I have a more important question that I have been waiting to ask. As he removes the forms, I see my opportunity.

“How come the forms don’t stick to the concrete? Are they treated?”

The concrete man who gave me keylines confirms my hypothesis. “We spray them,” he says.

“With a giant can of Pam?” I ask him.

“Something like that.” He smiles, but does not yield his concrete secrets to me.

Seriously nonstick, I think. Maybe a sort of Teflon? Unbidden, a picture of white rice sticking to the bottom of a pan presents itself to me. I wonder if the forms would come off just as easily if my foundation were made of rice.

No good, I think. Mr. Hayden’s butterflies would surely eat the rice.

COTTAGE-MOVING DAY,
and it dawns damp with a light drizzle. Hayden’s guys were here yesterday, measuring the bolts on my foundation, and I asked them how the weather might affect the move. “Oh, we can move in light rain, but they can’t use the crane in heavy rain. Too dangerous.” Visions of the cottage slippery, wet, eluding the grasp of the big red crane. We can’t have that.

Rain this morning means the cottage will probably spend the night in my driveway. We have the place cleared: a flat resting spot at the bottom of the circle where we can tuck the cottage in for the night. Scotty pruned the low branches on the oak tree and hauled out the midnight broom. The broom have seen their better days, and I know it gave the arborist pleasure to remove them. He has been telling me for years how awful they look, and they do—except when they are in beautiful, spectacular, bent, weeping bloom. I love the yellow sweep in front of the purple lilacs—old lilacs—as old as the house, fifty years.

Last night, Hayden called. He now identifies himself as Bob Hayden rather than Mr. Hayden when he calls, but somehow I can’t think of him as Bob. Maybe it is that gruff, matter-of-fact, smoky voice of his, and the image it conjures of a man at the helm of a whaling ship, somewhere in the mid-1800s. He is too crusty to be merely Bob. I don’t know that it would be polite to call him by his last name to his face, so I avoid the issue entirely.

“Weather tomorrow,” he said.

“So I heard.” I have learned not to say more than required with Mr. Bob Hayden. I try not to exceed his word count in replying to his remarks.

“Could hang us up,” he continued, and I was pleased that he answered the unasked question.

“How so?” I offered.

“Really heavy rain like they are predicting—we can’t be on the road. Too much of a hazard. It’s not that we can’t do it, but some idiot comes around the corner too fast, poor visibility, and he crashes into us. Then they say, ‘What were they doing moving a house in this weather?’”

“Oh.” Again, I didn’t ask a question and so he answered it.

“Hoping the storm will blow through tonight, clear early. We’re set with the cops for 8:30 in Harwich. Call you in the morning.”

It is almost 8:00
A.M.
now, and the weather is only starting to show up. Harry is already here; Bruce is due to walk off a bus any moment. Tony, who had planned to come, can’t make it. Something about work he had to do at Boston College. In that I think this may be the most exciting day of my life, I don’t understand how Tony would be willing to miss it. Ditto with most of my female friends who, while interested in the fact of moving the cottage, seem blasé about the act of it. In my mind, they should be gathered along the parade route, waving flags and clapping as we hold up traffic. I figure we will make those drivers’ days. How often do you see a cottage coming at you on Buck Island Road? It’s a story to tell at dinner, a memory for the kids strapped into the back seat, the perfect and complex excuse for being late to work on this gray May morning.

By quarter past eight, I still haven’t heard from Hayden; his machine picks up when I try the office. I wonder if he’s already in Harwich, if he forgot to call me. We pick up Bruce at the bus stop and take the back roads to the cottage. We follow in reverse the route that Hayden has plotted for the move. This way, we’ll meet the cottage on the way if they have started the move without us. We are just turning into the cottage colony when my cell phone rings. As I dig it out of my slicker pocket, I see my cottage.

“Bob Hayden,” he says as soon as I pick up, as if he were the one answering the phone. Before I can ask him what is happening, he tells me: “Postponed the troopers till 12:30.”

“I’m in Harwich,” I tell him. “It’s just starting to drizzle here.”

“It’s pouring in Cotuit,” he says. “Headed that way. Can’t move in this; no visibility. Too big a risk.” As he speaks, the rain is getting heavier; the storm is sweeping down the Cape. “Have to decide by 10:30 whether we’ll do it at 12:30,” he says. “The cops need two hours’ notice.”

“What do you think?” I ask him.

“Hard to say. Could blow by pretty fast. Call you on your cell.”*

*
THE WINDSHIELD WIPERS
can’t keep up. The defroster isn’t adequate without the air conditioning blasting too. Harry drives slowly as we head, shivering, straight into the storm. We have decided to go into Hyannis, grab some breakfast, see what the weather does. In Yarmouth, when we turn onto Route 28, Harry slows down so I can lean out the car window to get a shot of the sign.

MAY 24 House-moving Today. Expect Delays.

It’s raining so hard that I know the photograph will not come out. But it is a necessary act, nonetheless.

“Expect Delays,” I read. Well, we are having one now. And we’ve had plenty already. Two weeks back, on one of his afternoon visits, Hayden told me about the permit problem in Dennis. “The only town I have to get approval from all the selectmen. Last Friday, I bring the paperwork over for this Tuesday’s meeting, and the lady behind the desk tells me, guess what, I missed the deadline. ‘You said today,’ I say. And she says, ‘It had to be in by 1:00; it’s 3:00 now.’ Couldn’t believe it. Every other town, I just need one signature, no big deal. But not Dennis. Wish there was a way to avoid driving through that town.” There is exasperation in his voice. Whaling captains never had to file for permission.

I was sympathetic. I remembered my experience in the Health Department. I could imagine a gatekeeper in Dennis who took a secret joy in delaying us for two weeks. But Tom Howes was annoyed. “Hayden blew it in Dennis. We should have been moving this week.” Tom’s opinion was that Hayden does this for a living. He should know the rules. But I suspect what Hayden knows best is the way around the rules, the side roads that his houses take.

“Expect Delays. It’s a good working philosophy for any project, isn’t it?”

“Kate gets philosophical,” Bruce says to the mike in the video recorder. He’s getting a shot of the sign, too.

Harry reads the sign not as a fortune cookie, but as a banner. When I pull my soaked head back into the car for good, he says, “You’re famous.”

“Well, not me—the cottage,” I say. But I do feel a bit like a celebrity. It isn’t often that we get a public sign dedicated to an activity in our lives. Go/Children/Slow doesn’t exactly count. When my grandmother retired, she got a sign. At the brand-new Holiday Inn in Somerville, Massachusetts. Right out front, right under the green Holiday Inn logo, her name in marquee lettering. “Congratulations, Mary Ford!” the sign shouted on one side, “Best Wishes Mary Ford!” on the other. I was a teenager at the time and not easily impressed. But Nana’s name in lights—that was pretty damn cool.

In Hyannis, we head, not to breakfast, but to the Mid-Cape Home Center, my new favorite store in the universe. They have a section called the Bargain Box, where I am spending more and more of my time. Special orders not picked up, doors that did not quite fit, windows that fussy homeowners refused, odd-sized cabinets. I have been shopping for doors and windows mostly, and I want to show Harry a door with frosted glass that I am thinking could work as the back door for the hallway. On this third trip to see the door, I find it a little too formal for my setting, and Bruce suggests that there are security issues with an all-glass door. I decide I won’t tell him about the French doors that will lead to the deck, or the full-view door I have in mind to replace the front door of the cottage.

Ten o’clock and no word from Hayden. At the Home Center, the rain is pounding on the aluminum roof. We have to shout to hear ourselves.

“I don’t think we’ll be moving today,” I yell.

“Doesn’t look likely, does it?” Bruce is disappointed, because he only has today off from work. Harry, however, has taken two days for the big event, unwilling to miss either the move or the placing of the cottage.

We drive to downtown Hyannis for hot drinks and bagels. It’s after eleven now, and we have resigned ourselves to the idea of a rainy day. We split up the
Boston Globe
and decide we’ll pass on the bagels in favor of going to lunch at the Indian place in half an hour. “It’s letting up a little,” I say, my mind not on the paper in front of me. The men grunt in the way men do when they are reading newspapers. Then my cell phone sings. I grab for it, almost missing it.