Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved (18 page)

“I was a little worried,” I say.

“So much damn rain this spring.” I find I can read between the few lines Mr. Hayden offers me. I am following him. The rain made the ground soft; the soft ground made the truck get stuck. The stuck truck made the house tilt. The tilting house made me worried.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Perfect today, though.”

“Perfect day to land a house.” We walk companionably down the hillside onto the driveway.

“Oriole,” he says, just as I am wondering if that is the call I hear. We turn toward the sound, try to locate its source. But the trees are in leaf now, and the bird is well hidden. The orioles don’t stay for long on the Cape. They pass through in May, and if you’re lucky you’ll catch a glimpse of one or two in your backyard. Half an orange nailed to a tree trunk will sometimes bring one into view. “Saw one yesterday in Cotuit,” Hayden says.

“Oh—I haven’t seen one yet this year,” I say, and he can tell I am impressed that he has. The bird calls again. “Now it sounds almost like a robin. I wonder—”

“You must have a book, book lady.”

I nod.

“Go get your book.”

By this time, we are at the bottom of the steps. My mother and Harry are sitting together on the bench now. Harry takes in our approach and I know what he is thinking. Yesterday—following the house, watching Hayden wield his wire-rake, listening to Bruce narrate as he filmed the progress—I said, “In the movie version, I’d fall in love with Mr. Hayden.” Harry grins at me now.

“Go—get your book,” Hayden repeats. I follow his instructions and emerge with a Peterson’s guide. We hear the bird again and follow the sound back to the driveway. “What’s it say in that book?” he asks me.

I read the syllables that Roger Tory Peterson has assigned to the oriole’s note. “Hew-li.” Conveniently the bird calls again—from a different location.

“An oriole all right,” Hayden says. He is looking up again, and pointing. “See’m? Way up there.” I lean in, and follow his finger. I see little more than a speck, way up in the treetops. I stare hard, trying to confirm the oriole-nature of the speck. And then he flies, down, closer, close enough to see that, yes, he is an oriole. At that moment, he calls again, a series of hew-li’s in a piping song.

“Well, now you’ve seen your first one this year.”

Indeed I have, and I have seen the oriole—dressed in brilliant orange and black-tie black—on the day the cottage landed. It seems a blessing and another omen, another good omen.

I walk with the house-mover to his maroon Volvo wagon. “Thanks for everything,” I say. He’s already in the car.

“I’ll come by,” he says through the window. “Check progress.”

“I hope you do,” I say just before he starts the engine. He gives me a quick wave and pulls out of the driveway. I watch him turn onto the street.
Save a Tree. Move a House.
I wonder where I can get one of those bumper stickers.

IT IS EARLY JULY.
The cottage has been sitting beside the house for the better part of six weeks. I have been here watching nothing happen for three of those weeks. For the other three, I was away—far away. In Paris. I’m working on a novel that is set there, and depending on cash flow, project schedules, the balance on my Frequent Flyer account, and—most important—Tony’s ability to cat-sit, I sneak away once or twice a year. I love my Paris sojourns—time to be away from the daily demands, time to be a full-time writer—but I wasn’t as excited to make this last trip, leaving only ten days after the cottage landed. I’d made my travel plans last October—long before I knew I’d be expecting a cottage.

I was hoping to see some progress before I left—most notably, the final bit of concrete work. We need to build a foundation wall running from the left back corner of my living room to the right front corner of the cottage. A little bit of orientation might be helpful here. My living room juts out about four feet beyond the rest of the house, in the direction of the bog. In that four-foot jog, there was once a door, which I replaced with a single pane of glass that looks out onto the patio and the backyard. Now that the cottage has landed, you can still see to the backyard—through a narrow four-foot alley, the distance between house and cottage. Your more immediate view is of disturbed earth. Although the cottage is lined up with the corner of the living room, it sits about fourteen feet back, roughly even with the rear wall of my kitchen. A four-foot concrete block foundation wall will bridge that fourteen-foot expanse. On top of that foundation, we will build a new exterior wall, which will eventually mark the boundary of my expanded kitchen. Our plan is to get everything connected and sealed up before we break down the stretch of the existing load-bearing wall that now encloses the kitchen. Then you’ll be able to step from the kitchen through French doors to the deck.

The weather didn’t cooperate before I left for Paris, and I resigned myself to missing some of the action. But nothing happened in my absence. The plumbing company didn’t come to give an estimate. Stan the electrician didn’t come to review the long list I’d left with Tony. The lack of response from plumber and electrician is minor in comparison to the absence of the concrete forms men. Nothing can proceed without this stretch of foundation wall.

“Brecht must have been inspired by a construction project,” I write in an e-mail to a friend who asks how things are going. I check in with Ed and John, and they promise to push Ronny, to let him know we’ll go elsewhere if he can’t pull it together. But it is high season now for concrete men; the loss of my small job is of no consequence to Ronny’s business. We should probably threaten him that we will never give the job away, that it—and we—will haunt him to the end of his days. Maybe then he’d think of coming.

We wait. Ronny cometh not. He has been not coming for almost two months now. I attempt to blend calm with perseverance. I also watch the calendar, and I wait for Mercury to move forward. I have an abiding interest in astrology, a subject I have studied since I was a teenager and stumbled onto
Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs
at my aunt Rosemary’s house. I was babysitting; my cousins were napping, and I stretched out on the flowered couch to read about the Libra Woman. I remember one passage in particular that made me feel as though the author were reading my mind. I wasn’t yet a woman, and certainly not everything she said applied to me, but enough of it was exactly on target.

Music school and studies in Western philosophy sublimated but did not extinguish my interest in astrology, and my first job in a bookstore served to reawaken the budding astrologer within. The assistant manager warned me that customers could be difficult on the full moon. They made wacky demands—for books we’d have to order—and they wanted everything right away. They often left unhappy and without placing an order. Over time, I discovered that the new moon brought us customers who were equally odd, but in a much lighter way. Their requests were bizarre, but they were consistently good-natured, optimistic. They placed orders and were willing to wait. I returned to astrology, learned about the influence of the moon passing through each sign. More months and more moons in the store, and I began to notice the small fluctuations, each few days, in moods—and in requests, too. I was hooked.

Astrology at its best has wisdom and a sense of humor. Three times a year, Mercury provides the laughs, and the opportunity for learning. According to astrologers, when usually quick-moving Mercury is “retrograde,” life slows down. A good thing if we are vacationing, or if we are seekers focused within, but an often frustrating phenomenon if we are living in the outer world. Communication is tangled, breakdowns of all sorts are routine, and delays are to be expected. It isn’t a time for new beginnings, but a good time to revise and rethink, redo—often those very things you might have rushed into the last time Merc was in a tailspin.

With the backward motion of Mercury in mind, I call Ed or John every third day to report that Ronny has not arrived, but I don’t really expect him right now. We are well into the retrograde; it is best to wait it out. I am slightly annoyed, sure, but somehow not so worried about the lack of progress at the moment. I make a call to the plumbing company, reminding the receptionist that I am overdue for an estimate, but I don’t try to pin her down to a time. And the message I leave on my electrician’s answering machine is equally unemphatic. “Come when you can,” I say. “I expect construction to begin by the end of the month.” In two weeks, Mercury will move forward in the heavens once more. I’m willing to bet we’ll have some forward motion down here, too.

I am cautious about revealing my interest in astrology. In my working life, I have discovered that a handful of clients find an occasional astrological insight to be helpful, but most clients, I suspect, would be prone to firing me if they knew I was a serious star watcher. In my personal life, there is a similar divide. While even skeptical women friends have commented that my astrological bent is just an indication of my complexity, men—at least some decent proportion of them—seem to see it as an indication of a deeper personality disorder. They flee.

I smile now as I imagine talking astrology with Mr. Hayden. I don’t think so. Or even Ed, John, Dave. Dave, Erika’s father. He would be a runner, I bet. That quiet engineering mind. No, it was best not to mention Mercury to Dave, even while he worked on our application in the last Mercury retrograde. Better for me to expect delays, to double-check every document before we sent it out, and to double-check the double-check. We got through that cycle okay, and we’ll come out of this one, too.

While we wait, Egypt and I establish our routine. Every night we walk over to the cottage, walking out our front door and making a right—away from the cottage—circling around the house and into the backyard. You cannot approach the cottage directly yet. Stepping out the kitchen door, you would drop into the ditch between the two buildings.

I have created makeshift steps out of concrete blocks at the side entrance to the cottage. I use the steps. Egypt jumps up and over the threshold in a single leap. We walk from room to room, patrolling. It strikes me that this is just the way a cat would add onto a house. Get another house. Set it beside the old one. Rub up against the new doorways, head-butt the corners of things, scenting the place, claiming it as yours. Connect them later—only as a convenience for winter travel across your territory.

While I was away, Tony painted the little bedroom yellow, and most of what will be my office is now a deep, lovely aquamarine. The little Mexican tiles are still up in the kitchen, and the sink is still there, the tiny gas stove, the hot water heater, the homemade kitchen cabinets. Between client calls, I wander over to the cottage, where I pry off the tiles one by one. That wall will be disappearing soon. It will be the six-foot open entryway to my office. I imagine my office; in my mind, I place the furniture that Harry will build me. The desk, we have decided, will have a cherry surface, and the legs will be made of wide copper pipes. It won’t look like anything I have in my house already—not that a common theme could be identified, except perhaps yard-sale chic.

It isn’t hard for me to envision what the house will look like when it is finished, but as I receive visitors I realize that most of them do not see what I see. I give them the tour, tell them what wall will come down, what doors will be replaced, what the roof will look like, and what I hope to do with the inside hallway. At some point, they inevitably say to me, “What a lot of work!” My neighbor to the rear said pretty much the same thing after she saw the cottage tucked in place. Or more accurately, she said, “It needs a lot of work, huh?” I realized in that moment that she did not see what I saw, not at all. And these echoes of my neighbor’s remark tell me I am communicating process well enough, but I am not able to share the visuals that I carry with me in my mind’s-eye. It is a lot of work, sure, but what I can already see motivates me, propels me forward.*

*
MY UNCLE JACK
surprises me one Saturday with a visit. He and Jane were on the Cape for the weekend, and he decided to take a drive. I answer the door in disarray, wishing he had called first, even as I am touched that he took the time to come over.

“I thought I’d come to see your project,” he says, and makes no mention of my strange attire, my lack of makeup, my general dishevelment.

I invite him in, offer him a cup of something—not sure that I have coffee (another reason visitors, especially morning visitors, are wise to call ahead). He accepts a cup of tea, and I fill the teakettle and set it on the stove. We walk to the cottage while the water is heating. I give him the tour, tell some stories about the landing, point to where the roof will be, explain the hallway.

He listens carefully, nods, asks an occasional question. He stares down the alley between the houses. “It’s beautiful,” he says, and I note the tense. He is seeing it finished.

Back in my kitchen, he pulls up a stool to the counter, sips his tea, and tells me that his kidneys are in trouble. I’d known through my mother that he was having some tests, but I didn’t know what Jack is telling me now. “The doctor says I’ll be on dialysis within a year’s time.” He says it matter-of-factly, and I try to be matter-of-fact in turn. I know it is what he wants from me.

“What will that mean?” I ask him, and he speaks of home dialysis versus hospital dialysis, the differences, the pros and cons.

“I’m lucky to have some time to investigate my options,” he says. He talks about the possibility of a donation, and lets me know as if he is talking about the weather that he is already on a transplant list. He tells me about the special diet he is on now, and what he can and can’t eat. We sip our tea.

When he is ready to leave, I give him a big hug, thank him for coming by. I don’t know how to say more than that out loud to my uncle. But when I close the door behind him, I find myself standing absolutely still, contemplating the enormity of what he has just revealed to me. Jack, sick. Jack, very sick. He has always been the healthy one in the family. Sure, he’s not far from seventy, but until a few months ago, he was playing basketball—a champion in the senior league. It’s been easy to ignore the fact that Jack has been getting old, even as I have watched him these last few years grow into a man who resembles more his uncle than mine. I wonder about this blow to his body, this sapping of the physical well-being that has always bolstered his emotional strength. Jack has always been the one who comes through when you need him. Now, it seems he may start needing us. I can imagine the house complete—and so, I am pleased to know, can Jack—but I cannot imagine my uncle weakened, old—or gone.