The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir (5 page)

I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I set the bag aside and took my dog for a walk.

A
month later, I returned to the hospital for an echocardiogram—an ultrasound that takes a movie of your heart much like the sonogram I’d get if I were pregnant, awaiting the first tiny snapshot of my peanut baby with flipper arms that I would show all my friends and coworkers. It was like that, but no one would send me home with a photo of my heart. Instead, they’d send me home with news about how well my body would work, and for how much longer. By now, I’d come to trust my cardiologist and understood that he was trying the best he could to help me, to get me running again (literally), and to see me do more than scrape by; he wanted me to thrive. He was the kind of man who laughed a lot—probably the sort who often
cried or peed his pants while laughing (my personal favorite). I trusted him, completely.

I was waiting for my turn, thumbing through magazines, trying to ignore how all the people around me were ten thousand years old, and how, like them, I had a ten-thousand-year-old’s cardiac problems, when I came across an article about a guy who’d built a tiny house on wheels, a house smaller than my garage, smaller than a parking spot. It looked like a cabin that would be used in a commercial for pancake batter, or in a painting titled
A Simpler Time.

The article indicated that the owner had built the house himself, a fact that caused me to pull the magazine closer so I could examine the guy’s arms. To my surprise, they didn’t appear to be overly manly or even any stronger than my own. The article went on to explain that he had built the little house and then moved it to a spot behind his bigger, 1,200-square-foot house, tucking it near a low fence and scrub oak tree.

I was curious about Tiny House Man. Apparently, he rented out the big house and lived “for free” in the backyard, while his renters paid the mortgage and utilities. No bills. No overwhelming debt. A house the size of a Tic Tac to clean.

Suddenly, a light went on. Literally: a flashing red light. There was an emergency code somewhere in the bowels of the hospital, and as the lights flashed, my cardiologist fled down the hall, and I was left sitting there with the tiny-house article for an hour. I just stared at it, mulled it over, daydreamed,
and then thought: What would happen if I just . . . sort of . . . did that?

What if I sold my big house with its rats in the front yard, the mortgage, the hours of dusting, mopping, cleaning, vacuuming, painting, grass cutting, and yard pruning? How would it feel to live so light?

I wasn’t sure why I was so drawn to the photo, but the best I could figure was that it reminded me of everything I’d wanted as an eight-year-old, when I’d have been happy living in a tree stump or a tree house, or even in the scratchy little caves that my brothers and I carved out of the blackberry bushes along the fence line of our farm. The point was that I’d have a place of my own where I could hide from my chores or my family, where I could cry my eyes out if I needed to and make sense of the world by viewing it through a tiny spyhole. I had big plans for myself: I’d live in the woods and learn to speak to the chipmunks and squirrels. I’d spend my time examining the small bones and rocks found in the nearby creek bed. I’d make “sit-upons,” leafy sort of seat cushions, just like we did in Girl Scouts, and whittle tiny stick figures for my mother. I’d do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and in the end, all the woodland creatures would become my best friends forever, but for even longer.
That
was my dream life, so perhaps you can understand why the idea of building a tiny wooden house would click for me. Plus, building a house would be fun!

Then there was another voice. The idea of living in a tiny
wood house appealed to my inner eight-year-old, but what kind of adult does that? I wondered if Tiny House Man was happy; if he had good friends who would come over for dinner despite the cramped quarters, if they packed themselves into the living room (which was also the kitchen and bathroom), where they’d balance their dinner plates on their laps and play mini Scrabble with tiles the size of their teeth. I wondered if he had lumps on his head from sitting up in the night and smashing into the ceiling. Was Tiny House Man dogged by his decision to live so small, perhaps shunned by his neighbors, who secretly joked about his house; or did people love that he had downsized himself into the equivalent of a toolshed?

I wondered what kind of man would choose to live in a house that small when he obviously had other options. He didn’t live in Ireland, where a person might build a little Hobbit hut and live happy as a wee elf. This wasn’t Mongolia, Africa, South America, or China, where people regularly lived in houses that were barely big enough to keep the sun and rain off your head; this was America, where everything is BIG.

Maybe Tiny House Man was ill, suffering from a mental disorder that made it impossible to make wise decisions, like Ted Kaczynski (the man who made shoe-box-size bombs and mailed them out all over the country), who ended up pleading insanity, using the small size of his cabin and the fact that it didn’t have running water as proof of his problems. I thought about what might constitute normal or normal-ish behavior,
wise and not-so-wise decisions, and ultimately, I hoped the tiny-house guy was similar to me: a sane person without a big agenda, who simply wanted a way to make sense of the world, to create a new map with a big X in the middle labeled “Home,” even if that meant shrinking his world down to the size of an area rug.

My life was normal (or at least, normal-ish), though my new diagnosis and machinery made me feel chaotic inside. Before leaving the hospital, I had a defibrillator implanted—a gadget that would normally be delivered in a suitcase to the side of an ailing patient, but in my case was all sewn in, corkscrewed into my heart and wired to a battery that floated in my belly. It worked like this: If my heart rate suddenly spiked, causing me to pass out, the box (as I called it) would deliver a jolt of electricity to send me flying forward like I’d been donkey-kicked in the ass. It was like being Tasered from the inside out. My friends and I joked that I was the only one of us who could likely jump-start a car by running in place, or who could reasonably ask her lover to wear rubber boots connected to a grounding wire. We joked about it; but it unnerved me.

I never knew when my heart would quit and my defibrillator would fire. My doctors and I couldn’t connect it to the food I ate, water, beer, sex, vitamin deficiency, exercise, anxiety, thyroid problems, stress, joy, monotony, my job, scary movies, or the number of times I’d shot myself off a ladder doing home improvement projects. There wasn’t any specific behavior that
triggered my weird heart rhythm; it was a mystery, and that left me feeling lost inside.

One week, in spite of all advice to the contrary, I went for a run; three miles, up to the top of Mount Tabor and back. I wanted to test my heart, challenge it to see if it would explode like a water balloon in my chest or simply stop, like releasing a doorknob after you walk in the house. I raced up to my house and doubled over with my hands on my knees, like I always do, expecting to crumple into a wad of fluff on the porch. But nothing happened. I was fine.

And then two days later, as I sat at my desk, writing a report, my heart seized. It was like a switch was thrown, like the
pffft
out of a wall socket when the fuse pops; I nearly fainted, but instead I drove myself (against all reason) to the urgent care facility.

My heart made me see everything different, like looking at your over-sized legs dangling inside the water at the edge of a pool. I found myself stalled out at the grocery store, ogling the rows of produce, dishes, pots, scrub brushes, and soup ladles, imagining the people who may have spent their life propagating, harvesting, designing, and building these genius goods; items that were now a dime a dozen, expected, disposable, forgettable. I found myself staring out the window at the birds and the clouds, at the way rain gathered into tiny river deltas near the base of the windowpane. One day I started crying at a stoplight because the red color was so brilliantly beautiful, and the
idea of stoplights so perfect in a civil society. Later, I had an epiphany while trying to fix the vacuum cleaner, bending over it with a pair of pliers, with little parts fanned out on the rug all around me. I thought:
This
is what the living do. And I swooned at the ordinary nature of the task and myself, at my chapped hands and square palms, at the way my wrists bent and fingers flexed inside this living body.

Another day, I found myself telling a city inspector, a complete stranger, everything about my life. He had come to the house to evaluate why rats had burrowed into a hole in the front yard, and why they refused to leave even though I had purchased something called the “sonic emitter”—a contraption that was supposed to produce a high-frequency noise, inaudible to humans but ear-splitting to rats and guaranteed to send all varmints packing.

The inspector spoke with a southern drawl and wore an orange safety vest that made him look like a traffic cone. He explained the serious nature of pest control and how some people “just don’t give a fiddle-faddle,” and how he once saw rat turds in a silverware drawer but didn’t say anything to the homeowners because they “weren’t the sorts to take a note on it anyways.” And then, for some undefined reason (some bizarre, oddly satisfying reason), I told him the story about how I’d just gotten out of the hospital, and how I felt like I was walking around with a hole in me that every living thing seemed to fall into. He gave me a little tap on the hand as he handed off the
inspection report and pointed to his listed recommendations. “Change what you can, darlin’. That’s my best advice.”

I remember thinking: What would I change? That’s easy. I’d be on a perpetual vacation where I’d swim with dolphins and eat mangos every day, and I wouldn’t have to work or pay a mortgage. I’d travel to stunning, wild places; visit my family, and hang out with my friends and let their toddlers put cereal in my hair, cry in my arms, and poop in my lap—not because I like poop but because that is exactly the sort of real-life stuff I would want to have in the mix. I’d walk the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mexican border to Canada if my heart could handle it, which led me to what I really wanted to change: me. My heart. If I could change anything, I wanted to
not
think about my heart every five minutes. I wanted to have the nurses stop scribbling “congestive heart failure” in my medical chart, and I wanted to quit imagining that I was dying a little bit every day. I wanted to stop looking at everything so intensely—studying my housemates, the neighbors, my friends, the clouds, the way the sun warms me like it’s filling in the cavities between each and every one of my 4 trillion living cells. I wanted to stop looking at everything and thinking how perfect it is, and how much I was going to miss it, and then feeling so sad because I didn’t want to miss anything.

As I sat there in the waiting room, waiting for the next round of diagnoses, the idea of building a tiny house seemed to make all the sense in the world. Somehow, it would shrink my life into
a manageable mouthful and connect me to the trouble-free kid who raced around her backyard catching fireflies at night.

And building would be fantastic—a monumental project that would absorb every brain cell, and every ounce of focus and ability, and then maybe I’d stop staring at the sun like the most stunning act of God ever imagined. It would put all my home repair and remodeling skills to the test, and I’d have a chance to build something perfect; something warm and kind, and made out of materials that didn’t make me feel like I was lying to myself every time I claimed to be an environmentalist. I could build a little house like Tiny House Man, and if it made sense, I might even be able to move into it and let go of my big house—a move that would entail letting go of the perfect backyard, the beautiful gardens, and the accommodating floor plan, along with the mortgage, the utility bills, and the hours spent laboring to keep things from falling under the weight of time and the elements. Maybe I could walk away from all that. Maybe.

Deciding that I needed to take some kind of action, I tore the article out of the magazine and smuggled it out under my shirt like porn. When I got home, I stuck the picture on the refrigerator, and for the next week, every time I caught a glimpse of the pointy little roof, I’d get happy-melty feelings.

I convinced myself that I needed to find Tiny House Man. It was a completely logical course of action, like tracking down Jonas Salk for more information about his polio vaccine, or
finding the manufacturers of a particular product to see if there were any small pieces that presented a choking hazard. I needed to know the details, and a week after staring at the Tiny House Man and his perfect creation a thousand different times, studying the magazine photo in the same way a jewel thief would ogle the Queen’s crown, I decided to call directory assistance in Iowa City—that’s where the article placed Jay Shafer, The Tiny House Man.

My hands started sweating as I stood in my kitchen, then paced from the oven to the kitchen sink, holding the phone, and then dialed the operator in Iowa City and asked for Jay Shafer. A moment later, she offered me his phone number. Just like that, I had the winning lottery ticket. I simultaneously wanted to barf and scream. I grabbed RooDee and went for a walk, talking to myself along the way: “Hello, Jay Shafer, this is Dee Williams and I wanted to . . . I was hoping that . . . I like your house and . . . your house is really cool and . . . I want to . . .
hope
to . . . build one too.” So it went for a half an hour, then an hour as I worked my way through the neighborhood, up and down the same street over and over, trying to find the right way to ask Jay for help. I stood in my kitchen like I did when I was stealing myself for an inspection, tucking my hair behind my ears and standing up straight, chest out . . . like a lion tamer ready to invite his opponent out of its cage. “Hello, Jay,” I boomed in a false bravado, “How you doing today?”

In the long run, five minutes after I hung up the phone, I
couldn’t remember what we had said, or how the conversation had played out. I had asked him a few questions about the house, what it cost and how long it took to make, and then we had made a tentative plan to get together if I ever came to town. We had laughed a lot, and I’d hung up incredibly satisfied with myself. And then I bought a plane ticket.