How to Build a House Read online

  And when midnight rolls around, I stay in bed and watch as the red numbers on my digital alarm clock continue to flick by.

  HOME

  The last Thanksgiving before they moved out, we ate dinner at midnight. Jane had to work late, and the idea of having Thanksgiving without her was unthinkable.

  So we invited our guests for a midnight meal, when the whole family could be together.

  The Berkows and the Feldmans came, like they do every year. And Avi came too, with his new girlfriend, Lynn. We woke up Cole when all the food was spread out, and he ate his meal in his pajamas with the race cars on them, a streak of dried toothpaste still on his chin.

  Tess and I made everything: sweet potatoes with melted marshmallows on top, creamed spinach, fresh cranberry sauce, roasted asparagus. Neither of us had ever done much cooking, so we were a little overwhelmed by this sixteen-pound bird with no head. We stood there in the kitchen that afternoon, staring it down.

  “Cole was only eight pounds at birth,” said Tess, cocking her head. She was wearing a blue plaid apron and holding a wooden spoon as if it were a weapon. She leaned in closer to the turkey. “We probably could have fit him inside this thing.”

  “And he might have tasted better than the stuffing recipe you picked. Artichoke hearts? In stuffing? Vomit.”

  It was excellent. And so was the turkey when we took it from the oven at eleven p.m. Golden brown without the dry stringy parts I remembered from all the Thanksgivings before. It tasted even better because Tess and I did it together without any help from anyone.

  Something felt glamorous about the night. Magical. While all the houses in the neighborhood were dark, while everyone else crawled into bed with too-full stomachs, our holiday was just beginning.

  Our guests didn’t leave until the sun started to come up. We walked them to the door and watched as Avi and Lynn had to dodge the early-morning sprinklers of our next-door neighbor’s front lawn to reach their car.

  We vowed to make this a tradition.

  We’d have Thanksgiving at midnight every year, no matter what. A magical midnight Thanksgiving.

  But this past year, the very next Thanksgiving, it was just Dad and me. Cole was with Jane and Tess, and Rose, who’d come home for the weekend. I don’t know what they did or when they ate or who cooked the turkey.

  Dad and I went out for Thai food and were home in bed by ten.

  HERE

  I’m starting to realize that every place comes with its own ubiquitous noise.

  In Los Angeles, it’s lawn mowers. In New York City, it’s cabdrivers abusing their horns.

  In Bailey, Tennessee, it’s bugs.

  The air is always humming. You can even hear it over the sound of power tools.

  By the third morning at the site, I start to think I’ve developed a sleepwalking habit. I must be waking in the night, going to the middle of the interstate, lying down and letting the eighteen-wheeled semis en route from Nashville to Memphis run over my body, one after the other. The two little Advils Linus doled out at breakfast looked like a joke in the palm of his hand. Nothing that small could do anything for a pain this big.

  But I’m here.

  There are all kinds of people here, which comes as a relief. We’re a pretty solid bunch of kids. We want to do good. But there’s no way we can do this on our own.

  So I’m thrilled to see plumbers, electricians and guys in orange hard hats with the keys to the heavy machinery. There’re other volunteers. A bunch of big burly guys wearing Bailey High Football T-shirts. There’s a woman, too old to even be out in the heat if you ask me, passing out fresh limeade in plastic cups.

  There’s a huge mountain of gravel today that seems to have risen out of thin air. Seth and Frances and Marisol and her partner, Lana, are removing the gravel from the pile and raking it around the low cement-block walls of the foundation we put up yesterday.

  Captain and I are cutting wood.

  Linus gave us a lesson this morning on the ins and outs of a worm-drive saw, how we’re simply to guide it and let it do all the work.

  “It knows what it needs to do,” he tells us, and with that, another look passes between Captain and me.

  But then the wood vibrates beneath my gloves as it slides under the saw and breaks in two, and one end of it falls to the earth with a ka-thump. It’s pretty cool.

  We stop for lunch. So far it’s been a brown paper bag with a slightly soggy sandwich, a tired piece of fruit and no-name potato chips.

  Today there’s a table with a spread of ribs, roasted corn, a green salad and a vase of wildflowers. A tall woman with pale, freckled skin and thick blond braids is standing proudly behind it, serving spoon in hand. Diane Wright. It’s her house we’re building. This is a thank-you buffet lunch.

  “Come and get it, y’all,” she says, complete with Southern twang. She’s the kind of woman you want to let hug you. Wide smile and wider bosom. She’s got a frilly apron and everything.

  We eat, and I keep myself from hitting the buffet for the third time. I didn’t realize the true vileness of our poolside dinner cookouts until my first taste of Diane’s ribs.

  Her family walks up from the trailers where they’ve been living since April. There’s her husband, Wesley, an inch or two shorter than Diane, with rich black skin, a salt-and-pepper beard and wire-rimmed glasses. They have nine-year-old twins, Alice and Grace, indistinguishable except that one wears a white summer dress and the other wears cutoff jeans shorts. The one in the dress takes a seat next to me on the grass and ties a pile of dandelions into a long necklace.

  The son, Teddy, looks to be my age. His skin is the color of a latte, dotted randomly with some of his mother’s freckles, and his hair is cropped in tight curls close to his head. He’s tall and painfully skinny, with a crooked smile and deep dimples. He wears baggy skater shorts and a T-shirt from a blues club in Memphis.

  As we sit in the shade, lazy with the heat and richness of Diane’s food, not too far from where their house once stood, they tell us about the tornado.

  After, they thought about leaving. Going somewhere far away. But this is home. People needed them here. Diane is a nurse and the only doctor in Bailey had moved his family to Atlanta.

  Tornadoes don’t have names like hurricanes do. But they should.

  It doesn’t seem right that this thing came here and did what it did to these houses and farms and these lives—people living in trailers, some people not living at all—and yet this thing doesn’t have a name by which we can call it.

  And curse it.

  While Wesley is talking, the twin in the shorts climbs into Teddy’s lap and he takes her hair in his hands and twists it.

  My insides ache.

  My body feels like it wants to cave in on itself, and it isn’t because this family has lost everything. It’s because of the little girl sitting in her brother’s lap and the way he holds her hair, and the dandelion necklace, and Wesley’s protective arm around Diane’s pale, freckled shoulder.

  I ache, not for what they don’t have.

  I ache for what they do have.

  HOME

  When I saw Tess at school the first Monday after they’d moved out, she was wearing a shirt I’d never seen.

  That might not sound like such a big deal, but it was. Tess and I always did all our shopping together.

  I favor long-sleeved T-shirts over tank tops. Cords or cargo pants. Black Vans. Occasionally, a denim skirt.

  Tess is more fashionable. More feminine. Her shirts are always a little tighter and her shoes more delicate.

  This shirt Tess wore was light pink and had snaps down the front that stopped right below her chest, and underneath she had on a gray ribbed tank top we’d bought together over the summer at this store on the Promenade. When Tess walked out of the dressing room, her long curly hair falling over her shoulders, the gray of the tank top somehow deepening the green in her eyes, she looked like a model. People in the store stopped to stare.

  �
�What do you think?” she asked.

  I lied. “You look okay.”

  I turned and poked through a rack of on-sale summer skirts.

  In the hallway at school I said, “I like your new shirt. It looks amazing on you.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and we went to our next classes.

  Everything had changed, and I’m not just talking about Dad and Jane. Or Tess moving out. Or how Cole would become my part-time little brother.

  There was more.

  Dad told me on a Thursday night. I’ll probably always question their decision to tell us separately.

  I’d stayed after school for an environmental club meeting. When I got home, the house was quiet. Cole was in bed. Dad was in the kitchen alone.

  “Where are Jane and Tess?”

  “Out.”

  If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in the argument we’d had over Alternative Energy Awareness Day, I might have noticed that Dad said “out” as if it took every ounce of life left in him to utter that one syllable. But it’s only because I know what came after that word that I can go back and attach meaning to the way it was spoken.

  Dad at the counter. An empty Scotch glass with two almost-melted cubes of ice. A pad of paper with some sort of list scratched in Dad’s illegible scrawl. An unwashed dish in the sink.

  Me, standing in front of the refrigerator. A bottle of Hank’s root beer to my lips. The agenda from my meeting, folded, in my other hand.

  Then he said it.

  “We’re getting a divorce.”

  That would be when I dropped everything.

  Remarkably, the bottle didn’t break.

  In all the detail I remember about that moment, from Dad’s melting ice cubes to the sound of the soda glug-glugging out of the dropped glass bottle, I can scarcely remember anything that came after.

  But here’s what I do know.

  Here’s what I know that made the newness of Tess’s pink snap shirt insignificant, even though Tess shopping without me violated an unspoken rule of our sisterhood. As I stood there facing her that Monday morning after, and I told her that I liked her shirt, I was facing her with a secret.

  Tess and I never kept secrets from each other.

  Dad told me on a Thursday. Jane and Tess were at that very moment in a new house. I learned later that Jane had signed a lease on it a month before, and she had spent the weeks in between preparing for the move. By Friday night, Cole was there too.

  On Saturday night, after years of imagining it, but knowing it should never happen, I did something neither Tess nor I had ever done.

  I had sex.

  With Gabriel.

  HERE

  I’ve been in Tennessee a week now. It’s Sunday and I’m supposed to call Dad.

  Every Sunday. That’s our deal.

  I’ve never gone a whole week without talking to Dad. And it feels like it’s been longer. That conversation on Linus’s cell phone in the heat outside the airport feels like it took place a lifetime ago between Dad and some other version of me.

  I’m not trying to say I’ve been transformed. That spending a week in Tennessee on a construction site has made me a better, more evolved, selfless person who isn’t wrapped up in her own problems. Or that I’m suddenly confident. Strong. Able to erect new homes in a single bound.

  It’s just that Dad and the sound of his voice feel very far away.

  Yesterday was our first day off.

  When I woke up at eleven o’clock, sweet, sweet eleven o’clock, I found most of the group out by the pool. What I saw when I looked around provided a tidy summation of our first week together.

  1. Captain was rubbing sunblock onto Frances’s lower back.

  2. Seth was sitting on the edge of Marika’s lounge chair, scrolling through his iPod picking out a song for her to listen to, while pretending he wasn’t checking out her string bikini. And she, kindly, pretended not to notice that he wouldn’t, despite the heat, remove his baggy white T-shirt and expose his boy boobs to the group.

  3. Jared and Stacey, the first official couple of the summer, were in the pool. Their union became official, at least publicly so, when Linus threw open the door to the conference room after dinner Wednesday and found Stacey wrapped around Jared on one of the uncomfortable metal folding chairs.

  (Technically, Jared and Stacey weren’t breaking any rules when Linus found them. The rules say when you have to be in your own room and who can and cannot be in there with you. Nothing about conference rooms.)

  Luckily, the social scene here isn’t entirely about couples.

  Take my fourth observation:

  4. Marisol was sitting with Lana and her sister, Jo, already known as the Chicago Sisters, playing a game of Scrabble.

  They let me join in.

  In some universes you’d look like a total geek sitting by the pool playing Scrabble. But it doesn’t seem to matter here.

  That evening the bus took us to a movie at a gigantic mall forty minutes away. I ate dinner with Marisol and Captain and Frances in the food court.

  Frances had never eaten a meal in a mall in her life. “We don’t really have malls in the city.”

  “The city,” said Captain. “Why does everybody from New York call it the city, as if it’s the only city in the entire world?”

  “Because it’s the only one that matters,” said Frances.

  Captain rolled his eyes.

  I sat eating my salty french fries, thinking they had a very strange way of flirting with each other.

  “So what brings you here?” I asked Frances. “To this mega-mall with really bad french fries in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Just because I think New York is a superior place to live doesn’t mean I don’t care about what happens in the rest of the country.” Then she got a sheepish look on her face. “And my guidance counselor said it would help me get into Brown.”

  “Ah, the truth,” said Captain. “She’s just as selfish and self-centered as your average dweller in the city.”

  After we got back, and after lights-out, I heard doors creaking open and flip-flops on their way for another midnight swim. I heard Captain and Frances giggling in the hallway.

  “Are you going?” I asked Marisol. She was lying in her bed across the room reading a book in Spanish that looked like it weighed fifty pounds.

  “No. I’m not looking to hook up, so better to get my beauty sleep. What about you?”

  “Well, now you’ve set me up. If I say I want to go, I’m saying I want to hook up.”

  “By all means, don’t let me stop you from reaching your full slut potential. Why shouldn’t you? You’re not a nice Catholic girl like me.” She held up her crucifix.

  “No, I’m not. But also I’m not looking for any more drama in my life. Anyway, I want to hear more about Pierre.”

  Stories about a real boyfriend who writes you letters and misses you when you’re gone for the summer are as foreign to me as whatever was happening between the covers of Marisol’s Spanish novel.

  We stayed up talking until two a.m.

  And then this morning I wake up at eleven, and the first thing I think is that either Marisol succumbed to her guilt and went off to church, or else she failed miserably in her first attempt to sleep late, because she’s nowhere to be seen.

  The second thing I think is that I have to call Dad.

  He gave me a phone card that I shoved somewhere in my backpack. A phone card. It seems so quaint in the age of cell phones. When I go to dig for it, I feel something in the inside zippered pocket.

  Oh, right. Dad. He told me about the thing in the inside zippered pocket.

  Actually, it’s two things.

  I can tell before I pull it out what the first one is. A picture in a frame. Dad and Cole. Cole is sitting on Dad’s lap, squinting at the camera, a Hot Wheels car in his hand. Pavlov lies next to them, his head resting on his black and white paws.

  Before Cole was born, Dad liked to joke that in his house every night was Ladies�
� Night. We outnumbered him four to one. He’d complain about the suffocating levels of estrogen, but we all knew he loved every minute of it.

  Now I’m outnumbered three to one, if you count a border collie as a boy.

  I take the picture and hold it close to my face to see it more clearly in this dark room. You couldn’t even tell where it was taken if you hadn’t been there. But I took the picture with my new digital camera, out in the backyard at the end of last summer, in front of the lavender bushes, about six weeks before Dad and Jane split up.

  I’d been experimenting with close-ups. How to get a tight shot without the subjects going blurry. It worked. Dad and Cole and Pavlov fill up the frame, sharp and crisp, but when I look at this picture, I see little other than the small empty spaces at its edges.

  I put it next to my bed on the table with the wobbly leg.

  The other thing I find in my backpack is a bag of jelly beans.

  When I was little, I hated when Dad had to go away. All kids hate when their parents go away, but I really hated it. Maybe you could even call it a phobia. I was terrified that something would happen to him, and I guess you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to figure out where that came from.

  So Dad would put one jelly bean into a little heart-shaped box for every night he’d be away. I’d eat one before bed, taking my time to choose just the right flavor, and think of him. And as they disappeared night after night, and I’d see how few were left, I’d know he’d be coming home soon.

  I’m already a week behind on my jelly bean consumption, so I grab a handful and shove them in my mouth. It’s a better way to start the morning than with a cup of motel coffee.

  The phone rings five times before Dad picks up.

  It’s one of his weekends with Cole. Sunday-morning cartoons scream out from the background.

  “Hey, honey!”

  Dad sounds chipper. About one thousand times bigger than he did when I talked to him from the airport.

  This makes me feel small. I’m standing out in the hallway, at the only pay phone, with no shoes on my feet and some serious bed-head.