Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved (30 page)

It is over quickly, this moment of mutual recognition, and John gets down to business. I lead him to the boards, still in boxes leaning against the hallway wall. It’s cold outside, and he has brought the smell of winter inside with him. You smell this most keenly on children wearing parkas, I have noticed, but on a strong winter day, you can smell it on grown-ups, and even cats. The first time I picked up an incoming Egypt and noticed that blunt scent, I realized it must not be the clothing that creates the winter smell, but some odd interaction of body warmth with weather cold. Damp wool mittens, cold plastic coats, the fragrance of chill and stillness, heightened by a hint of wood fire; a heady combination of temperature and temperature, a bubble of the outdoors that comes indoors to burst.

We talk about how to lay the floor, the direction of the wood. I have this idea that the wood planks should carry us down the hallway, that they should follow the direction of the hall. But John points out I will see more nails that way. He explains that he can hide the nails for a certain number of planks, nailing sideways into the boards, but as he gets closer to the wall, he will have to hammer from above. There is a name for this: face-nailing.

“Can you start on the edges and work toward the middle?” I ask. I am thinking this may give him more elbow room in the narrow hallway.

He considers this, but points out that we would end up with a very visible row of nails right down the center of the hallway. He’d also have to split planks, do a lot of cutting and advance planning, so the skinniest planks wouldn’t end up in the middle.

We open the boxes as we consider the issue, and John lays out some boards for me. We do a section of the hallway with the planks running the long way, and a section with the planks running side to side.

“I’m fine with this,” he says, pointing to the lengthwise planks, “so long as you’re okay with the nails showing.”

“The nails don’t bother me so much. But I’m not sure I like the way the wood fits together.”

“You’ve got a lot of short boards,” John says. And I realize, yes, that is a big part of my problem. I’d imagined long glossy rows of matching boards, leading you from the living room to the back door. But the package we have opened is packed with two- and three-foot sections. We open another box, and another. Same thing. A couple of six-foot boards, everything else much shorter. “That’s usually the way this prefinished stuff comes,” John confirms.

“Hmmm.” I say it out loud. I am stalling. John knows this, and he is patient with me. We have learned that we can solve a problem together as long as I am allowed to examine the alternatives before making a decision. “Let’s talk about the trapdoor,” I suggest. It’s a way to get something done while I am considering the long-versus-wide problem.

The trapdoor will be built on top of the four-by-four section of plywood that covers the plumbing and heating and electrical connections between the house and cottage. We are thinking ahead to issues of home repair—or, more optimistically, home improvement. We might want these pipes and wires later, if I ever build that upstairs room.

“Would it have a hinge?” A stupid question, I realize. A hinge above would look awful and rise up to meet innocent toes. A hinge below would require massive engineering and special materials, not to mention more time than we have to finish the hallway. Before John has to answer me, I retract the question.

“Screws in each corner, was what I was thinking. I can do it with some nice brass screws, so they won’t look bad, and I’ll sink them.” We figure out the size of the opening, and he describes how he will arrange the boards. The trapdoor will be a feature, a bit of parquet in the hallway, at just about the midpoint. I leave the pattern to John. He’s made one before, in his own house. “I’ll figure it out as I go,” he says, and I can tell he is looking forward to it.

“I’ve got it on the floor. What about this?” I place three boards end to end against each wall, house and cottage, and I add another row of three on each side, also running the long way. Then I take some of the shorter planks and run them side to side, crossing the hallway between the lengthwise boards. The effect is a floor that is framed around the edges, a subtle echo of the parquet we imagine.

“That’ll work.” John says. The practical issues of visible nails and short boards and wood edges are resolved. He smiles. I smile.

“Let’s do it.” I say, as if I will hold the boards while he aims the nail gun.*

*
WHILE JOHN WORKED
on the hallway floor yesterday, I picked up the remaining boxes of flooring in two trips to Falmouth. John and I actually measured the interior of my car and the boxes from the Bargain Box. We figured I could probably haul all six boxes in one crammed trip, as long as the passenger seat was down flat. The guy at the dock was patient, if disbelieving. I kept telling him we’d measured the car, that it should work. Finally, I realized the boxes were an entirely different shape and size. It turned out the boxes I had at home were two feet shorter than the boxes I was picking up. We persevered, and managed to get three boxes in, cramming them between the foothold on the passenger side and the trunk of the car, which is partially exposed with the back seat folded down. I could still shift, but I lost use of my emergency brake for the ride home.

The wood is in the house now, acclimating to its new environment. I am acclimating too. I am back in my office today, and still feeling uncomfortable. It occurs to me that I welcomed yesterday’s wood trips as a chance to get away from this space. Not a good sign. Am I truly inhibited by the beauty of my new surroundings? As the day wears on, I realize it is more than that. We have some serious issues with the layout. For one thing, the phone—located on the computer table Harry made so that my desk can be free of electronics—is too far away. And the new desk light—with a telescoping arm and a milk-glass shade with stained-glass accents—rather than lighting my way, seems to be in the way. I shift the lamp on my desk, move the phone, and crawl around on the floor to work out the cord logistics. Then I sit and stare at the holly tree, loaded with deep red berries. Nice view. But it’s still not right. I call Harry.

“Well, the space really is set up more for a right-handed person,” he says.

Of course. I am painfully both-handed, so I didn’t take this into account, but I realize now that I always reach for the phone with my left hand, and I usually listen with my left ear. The right-sided phone means I am in a tangle of curly cord. No wonder I’m uncomfortable. After we hang up, I relocate the phone to my left, which requires additional phone cord taped to the underside of my desk. While I’m at it, I wrap the light cord around one copper leg. It feels a little better. Maybe I just need to get used to the space. But that night, staring at my bedroom dance floor, I realize the truth of the matter—the desk is facing the wrong way!

Before John arrives on Wednesday, I’ve reversed the desk. Now my view is out one window and my new, full-view door. I see the mahogany-red railing on the walkway, the treetops in the bog. It is a much larger view, expansive even. In the light snowfall, it is stunning. With the desk oriented toward the holly, I realize, I was replicating the view from my old office from just a slightly different angle. Facing the holly, I was also facing the original house, my old office—the past. Now I am positioned with a view of the present, a view that reminds me what we have done in these last twelve months, a view that only my cottage addition can afford. If I squint, I imagine, I might even catch a glimpse of the future.

As soon as I sit at the desk, I understand all this—my insecurities, my desire to keep an eye on my old space, to cling a little to my crowded office, to have a view of the comfort zone. I feel the power in the simple act of flipping the desk as I remove the taped phone cord. I relocate the little table that holds the printer—an engagement present from my grandfather to my grandmother—so it sits in front of the window that looks out on the holly. When I retrieve what I print, I will be reminded of my roots. Satisfied with my tiny feng shui victory, I return to my desk and turn to my left to send off an e-mail to Harry, just as John knocks twice on the French doors and lets himself in.

IT IS SNOWING OUTSIDE,
and John keeps his table saw covered with a blue tarp. The saw is set up on the deck, conveniently plugged into the outlet that Stan installed to the left of the French doors. The boards require a certain amount of cutting as John works to fit them, like a jigsaw puzzle, into the hallway. I had no idea that laying a prefinished floor would be so complicated. John tells me that the narrowness of the expanse is part of the reason so much cutting is involved. All week, John has been moving between the warmth of the hallway and the bitterness outside. He fits, measures, runs outside if a cut is required, comes in to hammer the wood into place. For this back-and-forth operation, John wears a T-shirt and jeans.

I am outside in a hooded parka, snapping pictures with a gloved index finger. I’m hoping for a good shot of the house and cottage united: green shutters and red-bowed wreaths on the windows, ivy with white lights wrapped around the lamppost, a dusting of snow not quite covering the red roof. I am thinking it will make the perfect December photo for the calendar I plan to give to John and Ed.

The snowfall is lovely. The branches of the spruce are white, but not yet heavy. We are only supposed to get a couple of inches; the birds, busy at the feeder, confirm this forecast. You can pretty much predict any weather by watching the birds. During a small snow, the birds visit the feeder nonstop. When they expect a big snow, they flock to the feeder before the weather begins. Then they disappear into silence and white, returning only after the storm has passed.

Like my first foray into gardening, my backyard birding habit was encouraged by Barbara. She gave me a thistle feeder many years ago. “It will bring the little finches,” she told me. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize a little finch if it came. But I bought the seed she told me to get and I hung the feeder by my dining room window. That winter, the color of the birds, their tenacious living in the midst of all the winter dead, heartened me and gave me hope for spring. I realize now that Barbara gave me the feeder because her winter bird-feeding days were over.

Barbara’s mother died in the wintertime, only a few months before Barbara made the first trip down the path to my house. Two years later, Barbara mentioned her mother’s death to me for the first time, confessed how hard it had been for her to live through the winters ever since. Barbara, I learned, had struggled all her life with depression. Another year or two later, she invited me up the hill to read her medical history. “You just read it,” she said to me, as she stationed herself in her mother’s rocker. Egypt had come up the hill with me, and he was moving between the two of us, catching a pat wherever he could. The record was grim, and kept in her own hand. She’d been subjected to electroshock treatment, psychotherapy, intermittent hospitalizations, and every brand of psychopharmaceutical you could name. Some of the side effects were worse than the cure, which in any case had never been effected.

After her mother’s death, winters in that house became impossible for Barbara to manage. I came to expect her annual hospitalization; she would usually disappear shortly after her birthday on December 31. In the spring she would return, stronger, but never quite as good as new. These last couple of years, her return seemed premature, her departure delayed, her suffering more long-standing. Winter’s agony, it seemed, had stretched into spring; fall was an anticipation of the pain to come, and even summer days were longer than she could bear. When she came home this past spring—after the robins, but before the catbirds—she was distressed a lot of the time. She’d call me often in the middle of the day. “Come up, please. I can’t get the safe open.”

The safe was ancient, big and clunky, and hard to open. Even with the combination written out in Barbara’s neat handwriting, I could never get it the first time. She’d fidget and complain, convinced we wouldn’t be able to get it open. Three tries usually did it, after I had some practice. Inside were some miscellaneous papers and her unused checks. Her compulsion to touch those papers, I think, was a compulsion to feel that some part of her life was in order. Outside that locked-up safe, there was disorder all around her.

Late last summer, her friend and companion summoned me up the hill. “Barbara’s in a very bad way,” she said on the phone. “Maybe you can help?”

I found Barbara in her bedroom—once her mother’s room—in physical and emotional pain. “I’m dying, Katie,” she said. “I am dying.” She said it in her incongruously loud voice, a declaration, not a protest.

“We’re all dying, Barbara,” I said. “It’s just a matter of timing.”

“Where are my glasses?” I found them for her so she could look up at me. I think she was a little surprised by my response. I wasn’t being glib, and she knew it. There is something about Barbara—at her best and at her worst—that invites you to be candid, blunt. Perhaps because she gives you nothing less in turn.

“Barbara,” I said. “You have a very strong body. It isn’t going to die without a lot of help. You aren’t going anywhere right away, Honey.”

She didn’t say anything, but lay her head back down on the pillow.

“Do you want to die, Barbara?” I asked her. I knew it was Barbara’s very nature that was pushing me to this boldness. Why mince words, she would have asked if she were feeling better.

Silence.

I sat down on the bed next to her. The mattress was ancient; it was awful for her back. Not to mention the room itself. Dark, and full of pain. I wondered whether I could get her out of this bedroom, move her into another room where the memory of her mother might not seep through the wallpaper.

“I don’t know, Katie,” she said.

“Of course you don’t.”

“I need my pills.” I got her a fresh glass of water, and she swallowed her medication. She handed back the glass, then her glasses. “I want to sleep now.”