The Maw

I’ve got this thing for houses. I like old houses best. I like the smell of old wood, I like the way light comes through single pane glass and old glazing. I even like the dust motes endlessly hovering along stairwells or sitting like ghosts in empty rooms. Today, for the record, is the day our major kitchen remodel begins. As of right now, I can still say that I like old houses.

When we bought our first house, it was my fantasy that my husband and I would slowly, room by room, fix it up. It was crooked, 1200 square foot, built at the turn-of-the-century, on river rock. The weekend after we closed, we spent redoing the floors. When I say we “spent the weekend,” I don’t mean it the way people usually mean the phrase, as in, worked hard but completed other tasks, like eating and hiking in between chunks of work. I mean we spent two days with crow bars and masks, ripping up carpet stained with cat piss and scraping up old linoleum glued to the wood. I recall one break for fresh air, during which I stated (inspiring no one): “This is ruining it for me. No matter how good it looks later, this is affecting my ability to enjoy it.”

After we moved in and my husband went to work, I faced an even more depressing reality; if window trim was going to be replaced, if window treatments were going to be installed or the walls were going to get painted it was not going to be done as a chuckling, happy team, not unless we hit it every weekend and never ate, hiked or had any fun. So, if that stuff was going to get done, it was going to be done by me. The day I found myself, midweek, lying on the floor hammering in trim, I knew I’d come to a new understanding of the phrase, “fix up.” It’s a verb, after all.

I am not complaining. What I’m doing is admitting something important. I like old houses. I do not like fixing them up. My husband and I realized in our first house that we are the opposite of what they call this new generation of thirty-somethings: the Do-It-Yourselfers. Instead, we hire it done. Even this, it turns out, I don’t really like. I hate having strange men in my house. And they’re always men who come to haul away the dead water heater, or install a new one. Dismantling the forty-year-old furnace, then finessing the new high-efficiency into place. Snaking out the toilet. Cutting the drywall to reveal the clean-out pipe. Even the guy who comes in and first thing puts on those little baggies over his shoes irritates me. It isn’t the mess they make that I mind. It isn’t even the socially awkward talk that must be done, the internal, endless quibbling about what to do: hover at their shoulder for the full hour, or leave them to it?

Partly it’s that I work at home. Can any full-time professional even conceive of plumbers, electricians, heating and cooling guys, sprinkler techs, painters, window/glass guys, or flooring specialists parading through their office during the day? While they are working?

But the part of it all that really messes with my mind is the maw. I hate the hole. Whether it’s a big wound dug out for a foundation, or a minor bit of plastic wrap to mask for paint, every improvement my house takes, I feel as a personal assault. Ripping out those cabinets will feel like losing a tooth. Tearing out the wall is going to be like losing an organ. Ripping into the external wall—oh, I don’t even want to go there.

Would it be different if I didn’t work at home? Probably. But what a question. That’s like asking would it be different if I were someone else? Of course it would. But I’m not. Never will be. Perhaps if I hadn’t moved at the delicate age of sixteen, waking in one culture (the Midwest) and going to sleep, forever altered, in another (east Tennessee). Of course it’s that, just as of course it’s that I work at home. I’m a writer, see. I have this temperament. I’m admitting it. The weeks, maybe months, of hand wringing and poor sleep, in this way a remodel is exactly like writing a novel. The relentless, fluttering anxiety is the dust stirred up in the stairwell. That steady, muscular resistance to it all is simply wasted effort. It does consume me. It’s supposed to. It will.

The kitchen.

House age: 1949.

Current kitchen cabinets: circa 1949.

Lighting: flourescent.

Counters: formica.

Ceiling: 8 ft 3 in, in that plaster textured stuff, with cracks.

Getting rid of all this is gonna be nice. Windows! Sunlight! A new backdoor! Oh, worth it worth it worth it—the not spending thousands of dollars on a camper or a pick up or a semester of college. A coupla ponies. Worth it worth it worth it!

I’m not the first to link a house to housing. As is the house, so is the body: shelter, safety, protection. The vessel. Houses reflect the people who live in them the same tricky way our hair or our feet reflect so much about us. Usually, more than we like. We believe, for instance, that we can dress ourselves up from the outside in, make ourselves seem a certain, very deliberate, conscious way: in this outfit, with my hair like this, in these shoes, and smelling like this, nobody will ever be able to tell that I am, in fact, a slowly decaying organic, breathing mammal not so different from the barnacled gray whale, with his curious, intelligent eye.

If I paint my house and furnish it with great stuff, nobody will ever know what it really is: a constant effort. Aging pipes and appliances, the constant loss of energy through windows and door. Talk about muscular. The water comes and goes like breath. How could a house not, finally, reveal the people who live there?

We have hanging baskets on our front porch. We do every year; this is my husband’s thing, while the barrel out front is mine. This year, our hanging baskets hang at different levels. One chain is longer than the other. We’ve had several discussions about this. It bothers us both, but not enough to actually fix it. The effort was made, the flowers purchased and planted, the soil tamped just right. They are gorgeous. Who cares if they’re not even? Neither of us notice anymore. This says something essential about who we are.