Michelle Panik
Linda and I were in seats A9 and A10, and our house was on the 5 freeway.
“Do you think the china hutch will be okay?” She asked, then with both hands cupped around her mouth, shouted, “Heads up, ref! That guy’s been in the key since the Carter administration!”
“Would you like to take his whistle?” I asked Linda. She was sipping white wine from a plastic cup and lowered it, smiled, then brought it back to her lips. God bless her for drinking cheap wine at a charity basketball game with me. We had floor seats, so at least the chairs were padded. Nights out lose their appeal when you’re past sixty and the date includes doing a number on your tailbone. My wife liked basketball, but she liked it with our couch and glass stemware. Which was boxed up and following our three-bedroom, two-bath ranch house down the freeway.
“The hutch will be fine,” I told her.
The game was a bit of a yawner, a charity matchup where the charity should have been us spectators watching has-been actors and singers slug it up and down the court. Not that Linda and I had paid for our tickets.
They were a retirement gift from my former coworkers. The tickets were presented on my last day of work, at a potluck put together by the latest admin assistant (she’d been there a week and a half and called me “Pops”). The invitations she’d made were nice, though—blue and gold paper, none of this email crap everyone relies on. The boss said a few words that either described my work history, or the work history of any other sales rep. It wasn’t upsetting, at least not much; over the years I had been asked to talk about coworkers at their retirement parties, and had doled out similar generic platitudes. I wasn’t going to bother being offended; I was getting out. Anyone who claims to love his job doesn’t love his wife enough.
High school cheerleaders took the floor at the next timeout. Together with the band, they led the crowd in an off-key rendition of “I Love L.A.” My wife sang the chorus and clapped during the fast parts. Watching her, I thought to myself that Linda is exactly the type of woman who claps along at a performer’s request. I loved it. She used to coordinate her Halloween costumes with our nieces’ until they finally asked her to stop.
I leaned into her and said, “I thought in order to take a timeout, you had to have a plan.” She winked and kept clapping. “Do you realize tomorrow we’ll be sleeping in our nuptial bed, at a new address?”
Linda reeled back. “Have we had that thing thirty-five years?”
“Thirty-two. The first one had that wool batting we traced back to your allergy.”
“Maybe it’s time to get a new bed, Sherwin. New address, new mattress.”
“We paid an extra forty bucks to have it strapped down.”
“Yes, and every morning I have to massage the cricks out of your back. Let’s get a new one.”
I told her okay. We were making our mid-life house our retirement house; there was money to spare.
Our house was careening down the freeway at fifty-five miles an hour, swaying from Santa Anas and any shortcomings the driver might have. And it was going to be good. Our old lot hadn’t been in Tornado Alley or the path of lava, but the packing and moving had felt just as desperate. The past eighteen months of our thirty-five years in Playmor Village had been awful.
I only agreed to preside over our HOA board because no one else was going to. The outgoing president, a nice guy who was too busy running his local coffee shop chain to serve another term, had let maintenance lapse. The wood fence was the worst. Rust dripping down from nails, which were loose and made the grayed boards wobble.
No other board member thought it was a problem, but the fence was highly visible to passersby and I worried it would make the development look shabby. And according to the HOA bylaws, the board’s primary role is to “maintain the value of the residential properties.” So I replaced the fence with cedar that was pre-treated to prevent weathering. It was an expensive add-on, but I figured the money would come back to us in the extra life we’d get out of the fence.
Turns out my neighbors didn’t agree—not that one of them ever bothered attending an HOA meeting to voice their opinion. The project had cost $275,000 and used half our monetary reserve. And they didn’t want to hear my point about the previous board having depleted it from one million to five-hundred-k in the first place. I’d done what I thought was right. I knew it was a thankless job when I put my name, listlessly unopposed, on the ballot.
Soon my neighbors, the people who’d served me mulled cider at their Christmas parties and from whose children I’d bought the same green box of Girl Scout cookies every year, were glaring at me when our cars passed. Linda and I threw a last-minute New Year’s party, and another neighbor put together an even more last-minute one, which everyone attended. Mail started disappearing from our box. Forty-ounce drink cups and burger wrappers were being left in our front yard (the neighborhood was far too snobby to eat that much fast food).
I decided I’d finish out my term by avoiding the work, and leave the meat of the presidential duties for the next poor unsuspecting sap. I’d coast to the finish line like one of our conservative Orange County politicians. The rest of the board had already mentally checked out of their positions, so I thought we’d have a real nice time in our remaining meetings, drinking merlot and discussing celebrity scandals. But when a child tripped over a tree stump and broke her foot and the board thought it was just a misfortune, I decided to act. The tree had been removed two years earlier, but its stump was left to save money.
I called a stump removal business. I’d never seen a stump removed and wasn’t intending to, except with everyone in the community calling for my head, Linda thought I shouldn’t leave anything to chance. She was tired of waking up to beer bottles planted, neck-side down, between the petunias.
Clyde, a “Stump Removal Expert” (embroidered on his button-down), came out the next week with a stump grinder. He chewed on something—tobacco or gum or maybe a piece of fibrous wood from his last job—the whole time. His grinding machine looked like an unhappy marriage of a roto-tiller and a golf cart, and had an engine as loud as a jackhammer. He mounted the thing and its churning blade lowered over the stump. It worked its way through, a termite on steroids. Clyde told me, over the deafening buzz, that in twenty minutes the stump would be a pile of wood chippings.
And bingo. It was then I realized that things that have been the same for a long time—things that have put down deep roots, one might say—can be unearthed and moved. (Of course the stump Clyde removed wouldn’t survive, it couldn’t be replanted, but you have to pick and choose the parts of a metaphor that work for you.)
The buzzer for halftime sounded and I jumped up. “How about a pretzel?”
We were halfway up the stairs when the band started “Louie, Louie.” There was a line of people behind us, but Linda stopped to listen. I thought she’d start clapping, but she was too busy studying the music. The people all went around us, but made sure to glare.
“The keyboard sounds nice,” Linda said.
“You’d be better,” I said.
Since retiring four years ago as a nonprofit grant writer, Linda had dabbled in a smattering of hobbies. The piano was what stuck. She was taking lessons in an old woman’s sunroom, her timeslot sandwiched between those of grade school kids whose legs dangled off the bench. Tomorrow was the spring recital, where students would show their families what they’d learned. For all the other students, “family” meant parents and siblings. I was the only spouse. We didn’t care. I was proud as heck of her.
At the last recital, Linda had followed a Korean boy who’d performed one of Chopin’s early works (at least that’s what the program said, that and a lot of other high-brow back-patting about the piece’s difficulty). When it was Linda’s turn, the audience immediately recognized the opening notes of “It’s a Hard-knock Life” and chuckled. A sixty-something woman playing a song from a musical, when all the kids were pounding out the great masters. But she played without missing a note, which was more than could be said of the other students, one of whom played a minuet with hands of lead. Linda’s performance was brilliant and she returned to her seat smiling, where she towered over her fellow students like a weed.
Afterwards, she was the first to the refreshment table, scooping up a cup of punch and loading a napkin with cookies. The smallest students weren’t able to reach the chocolate chip—the best ones—so Linda gave them a boost. Eventually the teacher got a footstool, but the kids preferred to wait for Linda who, every time she took one of them around their waist, would say “Going up.”
We were fifteen people back in the concession line. Our heads craned to the TV, and hand in hand, we watched a real matchup—Lakers versus Heat.
I had never known a house could be moved until I passed the motor home park over by the freeway underpass one morning and thought to myself, too bad you can’t move a regular house. I voiced this thought to a coworker, who told me he’d seen a cable show on house movers. “A flatbed truck, a few hours before dawn, a crew of men who know what they’re doing, that’s all you need.” My coworker had spent four years at St. Johns, but everything out of his mouth referenced TV.
So I knew it was possible, but never planned on doing it. Until I watched Clyde work that medieval farm contraption. Linda had always gone along with my crazy ideas (Sure, Honey, I think campaigning for Ed Muskie is a great idea). And she desperately wanted to escape the neighborhood glares and fast food trash. So while we were in that snack bar line, our house was on the interstate.
Imagine our delight and the HOA’s chagrin to learn that moving a house was within the bylaws. The HOA wanted us to go away, but they didn’t want the eyesore and construction noise that would result from our clever little plan.
When Linda and I were finally face-to-face with the concession worker, I ordered a pretzel, a plastic glass of wine (Linda snickering at the oxymoron), and—since the place was too barbaric to serve Scotch or any other liquor—a Corona. The kid plucked our pretzel from a rotating box with his bare hand, and then wrapped it in a sheet of sterile wax paper. Thank goodness. He handed it to me and I handed it to Linda, who made for the condiment stand where she loaded jalapenos into an empty French fry tray, popping a slice into her mouth. She chewed, making sure to get all the heat from the seeds, then gave me a grin.
“Do you think the driver knows to leave extra following distance? Would our house survive a head-on?”
“We’re paying them twenty-two thousand dollars to leave enough following room. The house will be fine.”
“Good,” she said with an emphatic nod.
Back in our seats, the announcer had brought three spectators onto the floor. Whoever made the most free throws in thirty seconds would win a motor scooter. Towel boys were wheeling carts of balls onto the court, the last ball on each row striped red, white, and blue.
Linda nodded to the boys and said, “Five dollars says they got more game than the guards on these teams.”
“That guard,” I said and pointed, “stars in your favorite soap opera.”
“Doesn’t mean he’s got game.” She popped a piece of pretzel into her mouth. How she can articulate such hip language without having raised kids will always befuddle me.
*
After the game mercifully ended, we went to a hotel on the beach. I’d reserved the room, which was five minutes from the arena, two months ago when we decided to move the house. You might say that the game coinciding with the weekend of our house move was fortuitous, if you were that type of person.
We ordered wine and a Johnnie Walker neat at the hotel’s bar and toasted to our drinks being served in glass, to calling home wherever we lay down together, and to hoping that the two-by-fours supporting our house wouldn’t fail. It was nice to sit and drink and not worry about our car being egged. The hotel’s public parking lot was safer than our old driveway.
“Why do they have to do it in the middle of the night?” Linda asked, turning towards the freeway’s direction, as if our domicile were at that moment flying by.
“Less traffic. It takes up two lanes.”
“I guess bumper-to-bumper would be a bitch.”
“It assures that our house arrives safely.”
I liked being the even-toned, sensible husband. It was a trait that made a good homeowner’s association president, were the residents smart enough to notice. Not that I was bitter.
I was watching the bartender slice limes when Linda nudged me and whispered, “Can you believe that?”
“What?” I said, apparently too loudly because she nudged me harder and slid her eyes to the man and woman next to her.
“I want him to enjoy all the freedoms of this remarkable country,” the woman was saying.
“But what are we going to call him until he can talk? Baby Boy?”
She was adamant. “Freedom of choice. He shouldn’t have an identity imposed on him.”
“She wants to let their baby choose his name,” Linda whispered.
“It’s a beautiful thing,” the woman told her husband. “It’s an escape from this capitalistic society that demands lock-step blandness.” She took a swig of beer.
Their conversation switched abruptly—disturbingly abrupt, to my baby boomer sensibilities—to the NBA playoffs. They got fresh beers and moved closer to the TV.
Linda said, “Do you think we should have?”
“What?” I asked. “Had a baby? Had a Caribbean timeshare? I wasn’t sure what they were talking about there at the end.”
“Have a baby, Sherwin. What if we’d had a baby?”
I waved an impatient hand. “What-ifs do you no good, Linda.”
“Maybe. But do you regret it?” She knew my opinion on regrets was even stronger than what-ifs. “Bronzed booties. Baby blankets. Those tiny little toes.”
I asked if she knew how different our lives would have been with children.
“Perhaps I would’ve freelanced for extra money,” she said. “And we would have needed a second hotel room for vacations. But there wouldn’t have been radical differences. It’s not like we spent our thirties in the Peace Corps, or backpacking through Europe.”
“Forgetting the children ‘what-if,’” I said, “what if I’d become a weatherman?” I nodded to a yellow-slickered reporter on the TV. It was only by holding a light pole that he remained vertical through hurricane winds. “He probably has a family. We could have ended up like them.”
Linda didn’t look at the TV. “I like the way we are.”
“I do, too. Then why are we arguing about this?”
“We’re not.”
“Okay, then.”
“Okay, then.”
The storm was in South Carolina, and ice was expected overnight. I didn’t understand why people lived in such conditions, when places like southern California existed. It didn’t have to be so tough.
The bar was being overrun with corporate types—ties loosened so everyone knew they were up for a good time—so we went to the beach and walked north. The shore was quiet, just a gentle ocean rumble and our shoes pushing through damp sand. It was too dark to walk out on the jetty, so we took a seat on its edge. Low tide had left a wide swath of mirror-wet sand.
I asked Linda if she were ready for the music recital. She heaved out a breath and said, “I hope so.”
“You’ll do fine.”
“Those parents can be tough.”
“No, they can’t.”
“Yes, they can. Gabriel Knickerbocker’s son has the lesson before me.” Gabriel Knickerbocker lived in our old neighborhood, a real hard-ass whose shit never stunk. His son Reggie tried rebelling for a while and quit piano. But eventually he went back. “Gabriel’s always trying to get Diana to tell him everything Reggie does wrong. And the poor kid has to sit there and take it.”
“Diana has parent-teacher conferences?”
“Yeah."
“Why haven’t I been invited?”
“You’re not my parent.”
“Unless you’re flying in your mother, I want to be there.”
“Next time,” she assured me.
A set of waves rushed in. Then, suddenly, Linda laughed. She was sitting in my lap and I turned to her, expectantly. She said, “Did I ever tell you about the time Mom and I went to The Cliff Bar and I got hit on?”
“How much wine have you had?”
“Stop. I’m not drunk.” She ran a hand through her salt-blown hair. “I want to tell you this story. You don’t know it.”
“I’m listening.”
“It was 1987, during the trip for Dad’s surgery.” Linda’s parents lived on Lake Michigan. “I took Mom to the harbor for lunch because Dad was recovering slowly and she was stressed.”
Linda sipped her wine some more, in no hurry to tell the story. She hopped off the jetty and continued north. I followed.
“So we’re in The Cliff Bar. And it’s not really Mom’s scene, you know? Lots of boaters in Bermudas and women in skimpy shirts.”
“Titty tops.” This was what Linda had always called them.
“Titty tops. Thank you.” Another sip. “I left Mom at our table and went to the bar to order two mimosas—one for her and one for me,” Linda added before I could make some crack about her being two-fisted. “And as I’m waiting for the bartender to notice me, this kid—really, he couldn’t have been out of college—comes up to me and says, ‘Can I buy you a drink?’”
I smirked. Having a young kid ogle your wife is flattering when there’s no chance she’ll act on it.
“So I say to him, ‘Sure. If you don’t mind buying one for my mom, too,’ and I point to our table. Mom raises her hand in a little arthritic wave that the kid returns before slumping away. I can’t believe I never told you this.”
But I could, because Linda was both beautiful enough to receive these types of advances, and humble enough to not make a big deal of them.
*
When we were back at the hotel, brushing our teeth, Linda spit and said, “We didn’t have to take it. It’s not like we have memories of raising children in it.”
My toothbrush paused. “We lived our lives in it. There are memories.” I spit and then swallowed instead of rinsing. “We both made the decision not to have kids.” I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation, but I believed in what I was saying. “I thought we were having a real nice evening.”
“We are having a real nice evening.” She put cold cream under her eyes and I watched, waiting. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it’s the stress of moving.”
I took her into a hug. “You never told me you had reservations.”
“Some people, like the female species, change their minds,” she said and pulled back to show me a slight smile.
I didn’t feel like joking. “What do you want to do? Adopt? Fertility pills?”
“Would you do any of those things for me?”
“You know I would.” And I would, and she knew it.
But she shook her head. “Some things you can’t make right. You can only make do.”
A rush of water through pipes, soothing, could be heard inside the wall. Next door someone was stepping into the shower, about to go somewhere or coming back. And Linda and I were so still. We moved slowly into a tighter hug, then went to the bed. She lay like a small child curled on her side, against my chest. I held her.
At first, we hadn’t wanted to move our house. The choice was extreme. But when it was all loaded up and the living room and kitchen were rolling away, we knew it was the right decision. Linda said the neighborhood suddenly seemed stale to her, and I looked around and agreed. It was the same feeling I’d had about the seventies on January one, 1980. The shrubs that were always pruned into the same lumps. The oak trees with trunks that had gradually thickened, like mine and Linda’s. The clubhouse, which was used more for a late-night teen hangout than a resident event. And, of course, the home-sweet-homes of our old neighbors: shake-shingle roofs and stucco in bland, HOA-approved earth tones.
The fence, though, looked fantastic.
