Tenemental Read online

  That said, our proximity to one another means we don’t attempt to hide the gross stuff. In the driveway of my own house, I’ve tripped over balled-up poop-heavy diapers, half-eaten food, dead birds, condoms, various pieces of clothing and underwear. I’ve found guys rooting around in my garage and peeing in my driveway at 2:00 a.m. Once, the morning after a late-night manhunt, during which the cops insisted on conducting a sweep of my basement and the first-floor apartment, I realized that the fugitive had been hiding out in my garden when I spotted squished tomato plants, his big footprints having mashed the soft soil.

  One particular incident showed me the depth of my neighbors’ goodwill. Where it runs alongside the house, the driveway at PennHenge is wide enough for one vehicle to pass through. A friend needed to park a medium-sized U-Haul truck in the driveway overnight. As he drove in, I noted a little too late and with some degree of horror that the U-Haul was only a couple of inches on one side from the house, and had the same short distance from the fence on the other side. This was fine for pulling in, where the view was clear and no rearview mirrors were needed, but it portended a precarious way back out. The next morning at 0700 hours, he jumped in and started inching the too-big truck back toward the thinnest section of driveway. Every time the truck would creep near to the house, I would yelp like an injured animal. There was no way we could do this without hitting something. Going back and forth with miniscule changes in tire direction did little to improve the odds. Finally, I coached him to just keep going, knowing full well he would run over a metal fence post, which responded by popping out of the ground at a high velocity, hitting the neighboring house with a resounding ping! and then a metallic clatter as it crashed to the concrete. The sleepy-eyed teenager whose bedroom we’d unintentionally mis-siled opened his window, stuck his head out, and—completely unperturbed, like this was how he woke up every day—said, “Yo, what was that?”

  We explained. We apologized. We all laughed about it. My friend left a contrite note and a grocery store gift card in the family’s mailbox, the latter of which they graciously declined when the dad of the house wrote his own kind note back to us. Eventually, we had a metalworking friend come over and weld the post back onto the base. It was like the whole incident had never happened, except that I loved my neighbors even more for being so understanding about these two jokers shooting a large metal projectile at their house at 7:00 a.m. Cheers to neighbors who know how to Let. Stuff. Go.

  The neighbors may have been lovely, but PennHenge was throwing insults. It had been raining for two weeks. I returned home looking forward to cranking up my heating pad and taking a leaden nap on our huge old multicolored Grandma couch. Instead I found a three-foot hole in the ceiling and a pile of faintly musty, incredibly heavy plaster. There’s a particular loneliness that comes with returning home to find that your living room ceiling is lying on the floor in dampened chunks. As I vacuumed the horsehair and tiny crumbles that had come loose, I could at least be thankful that we weren’t home when it fell, and that one of the cats hadn’t chosen that spot for a nap. But this was not good. There was in this experience both an urgency and a futility. I now had irrefutable evidence of the roof’s dire status, which had begun to invade our personal space. I also felt a total lack of interest in this project, in doing all the little things it would take to make it happen. I couldn’t afford it, I didn’t know who to call, and what was the difference, the house was a heap I had overpaid for anyway. Who was I kidding with this homeownership thing? I was so tired. I turned off the vacuum cleaner and took the nap anyway.

  When I woke up, the hole was still there. And now it was dripping.

  Since the cost of replacing the windows had cleaned me out, I was back at zero dollars and looking to drum up some cash. I didn’t know yet how much a roof would cost, but I knew James’s brother, Shane, would be doing ours, and he would bust it out as cheaply as he could, but he had to be paid up front, no credit. I also knew that under normal conditions putting on a new roof was about the most expensive routine thing you could do to a house. But I wasn’t going to do this on coffee shop money: I had a sweet new freelance writing job, at which I was flying blindly but enthusiastically. I was writing copy for a local web design company run by the nicest and fairest people imaginable. The pay was great, the hours were whenever, the attitude was wry. They designed the site interface, and then gave me the pages on which I would deign to create the most showstopping copy ever written about an alumni association. Staring at these blank-as-fuck pages for hours on end, sometimes something good flashed into my brain. Other times, it was an exercise in mediocrity. It wasn’t exactly researching climate change in Brazil for the Atlantic. But I was writing for a living, in an unscheduled fashion, with good people, being prodded on by the angry hole in my living room ceiling that now dripped rust-colored water into a bucket whenever it rained.

  Months later, the money was stockpiled and schedules aligned. The price for a new roof (and two new skylights that cranked open, to replace Al’s sealed-shut miser model) would be $7,500. I went downtown to get a building permit, where they thought I was lying about the cost of the job in order to lower the price of the permit—“It should be twice that, at least,” snorted the dude in charge. “Well, it’s good to have a roofer in the family,” I shot back. Considering the hijinks these bureaucrats must see every day in this little corrupt jewel of a city, my roof—even if I had lied about the cost—was a piddling matter, so they took my money and gave me the permit. I proudly went home and tacked it up in a front window as requested, feeling very boss.

  A couple of days later, the crew showed up in white vans, ready to rock. I looked out to spy them standing on the sidewalk dragging on prework cigarettes and draining white Styrofoam cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. There were five or six roofers, a variety of ladders and tools, and piles of bundled shingles. Watching them unload, the enormity of this vertiginous job hit me: a bunch of guys are going to carry sixty-pound bundles of shingles up to my very, very high, sloped roof, from where they will literally be able to spit down onto the roofs of the houses on either side? I stuffed down my nausea and tried to be like them: 100 percent unfazed. Goofing and conducting intriguing manversations, they got right to work, tearing off the old, damaged roof in a couple of hours and putting down a protective layer of waterproofing. By the end of the first day, they had a portion of the new roof on. By early afternoon on the third day, the job was done. They swept up the scraps and left, while I marveled at the looks of what I’d just bought: snug, solid, just about impermeable to the elements.

  I wondered what Shane had done to keep the costs so low. Did he pay his crew less than the usual rate? Did he use leftover shingles? Did he forego his own paycheck for the job, for his brother’s old lady’s sake? Or were the other roofers marking up their services just that much? He didn’t talk about money; he didn’t want to negotiate. He gave us a straight-up, rock-bottom price and I disbursed it gladly, paying my respects to the brusque and opaque ways of the roofer’s code of honor.

  I could now put the bucket away, though the living room ceiling hole persisted. I would no longer be tortured by the steady plunk, plunk, plunk of my house slowly drowning itself. But the experience had started up a simmering anxiety that made me strain my eyes and ears to search for new ruin.

  I heard the plunk, plunk, plunk long after it had ceased, though there was no bucket to plunk into, and no drip to do the plunking. As I watched TV or read a book on the couch, my eyes would drift magnetically up to the hole. I’d look at it with detached scorn, like, Someone really should get it together and fix that. I just couldn’t imagine that that someone was me. Hadn’t I already done enough? What more did this house want from me?

  Digging Down

  The shock of moving into a house in bare need of some very basic things had absorbed my available brain matter for a couple of years, but the next spring—as the weather went from icy to steamy in the space of a week, as is the norm in these parts—I reme
mbered with dread and excitement that I was also responsible for resurrecting a scrubby, trash-plastered dirt lot that I hoped someone might someday call a backyard.

  I didn’t know what I had or where to begin. The little square of land under my care was scarred and empty, as if torched by a fireball: scraggly, knee-high weeds reaching forth from scratched-up dust; a broken chain-link fence bisecting the small space—perhaps a former dog pen; faded bits of trash snagged in every corner; and dozens of little cellophane crack bags tumbling in the wind.

  But the lower the nadir, I told myself, the more dazzling the opportunity for transformation. I was going to reform this delinquent land! I was going to bring it back from ruination!

  I went to a used bookstore and bought books on organic gardening. I read blogs. I observed people around me who were building pretty and productive urban gardens—which were still a bit of a novelty in this time just before the locavore/farm-to-table/neo-hippie movement took full hold. Plus, crucially, my ace in the hole: I had friends who were starting up careers in farming and landscaping, who could be persuaded to help save a smidge of urban land from a dire state of affairs.

  An old friend and her husband had just started a landscape design business. As a belated house-warming gift, they offered to draft a plan to revive my apocalyptic little yard. I rattled off my priorities: plants native to the area; tall, fancy grasses; space for vegetable beds and leeway around the fire pit James was planning to build; skinny pines that would screen out some of the nastiness of the parking lot behind the chain-link fence. The entire yard is something like twenty feet wide by fifty feet long, so we had to keep it tight and tidy. They prepared a master plan for the “Warner Residence” that detailed what they would do with the space, given my desired features and a total disregard for financial constraints. It was beautiful, visionary, and—even they admitted—maybe a little much. But they were giving me a provisional plan, they said, and I could leave out any parts that didn’t suit me.

  James and I decided to follow the basic shape of the plan, and to at least put the plants they recommended in the places they recommended. The rest—fancy stone inlays, timber bed edging, a pea-stone-filled patio surrounded by dense plants and arborvitae trees—we’d see about later on and probably never. I spent a dreamy afternoon at the nursery, getting grandiose in my mind and optimistically picturing myself in a chaise lounge under a thick canopy of glossy leaves, the scent of geraniums infusing the Tom Collins in my hand. There are a few steps between here and there, I thought. First, you have to buy the plants, woman. I selected them haltingly, enjoying their names (heavy metal switch grass, gayfeather, fothergilla, meadow rue) and blankly taking a stab at a substitute species when I couldn’t find the exact one on the list.

  James dug the fire pit and lined it with old cobblestones we got from the public works department of a neighboring town for a dollar each. I borrowed a tiller for the topsoil, and we turned the whole yard into a mud pit so that new grass seed could be put down. Contrary to our collaborations on indoor projects, James and I found cooperation easier when we worked outside. There were fewer rules in the garden, and we felt less pressure to be exact. We could be creative without worrying that we were compromising the integrity of some important structure. And we could be under the sun, gloves on, happily ankle-deep in the muck we were learning to tend.

  The whole PennHenge crew helped us plunk the plants into the ground. The ten arborvitae trees, with their big burlap-wrapped root balls, were dunked into the dirt as well, watered liberally, and left to take hold. The whole setup looked a bit half-baked that year; amateur landscaping needs substantial settling time.

  We battened down for the winter and hoped that everything would survive.

  By April, all but one of the arborvitaes had died horrible, crispy deaths.

  Point taken. No trees. Got it.

  All of the smaller perennials made it, though, and as I went out to the yard to do the landscaper’s walk of shame—digging up the root balls of the very dead trees that had been so alive just a few short months before—I doubled down on my dream of making this bedraggled dirt pit beautiful and productive. To my glee, a couple of bona fide farmers—my affable friend and erstwhile coworker Dean and his bighearted girlfriend Cal—had just moved in with my anarchist crush, Nick. Dean and Nick went way back. Dean had introduced me to Nick that day at the farmer’s market, and now he and Cal were following him to PennHenge. It was perfect. I was so proud of the assemblage of quality people living in my home.

  Dean and I had gotten to be buddies while working at the farmer’s market, where we spent happy hours dissing the crabby customers while chomping reject cucumbers. Dean, a wiry, sweet guy with an unhurried air and a fondness for old Appalachian folk music, and Cal, a badass beauty from Baltimore with an effervescent laugh and a goofball sense of humor, arrived in a good-natured cloud of doggy dust (they had three between them), sweet music (they sang and played together), and crates of kale. They were starting up fledgling farming careers, and they’d drive off in a white truck with Dean’s pitbull mix every day to the rented land they farmed. I was surprised that they wanted to live in the city—especially in my crowded and chaotic neighborhood—and commute to this beautiful expanse of land, but they had a lot of friends nearby and the price was right. Although they were moving in the direction of a rural lifestyle in the long run, they were entrenched for now in an urban one, and they liked the half-on-the-farm, half-off life.

  Dean did not sweat the demise of the arborvitaes; he was more about efficiency than fashion. In their place, he mapped out a veggie garden. He planned and built two long and narrow raised beds, each twelve feet by three feet or so; we added clean soil from a pristine rural place to get around the problem of our certainly polluted, potentially lead-tainted industrial dirt.

  We joked about dead bodies; secretly I was slightly anxious that we might encounter one. In the heart of a former mob-controlled neighborhood, digging down is a dicey prospect.

  Dean and Cal started me off with some basic crops—easy stuff like greens, onions, cucumbers, and herbs. They ran through the rhythms of gardening—the cycles of planting, fertilizing, watering, harvesting, composting—and it blew my mind. We started a hack compost pile, and I bought some tools and books to keep around. I bought a couple of strawberry plants and hoped they’d spread into a patch. Dean and Cal set me up and trusted I would learn. It was one of the best gifts anyone ever gave me.

  I didn’t know I cared about gardening until I dug my hands in. I’d had no inkling of how hard I would fall for the seemingly repetitive and menial tasks required of the job. I would never have guessed that coaxing a seedling into ornate life could be so tactile, so intimate. Gardening helped me take everything more slowly. It helped me to see deeper down. It squared me with where I come from and with my current place in the world. And it gave me, simultaneously, a chance to be the queen of my own little domain, while also leaving me thrillingly open to the whims of wild chance. Sometimes I’d plant a columbine and the nasturtium would take hold instead. Sometimes a volunteer tomato plant ended up being the best producer of the season. And sometimes I went out to pick kale, only to discover the backside of every leaf encrusted in gray aphids resembling sesame seeds.

  I had never before felt a real connection to the land—or specifically, the everyday earth under my shoes. Dirt was a blank substance—it was neutral to me, of no consequence. I had no knowledge of the range of life it contains. I had subconsciously shrugged off the places in which I had lived, believing them to be subpar right down to their dull and depleted soil. It had always taken a trip to a far-flung, beautiful place to elicit wide-eyed terrestrial appreciation in me, but when I began to plant a native garden and grow vegetables, I gave that view up. There would be enough here to entertain me. Rather than always looking toward the big, sweeping things, I began to gaze straight into the ground.

  Angelo and Fiorella took avid notice that we’d been steadily improving the lot since mov
ing in; I imagine this was our saving grace in their eyes, because inside the house we were loud, we stayed up late, and we listened to weird music. Angelo and I began to have quick but regular chats through the tall wooden fence that separated our yards, his little dog skittering and barking and licking my hands. One day, when the landscaping was looking particularly orderly, Angelo yelled sweetly over the fence, competing with his Sinatra on the AM radio, “It looks-a like a villa ovah there!”

  I could see that their garden would forever kick my garden’s ass in terms of productivity—they had it rigged for maximum efficiency and used whatever they could put their hands on as planters—recycling bins, old bathtubs, trash cans. Their enormous grape arbor sent vines over my side of the fence, the leaves cascading prettily in lush layers. In late summer, the mellow scent of Concord grapes drifted across the grass. Angelo stood on the other side, smoking, coughing. I thought of his white hair, the way it sat vulnerably against the deeply tanned skin of his neck.

  Angelo’s tendency to mumble was so ingrained that there were often long strings of words and deep swings in intonation from which I could glean no more than a word or two. He mixed in Italian phrases when the English equivalent didn’t come to him in time. But I learned the patterns of his speech, and how he formed certain words, and soon enough I was able to respond with something more apropos than a nervous laugh or a blank nod. The tone of our conversations was world-weary, put-upon, as if we both had a thankless and impossible job to get done. He’d complain a little about his health, his medications, his tomato yield; I’d complain a little about the rats, litter, and my uncontrollable cucumber vines. Under the grousing, we were communicating our love and admiration for one another. He was an older and traditional man, and I was a younger, unmarried woman with a host of unfamiliar characters visiting my house at all hours. He probably found the whole situation a little strange, but he never let on. He was happy that the house and garden were in somewhat stable hands, because you never know around here.