After a year of chance cohabitation, Dave moves into PennHenge. He’s been living at the mill for the better part of ten years, so this must be bittersweet for him, but I can’t find an ounce of conflict in his disposition. We clean out his space at the mill, and he rents a storage unit for the vastness of his record overflow. It quickly becomes piled to the rafters. Then Dave begins the process of further classifying the treasured records that made it into the house. The records for everyday listening—the ones that we want to hear again and again—end up in the living room alongside the stereo and a set of boss speakers that are overkill for a third-floor apartment. The records not likely to find themselves on heavy rotation—no less coveted, just less frequently spun—end up outside the door on the third-floor landing. There are more in the basement. A dehumidifier hums next to the boxes; climate control is crucial.
“I don’t know, do you like this original Japanese copy of Rumours? I feel like the first American pressing is better. Boomier, earthier, definitely louder, you know?”
I can’t always hear the difference, but I like being asked.
My books, his records: PennHenge now needs constant vigilance to keep it from creeping into hoarder territory. I’m not precious about my books—they’re folded, creased, softened by my heavy-handed study. And I often give the extras away. I believe that’s how they’re best appreciated. But records—bought and sold on their condition—are sensitive, worth more money, susceptible to horrors brought on by heat, cold, dust, mold, overzealous handling, and haphazard storage. I cringe every time Dave takes one of my old records out of its sleeve because as a teenager I was a danger to keeping things nice, a maven of both overzealous handling and haphazard storage. “This one would be worth a hundred bucks if it wasn’t so beat,” he might tell me, quickly adding, “but it looks like you enjoyed it, so that’s great.”
I struggle with putting a new man in an old house, sometimes, especially when all the flotsam of my past seems to drift around us as we perch up here on the third floor. The physical space hasn’t changed much since James lived here with me. I dream, once, that Dave is speaking to me the way James sometimes did, toward the end: “Why don’t you clean the fuckin’ litter box? It stinks!” I yell back at him: “I cleaned it last night!” When I wake up, after a moment of ill reminiscing, I feel an acute sense of peace, a pleasant heaviness that illustrates how much my inner landscape has changed.
As “the landlady’s new boyfriend,” Dave could be a real nuisance to my tenants, but he is golden, the perfect buffer. He manages to be vocal without throwing his weight around. He is a master of wielding humor to solve problems. He’s a grounding force.
Testing the waters of working together, Dave and I take on a few projects. We clean out a particularly junk-filled room in the apartment, paint it, seal the floor and buy some midcentury furniture from Craigslist. We get rid of stuff, then organize what’s left. We have yardwork days; we cut down invasive trees and vines and trim back the plants that have gone out of shape. We both find this work highly meditative. There are smaller things, too—the un-clogging of drains, the fixing of toilets, the turning of compost. We alternate between wordless concentration and the briskly paced cracking of jokes, interspersed with frequent kissing. It’s not the quickest way to get a job done, but you can’t squabble about petty shit when you’re kissing.
I never feel embarrassed around this person; so often in the world I feel like I’ve said the wrong thing, or said too much, but never to Dave. He takes me at my most irritable, dorky, tentative, or premenstrual, and he encourages those expressions. Having that kind of freedom and emotional rigor in a relationship allows for far-and-wide explorations of one’s inner workings. My old tendency toward romantic speculation, of striving to figure a person out and then trying to force our goals to coincide, has abated. There is no wondering when things will change, when the circumstances will be right.
Is this where I tell you that we got married?
I certainly can’t leave that fact for the very end, as if it’s the payoff to this lonesome story of a lady and her house, struggling together, biding our time, waiting for a sweet and caring man to come along and make this drafty old shithole a home.
That isn’t how it went, but man, I am glad he came along.
Despite the risk of suddenly sending this story marching up to the summit of Mount Platitude, I have to tell you that we got married; it was beautiful, and we are colossal together.
He hasn’t made over the house in grand style or fixed all of its problems. He’s not a jacked furniture maker, or a tough-guy builder, or a sleek rich dude (as if), or any romantic male/domestic fantasy archetype, besides being a willing taker-out of garbage. So we are safe from perfection. The house is still a mess, but we’re happy.
After two years together, a couple of months before my fortieth birthday, we start kicking it around. There’s no ring, there’s no dramatic proposal; in our excitement, we just make the decision together. We start making plans for Maine in mid-September, which is two-and-a-half months away.
A week or two after the decision is thrillingly official, with our parents informed and plans just underway, we spend the Fourth of July in rural Vermont with Dave’s old buddy/bandmate and her family, and a crop of friends. The night before, we arrive and set up our tent in a clearing overlooking rolling hills, a few friends’ tents surrounding our own. The sweet little crowd assembled there are among the first people we inform of the upcoming wedding; a cheer goes up into the dusk. On the Fourth, we ready for a party, and an impromptu stage is set for the bands playing that day. People arrive and lay out their blankets, the music begins, and I let a child paint my face like a butterfly, the antennae curling up my forehead. It’s easy to fantasize from this perfect, revelatory place that the ugliness in the world has disappeared, that it isn’t crazy to be optimistic, to be taking romantic leaps in this time of national and global turmoil. Then some bad campfire music breaks our reverie, and Dave and I retreat to our tent, where we laugh and goof around like two nearly forty-year-old kids.
A month later, in August, I do actually turn forty. Going against all that a younger me had ever heard or believed about that threshold, when the day comes I am excited to cross it. Lying in the sand on a deserted beach at the tip of a little island, shutting my eyes against the gleam of high Rhode Island summer, I feel young, strong, ferocious with life force. In late bloomerism there is much to embrace.
Having observed unhappy “older” women all my life, I’d assumed I too would be miserable by now. Reaching adulthood wasn’t what I thought it would be, didn’t have to be the way I saw it internalized by some women I’d known—as a constantly building litany of trying tasks and overstated dramas to be endured from under the thinnest veil of acquiescence. A well of unreleased rage and knowing confinement seethes just under that veil. Our culture makes it this way, of course; we don’t choose it. Endless stipulations are imposed on us before we’re born. But in gaining a single degree of separation from cultural expectations, a space flares open. A little at a time, we push back and find there is room to divine our own spirit.
The plumber is named Matteo. He comes on a Sunday morning in September; it happens to be the Sunday before the wedding, and three days before Dave and I are to leave for Maine, where the wedding will be held. The house, sensing my imminent departure, sensing my dangerous level of happiness and that my energies are focused elsewhere, has asserted its power over me one last time in my waning single life, as usual in the form of water where it shouldn’t be.
By the time he enters the house, Matteo and I have already had a driveway-based conversation about how sad he is to see the state of his old neighborhood. He says he was born on my street—a few houses down—and has lived in Canada, and in Italy, and now he’s back in Rhode Island. “It’s a long story,” he says.
He speaks softly. His downturned face displays a look of pity for me.
“It’s really not bad, I mean, it’s not exactly paradise, but I like it! I’ve been here a long time,” I say, with overenthusiasm, really just to clamp this conversation shut. His sympathy, besides being totally unwarranted, is delaying an investigation of the pipes. I try to steer the conversation back to mechanical matters, as he is a plumber and not a leisurely gentleman caller just visiting for the hell of it. He joins the long line of sad-faced repairmen who seem to wish they could protect my small, white woman’s body from the horrors of this bad place and these bad people who are all around me, these obviously terrible, shadowy characters—who in truth haven’t so much as uttered an unpleasant word in my direction in twelve years and counting.
Dave comes home while Matteo is working on fixing the problem, and true to form, immediately engages him in a conversation about politics, religion, Trump, all the hits. At first, it is amusing to listen to Dave make a case for his humanist beliefs with an argumentative plumber, but the tenor of the interaction goes sour when Matteo—casually fingering a wrench—spouts off a couple of racist proclamations. We do our best to argue that his attitude is all wrong. Eventually we have to awkwardly shut down the conversation just so that the job at hand can go on and this man can leave our home.
After fixing the main problem at long last, Matteo tells me there is bad news: when a tenant shut off the flow of water to his apartment to avoid flooding, he must have loosened some sediment in the pipes, for there is now a blockage in the plumbing somewhere between the first and second floors. The second and third floors now have no water. He provides Dave and me with a few tips as to how we might find the clog, although he admits these usually don’t work. If we can’t locate and clear it, he says, we’ll need to cut into the first-floor ceiling and replace all of the pipes in that part of the house so that water will flow freely again. He’ll get the plumbing company in touch with us tomorrow morning to get the first appointment set up. Oh, and heads up, it’s going to be expensive.
“We’re . . . getting married in six days?” I sputter, as if that might grant us a reprieve.
“Aw, man, yeah, I’m sorry, that’s tough. We’ll get it fixed. Well, see you guys,” he says, hoists his toolbox and is gone.
Dave and I begin our investigation, monkeying with every faucet in the house, unscrewing various pieces of plumbing, turning knobs, jiggling anything that can jiggle. Dave calls friends for advice. They too are stumped. We are worked into a lather, picturing the shitstorm that will commence when this repair job gets going, and the cartoonish bill we’ll get: will it be five thousand dollars? Ten thousand? Not to mention that we have no water on two floors of the house and are soon leaving for a week to have a super romantic no-stress wedding time!
I’m palpitating in this manner when Dave says, “Let me just look around one more time.” We head back to the basement; he searches for unturned stones. He flips a blue lever near the ceiling, and I hear the triumphant song of water rushing back into the pipes throughout the house. There was no blockage; there will be no tearing apart of any portion of the house; best of all, there will be no gigantic red-inked bill.
Flipping that lever should have been the first thing Matteo did after finishing the repair. He’s a plumber. He knows this shit. He was too busy delivering his fearful screed to think straight. Dave and I got so thrown off that we too almost missed the simplest solution imaginable. If we needed a practical reminder that fear and hate are eternally bad for the soul, bad for the mind, even bad for business, here it was.
Compulsively engaging with people is a tricky game—sometimes they test out their most despicable stuff from out of nowhere. I’m trying to get better at reacting thoughtfully, calmly, and firmly, especially when the person in question is being paid by me, yet tries to control me in my own home.
Having restored order, recounted Matteo’s professional ineptitudes to the plumbing company, secured a partial refund, and escaped the awful world of pipes and drywall for a minute, Dave and I embark on a final, frantic stage of wedding prep. We assign bulky items like giant speakers, turntables, and coolers to friends to be brought to Maine. Thinking fondly of Angelo, I make jam from his precious grapes to give away as wedding favors; I gather a foothill-sized amount of vegetables from my friends’ farm. Dave pulls an all-nighter making mixtapes of dinner music. We check with his parents, and mine, to make sure their cars are packed and any required items are on board. We pack our clothes and our hiking boots and our bathing suits. I wrangle all the stuff I’d been setting aside for weeks: dessert plates, silverware, tablecloths, candles, extension cords, the rings, the marriage license. We check with our officiant, the company renting us tables and chairs plus a lone porta-potty, and our friend who lives a few minutes from the wedding site. The guest list is tightly nailed down at forty people, but arranging food, drinks, and music for even that small a crowd is foreign to me.
It takes us five hours to pack the car, which has us antsy, mentally overheated. But as soon as we get on the highway, we start squealing. We’ve dodged doom in our domicile, we’re en route to the coast of Maine, and we’re going to ignore America’s impending ruin—it’s less than two months before the 2016 election—for an entire week because we’re about to get wicked marital in one of the most relaxing places on earth, where the Wi-Fi is spotty and iPhones seem sort of ridiculous.
We arrive in Sedgwick, Maine very late at night and take a moonlit look around the place where we’ll be fully nuptialized in a few days. The water in the nearby harbor twinkles under a just-shy-of-full moon; the grounds are leafy; the dense flora rustle with the sounds of nocturnal animals. The grass is thick and wet. The house—a stout, white, mildly creepy-looking home built in 1817—glimmers an inky blue under the night’s light. We chose this location sight unseen, via FaceTime with the help of my friend Caitlin, a local, who came to tour it on a rainy day in July.
“Yeah, I think this is gonna work out,” we yell to each other from various spots in the moonshadow. I can’t see Dave, but I can hear his smile.
We unload the crucial stuff from the car and gingerly enter the house. We walk around turning on lights, checking out rooms; one of the lights turns itself off. We both see it happen. Dave and I verbally make note of it, but don’t discuss it any further; meanwhile, he is sure of a spirit presence, and I’m leaning toward an electrical problem. My position on the matter is determined mainly by a need to stay calm, to not freak out. I would rather not fixate on the image of a haunted wedding, so I decide to ignore it as we settle in for the night.
As it went, if any spirit visited us, it was a detail-oriented one, and definitely female—a helpful apparition who fully grasped the length of our to-do list. Two days before the wedding, our parents and friends begin to arrive; wearing giant smiles and beaming forth love and calm, they set up tables and chairs, string up lights, pick flowers. By the time Saturday rolls up, I feel the expected stress, but I’m also floating around, grinning, confident that the crew will make sure everything gets done. “What a great group of friends you have,” our parents all say independently of one another.
And then, in a flash, we are married. As my mom likes to note, very few bits of our ceremony are copied and pasted from elsewhere. “If you’re looking for traditional, you’ve got the wrong girl,” she says. “There was no ‘Here Comes the Bride,’ no ‘Till death do us part,’ no ‘I do.’ Made me nervous.” Instead, a psych band—new friends from Maine whose music we’d connected with—play beautifully for the occasion, before and after the ceremony. Dave and I wear ornate masks made out of flowers and leaves, which we remove at the start of the ceremony in the spirit of coming to one another fully engaged and unguarded, having cast off our various preconceptions. I blubber uncouthly through the entirety of my vows. At the end of the ceremony, we ask the guests to circle up, hold hands, and chant with us: “Let our light harmonize with the universe!”
And we did beam our light that night—if not throughout the universe, at least around a sleepy town on the coast of Maine.