Renovation
Barbara Phillips
Valentine Collage by Barbara Phillips
I know it’s only 10:00 am, but join me in having a martini. We’ll be going with my husband, Bob, to his Family Grab Bag Party at his daughter’s home— “Festivus,” they call it. I can’t image going without preparing properly. You’ll need every bit of that gin.
Let’s sit at the kitchen island of muddled-green slate that Bob and I chose for remodeling. We married when Bob was 62 and I was 54, determined that this marriage would be our last. We met thirty years before marrying and managed five marriages between the two of us before falling in love and marrying each other. We started transforming “his” home into “our” home by combining two flats into a comfortable single-family home. Bob was enthusiastic about the concept of renovation, but actually doing it was another matter once we got beyond the kitchen. He had lived on the first floor of this Victorian for over 35 years without changing a thing—no furniture or decorative item once placed was ever removed.
Just to give you the idea: I placed a vase on the living room mantel and suggested that we just look at it there for a week to see if this were the right place. He looked stricken. Barreling along, I suggested that we hang three pieces of art on the living room walls and then swap them out for a new grouping at the beginning of winter. He was speechless. And as we discussed new colors for all the walls, he found his voice to ask plaintively, “There won’t be one white wall?” I smiled benevolently. It tells you everything when I say home renovation was a picnic compared to my struggle with Bob’s family—resulting in renovation of an entirely different and unexpected sort.
Because my own family was shattered by the trauma of the sudden deaths of my parents in a car accident, one of Bob’s most attractive qualities was his valuing family. As my friend Beryl once wisely observed, the very thing that starts out as attractive about a man fairly often morphs into crazy. Because our relationship was long-distance, we spent most of our time together traveling or at my home in New York until after our marriage. My son and I visited Bob in Chicago on rare occasions. I had no idea Bob’s social life was almost exclusively with a family that turned out to be raucous, quirky, and crazy. When the sex is not just world-class but intergalactic and the man is so interesting that you know you’ll never be bored, well, you can overlook some details.
I wanted inclusion into that family—for my middle-school aged son and me to become members of that magic circle. I wanted, simultaneously, to center our marriage and nuclear family in our life together. But, to state the obvious, when you marry at age 54, your state of being differs from that of the 20-something-year-old self who looks forward to growing up with your husband and growing into his family.
It further complicated matters that my family culture was so very different from his. The difference in race was the least of it. I was raised in the genteel culture of the Southern Black Episcopal middle-class, while he was raised by parents who jettisoned the surname that would reveal them as Jewish and created a family culture my mother would have labeled “heathen” for its lack of social graces as much as for the absence of religion. That family culture had all the intimacy of side-by-side toddler play—nothing looked like how my family expressed love. Eventually, it helped me enormously to assume the secret identity of a wannabe cultural anthropologist doing original research on an as yet undiscovered subculture. I suggest you do the same.
Please, bottoms up! You’ll need every bit of that gin when we get to the party at his daughter’s home.
We enter her home through the front door and find what might have been a living room, but here, the space has been converted into the dimly lit chaos of a home office. And, yes, just toss your coat wherever you think gives you the best chance of finding it when we depart as soon as is possible without being conspicuous about fleeing. Now, make your way to the kitchen/dining area where the air is heavy with the unmistakable dull scent of two turkeys steaming into total tastelessness and side dishes concealing any hint of flavor. Don’t tarry. We now descend into the basement where we find a growing pile of haphazardly wrapped presents.
I know I’m not the only person in these United States who thinks a “Grab Bag Party” is to family Christmas what shoving cake into the bride’s face is to wedding – not an ounce of grace. As we Episcopalians proudly assert, “You can scratch an Episcopalian and find most anything”; but I’m sure you won’t find the creator of the Family Christmas Grab Bag Party. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go now and write that in your gratitude journal. Yes, it’s an okay party for the office; but, for family?!
Here’s what happens: each person brings a wrapped-some-kinda-way present and adds it to the pile on the floor. Then, each person gets a number. Person #1 gets to pick the first present. Person #2 gets to pick the second present from the pile OR TAKE THE PRESENT from Person #1. And so it goes. At the end of the greed fest, no one thanks anyone for anything. By the time I was #25 at my fifth Grab Bag Party, I didn’t give a second thought to taking that Dutch Oven away from my husband’s ex-wife. And I fell right in with everybody else who didn’t thank a living soul for anything. And as if that renovation of my notion of family weren’t enough, let me share the mandatory experience of summers at the lake.
Let me welcome you to summers on the lake. My husband’s baby sister walks into what passes for a living room at the family cottage. She plants herself behind the sofa of indescribable color and fabric that the dogs sleep on and the kids jump off of. There’s a gaggle of chairs on wheels that scooch around in front of the windows on the lake-side of the room. And she commences to broadcast – not speaking to or with anyone. She’s just broadcasting, “I just walked up the road figuring property values. It’s about $2.5 million. We should give it all back to the Indians! SHOULDN’T WE!! IT’S THEIRS!!” I yank out my magazine and start reading.
I bury my head in the magazine. It’s going to be a long weekend. When I first started coming here with my husband, I thought it was rude to carry around reading material. I was at least making some effort to be a part of it all. And there I’d be – totally defenseless. Out on the football field without a helmet. Let’s just say that I learned to carry that reading material like it was my job.
Silence. I’m not about to say anything. I take a peek and I can see she’s not looking at me. So, I get comfortable with the idea that I’m not the one who has to say something. I was raised to always hold up my end of the conversation, so, it’s hard not to even make an “Umm-humm” sound or to contribute that all-purpose phrase of my Granddaddy Russell, “Well, I say.” But, if I say anything, there’s just no telling what she’d say next.
My husband eventually says something. I can’t tell you the first thing he said because my brain just seized up when I heard his voice. Then, I heard something like, “There should be some kind of response, but I don’t know whether that’s it.” I’m awestruck. How could he make a reasonable sounding, some-kind-of-content response to that broadcast? I gaze at him in wonder and maybe fall in love with him a little bit more as my anthropologist-self takes note.
In addition to Festivus and mandatory confinement to the lake, there were other elements of family culture, such as the sport of Cousin-Sniping. I was standing right there during a memorial gathering for a deceased cousin when one of the cousin-pack said to the widower of the deceased, “We heard our cousin got you to marry her by refusing to have sex with you.” I glanced at Bob whose face looked no different than if the cousins had just expressed their kindest condolences and fixed my face to follow his example. After all, these were his beloved people, although their ways never looked like love to me until ten years after our marriage.
After ten years of marriage, Bob was suddenly fighting a losing battle for his life in the ICU at Northwestern Medical Center. These crazy people who wouldn’t even bring us a casserole while our kitchen was out of service during renovation, suddenly created a spreadsheet so that everyone took turns sitting by his bedside. Hospitalized for a month, this was Bob’s third trip to the ICU, and he had not been alone for a single moment. The day before, I thought he was on his way to the rehabilitation center. It was not to be.
On Bob’s final day, I walked into his room right behind the gaggle of doctors making morning rounds. Just as Bob’s baby sister raised concern about the need to restrain him while he was intubated, Bob’s son intervened and said to her, “Now, we’ve talked with you about not bothering the doctors.” I looked at her face. And what I saw pushed me through the white coats to put my arm around her and explain to the attending physician, “She wants to help take care of her big brother.” He responded to her with the kindness for which my eyes were pleading. After everyone else left and we sat together by Bob’s bed, she showed me that she came prepared for the duration. In her hands was a huge cookie tin, and in it were all the medications she takes to keep her mind together.
There I was with the baby sister who I last saw advocating returning the land to “Indians” – to use her word. We sat together through the night – mostly without words -but in deep communion, sometimes taking cat naps in turns, mostly each of us holding one of Bob’s hands as he began his journey to where we couldn’t follow. And, so, just as cracks appeared in Bob’s wall of resistance to renovation of an old Victorian, so my secret identity as a cultural anthropologist finally gave way to a renovation of my idea of family, as I embraced her and the abiding love of this crazy family.
Valentine Collage by Barbara Phillips
