The Time is Out of Joint
One too warm September afternoon, I take refuge in the air-conditioned mall. As I hand over my credit card, my phone vibrates.
“Mom, where are you? Firemen are in our house.”
What? In fact, I’m shopping. I’m playing hooky from my life, taking advantage of a small break as the over-scheduled headmistress of an all-girls school on a Friday afternoon. I am buying an over-priced Eileen Fisher outfit, my son and husband having headed to Michigan for the weekend. I’m alone.
I urge the saleswoman to simply throw the clothes into my arms, imagining flames shooting up, gray plumes of acrid smoke spiraling from the slate roof. Our Tudor-esque house was built in 1929 by alumnae for their beloved headmistress. Now, I’m the headmistress. I love our house, love the way it restores me each weekend after long days of meetings and conflicts and the inevitable challenges of life as the leader of any school. The house holds us safe within its sturdy walls, a fortress, a messy sanctuary. I do not want the firemen to chop down our arched front door—like a hobbit door, the children say. I dash to the car, drive an interminable six minutes.
Three fire engines greet me parked at the curb at the edge of our lawn I whisk out of the car, race through the back door, where our neighbor, Heather, is graciously accompanying the firemen. My quick-thinking husband had phoned her as I drove home. Our alarm is blaring: squawk, squawk. It’s too loud, relentless. I try to reset it, but the code doesn’t take. Unconcerned, the firemen ask where the smoke detectors are. I point up; we are standing underneath one outside the basement door.
“Any others?” I do not know. I feel guilty, like a bad mother. I have raised a son and two daughters in this house. I ought to know.
After a brief lecture on clutter, the firemen depart and Heather leaves with them. The alarm continues to screech. I walk the first floor, unsettled. In the living room, a table’s polished surface is sprinkled with water. Did a fireman rest an extinguisher on the table? I look up. Two long cracks stripe the plaster ceiling. Like tiny clear teeth, water droplets form along the fissures, dripping onto the table, onto the rug. “Aha!” I say aloud. Not fire. Water. How did water trip the alarm system?
A few hours later, I sit alone in the den. Our grown daughters now live in Manhattan; my son and husband are in Ann Arbor for a football game. In Shaker Heights, it’s just me. The last decade and a half swivel in my memory as I listen to Ken, the plumber, and a maintenance man from school move furniture, shake out drop cloths. I remember my son in footy pajamas at the top of the stairs, each elegant daughter descending the staircase for prom. I conjure our elaborate Christmas display, see us lighting the menorahs in the living room window. I lose myself in times past, helpless to fix whatever is awry. There is no action to take, just an odd sense of being alone, of casting on memories of our family’s life is this beloved space over many years. Though my lap is empty, in my mind, I am knitting row after row of recollection. I shudder at today’s close call, think about how much worse it could have been. I am frightened by what did not happen. Fire would have been irrevocable.
I hear the plumber intone, “We need to go in.” Plaster rains down. I calculate how much all this will cost the school—fixing the leak, fixing the plaster. I put a photograph of the gaping ceiling wound on Facebook; friends commiserate. It’s just a leak, inconvenient, not fatal. The school was built the year my mother was born; I used to tease that older ladies—schools, women—were slow to reveal their secrets, but both needed loving maintenance, occasional restoration. My mother is gone now. The school and the house endure, their structure sturdier than my mortal mother.
A week later, on Friday the 13th, my husband and I go to a play. With a pop and flash, the power fails—in the theatre and in the region. We wait a few minutes. Should we go or should we stay? Finally, we decide to leave. On the drive home, lightning flashes, strobe-like. Sirens wail. The streets have flooded--gushing brown rivers of deep water. Tree limbs tumble, jagged, across streets--a disco gone off the rails. A microburst. At home, our son is glad of our early return. One cat is dripping by the back door. We are reunited. Only the next day do we understand the vast destruction in our neighborhood, how lucky we were to be unscathed. Again, I shudder, contemplating what could have been, grateful.
Meanwhile, our house reveals more leaks. More holes are cut. The insides come out—ancient corroded pipes, lathe, plaster. Dining room furniture is shoved against the wall underneath my great-grandmother’s portrait. Huge sheets of plastic taped to the walls of the dining and living rooms rustle and dance, billowing ghosts. We camp out in the family room, laughing at the ways in which chaos closes in on us. In the midst of this madness, my husband has surgery, gets a new shoulder, begins to heal.
Houses can be fixed. Eventually, all will be whole again. Families are harder to repair. Last month, I visited the cemetery of the church where we grew up—my sister and I—thinking about our parents and our long dead brother. It’s death I fear the most. Those ruptures cannot be mended; their aftermaths spool out forever.
In my new navy Eileen Fisher outfit, I consider climate change, the destruction of the microburst, our house, families, choices we have and those that are thrust upon us. Shakespeare used foul weather to signal chaos— happenings in the external world mirrored disorder in society in his plays. Our house is crumbling. The world is off its axis. Global warning? How safe are we?