Remove a wall, invigorate a marriage

The tension is palpable. Can you feel it? Gaze upon this pristine expanse of white wall between our dated but functional kitchen and our dark and dreary dining room--but don't get attached to it because starting tomorrow, it'll be gone.

Not entirely gone. We're very noncommittal remodelers and like to draw out the decision-making process for as long as possible, so we're only taking out the top half of the wall, enough to move ductwork and wiring and experiment with just how open we want the space to be. We're on the verge of compromise here: I like an open floor plan, and Alex prefers a bit of separation between kitchen and dining. In this particular case, he should certainly have more say because he's the primary cook in the house. Look at the difference between his sliced cucumbers on the right and mine:



He etched in a pretty design on the skin of the cuke using a lemon zester or something. And this was just for a family dinner, not for guests! I don't bust out the fancy gadgets except when company comes over.

Cucumbers aside, remodeling is one of those things couples do that really smacks of optimism--or naivete. But in our case, let's call it optimism, because Alex and I have been down this road many times before, from the back-breaking work of constructing a brick patio at our first house to the huge tasks of refinishing the attic and remodeling the kitchen in our second house, with myriad other projects of varying complexity in between. Alex does the bulk of the work because he has a better idea of what he's doing. I help with things like planning, prep, demo, clean up, and painting, but he does pretty much everything else--with me at his shoulder asking questions, being annoying, and generally getting on his nerves. And when the going gets particularly dirty, I whisk SB away to safer, cleaner climes. Again, it seems like domestic work falling along gender lines (see my earlier post "Home-living over books and snack?")

But one thing in our marriage that seems to be genderless is the way that our dreams play out on the very structure of our houses. In much the same way that we daydreamed aloud about our shared future before we moved to Portland and while I was pregnant, we also dream (and argue and disagree and concede) together about our houses. We've done this so many times that we can predict each other's concerns before they're voiced, and sometimes rush into a quarrel without even articulating the problem. We know each other's aesthetics, politely acknowledge them, then make impassioned pleas for our own. We bicker and hold grudges and make up--or agree to disagree for the time being: when Alex showed me a mock up for how our new kitchen layout would look, I bit my lip and grimaced, and he smiled and closed his laptop. Remodeling has become a kind of proving ground for our marriage.

And this is where optimism comes in: We don't just move forward again on another project with the simple faith that we'll weather several weeks of disarray, of cracked moldings and shards of plaster, of the inevitable hurt feelings and misunderstandings followed by cold stony silences. We move forward in the face of all that. We move forward anticipating how the eastern light from the kitchen windows will dance on the dining room table at breakfast, whether by way of a large pass-through or a completely opened space. We move forward feeling grateful and lucky that after fifteen years together we're still in motion at all--moving in roughly the same direction, toward the same general end.

Love: A Pie or No?

Being in Tahoe for C & B's wedding--with all the typical ensuing craziness, frivolity, and mayhem--makes me think of both my own wedding ten years ago and Amy Bloom's short story, "Love Is Not a Pie." Though I haven't read that story in years, I still remember its vivid first line (though I cheated and looked it up online to get it exactly right): "In the middle of the eulogy at my mother's boring and heart-breaking funeral, I began to think about calling off the wedding."

The story is about a woman who comes to realize that her mother has been involved in complex relationships involving more than one man, and when she confronts her about this, her mother says something like, "Love is not a pie." I've always been intrigued by this idea that love isn't something round and finite that you divvy up into allotted slices, that it instead sprawls and meanders and is unwieldy (perhaps like a pie that isn't made with enough thickener, or more of a galette?), and the better for us, perhaps, to accept this--or, at least, the more interesting our lives might be if we do.

I thought about this line, "love is not a pie," when SB asked me for the second time "why" B & C are getting married (I think her exact question was "Why are they doing that?" as if "that" involved eating food off of a nontraditional surface). I said something like, "Because that's what people do when they love each other," but of course it's not that simple. For one thing, with rare exception, only marriages between men and women are recognized in most municipalities in this country. And certainly some people who love each other never get married, but their lives still seem pretty okay. So I gave her a short answer for a difficult question.

As for my own wedding, Alex and I had lived together for five years before literally throwing a wedding together in three weeks. It was one of those rare impulsively practical decisions: he was heading to grad school that fall and needed health insurance, we were feeling romantic one evening, and his family was going to be in town anyway. Why not get married? (Or, as SB might put it, "Why not do something like that?")

Ten years later, it seems silly, but not surprising, that I overthought something like getting married to a person I loved. Part of it was stubborn loyalty to my younger self and ideals of freedom, part of it was skepticism that marriage was such a great idea to begin with, and part of it was fear that getting married would be a public admission that I believed in something as unpredictable as love. It turns out that this last thing, admitting that you have faith in something or someone, is actually the best reason of all to get married.

I wrote about our marriage in a couple of different essays several years ago; one of them, "Plans Made Under the Stars," which was published in Notre Dame magazine, is still available online. Read it at your own risk: it seems like a painfully melodramatic piece to me now. The more interesting thing is a "letter of consternation" written by a woman who says that because of my essay, she and her husband weren't going to send their usual donation to Notre Dame. Apparently, the fact that we didn't tie the knot Catholic style and that the magazine chose to run my essay were terribly offensive to her. This is a person who clearly believes that love is simply a pie.