Newlyweds

                                                Newlyweds

The row of houses stood cutely all the way down Oak Street. Built for newlyweds, they went up quickly over a matter of weeks. It was thought young couples should have a place to begin in right away.

Tim and Sarah walked, holding hands, up to the third house from the end. All happy pastels up and down the street, their home was a lovely shade of lavender, with pale green shutters, and a soft yellow door. Sarah thought Tim might scoop her up and carry her inside, the way she saw on tv. She decided against asking when he didn’t offer. She brightened though at the flower boxes hanging from the two front windows. She could already imagine them filled with perky tulips, signaling springs arrival.

A small garage stood attached on one side, and Tim let go of her hand to move towards it. Sarah longed to go inside the house and see it, but she reminded herself she needed to be patient. It wasn’t only her own desires she had to contend with anymore! She felt proud of understanding this already. This caused her to look around at the other houses and be curious about who lived in them. Did they too understand so soon, or were some of them still figuring it out? She wondered what they would be like, their new neighbors. Maybe she would introduce herself with a pie. This also struck her as a mature thought. What could Tim be doing? The garage was empty after all. She reluctantly left the bottom step of the porch and walked to the garage.

Tim was staring into a circuit box. He motioned her over. “This one controls the living room. That one is for the kitchen. Down here are the bathrooms. This is the garage.” She stopped hearing and gazed out the garage window into the neighbors back yard. A woman was crying on a porch swing. She held a tissue and wiped at her eyes. Poor thing. She felt insulated in the new happiness of early marriage and was sure she would never relate to such a lonely, sad sight.

“So, do you think you could find and flip those switches if you needed to, Sarah?”

          “Hm? Oh, sure. Can we go inside now?”

          “Oh, Tim! It has a dishwasher!” Tim came up behind Sarah and put his arms around her. “Are you happy? Do you like it?” He began to nuzzle her neck.

She turned to kiss him, hoping to placate him long enough to finish seeing the upstairs.

He misread this as an invitation and moved his hands up her shirt.

           Well, they could go upstairs after.

Okay! Time to finally see the rest of the house. She pulled Tim’s hand up the stairs as he swaggered up, talking about christening the house so soon. At the top of the stairs, she bent down to examine a tiny crack in the wall. “Look, Tim.”

“We can putty that and paint it.”

“But does it mean there is a problem?”

           “No, it happens sometimes. It doesn’t mean anything more is going on.”

           She stood, but the crack left her feeling disturbed even as she went into the bedrooms.

           Whew! Sarah dropped onto their bed and sprawled out, her back aching. The last few weeks had been a blur of moving in, unpacking, decorating, and running back and forth to the store for little things they kept running into needing. Her mother suggested keeping a list so they could go all at once. She guessed there was a lot more to learn than she’d maybe bargained for, but still, they were almost settled in now and she felt pleased with how it had turned out!

           Their bedroom was her favorite. She’d hung flowy, peach curtains she loved to watch gently billowing in the breeze. When the sunlight shone through them, it cast a warm glow in the room, like the golden time at sunset. Instead of spending money they didn’t have on artwork, she and Tim had bought some canvases and poured and swirled paints in oranges, yellows, and pinks. They’d created them together, displaying them over their bed.

           Where was Tim? She looked at her watch. It was after 9:00. He had left for the store again just after dinner while she finished unpacking the last of the boxes. She was eager to show him the last, empty box and the progress she had made putting books on the shelves. He should be back anytime. She stood to get ready for bed.

           Sarah put her book down and got up. It was 10:30. She’d cycled through fear, anger, guilt about her anger (what if he was lying somewhere hurt?), and back through several times. She tried to imagine the possible scenarios that held Tim up. An accident? A robbery? Did he stop by his parents? She felt as though she should do something, but what could she do? He had the car. They hadn’t hooked up phone services yet. She had only briefly met one of their neighbors and surely they were in bed by now. Anyway, she had heard a lot of yelling coming from their house.. Just when she felt she was ready to start walking down the street blindly in search of him, she heard the downstairs door opening. She ran down the stairs.

           “Tim!”

           He was setting some bags down and smiled up at her. “Hi!”

           “What happened? Where were you?”

           “I went to the hardware store, the grocery store, and got gas. I ran into Jay at the gas station, and he invited me downtown for a few beers. We ran into Lee at the bar, he is healing up from his motorcycle accident. Still has his arm in a cast though.”

           Sarah stared. Anger welled up in her. The bar? A few beers?

           “Are you okay? What is wrong?”      

           She blinked. “I thought you’d be back. I didn’t know where you were. We were in the middle of working on the house. It’s 10:30.”

           “Should I have driven home first to tell you? We haven’t seen our friends since before the move. Should I have not seen my friend? Was I supposed to ask first? Jay would have asked if I had a wife or a Mommy at home if I’d done that.”

           All of the excitement about reuniting with Tim and sharing the progress drained out of Sarah, like blood from a cut.      

           She tried rapidly to consider what he was saying against what she was feeling and reconcile them, but she only felt tired now.

           She turned and went upstairs to bed. She lay staring at the wall and closed her eyes when she felt Tim climb into bed. The light clicked off. She stared into the darkness for a long time, even after Tim begin to snore.

           “What the hell was that?” Tim sat up in bed and clicked on the light.

           “I don’t know." Sarah sat up, disoriented. The clock said 3:00. “Did we have an earthquake?”

           “I didn’t feel shaking. More like one big cracking sound.”

           Sarah’s mind searched for something and wandered back to the stairwell crack with dread. That was silly though, wasn’t it?

           Tim got out of bed. Sarah followed him.

           Light flooded the top of the stairs as he found the switch. They looked at each other in shock. The crack was huge! It had been maybe five inches long before, a hairline fracture really, but it was gaping open now, a wound with its drywall guts exposed, threatening to spill out.

“How could this happen?” It occurred to her to be scared. What could happen

next? She wanted to go downstairs where it did not feel as though the floor could collapse beneath her.

           “I don’t know. Houses shift, but I’ve never seen one shift like this. Let’s go back

to bed. I’ll call my Dad tomorrow and see what he thinks. He can help me fix it.”

“How do we know something else isn’t going to crack, or that it won’t crack open

even more? How do we know the whole upstairs won’t just come crashing down? Maybe this house isn’t built well. What if we got a lemon, Tim?”

Tim laughed. He pulled her to him. “Sweetheart, its nothing we can’t fix, ok? It will all look better in the light of morning. Come on, let me help you get back to sleep.”

“What if we did though? Get a damaged home?”

“Then we got it together and we will deal with it together.”

“I know it is silly, but I can’t sleep up here tonight.”

“Come on. Help me get the blankets. We will make a bed on the living room floor tonight.”

They laughed spreading the blankets out like a fort at a sleepover. Sarah snuggled into Tim, feeling safe and thankful. She wondered if the other husbands in the houses down the street were so wise to make a bed on the floor for their wives when they were scared.

“Did you care, Tim? That I was worried and waiting for you?”

“I do care. Do you care that it didn’t seem like a big deal in the moment to grab a beer with my buddy?”

“Yeah, I can see where you might have thought that. Would you have liked it if I did the same thing, though?”

“Probably not.”

“Do you really feel like I’m acting like your mother?”

“No, it just felt weird to think of asking first, like I am getting permission. But I would have wanted to know where you were too.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t think of it as “asking permission”. Maybe we could call it “checking in” with one another. Isn’t that what people do when they get married?”

“I can do that. I’d like to check in with you right now, Sarah. Would that be ok?”

When Tim’s hand traveled up her thigh, she moved her legs apart for him, ready to give him anything, everything.

She woke smelling coffee brewing and heard the whisking of eggs. She stretched contentedly and smiled. Their little living room was charming and cozy. It had been fun to sleep in here like a camp out. She could show Tim all she had gotten done now. She rose, eager to find him in the kitchen. Yes, they still had the crack to deal with, but they would.

Sarah tiptoed in and wrapped her arms around him, leaning her head into his back. “Good morning,” she whispered.

“Well, hello. Did you sleep well?” He set the bowl down and turned.

“Yes,” she smiled shyly. “Did you?”

“I slept so good. Why don’t you go shower while I make some breakfast? Then you can clean up while I shower and we will drive over to my parents early and deal with that crack?”

“Sounds good to me.”

Sarah looked around with pleasure as she made her way upstairs. It was so satisfying to see the results of their efforts, the way it had turned out, their first big project together. See how well they were working together already? Some couples just figure it out sooner than others, why even her own mother and father didn’t always.. she stopped. Looked again. She couldn’t believe it.

“Tim! Tim!”

“What? What is it?” He was holding the spatula. It would have been funny, the way he held it up like a weapon, but she was too incredulous to laugh. She pointed.

“Wait. How? What?”

“I don’t know! What is going on?’

“Were we just so tired last night? Had we kind of hallucinated it? Heard a sound and imagined it had been the crack growing larger and so that is what we saw?”

“No. That was no hallucination. We both observed it. We were fully awake by then. This doesn’t make sense. Tim, look!” She ran her finger over the dust on the stairs, showed him the pieces of drywall stuck to her. “This proves it. It was starting to spill out last night.”

“I mean, yeah, I see it, but cracks do not just mend themselves like some kind of Disney movie, Sarah.”

“Of course they don’t, Tim, but here are the facts facing us, whether they make easy sense or not. Maybe the house is shifting, like you talked about, only in bigger ways for some reason. Maybe it shifted in a way that opened the crack larger last night and then shifted in a way to pushed it back tighter at some point.”

“Sarah, that sounds ridiculous.”

“Okay, then, Tim, what is your theory?”

“I don’t have one, but that doesn’t mean I should go pulling one out of my ass either.”

Sarah hated when he sounded so crude. The warm feeling of the night and morning fled her and a coldness coursed through her body.

“Why not? You pull anything else out of there when you need to.”

The floor shook and the crack gaped open, spilling more drywall content onto the stairs. Sarah screamed. Tim took hold of her and brought her to him, pulling them down onto a stair. He lifted her face to his.

“I’m sorry, Sarah. I’m confused too. We’re going to figure this out together. Are you with me?”

“Yes,” she sniffed.

“What do you mean though? What have I pulled out of my ass before?”

She laughed. “Just sometimes. When you don’t really know something, and you are speculating, you just declare a thing to satisfy a question, like you pull it out of your ass.”

Tim laughed. She laughed.

A sort of sizzling sound came from the crack and they turned to look.

The crack was mending, just a hairline fracture, barely visible.

They looked closer.

Was it a little bit bigger than how it started though?

The next morning, a loud crashing sound outside startled them as they had coffee and bagels. Rushing to the door, they flung it open and ran down the stairs. The woman next door Sarah had seen crying in the backyard was walking to the car with a suitcase. Behind her, the house had crumbled to the ground, into ashes. Sarah and Tim looked at each other and climbed the staircase to the crack.

It was holding steady. They held each other, understanding.

They would keep it from widening.