Shed

Posted by Ace on September 16th, 2008 filed in Tales of the Interregnum

Someone knocks “shave-and-a-haircut” on the front door.

The sound brings my attention up from the kitchen garbage can, where I have been focused on scraping the remains of this morning’s French Toast and bacon into a flimsy white bag with red pull-ties.  It is followed shortly by the sound of a handle rattling, then the hiss of the screen door piston, indicating that whomever it is knocking feels the need to announce himself only as a courtesy.  I straighten and turn around, still holding the plate, and lean just far enough to one side that I can see through the living room arch.

Ah.  Mayor.

My older brother is one of those people who never seems to be dressed more casually than a senior vice president on the golf links;  I have memories of him from when the two of us were much younger wearing T-shirts and jeans like I do, but they seem bizarre now, aberrations.  “Hey,” he says, noticing my head.

He gets no farther than this before his cel phone rings.  He fishes it out of the pocket of his khakis and gently unfolds it, holding up a finger to me.  “Just a second,” he says.  I turn back around and return to my scraping, trying not to roll my eyes.  Honey, my mother’s toy poodle, comes shuffling out of the hallway nervously, hearing the new noise;  I see her disappear into the living room out of the corner of my eye, presumably to paw at Mayor’s shins, then cross back into the hallway, a small puff of black disappearing into shadow.  She never barks, which is unusual.  It leads me to wonder how often Mayor visits the house when I’m not here.

“How you doin’?” he says to me, stepping through the archway into the kitchen.  He offers me his hand, which I take with the hand not holding the dish.  “Holdin’ up?  Need anything?” They’re the sort of casual remarks that often seem patronizing when he makes them, but not today;  his smile is warm, and he appears genuinely happy to see me.   Plus it’s nice of him to ask, coming as he does from St. Margaret’s Hospital, where he and Iris take it in turns watching over my Dad all day long.  I might better ask him how he’s holding up, and how he’s doing.

“I’m fine,” I tell him, fishing a dishtowel off of the counter.  “Everything’s under control.”  I throw the dishtowel over my shoulder and knee the kitchen garbage cabinet closed, reaching to turn on the hot water, then place the plate in the sink bottom.  “Mom’s in the bathroom,” I add, as I notice him looking out the back door window.

“Yeah,” he says, absently, scanning the deck for her anyway.  “I–“  He breaks off.  “Ho-ly cow!”

I glance over at him perfunctorily, but I already know what he’s looking at:  the tropical storm that passed over the night before has dropped a small lake of water onto the top of the in-ground pool cover.  The dusty black field of vinyl between the blue water bags has become a glassy expanse full of rich brown rotting leaves, deep enough to reflect the sky and trees above it.  “Yeah,” I smile, nodding.  “S’a lot.”

“I’ll say,” he agrees.  He looks to the hallway, where my mother has yet to appear, looks back out to the pool, makes a snap decision.  “All right, I’m gonna get right on that,” he says.  He makes to unzip his jacket.  “Better not to let that go.”

I nod at the dishes and sponge, equitably.  “It was on my list of things to do,” I tell him.

Something in the tone of my voice makes him pause.  “Oh, are you–“  he says.  “You wanna–“  Third gear shift:  “If you’re gonna do that later, that’s great, then I don’t have to.”  He stops again, looks at me, tilting his head slightly.  “You know how to do that, right?”

I stare at him bemusedly, up to my wrists in hot dishwater.  Remember that two years after I got out of art school, when they’d leave every two months to go down to Florida, and Iris was still in college?  And I was the only one here?

But then, why would he? “Yes,” I tell him.

Although–

I am walking around the outside corner of the laundry room in the basement, holding my unironed shirt, heading for the ironing board.  I reach in the darkness to where I know the light switch is, flip it on–  and there is no ironing board, no iron, no ancient lengths of clothesline tied between the grey-green support poles and the ten-penny nails sunk into the floorboards overhead.  Nothing but orderly rows of steel shelves choked with model train stuff, boxes and boxes of model train stuff…

“Is the pump still in the garage?” I ask him.

Mayor looks contemplatively at the basement door, then out the back window to the yard.  “I believe–” he says, hesitating, “–it is in the shed.”

Hnnnnnh, I think, setting down the sponge.

I stare out the kitchen window with him.

There is nothing that encapsulates the suburban ethos as succinctly as The Shed.  Its existence on your property establishes by definition certain givens:  that you have property, and that it is of sufficient size not to be unduly hampered by the presence of a shed, that you take care of the maintenance of that property yourself in some wise, that you have accoutrements dedicated to that pursuit, in sufficient numbers that it is inconvenient for you to store them in your garage or basement, and that you are rich enough to have been able to pay for all of these things, and for the shed itself.  When I owned my house in Ivory Grove, the property of which was not terribly much bigger than the house itself, the northeastern corner near the kitchen was occupied by an old mulberry tree.  It had as many dead branches as live ones, and swayed perilously in storm winds, grating its branches against the mud porch.  The mud porch was of ramshackle construction, and seemed like it was awaiting some excuse to fall off the house, so I reluctantly conceded that the mulberry tree was probably best cut down (and found out when we did so that it was actually two mulberry trees, one dead, one alive, the two fused together;  we killed the live one disposing of the dead one.)  Its absence left a sunny ten by ten foot square of open dirt that I dutifully seeded with quick-growing grass.  I wanted to use it to plant an olive tree.  Weaver wanted to use it to put up a shed–  and that alone should tell you pretty much everything there was to tell about our marriage.

There have been three such sheds in my parents’ backyard during my lifetime.  The first was a small sheet metal shed with two doors, painted white, a modest affair sitting on a squared platform of the same red-painted pine boards my father had used to build the back deck before I was born.  It was locked with a long-hafted rectangular lock, the key to which hung on a hook over the inside of the garage door, and it looked enormous to my child’s eyes.  It lasted a dozen years, until one day we looked out the back window of the kitchen and discovered it was gone:  simply removed, as if some wayward giant had taken a fancy to it and pocketed it as he went along, leaving the lawnmower and the fertilizer bags and the flower pots sitting blithely undisturbed.  We found it nearly thirty feet away, a few days later, lying in the tangle of leaves and bracken beyond the back fence, smashed flat like an orange peel.  We never figured out how it got there.  A man wandering along the sidewalk of the shopping center below saw it and asked my father if he could haul it away for scrap, and my father gladly consented, lest the responsibility for figuring out how to dispose of it remain with him.

The second shed, which replaced it, was much nicer.  It was made out of red and white coated aluminum, shaped like a barn.  It had double-segmented sliding doors that could be parted to allow normal entry or slid back all the way to open up the entire front, and a small plastic window with diamond panes in it.  With all of the clutter temporarily cleaned out of it and a fresh coat of paint on the floor boards, it was sufficiently pleasant that I had fantasies I might be allowed to live in it, Greg Brady-style, walking through the snow and ice of the back yard on crisp winter mornings to come into the kitchen and have breakfast, then retiring there again after dinner to light small lamps and do homework.  It was a stark contrast to years later, when it had rusted and smelled chokingly of chlorine and vinyl, and when my father would pull the picnic table away from the wall to discover it alive, the entire back side of it writhing in an inch-deep layer of sickly grey cave crickets.

I cross the red boards of the upper deck, walk down the three steps to the lower deck–  the same three steps I fell down as a toddler before slamming face-first into the hibachi grill, driving my teeth through my lower lip.  There was no Lower Deck then, but I still have the scar.

The third shed is the one occupying the space now.  It is not so much a shed, in the sense of those two I remember, as it is a small house:  constructed from 2x4s, covered in the same yellow siding as the main house, and decorated on the exterior with faux white gas lamps.  It has a shingled roof with rain gutters, glass windows for light, sits on a concrete foundation and has been turned 90 degrees from the orientation of the old sheds to align its entrance with the narrow run of grass that leads to the gate between the front and back yards.  The door in its front is an actual door, hinged, with an inset glass pane and cylinder lock in the door knob.  I have no idea when it was built, or what happened to the old one.  Its construction was obviously a significant undertaking, and I can imagine the details of it well enough as I stand there facing it–  the pouring of the concrete, the hammering together of the frame, the smell of tar and the grainy feel of the shingles–  but I cannot match those imagined details with anything in my memory.

I wasn’t here.

I cannot help but notice, looming silently behind the white plastic storm fence that separates my parents’ yard from the neighbor’s dog, the presence of the neighbor’s shed, which is larger than my parents’, and in addition to wood construction and a shingled roof has sliding windows which open, and functioning floodlights.

Hnh, I think, smirking.  Shed envy.

I twist the knob, push open the door.

The inside is quiet and dusty;  it smells of cool stone, and also of chlorine, but faintly.  There are no lawnmowers, no gardening tools at all, such duties having long since been relegated to a landscaping service owned by in-laws.  But there are long lengths of white gutterspout lain carefully through the rafters, plastic barrels nested in stacks, plus an army of inflatable toys and swimming paraphernalia–  all the clutter associated with Iris’ kids, who unlike Jack, seem to spend more time at my parents’ house than they do their own.  I can feel the mind behind it:  the same mind that removed the ironing board and built the shelves, laid the train boxes on them;  the same that nailed the lids of baby food jars to the underside of the cellar steps, then used the jars to sort nails and screws and twisted them back on.  The mind of my father.  But the objects, the forms, are all alien.

There is a lid on one of the plastic barrels near the doorway.   I reach down and seize it in both hands, my fingertips curling under the rim, expecting to have to pry it off, then stop as a diagram etched into the plastic resolves itself.  I study it for a moment, scowling, twist clockwise instead of pull, and it comes off cleanly in my hands, without effort.

The pump inside is the one I remember: a small round casing of black metal and latticeworked blue plastic, nestled in a snarl of black electric cord and clear plastic tubing, satisfyingly heavy in the hand.  I scoop it up with all the tubing, slap the plastic lid back on the barrel with my free hand and turn to leave.  But I pause in the doorway in spite of myself, eyes drifting over the inside once again, searching for something–  some reassurance that isn’t there.

Things are going to change, I tell myself–  then scratch it out in my head as the truth sinks in.

Things already have.

I close the door behind me.

The pump goes into the water on top of the pool cover, deep enough to place the intake under the water level, but not so deep that it will become choked with leaves as the suction draws them to it.  The electrical cord plugs into the outdoor socket at the base of the maple tree.  The clear plastic tube I throw into the packesandrias, over the crest of the downgrade that leads to the shed.  The switch at the tree is already on, but I have to go to the garage to throw the master switch, the one that brings power to the tree.

When I have done so, I cross back to the tubing and stand over it, arms folded.  A clear jet of fluid is leaping from the end of it merrily;  it spatters onto the earth and runs away secretly through the plants, down to the shed, and beyond it to who knows where else.

The back door of the house opens.  My mother walks out onto the upper deck, Honey at her heels, her arm in a black sling.  She stops at the railing without touching it, nightgown blowing in the wind.  “Is it working?” she calls out to me.

“Yeah,” I tell her.  “It’s working.”

Comments are closed.