Back to the metal framing on Grande Rue

The rain comes

Scritch, scritch, scritch.

That and far worse sounds were coming from the garden below my window, where I had gone to hide in my bed from the other storm brewing; the one I had set in motion this morning, bringing up the installation of the metal framing system for the sheetrock in the "petit salon", when he mentioned getting to the electrical work this weekend.

It was time.

It had to be done.

It was probably why I woke up catatonic. He thought he had finished. I did not.

"En fait, l'électricien vient mardi." I have forgotten to mention that here. I called yesterday, and he picked up.

"Bonjour, Madame Sisyphe."

"Mais! Comment le savez-vous que c'est moi?"

"Je reconnais votre numéro maintenant," he said, not adding, "after all these calls."

It appears that he came a couple weeks back and waited for me, that I was to have called to confirmed that I would be here and not at the airport. That was the week of the canceled flights, after the volcano blew in Iceland.

"C'est vrai?" I asked.

"Je vous ai attendu. Vous ne vous souvenez de rien?"

No, allowed; I didn't remember a thing of such an exchange, that I had said I would call to let him know if I would be at the airport or not. Funny, though, because I was not at the airport the morning he was waiting outside the gate. I am, however, reassured that it is not my support of President Obama that he does not want to come again. If it wasn't our discussion about race and immigration keeping him from coming, but my having stood him up, then there is still hope for the people of the world.

"Alors, je viendrai mardi. C'est sur? Vous serez là mardi matin?" Oui, Monsieur.

"Bon, alors," said mon mari, "tu ne veux pas que je fasse l'électricité dans le petit salon." It was sort of a question. The kind that is a restatement for clarity.

"Non. Il va la faire, mais cela nous laisse le temps de revenir à la préparation de l'installation du BA13." BA13 is 13 mm sheetrock. I waited for it to come.

"Mais, c'est fini," he said. I had to say it.

"Non, pas vraiment." And we were off. I said what I had to say, he blew, we argued, I exited, and from my room, I listened from the shallow depths of a light depression-induced doze.

Scritch, scritch, "Putain truc! Merde alors... fait chier -- argggghh", scritch, scritch -- stomp, stomp, stomp. Creak, creak, creak (he was climbing the ladder, bit of metal in hand; I could see it in my mind's dim eye). Bang, bang, bang-bang-bang, "Mais! Merde alors, allez! Al-lez, pu-tain!"

I rolled over and tried to remain unresponsive, still, absent while time continued its progression. I would eventually have to come down.

I did. He spoke to me civilly.

"J'ai fait un pet (you pronounce the "t", for those who want to know) dans le parquet." It is the same word as "fart".

I didn't ask to see the dent he had made in the floor. He had placed sheets of thin plywood from the old storage system he never finished under the legs of the ladder. I was going to cover the floor in kraft paper, or at least a sheet would have been a good idea. Every time he climbed up and down and brought the hammer down, twisted on that ladder in frustration with a bit of metal, he ground the plaster dust he was causing to shower down under his hammer blows right into the new floor.

I shrugged. I thought of Sam the other day and said, "Ca va lui donner encore plus d'authenticité." I'd have even preferred that it not be set so tightly, but that we had left larger joints between the strips of oak. My husband wanted perfection.

I walked back out of the room.

He says it's never serious when he swears and pronounces oaths against inanimate objects (or people); it's a "soupape", a valve. A safety valve. We have talked about this before, somewhere here. Ah, here it is. Funny, it's the same activity. Not funny. That's why I knew I'd take to my bed while I was still in it this morning.

I hear him sighing. Loudly. And then, "Ah la-la la-la la-la, mais qu'est-ce qu'il me fait chier celui-là!"

I started to see the room, and the rest of the house, never done. Never, ever, ever done. The misery stretching out into the finite infinity of our lives before us, a reminder of his ill humor and the fact that we can't just hire people to do things for us.

"You, sir, install that metal framing!"

"You, sir, hang, that sheetrock!"

"You, sir, I'd like three more units like the last wall system you built to specification."

"And, you, sir, clean up that paint dribble."

No. It's our work. All of it, and it isn't any fun at all because some parts of it just aren't his thing, and if he doesn't want to buy that terrific tool for cutting through metal framing like butter, then I am not going to make it mine.

No, sir.

We all makes our beds and lie in them, don't we?

Rapide knows what I'm talking about, don't you, Rapide?
....

Standards of womanliness

Framing around the old door frame
(it's cemented into the wall)

There is one good thing about vacuuming: I can't hear my husband muttering and swearing at the lengths of metal framing over the motor. The sounds of the sawing become more violent, however, as the afternoon wore on into evening, and the evening darkened into night.

I vacuumed and dusted harder.

So, it turns out that framing out the walls for the insulation and sheetrocking really aren't a job for two at all, at least not if one of them is doing it for the first time and wants to take charge. In that case, it is better for the other to steer clear and demonstrate the willingness to work equally hard in another area completely.

I chose the kitchen pantry and plate cupboards. I threw away old foodstuffs and cleaned the dust and food particles accumulated stickily in the corners with abandon and commitment rarely seen before, and never in my grandmother's kitchen, oh, to pick an example entirely at random, because my grandmother never let anything in her house get that dirty. I remember a day when I was about 15 or 16. I was visiting in the summer, and I had decided to go out for a run. Somehow, I took a misstep and landed hard on my hands and knees in the gravel of the decaying "Old Road" that ran along the newer highway, paralleling the Saint Lawrence "Seaway", which was once a plain old river, until it was "improved" for cargo ships heading from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes during the time of my mother's youth. I knelt there on the broken pavement, ready to never get up.

The pain hadn't come yet. My knees were frozen stiff. When the pain did come, it was intense. Irrational, I wondered if anyone had ever died on the Old Road from a running accident. Would a passing car see me, kneeling there -- lying there, eventually --, and come to my rescue, while I, barely conscious, would tell them in the faintest of voices where to take me? Where I belonged, temporarily, that summer? I shook my head. That would never do. Only I could get myself home. That, or appear even more ridiculous than I already did with bits of gravel embedded in my knees, blood starting to trickle down toward my shins. The heels of my hands weren't in much better shape, but I used them to push myself up very gingerly and gradually. I made it to a standing position. Still no car had stopped over there on the faster road, just to my left and a little higher up across a strip of grass that made an embankment and a tree or two.

I took a step. I didn't fall down. I did this the remaining quarter mile to the house my grandfather built for my grandmother and my mother, a baby, in 1938, the year someone built the addition with the petit salon and entry on this old house, and on up the long gravel driveway to the garage, where my uncle was working on someone's car. He took one look at my face and dropped his eyes to my knees and led me into the house, straight past where my grandmother was fussing in the kitchen. I believe it was already after The Guiding Light, and she was back to business; my grandfather would be home on the stroke of 5 pm, the horn over at the state hospital sounding just before we'd sit down to dinner. My grandmother was up, frowning over the stove by 7 every morning, fully dressed in her girdle, nylons and a dress.

"Ladies do not wear slacks", said my grandmother, not until my aunt convinced her that pantsuits were perfectly ladylike in the 1970's, when she was approaching 60, anyway, and then coordinating sweater and slacks sets in the 1980's when she was ready for greater comfort still at going on 70 . She never did wear a pair of jeans.

I watched her cook eggs and bacon and Cream of Wheat on that white electric stove from my chair at the kitchen table, and I studied the different colored lights. There were red ones and blue ones, and there might have been yellow ones, too. I also worried sometimes.

"Why are you frowning, Grandma?," I asked. "Smile, Grandma. Grandmothers are supposed to smile," I added. I had ideas about these things. I read books. She turned to look at me and smile a real smile.

"I'm not frowning," she told me. She had been. I was sure of that.

Years later, in high school, someone watching me backstage where I was waiting at the ropes for the next scenery change asked, "Is something wrong? Are you unhappy?"

"No, I'm not unhappy, why do you ask?"

"You were frowning. You frown often." We don't escape our genes easily.

I worried about kisses, too, especially when my grandmother kissed me, which she did often.

"Grandma, you'd better be careful. You might run out of kisses," I told her. She smiled again. Maybe I said these things just to see her smile. I might have.

"Why no!" she exclaimed. "It's like love. The more you love, the more love you have. You can never run out of kisses." She gave me one, just to show me, and all was settled and good.

But that day, Grandma wasn't kissing her son or me as we headed through her spanking clean, white kitchen to the shiny, white bathroom, its floor suitable for serving tea. No, she didn't kiss either of us. She followed us straight to the bathroom door, her face as white as her appliances and trembling, but not for fear over my well-being. Oh my goodness gracious no! It was for fear that I'd bleed all over her clean bathroom that she shook.

"You're not going to go getting blood and mud all over my nice clean --" she began. My uncle reached behind him, and in one deft movement of his arm, my grandmother found herself staring at the hallway side of the immaculate white painted door.

Silence.

I already worshipped him, only 6 1/2 years older than I was, and the best uncle a girl without an older brother could have, and in that moment, my heart clutched tight (not just from pain) as he set about removing gravel and bandaging up my leg, dripping blood and mud all over her nice clean bathroom floor.

I was sure. I loved my uncle.

But, Grandma, the kitchen is a little cleaner for my aunt's arrival. She'll be stepping around a big pile of sheetrock and rolls of insulation, but at least the plates will be in the cupboard my husband insists they should be.

I gave in.


....

Contest of wills

"quarante-heuriste" ou "anti-quarante-heuriste"

The line of confrontation was drawn: a small segment of rail fixed to the ceiling. Symbol of everything that can be contested in a marriage.

"Mais que c'est ça?" I breathed, having come to see what the relative quiet coming from the petit salon had produced since we had left the dinner table, at well past 11 pm. Rather than installing a wall-to-wall length of the ceiling rail to receive the uprights, to which the sheetrock is eventually screwed, there was a 15 cm bit, fixed at a slight angle with respect to the wall, causing a larger and larger face of the front of the upright to show from where I stood to the side.

"J'essaye de voir quelque chose. Ca doit marcher aussi bien." I saw my frustration and fury in Technicolor behind my retinas.

"C'est un système particulièrement conçu par des spécialistes dans l'isolation thermique et l'installation de plaque à plâtre, peut-être on peut leur faire confiance et suivre les documents au lieu d'inventer des solutions individuelles," et bidonnes, I added in the raging silence of my own head.

"Ca va aller. Tu me permets de voir?"

"Ce n'est pas droit. Si tu mets toute une longueur, on peut être sûr que chaque vertical soit aligné avec ses voisins. Si tu mets que des bouts, un pour chaque vertical, il se peut forcément que chaque vertical fait un peut comme il veut, malgré que tu les vérifies avec ton niveau. Déjà, je vois d'ici que celui là est peut-être dans le vertical, mais il est tordu."

Which means to say that the fourrure verticale was twisted. Using little bits of the horizontal railing that receives the vertical elements at the ceiling at each vertical element only means that each one is oriented in function of the bit of railing. It might be vertical, checked by the level, but it might be twisted. I could see from where I stood that this first one was. If you use a wall-to-wall length, in which you insert each vertical along the length of wall, then their faces are sure to be aligned with one another. Additionally, there is a small back-up support at the tops of the panels of sheetrock other than at their limits, although the documentation does not call for screwing the sheetrock to the top and bottom horizontal rails, I'll grant you that.

"Tu me laisses faire, si t'il plait? Tu n'en sais rien du système. C'est moi qui en sais quelque chose."

This is where I get completely nuts. I don't know about the system. No, this is where I spent several years working on construction sites watching the subs work, learning from them and making sure they were doing what we wanted. I am far from an expert in everything, and what's more, next to nothing is the same here, but I get the principals, and I know that it is generally better to respect the integrity of systems than to cave in to frustration and do it your own way.

"Je peux toujours le refaire," he added, "si ça ne marche pas."

"Tu ne vas pas le refaire une fois que tu l'aurais fait!" I shot back, adding a few thoughts about the state of my contentment in our marriage, and returned to the living room. He followed. I was not talking.

Sometimes it is best not to continue negotiations with the adversary.

I did recognize, however, that he was the one suffering through the cutting and attaching of the system, but I was not going to feel sorry for him if he were trying to do a professional job with a bricoleur's equipment. The mason said as much when I called him to say that my husband couldn't drill holes of sufficient depth for the 4-5 cm concrete nails and plastic anchors (cheville à frapper) to fix the horizontal rail to the slab he had poured. I suspected that we were encountering the (what appeared large to me) aggregate stone too soon in this fairly shallow slab, but he said that he never has problems installing chevilles à frapper in his slabs with his equipment.

"Il utilise un matériel de bricoleur," suggested the mason.

"Je ne sais pas," I sighed over the sound of my husband clattering around and swearing. "C'est un Skil à 550 watts et des mèches en carbure de tungsten d'une qualité dite professionnelle."

Really, my husband meant "forets". These are drill bits for concrete and stone, where "mèches" are for wood. The term "mèche" is used en parlance for both, unless you mean to be very precis.

"Ah bon? Ca devrait aller alors," said the mason. "Puisque vous êtes gentils, je le ferai pour vous si vous pouvez attendre jeudi."

"Je ne sais pas. Mon mari est très tétu." I looked over at my stubborn husband, like a frustrated bull in his pen, surrounded with building materials he was knocking about, this way and that.

"Ah, alors s'il est tétu --" he chuckled. I leaned against the wall and tried to keep my sense of perspective.

"On verra. Je lui dirai que vous le feriez jeudi. A jeudi, Monsieur, et merci."

"A jeudi."

I addressed my husband, "Il dit qu'il le fera jeudi, si tu veux juste marquer les trous qu'on veut." He muttered something. He returned to sawing off the ends of his chevilles à frapper, to make them fit into the shallow holes he could pierce in the concrete with his forets intended for concrete, marble, granite and other very hard stone. "Il semble vouloir dire que ta perceuse doit marcher, mais peut-être elle est fatiguée par l'usage?" I suggested. He muttered again.

I left him to his self-imposed enfer. If you want a job done, not only should you do it yourself, you should also equip yourself with the correct equipment in top condition. I'd have done this myself, except he preferred to saw the metal framing members by hand rather than invest in an electric saw, specifically for this type of work.

I could have resold it on eBay.

And, we were already saving thousands of euros in labor by doing it ourselves.

But, I had given up reasoning and the hostilities. The worst about the French (excusez-moi), is that they are persuaded of their ultimate rationality and reasonableness (see Descartes), when they are in fact Mediterraneans in warm clothing who really wish they were as rational and reasonable as they can imagine themselves to be.

I turned the page again on that newspaper stapled along the edge of the board with the print of the woman in the bonnet that told me of the tragic deaths, under the wheels of the "rapid" train from Dieppe to Paris on August 25, 1938, of Mesdesmoiselles Renée and Marcelle Ruë, the elder of whom felt unable to continue to live, condemned as she felt herself to be by the doctors' lack of optimism for her crushing "anémie mentale", and the younger of whom could not imagine her life without her sister, and I found what I knew had to be there it if were the end of the summer of 1938.

The headline was torn, but the second line read:

et la DEFENSE NATIONALE
le comité de rassemblement
populaire s'est déclaré
prêt à parer aux nécessités de l'heure

IL APPARAIT DONC COMME CERTAIN QUE
les industries de guerre pourront très prochaine-
ment produire à une cadence accélérée

AUJOURD'HUI:
Réunion de groupes,
meetings et délibérata-
tion de la déléga-
tion des gauches


DEMAIN MATIN:
M. Edouard Daladier
recevra une délégation
du rassemblement
populaire

The article follows. It goes on to recount that:

The misunderstanding apparent between the politicians and the unions -- misunderstanding that we were the first to report -- after the M. Edouard Daladier's speech and in particular by the subsequent ministerial reorganization that it occasioned, is fading away.

There is reason for all French to heartily congratulate themselves. It is not at the moment when the international situation gives reason for maximal concern to those who, in absolute agreement with the British government, are looking for solutions that will maintain the peace that the discussions, the conflicts should fragment the diverse elements of national opinion.

The situation, certainly, is not tragic, but it is serious. It seems to us, then, an absolute necessity that the French people unite behind their government. The work of the government will be made easier. It must not be lost from sight that a political crisis would favor certain businesses. M. Edouard Daladier's talk before the executive committee of the radical party and radical socialist party has given reason to reflect to those who thought that we could unburden ourselves of the management of national politics without unfortunate consequences.

The political parties and the groups that met the day before yesterday and yesterday have understood perfectly the danger four our country that could result from discussions that risk dividing us and pitting factions the one against the other.

It is signed Charles MORICE and continues on page 2. I think you get a sense of the article's intent.

Below, there is a photo of the Third Reich's troops, parading in Berlin, with the headline:

HORTHY CHEZ HITLER

Horthy having by 1938 become the leader of the first nationalist dictatorship in Europe after Work War I in Hungary.

The news pertaining to the growing tensions with Germany and the apprehension of coming war is accompanied by a "Pour et Contre", or weighing of the arguments for and against.

It reads:

We can be assured that our friends and adversaries are observing us with great attention.

M. Daladier, with an authority no one would think to question, declares that it is indispensable to proceed with changes to the law of forty hours, so that France will be able to respond to the imperatives of the hour.

What to do?... Ought one prefer that the principle of the law pass ahead of the vital interests of our country? Ought we sacrifice national defense and our currency to the principle of a law?

Assuredly not! No one in France thinks so. Those who show themselves to be worried or reserved upon the announcement of this change to the law, nonetheless know well, under the present circumstances, find themselves with the overriding obligation to act immediately.

The law must be be put into effect under conditions of loyalty, probity, sincerity, giving no reason for material or moral damages. It is a national and social question that must be resolved in the national sense, the social sense, in good faith, in good will, with good sense and good humor.

What would be without sense -- and which will not happen -- would be to see the law of forty hours become a torch of discord at the very same hour that Hitler is maneuvering one million men who don't know when they will be free.

What would be without sense would be to make the analysis of this law a matter of simple and calculating politics, a matter of party politics. We would dispute among ourselves in the house of deputies, and in the cafés, and in the family, about this change that is yet to be realized!

We would be "for the forty hours" or "against the forty hours" with passion, with anger, with intransigence.

We would not want to make ourselves ridiculous in front of the entire world that is watching us.

It is signed by Maurice Prax, born in 1881 in Tours, died in 1962. He was a writer and journalist with Le Petit Parisien, the paper in which this article appeared on August 25, 1938. He was the son of General Léon Prax and the grandson of General Jean-Louis Prax.

The forty hours in question refer to the legally mandated work-week.

Her blue eyes gaze out from a century before, unseeing the news that would see Rommel install the Nazi HQ 5 kilometers across the boucle and the Seine in La Roche-Guyon, and himself in the Vacherie, German officers lodged in the houses that lined the narrow village street in which we live.

I will follow my sister's advice and seal her, and the paper, back under the stair, witness for the next to come along and decide the house is no longer to their taste.

This morning, I looked into the petit salon. The small strip of rail at the ceiling had been replaced with one the length of the wall.
....

This is the story of us

Steel on plaster and a ladder

This is not a project for two. If it is said that a couple that survives installing curtain rods will survive any épreuve together, then the bar has been set too low, or no one imagined my husband. I exited stage right and remained there, fingers in my ears. Which wasn't enough. I can hear him anyway.

"Je ne suis pas énervé," he tells me, after swearing a streak bleu. "C'est ma soupape. Si je rale, je ne m'énerve pas."

Non, I explain to him. A soupape does not open to relieve pressure if there is none to release. If there is pressure, then you are énervé already and you are en train de raler, meaning manifester verbalement son mécontentement, sa mauvaise humeur.

C'est comme ça.

Today, I didn't even bother. It would only m'énerver plus to hear him say it. It already makes me nuts to know what he would say, possibly more than to listen to him raler.

We cannot even say that he ralôte. Non, it is decidedly not doux.

"If you love him," said my friend, "tell yourself it is part of him, or part of what you love about him.

My friend is deluded. Perhaps right, but certainly à côté de la plaque. He is also a guy.

Love me, love my faults.

Mm -- non.

And so I stayed in the living room and worked on the plans, feeling worse and worse, more and more doubtful, less and less secure. I googled an old boyfriend, and I saw his face looking back out from the screen of my computer. His corporate biography photo. Senior vice president. Soon, he will accomplish his objective, the one he announced to me after I had destroyed love for him, too. I remembered when those eyes looked directly into my own, and I was unafraid, happy. He hadn't changed since the last time I saw him, when we wanted to see each other, but ought not have.

I have.

I looked at the wedding photos of a couple I don't even know, and then I looked at their blog.

This is the story of us.

This is the story of how we fell in love, and we thank you for sharing in our life.

This is a blog about a lot of things – from fashion, bicycles, food & drink, life as a couple, pop culture to our dreams for the future.

-- Our dreams for the future.

I had to get up, find an excuse to leave my computer. Go to the toilet. I had dreams for the future, too, and I forgot to become someone. We never had dreams for our future, just an idea that we had one and that it would reveal itself to us.

Once I was loved by a very young man who solved problems with a joke, a brilliant idea, as though no problem could ever be one, until I broke up with him, when I started my French adventure, years ago. The adventure that led me to my husband, who had nothing to do with his broken heart, but maybe something to do with mine. Some days. Problems didn't used to be problems for me, either. I solved them in the due course of things, with bonne humeur. I looked forward to the future, and had dreams for one. Now I am loved by a man who sees problems in everything.

I have lost mon humeur, along with mes rêves.

I tell my son, Love is simple. It hits you right between the eyes, and I point to the spot between my eyes. Don't go looking to make sure. Don't go looking for love after love, 'just in case'. Love is simple, and it is joyous and it is playful, and when you pile too many of them up behind you, it isn't anymore. It can't be anymore. When you are happy in love, it is good enough.

I learned the hard way, when it was too late for me, after we had each piled too much up and tried to bring it all into our future together. We had no plan.

Our present was hard enough.

"Combien font tes boiseries," asked my husband. "Your" woodwork, not "the" woodwork. This is subtle, but it is significant. How far do your wainscoting and bookshelves stick out, was what he was asking.

"Pour quoi?" He wants bookshelves, too.

"Parce que, déjà avec ce système de merde," everything he uses, from tools to products, is "de la merde", his soupape, at least until he gets the hang of it, "on perde tout cet espace. La pièce va être toute petite."

"La pièce est déjà toute petite." I said, civilly. The house is already toute petite.

This is the story of us.

This is the story of how I gradually fell out of love, and I thank you for being so considerate as to keep it to yourself.

This is a blog about a lot of things – from working in the garden, motorcycles, renovations, life as a couple, French versus American culture to coming to terms with the reality of those dreams of our future.
....