our table?” I asked.
“Plywood.”
“Plywood! What the hell! Why?”
“The top was broken when Dad bought it,” Tom answered, shrugging. “That shit’s expensive, so instead of granite, we used plywood and then had the whole thing covered with new felt so no one would notice.”
Why do we have to be so different from everyone else? I remember wondering. As always, no answer to this important question was forthcoming.
* * *
I had just started school at Sacred Heart Cathedral when my parents decided it was high time to remodel the upstairs of the house. The decision was made over dinner one Friday night, and by Saturday afternoon, my father and older brothers had ripped the kitchen cabinets off the wall and tossed them unceremoniously into the front yard. The violence and finality of the action shocked me deeply. It was as if some kind of madness had come over these people I thought I knew, and they were behaving now as men possessed—as zombies or something worse, not to be trusted. I remember sitting on my bicycle in the middle of Cedar Street, which was then little more than a dirt road, watching the chaos and destruction unfold. First the cabinets flew out the side door, then the sink, followed by huge chunks of linoleum flooring that sailed through the air like wounded Frisbees. Then one of my brothers—I think it was Alan, the second oldest—came outside, sledgehammer in hand, and started to break apart the wooden porch on the north side of the house.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Dad said to,” he answered in his zombie way. “We’re gonna get rid of this whole doorway and expand this side of the house into the yard and make a sitting room for Mom.”
“A sitting room?” I asked. “What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” Alan replied. “But that’s what Dad is calling it, so I guess that’s what it’s going to be.”
Unlike the Move to Town and the finishing of the basement, neither of which I was old enough to remember in any detail, this round of remodeling was something I experienced directly, the way refugees in a war-torn country experience war. It was my turn now to understand what it meant to “camp” in the basement, sleeping on fold-out cots and cooking dinners of macaroni and cheese on a Coleman stove set up next to the pool table. For months, while the work dragged on and on, and ideas multiplied like flies, the family lived in a strange, almost surreal state in which everything that had once seemed “normal” was turned on its head, and even the strangest of circumstances provoked little more than a tired yawn. Was it “normal” to take your bath in a plastic baby pool, to think of a Styrofoam cooler as “the fridge,” to eat Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup over rice for fifteen days in a row? Well, who was to say it wasn’t normal when clearly it was the only reality going?
And so the zombies continued with their dubious enterprise, fitting the work in on evenings and weekends and holidays such as Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Watching the work take place, all I could do was shake my head and whisper my mother’s old mantra under my breath, so no one else could hear, “And this, too, shall pass. And this, too, shall pass.”
It did pass. And in time life went back to “normal” again. However, having experienced life as a refugee, I no longer trusted the whole idea of normalcy. Deep down, I knew that the zombies could reappear at any moment, and when that happened, the world as I knew it would be laid to waste as if a flood or a tornado had raged through the neighborhood.
The older I got, the more adept I became at forecasting the squall on the horizon that in time would grow into a full-blown storm of remodeling. Usually it began in this way. My mother, whom I was beginning to recognize as a co-instigator of the madness, rather than a co-victim, would express in passing some dissatisfaction with the house as currently configured. The bathroom was too small or in the wrong part of the house; whenever it rained, water ran down the basement steps, flooding the laundry room; the front room lacked a fireplace, and wouldn’t it be grand to sit before a crackling fire, glass of wine in hand, kids exiled to the basement where they belonged? Hearing this, my father would remain quiet for a long time, his Rebein jaw thrust out before him. At first I thought this look was because he was mad at her; only later did I learn that the silence was a sign that the wheels in his mind had begun to turn, seeking answers to these riddles his mate had posed. Not long after the comments were made, the two of them would move on to the next inevitable stage in their process—driving around town to “look at houses.” How I hated this ritual! Invariably the houses they looked at were in upscale neighborhoods like the one surrounding the country club golf course, a part of town universally derided as Snob Hill.
“There’s no harm in looking,” my mother would say at the beginning of one of these interminable expeditions.
“No, looking is free,” my father would agree. “It’s buying that’s expensive.”
Sitting in the backseat of the family Buick, a car I considered not nearly nice enough to be driving down these particular streets, I would try to predict the future by paying attention to which houses my parents looked at and what they said about them. It wasn’t particularly hard.
mom [pointing to a two-story Tudor with a massive front lawn]: Oh, I like that one, Bill.
dad: The roof doesn’t have enough overhang. [Nodding at a single-story brick ranch with an open ceiling and massive windows across the front]: What do you think of that one over there? Now that’s a house.
mom: Nice. But what do you suppose a house like that costs?
dad [shrugging]: A lot. What do you think of that color of brick?
mom: I like it. A lot.
dad: So do I. See the way the chimney rises up on that side of the house . . .
Having heard this much, I knew it was just a matter of time before my father grabbed some piece of unopened mail and used the back of it to draw a rough sketch of his latest home improvement idea. But was that really so bad? I found myself wondering, as time went on. While part of me blamed both my parents for continually pulling the carpet out from under my childhood, another part of me was beginning to look at them with something like awe, maybe even admiration. They’re crazy as loons, I’d think to myself. But they certainly do know what they want, and they aren’t shy about going after it.
* * *
The biggest of my parents’ “remodeling projects” stretched across several years in the late 1970s, when I was twelve or thirteen years old, and my oldest brother David was in law school at the University of Kansas. After years of talking about it, my parents were going to remodel the house’s exterior, adding a shake shingle roof, a fireplace, and an exterior of new red brick. In essence, they were going to remake the house in the image of one of those sprawling ranches on Snob Hill they were always driving past and admiring. Of course, being Rebeins, they had their own way of going about this, one that only someone who knew their history and tendencies could have predicted.
During World War II, which coincided roughly with the later years of my father’s childhood, Dodge City was a veritable hive of military activity, particularly as regarded the testing of aircraft and the training of pilots. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, an army air base home to some forty thousand people was thrown up in wheat fields west of town. There were massive airplane hangars, hundreds of smaller Quonset huts, and row upon row of temporary barracks heated by tall chimneys of red brick. In the years after the war, however, the old air base quickly fell into disrepair. Finally it was closed altogether, the
