Rachel Simon - The House on Teachers Lane: A Memoir of Home, Healing, and Loves Hardest Questions

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Table of Contents

A PLUME BOOK

THE HOUSE ON TEACHERS LANE

RACHEL SIMON is the author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling memoir Riding the Bus with My Sister, which was adapted for a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie by the same name. Her other books include the novel The Magic Touch and a collection of short stories, Little Nightmares, Little Dreams. She lives in Delaware with her husband, Hal, on the street informally known as Teachers Lane. To learn more, go to www.rachelsimon.com.

Praise forRiding the Bus with My Sister

A heartwarming, life-affirming journey through both the present and the past ... Read this book. It might just change your life.

Boston Herald

Clever and unsentimental.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

I found myself speeding through the monthly accounts, eager to meet the next bus driver.... But then Id slow down to savor Simons keen insights, humor, and evocative storytelling.

Newsday

Stirring ... authentic and impressive, an enriching story of reconciliation and rediscovery. A terrific, heartwarming ride.

Rocky Mountain News

Wonderfully crafted ... Anyone who reads this book will come away with a real respect for people with mental retardation, and the families who love and cherish them.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

You couldnt get off this bus if you tried. Its about how our journey through life is marked by the kindness of others, and about how lovely the bond between sisters can be.

The Arizona Republic

With tenderness and fury, heartbreak and acceptance ... Simon comes to the inescapable conclusion that we are all riders on the bus, and on the bus we are all the same.

Jacquelyn Mitchard

ALSO BY RACHEL SIMON

Little Nightmares, Little Dreams

The Magic Touch

The Writers Survival Guide

Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

For Hal
Husband, Architect, Court Jester

PRECONSTRUCTION

SITE SELECTION

House

Finally, we get married. After nineteen years of one of the most ridiculous courtships in the history of love, I move back in with Hal, and five days later, on a sunny May afternoon, I put on my wedding gown, he dons a suit, and we walk hand-in-hand through the city streets until we reach the justice of the peace. Hal is forty-nine, I am forty-one. Having survived every phase of dating, cohabiting, breaking up, and renewing, we are more in love when we say I do than Ive ever believed possible. For the next three years we savor laughter and relief, conversation and contentment. This is it, I think, I finally understand love, and I want this to last forever.

But then one January afternoon, the next phase of our journey suddenly begins.

I do not know this when I step onto the front porch of our row house that day and pull the wooden door shut behind me. The sun is bright as it reflects off the snowdrifts on either side of our quiet, tree-lined street, so I keep my gaze down as I cross the single lane to my car, my thoughts on the flight Im about to catch. This is why I will never know if I am alone on the block that afternoon, or if, as I unlock my car, I am being watched.

But when I look back on this moment, I realize that eyes must have been hiding in the shadows of one of the slender alleys on our street, listening to the beep beep beep of our houses security system, following my actions as I lower my suitcases into my trunk. Maybe they even scoped out my routine over the last many months, so theyre aware that Im a writer about to fly across the country for a speaking engagement. Of course, its possible theyve only canvassed our street since this morning but still saw Hal leave for work, blueprints in his bag. However long theyve spied, some premeditation must have been necessary. After all, ours isnt just a neighborhood of nine-to-fivers, but also in-the-home artists, blue collars sleeping off the night shift, and retirees watching TV And although I find our house unbearably snug, its two-and-a-half stories, with basement, bath, and seven tiny rooms have lodged large families over its hundred-year life. Theres no way of assuming that once weve departed, the house will be empty.

Yet my spy remains a puzzle. Hal and I live on a lightly traveled block of row houses in the small city of Wilmington, Delaware. Pedestrians and vehicles pass only occasionally except for rush hour, when the thirteen households come and go, and the banking and credit card professionals who work in the nearby skyscrapers deposit or retrieve their cars at the unmetered curb. But there is a delay of an hour after I drive off. Is the wait because the little boy across the street is making a snowman on the sidewalk? Are the many neighborhood dog walkers enjoying impromptu chats at the corner? Or does the course of our lives get rerouted not by design, but whim?

All we know is that at two thirty, while my bags are being screened by airport security, heand I will take the liberty of assigning a gender and a solitary statusleaps out of his life and lands on our sidewalk. Immediately he rejects a hustle up our seven steps to the wooden front door with its beveled glass window, sure itll be deadbolted. He dismisses a dash down the alley along the western side of the house, rightly knowing the rickety back door is locked, too.

Why bother, when theres a ragged basement door in the front?

He darts down the three steps from the sidewalk. The door is splintered, peeling, wiggly in its frame. He gives a hard shove. The rotted casing gives way, and hes in.

Beep beep beep. The security system starts counting: forty-five seconds until the alarm.

He tears past basement storage and a dank laundry room, up steep angled steps, into the kitchen. He takes in the decrepit stove, caramel-sticky cabinets, floor the color of tooth decay.

He scrambles through a doorway into the dining room. Nothing but a table piled with newspapers, walls lined with Ikea cabinets, the kind of organ found in old chapels.

He scurries ahead to the living room. A motley assemblage of used furniture, bricked-up fireplace, massive collection of CDs, library of books, a sitar, a turntable, a bulky TV. Models of buses on the mantel. Figurines from The Wizard of Oz. Would this junk even sell on eBay?

Up the stairs he flies. To the left is a pitiful-looking bathroom tiled in hazard-sign black and yellow. He barrels through the hall, throwing open a door halfway down. The rooms crammed with more books, recordsrecordexercise machines, laundry. What a mess. The door for the back bedroom opens to an unmade bed, two cats quivering beneath. Hand-me-down cabinets. No jewelry box, no fur, no designer labels, no flashy knickknacks. Of all the houses he couldve hit, whyd he pick this loser? One more possibility on this floor. Feet sprinting over the crappy green carpet back down the hall, he throws himself into the front bedroom. Onlyits a home office. Jammed to the ceiling with shelves, file cabinets, storage units, desks, copierand a laptop!

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