It's a good thing that my partner Kathy and I have long been out of the closet because otherwise we'd probably be stuck there, since none of the doors in our house work properly. Ironically, though, the closet doors are actually more likely to swing suddenly open rather than to get stuck closed-;a fact that no doubt would strike certain members of Kathy's family as a metaphor for the two of us, much to their unease. At any rate, it is hard for me, as a writer, not to see all our issues with the doors in our ailing hundred-year-old house as symbolic somehow.
The front door, for example, is very hard to open and close in humid weather. You need two hands and a rugged constitution to yank it open from the inside or an iron shoulder to push it open from outside. It can take three or four good slams and a small human chain to pull the door closed enough to turn the key in the lock when leaving. And the key, then, cleaves to the lock unless you press your thumb in just the right spot. Are these tight seals emblematic of a pathologically close relationship? A figurative reflection of how seldom we have time to socialize anymore, with our hectic schedules? Or is the latter more of a simple cause-and-effect relationship: it's simply too hard to open and close the door so we just don't?
If that were our only problem door, we'd be happy campers, since we're both strong, healthy women-;not rugby material, perhaps, but certainly capable of manhandling, if you will, our stubborn door. But that's just the tip of the entryway iceberg. The front screen door, brand new as of the past year, had a tendency to snap shut like a bear trap-;until, that is, the bottom hydraulic door-closer pulled loose from the door frame recently and hung like a useless appendage, getting caught between the door and the sill, until we finally got around to removing its lifeless body. The door from the kitchen to the mudroom will not tolerate a doorknob, so you have to snake your finger between the wall and the slide lock and pull it open by the narrow piece of the lock that sticks out. The door to the pantry has to be held shut with a hook or it will pop open, and the door to our bedroom has to be held open with a doorstop or it will swing closed. The screen door at the back of the house, also new, has a sheet of glass that you can secure over the screen during the winter months, though "secure" is hardly the right word here, since it is liable to whoosh down like a guillotine. Surely any high school English teacher worth her salt would see communication or intimacy symbols galore in all this were it fiction.
But it's the back door that has provided the most dramatic instance of our trouble with doors lately. For weeks, it had been getting increasingly difficult to lock. For a while, if you pulled up on the handle, the deadbolt would reluctantly scrape into the metal opening in the doorframe. Then the key was no longer adequate to this brute task, and the door could only be locked by pulling up on the handle from the inside and turning the deadbolt latch. Kathy retrieved the car from the garage, while I stayed behind to lock the door, then exit through the front to meet her out there. At last, even that no longer worked, and we took to propping a stepladder under the doorknob to keep any would-be robbers from entering. That seems like about the right amount of security, actually, for the value of the contents of our house.
But while we were both impressed with Kathy's ingenuity at devising this foolproof security system, it wasn't especially convenient. The door had bested us and we knew it: we threw in the towel and called our contractor.
Because he is a professional, he made short work of the problem. What, we wondered, though, had caused the problem in the first place? Was the door sticking because of the cold? Were the hinges coming loose? Have we been too closed off, and this was the universe's way of saying, "Open up and let the whole damn world in"? It turns out, though, that our problem has nothing to do with doors, metaphorically or otherwise. The fact of the matter is, the weight of the snow and ice that has accumulated on the roof has apparently caused our porch to shift away from the house, venturing off in its own direction. I'm sure that's a sign of some sort, too, but my current plan is to ignore it-;until, of course, I'm eating breakfast one day, and that part of the house slides into the backyard.
There's a saying that goes something like, "When god closes a door, he opens a window." In our case, that might turn out to be of critical importance, since it seems entirely possible that all of our doors could simultaneously stop opening. As it stands, I like to take our accumulated difficulties with leaving our house as a portent that we were meant to stay together. Or maybe it just means it's time to get a new house.
yxz@press.uchicago.edu
