Fifty-seven Inches

“Guilt Walks of Life” by Henry Hu. Image courtesy of the artist.

A writer remembers the early years of her marriage, and the odd significance of a first home

By Kate McCorkle

My lips clenched a slim nail as I balanced on couch cushions so shoddy my feet instantly sank to the springs. I had set a painting on the couch to be rehung, and the movement from the cushions nearly sent it crashing to the floor. That wouldn’t be so bad. But no — I couldn’t risk any evidence. Hammer in one hand, I removed the nail between my lips and placed it on the wall an inch below another hole. I tapped as if I didn’t want the noise to disturb someone. After this one, I had six more to go.

405 B Rose Drive in Clarksville, Tennessee, was my home as a newly married twenty-three-year-old. My fiancé, Jason, found the rental and signed the lease without me, a plan I okayed because it meant one less trip to that town. I figured I’d adapt to his military life once we were married, but I wasn’t in any rush to leave Chicago. I told him I didn’t care about the house as long as it was located off the Army post of Fort Campbell. A place with some trees would be nice, though. Jason followed both guidelines, and we ended up with straggly poplars growing from a creek bed that also housed cottonmouths.

When Jason opened the front door to 405 B after an hour drive from the Nashville airport, I couldn’t see anything.

“You covered the window,” I half-stated, half-questioned, when I spotted the massive entertainment center.

Jason puffed his chest. “There’s no glare this way,” he said.

The room was dim even with the overhead light. I registered two oval shapes high above a plaid couch, almost touching the ceiling. They were pictures of some kind, but I couldn’t tell of what. The images weren’t familiar enough for me to connect the dots and perceive, say, a bowl of fruit or a sailboat. I had to get closer. Squinting, I finally realized each portrait was of antelope and buffalo haunches. I had to be seeing that wrong. The bad lighting or maybe dust on the glass or…nope. There was the antelope’s long face, turned and looking coyly behind a prairie centerfold.

Jason’s grandma had died several months earlier, and when her children cleared out her home in Dayton, Ohio, he found an opportunity to furnish our townhouse. She had grown up in Cody, Wyoming, in a family that worked with Buffalo Bill before running their own ranch. Her whole sensibility had a western flair. Jason took the kitchen table that sat ten, six oak captain’s chairs, the washer and dryer (that he’d soon learned were broken), and almost everything that hung on her walls. He called a few times on the drive, excited about his haul, particularly the instant art collection.

Rounding out his grandma’s antelope and buffalo ass, there were several portraits of blanket-draped Native Americans on horseback, as well as a few battle scenes of cavalry soldiers fighting said natives. In these images, the dramatically arched backs of the dead contrasted nicely with the straight lines of the fight and landscape. The Union blue uniforms, splotched with red, popped against the setting’s ochre tones. Jason also hung a pencil drawing of his great-grandparents’ ranch house tucked into a valley. Soft watercolors washed over the graphite lines. If you had a sentimental reason for being attached to that home, I could see where the picture might be pretty. Coming to it cold as I was, it was a random cabin lost between pale mountains.

Less than two days after we returned to Clarksville, however, terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That meant Jason, as an infantryman, was gone. He was on lockdown on post at first, but everyone knew they would deploy soon. It was inevitable. The company worked and trained nonstop in preparation.

I did not love buffalo and antelope heinie in the front room. Adding insult to injury, the pictures hung maybe five inches from the ceiling. I knew art wasn’t hung like that in his parents’ house. Was this a crazy military thing? In terms of triage, though, the nosebleed-section paintings would have to wait. First, we had to free up that window — let in some light. Moving the gigantic entertainment center meant unplugging, untangling, and removing the DVD player, VCR, cable box, stereo, and TV as well as relocating a loveseat. Those activities zapped enough time and emotional wherewithal that we didn’t move the paintings that afternoon.

When lowering the pictures finally became priority, it was time to go home to Massachusetts and get ready to be married. I’d move the pictures when we got back from the honeymoon.

Less than two days after we returned to Clarksville, however, terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That meant Jason, as an infantryman, was gone. He was on lockdown on post at first, but everyone knew they would deploy soon. It was inevitable. The company worked and trained nonstop in preparation.

Gear packed, they boarded helicopters for a mission in those first weeks. A major’s wife told me they were bound for Kuwait. It turned out to be a power plant in Indiana. I was so relieved Jason was home, even if he wasn’t home; but the company itched to deploy. This was their job. Eventually, maybe by December, they settled into a work cycle where they’d keep regular hours for a week or two, then be gone for a week or two training in the field.

All that fall and into winter, I wanted things to be good and normal when Jason was home. He was away more than we were together, and I didn’t want to add to the stress of his job. And yet, I also wanted some sympathy for my own crummy situation; I wanted him to meet me halfway in this suck-fest. He didn’t. In this atmosphere, it was hard not to be full of self-pity and pick fights.

We argued about money until I found a job, which was impossible post-9/11 for an over-educated northerner in a southern town, a “transient” military spouse — we were living off one income. I thought we needed a budget. Jason thought a budget meant you weren’t living life. Conversely, he thought I spent recklessly at the grocery store. Until our marriage, he’d never bought fresh produce. Weekly dinner for him was two nights of spaghetti, two nights of sloppy joes, and three nights of restaurants. The fact that I spent ten dollars every week on fruit and vegetables at the commissary sent him through the roof.

We fought about bachelor parties. He thought it was his duty to visit the strip clubs of Nashville in honor of a colleague’s impending wedding. I disagreed. Heartily. This was usually good for two weeks of silence, with the event wadded in the middle like a peach pit in a napkin.

The height of the paintings was a standing, low-simmering disagreement, easy to pick up and fret when there was nothing else for our anger and fear to latch onto.

I perpetually suggested gallery or museum height as the ideal aesthetic: approximately fifty-seven inches from floor to center of art (omitting the question of whether buffalo butt constitutes art). Growing up, I had a great-uncle who was more attuned to these environmental niceties. He passed his sensibilities to my father, who passed them to me. I said museum height, fifty-seven inches, was considered eye level. Pictures were supposed to hang at eye level.

Jason said that at over six feet tall, his eye level differed from mine. And we didn’t live in a museum or gallery.

I said it was disturbing. A psychological assault.

He said I was being anal. Why couldn’t I respect his decision?

I said I had documented aesthetics on my side, and yes, it’s hard not to be anal when discussing antelope ass.

He said I was a snob. I thought I was better than his dead grandma.

Eventually I got tired of arguing about something so trivial. Guys who easily could be Jason were being shipped off to God-knows-where. I had neither family nor friends here. No job to provide any routine or accountability. It was just me and this tiny townhouse with its meagre light and its big dark furniture, occupied by the image of two falling towers and news of young people leaving to fight. Maybe that’s partially why I needed the pictures to move to a reasonable height so badly. It was an easy fix for an obvious wrong.

One day when Jason wasn’t home (training? on assignment?), I searched for my blue metal toolbox. I needed the hammer. When I moved into my first apartment in Chicago, my dad made a gift of the toolbox stocked with essentials: a hammer, two screwdrivers, measuring tape, a wrench, a level, and an assortment of nails and screws. Everything but the tape belonged to my grandpop.

I had decided that when Jason was away, even if it was just forty-eight hours, I’d lower all the pictures by one inch. Native Americans on horseback, dead cavalry officers, isolated ranch house, buffalo butt, and antelope ass. One inch only. The hardest part was balancing on the flimsy couch. I didn’t know why I hadn’t done this sooner.

I was nervous when Jason’s tan boots next walked through the door. I anticipated the verbal jab when he saw the paintings had moved. Nothing. I waited for his accusation as he settled to watch TV. Nada. I thought maybe a well-timed barb before bed. Zilch. Jason noticed nothing.

In another week, when he was gone again, I got my hammer and moved the nails by another inch. Then I waited until next time. Jason was either training or deployed stateside enough that I lowered the pictures to my desired fifty-seven inches by spring. I rubbed the visible foot-long line of holes above the pictures with my index finger, thinking it might make the cheap wallboard close up again, like smoothing out a pinhole in Play-Doh. I didn’t need to be concerned about the holes, though. Jason never saw them. He never realized all the pictures in the house had been lowered by almost two feet.

The coy antelope stayed at museum height until we moved about eighteen months later. Jason had returned from a deployment to Iraq and, coincidentally, his time in the army was ending. We were leaving 405 B and Clarksville. He would have never known about the migrating pictures except — once they were off the wall and wrapped in moving blankets — I pointed out the line of nail holes affiliated with each artwork, a tattoo documenting the passage of time.

As my finger glided over the series of holes, he studied me with wide blue eyes. “You did this? Every time I was gone?”

“Not every time,” I replied. “Only until that first spring. They were where I wanted by then.”

He rubbed the line. Then he laughed.

“I can’t believe you did this,” he said. “I didn’t know — was I that much of an ass?”

“Kind of.”

Jason continued to trace the trail of holes, looking where the other pictures formerly hung to see their similar trajectory. “I guess that shows I didn’t really care about where they hung,” he said. “I was just sticking by my decision.” He lowered his hand to look at me squarely. “But that’s seriously passive-aggressive.”

“Is it?” I asked. “I wasn’t trying to get at you. I was just sick of arguing over a buffalo.” I moved from the wall, reached for something to load into a nearby box.

The story — the gradual lowering he never observed and to which I was so committed —  comes up often enough now when we talk about those first months together. Jason seems oddly proud of me when he tells it. He says I “play the long game.” I’m more embarrassed now when I recount the tale — like why didn’t I just move the pictures right away if it bothered me that much? Why did it need to be something we decided together?

It also sounds petty to be upset about the house, to be preoccupied with things. I didn’t want my first home to be some Pottery Barn, cookie-cutter version of the other officers’ wives’ houses. I did want it to reflect me, and my sensibilities, though. I wanted a say in how my life looked. And with everything else going on in the big world and my little one, that was not the case.

Today, many years later, I remain undecided on how to interpret my stealthy lowering of the antelope ass. Was I being passive-aggressive? Was I sincerely avoiding a fight over something trivial? Was I really playing the long game? It might be all of it. But if I am indeed playing the long game and looking at the big picture, I’m relieved and heartened this is something about which Jason and I can laugh. His stubborn absolutism, my covert defiance —  there are a few ways besides funny that could have ended. I am also happy that today, no prairie animals live on my walls, and we hang any pictures — for the most part — approximately fifty-seven inches from the floor to center.

Kate McCorkle’s essays and fiction have appeared in many publications. Her 2015 essay, “Laundry,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She reads, writes, and swims near Philadelphia, often with her four children.