December 1, 2021 by Amy
Welcome to Amytown
When M and I were first married, the ink not yet dry on our marriage certificate, he began to act strangely. Instead of coming home each night after work, he went to his grandmother’s. “I am making her a plant stand,” he said. “She wants me to make her a plant stand.” Okay, fine, but when it was taking days, then weeks, I had my doubts. I had seen Grandma’s plant stands. A plant stand was a slab of Formica with a kitchen cabinet handle affixed to each end and casters mounted to the bottom. This allowed her to place tall plants in giant pots wherever she wanted in her house. She already had quite a few, built for her, I suppose, by her incredibly handy husband. He had passed away a couple of years before we got married, though, so I guess she needed another one and it was up to her grandson, who had inherited her husband’s mechanical inclinations, to make one.
After a few weeks of this, I began to get suspicious. Two terms of middle school shop class (a successful attempt to avoid taking home ec) had given me decent skills around power tools and enough understanding to realize that one of these plant stands could be slapped together in a couple of hours. No matter how much I asked, though, M never wavered from his story. “I’m making Grandma a plant stand. It’s just taking longer than expected.” This was one of my first clues that my new husband could not lie, a trait I still like. I even confirmed, “This is one of those formica plant stands, right? With a handle at each end and the casters?” Yep, he’d say. That’s it. He refused to elaborate. I began to wonder if he wasn’t as mechanically-inclined as I thought.
Home alone yet again for another evening, I would call my mother and sob. “What is going on? Doesn’t he want to come home to me?” We were newly married and he was spending every spare moment with his grandmother. This did not bode well for our future.
It turned out he was lying. He wasn’t even at his grandmother’s. He was returning to his parents’ home each night to continue work on his first Christmas gift for his new wife: a beautiful (and giant) train board to go under our Christmas tree. He began this enormous project before the wedding—which was exactly two months before Christmas—and hadn’t finished it yet, and he was on deadline. The board has a big, oval track and telephone posts and streetlamps that light up and little ceramic houses with windows that glow. It has bushes and greenery and trees small and large, frosted with snow. The whole thing sits in a finished bed of varnished oak. Or maybe maple? I don’t know. It’s light wood and it’s beautiful. The whole thing is magical. So, needless to say, I forgave him for his lying and indiscretions. And after the trainboard was installed at our house he promptly came home after work each night and has ever since.
Getting the trainboard ready for Christmas every year is my job, and I like looking at all the different houses and finding all the tiny holes drilled to hold the tree trunks and arranging the lichen just so. M, engineer that he is, had mapped out the town on a sheet of graph paper. Each ceramic house (and one church) is labeled with a number on its bottom, and the graph paper map shows where each structure belongs on the trainboard. I faithfully adhered to this plan for years.
And then, several years ago, I didn’t. There is one specific house, a cottage really, that is my favorite. It’s a little log cabin with a stone chimney and a boat leaning up against one corner. It has a red door and red window mullions. I love it. And a few years ago, nearly two decades after receiving the train board as a Christmas gift, I decided it should be moved to the front of the board where I could see it easily whenever I wanted. So, without saying anything, I moved a boring house from its prime location and placed the log cabin there. The boring house went in the cabin’s old lot, a few houses down the street.
As you can imagine, it didn’t take long for M to notice. I laughed and laughed as he sputtered and pointed. “What did you do?” He was reacting like I had placed all his grandmother’s plant stands in a pile and lit them on fire. He went to move the houses back to their original locations, which inspired a fervent discussion over how when something is given, the new owner is just that: the owner. And can do with it what she pleases.
Sometimes I would catch him in the act of trying to swap the houses. I’d walk into the family room and there he’d be, crouched over the board and furtively moving pieces around. “But there’s a plan,” he’d say. “We have to stick to the plan.” He tried arguing that the Town Planner still has jurisdiction and has decreed that the homes should be restored to their original locations. “Perhaps that was the case in Michaelville,” I’d say, “but there’s a new mayor. Welcome to Amytown.”
Once I came in to find my prime lot empty, devoid of any structure. He had stolen my beloved cottage and replaced it with a realtor’s sign. “For sale,” it reads. “Agent: Town Father.” He was stooping to new lows. It didn’t take long for him to reveal where the cottage was hidden; it just about killed him to have a vacant lot in the village. Turns out it was more painful to have blight than to have two houses “out of place.” We kept the realtor’s sign, though. It’s just too funny not to.
So, for now, the cottage remains where I planted it. He scowls every time he looks over at the train board, and I laugh at his reaction. Also, he still can’t tell a lie. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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