Thirty-Four Inches: a comic short story about a hot tub, a side gate, and a fence, and the detector that could not see it

The beeping started at ten minutes to seven, and Nadia lay in the dark doing arithmetic on how much sleep she had left, which was all of it, because she had gotten home at twenty to six.

She gave it four minutes. The beeping stopped and was replaced by a sound she could not identify, a long grinding scrape with a shriek at the end of it, like a filing cabinet being dragged across the surface of a bell. Then men laughing. Then the truck again.

She put a coat on over her scrubs and went out with one clog on and one in her hand.

There was a flatbed trailer in the driveway next door and two men in it and a large square object on the concrete behind them, wrapped in shrink film gone milky with road grime. Her neighbor was standing beside it with his hands on his hips in the posture of a man who has just been handed a baby.

“Is that a hot tub,” Nadia said.

“It is.”

“In your driveway.”

“For now,” he said.

One of the men on the trailer looked down at her, then at her one bare foot, then away, the way you look away from something you have decided is none of your business. The other one was winding a strap.

“You got a guy?” the winding one said.

“I got a plan,” her neighbor said.

They left. The trailer took the corner of the curb on the way out and left a black scuff on it that Nadia would look at, on and off, for the next eleven hours.

His name was Ray. She had known this for six years in the way you know a name from a package left on your porch by mistake, which is to say she could have produced it under pressure and had never once said it out loud. He was fifty-two, heavy through the shoulders, and he was wearing a Carhartt jacket over a shirt with a dry cleaner’s tag still stapled to the hem.

“I’m sorry about the noise,” he said. “They were supposed to come at nine.”

“I work nights.”

“I know it.”

“Do you.”

“Your car’s gone when I take the trash out,” he said. “It’s back when I get up.”

Nadia stood on the cold driveway with her one clog and decided this was, in its way, the most attentive thing anybody on this street had ever said to her.

“What are you going to do with it,” she said.

He gestured at the gate on the side of his house. It was a cedar gate about as wide as a gate, set between the house and the fence, and she could see from where she was standing that it was not going to work, and she could see from his face that he could see it too and had decided to disagree with it.

“Measure it,” she said.

“I measured it.”

“Measure it in front of me.”

He got a tape out of the truck. He hooked it on one post and walked it to the other and said “thirty-four” in the voice of a man reading a verdict he had already appealed.

“And that,” she said, pointing.

He climbed onto the trailer hitch to reach the top of the shrink film and cut it with a utility knife, and the film came off in a sheet with a sound like a wave going out. Underneath was a hot tub the color of a bathtub, with a gray plastic skirt and a hard cover strapped down over it and, on the side, a foil sticker that said 84 x 84 x 36.

“Thirty-six,” Nadia said.

“It’s not exactly thirty-six.”

“It says thirty-six.”

“That’s a nominal number,” Ray said.

The first thing he tried was soap.

He drove to the hardware store and came back with two bottles of dish soap and a roll of contractor’s paper, and he laid the paper down through the gate and poured soap on it, both bottles, the whole way, and then he stood there looking at the tub like a man waiting for it to volunteer.

Nadia had gone inside to sleep. She got about fifty minutes. What woke her was not a sound, it was the absence of the sound she had been half-listening for, and she came to the window and he was sitting on the tailgate of his truck with a granola bar in his hand, not eating it.

She got dressed for real and went out.

“It didn’t compress,” Ray said.

“It’s fiberglass.”

“I understand that now.”

The driveway was slick from the gate to the apron. He had a garden hose out and had made the situation worse by about a factor of three, and there was a rainbow film going down the gutter toward the storm drain, and Nadia thought about the eight years of school she did not have and the two she did.

“Take the gate off the hinges,” she said.

“That gets me an inch and a half.”

“It gets you closer than soap.”

He took the gate off. It took him thirty-five minutes and a trip back to the truck for a different screwdriver, and when it was off, leaning against the siding, he measured the opening again and said “thirty-four,” which is what it had been with the gate on, because the gate had been mounted outside the posts, and Nadia watched him arrive at this and did not say anything, because there was nothing to say that would not have been a kind of hitting.

“Okay,” Ray said.

“Okay.”

“Well, now the gate’s off.”

At nine-forty she came out with coffee and caught him measuring the tub.

“It’s still thirty-six.”

“I know what it is,” he said.

“You measured it at seven.”

“I measured the sticker at seven.”

She handed him one of the coffees. He looked at it a second too long before he took it, and she understood that in the six years they had lived forty feet apart, this was the first thing either of them had ever given the other.

“There’s a guy,” he said. “Duckworth. He’s got a boom truck.”

“Call him.”

Ray called him on speaker, holding the phone flat on his palm like it was a bird. Duckworth had the voice of a man who was already doing something else.

“Six hundred,” Duckworth said.

“For forty-five seconds.”

“It’s six hundred if it’s Saturday, Raymond.”

“What is it if it’s Tuesday.”

“Six hundred,” Duckworth said, and hung up.

Ray put the phone in his jacket. He looked at the tub. Nadia drank her coffee and looked at the tub too, and it looked back at them the way a large object does, which is to say with total indifference, having not asked to be here.

“The tub was four hundred,” Ray said.

“I know.”

“How do you know.”

“Because you told me twice,” she said.

Around eleven he went at the fence post with a post hole digger.

She let him get down about eighteen inches. It was good soil for the first foot and then it was clay, and every load he brought up got heavier, and he was breathing through his mouth, and when the digger finally hit concrete it made a flat sound that meant the footing was wider than the hole.

“How deep did you pour these,” Nadia said.

“I don’t remember.”

“You poured them.”

“That was 2016,” he said, and sat down on the edge of his own hole.

She went and got two lawn chairs off her patio and set them up in his driveway facing the tub, which she recognized even as she did it as a formal act, the sort of thing that turns an interruption into a day. She sat in one. After a while he came over and sat in the other.

He held out half a granola bar. She said no thanks.

“Other side of the house,” she said.

“Twenty-eight inches, and the gas meter’s in it.”

“So no.”

“You want to hit a gas meter with seven hundred pounds of fiberglass?”

“I don’t want to hit anything with it,” Nadia said. “I want to be asleep.”

Here is what she knew that he did not, and it was not about hot tubs.

At the clinic there was a mastiff named Gerald who came in twice a year and weighed a hundred and eighty pounds and could not be lifted, not by two people, not by four, because there is nowhere on a mastiff to put your hands that a mastiff agrees with. What you did with Gerald was you never lifted him. You got a tarp under him one hip at a time, and then you slid him, and the whole art of it was in the fact that Gerald weighed exactly as much either way and the tarp did not care.

“You don’t lift it,” she said. “Ever. You slide it, and you never put your fingers where it’s going.”

“I’ve moved a piano.”

“When.”

“Ninety-six,” Ray said.

She got the lift harness and two ratchet straps out of her trunk, and by noon they had the tub up on its side on a moving blanket, standing on the driveway like a monument, and it had taken both of them and a two-by-four and a language of grunted single syllables that she found she could speak fluently, and afterward they stood back from it breathing hard and she felt the first genuine pleasure of the day, which is the pleasure of a heavy thing having gone exactly where you said it would.

Then they rolled it eleven feet to the gate opening and it stopped, because it was thirty-six inches and the opening was thirty-four.

She fell asleep in the lawn chair a little after one.

She had not intended to. The sun had come around the corner of his house and hit her full in the coat, and the last thing she saw was Ray on his knees with a furniture dolly, and the next thing was the sound of her own name, which he had never used before, said twice.

The tub was in the gate. Not through it. In it. He had gotten one corner past the post at an angle and the dolly had gone out from under it, and now the whole thing was cocked in the opening like a swallowed pill, resting on the concrete on one edge and on the post on the other, and it had taken about four inches of siding off the house on the way in.

“How long was I out.”

“Forty minutes.”

“You did this in forty minutes.”

“It was going,” Ray said. “It was really going for a while there.”

They could not move it forward. They could not move it back. They spent twenty minutes with the straps and the two-by-four and got it to shift a half inch in the wrong direction, and then Ray put both hands flat on the fiberglass and leaned on it and did not say anything for long enough that Nadia looked away and gave him the yard.

“I have to be at work at seven,” she said, eventually.

“I know.”

“That’s a Sunday thing to say. It’s Saturday.”

“Deb gets back at eight tonight,” Ray said.

That was the first time he had said the name and he said it like a man putting a card down.

Nadia did not ask. It was not that she was not curious. It was that they had reached, sometime around the post hole, an arrangement in which certain things were carried and not discussed, and she had a strong suspicion that if she asked he would answer, and then the day would become a different kind of day, and she would have to be a different kind of neighbor in it.

So instead she stood back and looked at the fence.

It was a good fence, six feet, cedar, going gray the way they do. The panel that ran from the gate post out to the property line was eight feet long and it had two horizontal rails, and the rails were on this side, and the pickets were nailed to the far side, and Nadia looked at it for a while.

“Why is the ugly side facing you?”

“What?”

“Your fence. The rails are on your side. The finished side’s facing his yard.”

“That’s how it went up,” Ray said.

“You built it.”

“That’s how it went up,” Ray said.

It took her another hour to say the rest of it, and she said it while they were sitting in the lawn chairs again with the tub wedged eleven feet away like a piece of modern art nobody had commissioned.

“Take the panel out.”

“It’s lagged into the posts.”

“So take the lags out.”

“That fence is on the line,” Ray said. “It’s half his.”

“Okay.”

“It’s a shared fence. Legally it’s a shared fence.”

“So go ask him,” she said.

Ray looked at the house on the other side of it. It was a house. There was a light on over the stove and a Buick in the driveway and a bird feeder with no birds at it.

“His name’s Doug,” Ray said.

“Great.”

“Wysocki.”

“Ray.”

“I haven’t talked to him since 2016,” Ray said.

Nadia did the subtraction, and then she did it again, because the answer was the fence.

She got up. She walked across two lawns and up the concrete steps and knocked on Doug Wysocki’s door, and Ray said something behind her that she did not turn around for.

Doug came to the door with reading glasses pushed up on his head. He was maybe sixty-six. He looked past her, at the driveway, at the thing standing in the gate, and he took the glasses off his head and held them.

“He needs to take the panel out,” Nadia said. “He’ll put it back today.”

Doug looked at it some more.

“They’re lags,” he said. “You’ll want a socket. Half inch.”

Then he shut the door, and Nadia stood on the step for a second with the whole speech she had prepared going nowhere, and then the door opened again and Doug came out with a socket set and a pry bar and walked past her toward the fence without waiting to see if she was coming.

The panel came off in eleven minutes.

Two lags at each post, and the rails came free, and the whole eight-foot section walked back into Doug’s yard on its own weight with the three of them holding it, and where it had been there was a gap ninety-two inches wide, and through the gap Nadia could see Doug’s patio and a stack of upside-down flower pots and a folding chair.

Getting the tub out of the gate was worse than getting it in. It took all three of them, and Doug turned out to know exactly how to use a pry bar as a lever and exactly when not to, and at one point he put his hand flat on Nadia’s forearm to move it out of the pinch, and did not comment on it, and she thought: this man has done this before, with somebody.

Then it was out, and then it was through the gap, and then it was in the yard, and it took about ninety seconds.

Ray stood in the middle of his own backyard with his hands at his sides.

“Ninety seconds,” he said.

“It’s a wide gap,” Doug said.

“It’s four hundred dollars and eleven hours.”

“Well,” Doug said.

They set the tub down on the pad Ray had poured in June, which Nadia had not known was there, and which had been the actual first move in a plan that had otherwise consisted entirely of hope.

They put the panel back before they did anything else, because Ray insisted on it, and while they were lining it up he turned it around.

Nobody said anything about it. He just turned it, pickets facing his yard now, rails facing Doug’s, and Doug stood there holding the far end and looked at it, and then at Ray, and then he set his end on the ground and got a lag started.

“Huh,” Doug said.

They ran the lags down. Nadia held the middle.

When they were done, Doug rolled the socket set closed and stood looking through the gray cedar at the tub, which from his side was mostly a shape.

“Deb’s wanted one of these twenty-some years,” he said.

“Yep,” Ray said.

Doug took his pry bar and went home.

At six-forty Ray went to plug it in.

Nadia was sitting on the edge of the pad with her back against the tub, half asleep, and she heard him stop, and then she heard nothing for a good while, and she turned around.

He was holding the end of the power cord. There was no plug on it. There were four wires in a rubber sleeve, red and black and white and green, cut clean, the way an electrician leaves a thing that is meant to go into a box.

“What,” she said.

“It’s hardwired. It’s a fifty-amp circuit.”

“So?”

“So there’s no outlet in the world it goes in,” Ray said. “It goes in a panel. It needs a disconnect, and a GFCI breaker, and forty feet of six-gauge in conduit, under the ground, and an inspection.”

Nadia put her head back against the fiberglass.

“So it doesn’t work.”

“It works great,” Ray said. “It just doesn’t have any electricity.”

They got in it anyway.

The cover came off in one piece and they climbed over the side and sat down in the two molded seats facing each other with their knees up, dry, in a hot tub, in a backyard, at dusk, on the last Saturday in September. He had a beer in each hand and he held one out and this time she took it, which she noticed herself doing, and which she suspected he noticed too.

“Twenty-some years,” she said.

“Twenty-seven in May.”

That was all either of them said about it, which she had known it would be, and it was the right amount.

The light went off the top of the fence and the streetlight on the corner came on with that half second of pink it does. Somewhere over on Larkin somebody was cutting a lawn in the dark, which is a thing men do out here.

“You know what’s going to happen,” Nadia said.

“What.”

“You’re going to have an electrician out here Tuesday and he’s going to tell you your panel’s full.”

“My panel’s not full.”

“Everybody’s panel is full,” she said.

Headlights came up the driveway at seven minutes after eight.

Neither of them got out. They heard the car door, and then the front door, and then the house lights coming on room by room from the front to the back, and then the back door, and then nothing at all for about four seconds.

Deb Kabat came down the steps and across the grass in her work shoes and stopped at the edge of the pad and looked up at the two of them sitting in a dry hot tub with their knees up.

“There’s no water in it,” she said.

“There’s no plug,” Ray said.

“Okay,” Deb said.

She took her shoes off and put one hand on the shoulder of her husband and climbed over the side, and sat down in the third seat, and put her feet up on the empty footwell where the jets were.

Nadia had to be at work in ten hours and fifty-three minutes.

She stayed.