The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  My daughter, Clarissa, twenty-five, agreed a soft-landing Lake Laconic holiday might be “restorative” for me and help me get over “a pretty intense summer.” She and her girlfriend, the heart-stoppingly beautiful Cookie Lippincott, her former Harvard roommate, took charge when I flew back from Mayo in a diaper and in no mood for laughs. (Lesbians make great nurses, just like you’d think they would: serious but mirthful, generous but consistent, competent but understanding—even if yours happens to be your daughter.) During my early recovery days, I took her and Cookie to the Red Man Club, my sportsman’s hideout on the Pequest, where we shot clay pigeons, played gin rummy, fished for browns till midnight and slept out on the long screen porch on fragrant canvas army cots. We took day trips to the Vet for the last days of the Phillies’ season. We visited Atlantic City and lost our shirts. We hiked Ramapo Mountain—the easy part. We went on self-guided tours to every passive park, vernal pond and bird refuge in the guidebook. We read novels together and talked about them over meals. We managed to assemble a family unit—not your ordinary one, but what is?—one that got me back on my feet and pissing straight, took my mind off things and made me realize I didn’t need to worry much about my daughter (which doesn’t go for my son).

  But then in the midst of all, Clarissa decided she should take a sudden, divergent “new” path, and parted with Cookie to “try men” again before it was too late—whatever that might mean. Though what it meant at the moment was that with her brother not attending, my New Hampshire Thanksgiving idyll fell through in an afternoon, with my house in Sea-Clift elected by default.

  For this Thursday, then, I’ve ordered a “Big Bird et Tout à Fait” Thanksgiving package from Eat No Evil Organic in Mantoloking, where they promise everything’s “so yummy you won’t know it’s not poisoning you.” It comes with bone china, English` cutlery, leaded crystal, Irish napkins as big as Rhode Island, a case of Sonoma red, all finished with “not-to-die-for carob pumpkin pie”—no sugar, no flour, lard or anything good. Two thousand dollars cheap.

  I’ve devised a modest guest list: Clarissa, with possibly a new boyfriend; Paul with his significant other, driving in from K.C.; a refound friend from years gone by, widower Wade Arsenault, who’s eighty-something and a strange father-in-law figure to me (being father to an old flame). I’ve also invited two of my men friends from Haddam, Larry Hopper and Hugh Wekkum, good fellows of my own vintage, former charter members of the Divorced Men’s Club and comrades from the bad old days, when we were all freshly singled and at wits’ end to know how to tie our shoes. Unlike me—and maybe wiser—neither Hugh nor Larry has married again. At some point they both realized they never would—just couldn’t find the low-gear pulling power to mount another love affair, couldn’t even imagine kissing women. “I felt like a homeless man groping at a sandwich,” Larry has confided with dismay. So with no patience or interest in the old dating metronome, he and Hugh figured out they were seeing more of each other than they were of anybody else. And after Hugh had a by-pass, Larry moved him into his big white Stedman House with attached slave quarters on South Comstock. They’ve ended up playing golf every day, and Hugh hasn’t had any more heart flare-ups. There’s no hanky-panky, they assure me, since both are on blood thinners and couldn’t hanky the first panky even if the spirit was in them.

  I’ve also thought about inviting my former wife, Ann Dykstra, now a well-provided widow living, as mentioned (of all places), in Haddam, having purchased back her own former house from me at 116 Cleveland (no commission), a house she’d lived in previously, then abandoned and sold to me when she married her second husband, Charley O’Dell, and moved to Connecticut, following which I lived there for seven years, then moved to the Shore for my own second try at happiness. Aldous Huxley said—after reading Einstein—that the world is not only stranger than we know but a lot stranger than we can know. I don’t know if Huxley was divorced, but I’m betting he had to be.

  Since Sally’s departure in June, and my life-modifying trip to Mayo in August, I’ve spoken with Ann a few times. Nothing more than business. She conducted the house re-resale using the same vicious little lawyer she’d used to divorce me back in ’83, and didn’t come to the closing, to which I’d grinningly brought a bouquet of nasturtiums to commemorate (in a good way) life’s imperial strangeness. But then, one warm evening in September, just as I’d constructed a forbidden martini and was sitting down in the sunroom to watch the campaign coverage on CNN, Ann called up and just said, “So, how are you?” It was as if she was holding a policy on my life and was checking on her investment. We’ve always kept our contacts restricted to kid subjects. She didn’t understand what Paul was doing in K.C., and wouldn’t discuss the concept that her daughter was a lesbian (which I assume she blames me for). Once before, she’d inquired about my health, I lied, and then we didn’t know what else to say. And to her more recent question about how I was, I lied again that I was “fine.” Then she told me about her mother’s Christmas letter describing trouble with her dental implants, and about her once giving holy hell to Ann’s since-deceased father, for failing to leave Detroit with her in ’72 (when she divorced him) and come enjoy the sunsets in Mission Viejo.

  We hung up when that was over.

  But. But. Something had been opened. A thought.

  Since September, we’ve had coffee once at the Alchemist & Barrister, exchanged calls about the children’s trajectories and plights, gone over house eccentricities only I, as former owner, would know about—furnace warranty, water-pressure worries, inaccurate wiring diagrams. We have not gone into my medical situation, though obviously she’s wise to plenty. I don’t know if she thinks I’m impotent or have continence issues (not that I know of, and no). But she’s exhibited a form of interest. In her husband Charley’s last grueling days on earth—he had colon cancer but had forgotten about it because he also had Alzheimer’s—I agreed to sit with him and did, since none of his Yale friends were brave enough to. (Life never throws you the straight fastball.) And since then, two years ago, some sort of low ceiling of masking clouds that had for years hung over me where Ann was concerned has slowly opened, and it’s almost as if she can now see me as a human being.

  Not that either of us wants a “relationship.” What’s between us is almost entirely clerical-informative in nature and lacking the grit of possibility. Yet there are simply no further grievances needing to be grieved, no final words needing to be spoken, then spoken again. We are what we are—divorced, widowed, abandoned, parents of two adults and one dead son, with just so much of life left to live. It is another facet in the shining gem of the Permanent Period of life that we try to be what we are in the present—good or not so good—this, so that accepting final credit for ourselves won’t be such a shock later on. The world is strange, as old Huxley noticed. Though in my view, my and Ann’s conduct is also what you might reasonably hope of two people who’ve known each other over thirty years, never gotten completely outside the other’s orbit and now find the other still around and able to make sense.

  But the final word: Ann would say no to my invitation if I extended it. She’s recently gone to work—just to keep busy—as an admissions high-up at De Tocqueville Academy, where I’m meeting her today, and where she has, Clarissa says, made some new friends among the gentle, introverted, over-diploma’d folk there. She’s also, Clarissa reports, been appointed coach of the De Tocqueville Lady Linksters (she captained at Michigan in ’69), and, I’m sure, feels life has taken a good turn. None of this, of course, specifically explains why she wants to see me.

  Political placards sprout along Route 206 when we detour around Haddam toward the north. Local contests—assessor, sheriff, tax collector—were settled weeks back, though a feeling of unfinality hangs in the suburban air. Here, now it’s fat yellow Colonial two-of-a-kinds and austere gray saltboxes with the odd redwood deck house peeping through leafless poplars, ash and bushy mountain laurels. Some recidivist Bush sentiment is alive on a few lawns, but
mostly it’s solid-for-Gore in this moderate, woodsy, newer section of the township (when Ann and I were young newcomers down from Gotham in 1970, it was woods, not woodsy). The placards all insist that we the voters who voted (I went for Gore) really meant it this time and still mean it and won’t stand for foolishness. Though of course we will. And indeed, cruising past the uncrowded, familiar roads late in my favorite season, these bosky, privileged precincts feel punky and lank, swooning and ready for a doze. As we used to say, yukking it up in the USMC about recruits who weren’t going to make it, “You’ll have to wake him up just to kill him.” In these parts, it’s a good time for an insurrection.

  No real commerce flourishes on this stretch of 206. Haddam, in fact, doesn’t thrive on regular commerce. Decades of Republican councilmen, building moratoriums, millage turn-downs, adverse zoning reviews, traffic studies, greenbelt referendums and just plain shit-in-your-hat high-handedness have been disincentives for anything more on this end of town than a Forestview Methodist, the odd grandfathered dentist’s plaza, a marooned Foremost Farms and one mediocre Italian restaurant the former Boro president’s father owns. Housing is Haddam’s commerce. Whereas the real business—Kia dealerships, muffler shops, twenty-screen movie palaces, Mr. Goodwrench and the Pep Boys—all that happy horseshit’s flourishing across County Line Road, where Haddamites jam in on Saturday mornings before scurrying back home, where it’s quiet.

  I never minded any of that when I sold houses here. I voted for every moratorium, against every millage to extend services to the boondocks, supported every not-in-my-neighborhood ordinance. In-fill and gentrification are what keep prices fat and are what’s kept Haddam a nice place to live. If it becomes the New Jersey chapter of Colonial Williamsburg, with surrounding farmlands morphed into tract-house prairies, carpet outlets and bonsai nurseries, then I can take (and did take) the short view, since the long view was forgone and since that’s how people wanted it.

  What exactly happened to the short view and that drove me to the Shore like a man in the Kalahari who sees a vision of palm trees and sniffs water in the quavery distance—that’s another story.

  Since we’ve crossed into Haddam Township, Mike’s fallen to sighing again, raking his hand back through his buzzed-off hair, squinting and looking fretful behind his glasses as we head out toward the Montmorency County line. His driving has devolved into fits and spurts in the lighter township traffic. Two times we’ve been honked at and once given the finger by a pretty black woman in a Jaguar, so that his piloting’s begun to get on my nerves.

  I again know what he’s on about. Mike’s belief, and I subscribe to it myself, is that at the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it’s usually long after the real decision was actually made—like light we see emitted from stars. Which means we usually make up our minds about important things far too soon and usually with poor information. But we then convince ourselves we haven’t done that because (a) we know it’s boneheaded, and no one wants to be accused of boneheaded-ness; (b) we’ve ignored our vital needs and don’t like to think about them; (c) deciding but believing we haven’t decided gives us a secret from ourselves that’s too delicious not to keep. In other words, it makes us happy to bullshit ourselves.

  What Mike does to avoid this bad practice—and I know he’s fretful about his up-coming meeting—is empty his mind of impure motives so he can communicate with his instincts. He often performs this head-rubbing, frowning ritual right in the realty office before presenting an offer or heading off to a closing. He does this because he knows he frequently holds the power to tip a sale one way or the other and wants things to work out right. I’m sure if you’re a Buddhist, you do this all the time about everything. And I’m also sure it doesn’t do any good. They teach this brand of soggy crappolio in the “realty psychology” courses that Mike took to get his license. I just came along years too early—back when you only sold houses because you wanted to and it was easy and you liked money.

  The other scruple I’m sure is thrumming in Mike’s brain is that during his fifteen years in our country he’s swung rung to rung up the success ladder, departing one cramped circumstance for a slightly less cramped next one. He arrived from India to his Newark host family, segued on to Carteret and the industrial-linen industry, then to a less nice section of South Amboy, where he worked for an Indian apartment finder. From there to Neptune, Neptune to Lavallette—both times as a realty associate. And from there to me—an impressive climb most Americans would think was great and that would get them started filling up their garages with Harleys and flame-sided Camaros and snow machines and straw deer targets, their front yards sprouting Bush-Cheney placards, their bumpers plastered with stickers that say: I TAKE MY ORDERS FROM THE BIG GUY UPSTAIRS.

  But to Mike, the assumption that Lavallette, New Jersey, ought to seem like Nirvana to a smiling little brown man born in a wattle hut in the Himalayas is both true and not true. Deep in his hectic night’s sleep, with his estranged wife in her estranged home in the Amboys, his teenagers up late noodling on their laptops with SAT reviews, his Infiniti safely “clubbed” in the driveway, Mike (I would bet) wonders if this is really it for him. Or, might there not be just a smidgen more to be clutched at? Real estate, the profession of possibility, can keep such dreams fervid and winy for decades.

  Haddam, therefore, makes him as nervous as a debutante. It makes plenty of people feel that way. All that serenely settled, arborial, inward-gazing good life, never confiding about what it knows (property values), so near and yet so far off. All that pretty possibility set apart from the regular social frown and growl. Haddam’s rare rich scent is sweetly breathable to him—as we drive past out here on 206—there behind its revetment of Revolutionary oaks and survivor elms, from its lanes and cul-de-sacs, its wood ricks, its leaf rakage, its musing, insider mutter-mutter conversations passed across hedges between like-minded neighbors who barely know one another and wouldn’t otherwise speak. Haddam rises in Mike’s mind, a citadel he could inhabit and defend.

  It’s just not likely to happen. Which is fine as long as he doesn’t venture too close—which he’s almost done—so that his immigrant life flashes up in grainy black and white and not quite good enough. This, of course, happens to all of us; it’s just easier to accept when the whole country’s already your own.

  “You know, when Ann and I moved to Haddam thirty years ago, none of this was out here,” I say to be encouraging as we pass a woodlot soon to be engulfed beside Montmorency Mall. COMMERCIAL SPACE FOR SALE is advertised. “Not even a deer-crossing sign.” I smile at him, but he frowns out ahead, his seat pressed close-up to the wheel, his mind in another place, across a gulf from me. “If you lived here then, you wouldn’t be home now.”

  “Ummm,” Mike grunts. “I can see that, yes.” My attempt doesn’t work, and we are for a time sunk in reverential silence.

  A mile into Montmorency County, 206 drops into a pleasant jungly sweet-gum and red-clay creek bottom no one’s quite figured how to bulldoze yet, and the old road briefly takes on a memorial, country-highway feel. Though we quickly rise again into the village of Belle Fleur, old-style Jersey, with a tall white Presbyterian steeple beside a sovereign little fenced cemetery, and just beyond that, a seventies-vintage strip development, with two pizza shops, a laundrette, a closed Squire Tux and an H&R Block—and across on the facing side of the road two deserted, dusty-screened redbrick Depression houses (homes to humans once) from when 206 was a scenic rural pike as innocent and pristine as any back road in Kentucky. Another double-size wooden sign with big red lettering spells an end to the houses: OWNER WILL SELL, REMOVE OR TRADE. It’s a perfect site for a Jiffy Lube.

  Mike takes a left past the church and commences west. And right away the atmosphere changes, and for the better. Somewhere out ahead of us lies the Delaware, and all can feel the relief. Though Mike’s now consulting his watch and a scribbled-on pink Post-it while the road (Mullica Road) leaves the strip development for the peaceable tow
n ’n country housing pattern New Jersey is famous for: deep two-acre lots with curbless frontage, on which are sited large but not ominous builder-design Capes, prairie contemporaries and Dutch-door ranches, with now and then an original eighteenth-century stone farmhouse spruced up with copper gutters and an attached greenhouse to look new. Yews, bantam cedars and mountain laurels that were scrubby in the seventies are still young-appearing. The earth is flat out here, poorly drained and clayey. Plus, it’s dry as Khartoum. Still, a few maples and red oaks have matured, and paint jobs look fresh. Kids’ plastic gym sets and chain-link dog runs clutter many back lawns. Subarus and Horizons stand in new asphalt side drives (the garages jammed with out-of-date junk). Everything’s exactly as they pictured it when it was all a dream.

  Passing on the left now, opposite the houses, lies a perfect, well-tended cut cornfield extending prettily down to Mullica Creek, remnant of uses that predate memory but a plus to home buyers prizing atmosphere. Though you can be sure its pristine prettiness is giving current owners across the road restless nights for fear some enterpriser (such as the one driving my car) will one day happen along, stop for a look-see, make a cell-phone call and in six months throw up a hundred minimansions that’ll kick shit out of everybody’s tax bills, fill the roads, jam the schools with new students who score eight million on their math and verbal, who steal the old residents’ kids’ places at Brown, and whose families won’t speak to anybody because for religious reasons they don’t have to. Town ’n country takes a hike.

  Every morning, these original settlers who bought in at 85K—on what was Mullica Farm Road—frown down at their mutual-fund numbers, retotal their taxes against retirement investitures and wonder if now might be the time to roll over their 401s, move to the Lehigh Valley and try consulting before beating it to Phoenix at age sixty-two. Median house prices out here are at 450K, the fastest market in the land—last year. Only, that’s not holding. One or two neighbors already have BY OWNER signs up, which is worrisome. Though to me it’s all as natural as pond succession, and no one should regret it. I like the view of landscape in use.