The Association

by Bentley Little

  Maureen now understood the lack of a personal touch in Liz's house, the general sparseness in the interiors of the other homes she'd seen. She could not recall reading anything about this in the sacred C, C, and Rs, but she had no doubt that they would find it in the document if they looked through it right now. She stared at the short-haired yuppie's falsely friendly face and was filled with anger and the type of stubborn rage that Barry must have been experiencing. There was no way on God's earth that she was going to rearrange her house according to the dictates of the association. No one could tell her how to decorate her own home, and she'd be damned if an impersonal document created by a cabal of her most fascistic neighbors was going to impose some type of lunatic standards on her taste.

  Barry was on the exact same wavelength. "What gives you the right to come into our house and pry into our private life and tell us what we can and can't do in our own fucking home?" He started out speaking at a normal volume, but by the end of the question he was shouting.

  "I'm chairman of the inspection committee," Bill said brightly, walking away from them. He nodded as he stepped out the door. "Good night to you." He closed the door behind him and they heard the lock turn.

  "Didn't we have the deadbolt and chain hooked up?" Maureen said, turning toward Barry.

  He nodded. "I was thinking the same thing."

  "How did they--"

  "I don't know."

  Every light in the house had been turned on. Downstairs, lights in the hall, bathroom, and Maureen's office were blazing, and the thought that those men had been snooping through her belongings while she was asleep in the next room chilled her to the bone. But she was far more angry than scared, and she remembered a horror movie Barry had forced her to watch in which parents had booby-trapped their house to catch their daughter's murderers, and she wished she could do the same thing here.

  Right now, the thought of Bill and his smug little lookalikes speared on some make shift shiv sounded mighty appealing.

  Neither of them had bothered to look at the time, but as they went from room to room, checking to make sure nothing was broken or stolen, turning off the lights, she saw by the clock in the kitchen that it was two-thirty.

  It was another ten minutes before they were back in bed, and although Barry was snoring almost instantly, it was a long time before she was able to fall asleep.

  As early as was polite, she called Liz.

  Barry was taking his shower, and she poured herself a cup of coffee while she dialed her friend's number.

  The voice that answered halfway through the first ring was wary and suspicious. "Yes?"

  "Hello, Liz? It's me, Maureen."

  "Maureen." Her name was repeated in a disassociated monotone that raised the hackles on her neck and set off alarm bells in her head.

  "Liz? Are you all right?"

  "Fine. I'm fine." But the monotone remained, her friend's voice drained of its usual life.

  "What happened? What did they do?"

  Liz didn't answer.

  Maureen spoke quickly before her friend hung up. "It's the association," she said. "That's why I'm calling. They've come down on us for ... for... shit, for our interior decorating. We woke up in the middle of the night and five of those assholes had broken into our house to 'inspect' it. They told us we had to get rid of family photos and personal effects, and we had to rearrange our entire house."

  Liz's voice exhibited its first sign of emotion.

  Fear.

  "The middle of the night?"

  "Yes."

  "They always come in the middle of the night." Again the monotone.

  "What happened to you?" Maureen asked once more. "No. Don't say anything. I understand that you can't talk over the phone. I'll come up--"

  "No!" her friend said sharply.

  "Liz..."

  "Do. Not. Come. To. See. Me." The words were bitten off.

  "I know you're--"

  "It's not safe."

  The old woman's voice was replaced by a dial tone. She'd hung up, and Maureen stared blankly down at the phone for a moment, unsure of what to do. If she called back, Liz probably wouldn't answer--and if she did answer, she'd be angry. She'd been specifically ordered not to go to Liz's house, so that was out of the question.

  Tina.

  Maureen found the other woman's number and called.

  Mike answered the phone, and she asked to speak to his wife. A minute later, Tina was on the line, sounding sleepy. "Hello?"

  "This is Maureen. Did I wake you up?"

  "Sort of."

  "Sorry, but it's kind of an emergency." She explained about their nighttime visitors and about her unsettling call to Liz. "First things first," she said. "What do we do about Liz?"

  "What can we do? You know what happened last time. We all tried to help her, but she just shut us out. I'll call her myself later, go up there if she'll let me, and maybe call Audrey and Moira, too. But I'll tell you true, I have a feeling it's going to be the same situation.

  There may be nothing we can do. She might have to just work it out herself."

  "And if she can't?"

  Tina didn't answer.

  "What about our situation?"

  Tina sighed. "I wondered when they were going to crack down on you."

  "You knew about this?"

  "I guess."

  "Why didn't you say anything? Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I thought maybe you'd squeaked by, maybe they hadn't seen the inside of your house or for some reason didn't want to make you conform. I

  didn't want to worry you unnecessarily or draw attention and let them know that you'd escaped them. But... but I guess in the back of my mind I knew it would happen."

  "You should have told me about this," Maureen said.

  "You're right. I'm sorry." Her voice was wistful. "But it was nice seeing family photos again. And more than one wall of pictures and hangings. And all those collectibles and antiques you have."

  "You're still going to see them," Maureen told her. "We're not changing anything."

  There was a pause, as if Tina did not know how to respond to that. "But you have to."

  "What if we don't?"

  Tina's voice grew lower. "The fines will start. And you don't want to get into that cycle. Believe me."

  "Then what can we do?"

  "There's nothing you can do," Tina said. "It's something we all have to put up with."

  "Middle of the night inspections?"

  "Well," she admitted, "ours have never been in the middle of the night.

  Probably they just wanted to rattle you."

  "That's selective enforcement right there, then. They're treating us differently than they treat everyone else."

  "I don't know if I'd say that," Tina added quickly. "We've escaped it, but that doesn't mean other people have."

  "But you'd stand up for us? You'd tell the truth? You'd sign a statement saying that your inspections have all been at reasonable hours?"

  More backpedaling. "Sign a statement? I'd have to talk to Mike about that."

  Tina obviously wasn't going to be much help. And if she wasn't brave enough to stand up to the association, Maureen was sure no one else would be. Rather than tempering her anger, the disappointment she felt only fueled it further, and she said a quick goodbye.

  She and Barry were in this alone; they'd have to face down the association by themselves.

  But that was okay. They didn't need anybody else.

  When Barry came out of the shower, she was sitting at the dining room table, staring out the window at the trees, nibbling on a piece of cold toast.

  "Did you call Liz?" he asked.

  "And Tina."

  "And?" he prodded when she didn't elaborate.

  She told him about both conversations, about Liz's frightened paranoia and Tina's ineffectual support.

  "What do you want to do?" Barry asked. "Do you still want to go back to California?"

  "Hell no."

  "That's
the spirit."

  "Fuck 'em," Maureen said, and the words felt good. "We're not going anywhere. We're staying here just long enough to wipe our asses with those damn C, C, and Rs ."

  It was another fine.

  He had paid none of them yet, but they'd been arriving daily, signed by the association's treasurer--someone named Thompson Hughes. They were all ridiculously inflated, and although he hadn't kept track, the total they owed must be well over three thousand dollars by now. It was ludicrous that they were being penalized in such a way for minor infractions of unreasonable rules, and he'd saved each of the notices for a future court case.

  Barry dropped the rest of the mail on the coffee table and tore open the unstamped envelope. This one was levied against them for failure to park both of their vehicles facing in the same direction. For that offense, the association was docking them seven hundred and fifty dollars.

  "Seven hundred and fifty this time," he said.

  Maureen looked up from her book. "Losers."

  With the fine notice was another form, and he unfolded the paper and scanned its contents.

  "Jesus," he breathed.

  "What's it say?"

  "The title is "Bath and Toilet Violations." Does that give you some clue?"

  "Let me see that!"

  He handed her the paper. "Someone has apparently been monitoring our bathroom habits. It says that you do not| have the right number of tampons or maxipads , that a certain surplus number is required, which you have failed to j maintain, and that we are discharging three gallons more effluent than is allowable for a domestic residence with two I people."

  Her face paled as she read. "My God." She looked at him. "You think they have a camera in there?"

  "It's possible--and I'm going to get some wallpaper and cover over every square inch of the wall and ceiling just in case--but that maxipad/tampon thing is not something that you could find out with a camera. Someone's been snooping, someone's been in the house."

  "But when? We've been home all the time."

  "While we were sleeping," he said, and the thought of it curdled his blood. Bill and his inspectors were one thing. As invasive and intrusive as that had been, at least they'd been open about it, at least they had made their presence known. But the idea of people breaking into their home and sneaking around in the dark, checking on Maureen's feminine hygiene products and God knew what else, made his skin crawl. Who were they? And how many of them? The scenario conjured by his writer's imagination had Kenny and the most disfigured volunteers creeping, crawling, and limping silently through the rooms of the house, peeking at and examining their most intimate items:

  fingering his condoms, sniffing Maureen's dirty panties.

  And the scary thing was that he was probably not that far off the mark.

  He did indeed put wallpaper over the walls and ceiling, founding off the corners so there would be no cracks or gaps through which miniature devices could peer. They had several rolls left over from their initial renovation, and it occurred to him that perhaps he should re-wallpaper the entire house--or at least those rooms where they'd painted rather than papered the walls--but the thought was intimidating, He recalled how much work they'd done that first month, and he didn't want to go through that again unless he absolutely had to. Besides, there was no indication that any other rooms were under surveillance.

  Maybe they needed to watch BVTV more often.

  As he should have expected, the next day they received a notice alerting them that they had made unauthorized changes to a room's appearance without getting approval from the interior design committee.

  They were required to both pay an eight-hundred-and-twenty-dollar fine and remove the wallpaper.

  "Fuck that," he said.

  "I wonder how the people before us survived," Maureen said. "This place was like a bat cave when we bought it. They must have broken at least as many decorating rules as we have."

  "Maybe they didn't survive."

  She looked at him quizzically.

  "Did you notice on all those papers we signed when we bought this place that it said Jordan and Sara Gardner Trust! I wondered about that at the time. I assume it meant that the owners were dead and their relatives were selling off the house."

  "Probably to pay the fines."

  They spent the afternoon at Mike and Tina's. Liz was still avoiding contact with everyone, hiding reclusively in her house, keeping her door locked and her drapes drawn, and they were all worried for her, though none of them had any ideas of how to help. Maureen had sent her a long letter through the mail, trying to appeal to the old woman's logical side and assuring her that she had a lot of allies and didn't have to face anything alone, no matter what it was, but no one was even sure if Liz was collecting her mail these days.

  "I'll tell you one thing," Mike said. "This wouldn't have happened if Ray was still here."

  "A lot of things wouldn't have happened if Ray was still here,"

  Barry agreed.

  Indeed, Ray's death seemed to have been the catalyst for| much of what had occurred since. He had been a sort of un-official opposition leader, the only person with enough influence and gravitas to counteract the association's monopolization, and once he was out of the way, once that domino had fallen, everything else had started to come undone.

  Barry wanted to get the names of the people who had attended the Dysons' parties, all of Ray's anti-association acquaintances. "We can put together a petition," he said, "try to get a recall."

  "First of all," Mike told him, "there are no recalls. It's disallowed.

  There's no such thing here. Secondly, the annual meeting is coming up on Labor Day weekend. That's when they vote for officers, make amendments to the C, C, and Rs , conduct all that sort of association business. It's when they allow us mortals to see the man behind the curtain."

  "So that's our big chance."

  "Yeah."

  "If I can talk to enough people, get them to propose, second, and vote for a number of different initiatives, we can institute some of our own reforms."

  "In theory."

  "You don't think it's possible?"

  "Let's just say I've been to these meetings before. I know how they go."

  "Is it true that on the ballot you can only approve the existing board, there's no other choices?"

  "Oh yeah."

  "You also have to bring your federal income tax forms to the meeting,"

  Tina said. "The ones from last year. That's when we turn them in."

  Maureen frowned. "Why is that?"

  "It's required," Mike said. "As crazy as it sounds, the courts have upheld this. It's perfectly legal. I would've thought it was an invasion of privacy, but an association can require full financial disclosure from any homeowner who belongs to it. And of course our association does."

  Maureen turned toward Barry. "That's how they learned about the precariousness of the Davidsons ' finances, why they knew that an increase in property taxes would force them to move."

  Mike nodded. "Yep."

  "About Greg Davidson ..." Barry said.

  "What?"

  "At Ray's party, he said they were going to sell their house and move.

  His brother or someone had found him a job in Arizona."

  "Yeah."

  "But they didn't move. I saw Greg. He's one of the volunteers. I

  don't know what happened to Wynona, but Greg was helping to dig the pool and he was at the gate the night of the rally."

  Mike and Tina exchanged a look. Barry caught it, but he didn't know what it meant, and suddenly he wasn't sure if he should say any more.

  He thought about Frank and Audrey Open my box --and realized that he really didn't know Mike and Tina any better. His gut said they were okay, and they seemed to have all the right ideas, but in Bonita Vista you could never tell.

  Maureen seemed to have caught the same vibe. "You don't want to talk about the volunteers."

  "It's not that," Tina said. "It's just..." She
looked over at her husband.

  "We didn't find out about them for a long time ourselves," Mike offered. "And, you're right. They're not something that people talk about. Everyone knows they're there, and they help clear the roads after big storms and| stuff, but we like to pretend like we don't know anything! about them."

  Barry shook his head. "I don't understand why you--"

  "I volunteered for a week myself."

  They were stunned, silent. If Mike had said he'd murdered his first wife and met Tina after his release from prison, it could not have been more shocking, and Barry marveled at how sinister such a mundane concept had become in this wacked -out world.

  "I truly did volunteer," Mike said. "I was fined a hundred dollars for violating Article Eight, going outside in the morning to pick up my newspaper while wearing a bathrobe. You're not supposed to appear outside the house wearing a robe. We could've paid the fine, but our refrigerator was going, we'd been saving up for a new one, and this would've put us back another month. I'd heard through the grapevine that you could volunteer, that you could work off your fine instead of pay it, and I approached the board and they said okay. I was assigned to pick up trash on the roads and in the ditches for a week."

  "And that was it?" Barry asked.

  "Not exactly. On Saturday, the last day, I was told to help clear dried brush from one of the green belts and I found out for the first time that there were ... gradations of volunteers. There were people like me, who were assigned specific tasks for a specific amount of time, and there were people who weren't trying to work off anything.

  They were just volunteering to help out, and they could pretty much do whatever they wanted to on whatever needed to be done." He licked his lips. "Then there were the indentureds and I'm pretty sure that's what Greg is. They're the ones who've lost their homes but owe so much that even that doesn't cover it. They pretty much sign away their lives, forfeit their rights and are at the association's beck and call until their debts are paid off. They supposedly live together in a bunkhouse somewhere, although I still don't know where that is.