Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  “Frank, Joe said he could see himself standing in the driveway being interviewed by a local TV reporter,” Phyllis says sheepishly, “and he didn’t want to be that person, not in the Houlihan house.” I must’ve already talked to Joe about my theory of seeing yourself and learning to like it, since he’s now claimed it as his own patented wisdom. Joe has apparently left the room.

  “What was he being interviewed about?” I say.

  “That didn’t matter, Frank. It was the whole situation.”

  Outside the glass doors in the orange-lit parking lot, a big gold-and-green cruiser bus pulls past the entrance, Eureka written on its side in lavish, curving scripted letters. I’ve seen these buses while driving to Sally’s via the Garden State. They’re usually crammed with schnockered Canucks headed for Atlantic City to gamble at Trump Castle. They motor straight through, arrive at 1 a.m., gamble forty-eight hours without cease (eats and drinks on the cuff), then hustle back on board and sleep the whole way back to Trois-Rivières, arriving in time for half a day’s work on Monday. Someone’s idea of fun. I’d like to get on my way before a crew of them comes storming in.

  Phyllis, though, has won a round, somehow letting Joe convince himself he’s the bad-tempered, tight-fisted old noncompromiser who put the ki-bosh on the Houlihan house. “We also feel, Frank,” Phyllis drones, “and I feel this as strongly as Joe, that we don’t want to be bossed around by a false economy.”

  “Which economy is that?” I say.

  “The housing one. If we don’t get in now, it could be better later.”

  “Well, that’s true. You never get in the river the same place twice,” I say dully. “I’m curious, though, if you know where you’re going to live by the time school starts.”

  “Uh-huh,” Phyllis says competently. “We think if worse comes to worst, Joe can rent a bachelor place near his work and I can stay on temporarily in Island Pond. Sonja can go right on with her friends in school. We plan to talk to the other relator about that.” Phyllis actually says “relator,” something I’ve never heard her say, indicating to me she’s reverting to a previous personality matrix—more desperate, but more calculating (also not unusual).

  “Well, that’s all pretty sound reasoning,” I say.

  “Do you think that, really?” Phyllis says, undisguised fear suddenly working through her voice like a pitchfork. “Joe says he didn’t have a feeling anything significant ever happened in any of the places you showed us. But I wasn’t sure.”

  “I wonder what he had in mind there?” I say. Possibly a celebrity murder? Or the discovery of a new solar system from an attic-window telescope?

  “Well, he thinks if we’re leaving Vermont we should be moving into a sphere of more important events that would bring us both up in some way. The places you showed us he didn’t think did that. Your houses might be better for someone else, maybe.”

  “They aren’t my houses, Phyllis. They belong to other people. I just sell them. Plenty of people do okay in them.”

  “I’m sure,” Phyllis says glumly. “But you know what I mean.”

  “Not really,” I say. Joe’s theory of significant events suggests to me he’s lost his new finger-hold on sanction. Though I’m not interested. If Joe rents a little dépendance in Manalapan, and Phyllis finds “meaningful” work substituting in the Island Pond alternative crafts school, gets into a new “paper group” with a cadre of acid-tongued but spiritually supportive women friends, while Sonja makes the pep squad at Lyndon Academy, marriage Markham-style will be a dead letter by Turkey Day. Which is the real issue here, of course (a pro-founder text runs beneath all realty decisions): Is being together worth the unbelievable horseshit required to satisfy the other’s needs? Or would it just be more fun to go it alone? “Looking at houses is a pretty good test of what you’re all about, Phyllis,” I say (the very last thing she wants to hear).

  “I would’ve looked at your colored house, Frank—I mean your rental. But Joe just didn’t feel right about it.”

  “Phyllis, I’m at a pay phone on the turnpike, so I better be going before a truck runs over me. But our rental market’s pretty tight, I think you’ll find.” I spy a phalanx of chortling Canadians, most of them in Bermudas, rumbling across the lot, all primed to hit the can, down a gut-bomb, have a sniff at the Vince trophy case, then grab one last en-route catnap before nonstop gaming commences.

  “Frank, I don’t know what to say.” I hear something made of glass being knocked over and broken into a lot of pieces. “Oh, shit,” Phyllis says. “This isn’t, by the way, a realtor in Haddam. She’s more in the East Brunswick area.” A portion of central New Jersey resembling the sere suburban scrub fields of Youngstown. It’s also where Skip McPherson rents ice time before daylight.

  “Well, that’ll have a whole new feel for you guys” (the Youngstown feel).

  “It’s sort of starting over, though, isn’t it?” Phyllis says, giving in to bewilderment.

  “Well, maybe Joe’ll picture himself better up there. And there really isn’t any starting over involved, Phyllis. It’s all part of your ongoing search.”

  “What do you think’s going to happen to us, Frank?”

  The Canadians are now bustling into the lobby, elbowing each other and yucking it up like hockey fans—men and women alike. They are big, healthy, happy, well-adjusted white people who aren’t about to miss any meals or get dressed up for rio good reason. They break off into pairs and threes, guys and gals, and go yodeling off through the metal double doors to the rest rooms. (The best all-around Americans, in my view, are Canadians. I, in fact, should think of moving there, since it has all the good qualities of the states and almost none of the bad, plus cradle-to-grave health care and a fraction of the murders we generate. An attractive retirement waits just beyond the forty-ninth parallel.)

  “Did you hear me, Frank?”

  “I hear you, Phyllis. Loud and clear.” The last of the laughing Canadian women, purses in hand, disappear into the women’s, where they immediately start unloading on the men and gassing about how “lucky” they were to hook up with a bunch of cabbage-heads like these guys. “You and Joe are just overwrought about happiness, Phyllis. You should just buy the first house you halfway like from your new realtor and start making yourselves happy. It’s not all that tricky.”

  “I’m just in a black mood because of my operation, I guess,” Phyllis says. “I know we’re pretty lucky. Some young people can’t even afford a home now.”

  “Some older people too.” I wonder if Phyllis visualizes herself and Joe as among the nation’s young. “I gotta get a move on here,” I say.

  “How’s your son? Didn’t you tell me he had Hotchkin’s or brain damage or something?”

  “He’s making a comeback, Phyllis.” Until this afternoon. “He’s quite a boy. Thanks for asking.”

  “Joe needs a lot of maintenance right now too,” Phyllis says, to keep me on the phone. (Some woman in the rest room lets out an Indian whoop that sets the rest of them howling. I hear a stall door bang shut. “Yew-guyz … Jeeeeez-us,” one of the men answers from next door.) “We’ve seen some changes in our relationship, Frank. It’s not easy to let someone into your inner circle if you’re both second-timers.”

  “It’s not easy for first-timers either,” I say impatiently. Phyllis seems to be angling for something. Though what? I once had a client—the wife of a church history professor and a mother of three, one of whom was autistic and got left in the car in a restraining harness—who asked me if I had any interest in getting naked with her on the polished floor of a ranch-style home in Belle Mead, a house her husband liked but she wanted a second look at because she felt the floor plan lacked “flow.” An instance of pure transference. Though no one in the realty business isn’t clued in to the sexual dimension: hours spent alone in close quarters (front seats of cars, provocatively empty houses); the not-quite-false aura of vulnerability and surrenderment; the possibility of a future in t
he same grid pattern, of unexpected, tingly sightings at the end of the lettuce rack, squirmy, almost-missed eye contact across a hot summer parking lot or through a plate-glass window with a spouse present. There have been instances in these three years and a half when I haven’t been a model citizen. Except you can lose your license for that kind of stunt and become a bad joke in the community, neither of which I care to risk as much as I might once have.

  Still, for some reason, I find myself imagining fleshy Phyllis not in a pink petunia print but a skimpy slip over her bare underneath, holding a tumbler of warm Scotch while she talks, and peeking out the blinds at the grainy-lit Sleepy Hollow parking lot as the innkeeper’s eighteen-year-old half-Polynesian son, Mombo, shirtless and muscles bulging, hauls a garbage bag around to the dumpster outside their bathroom in which sluggo Joe is grouchily tending to more of nature’s unthrilling needs behind closed doors. This is the second time today I’ve thought of Phyllis “in this way,” her health situation notwithstanding. My question, however, is: why?

  “So you live alone?” Phyllis says.

  “What’s that?”

  “Because Joe had at one time thought you might be gay, that’s all.”

  “Nope. A frayed knot, as my son says.” Though I’m baffled. In two hours I have been suspected of being a priest, a shithead and now, a homo. I’m apparently not getting my message across. I hear another round-bell go ding, as Joe turns up the TV from Mexico.

  “Well,” Phyllis says, whispering, “I just wished for a second I was going wherever you were going, Frank. That might be nice.”

  “You wouldn’t have a good time with me, Phyllis. I can promise that.”

  “Oh. It’s just crazy. Crazy, crazy talk.” Too bad she can’t get on the bus with the Canadians. “You’re a good listener, Frank. I’m sure it’s a plus in your profession.”

  “Sometimes. But not always.”

  “You’re just modest.”

  “Good luck to you two,” I say.

  “Well, we’ll see you, Frank. You be good. Thanks.”

  Clunk.

  The truckers who’ve been glowering at me have wandered off. And both sets of Canadians now emerge from their comfort stations, hands damp, noses blown, faces splashed, hair wet-combed, shirttails for the moment tucked, yaw-hawing about whatever nasty secrets were shared around inside. They march off into Roy’s, their skinny, uniformed bus driver standing just outside the glass doors, having a smoke and some P&Q in the hot night. He cuts his eyes my way, sees me down the phone bank watching him, shakes his head as if we both knew all about it, tosses his smoke and walks out of view.

  Without as much as one guarded thought left from dinner, I punch in Sally’s number, feeling that I’ve made a bad decision where she’s concerned, should’ve stayed and wooed my way out of the woods like a man who knows how to get messages across. (This of course may turn out to be a worse decision—tired, half drunk, fretful, not in control of my speech. Though sometimes it’s better to make a bad decision than no decision at all.)

  But Sally, from her message, must be in a similar frame of mind, and what I’d like to do is turn around and beat it back to her house, scramble into bed with her and have us go slap to sleep like old marrieds, then tomorrow haul her along, and begin instilling proper wanting practices into my life, and fun to boot, and quit being the man holding out. Forty psychics able to find Jimmy Hoffa in a landfill, or to tell you what street your missing twin Norbert’s living on in Great Falls, couldn’t tell me what’s a “better deal” than Sally Caldwell. (Of course, one of the Existence Period’s bedrock paradoxes is that just when you think you’re emerging, you may actually be wading further in.)

  “Uffda, ya goddamn knucklehead,” one of the Canadians yorks out as I listen intently to Sally’s phone ring and ring and ring.

  Though I’m quick to the next decision: leave a message saying I would’ve zoomed back but didn’t know where she was, yet I stand prepared to charter a Piper Comanche, zoom her up to Springfield, where Paul and I’ll pick her up in time for lunch. Zoom, zoom.

  But instead of her sweet voice and diversionary, security-conscious message—“Hi! We’re not here, but your call is important to us”—I get rings and more rings. I actually picture the phone vibrating all to hell on its table beside her big teester bed, which in my tableau is lovingly turned down but empty. I pound in the number again and try to visualize Sally dashing out of the shower or just coming in from a pensive midnight walk on Mantoloking beach, taking the front steps two at a time, forgetting her limp, hoping it’s me. And it is. Only, ring, ring, ring, ring.

  An overcooked, nearly nauseating hot dog smell floats across the lobby from Nathan’s. “And your mind’s a sewer too,” one of the Canuck women sounds off at one of the men standing in line.

  “So and what’s yers, eh? An operating room? I’m not married t’ya, okay?”

  “Yet,” another man guffaws.

  Defeated, I’m nonetheless ready to go, and take off striding right out through the lobby. Gaunt boys from Moonachie and Nutley are straying in toward the Mortal Kombat and Drug War machines, angling for the big kills. New weary-eyed travelers wander through the front doors, seeking relief of some stripe, ignoring the Vince trophy case—too much on a late night. I should, right here and now, buy something to bring Clarissa, but there’s nothing for sale but football crap and postcards showing the NJTpk in all four seasonal moods (I’ll have to find something tomorrow), and I pass out of the air-conditioning right by the Eureka driver, leaning one leg up on his idling juggernaut, surrounded now by white gulls standing motionless in the dark.

  Up again onto the streaming, light-choked turnpike, my dash-board digital indicating 12:40. It’s tomorrow already, July 2, and my personal aspirations are now trained on sleep, since the rest of tomorrow will be a testing day if everything goes in all details perfectly, which it won’t; so that, I’m determined—late departure and all—to put my woolly head down someplace in the Constitution State, as a small token of progress and encouragement to my journey.

  But the turnpike thwarts me. Along with construction slowdowns, entrance ramps merging, MEN WORKING, left-lane break-downs and a hot mechanical foreboding that the entire seaboard might simply explode, there’s now even more furious, grinding-mad-in-the-dark traffic and general vehicular desperation, as if to be caught in New Jersey after tonight will mean sure death.

  At Exit 18E&W, where the turnpike ends, cars are stacked before, beyond, around and out of sight toward the George Washington Bridge. Automated signs over the lanes counsel way-worn travelers to EXPECT LONG DELAYS, TAKE ALTERNATE ROUTE. More responsible advice would be: LOOK AT YOUR HOLE CARD. HEAD FOR HOME. I envision miles and miles of backup on the Cross Bronx (myself dangled squeamishly above the teeming hellish urban no-man’s-land below), followed by multiple-injury accidents on the Hutch, more long toll-booth tie-ups on the thruway, a blear monotony of NO VACANCYS clear to Old Saybrook and beyond, culminating in me sleeping on the back seat in some mosquito-plagued rest area and (worst case) being trussed and maimed, robbed and murdered, by anguished teens—who might right now be following me from the Vince—my body left for crows’ food, silent on a peak in Darien.

  So, as ill advised, I take an alternate route.

  Though there is no truly alternate route, only another route, a longer, barely chartable, indefensible fool’s route of sailing west to get east: up to 80, where untold cars are all flooding eastward, then west to Hackensack, up 17 past Paramus, onto the Garden State north (again!), though eerily enough there’s little traffic; through River Edge and Oradell and Westwood, and two tolls to the New York line, then east to Nyack and the Tappan Zee, down over Tarrytown (once home to Karl Bemish) to where the East opens up just as the North must have once for old Henry Hudson himself.

  What on a good summer night should take thirty minutes—the G.W. to Greenwich and straight into a pricey little inn with a moon-shot water view—takes me an hour and fi
fteen, and I am still south of Katonah, my eyes jinking and smarting, phantoms leaping from ditches and barrow pits, the threat of spontaneous dozing forcing me to grip the wheel like a Le Mans driver having a heart attack. Several times I consider just giving in, pulling off, falling over sideways from fatigue, surrendering to whatever the night stalkers lurking on the outskirts of Pleasantville and Valhalla have dreamed up for me—my car down on its rims, my trunk jimmied, luggage and realty signs strewn around, my wallet lifted by shadowy figures in Air Jordans.

  But I’m too close. And instead of staying on big, safe, reliable 287 up to big, safe, reliable 684 and pushing the extra twenty miles to Danbury (a virtual Motel City, with maybe an all-night liquor outlet), I turn north on the Sawmill (its homespun name alone makes me sleepy) and head toward Katonah, checking my AAA atlas for the quickest route into CT.

  Then, almost unnoticeable, a tiny wooden sign—CONNECTICUT—with a small hand-painted arrow seeming to point right out of the 1930s. And I make for it, down NY 35, my headlights vacuuming its narrow, winding, stone-walled, woods-to-the-verge alleyways toward Ridgefield, which I calculate (distances that look long on the map are actually short) to be twelve miles. And in ten minutes flat I’m there, the sleeping village rising into pretty, bucolic view, meaning that I’ve somehow crossed the state line without knowing it.

  Ridgefield, as I drive cautiously up and through, my eyes peeled for cops and motels, is a hamlet that even in the pallor of its barium-sulfur streetlights would remind anyone but a lifelong Ridgefielder of Haddam, New Jersey—only richer. A narrow, English high street emerges from the woodsy south end, leads through a hickory-shaded, lush-lawned, deep-pocketed mansion district of mixed architectural character, each mansion with big-time security in place, winds through a quaint, shingled, basically Tudor CBD of attached shops (rich realtors, a classic-car showroom, a Japanese deli, a fly-tiers shop, a wine & liquor, a Food For Thought Books). A walled war-memorial green lies just at village center, flanked by big Protestant churches and two more mansions converted to lawyers’ offices. The Lions meet Wednesday, the Kiwanis Thursday. Other, shorter streets bend away to delve and meander through more modest but still richly tree-lined neighborhoods, with lanes named Baldy, Pudding, Toddy Hill, Scarlet Oak and Jasper. Plainly, anyone living below the Cross Bronx would move here if he or she could pay the freight.