Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  It is of course foregone that they will rent the house and move in as early as within the hour. Though in the spirit of lagniappe I am acting as if all is not yet quite settled. Another realtor might adopt a supercilious spirit toward the Markhams for being hopeless donkeys who wouldn’t know a good deal if it grabbed them by the nuts. But to me it’s ennobling to help others face their hard choices, pilot them toward a reconciliation with life (it’s useful in piloting toward one’s own). In this case, I’m helping them believe renting is what they should do (being wise and cautious), by promoting the fantasy that each is acting in his own best interest by attempting to make the other happy.

  “Now, I can tell this is a completely stable neighborhood,” Joe says with more of an off-duty military style now. (He means, though, no Negroes in evidence, which he takes to be a blessing.) He’s remained on the bottom step, small hands inserted in his pockets. He’s dressed entirely in Sears khaki and looks like a lumberyard foreman, his nutty goatee gone, his pecker shorts, flip-flops and generic smokes all gone, his little cheeky face as peaceable and wide-eyed as a baby’s, his lips pale with medicated normalcy. (The “big cave-in” has apparently been averted.) He is, I’m sure, contemplating the front bumper of my Crown Vic, where sometime in the last three days Paul—or someone like Paul—has affixed a LICK BUSH sticker which, also in the spirit of lagniappe, I’m leaving on.

  Joe senses, I’m sure, his gaze carrying across the newly mown lawn and down Clio Street, that this neighborhood is a close replica writ small of the nicer parts of Haddam he was offered and mulishly turned down, and of nicer parts he wasn’t offered and couldn’t afford. Only he seems happy now, which is my wish for him: to put an end to his unhappy season of wandering, set aside his ideas of the economy’s false bottom or whether a significant event ever occurred in this house, to be a chooser instead of a bad-tempered beggar, to view life across a flatter plain (as he may be doing) and come down off the realty frontier.

  Though specifically my wish is that the Markhams would move into 46 Clio, ostensibly as a defensive holding action, but gradually get to know their neighbors, talk yard-to-yard, make friends, see the wisdom of bargaining for a break in the rent in exchange for minor upkeep responsibilities, join the PTA, give pottery and papermaking demonstrations at the block association mixers, become active in the ACLU or the Urban League, begin to calculate their enhanced positive cash flow against the dour financial imperatives of ownership in fashioning an improved quality of life, and eventually stay ten years—after which they can move to Siesta Key and buy a condo (if condos still exist in 1998), using the money they’ve saved by renting. In other words, do in New Jersey exactly what they did in Vermont—arrive and depart—only with happier results. (Conservative, long-term renters are, of course, any landlord’s dream.)

  “I think we’re damn lucky not to have got sucked into that Hanrahan house.” Joe looks at me with a bully’s self-assurance, as if he’s just figured this out by staring down the street—though of course he’s only angling for approval (which I’m happy to supply).

  “I don’t think you ever saw yourself in that house, Joe. I don’t really think you liked it.” He’s still staring off from the bottom step, waiting, I take it, for nothing.

  “I didn’t like having a prison in my back yard,” Phyllis says, fingering the doorbell, which chimes a distant, lonesome two tones back in the empty rooms. She is dressed in her own standard roomy, hip-concealing pleated khakis and sleeveless white ruffle-front blouse that makes her appear swollen. In spite of trying to act plucky, she looks hollow-cheeked and spent, her face too flushed, her fingernails worked down, her eyes moist as if she might start crying for no reason—though her red mushroom cut is as ever neat, clean and fluffy. (Possibly she’s experiencing recurrent health woes, though it’s more likely her last few days on earth have simply been as rigorous as mine.)

  And yet despite these diminishments, I sense an earnest, almost equable acceptance is descending on both the Markhams: certain fires gone out; other, smaller ones being ignited. So that it’s conceivable they’re on the threshold of unexpected bliss, know it instinctually like a lucky charm but can’t quite get it straight, so long has their luck been shitty.

  “My view’s simple,” Joe says, apropos of the lost Hanrahan option. “If somebody buys a house you think you want before you can get it, they just wanted it more than you did. It’s no tragedy.” He shakes his head at the sound wisdom of this, though once again it’s verbatim “realtor’s wisdom” I provided long months ago but actually don’t mind hearing now.

  “You’re right there, Joe,” I say. “You’re really right. Let’s take a look inside, whaddaya say?”

  A walk-thru of an empty house you expect to rent (and not buy and live in till you croak) is not so much a careful inspection as a half-assed once-over in which you hope to find as little as possible to drive you crazy.

  The Harrises’ house, in spite of opened doors, raised windows and every single tap run for at least a minute, has clung to its unwelcoming older-citizen odor of sink traps and mouse bait, and generally stayed dank and chilly throughout. As a consequence, Phyllis lingers noncommittally near the windows, while Joe heads right off for the bathroom and a quick closet count. She touches the nubbly plaster walls and looks out through the blue blinds, first at the close-by McLeods’, then down at the narrow side yard, then into the back, where the garage sits locked up in the morning sunshine, surrounded by a bed of day lilies weeks past bloom. (I’ve left the push mower against the garage wall where they can notice it.) She tries one sink faucet, opens one cabinet and the refrigerator (which I have somehow failed to inspect but am relieved to find doesn’t stink), then walks to the back door, leans and looks out its window, as if in her mind right outside should be a verdant mountain pinnacle in full view, where she could hike today and take a drink from a cold spring, then lie faceup in gentians and columbines as pillowy clouds scud past, causing no car alarms to go off. She has wanted to come here, and now here she is, though it requires a specific moment of wistful renunciation, during which she may once again be seeing backward to today from an uncertain future, a time when Joe is “gone,” the older kids are even more scattered and alienated, Sonja is with her own second husband and his kids in Tucumcari, and all she can do is wonder how things took the peculiar course they did. Such a view would make anyone but a Taoist Sage a little abstracted.

  She turns to me and smiles actually wistfully. I am in the arched doorway connecting the small dining room with the small, neat kitchen, my hands in my red windbreaker pockets. I regard her companionably while fingering the house keys. I am where a loved one would wait below a mistletoe sprig at Christmas, though my reverie of a physical Phyllis has become another holiday statistic.

  “We did think about just staying permanently in a motel,” she says almost as a warning. “Joe considered becoming an independent contractor at the book company. The money’s so much better that way, but you pay for your own benefits, which is a big consideration for me now. We met another young couple there who were doing it, but they didn’t have a child, and it’s hard to go off to school from a Ramada. The clean sheets and cable are attractive to Joe. He even called some nine hundred number at two o’clock this morning about moving to Florida. We were just beyond making sense.”

  Joe is in the bathroom, studiously testing the sink and both faucets, checking out the medicine cabinet. He does not know how to rent a house and can only think in terms of permanence.

  “I expect you all to keep right on looking,” I say. “I expect to sell you a house.” I smile at her, as I have in other houses, in direr straits than now, which in fact are not so dire but pretty damn good at $575.

  “We were burning our candle at both ends, I guess,” she says, standing in the middle of the empty red-tiled kitchen. It is not the right trope, but I understand. “We need to burn one end at a time for a while.”

  “Your candle lasts longer that way,”
I say idiotically. There isn’t much that really needs saying in any case. They’re renting, not buying, and she is simply not used to it either. All is fine.

  “Bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, bip,” Joe can be heard saying back in the bedroom, seizing his chance to check the filters on the window unit.

  “How’s your son?” Phyllis looks at me oddly, as if it has occurred to her at this very second that I’m not at his bedside but am here showing a short-term rental on the 4th of July with my child on the critical list. A sense of shared parental responsibility but also personal accusation clouds her eyes.

  “He came through the surgery real well, thanks.” I fidget the keys in my pocket to make a distracting sound. “He’ll have to wear glasses. But he’s moving down here with me in September.” Perhaps in a year, as a trusted older boy, he can even escort Sonja on a date to a mall.

  “Well, he’s lucky,” Phyllis says, swaying a little, her hands judgmentally down in her own generous pockets. “Fireworks are dangerous no matter whose hands they’re in. They’re banned in Vermont.” She now wants me out of her house. In the span of sixty seconds she’s assumed responsibility for things here.

  “I’m sure he’s learned his lesson,” I say, and then we stand saying nothing, listening to Joe’s footsteps in the other rooms, the sound of closet doors being cracked open and reopened to check for settling, light switches clicked up and down, walls thumped for studs—all activities accompanied by the occasional “Bip, bip, bip” or an “Okay, yep, I get it,” now and then an “Uh-oh,” though most often “Hmm-hmmm.” All, of course, is in perfect, turn-key condition; the house was gone over by Everick and Wardell after the Harrises left, and I have checked it myself (though not lately).

  “No basement, huh?” Joe says, appearing suddenly in the hall doorway, from which he takes a quick look around the ceiling and back out toward the open front door. The house is warming now, its floors shiny with outside light, its dank odors shifting away through the open windows. “I’ll have to improvise a kiln somewhere else, I guess.” (No mention of Phyllis’s papermaking needs.)

  “They just didn’t build ’em in this neighborhood.” I nod, touch my sore, bitten cheek with my tonguetip, feel relieved Joe isn’t planning to fire pots on site.

  “You can bet it’s a groundwater consideration,” Joe says in a spurious engineer’s voice, going to the window and looking out as Phyllis did, straight into the side of the McLeods’ house, where my hope is he doesn’t come eye-to-eye with a shirtless Larry McLeod aiming his 9-mm. across the side yard. “Anything really bad ever happen in this house, Frank?” He scratches the back of his bristly neck and peers down at something outside that has caught his eye—a cat, possibly.

  “Nothing I know about. I guess all houses have pasts. The ones I’ve lived in all sure did. Somebody’s bound to have died in some room here sometime. I just don’t know who.” I say this to annoy him, knowing he’s out of options, and because I know his question is a two-bit subterfuge for broaching the race issue. He doesn’t want credit for broaching it, but he’d be happy if I would.

  “Just wondering,” Joe says. “We built our own house in Vermont, is all. Nothing bad ever happened there.” He continues staring down, inventorying other gambits. “I guess this is a drug-free zone.” Phyllis looks over at him as if she’d just realized she hated him.

  “S’far’s I know,” I say. “It’s a changing universe, of course.”

  “Right. No shit.” Joe shakes his head in the fresh window light.

  “Frank can’t be held responsible for the neighbors,” Phyllis says crabbily (though it’s not completely true). She has been standing under the arch with me, looking at the empty walls and floors, possibly envisioning her lost life as a child. Only her mind’s made up.

  “Who lives next door?” Joe says.

  “On the other side, an elderly couple named Broadnax. Rufus was a Pullman porter on the New York Central. You won’t see them much, but I’m sure you’ll like them. Over on the other side is a younger couple” (of miscreants). “She’s from Minnesota. He’s a Viet vet. They’re interesting folks. I own that house too.”

  “You own ‘em both?” Joe turns and gives me a crafty, squint-eyed look, as if I’d just grown vastly in his estimation and was probably crooked.

  “Just these two,” I say.

  “So you’re holdin’ onto ’em till they’re worth a fortune?” He smirks. For the moment he has begun speaking in a Texas accent.

  “They’re already worth a fortune. I’m just waiting till they’re worth two fortunes.”

  Joe adopts an even more ludicrous, self-satisfied expression of appreciation. He’s always had my number but now sees we are much more of a pair and a lot sharper cookies than he ever thought (even if we are crooked), since socking away for the future’s exactly what he believes in doing—and might be doing if he hadn’t plunged off on a two-decade Wanderjahr to the land of mud season, black ice, disappointing perk tests and feast-or-famine resales, only to reenter the real world with just the vaguest memory of which coin a quarter was and which was a dime.

  “It’s all still a matter of perception, idn’t it?” Joe says enigmatically.

  “It seems to be, these days,” I say, thinking perhaps he’s talking about real estate. I more noisily jingle the keys to signal my readiness to get a move on—though I have little to do until noon.

  “Okay, well, I’m pretty satisfied here,” Joe says decisively, Texas accent gone, nodding his head vigorously. Through the window he’s been looking out, and across the side yard, I see little Winnie McLeod’s sleepy face behind the thin curtain, frowning at us. “Whaddaya think, baby doll?”

  “I can make it nicer,” Phyllis says, her voice moving around the empty room like a trapped spirit. (I’ve never imagined Phyllis as “baby doll” but am willing to.)

  “Maybe Frank’ll sell it to us when we come into our inheritance.” Joe gives me a little tongue-out, sly-boots wink.

  “Two inheritances,” I say and wink back. “This baby’ll cost ya.”

  “Yeah, okay. Two, then,” Joe says. “When we make two fortunes we can own a five-and-a-half-room house in the darky section of Haddam, New Jersey. That’s a deal, isn’t it? That’s a success story you can brag to your grandkids about.” Joe rolls his eyes humorously to the ceiling and gives his shiny forehead a thump with his middle finger. “How ‘bout the election? How d’ya choose?”

  “I’m joined at the hip with the tax-and-spenders, I guess.” Joe wouldn’t be asking if he weren’t at this very moment vacating long-held principles of cultural liberalism in favor of something leaner and meaner and more suitable to his new gestalt. He expects me to sanction this too.

  “You mean joined at the wallet,” Joe says dopily. “But hell, yes. Me too.” This to my absolute surprise. “Just don’t ask me. My old man”—the Chinese-slum king of Aliquippa—“had a wide streak of social conscience. He was a Socialist. But what the fuck. Maybe living here’ll pound some sense in my head. Now Phyllis, here, she’s the mahout, she rides the elephant.” Phyllis starts for the door, tired and unamused by politics. Joe fastens on me a gaping, blunt-toothed, baby-faced smile of philosophical comradeship. These things, of course, are never as you expect. Anytime you find you’re right, you should be wrong.

  It is good to stand out on the hot sidewalk with the two of them under the spreading sycamore, and encouraging to see how quickly and tidily permanence asserts its illusion and begins to confer a bounty.

  In fifteen minutes the Markhams have become longtime residents, and I their unwieldy, unwished-for guest. An invitation to come back, have lemonade, sit out back on nylon lawn chairs is definitely not forthcoming. They both squint from the pavement to the sun and the untroubled beryl sky as though they judge a good soaking rain—and not my paltry, unremarked watering—to be the only thing that’ll do their yard any good.

  We have painlessly agreed on a month-to-month, with three months in ad
vance as a security blanket for me—though I’ve consented to remit a month if they find a house worth buying in the first thirty days (fat chance). I’ve passed along our agency’s “What’s The Diff?” booklet, spelling out in layman’s terms the pros and cons of renting vs. buying: “Never pay over 20 percent of gross income on housing,” although “You always sleep better in a place you own” (debatable). There’s nothing, however, about needing to “see” yourself, or securing sanction or the likelihood of significant events ever having occurred in your chosen abode. Those issues are best dealt with by a shrink, not a realtor. Finally we’ve agreed to sign the papers tomorrow in my office, and I’ve told them to feel free to haul in their sleeping bags and camp out in their “own house” tonight. Who could say nay?

  “Sonja’s going to find it real eye-opening here,” Phyllis the Republican says with confidence. “It’s what we came down here for, but maybe we didn’t know it.”

  “Reality check,” Joe says stonily. They’re both referring to the race issue, albeit deviously, while holding each other’s hand.

  We are beside my car, which gleams blue and hot in the ten o’clock sun. I have the Harrises’ accumulated junk mail and the Trenton Times tucked under my arm, and have handed over their keys.

  I know that filtering up like rare and rich incense in both the Markhams’ nostrils is the up-to-now endangered prospect of life’s happy continuance—a different notion entirely from Irv Ornstein’s indecisive, religio-ethnic-historical one, though he might claim they’re the same. An abrupter feeling is the Markhams’, though, tantamount to the end of a prison sentence imposed for crimes they’ve been helpless to avoid: the ordinary misdemeanors and misprisions of life, of which we’re all innocent and guilty. Alive but unrecognized in their pleased but dizzied heads is at least now the possibility of calling on Myrlene Beavers with a hot huckleberry pie or a blemished-second “gift” pot from Joe’s new kiln; or of finding common ground regarding in-law problems with Negro neighbors more their age; of letting little dark-skinned kids sleep over; of nurturing what they both always knew they owned in their hearts but never exactly found an occasion to act on in the monochrome Green Mountains: that magical sixth-sense understanding of the other races, which always made the Markhams see themselves as out-of-the-ordinary white folks.