Local Knowledge

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  “I need to get you home, Maddie,” he told me again, sitting up to lean on his elbow and looking down at me. I knew—and I didn’t know—what he really needed. We’d been kissing for a long time, and then he’d pulled away from me. I think I was well aware of what I was doing. Of course I was, though it was his pleasure I was interested in rather than my own. What thrilled me was the effect I had on him. The fact that I could simply reach up and pull his face down toward mine …

  I never considered blaming him or regretting that, in the end, he didn’t take me home. I wasn’t brought up on a steady diet of guilt the way Paul had been. I’d been coddled all my life, allowed to grow almost to full adulthood without having to learn the meaning of self-sacrifice or discipline. I simply took what I wanted, and gave the same way. But I also think that Paul valued the whole thing far more than I believed it was worth. Afterward, he was as remorseful as I’d ever seen him up until that point. As a rule, it’s the girl who’s supposed to cry. But Paul wept for us. I remember feeling that I’d been undone, but not in an unpleasant way—more like a present with paper and ribbons scattered all around. So, I thought, I’ve given myself to Paul. That was all. It had been thoroughly detached from my other, much deeper feelings for him.

  Whereas for Paul, it was as real and serious as anything he’d ever done. He’d sinned, and there was only one way in his eyes to make it right. He committed himself to me that night, though he decided not to burden me with the gravity of his intentions until he thought I was ready to accept them. In the meantime, I was to be protected and cherished. He didn’t understand that I was complicit in our lovemaking, that in many ways it was me who seduced him. He could not see what Luke saw at a glance: I was willing to do just about anything to be accepted and loved.

  I worked for my father that summer, too, though it was as slow as any of the midwinter months. The only steady and significant custom came from Westhover, the contracting firm that was building the new condominium complex outside Northridge. Though my father had initially demanded and received payment up front, he’d extended credit when the company promised him that he would be awarded an exclusive contract as middleman and supplier. It was unlike him to be so careless and trusting; he must have really needed to believe that the offer was legitimate. In fact, the larger hardware and lumberyard in Northridge had run a credit check and knew the organization was shaky. It was about halfway through the summer when my father learned the company was filing for Chapter 11.

  “Well, guess who else isn’t getting paid?” Paul said when I told him our bad news.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dad let two of the regulars go and he’s got Ethan, Bob, and me working for nothing. No, not nothing: he claims he’s giving us food and board for free. It’s no better than being a slave.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I promised Dad I wouldn’t. We all did. He’s a little nuts right now in case you haven’t noticed.” But I hadn’t noticed. I didn’t yet understand how much of what transpired among members of that family was hard to detect by outsiders, even those of us who would eventually become in-laws. They communicated on some primordial, nonverbal level, and despite their differing temperaments, they rarely argued. Theirs was an old-fashioned patriarchy, and I was impressed with the respect and obedience Dandridge demanded and received from his children. But for all their seeming openness and bluff goodwill to everyone they knew, the Aldens were a tribe unto themselves, especially when things were going against them. Then the doors slammed shut. It might have been due in some part to their being Catholic, to the sense of separateness that instilled in them, but I think, in the end, that what they believed in most deeply was the idea of family. Their loyalties were never divided. It must have been difficult for Paul to tell me what he did; it was a kind of betrayal.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I’m obviously not getting my certification anytime soon. I’ve been looking into other kinds of work. I actually talked to Westhover a few weeks ago, but they said they already had more help than they needed. What a laugh, huh?”

  Heinrich Hardware held on for another few years, fueled by a second mortgage on our house and my parents’ bitterness over the Westhover debacle. It turned out that my mother had pushed my father to accept the developer’s offer, and that he’d finally gone against his own strict business principles to accommodate her wishes. I think they found it easier to blame each other than to face up to the fact that, like so many other small businesses dependent on the local economy, the hardware store was heading in only one direction anyway. But I don’t think they could conceive of that; the store had always been there, a three-story white-clapboarded building in the middle of town. In the summer, the long front porch was chockablock with Weber grills and American flags. In the winter, it was stacked with sleds, bags of salt, bundled kindling. This was where you came for your grass seed, house paint, lightbulbs, sandpaper, glue strips, pine bark mulch, suet, kerosene. Real things, useful items. Surely, it wasn’t possible that the shelves, filled for so long with so many articles, could lie bare? Or that the floorboards, worn down by so many generations, could now stand empty? For my parents, it must have been like trying to imagine the world without themselves, because the store had been at the center of their lives and their marriage for more than two decades before I came along.

  Paul continued to work at Alden Dairy while casting around for something else, anything else, to do. I knew he felt trapped, and that he believed his father was trying to force him into joining the business.

  “He’s hoping to starve me into it. He thinks I don’t have any options.” And, as far as I could see, Paul really didn’t. The bad economic times nationwide were starting to hit home: the farms that hadn’t already gone under just scraping along, Untermeyer Paper, Westhover Associates, and a dozen other firms in bankruptcy, followed by cutbacks, layoffs, unemployment. Nobody was hiring.

  I didn’t see Luke much during that period, though I knew Paul got together with him once or twice a week. He’d continued on at his father’s law firm through the fall with the vague hope, so Paul told me, that the firm might help pay his college tuition. Abruptly, just before Christmas, he was let go. Paul claimed he didn’t know why, but I suspected that it had something to do with the fact that Luke seemed stoned a lot of the time. I don’t think Paul realized that Luke had a drug problem at that point. He’d have a joint himself from time to time, and didn’t see any harm in it. But, for Paul, it was a sometime, after-work kind of thing. For Luke, I was beginning to think it was more a necessity, a way of dealing with the world. It blended so easily with his laid-back, heavy-lidded personality, the knowing nod, the half smile. If you didn’t observe him closely, the way I did, you wouldn’t necessarily know.

  Paul talked about Luke more often during the early winter months. Luke had an idea. For a business. Something to do with his property. Development.

  “Honestly, Paul, is he nuts? Nobody’s building now.”

  “It’s not just building. It’s bigger than that—he’s talking about housing units, commercial possibilities, even a golf course. And he’s got some people interested in backing him. He’s got it all worked out. Really, Maddie, he’s got a good head for business.”

  “If you say so,” I said, though I didn’t believe him. But I let him talk. He seemed almost happy again, buoyed by Luke’s fantasies. There was no risk involved. It was all win-win. They’d use other people’s money and their own hard work.

  “We? You’ve been saying ‘we’ all night, do you realize that?”

  “Well, yes. I’m going to help him, Maddie. I’d be crazy to miss out on a deal like this.”

  From all appearances, he seemed to be right. According to Paul, the pitch that Luke and he made to their prospective financial backers had gone incredibly well. A contract was drawn up and signed. The initial investment capital came through. Suddenly, Paul had spending money. Though I pushed Paul a few times
for details about who these “backers” might actually be, he hadn’t been forthcoming about the financial underpinnings of his business. But I thought I knew what was going on. I suspected that they were really just a couple of Howell’s old cronies, generously trying to give Luke a leg up in the world.

  Should I have been more curious? More demanding? I don’t know. I was still in high school. A different universe, you could say, but it wasn’t just that. A lot of Paul’s talk did sound high-blown and vague to me, but I didn’t really want to know the details. I’d had enough of the constant ache and weariness of being poor. My parents were bowed down with debt, as beholden to it as serfs serving a cruel landowner. They argued openly and constantly, as if they’d forgotten any other mode of communication. I was sick to death of their bickering about interest payments, their niggling over grocery items, and I began to stop thinking of them as two people struggling to find a solution. They became the problem. Their sourness was self-defeating, their bitterness a smell that permeated the kitchen and drifted up the stairs.

  Paul, on the other hand, was never without a thick roll of dollars now. He’d purchased a new Jeep. He and Luke always seemed to be busy, working late into the night out at the site, or driving up to Albany for meetings with their “venture capitalists,” as Luke called them. At the end of the summer, after repeated requests on my part, Paul finally took me out to the construction area in the northwestern corner of the Barnett land. Luke and he had been talking about their development ideas for so long that I had to hide my disappointment when I saw what was actually there: a cleared quarter acre or so of woodland and mounds of dirt surrounding a large, roughly rectangular area covered with tarpaulins held down by cinder blocks. Wind worried the edges of the tarps, making them flutter and flap like birds trying to take flight.

  “No, don’t get out,” Paul said when I reached for the door handle.

  “But—why? I want a closer look.”

  “No way. There are nails and loose boards all over the place. It’s not safe.”

  “Oh, okay. So, tell me where everything’s going to be. What are we looking at here?”

  “It’s the foundation, Maddie.”

  “For what, though? Sometimes, this all seems—I don’t know—so vague. Where are the shops going to be? And the golf course?”

  “Hey, come on. I told you there wasn’t much to really look at yet but you’ve been badgering me to see it anyway. And now that you’re here—Jesus, Maddie—give me a break!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head as he turned to me. “No, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to jump all over you. It’s just that—this kind of thing takes time. Money. Work. It’s not going to happen overnight, but it is going to happen. It’s all going to come together. We’re going to get there, okay? Believe me?”

  I stared out over the clearing. We were in the middle of nowhere, miles from a decent two-lane county highway. The ragged wilderness of wood and underbrush encroached upon us from every side. How well I knew this land, heavy with rock debris and riddled with veins of glittering, worthless mica. A half dozen crows sailed down and hopscotched from dirt mound to cinder block, pecking at the tarpaulin, cawing sarcastically.

  “Of course,” I said, ashamed that a part of me continued to doubt him. I knew I had to fight my practical, earthbound nature. Nothing great was ever accomplished without a leap of faith, I told myself. I couldn’t keep dragging Paul down. I had to take hold of his vision, close my eyes—and let go.

  Though Paul and I had often talked about getting married someday, it had always been in a dreamy, make-believe kind of way. Then Paul had some kind of a blowup with his father and moved abruptly out of the house. Luke invited him to stay at the empty cottage on the Barnett estate free of charge, and Paul took up residence there—though I could tell that he was far from settled emotionally. Paul refused to talk about the fight with his father, but I knew it had hurt him in ways that I could do little to alleviate. Whatever had caused the final rupture with Dandridge was fundamentally male in nature, I decided, and no doubt complicated by bad times and disappointments on both sides of the argument. After that, though, Paul was suddenly impatient to take definite steps about our future together. We told my parents that we intended to get married as soon as I graduated from high school in another two years.

  My parents were thrilled, of course, though the now formalized nature of my relationship with Paul freed my father to offer him endless business advice. It seemed to me that, as the hardware store continued to languish, my father took a more and more proprietary interest in Barnett-Alden Enterprises. Unlike Paul’s own father, my dad was almost pathetically eager to be a part of the new venture.

  “You still haven’t filed with the town planning board, have you?” he said one night when Paul had come to our place for dinner. Since moving into the Barnetts’ cottage, he’d been eating with us a couple of times a week. My mother fussed over these meals in a way she never did when it was just the three of us, and she blossomed conversationally in his presence, usually taking his side against what she also deemed my father’s nit-picking tendencies.

  “I imagine Paul knows what he’s doing,” she said, untying her apron to sit down with the rest of us at the table. “And he’s getting first-rate financial advice from that outfit in Albany. Isn’t that right, Paul?” I surmised that Luke’s “venture capitalists” had organized themselves in my mother’s imagination into a kind of financial services juggernaut. This was typical of her unquestioning confidence and pride in her future son-in-law. Though they made no bones about their dislike for Luke, both my parents doted on Paul. They were as proud of him as they would have been their own son.

  But I was beginning to see a side of Paul they didn’t. Without the structure of his immediate family, I sensed he felt vulnerable and a little out of control. He wasn’t used to living alone, or even being by himself for very long, so I spent as much time as my parents allowed over at the cottage. It was a brown-stained cedar shake Cape, long vacant, tucked behind a towering stand of hemlocks near the gated stone entrance to the Barnett estate. In more prosperous times, it had been the farmhand’s house, and the remnants of an extensive vegetable garden, a barn, and outbuildings attested to past cultivation and productivity. It was still fully furnished, the pantry shelves lined with yellowed newspapers laid down on June 11, 1977, though now pillaged and soiled by the endless generations of mice that had infested the whole structure.

  Paul did what he could to clean up the downstairs, though he abandoned the upper floor and attic to the bats that had long ago staked their own claim. He slept on an army blanket on the ravaged couch in the living room, and we spent most of our time there in the kitchen. Luke dropped in on a regular basis. The three of us would sit around the chipped oak-veneer table in the kitchen, playing poker and talking. I’d put out a bowl of pretzels or potato chips, just like any other hostess. Luke was now smoking marijuana openly and every once in a while Paul would join him.

  “Deer season opens this week,” Paul said one night, passing the joint back to Luke. “My dad and my brothers and I used to always go away for a weekend up to my uncle’s place north of Troy. He’s got about fifty acres of woodland that’s kind of like deer heaven. Ever go hunting, Luke?”

  “No.”

  “We should go out this weekend,” Paul went on. “Just the two of us. Hey, we could go back in your woods here. I could show you how—”

  “No. Sorry. I don’t like guns.”

  “But, why not? What’s the matter with them? Hunting too good-ole-boy for you, that it?” I’d been noticing that Paul sometimes got uncharacteristically mean when he was stoned, his tone alternately bullying and suspicious.

  “No, my dad used to hunt. But he got rid of his guns after my mother tried to use one on herself about ten years back. All she managed to do was blow out the glass in an heirloom mirror in the upstairs hall. It was just a bid for attention.”

  Per
haps Luke had always talked this openly to Paul about his family; Paul seemed to be unfazed by the frequently shocking tidbits Luke let drop. To me, however, raised in repressed awe of the Barnetts’ wealth and scandalous behavior, these revelations flung open a window to a world that had always secretly fascinated me. I listened raptly to Luke’s offhanded asides about the money Howell lavished and lost on his antique car collection. The weeklong drunks that Luke’s parents used to indulge in, behind locked doors in the master bedroom, their dinners brought up to them on trays, as if they were invalids. The parade of maids and cooks who lied and cheated and then walked away with whatever wasn’t nailed down.

  I took in Luke’s stories without comment, vaguely aware that I could break the spell of intimacy if I insinuated myself too directly into his musings. I tried never to appear too shocked or overly interested, and I felt I was rewarded by Luke’s openness and sometimes outright anger about his upbringing. Paul seemed not to hear the reticence or pain behind Luke’s words the way I did; I think he was too caught up in his own problems. We played cards and talked. Paul and Luke passed another joint back and forth.

  “You know, I really miss it,” Paul said suddenly. His elbows were on the table and he dropped his head into his hands. “I miss them. Everything. Jesus, I’m fucked up. What the hell’s in this shit?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What’s in this? What’re you doing to me?”

  “Nothing, man,” Luke said. “Everything’s cool.”

  “Don’t talk fucking dope talk to me!” Paul slammed both hands on the table. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re trying to do.”