Local Knowledge

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  “Mrs. Zeller,” Tom said, nodding at Anne. “I’m really sorry to bother you about this. Hey there, Maddie.”

  “I’d say it’s our problem, not yours,” Anne replied as she walked right past Tom to lead the way up the front path to the house. It always surprises me how chilly and dismissive she can be to people she doesn’t want to know, but I was also aware her attitude wouldn’t bother Tom. He’s like Paul in the way he’s learned how to handle the wealthy weekenders, though some people believe he leans too far over backward in their direction. I’d always thought that he just enjoys the feeling of power his office bestows on him, that he likes to think of himself as being on an equal footing with the millionaire lawyers and brokers who banter with him about knocking off points from their speeding tickets.

  “Well, frankly, I think this whole business is ridiculous,” Tom said. “I thought you folks were extremely generous to invite everyone up here the way you did. My wife and I had a great time, I can tell you. But, that said, it’s still my duty to pass these things along.”

  Anne stopped at the front door and turned around.

  “This isn’t about the alarm?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, balancing one booted heel on the top step. “We got a complaint about the party, I’m afraid. One of your neighbors called me up about all the cars parking on his land. Apparently, somebody damaged some of his personal property.”

  “What neighbor? I thought we invited everybody nearby.”

  “Well, you may have invited him, but he didn’t come. He lives down at the end of your road. It’s that little brown shingled cottage set back under the trees.” Tom pointed down the driveway, but the Zellers’ long teak porches and the summer vegetation blocked Luke’s house from view.

  “Oh, really?” Anne said. “I guess I remember hearing that someone used to be there, but I thought it was abandoned now.” I looked at her, surprised. I was sure she knew who lived there; we’d talked about Luke several times already that summer.

  “No, ma’am.” Tom chuckled, shaking his head to show that he agreed entirely with her assessment of Luke’s living conditions. “It’s owned by Luke Barnett. He lives and works there, making what he calls his art pieces.”

  “What happened? Did someone knock one of them over or something?” Anne laughed. I could tell that she’d overcome her initial hostility toward Tom; he was so clearly trying to court her good opinion. But I couldn’t understand what kind of a game she was playing with him—and me. Why pretend she didn’t know about Luke?

  “Yep. Ran right over it!” Tom said, laughing with her, obviously captivated. I hated him at that moment, the way he so quickly sacrificed Luke, whom he had grown up with and known all his life, to gain a little recognition from a relative stranger like Anne.

  “I’m sorry it upset him,” Anne said. “Is there anything we should do? Maybe go down there and apologize?”

  “Well, personally, I’d forget about it,” Tom told her. “I think he just needed to vent. He’s a little on the loony side. Goes off on these tirades. Most of us have been on the receiving end of his anger at one time or another, isn’t that so, Maddie?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was confused by Anne’s white lie—as well as her obvious assumption that I wouldn’t call her on it in front of Chief Langlois. And how could Luke have been so foolish to complain about something so unimportant? He’d exposed himself to ridicule now—as well as unwanted scrutiny.

  “I think I’ve mentioned him to you, Anne. He is a little eccentric,” I replied evenly, though I felt an urgent need to defuse the situation.

  Richard Zeller did it for me, honking the horn of his silver Lexus as he raced up the driveway toward us. Anne had complained to me a number of times about her husband’s fast, aggressive driving, but it seemed to me just part and parcel of his whole domineering personality. I could hear Max and Katie yelling and running up the hill to meet him. As usual, away on business all week, he was being greeted by his children on this Friday night as though he was a returning god. It helped that, like any self-respecting deity, he tended to arrive bearing gifts from his travels: a Pittsburgh Pirates cap for Max, or a San Diego Zoo T-shirt for Katie. But it wasn’t just his largesse that made his children jump all over him as he climbed out of the car. Though absent a lot of the time, when he was home, Richard focused a lot of his attention on his kids. Unlike Anne, he didn’t treat them as equals, and he disciplined them with no-nonsense brevity, as though they were underlings on his payroll. But they seemed to thrive on it, perhaps ready for a tougher kind of love after a week of Anne’s free-rein approach to parenting.

  “We should be going,” I told Anne as Richard picked up Katie and Max in either arm and lumbered up the path toward us. My children followed in their wake.

  “Oh, Christ, don’t tell me—” Richard said when he saw the chief of police.

  “No, it’s not the alarm this time,” Anne cut him off. “And, hold on a second, Maddie. I need to write a check for Rachel for the week. I’ll be right back.”

  “What’s up, Tom?” Richard asked, setting his children down with a grunt of relief. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that he remembered the chief ’s name. Richard is very good at making people he considers important feel that way. I, on the other hand, often feel more or less invisible in his presence. The babysitter’s mother. Someone Anne knows.

  “I hate to even bring it up, but … ” With the same shaking of the head, Tom repeated to Richard what he’d just told Anne.

  “What a load of crap!” Richard responded when the chief finished. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s too bad someone didn’t take the opportunity to flatten the whole damned mess. The place is like a pigsty, don’t you agree? I mean, we’ve got these four really beautiful homes up here now, pumping Christ knows how much tax revenue back to you folks in town, and we’ve got to look down on that pathetic garbage dump. There’s got to be something you people can do to force this crazy shithead to clean things up.”

  “Well, I know it’s been tried,” Tom replied. “And I sure wish I could be of some help. But I’m strictly on the serve-and-protect end of things, I’m afraid. This is really a problem you should take up with the selectmen, Mr. Zeller, if you feel so strongly about it.”

  “Hey, come on, it’s Richard to you, Tom,” he said, throwing his right arm around the chief ’s shoulder and walking him back toward the cruiser. Anne came out at that point with her check for Rachel, so I could only catch snatches of what Richard was saying to Tom: “… fed up with the attitude … whatever you can do to get the ball rolling.”

  My daughters had heard the entire exchange between Chief Langlois and Richard, so I wasn’t surprised when Rachel asked me in the car as we made the curve around Luke’s place:

  “Is Luke in some sort of trouble?”

  “I don’t think so,” I told her. “You heard what happened, right? I mean, he has a legal right to complain about something like that, don’t you think?” As we braked to make the left onto River Road, the late sunlight glinted off some of the objects in Luke’s front yard. I’d spent so many months trying to ignore them, trying to force Luke and all of his concomitant problems out of my mind, but now I turned and let my gaze travel over the metal bolts and hubcaps welded into an enormous sea turtle, a rhinoceros, a scarecrow, the mufflers fashioned into a gigantic bouquet of sunflowers, the pair of chairs soldered together from old tractor parts—and the dozens of other wacky, sardonic creations—many of which had been rusting away undisturbed for years. Oh, Luke, I thought, what have you done? Why have you started this now?

  “I guess so,” Rachel said, turning to look out the passenger window. The long hay field on our right was lush with humidity, swallows circling and swooping above it, the tree line beyond melting hazily into the purply backdrop of hills. Rachel had been working full-time for the Zellers for nearly a month now, and though she was clearly thrilled with all the money she was making and obviously doted on Katie and Max, I se
nsed the experience was not altogether a happy one for her. But I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. The house was finally in great shape, thanks in large part I’m sure to Rachel’s organizational abilities and hard work. Anne and she appeared to be hitting it off; in fact, every once in a while I found myself envying all the fun they seemed to have. I knew that part of my concern stemmed from my sense that Rachel was drifting ever further from me. There were places in her heart that I could no longer reach, moods she fell into that I couldn’t account for at all.

  “Do you ever see Luke when you’re over there, Rach?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “What does that mean? Either you see him or you don’t. I believe I asked a pretty straightforward question.”

  “Sure. What other kind do you ask, Mom? And I’m saying that I’ve been kind of busy trying to take care of four kids—plus about a million other things. I don’t have time to notice much, okay? Besides which, I don’t think I’d even recognize him now. I hardly remember what he looks like.”

  Her anger startled me: where in the world had that outburst come from? Was it just part of her general moodiness, or was something else going on? I glanced over at her but she was staring fixedly out the side window.

  “I remember,” Beanie announced from the backseat. Though she was only three and a half when Luke stopped speaking to us, I believed her. Gentle, dreamy Beanie has a mind as swift and accurate as a calculator.

  “I ’member, too,” Lia declared, not wanting to be left out of whatever we were discussing.This was actually the first time I’d talked to my daughters about Luke since that final blowup. Paul and I had decided when it happened that it was all too complicated and sad to try to explain to them. So, frankly, we’d taken the coward’s way out: if we stopped talking about him, perhaps we could all eventually grow to believe that he didn’t matter to us. That he never had. But now I was forced to face the futility of what we’d attempted.

  We had dinner, as we usually did in the summer when the weather was fine, out on the temporary screened-in porch off the kitchen that Paul assembled early every May and took down each fall. This is where we’d long planned to build an extension, a family room cum sunporch, screened on one end, that would run down the entire length of the house. He’d constructed a little deck a few summers back, but then got too overwhelmed by regular work to do more than throw together removable screened panels and corrugated plastic roofing. We’d started a savings account for home improvement years ago, but now Paul was beginning to talk about that small accumulation as Rachel’s college fund. And most of the money I was earning had helped pay down a home equity line of credit we’d taken out after Lia was born and Paul wasn’t able to work for a long stretch. Though we’d be almost entirely debt-free in a week or two when I got my commission check from the Naylor sale, I knew Paul wasn’t ready yet to start investing in renovations. He was almost ridiculously proud of my success, but he didn’t trust that it would last. Nor, for that matter, did I. I’d been lucky, that was all. And both of us knew how quickly luck could change.

  “The police were at the Zellers’ today,” Rachel told her father shortly after we sat down in front of our bowls of tossed pasta and chicken salad. Considering her reluctance to discuss the matter with me in the car, I was surprised she’d brought it up so freely with Paul. But then she remained more open with him than me, more needy of his attention.

  “What?” Paul asked. “Are they collecting for the steak roast already? Those guys are totally shameless.” Paul was a longtime member of the volunteer fire department, which was in constant, often acrimonious competition with the paid police force for fund-raising dollars, especially those coming from the roomy pocketbooks of second-home owners.

  “It was just Tom, actually,” I said, looking across the table at Rachel and wondering what she was hoping to accomplish. I’d intended to tell Paul about the visit when we were alone later on, when I could put my own spin on what had happened. Rachel must know that any discussion of Luke with her father was bound to be difficult.

  “He was there to tell the Zellers that Luke had called him about their party,” Rachel continued. “He’d complained to the police because someone had run over one of his sculptures. Mr. Zeller says that he’s crazy. That Luke’s place is like a garbage dump. That the town has to do something about him.”

  Paul looked at me. He put down his fork.

  “Sounds exactly like something Mr. Zeller would say.”

  “But he can’t really force anybody to do anything, can he?”

  “It’s already been tried. If Ingrid Soneson and the Red River Historical Society can’t get Luke to clean up his act, I seriously doubt Mr. Zeller has much of a chance. There’s nothing to worry about, okay?”

  “I just wish … ” Rachel speared a pasta shell and then dropped her fork into her bowl.

  “What, Rach?” I asked, but it was her father Rachel turned to when she blurted out with surprising vehemence:

  “I don’t understand why we can’t be friends with him anymore, okay? I mean, I know something happened between you guys. I know all that, and I don’t care about it. Because he was our friend, too, you know! It’s not fair. It’s just not fair! I don’t think it’s right that he has to be all alone—” Rachel, like her father, rarely lets her emotions get the better of her. She’s usually so careful to keep her feelings under control that when they start to spill out, she’s easily overcome by them. Now, her face streaming with tears, she slammed out the side screen door and stamped off across the lawn. I began to get up from the bench to follow, but Paul dropped his napkin beside his bowl and said:

  “No, no. I want to go.”

  Beanie and Lia and I finished our meal in subdued silence. Beanie, as usual, seemed lost in her own world, but I knew she must be thinking about Luke; he was her first real friend outside the family. Lia was too young to understand much more than the fact that calm, loving Rachel, whom she adored, was mad at Paul and me. As mother and day-to-day disciplinarian, I was frequently resented and challenged. But Paul’s authority was sacrosanct, so Rachel’s outburst had, along with resurrecting memories of Luke, overturned the natural order of her younger sisters’ existence. Strawberry pop-ups eased their worries a little, but they lingered at the table long after they were done, watching and waiting for Paul and Rachel to, hopefully, make their peace and return.

  I sat with them, listening to the rising chorus of cicadas and the distant hum of the highway traffic, always heavier on Friday nights in the summer because of the influx of weekenders and tourists. This is the time of year when you frequently can’t find a parking spot in Northridge and you need to make reservations at almost any decent restaurant in the area. It really does sometimes feel as though we’re being invaded by aliens, creatures from a far more privileged and aggressive planet who honk their horns and think nothing of swearing in front of our children. These are the people who make up my client base now, and I do believe I’m beginning to know how to handle them better. I’m growing the same kind of armor that Paul has, impervious to insults and snubs. But the conversation I’d overheard between Richard Zeller and Tom Langlois that afternoon had pierced whatever illusion I’d been fostering that the community was coming together. The fault lines were still there. And I knew they lay dangerously close to everything that mattered to me.

  By the time Paul and Rachel returned, Paul with his arm around her shoulder, Beanie and Lia were falling asleep at the table. We decided to forgo toothbrushing and pj’s for one night, and I carried Beanie and Rachel took Lia out to the tent, and tucked them into their sleeping bags, leaving the electric lantern on low by the screened flap. Rachel walked back with me to the porch, where Paul was sitting down to finish his dinner.

  “You two okay?” I asked as we joined him at the table.

  “Yep. We’re good,” Paul said between bites.

  “Dad told me what happened. About the property and the sale. How Luke didn’t really understand the situati
on. I just think you could have been a lot clearer with him, you know? And me, too, for that matter.”

  So, Paul had made me the fall guy. I could tell by the way he was concentrating on the food in front of him that he knew perfectly well what he had done. But how would I have explained things to her? I wondered. I knew how easy it would have been for me to cast doubt on Paul’s own role in the mess, to suggest that he, as Luke’s best friend, could have done a lot more to avoid what had happened. The story could be told so many different ways. And, in fact, the story began so many years ago that, unless we started from the beginning and told Rachel the whole thing, she’d only always be holding on to pieces of the truth, the way she was now.

  “Please remember that I was just starting out, okay?” I told her. “I didn’t know how important some of this stuff could be.”

  “Well, in any case, we’ve got a plan,” Paul said. “We’re going to go over to Luke’s tomorrow. Buy one of his things. See if we can get a detente going.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake—” I started to say, then I saw the look on Paul’s face. He and Rachel had worked this out between them; my objections at this point would only make matters worse. “Okay, whatever,” I said. “If you think that will help things.”

  Later, undressing, I said to Paul:

  “Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t talk to Rachel—about everything.” We’d been over this ground before. Many times, but not for several years now.