The Locals

by Jonathan Dee

  “He’s not my boy,” Gerry said. “We don’t even talk. I haven’t talked to him in months.”

  “Well, maybe you should reach out. Is this really what you want? Why don’t we all just start building moats and spike pits around our houses and be done with it?”

  “First of all, the fact that no one uses the library speaks for itself. I kind of admire what he’s doing, if he’s actually doing what you say. This isn’t Little House on the Prairie. There are other places to get books, if you’re somebody who still reads books. It’s an outdated idea. Just because government always has spent money on a particular thing is no argument for its continuing to do so.”

  “Right,” Candace said, “great. Terrific. And what’s second of all?”

  “Second of all,” Gerry said, “is who’s ‘we’? Technically you don’t live here.”

  Haley overheard so much of that call that there seemed to Candace little point in not filling her in on the rest of it. So she did. Haley was distraught, not that she herself might lose access to the library but out of concern for her aunt, who would have her job, which seemed very much like her home, taken away. Haley, still in her first year of high school, had only a hazy idea what happened to people with no job, which made her fear more atavistic. It upset her enough that she brought it up at the dinner table, even though she knew that the mere invocation of Aunt Candace’s name could put her parents in a confrontational mood.

  “They’re going to just close the library and sell it,” Haley said. “I mean, what kind of a place are we living in? How screwed up is that?”

  “Language,” Mark said.

  “Who’s ‘they’?” Karen said.

  “What do you mean? They! Them! The government!”

  “We’re doing it, is my point,” Karen said. “The government, c’est nous, or whatever. This is all our own doing.”

  “Well, then stop doing it!”

  “I keep going back, in my head,” Mark said, wiping his mouth, “to the fact that everything was going great around here until a small group of agitators, my idiot brother among them, decided that everything has to be a conflict, that there’s no such thing as a rich guy who’s not evil.”

  “Oh please,” Karen said.

  “Oh please what?”

  “Can we stay on the subject here?” Haley said, a little catch in her voice that she’d been trying to avoid. “This is important to me!”

  Karen’s jaw set; she could feel herself hardening, inside and out, against this particular display. “Well,” she said at length, “this town is going down the tubes, that’s true, but I’m sorry, the Howland library is not going to be my line in the sand. Believe me, if everybody in town knew what I know about the shenanigans going on there, the town budget might not be its biggest problem.”

  “What?” Haley said.

  “What?” Mark said.

  “Believe me,” Karen said.

  After dinner, when Haley had cleared the table and withdrawn to her room, Mark said to Karen, “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  Mark started dropping things into the blender, to make one of his infuriating smoothies. He hadn’t eaten much dinner. You could make a dinner that Haley would eat or you could make a dinner that Mark would eat, but, increasingly, not both. “Talk about how the town is going down the tubes,” Mark said.

  “What? Why not? It is.”

  “Well, regardless of what you think, it’s just not a real positive force for people to hear you talking in that kind of negative way, or even for you to be thinking like that.”

  “For people to hear me? What are you talking about? I’m in my own home!”

  “Regardless,” Mark said.

  He hit the button on the blender and, in the time it took for him to turn it off again, in the high-pitched, grating roar, Karen believed she figured out what was really going on.

  “How’s your business doing?” she said.

  He looked at her over the top of whatever he was drinking. He made such a fetish out of his own health, for all the good that vanity would do him in the end. “Fine,” he said. “Very well.”

  “All the bad news I keep reading about, that hasn’t had any negative effect on you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean specifically by bad news.”

  “The crash or the bubble or whatever you want to call it?”

  He looked off to one side, rather theatrically, she thought. “It’s a fact,” he said, “that optimism in a given market has a positive effect on that market. That’s not something I made up, stupid though you may think it is. But anyway, my business is doing very well, all that stuff about Wall Street guys trading mortgages to each other doesn’t really affect it, so you don’t need to concern yourself with that.”

  She shook her head, as if to clear it. “So optimism affects value,” she said. “So pessimism too.”

  “Correct.”

  “And that’s pretty much all you hear lately, everywhere, when it comes to real estate: pessimism. And that’s your business. Real estate.”

  “More or less, yeah.”

  “So the value of what you own has gone down. Yet somehow we’re doing just fine.”

  Mark bit his lip. “You want things to go badly?” he said. “You want me to fail? Is that it?”

  “I want you to not fucking spin me,” she said.

  “I wasn’t aware,” he said, “that asking you to have some faith in me constitutes spinning you.”

  They heard a noise from upstairs, just a chair moving, but they both stared up at the ceiling.

  “I can’t help it,” Karen said more softly. “I’m sorry. I can’t. I’m just trying to brace for the crash this time. It’ll be less hard on me if I’m braced for it. That’s how I’m thinking.”

  “You have to cut yourself off from the past,” Mark said. “You can’t let it frighten you. If you do, you’re dead. That’s the whole secret.”

  —

  He said it so passionately, she wanted to believe it, but by the morning she was back to worrying that she was married to a crazy person unaware of his own limitations who would gamble their house right out from under them. She decided, with enough of a touch of perversity to make her feel she wasn’t betraying herself, to check out his hypothesis, to take him at his word. She called up Asana, the yoga retreat in Stockbridge, and tried to check herself in for a weekend. The deposit alone would have been enough to max out one of their credit cards.

  But the first available date, for a three-day stay, was in eleven months. Karen felt like crying—not because she wanted so badly to go, but because her idea had been a naïve one, ignorant, assuming the sort of thing an inconsequential outsider like herself would assume. But then the young woman on the other end of the phone, perhaps hearing the distress and embarrassment in Karen’s voice, asked if she would be interested in a day pass instead. You wouldn’t get the full experience, obviously, not getting to fall asleep in that environment, not waking up in it. But she could take part in all the workshops and meditations, with plenty of time to herself as well, to roam the grounds and meet similarly spiritual people, and commune with herself and others as she chose.

  Meet similarly spiritual people, Karen thought: that’s the ticket. She didn’t hope to commune with them but rather to pass herself off as one of them; that would be funny, she imagined. Just because she was there, they’d believe she was another idle wife from New York or Boston with nothing but time and money to spend, and not just some local, a working mother, a secretary without a rich boss, a wife of an erstwhile contractor who was great with his hands but whose self-image would not stay put. Maybe she would even run into Rachel Hadi there. That would be the best. Unlikely, though. The Hadis were now gone for good, into some realm where they could not be followed.

  She said yes to the day pass, and purchased it over the phone. The only disappointing thing about this revised plan was that it would get less of a reaction from Mark. For nights she had rehears
ed how she would tell him she was decamping to Asana for a week, and how much that would cost, and how much of that pesky negative energy of hers she hoped to leave behind there; he would struggle to come up with reasons why he couldn’t be expected to take care of Haley all by himself because he was so busy, when in fact he wasn’t, he seemed to have all the time in the world. But no one would miss her for just one day. He might even be happy for her now, say it sounded like a great idea, which would spoil it for her considerably.

  —

  The parking lot was only about half full when she got there. It was freakish weather for January. She wore no coat, just a long sweater with a sash; she had tried to put as little thought as possible that morning into what she would wear, how she would appear. The closer she drew to the place—just as had been happening the closer she drew in time to the day itself—the less the whole excursion felt to her like an act of revenge or an ironic domestic protest. She was going to be asked to meditate, and she was nervous. Meditate on what? She was not the type. Yet the thought of failing at it scared her.

  The first scheduled event was yoga; she’d been assured it was a beginner-level class, but it sure didn’t look like it. She had only a hazy idea what yoga was: like contortionism without applause. The instructor, skinny with boy-cut hair, was as nice as could be, but Karen hadn’t even realized that a change of clothes would be a good idea—it just didn’t look that strenuous, not even up close. There was something unavoidably sexual about some of the positions the women got themselves into. They were all women. Other than Asana employees, she didn’t see a man that whole day.

  She followed the crowd to find lunch—they’d given her instructions at registration, but she’d forgotten: it was just like the first day of school—and she saw nearly everyone go inside the Center and reemerge with a tray. There were picnic tables and Adirondack chairs scattered on the vast lawn overlooking a lake. Inside, the Center was a strange, funkily charming mix of the renovated and the unrenovated, the state-of-the-art and the retro: there was, for instance, still a row of old-fashioned phone booths, the kind with accordion doors, in the lobby just off the kitchen. Karen had left her cell phone at home, as she’d been instructed to do. The booths even had phone books. She peeked to see if they still had rotary dials—maybe they didn’t work at all anymore, maybe they were just museum pieces—but they weren’t quite as vintage as that.

  Lunch was vegetarian—not a shock; she couldn’t identify everything, but some of the tray compartments were legitimately tasty. She set the tray down on the grass next to her chair and almost immediately someone came and discreetly carried it away. Karen felt mildly guilty—had she accidentally sent some signal that she didn’t even know about, because she was new there? She certainly could have bussed her own tray. She tried to put it out of her mind and stared at the empty lake. It glittered under the sun. There was something calming about it, just as advertised.

  She didn’t want to lose everything. She didn’t want to be broke and in debt again, and even if she couldn’t really love her husband anymore, nor did she want to hate him—or not hate him so much as live in fear of him, of his lack of guile, his confidence, his inability to judge himself. She felt threatened, defensive, even in what was supposed to be the sanctuary of her own house.

  So was this meditating? All the conditions were right for it, the setting was peaceful, and yet left to their own devices her thoughts naturally flowed in the direction of doubt and fear and self-preservation. That’s what was in her. Her spirit had been polluted, or corrupted, or maybe neither, maybe this was just who she was. Terrified of losing a life she couldn’t defend and didn’t really enjoy all that much anyway.

  At two she reported to the pavilion, to learn how to meditate properly. She found the proximity of other people inhibiting. Anyway, who were they? She couldn’t keep from turning to stare at them. Rich people who led lives full of manufactured stress. Women who worked harder than they needed to, or women who didn’t work at all. Their hyper-refined problems expanded to fill the shape of expensive solutions. Like this place. She was not one of them. She tried, tried, tried to empty her thoughts like the white-haired facilitator said, but her mind was not empty, it was a vacuum: all kinds of random shit naturally rushed to fill it. She really just wanted to be back in her chair in front of that lake again, even though she’d felt bad there too.

  “Stick with it,” the facilitator said to her as she left, taking Karen’s hand in both of hers. “Nobody gets there the first time. Come back often. I hope to see you again.”

  Come back often! It was all just a sales pitch, in the end, and yet when Karen was back on the lawn—colder now, as the afternoon shadows stretched across it—she felt herself starting to cry. Maybe I’m not such a good person, she thought. Maybe that’s the root of it. But you can’t change who you are. And anyway, any one of these tranquil bitches would respond to threats the same way I do. When someone comes into your home, basically, and tries to claim what’s yours, your instincts take over. All you had, all you were, was worse than useless if there was no one to bequeath it to. Nobody was going to take that away. There was family, and then there was blood.

  She went back inside the Center, past the dormant cafeteria, and closed herself into one of the phone booths. In the book she looked up the number for Howland’s Town Hall. She asked the secretary there to connect her to Selectman Allerton’s office; “don’t worry, it’s not a complaint,” she said. At length Allerton picked up the line and said a cautious hello. “I’m a concerned citizen,” Karen said. “I know you’ve been looking into the library situation. I’m calling with a tip, which is that the next time you go to the library, don’t go when it’s quote-unquote open. Go when it’s supposedly closed. Like early in the morning. I think you’ll be surprised by what you’ll find going on there. It’ll give you cover to do what you want to do.” She hung up, breathing rapidly, but then within a minute she was calmer than she’d felt all day. She got home in time to make everybody dinner.

  —

  Barrett believed that he was on his way to being a better man. He’d made a lot of mistakes. And he continued to fuck up, not a lot, but never for the last time, either. It was like one of those signs they hung in factories—he’d never worked in a factory, never even seen the inside of one, but he’d seen these signs on TV or in movies or cartoons—that said such-and-such days without an accident. Then some guy wasn’t paying attention and got a finger cut off or a toe crushed, and the number on the sign got flipped back to zero. That was Barrett’s life.

  He found a job with a new guy across the line in Hillsdale, and the guy said the work Barrett did on the slate roofing was as good as he’d ever seen; and so the guy hired him twice more, but then randomly they got into a fight about immigration—right on the site, right in front of the client—and Barrett, when he tried to drop it and just go back to work, found he couldn’t, and walked off the job. Stupid. People were entitled to their opinions—that was what his wife kept reminding him, loudly sometimes.

  Were people really still entitled to their opinions, though, when those opinions did actual damage? What if somebody had his hand in your pocket, trying to get your wallet, your keys, your ID, everything, and some asshole’s “opinion” was that everybody’s pockets should be bigger and looser and easier to access? You were just making it easier for the takers in this world, the people who had it in for you and wanted what you had. If you wanted to hand your own shit over without a fight, then fine, whatever, except that that emboldened the takers further, after they’d burned through your money, to come for mine. So it wasn’t really about politeness or tolerance, otherwise known as political correctness. It was about right and wrong.

  Just the presence of that idea in his life—right and wrong—was improving him, sharpening him. But he was prone to slips: it was like a balance beam, he could only stay up for so long, then he’d lose his balance and have to climb back up again. Thus he did a night in the Stockbridge jail for get
ting into a fight in the parking lot of some bar he’d never even been to before. Things like that. He was learning. He had such a passionate nature; it was not an easy thing to regulate in every situation.

  One night—two nights—he’d apparently got so passionate his wife felt she couldn’t stay in the house. He never laid a hand on her, but she didn’t feel safe. She came back in the morning. He’d asked her contritely where she’d been and she’d said “the library,” which was obviously such sarcastic bullshit that if he was ever going to hit her he would have done it right then, but he didn’t.

  You’d think the people with their hands in your pocket would be the needy, the have-nots, the disadvantaged, but no: it was always the powerful. It was always those with more than you—and their instruments, which they called “law” or “government”—who were bent on walking away with what was yours.

  —

  He didn’t go to the Ship that often anymore, partly because he didn’t want to get buttonholed by Gerry Firth again. He didn’t like that guy. The more he felt they had in common, politically speaking, the less Barrett liked him, which was weird but true. Maybe it went all the way back to Barrett’s never getting the high sign he’d expected after tagging Hadi’s house. It was like Gerry was egging him on, and then afterwards wanted nothing to do with him anymore. Expendable. Well, maybe that was the truth about him. And if it was, then maybe there was something liberating about that.

  He drove into town one morning in February because he was out of cigarettes. Stevie, who was catching only occasional replacement shifts at the hospital, was still in bed. The guy who ran the newsstand had been there forever; he seemed kind of nicotine-stained himself. Barrett looked at the headlines in the Gazette and the Globe while the old Yankee rang him up.

  “Glad I can still buy these here,” Barrett said, gesturing with the pack.

  “How’s that?” the Yankee said. Though they’d never technically met, Barrett, like everyone else in town, knew his name was Hank.