by Sarah Gerard
The Realtor passes between us and opens a glass door to three beeps. We step into a spacious screened-in porch holding several upholstered deck chairs and a chiminea, a level above the pool and overlooking the golf course.
“Through most of the windows and doors, you can see pretty much three fairways,” she says. “Which is really pretty and serene. The water is not normally like this.”
In the middle distance, a large body of water has overflown its banks and seeps outward into the grass.
“I thought that was a lake,” I say.
“Usually you can walk right out to that golf course. I’ve never seen it like this. This is so full. The birds are loving it.”
“Are there a lot of birds out here?”
“The pool deck is really very large and has multiple levels on it, so—”
“I didn’t notice,” says my husband. “Is this a shingle roof?”
“It is.”
“The exterior really calls for shingles,” he says. “You can’t go and put a Spanish tile on this roof, the way the exterior is.”
“And that is cedar siding,” she says, looking from my husband to me. “People ask, ‘Why is it discolored?’ It’s meant to do that. You can restain it if you want.”
“I like the variation,” I say.
“It doesn’t attract termites,” she says. “Termites will not eat cedar.”
When I was ten, my parents bought a house for $200,000. My dad had been running his advertising agency out of the spare bedroom of our house on Twelfth Avenue, and when he hired his third employee, he set up a desk in my bedroom for the graphic artist to work at while I was at school. Then a neighbor called the city about all the cars parked on the street, and my parents cracked a plan to move into a bigger house and bring the agency into the new house with us. By that time, though, business had gone gangbusters, so it turned that out moving the company into the new house wasn’t necessary, after all—my dad rented an office, instead. The new house was entirely ours.
It was a single-story, with four bedrooms, three and a half baths, a roundabout drive, and a screened-in pool. “You’ll see the gates,” I’d say to my friends when giving them directions to my new house, feeling endowed with importance, despite the fact that these were not real gates—they were only for show. “They’re metal arches that say ‘Carlton Estates,’” I’d say. These words tasted like gold. Carlton was a surname hyphenated invisibly after my own. I lived in Carlton Estates: that was surely worth something.
We had a fireplace, a poolside grill, and a river-rock deck with closing screens. We had an island counter. We had walls covered with mirrors. To get to my parents’ master bathroom, I passed through a dressing area connected to a walk-in closet. The bedroom next to mine was expressly for guests; the one at the end of the hall became a study. One of two living rooms seemed intended only for show, and the planter inside the front door housed pots of plants—silk, they never wilted. The bathroom off the family room had an outside door and a shower for people coming in from the pool. We bought new furniture, new rugs, new artwork. I had never felt more proud.
The houses in Carlton Estates were a magnitude above those in our old neighborhood, where all of the concrete homes followed more or less the same design. These sat on larger lots and had deeper lawns, and each was entirely unique. There were second and third stories, and sloping, multilevel roofs. There were bamboo thickets obscuring homes from the street. Stone and wood exteriors. Stained glass windows. No sidewalks. No streetlights.
I would peer over the wooden fence wrapped around our backyard into the lives of those around us. A noisy macaw lived in a sculpted metal cage on the pool deck next door. At the house behind ours, a gazebo covered in vines sat next to a pool, larger than ours, which sat beneath an even taller screen.
Going door-to-door for a school fund-raiser, I walked the winding, Anglophile streets—Kent Drive, Kings Point Drive—that looped around to the Intracoastal Waterway and back again in a closed circuit. The farther I strayed from our street, the larger the houses became. One house looked like an old-time plantation. Another had a waterfall in the center of its circular driveway, and a bright blue roof. I stood in dark foyers and bright, airy kitchens, saw antique furniture and shiny out-of-the-box appliances and mysterious works of art.
At the top of our street, I found a squat house with no windows—they’d all been cemented over. The grass yard had been replaced with gravel. The pool was covered and the cover was filled with leaves.
At the bottom of our street, I found an iron gate with a code confining three mansions bordering the Intracoastal. I slipped through it and knocked on the door of the mansion farthest to the right. A man answered with an angry-looking English bulldog at his feet. “How’d you get in here?” he demanded.
The pool deck is made of a flexible material the color of sunbaked fiberglass and molded to look like stones. It bows beneath our feet when we walk over it, as if hollow underneath. I see my husband notice it, too.
“What is this material?” I ask, pointing to the deck.
“I’ve never asked and I probably should,” says the Realtor. She’s been telling us about the pool pumps.
“It’s some sort of fiberglass or plastic composite,” says my husband.
“It does flex to some degree,” she says.
“I’d want to replace it,” I say.
“It’s better than those concrete pool decks they put in,” my husband says. “I bet it looks beautiful from the golf course.”
“It does,” she says. “Have you seen it from Google Earth? It really gives you a perspective of where you are in relation to Tampa Bay.”
My husband approaches the edge of the deck and looks out over the hedges and across the golf course. A flock of ibis has congregated around the standing water. I join him and see that he’s smiling.
“You like this?” I say.
“I really like this,” he says. He turns to the Realtor. “My father’s a big golfer. I bet he’d sit right here and watch them try.”
“There’s only one little problem with this house,” says the Realtor as we follow her back inside through a different door, “and that’s ‘Which door should I go in?’ There are so many doors!”
We’re back in the central area. From an adjacent room comes the sound of a television and we make our way toward it. The room is ruby-carpeted with red-and-gray-striped wallpaper, three tapered wall lamps, and a giant projection screen angled downward. A man faces away from us in a floral upholstered recliner. He pauses the television when we come in.
“Don’t stop for us,” says my husband. “What are you watching?”
“Law and Order,” says the man.
We commence watching television. The man is indifferent. At the commercial break, my husband asks the Realtor what kind of wood is used for the paneling on three of four walls in this room.
“Brazilian cherry,” she says.
We move to the base of the stairs and she opens a closet to three beeps. Inside is a circuit board and a mass of wires. “This house obviously has a lot of lines and cables in it,” she says. “This is the command center, the central nervous system.” She shuts the door again.
At the landing of the stairs, she turns to face us. “The one thing you need to know about this house is that the whole area as you go up on this side is a safe area. So, you can see that this will roll down.” She points to a metal compartment above us, which neither my husband nor I had noticed. “I’m going to show you that all the hurricane shutters will also come down,” she says.
The top of the stairs leads into the master suite. It is carpeted in ruby with burgundy walls. Gold curtains hang over the bed, which sits on a raised platform in the center of the room. The wall behind the bed is papered in gold filigree.
One corner of the room opens onto a green and white marble bathroom with a wall of mirrors. In the next room, we find two bookshelves and a leather-topped desk.
“The master study,” says m
y husband.
I kneel to peer through the double-sided fireplace and see the master suite on the other side.
“I think it does get chilly here in winter,” says the Realtor, “and so I think it’s neat to have a double-sided fireplace.”
“Forty at night,” says my husband in agreement. “Sixty, maybe sixty-five the next day.”
I leave the room. On the other side of the hall, I find a girl’s bedroom. The walls are lavender and pink with white crown molding. There’s a bay window to my left and a set of white wooden bookshelves piled high with worn books. A pair of autographed pointe shoes hangs on the wall before me.
“We have a dancer here,” I say, noticing the Realtor beside me.
“Are you a dancer?” she asks.
“I danced for a few years.”
“She’s being modest,” says my husband.
The bay window overlooks the length of the roof, which stretches on for a long, long time. I imagine going out there to be alone.
“She had a great room,” says the Realtor.
“How many kids were there?”
“Six. It’s a great house for a lot of kids.”
“You could easily sneak out this window,” I say.
“Oh, yeah.” The Realtor laughs. “So, all those hurricane shutters will come down. And those will come down.” She points to the bay window. “And those will come down, too.” She points to the other window.
It is rare to see poverty mentioned in Amway’s literature. When it is, it’s usually in the context of an Amway distributor having escaped it. Success is equated with wealth.* With wealth is promised an enhanced way of life, one crafted of your own dreams—and Amway gives you The Plan to achieve that life. To let your attention stray from The Plan is to invite doubt and negative thinking, which can only result in failure. “As successful distributors tell people they are recruiting, the pursuit of excellence can be achieved only when they discipline themselves to tune in the positive dialogues and tune out the negative ones,” says Cross. Poverty makes us feel bad. Feeling bad is negative. Negativity causes failure.62 It makes poverty feel contagious. So don’t think about it.
Occasionally, though, it can be useful to mention poverty in a certain context. Inspired by the personal and business philosophies of DeVos and Van Andel, Cross spent the ten years after writing Commitment to Excellence researching the two men,63 culminating in his 1995 self-help book Choices with Clout: How to Make Things Happen—by Making the Right Decisions Every Day of Your Life. Much of the book is compiled from interviews with the Amway founders and top-level distributors. In a passage about excellence, Van Andel outlines the proper way for an Amway distributor to rationalize the issue of poverty:
People think in terms of excellence, including success, wealth achievements, and gracious living. We feel uncomfortable about things at the lower end of the scale. We become anxious about peoples and nations in the grip of poverty. It makes us uneasy and often guilty to think of starving children and realize what bounties we have in America. Yet we should always bear in mind that poor people cannot help poor people. What we can do, however, is to condition ourselves to speak out and stand up for those things in which we believe. To do this effectively, we must first have faith—faith in self, faith in God, faith in our convictions. Once these conditions are met, you will be amazed at how easy it is to speak out.
Success usually requires sacrifice. You have to give up certain pleasures in order to devote time and effort to goals with higher priorities. Are you ready now?64
Implicit in this is that those who have failed have failed because they have not made the necessary sacrifices to succeed. These are poor people. You’re not a poor person, are you?
To achieve success through Amway, we must not only work hard but also have faith. We know that we should have faith in ourselves—Amway tells us this all the time. And we must have faith in our convictions—for instance, in the efficacy of free enterprise. The theologian, author, and “longtime friend of Amway and believer in its work ethic” Dr. Robert Schuller takes this one step further. In his writing he actually provides a list of six “existing strengths” in which Amway distributors should have faith, both individually and collectively: yourself, family, community, free enterprise, America, and faith itself.65
But having faith in God, as Van Andel instructs above, is different. If you want to achieve success so that you can stand up for what you believe in, he says—you must have faith in God.
Amway’s official position is that it doesn’t endorse a single religion.66 Anyone can be an Amway distributor, it says—just look at the diversity of people around the world who are doing it. You see people of all races, political affiliations, and creeds succeeding in Amway.67
And yet God frequently makes appearances in Amway’s literature and teachings. Faith in God is given as the motivation underwriting everything from recruiting more distributors68 to persisting in The Business through every hardship69 to succeeding financially. Free enterprise is a blessing from God,70 says Amway. In Simply Rich, DeVos says:
And then of course one question always comes up: “Should I even have this much wealth in the first place?”* I feel the Lord allocated some money for us to use for our pleasure, some for our ability to experience His world, some for investing to help create economic expansion and job opportunities for others—and of course, some for sharing with those who have a real need.
It’s not because we’re better or entitled to more money; we have been entrusted with it, and therefore need to be especially responsible. We just make sure personal spending doesn’t become a priority over the giving side. Once you learn the budgeting process of setting aside for giving first, then what you have left you can allocate elsewhere—including a home or an airplane or a boat. One could always argue that these things aren’t necessary and that you could give away more, and that’s always true. But if you look at it that way, you’d never do anything more than take the bus.72
The Bayou Club
7979 Bayou Club Boulevard, Largo, FL 33777
We’ve gone Diamond, we tell the membership director. We’re joining the Bayou Club. We’re starting a family.
The club recently underwent a $1 million renovation:73 new roof,74 redecorated dining hall and casual-attire bar and grille, revamped golf shop, locker rooms, fitness center, renovated driving range and greens. It closed for an extended period of time over the summer so that they could replace the greens and restore them to their original Tom Fazio PGA Tour–quality design. They use only Champion Dwarf Bermudagrass because, as the turf farm’s website says, “even among the ultradwarf cultivars, there is no other grass capable of producing the incredible ball roll of a well-maintained Champion green.”75
We meet Dale at the top of the stairs at the Bayou Club’s entrance. The room is cavernous—much bigger than it appears from the beach-colored exterior, where it seems miniaturized alongside the vastness of the course. He wears khaki pants, a too-small blue button-down shirt, and penny loafers. He reminds me of a shoe salesman.
He tells us the club no longer has an initiation fee76—they were forced to waive it six years ago in response to the economic downturn. “You have the top two or three clubs in the area—Bayou Club, Belleair Country Club, and probably Feather Sound—with no initiation fees to join,” he says. “It makes it very easy to be part of a club these days.”
My husband seems pleased by this. His shoulders relax, and his gaze begins to wander around the place with familiarity.
We follow Dale into the casual grillroom. There are four square wooden tables and blue upholstered wooden chairs along a wooden bar that wraps around to another room with more tables. Floor-to-ceiling windows display the ninth and eighteenth holes.
“Shorts are fine here, jeans are fine. Casual attire, golf attire, tennis,” says Dale. “What we train our staff on here, constantly, is the difference between a country club and a normal restaurant. We have a membership: they’re paying X amount of doll
ars just to walk in the door and come have a hamburger. So, we encourage the staff to make introductions if there are two members sitting here and they don’t know each other. To get them involved, help them meet each other, help them make friends—because that’s what’s going to make them participate more and stay members longer. It’s like a church. Like trying to get your congregation active and engaged and involved.”
In the formal dining area, the windows are even taller, and peaked at the top. The area is bordered with potted palms and lit overhead by three chandeliers. Each table has a tall, skinny vase with lavender in its center. “We do a lot of weddings now because that’s good business for the club,” Dale says.
“This is a beautiful place for a wedding reception,” I say.
“It is, and it’s reasonable. I think that’s where a lot of private clubs have leaned.”
“Are those baby ducks out there on the course?” my husband says, moving toward the windows.
“A lot of wildlife,” says Dale. “If we take the cart out, I can show you some of the real natural bayous in the golf course—the golf course is built around them to showcase that natural bayou setting.”
We exit onto the back patio. It overlooks the pool on the lower level and the golf course, bordered by houses of the Bayou Club community. It’s begun to rain lightly, but the sun is still out. We pass through an outdoor dining area and reenter through the fitness center: a room the size of a small apartment with mirrored walls, two rows of exercise machines, and a flat-screen TV mounted in the corner. A man and a woman exercise separately.
“We’re just taking a quick peek,” says Dale. “We’ll be out of here in a minute. Morning, Dave!”
“Morning,” says Dave.
“The gym used to be the men’s smoking lounge,” Dale says to us. “This is a pretty young club, but already we’ve seen a lot of changes. It’s not all about the men saying, ‘I want to join a golf club.’ Now, with women having a much larger role in the family, they want to know, ‘Well, what’s in it for me?’ There’s got to be a fitness center, there’s got to be some activities for ladies and kids, and it has to be more of a family culture. A lot of traditional men’s golf clubs have had to really evolve into family clubs.”