The Summer of Our Foreclosure

by Sean Boling

  Chapter Twelve

  Mom and Dad were somewhat manic in their attempts to be nice to me after the incident at the sign. It was as if they wanted my vote. They pandered so thoroughly that they had a hard time noticing when their attempts at not offending became offensive. Mom’s favorite term she used to describe me over the summer was that I was going through an “in-between stage”. And as much as it drove me nuts to hear that phrase repeated with such frequency, I realized she was right. I was hovering between childhood and adulthood, destined to bypass being a teenager whenever one stage gave way to the other.

  But the stages I was caught between were specific. The adults at Ranch Ranch weren’t sure what they were caught between, and their attempts to escape from what flanked them illustrated their confusion.

  Just like my parents, all of the parents tried too hard. They would start a game of two-on-two basketball in a driveway, or a video game tournament in a living room, or badminton in a backyard, or lawn darts, or ring toss, or just about anything that was supposed to be a fun distraction leading up to a barbeque later on, and the game would turn into a measure of self-worth. The kids would slowly bow out and leave it to the adults as their passion became ferocious. Nobody would throw a punch, but the ball would be slammed against the garage door, the clever trash talk would devolve into a hollering of Fuck Yous, and wives would herd husbands into corners and soothe them and assure them it was just a game, that they loved them no matter what happened. Then later at the barbeque after a couple of beers the husbands would embrace and slap each other on the back so that the hug would not be too intimate, and say that they were in this together, that they had each other’s backs, that they loved each other, but the word “love” didn’t seem to mean anything, it was just something to say.

  At night the desperation was more naked. The horror of first stumbling upon a couple of parents having sex had long since sunk any fantasies I entertained about sexual voyeurism as part of my reality checking. But as the block parties and the feelings they were trying to mask started to intensify, catching some of the adults in compromising positions became even more disturbing for reasons beyond their deflated bodies; so much so that I actually found myself lingering by those windows in spite of my repulsion, unable to look away. I learned just how much sex depended upon feelings. The emotions they relied on to propel them through the act were so unmoored and damaged that they could not function sexually for very long, and their attempts would end badly.

  Some men would start to weep as their penises would remain limp in their wives’ hands or mouths, the slightest twinge of an erection merely reminding them of what used to be, what could have been. Others who managed to get hard would become too aggressive and their wives would have to ask them to stop, softly at first, politely, but eventually in a raised voice and a single command: Stop!

  Some women seemed to be trying to convince themselves that their husbands were still worth the effort. Even those moments when they were obviously enjoying it were soon followed by a vacant expression unbeknownst to their husbands, as though something rudely reminded the women of better times, of an era when sex and alcohol enhanced their appreciation of life rather than offered an escape from it. They would then force themselves back into the moment, but may as well have been masturbating. I would wonder if the husband didn’t notice or didn’t care that their wife had clearly decided “Well, at least this loser still has a dick.” Perhaps it’s harder to notice such things when you’re in the moment rather than observing it.

  Nonetheless, this was the thought that would motivate me to stop peeking and move on: the threat of being so immune to your partner’s feelings unless it inhibited your ability to have an orgasm. As I crept to the next backyard and the next grid of lighted windows after one of those disheartening sex scenes, I would brood over whether my reality checking was going to turn me off to sex, that maybe I was going to become phobic about intimacy. But then I would assure myself that I had seen plenty of accident sites by the side of the road and still wanted to learn how to drive, just as I still fantasized about Lourdes and Lana and even Blaine’s sister on occasion in spite of seeing such depressing displays of sex through the portholes of our sinking neighborhood.

  Many of the parents tried to make up for however emasculated or abandoned they felt in their relationships by formulating grand plans for their economic recovery. If they were going to cry and disassociate in the bedroom, well then by God they were going to make amends in what was destined, in their minds, to become the home office.

  Some of the plans were laid in groups, some individually, depending on whether they needed to recruit neighbors and friends, and depending on the plot’s degree of shadiness. So the insurance scams remained between husband and wife, hunkered over their office desk or in the corner of the kitchen close enough to the window so I could hear their concentrated whispers; and as far as I know, none of them ever followed through on a scam, since no homes burned down, and nobody took in a group of unrelated elderly people or orphaned children.

  The sales pitches, on the other hand, started with individual couples, who would then strategize on how they could turn their home into a platform, their neighbors into customers, and our development into a market, with the neighbors-turned-customers either unaware of what was being done to them, or embracing it thanks to the brilliance of the pitch or value of the product. The various couples would role play, practicing how to guide a conversation toward a plug for the product or an invitation to a sales meeting.

  “That was a great game the other night, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure was.”

  “I think if they can avoid any major injuries, they could go all the way.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Me, too. Want another beer?”

  “No. I’m good.”

  “All right. Hey…how happy are you with your current line of household products?”

  Then they would imagine out loud how they would spend the money, keeping their aspirations reasonable, as if lowering their expectations made success any more possible.

  “Wow. That sunset sure is relaxing.”

  “Sure is.”

  “Do you often find yourself feeling pretty tense?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Are you interested in a stress reliever you can use when you can’t see the sunset?”

  They would pay cash for a modest house, invest in municipal bonds, buy conservative stocks that held their value and paid a dividend.

  “I was thinking of not going back to my job once this vacation is over.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Got something lined up?”

  “How does five thousand dollars a month working from home sound?”

  Only when they applied their rehearsals to an actual conversation, as with everything else in their adult life recently, it did not go as planned. The farthest they could push anyone was to a promotional party in their living room. These presentations were held at night, at a house where the kids were sleeping over at someone else’s house, as though the ceremony had to be hidden from the children, like some primal hazing ritual or tribal initiation. What it most resembled, however, was a séance; because in terms of finances and morale, they were talking to the dead.

  Some of the people being pitched had given essentially the same presentation in their own living room days earlier. Sandwich boards featuring diagrams of pyramids with ascending dollar amounts working their way to the top would be held up by the wife; bar graphs charting future growth would be hoisted by the husband; the signs in hand would mount to a degree that made the presenters look like someone standing on a street corner advertising a new tire store down the street, or that they were on strike, protesting unfair treatment. Only the products differed, which is perhaps why each thought their version would be more convincing than yesterday’s. They touted kitchen knives, pots and pans, algae from a lake in Southern Oregon that had medicina
l qualities and was now being domesticated in a cement reservoir in Southern California, earthworms that had been genetically modified with the ability to burrow into harder soil and withstand higher temperatures, hand-held computers, software applications, water softeners, even real estate.

  Real estate.

  And when the circular firing squad of network marketers had all shot each other, a new kind of meeting dominated the ground floors of Ranch Ranch after dark.

  “You’re upset that you’ve lost your house. We’ve all lost our homes. We’re all upset. I know I am. Or at least I was. Then I realized it was never my house. It was God’s house. It was always God’s house.”

  Everything else would be God’s, too.

  Even before we ended up a hundred miles from the nearest church, we had never gone much; just a couple of times, and it was out of state, at my grandmother’s church: once to see her sing in the choir, and then one more time to attend her funeral. I had also failed in several attempts to read a Bible that a very sweet lady had given me one afternoon as I sat in the fast food restaurant waiting for Shay to return from the back of the restaurant where she was needed in the manager’s office to verify her mom’s excuse for missing work the day before. I must have looked especially forlorn sitting in that booth by myself in what had to be the least lucrative franchise in the chain. The lady said if I needed companionship, I could open The Book and find it. I thanked her and was genuinely intent on reading it, but for a different reason: I wanted to be familiar with the stories that inspired so much great literature. But all of my efforts only solidified my love of the re-writes.

  So all of this was new to me. Giving everything up to God, including the decision to take out a mortgage, at first struck me as directing blame rather than accepting responsibility, but I could certainly understand and relate to how comforting that is. It was always our first reaction when any of us kids got in trouble. And unlike the sales pitches, I wished I could participate. I often felt like tapping on the window to ask a question or for clarification on a point.

  The props were also more interesting. Rather than items bought from an office supply store, they appeared to have been bought from a feed store: seeds, small shrubs, pruning scissors, a trowel, landscaping rocks, a watering can, wooden lattice, and tomato stakes; the seeds and small shrubs playing the role of the soul, the pruning scissors and trowel in place to demonstrate the slings and arrows of life on a dangerous planet, the rocks and water playing God and the things God does, the lattice and tomato stakes illustrating a world bound by God’s love. Seeing all of the hardware reminded me of the accounts I had read of gold and silver rushes throughout history, how the ones who grew most wealthy were those who sold the dreamers all of the tools they would need to go out and not find what they were looking for.

  Not that anyone seemed bent on making any money off the people in their living room (another difference between the prayer meetings and marketing presentations), but the chance to affect someone’s life seemed to stimulate a kind of motivation just as powerful as the pursuit of money, a chance to still leave a mark when using wealth to do so was no longer an option; instead of commissioning a statue of themselves in a town square or lobby, they could erect themselves in someone’s memory, preferably a whole bunch of people’s memories. I had not grown so prematurely jaded to discount the idea that they may genuinely see it as God’s work and not their own, but concluded that even if this was their perspective, successfully persuading someone to see God would arouse feelings that were powerful, satisfying, and all theirs.

  The mood was usually optimistic, but every so often a parent, or a pair of them, would have a breakdown like the one my parents had in front of our house when the sign went up. It usually happened in the prayer circle at the end of a meeting, when everyone had their chance to pray out loud for a few moments. Most of them would stick with praising God, some would also invoke Jesus, and they would offer thanks for the chance to be alive, and promise to show their thanks by living a good life, and ask for the strength to do so. In asking for strength, some would say they need it because they’re so weak, and the ones who would fall apart were the ones who couldn’t stop saying that, who would get stuck on saying “I’m so weak, God; I’m a weak person; please give me strength; I’m too weak to do it without you; please rescue me from my weakness; I’m too weak; please God forgive me for being so weak…” until they would start to cry, and the person next to them would rub their back, and they would cry harder, so hard that they would become too weak to say anything more out loud.

  I saw my parents at some of the meetings, one of which included such a breakdown. When it happened they didn’t look at each other, and didn’t make a move to comfort the woman who was crying. They had already had their front-lawn catharsis, and now it was supposed to be time to have fun, to send everyone off in a contented and hopeful haze. Seeing other people in tears was not part of the plan. They remained expressionless as others hugged the woman and convinced her that better times were ahead, to focus on the strength and not linger on the weakness, until she finally pulled out of her funk with an embarrassed giggle and an apology, which seemed to assure my parents that it was okay to unthaw their faces. They moved in for some last second back slaps, like football players jumping on the pile after several teammates had already made the tackle, and said something about it being darkest before the dawn, or about a silver lining, or a rainbow.

  Occasionally I would see some of my friends sitting at the God meetings. They never seemed as moved as the adults. They were rather more concerned with the present, too young to think about leaving a legacy or what comes after their heart stops beating; what was to come after the move from Rancho Hacienda was more important to them. And if their body language wasn’t enough evidence of their point of view, the kids’ platform was summarized in a conversation I heard through the side gate of a hosting house one night between Nub and his parents as they exited down the driveway:

  “You wouldn’t need to go to these things if you hadn’t bought a house you couldn’t afford.”

  “Life isn’t always easy, son. We go through some tough times, and that’s where God can help.”

  “Then ask for help before you make a stupid decision, and save the healing kind of help for an accident.”