Famous Builder (8 page)

“No!” And I’m a bit startled by the tone of my own voice. What am I so afraid of? Is it only that I’m worried that I haven’t measured up in her eyes, and I can’t deal with the possibility of her censure or indifference? But she’s in her eighties now. Her husband has been dead for ten years. Might she be touched by the fact that we’ve remembered her, that we’ve come to pay homage?

Bobby folds his arms and sighs, plainly annoyed by my paroxysm of shyness. I haven’t yet relented. But his eyes fall once again on the safety-cone orange as if it tells him something he doesn’t want to take in, and he swings back behind the wheel and drives north.

***

It was a matter of accident that we ended up spending our summers next door to her. My parents must have seen something—a newspaper ad? a billboard?—prompting them to take a detour from Ocean City, New Jersey, where they’d spent the afternoon pushing me down the boardwalk in my infant stroller. It was nearly 5:00 P.M., August 1960. Sunburnt, thirsty, they pulled into Anchorage Point past strings of snapping pennants. WATERFRONT WONDERLAND. MODEL HOMES FROM $12,990. They drove around and around the single completed loop, gazing at the spinnakers on the bay, the humble skyline of Ocean City. Soon they were talking to Isabel Falone, the developer, with whom they stood outside the landscaped model home. The future glittered before them: yacht clubs, restaurants, shopping centers, marinas, beaches. Three thousand homes, the most extensive waterfront development in the state. I have no idea how Isabel Falone might have appeared then, but I’ve given her a black French twist, dark eyeliner, and seriously red lips. She’s a force to be reckoned with, a hybrid of Bill Levitt and Jacqueline Susann.

Before 6:00 P.M. my mother and father had placed a $1,000 down payment on the single model available, The Sea Breeze, a waterfront three-bedroom rancher. If only he’d known that Isabel Falone’s Anchorage Point Development Company would file for bankruptcy not two days later. For years I imagined Isabel Falone literally running from continent to continent away from my screaming father. I’d decided she’d made off to Buenos Aires where she ran down the boulevards, hiding her French twist with a sheet of clean newspaper.

In retrospect, I’m surprised that that bit of lousy luck never prompted my father to forgo his dream of owning a summerhouse. His dedication to the pursuit of pleasure is certainly not in character. Why didn’t he turn his attention toward something harder, more demanding? But he was fierce, optimistic in those years. The son of Eastern European immigrants, he’d made a little money, and he wasn’t going to let anyone turn him away from the door. And he genuinely loved Anchorage Point. He couldn’t forget the color of that lagoon. Freshly dredged, it was a rich Caribbean beryl, an enormous outdoor aquarium through which you could see all eight feet down to its clean sandy bottom. Minnows, sand sharks, blue claw crabs: every few seconds they flashed up to the surface, scuttled away, then flashed again. And the water temperature was just to my father’s taste, cool enough for swimming laps. So my parents bought one of the existing forty-four houses—one not that much different from the one they’d hoped for and lost—next to a middle-aged couple from Huntingdon Valley.

***

I’m a little troubled by my parents’ relationship to the house. It seems to me they don’t take it seriously enough. It’s not that they don’t take care of it, but their work goes only as far as cutting the lawn every two weeks, sweeping beach sand from the floors. All around us, however, our neighbors stamp the once-identical houses with their signatures. The Bertmans, for instance, put up a basket-weave fence enclosing yucca, sunflower, dusty miller, and prickly pear. Two houses, down the Brunos side their house with raw textured planks resembling California redwood. The Ansteys even talk about adding a second story in order to take advantage of the views across the marshes and bays. Hammers start banging at 7:30 A.M., followed by the shredding circular saws. People have forgotten how to relax. No one seems to remember that these are vacation houses. Boats stay fastened to their docks, squeaking and rubbing as they go up and down with the tide.

Could it be that the house is entirely too modest for my father, and he’s cultivated a relaxed attitude? On one level, its sheer austerity—pebbled roof, vertical wooden trim, its two modest double-hung windows facing the street like two expressionless eyes—must not fit the bill. He’d prefer something bigger. But bigger costs money (they’ve already given up on Seaview Harbor, the more expensive lagoon development closer to the ocean), and my father obviously wonders whether it would be appropriate to take on a larger monthly payment. Aren’t all his brothers and sisters working overtime? And isn’t his mother getting older, less mobile, waking up in the middle of the night to talk about her fears of the “poor house”? So he makes a pact for us to live simply. The house will embody one thing alone: we’re not going to be something we aren’t. Which is finally more difficult than you’d think: who
are
you if you’ve essentially recreated yourself?

The Foxes, who have struck up a friendship with my mother and father, gently encourage them to take a look around. They stand at the property line and point out our crabgrass, commenting breezily upon the punched holes in our screened porch. The chain-link fence, which encloses our entire yard, seems to be a particular point of contention. I’ll be ashamed of its grave practicality myself a few years into the future and cite several reasons for it to be replaced, but my father has installed it so he won’t have to worry about finding Bobby or me floating facedown in the lagoon.

It’s interesting to me that my parents don’t seem to mind the Foxes passive-agressive jibes. I can’t tell whether they just don’t hear them, or don’t care, consumed by problems of their own. The work goes on next door. One day several dump trucks spill enough bleached stones to cover the yard six inches deep. On another the wooden picture window is replaced with a sleek two-panel sliding glass door. “Custom,” Mrs. Fox assures us. This in addition to redwood planters, a cupola/weathervane, floodlights, a patio, stepping stones, a short pier into the lagoon. Inside, the work has been even more extensive, the stuff of neighborhood myth. They’ve filled it with sleek, understated furniture and have installed appliances that indicate they’ve taken the house seriously, quite seriously, in fact: a pale pink refrigerator, a front-loading washer, and most intriguing to me, a General Electric wall oven in which Mrs. Fox allegedly never cooks anything. Not that I’ve seen any of this. Children aren’t allowed in the Fox house. Not even her own grandchildren, Jonah and Jonathan, who must stay with their parents at the Port o’ Call Hotel in Ocean City.

Nor is Mrs. Fox’s mother, for that matter. Well, she’s allowed, but not welcomed. During Mrs. Halvorsen’s single weeklong stay, she sits all day on the carport and stares morosely at the lagoon. Mrs. Fox makes no secret about her feelings for her mother. She calls her “Muz,” which my own mother finds particularly disrespectful, though forgives. Mrs. Fox tells my mother about the time when, as a teenager, she came home to find Muz naked in bed with another man, a man she’d met in some bar, and how they kept at it (“fucking,” she whispers), while she went into the bedroom to scratch holes in the wall.

“Whoore,”
she grimaces, twisting the pronunciation to sound like
sewer.

My mother’s mouth falls open.

“That’s right, Annie. I’m not afraid to say it. My mother, a
whoore.
”

“What’s a
whoore?
” I say later. I stand with my mother in the tiny kitchen, high on my tiptoes, and stir chicken Rice-A-Roni while she empties a brick of frozen peas into a saucepan.

“Whore,” my mother says, correcting me.

“Whore.”

“A woman who sells dances,” she says without missing a beat.

I cock my head. Selling dances: I cannot think of anything more delightful.

***

I love our seashore island. Its elevation, a mere six inches above the high waterline, both alarms and mesmerizes me. I love nothing more than those new moon nights when the lagoon actually spills onto the yard for a few hours and leaves behind piles of cordgrass that we must rake, gather, and deposit in the trash. But there’s more to my enchantment than that. Surrounded on three sides by flooded green marsh, Anchorage Point’s topography satisfies my desire for solitude and separation. Or could it be that fluidity of land, water, weather, sky? There’s nothing better than returning to our house after we’ve spent a hectic week in Cherry Hill, the suburb that we’re supposed to like, but actually don’t. Far from the brutal playground, far from Sister Miriam Veronica, who humiliated me before my second-grade class because I had a Go Port folio instead of the required Pee Chee brand—all our petty anxieties disperse once we hit the bridge and pass the Coppertone billboard. (That pigtailed girl and her round white butt always elicits a song from us:
Get the fastest tan that anyone can.
…) To the east: the beaches of Longport and Margate. To the west: the bustling marinas, the bright blue generating station, the shining expansive water. No more claustrophobia, no more repetition and rigidity. Walking through the back door, I breathe in that reassuring closed-up house smell (mildew? crawl space?) and creep into the room I share with my brothers. Bobby and I lie in our respective twin beds, with Michael on the folding cot in the middle, thirsty and pleasantly carsick from the 55-mile drive. We rest beneath screens beaded with moisture. Sleep never takes long. I press my scalp into the damp flat pillow and try to name what I hear: rose vines creaking in the breeze, a line chiming against a mast, the moaning of the drawbridges as cars pass over their grids.

And Mrs. Fox’s rituals and rites are a part of this experience. The next morning I wake to the suck-slam of her jalousie door, to which she has added a device that plays a jingle when it opens. I crouch on my bed, chin pressed to the sill, and revel in my role as spy. She’s working hard today, but not any harder than usual. Down on her hands and knees, she scrubs down the asphalt driveway with a bucketful of Tide. She’s in her regulation day uniform: tight tight shorts, candy pink tube top, and a white sailor cap with a turned-down brim. She scrubs harder now and peppers her exertions with soft grunts and a curious utterance that I’ve learned to imitate:
ish.
She glances up at a cabin cruiser, breathing in the dim smell of spent fuel.

***

Early on, I know that Mrs. Fox’s struggles are compounded by the fact that she doesn’t drive. It’s two miles to the Somers Point Center, and she’d rather stay at home than be seen walking along the shoulder of Longport Boulevard. No wonder she’s always sending my mother on some little errand, a loaf of Arnold Bread, some Taylor Pork Roll. More often than not it’s for a six-pack.

“Which brand again?”

“Piels,” she says, passing the five-dollar bill over the fence rail. “Buy the boys some candy with the change.”

The request inevitably comes on an occasion when Mr. Fox is away in Huntingdon Valley or out on the boat fishing. Since he’s due in at midnight, she consumes all six cans in quick succession, “tinkles,” as she puts it, then takes herself to bed.

My mother bristles at these requests, but complies anyway. For some reason, she always stops at the closest place and leaves us in the car. It’s not quite a package store, but a taproom in which she must walk past the older men at the bar, most of whom fall silent upon her entry. Only a few nights ago she sat behind the wheel to inform us that one of the men had called her “stacked.” I couldn’t tell whether she was delighted or appalled, or some combination of both.

“Be back in a few hours,” says my mother.

My brothers and I walk to the car and dream about what kind of candy to get with Mrs. Fox’s change: a Tootsie Roll pop, some Pixy Stix, Fleer bubblegum. But as I turn around at the gate, I see Mrs. Fox pinching and twisting the skin of her palm, as if to say
hurry.

***

We watch
Exercise with Gloria
, which comes on every morning at nine following the
Today Show
with Hugh Downs. Although the program’s clearly designed for women and their special needs (the opening segment features the svelte Gloria and her seven blond daughters in black leotards), Bobby and I exercise with our mother anyway. We thrust our fists from side to side, scoot our butts across the rough beige rug until we get carpet burns. We’re all panting and gasping when we hear a tapping sound on our front window. It’s Mrs. Fox, a look of anxiety and boredom on her face. She’s been spending far too much time in the sun, and she’s getting so dark that Mrs. May recently mistook her for someone’s cleaning lady, something she’d never in a million years repeat to Mrs. Fox.

“Annie,” she calls. “Annie? Are you inside?”

“Oh, Hell’s Bells!” My mother has made it quite clear that she prefers to be called Anne, but Mrs. Fox persists.

I pull up my mother by the arm, then follow her outside. Bobby totters behind. Her flash of rancor fades to relief. She likes the company, after all, even if Mrs. Fox manages to say something patently offensive, which she does without fail. My father’s RCA job requires voracious amounts of overtime, and when we do see him now, on the occasional brief weekend, he seems nervous, embarking on the latest in a series of projects—jacking up the sinking porch slab, tarring the roof—endeavors only an engineer could love. Years later, we’ll call them home destruction projects, if only because they remain unfinished for months and never involve the pursuit of beauty.

I love to listen to Mrs. Fox. I rest my brow on the warm fence rail, the summer heat boring deep down into the roots of my hair. Much of what’s discussed goes over my head, but it has the luscious zing of gossip. It underlines all our neighbors’ gestures and celebrates community life, inadvertently making all of us feel significant.

“The Sendrows are away,” she says conspiratorially.

My mother’s eyes dull. Mrs. Fox has been consumed lately by the aesthetic sins of her next-door neighbors to the south, and my mother’s probably not so sure she wants to open that door.