Independence Day (10 page)

My job—and I often succeed—is to draw them back toward a chummier feeling, make them less anxious both about the unknown
and
the obvious: the ways they’re like their neighbors (all insignificant) and the happy but crucial ways they’re not. When I fail at this task, when I sell a house but leave the buyers with an intact pioneer anxiety, it usually means they’ll be out and on the road again in 3.86 years instead of settling in and letting time slip past the way people (that is, the rest of us) do who have nothing that pressing on their minds.

I
turn off Route 1 onto NJ 571 at Penns Neck and hand Phyllis and Joe two fresh listing sheets so they can begin placing the Houlihan house into a neighborhood context. Neither of them has had much to say on the drive up—I assume they’re letting their early-morning emotional bruises heal in silence. Phyllis has posed one question about “the radon problem,” which she said was more serious than a lot of their Vermont neighbors would ever admit. Her blue, exophthalmic eyes grew hooded, as if radon was only one item in a Pandora’s box of North-country menace and grimness she’d grown prematurely old worrying about. Among them: asbestos in the school heating system, heavy metals in the well water, B. coli bacteria, wood smoke, hydrocarbons, rabid foxes, squirrels, voles, plus cluster flies, black ice, frozen mud—the wilderness experience up the yin-yang.

I, however, assured her radon wasn’t a big problem in central New Jersey, owing to our sandy-loamy soil, and most people I knew had had their houses “crawled” and sealed around 1981, when the last scare swept through.

Joe has had even less to say. As we neared the 571 turnoff he peered back once through his side mirror at the streaming roadway behind and asked in a mumbling voice where Penns Neck
was
. “It’s in the Haddam area,” I said, “but across Route I nearer the train line, which is a plus.”

He was silent for a while, then said, “I don’t want to live in an area.”

“You don’t what?” Phyllis said. She was leafing through the green-jacketed
Self-Reliance
I have brought along for Paul (my old, worn, individually bound copy from college).

“The Boston area, the tristate area, the New York area. Nobody ever said the Vermont area, or the Aliquippa area,” Joe said. “They just said the places.”

“Some people said the Vermont area,” Phyllis answered, flipping pages smartly.

“The D.C. area,” Joe said as a reproach. Phyllis said nothing. “Chicagoland,” Joe continued. “The Metro area. The Dallas area.”

“I guess you have to chalk it up to perception again,” I said, passing the little metal Penns Neck sign, which looked like a license plate, nearly hidden by some clumpy yew trees. “We’re in Penns Neck now,” I said, though no one answered.

Penns Neck is not in fact much of a town, much less an area: a few tidy, middle-rank residential streets situated on either side of busy 571, which connects the serenely tree-studded and affluent groves of nearby Haddam with the gradually sloping, light-industrial, overpopulous coastal plain where housing is abundant and affordable but the Markhams aren’t interested. In decades past, Penns Neck would’ve boasted a spruced-up, Dutchy-Quakery village character, islanded by fertile cornfields, well-tended stone walls, maple and hickory farmsteads teeming with wildlife. Only now it’s become just one more aging bedroom community for other larger, newer bedroom communities, in spite of the fact that its housing stock has withstood modernity’s rush, leaving it with an earnest old-style-suburban appeal. There is, however, no intact town center left, only a couple of at-home antique shops, a lawn-mower repair and a gas station-deli hard by the state road. The town office (I’ve checked into this) has actually been moved to the next town down Route 1 and into a mini-mall. At the Haddam Realty Board I’ve heard the sentiment bruited that the state should unincorporate Penns Neck and drop it onto the county tax rolls, which would sweeten the rates. In the past three years I’ve sold two houses here, though both families have since departed for better jobs in upstate New York.

But in truth I’m showing the Markhams a Penns Neck house not because I think it’ll be the house they’ve waited for me to show them all along, but because what’s here is what they can afford and because I think they may be dejected enough to buy it.

Once we turn left off 571 onto narrow Friendship Lane, pass a series of intersecting residential streets to the north, ending up at Charity Street, the beating-whomping hum of Route 1 traffic fades out of earshot and the silken, seamless ambience of quiet houses all in neat, close rows amid tall trees, nice-ish shrubberies and edged lawns with morning sprinklers hissing, plus no overnight parking—all this begins to fill the space that worry likes to occupy.

The Houlihan house, at 212 Charity, is forthright and not even so little, a remodeled gable-roofed American farmhouse set back on a shaded and shrubbed double lot among some old hardwoods and younger pines, farther from the street than any of its neighbors, and also elevated enough in its siting to suggest it once meant more than it means now. It has, in fact, the nicer, larger, slightly out-of-place look of having been the “original farmhouse” when all this was nothing but cow pastures and farmland, and pheasants and unrabid foxes coursed the turnip rows and real estate meant zip. It also has a new bright-green shingled roof, a solid-looking brick front stoop, and white wooden siding a generation older but of more or less the same material as the other houses on the street, which are smaller one-storey, design-book ranches with attached pole garages and little concrete walks straight to the curb, where mailboxes are posted house after house after house.

But here—and to my complete surprise, since I see I’ve, in fact, never seen it before—here might be the house the Markhams have been hoping for; the fabled long-shot house, the one I’d never shown them, the little Cape set too far back, with too many trees, the old caretaker’s cottage from the once-grand manor now gone, a place requiring “imagination,” a place no other clients could quite “visualize,” a house with “a story” or “a ghost,” but which might have a
je-ne-sais-quoi
attraction for a couple as amusingly offbeat as the Markhams. (Again, such houses do exist. They’ve usually just been retrofitted into single-practice laser-gynecological clinics run by doctors with Costa Rican M.D.’s and are most often found along older, major thoroughfares and not in actual neighborhoods in towns like Penns Neck.)

Our “Lauren-Schwindell Exclusive” sign is staked out front on the sloping lawn with
Julie Loukinen
, the listing agent’s name, dangling from the bottom. The grass has been newly trimmed, shrubbery pruned, the driveway swept clear to the back. There are lights inside, glowing humidly in the post-storm gloom. A car, an older Merc, sits in the driveway, and the door behind the front screen is standing open (aka no central air). This could be Julie’s car, though we haven’t planned to show the house as a team, so that it probably belongs to owner Houlihan, who (I’ve arranged this with Julie) is right now supposed to be eating a late breakfast at Denny’s courtesy of me.

The Markhams sit silent, noses first in their listing sheets then to the windows. This has often been the point when Joe announces he’s seen quite enough.

“Is that it?” Phyllis says.

“It’s our sign,” I say, turning in the driveway and pulling up halfway. Rain has stopped now. Beyond the old Merc, at the end of the drive behind the house, a detached wooden garage is visible, plus an enticing angle-slice of green from the shaded back yard. No crime bars are on any windows or doors.

“What’s the heating?” Joe—veteran Vermonter—says, squinting out the windshield, his listing sheet in his lap.

“Circulating hot water, electric baseboards in the den,” I say verbatim from the same sheet.

“How old?”

“Nineteen twenty-four. Not in the floodplain, and the side lot’s buildable if you ever want to sell or add on.”

Joe casts a dark frown of ecological betrayal at me, as if the very idea of parceling off vacant lots was a crime of rain-forest-type gravity which no one should even be allowed to conceptualize. (He himself would more than conceptualize it if he ever needed the money, or were getting divorced. I of course conceptualize it all the time.)

“It has a nice front yard,” I say. “Shade’s your hidden asset.”

“What kind of trees?” Joe says, scowling and concentrating on the side yard.

“Let’s see,” I say, leaning and looking out past his thick, hairmatte chest. “One’s a copper beech. That one’s a split-leaf maple, I’d say. One’s a sugar maple—which you should like. There’s a red oak. And one may be a ginkgo. It’s a good mix soilwise.”

“Ginkgoes stink,” Joe says, fixed in his seat, as is Phyllis, neither one offering to get out. “What’s it border on the back side?”

“We’ll need to look at that,” I say, though of course I know.

“Is that the owner?” Phyllis says, looking out.

A figure has come to the door and is rubbernecking from behind the shadowy screen: a man—not large—in a shirt and tie with no jacket. I’m not sure he even sees us.

“We’ll just have to find that out,” I say, hoping not, but easing the car a notch farther up the drive before shutting it off and immediately opening my door to the summer heat.

O
nce out, Phyllis steams right up the walk, moving with the same wobble-gaited unwieldiness as before, toes slightly out, arms working, intent on loving as much as possible before Joe can weigh in with the bad news.

Joe, though, in his silver shorts, flip-flops and pathetic muscle shirt, hangs back with me, then stops stock-still on the walk to survey the lawn, the street and the neighboring houses, which are Fifties constructions and cheaper, but with fewer maintenance worries and more modest, less burdensome lawns. The Houlihans’ is in fact the nicest house on the street, which can become a scratchy price issue with an experienced buyer but probably will not be today.

I have grabbed my clipboard and put on my red nylon windbreaker from the back seat. The jacket has the Lauren-Schwindell
Societas Progressioni Commissa
crest on the breast and a big white stenciled REALTOR across the back, like an FBI agent’s. I’m wearing it today in spite of the heat and humidity to get a point across to the Markhams: I’m not their friend; it’s business, not a hobby; there’s something at issue. Time’s a-wastin’.

“It ain’t Vermont, is it?” Joe muses as we stand side by side in the last drippy moments of the morning’s wet weather. This is exactly what he’s said at similar moments outside any number of other houses in the last four months, though he probably doesn’t remember. And what he means is:
Well, fuck this. If you can’t show me Vermont
,
then why the hell are you showing me a goddamned thing?
After which, often before Phyllis has even made it to the front door, we’ve turned around and left. This is why Phyllis caught fire to get inside. I, however, am frankly glad just to get Joe out of the car and this far, no matter what his objections might later be.

“It’s New Jersey, Joe,” I say as always. “And it’s pretty nice, too. You got tired of Vermont.”

Which has usually prompted Joe to say ruefully, “Yeah, and what a stupid fuck I am.” Only this time he says “Yeah” and looks at me soulfully, his little flat brown irises gone flatter, as if some essential lambency has droozled out and he has faced certain facts.

“That’s not a net loss,” I say, zipping my jacket halfway up and feeling my toes, damp from standing in the rain back at the Sleepy Hollow. “You don’t have to buy this house.” Which is a hell of a thing for a realtor to say, instead of: “You goddamn
do
have to buy it. It’s God’s patent will that you buy it. He’ll be furious at you if you don’t. Your wife’ll leave you and take your daughter to Garden Grove and enroll her in an Assembly of God school, and you’ll never see her again if you don’t buy this son of a bitch by lunchtime.” Yet what I go on airily to say is: “You can always head back to Island Pond tonight and be there in time to watch the crows come home to roost.”

Joe is not susceptible to other people’s witticisms and looks up at me strangely (I’m a few inches taller than he is, though he’s a little bullock). He clearly starts to say one thing in one tone of voice (sarcastic, without doubt), then just lets it go and stares out at the unpretentious row of hip-roofed, frame-with-brick-facade houses (some
with
crime bars), all built when he was a teenager, and where now, across Charity Street at 213, a young, shockingly red-haired woman—brighter red even than Phyllis’s—is pushing a big black-plastic garbage-can-on-wheels to the curb for the last pickup before the 4th.

The woman is obviously a young mom, in blue jeans cut off midthigh, sockless tennies and a blue work shirt sloppily but calculatedly cinched in a Marilyn Monroe knot just below her breasts. When she squares her plastic can up beside her mailbox, she looks at us and waves a cheery, careless wave that means she knows who we are—new-neighbor candidates, more lively maybe than the current owner.

I wave back, but Joe doesn’t. Possibly he is thinking about seeing things across a flat plain.

“I was just thinking as we were driving over here …,” he says, watching young Marilyn flounce back up the driveway and disappear into an empty carport. A door closes, a screen slams. “… that wherever you took us today was going to be where I was going to live for the rest of my life.” (I was right.) “A decision almost entirely in other people’s hands. And that in fact my judgment’s no good anymore.” (Joe hasn’t tumbled to my telling him he didn’t have to buy this place.) “I don’t know what the hell’s the right thing anymore. All I do is hold out as long as I can in hopes the really fucked-up choices will start to
look
fucked up, and I’ll be saved at least that much. You know what I mean?”