The Development (17 page)

"Maybe even a scholarship at Stratford?" Paul Ashton suggests to Peter. "I know you have a few foreign students from time to time, but none from equatorial Africa, I'll bet."

"Doesn't sound impossible, actually," Peter grants, warming to the idea while at the same time monitoring his wife's reaction. "
If
she's legit, and qualified. Our African-American student organization could take her in."

"And our Heron Bay Search and Rescue Squad could unofficially adopt her!" Lisa Bergman here joins in, whom the Ashtons have evidently briefed already on their proposal. "Having another teenager to keep out of trouble will make us all feel young again! Whatcha think, Deb?"

To give her time to consider, Peter reminds them that there remains the problem of the girl's younger siblings, whom she's resolved not to abandon: "We remained five and we should stick five," et cetera. Whereas if she "went to university" in Kampala for at least the first couple of years, say, she could see the youngsters into high school and then maybe come to Stratford for her junior or senior year ...

"Listen to us!" He laughs. "And we don't even know yet whether the girl's for real!"

"But we can find out," David Bergman declares. "And if we can make it happen, or make something
like
it happen, it'll be a credit to Heron Bay Estates. Make us feel a little better about our golf and tennis and progressive dinners. Okay, so it's only one kid out of millions, but at least it's one. I say let's do it."

"And then Pete and I officially adopt her as our daughter," Debbie says at last, in a tone that her husband can't assess at all, "and we stop eating our hearts out about losing Julie, and everybody lives happily ever after."

"Deb?" Lisa puts an arm around her friend's shoulder.

"Alternatively," Debbie suggests to them then, "we could start a Dick and Susan Felton Let's Get It Over With Club, and borrow the Barneses' new garage for our first meeting. Meanwhile, let's enjoy the party, okay?" And she moves off toward where the Pitts, the Hardisons, and a few others are chatting beside the lighted pool. To their friends Peter turns up his palms, as best one can with a cup of decaf in one hand and it's saucer in the other, and follows after his wife, wondering and worrying what lies ahead for them—tonight, tomorrow, and in the days and years beyond. They have each other, their work, their colleagues and friends and neighbors, their not-all-that-close extended family (parents dead, no siblings on Debbie's side, one seven-years-older sister of Peter's out in Texas, from whom he's been more or less distanced for decades), their various pastimes and pleasures, their still prevailingly good health—for who knows how much longer? And then. And then. While over in Uganda and Darfur, and down in Haiti, and in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib and the world's multitudinous other hellholes ...

"They had
nothing
like this back in Blue Crab Bight, man!" he hears Joe Barnes happily exclaiming to the Greens. "Just a sort of block party once, and that was it."

"Feltons or no Feltons," Judy Barnes adds, "we've made the right move."

Nearby, florid Chuck Becker is actually thrusting a forefinger at David Bergman's chest: "We cut and run from I-raq now, there'll be hell to pay. Got to
stay the course.
"

"Like we did in Nam, right?" unintimidated Dave comes back at him. "And drill the living shit out of Alaska and the Gulf Coast, I guess you think, if that's what it takes to get the last few barrels of oil? Gimme a break, Chuck!"

"Take it from your friendly neighborhood realtor, folks," Jeff Pitt is declaring to the Ashtons: "Whatever you have against a second Bay bridge—say, from south Baltimore straight over to Avon County?—it'll raise your property values a hundred percent in no time at all, the way the state's population is booming. We won't be able to build condos and housing developments fast enough to keep up!"

Peggy Ashton: "So there goes the neighborhood, right? And it's bye-bye Chesapeake Bay ..."

Paul: "
And
bye-bye national forest lands and glaciers and polar ice caps. Get me outta here!"

Patsy Hardison, to Peter's own dear Deborah: "So, did you and Pete see that episode that Tom mentioned before, that he and all the TV critics thought was so great and I couldn't even watch? I suspect it's a Mars-versus-Venus thing."

"Sorry," Debbie replies. "We must be the only family in Heron Bay Estates that doesn't get HBO." Her eyes meet Peter's, neutrally.

Chuckling and lifting his coffee cup in salute as he joins the pair, "We don't even have
cable,
" Peter confesses. "Just an old-style antenna up on the roof. Now is that academic snobbishness or what?" He sets cup and saucer on a nearby table and puts an arm about his wife's waist, a gesture that she seems neither to welcome nor to resist. He has no idea where their lives are headed. Quite possibly, he supposes, she doesn't either.

Up near the house, an old-fashioned post-mounted school bell clangs: The Greens use it to summon grandkids and other family visitors in for meals. Rob Green, standing by it, calls out, "Attention, all hands!" And when the conversation quiets, "Just want to remind you to put the Rockfish Reach sunset cruise on your calendars: Saturday, July fifteenth, Heron Bay Marina, seven to nine
P.M.!
We'll be sending out reminders as the time approaches, but
save the date,
okay?"

"Got it," Joe Barnes calls back from somewhere nearby: "July fifteenth, seven
P.M.
"

From the porch Chuck Becker adds loudly, "God bless us all! And God bless America!"

Several voices murmur "Amen." Looking up and away with a sigh of mild annoyance, Peter Simpson happens at just that moment to see a meteor streak left to right across the moonless, brightly constellated eastern sky.

So what? he asks himself.

So nothing.

T
O HIS WIFE
, his old comrades at the
Avon County News,
or his acquaintances from over at the College, Gerry Frank might say, for example, "Flaubert once claimed that what he'd
really
like to write is a novel about Nothing." In his regular feature column, however—in the small-town weekly newspaper of a still largely rural Maryland county—it would have to read something like this:

FRANK OPINIONS, by Gerald Frank
Us/Them

The celebrated 19th-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert, author of
Madame Bovary,
once remarked that what he would
really
like to write is a novel about Nothing.

After which he might acknowledge that the same was looking to be the case with this week's column, although it's author still hoped to make it not quite about Nothing, but rather ("as the celebrated Elizabethan poet/playwright William Shakespeare put it in the title of one of his comedies") about Much
Ado
About Nothing.

There: That should work as a lead, a hook, a kick-start from which the next sentences and paragraphs will flow (pardon Gerry's mixed metaphor)—and voilà, another "Frank Opinions" column to be e-mailed after lunch to Editor Tom Chadwick at the
News
and put to bed for the week.

But they
don't
come, those next sentences—
haven't
come, now, for the third work-morning in a row—for the ever-clearer reason that their semiretired would-be author hasn't figured out yet what he wants to write about what he wants to write about, namely: Us(slash)Them.
In Frank's opinion,
he now types experimentally in his column's characteristic third-person viewpoint,
what he needs is a meaningful connection between the "Us/ Them" theme, much on his mind lately for reasons presently to be explained, and either or all of (1) a troubling disconnection, or anyhow an increasing distinction/difference/whatever, between, on this side of that slash, him and his wife—Gerald and Joan Frank, 14 Shad Run Road #212, Heron Bay Estates, Stratford, MD 21600—and on it's other side their pleasant gated community in general and their Shad Run condominium neighborhood in particular; (2) his recently increasing difficulty—after so many productive decades of newspaper work!—in coming up with fresh ideas for the F.O. column; and/or (3) the irresistible parallel to his growing (shrinking?) erectile dysfunction
[but never mind
that
as a column topic!].

Maybe fill in some background, to mark time while waiting for the Muse of Feature Columns to get off her ever-lazier butt and down to business? Gerry Frank here, Reader-if-this-gets-written: erstwhile journalist, not quite seventy but getting there fast. Born and raised in a small town near the banks of the Potomac in southern Maryland in World War Two time, where and when the most ubiquitous Us/Them had been Us White Folks as distinct from Them Coloreds, until supplanted after Pearl Harbor by Us Allies versus Them Japs and Nazis (note the difference between that "versus" and the earlier, more ambivalent "as distinct from," a difference to which we may return). Crossed the Chesapeake after high school to Stratford College, on the Free State's Eastern Shore (B.A. English 1957), then shifted north to New Jersey for the next quarter-century to do reportage and editorial work for the
Trenton Times;
also to marry his back-home sweetheart, make babies and help parent them, learn a few life lessons the hard way while doubtless failing to learn some others, and eventually—at age fifty, when those offspring were off to college themselves and learning their own life lessons—to divorce (irreconcilable differences). Had the immeasurably good fortune the very next year, at a Stratford homecoming, to meet alumna Joan Gibson (B.A. English 1967), herself likewise between life chapters just then (forty, divorced, no children, copyediting for her hometown newspaper, the
Wilmington
[Delaware]
News Journal).
So hit it off together from Day (and Night) One that after just a couple more dates they were spending every weekend together in her town or his, or back in the Stratford to which they shared a fond attachment—and whereto, not long after their marriage in the following year, they moved: Gerry to associate-edit the
Avon County News
and Joan ditto the College's alumni magazine,
The Stratfordian.

And some fifteen years later here they are, happy with each other and grateful to have been spared not only direct involvement in the nation's several bloody wars during their life-decades, but also such personal catastrophes as loss of children, untimely death of parents or siblings, and devastating accident, disease, or other extraordinary misfortune. Their connection with Gerry's pair of thirty-something children, Joan's elder and younger siblings, and associated spouses and offspring is warm, though geographically attenuated (one couple in Oregon, another in Texas, others in Vermont and Alabama). Husband and wife much enjoy each other's company, their work, their modest
TINK
prosperity (Two Incomes, No [dependent] Kids), and their leisure activities: hiking, wintertime workouts in the Heron Bay Club's well-equipped fitness center and summertime swimming in it's Olympic-size pool, vacation travel to other countries back in more U.S.-friendly times, and here and there in North America since 9/11 and (in Gerald Frank's Frank Opinion) the Bush administration's Iraq War fiasco (U.S./"Them"?). Also their, uh ... friends?

Well: No F.O. column yet in any of
that,
that Gerry can see. While typing on from pure professional habit, however, he perpends that paragraph-ending word above, flanked by suspension points before and question mark after: something to circle back to, maybe, after avoiding it for a while longer by reviewing some other senses of that slash dividing Us from Them. Peter Simpson, a fellow they know from Rockfish Reach who teaches at the College and (like Joan Frank) serves on the Heron Bay Estates Community Association, did a good job of that at one of HBECA's recent open meetings, the main agenda item whereof was a proposed hefty assessment for upgrading the development's entrance gates. As most readers of "Frank Opinions" know, we are for better or worse the only gated community in Avon County, perhaps the only one on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Just of the state highway a few miles south of Stratford, Heron Bay Estates is bounded on two irregular sides by branching tidal tributaries of the Matahannock River (Heron and Spartina Creeks, Rockfish and Oyster Coves, Blue Crab Bight, Shad Run), on a third side by a wooded preserve of pines, hemlocks, and sweet gums screening a sturdy chain-link fence, and on it's highway side by a seven-foot-high masonry wall atop an attractively landscaped berm, effectively screening the development from both highway noise and casual view. Midway along this side is our entrance road, Heron Bay Boulevard, accessed via a round-the-clock manned gatehouse with two exit lanes on one side, their gates raised and lowered automatically by electric eye, and two gated entry lanes on the other: one on the left for service vehicles and visitors, who must register with the gatekeeper and display temporary entrance passes on their dashboards, and one on the right for residents and nonresident Club members, whose cars have HBE decals annually affixed to their windshields. So successful has the development been that in the twenty-odd years since it's initial layout it has grown to be the county's second-largest residential entity after the small town of Stratford itself—with the consequence that homeward-bound residents these days not infrequently find themselves backed up four or five cars deep while the busy gatekeepers simultaneously check in visitors in one lane and look for resident decals in the other before pushing the lift-gate button. Taking their cue from the various E-Z Pass devices commonly employed nowadays at bridge and highway toll booths, the developers, Tidewater Communities, Inc., suggested to the Association that an economical alternative to a second gatehouse farther down the highway side (which would require expensive construction, an additional entrance road, and more 24/7 staffing) would be a third entry lane at the present gatehouse, it's gate to be triggered automatically by electronic scansion of a bar-code decal on each resident vehicle's left rear window.