The Lay of the Land (51 page)

“I’m pure cracker,” I say. “Mississippi.”

“I heeerd dat,” Termite sneers. A lineage check means we’re aiming toward subject matter her customers down the bar wouldn’t tolerate, something, in her experience, only another southerner could possibly comprehend: exactly why your colored races are constitutionally unsuited to work a forty-hour week; the consequences of their possessing statistically proven smaller brains; why they can’t swim or leave white women alone. It’s too bad there can’t be something good to come from being a southerner. However, I’m getting happily drunk on my second highball and these are subjects easily skirted.

“Okay. See. I read this.” Termite inches in close to the bar, drops her voice. “Your brain don’t have no manager, see. Not really. It’s just like a plant. It go dis way, den it go dat way. Dey ain’t no
self
ever runnin’ it. It just like adapts. We all just like accidents dat we got minds at all.” Her little rodent’s face grows solemn with the dark implications of this news. I know something about this matter from my bathroom study of the Mayo newsletter, where such matters are regularly reported on. The mind
is
a metaphor. Consciousness
is
cellular adaptation, intelligence
is
as fortuitous as pick-up sticks. All true. I only hope Termite’s not vectoring us toward adumbrations about The Lord and His Overall Design. If she is, I’ll run right out into the storm. “You know what ahm sayin’?” She’s whispering in a secret-keeping voice the other bar patrons aren’t supposed to hear. “You know what ahm sayin’?” she says again.

“I do.”

“Millennium! What fuckin’ Millennium?” The big boisterous girls are getting drunker, too, and have decided they’ve got the place to themselves, which they nearly do. No one’s come in since I did. “I musta been in the crapper when that happened!”

Termite gives them a disgusted look and begins spindling the
Shore Home Buyer’s Guide
into a tight tube, scrolling it smaller and smaller into itself until it looks solid. “So, see,” she says, still confidentially. “Like I’m fifty-one”—I’d have said forty—“and I try to like test ma mind sometimes. Okay?” I smile as if I know, and simultaneously try to know. “I try to think of a specific thing. I try to remember somethin’. To see if I
can.
Like—and it’s usually a name—de name of dem flowers with red berries on ’em we useta always have at Christmas. Or maybe something’ll come up when ahm talking, and I wanta say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s like…’ Den I can’t think of it. You know? They’s just a hole there where what I want to say ought to be. It ain’t never nuttin important, like what’s Jack Daniel’s or how you make a whiskey sour. It’s like ahm sayin’, ‘…and den we all drove over to Freehold.’ But den I can’t say Freehold. Dat ain’t the best example. ’Cause I can say Freehold, whatever. But if I give you a good example, den I won’t think of it. I can’t even think of a good example. You know what I’m talkin’ about with dis thing?”

Termite takes a long consternated drag on her Camel, then douses it in the rinse sink and tosses the butt into a black plastic garbage can behind the bar, blowing smoke straight down without lowering her head.

“I’ve had that happen to me plenty of times,” I say. Who hasn’t? This is the kind of pseudo-problem that would easily succumb to a Sponsor call. And as always, my solution would be: Forget the hell about it. Think about something better—a new apartment with a wheelchair ramp and maybe a Jenn-Air and lots of phone jacks. Your mind’s not the fucking Yellow Pages. You’ve got no business asking it to perform tasks it’s not interested in just so you can show off. To me, it’s a worse signal that anybody would ever worry about these things than that he/she can’t remember every little bit of nibshit minutiae you can dream up but that maybe doesn’t even exist.

“Pyracantha?”

“Say what?” Termite blinks at me.

“That Christmas flower with the red berries.”

“Dere it is, okay. But dat ain’t all. ’Cause the real baddest thing is that when I can’t get what you just said into my mind, den I worry about dat, and den dat like opens the floodgates for stuff you wouldn’t believe.”

“What stuff?”

“Stuff I don’t wanna talk about.” Termite guardedly eyes the two large-bodies down the bar again, as if they might be snickering at her. They are, in fact, pulled in close together, whispering, but holding hands like married bears.

“But I mean, true stuff?” I’m wondering but not wondering very hard.

“Yeah, true stuff. Stuff I don’t like to think about. Okay?”

“You bet.” I take a subject-changing sip of my—now—third happy-hour highball. I may have had enough. I don’t have the stamina I used to. I’m also on the brink of a discussion that threatens to tumble into seriousness—the last thing I want. I’d rather talk about beach erosion or golf or the Eagles’ season or the election, since I’m sure these girls have to be Democrats.

“You think ahm losing my mind?” Termite asks accusingly.

“Absolutely not. I
don’t
think that. Like I said. I’ve had that happen to me. Your mind’s just got a lot in it.” Tattoo and piercing decisions, who’s a good knife sharpener, her invalid mom.

“’Cause Mamma thinks mebbe I’m losing it. Ya know what ahm sayin’? And sometimes
I
think I am, too. When I want de name of some got-damn red flower, or whatever dat woman’s name is who’s the Astronaut—whatever—then I can’t think of it.” Her lips curl in a smile of disgust with herself—a look she’s used to.

And then, in by-the-book bartender protocol, she turns and walks away, resuming something with the lovebirds who’ve been smooch-dancing to Perry. I hear her say, “…they just treat Thanksgiving like it really meant somethin’. What I want to know is, what
is
it?”

“Me, too,” one of the slow dancers speaks, with an echo that registers sadly in the bar.

Termite’s left me the spindled
Home Buyer’s Guide.
I intend to show her my ad and leave my card. Sometimes a new vista, a new house number, a new place of employ, a new set of streets to navigate and master are all you need to simplify life and take a new lease out on it. Real estate might seem to be all about moving and picking up stakes and disruption and three-moves-equals-a-death, but it’s really about arriving and destinations, and all the prospects that await you or might await you in some place you never thought about. I had a drunk old prof at Michigan who taught us that all of America’s literature, Cotton Mather to Steinbeck—this was the same class where I read
The Great Gatsby
—was forged by one positivist principle: to leave, and then to arrive in a better state.

I take this opportunity to climb off my stool and walk to the porthole door and have a check across the lot to find out if my car window’s ready. It isn’t. Chris, the Fitzgerald scholar, has pulled it into the fluorescent-lit garage bay and is moving around the murky shop interior, seeming to be in search of the right materials for the job. The other man, small and raffish and unshaven, stands at the office door, looking up at the rain-torn skies as if into a cloud of sorry thoughts. Edward Hopper in New Jersey.

I reclaim my bar stool and remind myself to grab another piss or be faced with again relieving myself in the rain, behind some darkened Pathmark, where I’ve already been caught more than once by security patrols, resulting in a lot of unwieldy explanation. In each instance, however, the officers were moonlighting middle-age cops and completely sympathized.

Termite’s staying down with the girls at the end of the bar. No one else has shown up for happy hour (weather and the holiday are always negatives). I leaf through the
Buyer’s Guide,
perusing the broker-associate faces in their winning, confidence-pledging smiley cameos. The glam Debs, Lindas and Margies with their golden silky hair, big earrings, plenty of lens gauze to disguise what they really look like, and the men all blow-dried Woodys and mustachioed Maxes in hunky poses—blue jeans, open-collar plaids, tasteful silver accessories and gold throat jewelry. Most of what’s for sale are “houses,” our term of art for cookie-cutter ranches and undersized split-levels—nothing different from our basic inventory in Sea-Clift. Every few pages, there’s a grandiose one-of-a-kind “palatial beach estate” that doesn’t list the price but everyone knows is seizure-inducing.

My 61 Surf Road listing is back on page ninety-six, a boilerplate box with the Doolittles’ house in washed-out color, a shot captured by Mike using our old Polaroid. It strikes me again, even knowing what I now know, that it’s as good as there is at this location, at this time, at this price. There are nicer listings in Brielle, but at twice the ticket. Monday morning, I’ll call Boca and discuss options regarding foundation issues and amending the disclosure statement. “Foundation needs attention” is naturally a death knell in a saturated market unless the buyer sees the whole thing as a tear-down. My bet is the Doolittles jerk the listing and hand it to a competitor who knows nothing about the foundation. I’m not sure I’d blame them.

“Hey! You!” the big Yanks-cap mama bear down the bar (she’s shit-faced) is addressing me. I smile as if I’m eager to be spoken to. “You wouldn’t happen to be named Armand, would you? And you wouldn’t happen to be from Neptune, I guess?”

“Or Ur-a-nus.” Her can’t-bust-’em friend bursts out a guffaw.

“Nope. Afraid not.” Smiling back winningly. “Sea-Clift.”

“Told ya,” the overall woman gloats.

“Big deal. Well then, do you wanna dance? I promise I’m a woman.”

“He doesn’t give a shit,” her companion stage-whispers, leaning in front of her to grin down at me. “Look at him.” More laughing.

“That’s really nice. But no thanks,” I say. “I’m taking off pretty soon.”

“Who isn’t?” she growls. “Tough luck for you. I’m a good dancer.”

“On her feet and yours, too,” her friend mocks.

“You two should dance,” I say.

“There you go,” the second woman agrees.

“
Where
I go?” the first woman grumbles, and they immediately forget about me.

It is a fine and fortunate feeling to be beached here—stranger and welcomed onlooker. I could’ve easily gotten mired into nowhere-no-time, with only the night’s dark cave in front of me. But I’m not. I’m found, though I’m not sure anyone but me would see it like that.

Still, my day has accomplished much of what I wanted when I set forth—which is full immersion in events. Three occurrences have been of a positive nature: a good if unproductive house showing, a successful implosion and a salubrious interlude here. Versus only two and a half of a low-quality: a not-good kitchen encounter with my daughter and her beau; my car busted into; Wade blowing a gasket and ending up—where? (Home, I hope.)

Any of the latter events would be enough to set a man driving to North Dakota, ending up at a stranger’s farmhouse east of Minot, pleading amnesia and letting himself be sheltered for the day—Turkey Day—before regaining his senses and heading home. Suffice it to say, then, that when you see a man bending an elbow, head down, shoulders hunched before a dark brown drink, chatting elliptically,
sotto voce
with the barkeep, looking tired-eyed, boozy, but apparently happy, you should think that what’s being transacted is the self giving the self a much-needed reprieve. The brain may not have a true manager, but it’s got a boss. And it’s you.

Several pairs of fresh patrons have rumbled in out of the rain, which turns the bar more festive. All the ladies—a couple being 200-plus-pounders—are in some species of loose-fitting work clothes with durable footwear, as if they were members of the pipe fitters’ union. Some have donned amusing headgear (a pink beret, a zebra-striped hard hat, a backwards Caterpillar cap), and they’re all in cracking good spirits, know everyone else’s name and are joking and ribbing one another just like a bunch of men—though these women are younger than men would be, and more amiable and tolerant, and would undoubtedly make better friends.

They each give me a surreptitious appraising eye upon entering and share a quick naughty remark, as if I was actually a woman. One or two of them smile at me in a haughty way that means, we’re happy you’re here, we’re on our best behavior, so you better be on yours (which I intend to be). Termite, they all treat like a beloved little sister, but a scandalous little sister with a vicious mouth any parent would have trouble with. She stalks the duckboards with their drink orders, calling everyone “gents” and “goyls” and “douchebags,” occasionally wisecracking something down to me that I’m not supposed to answer. She drifts my way, eyes snapping, offers me something known as an “Irish Napalm” that the “goyls” all like, and that’s served on fire. “They’ll all be wanting ’em in a minute,” she says in a tough, loud voice over the enlarged noise, “after which all shit’ll break loose in here. Anyway, an-y-way.” She’s forgotten about having talked to me twenty minutes ago about being afraid she’s going crazy.

“De thing I want to know,” she says, leaning in again, tiny eyes slitted, as if this is definitely not for general consumption, her right hand resting on her bowie knife handle, “is—when did everything get to be about bidnus? You know what ahm sayin’? Bidnus this, bidnus that.”

One thing I hadn’t noticed, now that Termite’s moved in close to me again, is that she’s wearing silvery orthodontic appliances on her lower incisors, in addition to her silver tongue rivet—which makes her look even stranger.

“The business of business is business,” I say with a frank expression to suggest I know what that means.

“Okay.” She nods, then glances over her shoulder at her bar full of business, as if the new raucousness in here gives us some privacy we hadn’t had. “You a good listener. Did ma old husband, Reynard, hear one thing I ever said, ah mighta been stayed married to dat knucklehead. You know what ahm sayin’? But no way. Uh-uh. Wudn’ no listenin’ involved. Just him talkin’ and me jump’n round like a old hop-frog.”

“That’s too bad. Some men aren’t good listeners, I guess.”

“Oh yeah.” She sucks a tooth and looks down. “You a good-lookin’ man, too. You got you a good young hotsy down-ere where you livin’ at Sea-what’s-it-called?” Termite suddenly smiles at me both directly and sweetly, a smile that features her lower line of silver braces, and tentatively advances a thought that a better, stronger bond might form between us, with other things possibly permissible.