Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

H eaded home now, fully contextualized, vacant of useful longing. Bernice could’ve conferred a sporty insularity, made me feel my own weight less. Even un-ideal women can do this. But help’s not available, which is a legitimate mode of acceptance. It just doesn’t feel good.

Traffic lights are working again, candy-cane ornaments weakly lit. Commerce is flickering to life as I drive out of Seaside Park and reenter Sea-Clift. LIQUOR has illuminated its big yellow letters at noon, and cars are flocking. The drive-thru ATM at South Shore Savings is doing a smart business, as is the adult books, Guppies to Puppies and the bottle redemption center — the former Ford dealership. The Wiggle Room has opened up, and a hefty blue New Jersey Waste snail-back is swaying into its back alley. There are even tourists outside the mini-golf/batting cage, their nonchalant gestures betraying seasonal uncertainty, their gazes skyward. The green EMS wagon rests back in its Fire Department bay, the same crew as earlier out front under the waving American flag, sharing a smoke and a joke with the two jodhpured motorcycle cops who guarded the race. The Tru-Value is holding its “Last Chance Y-2K Special” on plastic containers and gas masks. THE FUTURE WAS A BOMB, their hand-lettered sign says.

Many of the 5-K runners are here straggling home along the sidewalks and down the residential side streets, their race run, their faces relaxed, limbs loosened by honest non-cutthroat competition, their water bottles empty, their gazes turned toward what’s next in the way of healthy, wholesome Thanksgiving partaking. (There’s no sign of the Africans.) I still wouldn’t want to be any of them. Though one scrawny red-shoed runner waves at my car as I pass — I have no idea who — someone I sold a house to or busted my ass trying, but left a good impression of the kinda guy I am. I give a honk but head on.

When I cruise past my Realty-Wise office, Mike’s Infiniti sits by itself in front. The pizza place is lighted and going, though no one seems to want a pizza for Thanksgiving. Doubtless, Mike’s at his desk tweaking his business plan, re-conferring with his new friend, the money bags. He may be trying the Bagosh family on his cell before they hit the Parkway after lunch. I lack the usual gusto to go have a look-see at what he’s up to — which makes business itself seem far away and its hand-over a sounder idea. How, though, will I feel to “have sold” real estate and sell it no more? The romance of it could fade once the past tense takes over. Different from, “Well, yeah, I usta fly 16’s up in that Bacca Valley. Pretty hairy up there.” Or, “Our whole lab shared credit on the malaria cure.” The only way to keep the glamour lights on in the real-estate commitment is to keep doing it. Do it till you drop dead, so you never have to look back and see the shadows. Most of the old-timers know that, which is why so many go feet first. This won’t please Mike, but fuck Mike. It’s my business, not his.

Ahead, beyond the old shuttered Dad ’n Lad, where the Boro of Sea-Clift originally ended because the topsoil ran out and the primeval white sand beach took up, the old Ocean Vista Cemetery, where Sea-Clift’s citizens were buried back in the twenties, lies shabbily ignored and gone to weeds. The Boro officially maintains it, keeps up its New Orleans-style wrought iron fence and little arched filigree gate that opens pleasantly down a slender allée three-quarters of a city block toward the sea, where the ocean vista’s long been blocked by grandfathered frame residences that have gone to seed themselves but can’t be replaced. No one is currently at rest in Ocean Vista, not even gravestones remain. The ground — alongside the Dad ’n Lad — looks like nothing but a small-size shard of excess urban landscape awaiting assignment by developers who’ll tear down the whole block of elderly structures and put up a Red Roof Inn or a UPS store — the same as happened on a grand scale in Atlantic City.

The particular reason our only town cemetery no longer has residents is that the great-great-grandchildren of Sea-Clift’s first Negro pioneer, a freed slave known only as “Jonah,” somehow discovered him interred plumb in the middle of the otherwise-white cemetery, and began agitating at the state level for a monument solemnizing his life and toilsome times as a “black trailblazer” back when being a trailblazer wasn’t cool. Jonah’s progeny turned out to be noisy, well-heeled Philadelphia and D.C. plutocrat lawyers and M.D.’s, who wanted to have their ancestor memorialized as another stop on the Coastal Heritage Trail, with an interactive display about his life and the lives of folk like him who valiantly diversified the Shore — a story that was possibly not going to be all that flattering to his white contemporaries.

Whereupon all hell broke loose. The town elders, who’d always known about Jonah’s resting place and felt fine about him sharing it with their ancestors, did not, however, want him “stealing” the cemetery and posthumously militating for importance he apparently hadn’t claimed in life. Jonah had his rightful place, it was felt, among other Sea-Clifters, and that was enough. The grandchildren, however, sniffing prejudice, commenced court proceedings and EEOC actions to have the Boro Council sued in federal court. Everything got instantly blown out of proportion, at which point an opportunistic burial-vault company with European Alliance affiliations in Brick Township offered free of charge to dig up and re-inter anybody whose family wanted its loved one to enjoy better facilities in a new and treeless memory park they had land for out Highway 88. Everyone — there were only fifteen families — said sure. The town issued permits. All the graves — except Jonah’s — were lovingly opened, their sacred contents hearsed away, until in a month’s time poor old Jonah had the cemetery all to his lonesome. Whereupon, the litigious Philadelphians decided Jonah and his significance had been municipally disrespected and so applied for a permit themselves and moved him to Cherry Hill, where people apparently know better how to treat a hero.

The town is still proprietor of the cemetery and awaits the happy day when the Red Roof site-evaluation crew shows up seeking a variance and a deconsecration order. For a time — two winters ago — I proposed buying the ground myself and turning it into a vernal park as a gesture of civic giving, while retaining development rights should the moment ever come. I even considered not deconsecrating it and having myself buried there — a kingdom of one. This was, of course, before my prostate issues. I’d always pondered — without a smidge of trepidation — where I’d “end up,” since once you wander far from your own soil, you never know where your final resting place might be. Which is why many people don’t stray off their porch or far from familiar sights and sounds. Because if you’re from Hog Dooky, Alabama, you don’t want to wind up dead and anonymously buried in Metuchen, New Jersey. In my case, I thought it would’ve saved my children the trouble of knowing what in the hell to do with “me,” and just deciding to entrust my remains to some broken-down old Cap’n Mouzakis who’d “return” me to the sea from whence as a frog I came. You could say it’s a general problem, however — uncertainty over where and how you want to be eternally stowed. Either it represents your last clinging to life, or else it’s the final muddled equivocation about the life you’ve actually lived.

Not surprisingly, insider development interests on the Dollars For Doers Council saw disguised dreams of empire behind my petition and declined my cash offer for the cemetery. The “civic giving” part put them on their guard. Which was and is fine with me. Money not spent is money saved, in my economy. Though it has left as an open subject the awkward issue of my ending-up formalities. I have a will which leaves the house and Realty-Wise to Sally and all remaining assets to the kids — not much, though they’ll get plenty from their mom, including a membership in the Huron Mountain Club. But that picture’s different since Sally left for Mull, and could shift again, since she could come back and Mike now wants the business. I’d even thought the three of us nuclear-family components might sit around a congenial breakfast table during the coming days and talk these sensitive matters into commonsense resolution. But that was prior to reexposure to Paul (and Jill), and hearing of his secret dreams to be my business partner. And before Clarissa hied off to Atlantic City, leaving me with the uneasy sensation she’ll return changed. In other words, events have left life and my grasp on the future in as fucked-up a shape as I can imagine them. Life alters when you get sick, no matter what I told Ann. Don’t let any of these Sunny Jims tell you different.