Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

Plus, why would she be attracted to me ? And now? I must be much paler from my ordeal. I’m definitely thinner. Am I stooped, too? (I said I never look.) Are my cheekbones knobby? My clothes grown roomy? I’m sure this is how old age and bad health dawn on you — gradually and unannounced. Just all at once people are trying to persuade against things you want to do and always have done: Don’t climb that ladder. Don’t drive after dark. Don’t postpone buying that term life. The Permanent Period, again, is set against this type of graduated obsolescence. But its strengths again seem in retreat.

Ann, of course, has also crudely played the “Ralph card” by referring to parents who lost children and the connecting path to early death — which is close to a cheap shot and offers no reason for us to get back together. I mean, if having my son die condemns me to an early exit, can that mean there are interesting new choices open that weren’t before? Becoming a synchronized sky diver? Sailing alone around the world in a handmade boat? Learning Bantu and ministering to lepers? No. It’s information that releases me to do nothing different and, in fact, almost challenges me to do nothing at all. It’s like dull heredity, whereby you learn you have the gene that causes liver cancer, only you’re too old for the transplant. Better not to know.

Though the truest, deep-background reason Ann is courting me (I know her as only an ex-husband can) is for a private whiff of the unknown, to provide the extra beat in her own life by associating it with a greater exigence than the Lady Linksters can offer: me, in other words, my life, my decline, my death and memory. Her daughter’s on a similar search. If you think this kind of mischief is unthinkable, then think again. As I used to preach to my poor lost students at Berkshire College back in ’83, when I wanted them to write something that wasn’t about their roommate’s acne or how it felt to be alone in the dorm after lights were out and the owls were hooting: If you can say it, it can happen.

I motor past the brick-and-glass-facaded village hall, lit up inside like a suburban Baptist church. Thick-chested policemen stand inside, talking casually while a poor soul — a thin, shirtless Negro — waits beside them in handcuffs. Does this bear on the Haddam Doctors Hospital “event” today? A known troublemaker, one of the usual suspects in for a round of grilling? Since there are no TV cameras or uplink trucks out front, no flak jackets, no FBI windbreakers, no leg irons, my guess is not. Just someone who’s had too much pre-holiday fun and now must pay the price.

Seminary Street, when I cruise in just past six, appears reduced to its village self. The streets crews have strung up red and green twinkly Christmas lights and plastic pine-needle bunting over the three intersections. (The “no neon” ordinance is a good thing.) A modest team of rain-geared believers is setting up a lighted crèche on the lawn at the First Prez, where in days gone by I occasionally snuck in for a restorative, chest-swelling sing. Two women and two men are kneeling in the wet grass, training and retraining misty floods and revolving colored lights into the manger’s little interior, while others cart in ceramic wise men and ceramic animals and real hay bales to set the scene. All is to be up and going for the first holiday returnees.

Across the street — below the United Jersey Bank sign, its bleary news crawl streaming out-of-town events — a gaggle of local kids, all boys, stands slouched in the pissy weather, wearing baggy jeans cut off at the calves, long white athletic jerseys and combat boots. This is the Haddam gang element, children of single moms back-in-the-dating-scene, and dads working late, who arrive home too tired to wonder where young Thad or Chad or Eli might be, and head straight for the blue Sapphire in the freezer. These kids merely long for attention, possibly even a little tough-love discipline, and so are willing to provide it for each other, their mode of communication being bad posture, bad complexion, piercings, self-mortifications, smirky graffiti from Sartre, Kierkegaard and martyred Russian poets. In his day, Paul Bascombe was one of them. He once spray-painted “Next time you can’t pretend there’ll be anything else” on the wall of the high school gym, for which he was suspended, though he said he didn’t know what it meant.

These idle kids — six of them, under the bright galloping news banner — are taunting the Presbyterian crèche assemblers, who occasionally look across Seminary and shake their heads sadly. Gamely, one ball-capped man comes out to the curb, where I stop at the light, and shouts something about lending a hand. The kids all smile. One shouts back, “Eat me,” and the man — probably he’s the preacher — fakes a laugh and goes back.

And yet, as it always could, the town works its meliorating blessing on me and my mood. There’s nothing like a night-time suburban town at holiday season to anesthetize woe out of the feelable existence. I cruise down past the Square, where the Pilgrim Village Interpretive Center is now closed and padlocked against pranksters, the Pilgrims all hied off to their motel rooms, period animals stabled and safe in host back yards, the re-enactors disappeared into their Winnebagos, their uniforms drying, tomorrow’s skirmishes vivid in their minds. At the I Scream Ice Cream, customers are crowded in under the lights, while others wait outside against the damp building, having a smoke. A thin queue has formed at the shadowy Garden Theater — a Lina Wertmüller offering I saw a hundred years ago, reprised for the holiday, the ship’s-prow marquee proclaiming Love and Anarchy. It’s the holiday. Not much is shaking.

My rendevous with Mike at the August is not until 6:45. I have time to slide by my dentist’s, on the chance he’ll be in late doing a pre-holiday bridge repair and can make a quick adjustment to my night guard before I head out to Mayo next Tuesday. I turn around in the Lauren-Schwindell lot — my old realty firm. All’s dark within, Real-Trons sleeping, desks clean, alarms armed, not open until Tuesday no matter who wants what. A big cheery orange banner in the window proclaims GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, which I understand means “Thanks.”

I drive back up to Witherspoon, which goes direct to 206 and Calderon’s office. The gang-posse hangs out under the bank sign, eyeing me pseudo-menacingly, though this time my notice is captured by the crawl, a miniature, bulb-lit Times Square above them, to which they’re oblivious. Quarterlysdown29.3…ATTdown62 %…Dowclose10.462…HappyThanksgiving2000…LLBeanChinamadeslippersrecalledduetodrawstringdefectabletochoketoddlerusers…PierreSalingertestifiesreLockerbiecrashsez“ Iknowwhodidit”…Airlineblanketsandheadrestssaidnotsanitized…Buffalostymiedunder15"lakeeffectsnow…HorrorstorieswithFlaballots:“WhatinthenameofGodisgoingonhere?”workersez…NJenclavesuffersmysteriousbombdetonlinktoelectionsuspec’d…TropicaldepresWaynenotlikelytomakeland…BigpileupontheGardenState…HappyThanksgiving…

These things are never easy to read.

I turn and pass down Witherspoon, the old part of Haddam, from when it was a real town — the old hardware, the old stale-but-good Greek place, the pole-less barbershop, the old Manusco photography gallery where everyone got his and her graduation portraits done until Manusco went to prison for lewdness. A new realtor’s moved in here — Gold Standard Homes — beside the Banzai Sushi Den, where few customers are visible through the window. The tanning salon’s in full swing for those heading to the islands. Bombdeton…linktoelectionsuspec’d —I “speak” these quasi-words in a mental voice that sounds portentous, though I don’t think it could be true. Such a thought doesn’t want to stay in mind and drifts away on the rainy evening’s odd movie-street limbo, overtaken quickly by a thought that I can get my night guard fixed before heading home. I wonder, driving again along untrafficked Pleasant Valley Road past the cemetery fence, if I mentioned to Ann about the bomb, or if I told Marguerite during my Sponsor visit, or did she mention it to me, and did I go past Haddam Doctors before or after my funeral home stop? I can spend hours of a perfectly sleepable night wondering if I’ve kept such things straight, getting it all settled, then starting the process over, then wondering if I’ve contracted chemically induced Alzheimer’s and pretty soon won’t know much of anything.