Chang-Rae Lee - On Such A Full Sea

Pix of Quig before and after the animal ban show a profound change in his appearance. Look at the man he was, reading poolside or picnicking with his wife and daughter in a park, sporting a tidy beard and moustache, the prosperous fullness to his neck and jowls like that of any respectable midlife Charter professional who knows he’s belted in and secure, and then at his drawn, clean-shaven twin (the facial hair removed along with anything else that might appear remotely sinister, down to the kitten silhouette stickers on their car), whose newly yielding posture (lowered shoulders, a forward pitch of the chin) also contained an ever-tightening coil of disillusion, this reserve of bitterness and anger that might never spring outward but was steadily grinding its way into his psyche, forever hollowing out shadowy pockets in him that he himself was unaware of. Look at his attractive but weary-faced wife, Glynnis, who could no longer afford to have her hair colored or her crow’s-feet smoothed, time catching up and passing her by right before your eyes. And yet there she is at the boutique with their gleaming, unsullied Trish being fitted with a new carmine gown and matching shoes for the coming pageant, her thumbs-up salute to the camera betraying nothing of the bellowing wonder of how any of it would be paid for. Look, at last, at the former call-van Quig converted himself, stripping the Mobile Vet lettering from the sides and refitting it as a delivery truck for a new linens business he was about to start, the blooming of his hope reflected in the shine of the freshly dressed tires, Trish and Glynnis crammed at the wheel behind him and mugging for the camera, this family for whom he would do anything, no matter how humble or retrograde, accepting whatever destiny his needed to be.

But the descent is the harshest journey, and for Charters especially.

The linens service was doing all right, but a former veterinary client who was a restaurateur was the source of most of the billings, and Quig couldn’t yet afford to go less than part-time at the health club. Glynnis took a position there, too, in the women’s locker room, and it was here that she reconnected with some members she knew from before the ban, girlfriends who commiserated with her plight. Glynnis would never accept charity and in fact none was offered, but they wondered if her husband had leftover stocks of the anesthetics they used on the pets. He did, in abundance, as there was no market anymore for them, and to her surprise her friends offered to buy the drugs at an extraordinary price.

There are illegal drugs in the Charters, of course, but they are extremely difficult to get, given the security measures, and it dawned on users that after the animal ban that certain tranquilizers might be more readily available. So it went for Glynnis, one tiny vial at a time tucked inside a rolled hand towel and placed where the cash had been left for her in the locker. Word spread and soon she was selling a dozen vials a week, and as the supply dwindled, she charged double and triple, which didn’t deter the Charter women from telling their friends. Glynnis didn’t tell her husband about what she was doing until one day he found stacks of money in the storage locker where they kept the veterinary supplies. He was furious at her — the huge risks she was taking, given the penalties for drug dealing! — but she was just as angry with him; the linens business clearly wasn’t growing and meanwhile their standard of living was steadily falling. They couldn’t see their friends much anymore, because seeing them required spending a surprising amount of money on drinks and meals and activities, something neither of them had ever paid attention to before. They had traded in their sleek silent-running sedan for a clattery old electric wagon that partly ran on diesel, a kind that mostly counties people drove. And of course, they lived in a small two-bedroom flat instead of the airy, light-filled duplex with two balconies overlooking the village reservoir. How did he think they were still eating out once a month at places like the Tomato Grove? How was Trish able to go on the weeklong school trip to Paris with her French class, and take cooking and oil painting classes? Where did he imagine the money was coming from? It surely wasn’t put on credit, as theirs had been cut off by the banks, they would find out, the day before the ban. Glynnis wasn’t ever a spoiled Charter wife, but once things changed, it seemed she just gripped tighter to whatever semblances of their former life they could manage. Up to that time, Quig was perhaps the dreamiest in the family, the one who passionately but unassumingly went about his work with animals while Glynnis and Trish were in perpetual motion with the packed agenda of a full Charter life, his former partners the ones who arranged the marketing and expansion of the veterinary business and liked to be taken out for golfing and wine-themed dinners by their suppliers. Quig always chose to stay home with his family, and if he traveled, it was in one of the call-vans for work, when he never bothered to explore the shops and facilities of other Charter villages but instead called home to say he would be back in time to go out for dinner.

Glynnis convinced him to allow her to continue selling the vials, which she did, and once their former stocks were exhausted, she got him to contact his old partners and other colleagues to replenish their supplies. It wasn’t long before the linens service turned into a special-delivery scheme, Quig himself at the wheel of the van with Glynnis and a former veterinary assistant named Ricky bringing the “linens” to many of the most exclusive residential lanes of their village. For Charters, we all know, relish their wine and spirits, frankly in many cases to the point of dependence, and it followed that the prevailing thin trade in illicit pills and powders and herbs had much room for expansion. They’re so busy, so focused as a lot, seeing everything they tackle in work or leisure as an opportunity for personal “leveraging,” that their tightly compacted psyches require regular and deep unwinding. The vial business boomed, the level akin to when an enterprising fellow in B-Mor marketed a scientifically formulated “synaptic-booster” cookie for our school kids to eat before the annual Exams (which turned out to be simply full of caffeine), the money piling up so fast, in fact, that they were planning to repurchase their old condo, though they couldn’t quite figure out how to pay for it aside from using hard cash, which is all they had.

If this brief period was not exactly a golden time for their family, it was certainly a heady stretch, when Glynnis and Quig (and even Trish, who didn’t know really anything of what was going on, save that her parents and especially her mother seemed much happier) could imagine themselves to be making the climb back into their life, reinstating their tennis club membership, renting a proper non-service-people’s condo, and traveling for the regional finals of the beauty pageant to a major Charter village on Lake Erie, where they stayed in a double suite at the best hotel with views of the water and a king-sized bed for Trish as well as for them, their splurging a way to spend the hard cash for sure but also to suppress the gaining feeling of impermanence that must have been marking their days, each sweet moment tinged dire.

It happened this way: Glynnis was making up Trish’s face and hair, and Quig was on a call with Ricky back home going over the heavy weekend orders when the line seemed to buzz. The suite door burst open, an angry platoon of midnight-blue-clad Charter security rushing in with their powered batons. Quig instinctively resisted and they shocked him nearly senseless, and they jolted Glynnis, too, when she tried to pull them off him. All the while Trish was screaming in horror and confusion in her lustrous dress that would get badly torn in the melee. They were flown back to their village and on Ricky’s testimony, Quig and Glynnis were tried and convicted. Within a week, the family was forever banished from the Charter, allowed only what they could fit into their wagon (less the confiscated cash) as their worldly estate.