David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

“You’re a lousy liar, Claudia.”

Wrong. She silently corrected him. I’m an excellent liar.

“It’s okay. I’d tear it down tomorrow if I didn’t see my dad everywhere I look. For years he did all of his work out of our kitchen, so it was a big deal for him to have an office. A real office. Even if it is the ugliest place on earth.”

“It’s not the ugliest.”

“It’s close.” He laughed.

“And you’re preserving it in perpetuity.”

“Carrying the torch of unsightliness.”

“Generation to generation.”

“Father to son.”

Her laughter fell dead, as if he’d pulled out a gun and fired it. Claudia opened her mouth to say — what? What could she possibly say? But Nick raised his hand in beneficent appeal. “My bad. I told myself I wasn’t going to bring it up. Which, I’m sure, is exactly why I found a way to bring it up. Pesky unconscious.”

Claudia smiled uncertainly. She was aware of her hands, hanging heavily, stupidly at her sides. She suddenly felt the need for them to have something to do.

“Do you have kids?” Nick paused. “Other kids?”

“No. You?”

“No.”

She cleared her throat and, twisting her engagement ring around so that the diamond dug into her palm, said, “How can you not hate me?”

“Who said I don’t?” He stepped up and hugged her before she could respond, laughing mischievously, and held her close. “Don’t get me wrong. I did. For a long, long time. But who wants to carry that around for a lifetime? We were babies.”

When he let her go, she stayed close for a moment, waiting, as if he might reach out again. He breathed deeply then stepped away.

“I drove past this on the way into town,” she said, returning to the table, the plans.

“You said.”

“So much for Herrick’s,” she answered, aware that the little mom-and-pop venture where she and Nick used to buy paper bags full of Swedish Fish had closed long before the Amatos graduated from house painting. She espoused a theory of the world that would always favor Herrick’s, the two-thousand-square-foot family-owned general store over the refrigerated, cheaply built goliath twenty times its size. In fact, it was precisely these “cathedrals of gluttony,” as she’d called them in an article she’d soon inflict on a roomful of Barnard urban studies majors, that illustrated all that was wrong with Americans’ sense of public space: 1) it was endless, 2) it was theirs for the taking, 3) anything and everything — rape of the land, depletion of natural resources, turning the planet into an unlivable oven — was excusable in the name of convenience. Give her a green market any day! She was an ardent, if not bullying, supporter of sustainable farming and found herself in Union Square twice a week filling her reusable canvas totes with a premium of local bounty. Preferring to patronize the sort of small bodegas and specialty shops that, shining like neighborhood beacons, made Jane Jacobs wax poetic, Claudia shared that vision of a well-functioning city and dreamed of designing dense, vital, suburban developments, with plenty of parks and pedestrian-friendly streets, that would lure the zeitgeist away from its isolating and egotistical fascination with the two-car garage and single-family home. She imagined building her own Winter Park or Seaside — though in no place as tacky or politically inept as Florida — and in this way hoped to make her mark by helping human beings make a smaller, less sprawling one.

“This is the problem with America.” She tapped the tabletop, grateful for a digression to take them away from the past, away from even an hour into the future. “Here”—she indicated the Price Chopper with a perfectly polished nail—“you get ninety-five brands of toilet paper. But I don’t need ninety-five brands of toilet paper. Nobody needs ninety-five brands of toilet paper. But we expect it. We’re Americans: we’re entitled to it! But we don’t need it. But we think we do need it, so we build these, these behemoths — no offense—”

“Behemoth is better than a lot of other things you could have said.”

“Like monstrosity.”

“For example.”

“These behemoths that are so big they have to be built where nobody lives. You have to drive ten, fifteen, twenty minutes to get to them. Then your family of four buys enough for four families because you drive a tank and live in a house the size of a tennis court. You have all this room, so why not fill it?” She could have cried for joy at the absurdity of the debate: not a word in twenty years, and within an hour, as intuitively as retired lab rats remembering their way through the old maze, they began the course of playful bickering. No matter the obstacles in their way.

“Claudia?”

“Hm?”

“Yoo-hoo. Where did you go?”

“Oh. Just that the carbon footprint of these kinds of construction is astonishing.”

Nick, who’d stopped by the office merely to grab a set of plans on his way to the site of his newest monstrosity, admitted that the hundred-acre development he’d envisioned as a slam dunk — two hundred half-acre lots, two- to four-bedroom colonials each, yes, with a two-car garage — had become a burden, a blight.

“A behemoth,” he said, “right up the ass.”

It haunted his days, kept him up at night. The announcement hardly qualified as an invitation, but somehow not ten minutes later, Claudia found herself bouncing along beside him as the big red Escalade turned off the paved road and, like a needle lowered onto a record, followed a well-worn groove through the weeds.

The tall, dry grass that grew along the ruts brushed against the car with a drawn-out shussssssh as Nick talked excitedly about what he had in store. He asked if she’d heard of Compton’s Mound. “Rust-eaten iron gates. Rubbled headstones. It’s straight out of Scooby-Doo . All that’s missing is a groundskeeper dressed like the Swamp Thing.”

“I have heard of it. Benji’s girlfriend is one of your rust-eaten iron-gate crashers.”

“You mean those ‘Save Compton’s Mound’ crazies?”

Tell him, Claudia ordered herself. Tell him, but shook off the idea like a shawl in the summer heat. “She thinks you’re Hitler.”

“Was she one of the ones who chained herself to the gravestones to keep the backhoes from leveling them?”

“I don’t know if she’s that devoted. She seems devoted. She has a T-shirt and everything.”

“From the shit I’ve been getting, you’d think I was trying to tear up Arlington. This, by the way, was a family plot. For the most part.”

“The qualifications.”

“I don’t need to make qualifications. It’s private land. There are thirty graves here, total. A few of them soldiers who died in the Revolutionary War.”

“And you want to dig them up? Maybe you are Hitler.”

“Just because you fight in a war doesn’t make you a hero. Even if it did — heroes get forgotten. History gets forgotten. The last burial here happened in 1860, and nobody’s delivered a daisy since. Going in should have been.” He bulldozed one palm across the other to illustrate the simple, satisfyingly boyish transaction he’d been denied.

“Haven’t you seen Poltergeist ?” Claudia couldn’t refrain from asking. “Bad things happen when you build on a cemetery.”

They passed fallen trees and little ponds gone acid green with algae.

“We don’t want to build over the bodies. What kind of monstrosity-maker do you take me for? We’re going to move them. To Glenlawn. My parents are buried in Glenlawn.”

“That’s where my parents are going,” Claudia said, as if naming the destination of their next vacation.