And luckily, that’s what I’d finally allowed myself to do again; otherwise, I don’t think I’d have reacted quickly enough. As it was, I almost rear-ended the Jaguar flying out onto the road from the circular driveway to our right — with the woman behind the wheel oblivious to our existence. Admittedly, with the tangle of Italian- and German-made vehicles blocking her forward progress, she had limited options, but she might have considered a shoulder or rear-view-mirror check as she backed onto the street with the abandon of an Arkansas moonshiner.
Consideration of any kind, though, hadn’t landed her in the Estates; so we sat motionless for a moment, almost bumper to bumper in the middle of the road, as the woman, still unaware of our presence, struggled to slip her automatic gear shift from reverse into drive. I touched the horn and she turned her head. Instantly, equal parts surprise, contempt, and consternation registered on her face: not only was she astonished to find someone behind her, but what the hell were the Clampetts doing in her neighbourhood?
Then, shrugging us from her consciousness, she turned and drove off. As I reaccelerated, Rachel (in a passable upper-crust voice) commented from the back: “I say, it must have been the chauffeur’s day off.”
Eric continued with the same clipped enunciation. “And she simply had to get to the spa and have more platinum dye rubbed into her hair before she started regaining IQ points.”
Maybe it was just a father’s pride, but I thought they were funny, and I couldn’t help but notice that they held a feel for life that belied their ages.
Maddy agreed — but not quite in the same way. “Doesn’t anyone in this car think that those statements were a bit cynical, a trifle jaded, for twelve- and thirteen-year-old children?”
“I thought they were witty,” I said,“for ... young adults.” “Really,” Maddy countered.“So am I going to have to be the only mother in the world who’s forced to take her son and daughter aside and tell them to stop making fun of the more fortunate?”
At this point I might have suggested that they were trying to lessen the sting of deprivation through humour, but they’re not at all deprived so I said nothing.
For a moment no one did ... until Rachel filled the dead air. “Oh, no. It’s not like that at all, Mom,” she said, cheerfully. “We enjoy making fun of the equally fortunate, too.”
Then Eric, with obvious feigned chagrin, applied the coup de grâce.“And the less fortunate.” Another hush fell over the car until he continued — again with the privileged accent, “They’re khaki!”
Once more hoots of glee echoed from the back seat, but I couldn’t join in. I clamped my lips shut, trying to stifle the laughter, and immediately fired a plug of snot from my right nostril. It hit the outside of my right pant leg and stuck, glistening, like a bright green garden slug clinging to a leaf.
And that’s when I sensed the initial gust, I suppose. Normally Maddy would have responded to my misfortune, maybe with a belly laugh, some pointing, and a hearty “Hey guys, look at that!” But this time nothing, not even a look of contempt — only a reapplication of silence.
Whether she’d actually started planning the changes to come at that moment or just wallowed in the urge to do so, I couldn’t say, but she didn’t speak for the rest of the trip home.
Home.
The word itself is worthy of a paragraph — and much more. It’s where the heart is; it’s where you hang your hat; it’s where you can’t go back to again (okay, so that’s a bit convoluted, but you get the drift). Figuratively, it’s many meaningful things; literally, it’s where you live.
Maddy and I have lived on Linden Avenue for seventeen years now (an accomplishment I still find amazing) and witnessed its most dramatic changes. When we first moved here, as a youngish married couple in the mid-eighties, the area was a predominantly Scottish enclave — as hard as that is to believe, or even detect, for that matter. Tidy green lawns fronted bungalows and detached two-storey brick homes with mailboxes that read Lynch or Tiernay. Often, a single initial, a stylized M, would grace the aluminum grill on the front screen door of a neigh-bourhood home, subtly representing the good name of the Macphersons or Macdougals or Macdonalds within.
As I stated, why Scots had come to populate this area, built during a boom in the mid-forties, is hard to figure. With other cultures and nationalities, you can pinpoint the sudden need for migration: potato drought, persecution, the horror of genocide. But Scotland? Had a post–Second World War candy shortage befallen the country and the history books failed to record it?
Whatever the reason, the Glaswegian Bakery, a purveyor of small, spartan-looking pastries over on Kendall Avenue, demonstrated the only hard evidence of the existence of this otherwise almost indiscernible ethnic group. When Maddy and I first moved into the neighbourhood, throngs of aging patrons filled its aisles every Saturday morning, accchingg and ayeing to each other, clutching their change purses, and looking to satisfy any remaining sweet tooth with bonbons from back home.
The bakery faded away some time ago, as did most of the Scots (to their graves or old-age homes), and their children have grown up and moved on to build their own lives, but Maddy and I have stayed put — through all the booms and busts in real estate and the shifts in sensibility around us. Over the years (the last few in particular) the change in the landscape has been shocking, as, one by one, properties have changed hands, and the golf-green lawns and discreet shrubberies of Linden Avenue have given way to terraced rock gardens, wildflower explosions, and pastel picket fences.
And that’s just what I see now whenever I look across the street: a pastel picket fence, the colour of a clear midday sky. Behind it, a huge oaf of a dog named Apricot patrols a blanket of red wood-chip ground cover at any given time of the day. Some kind of Ridgeback/Lab mix, she weighs maybe 120 pounds and could easily knock the fence over with one good ram — but that’s not her style, her raison d’être. Apricot’s a greeter; propping herself up on the fence with her front paws, she waggles her enormous butt and tries to lay her washcloth of a tongue on anyone brave enough to stop and say hello.
I like Apricot and often do stop to say hello to her. About her masters, though, I know little.The wife and mother in this unit, Ashley, is still young enough to be pretty and fit. She drives their Honda Accord downtown every morning, where she does something much more than secretarial (although I don’t remember what) for a major insurance company. The husband and father,Wendell, has written a critically acclaimed short story collection (now there’s a profession for you — he might as well have penned some top-drawer poetry, too) and is in the midst of contemplating another one. What he really does, besides lugging cases of beer into the house on Friday nights and looking cool, I’m not sure. And their two-year-old boy, Casey, is as precocious as a child can possibly be without crossing the border into obscene.
I don’t know; maybe I’m being a bit unfair. Maddy’s had coffee over there a few times and swears the whole damn family’s as pleasant as they appear to be — and that Wendell’s poised at the doorway to literary success. My response to that is this: Writing short stories? What fucking doorway’s that? The one with the wino sleeping in it? But I keep it to myself because I don’t really know him (and I do know Maddy).
At this point, I can safely say I don’t really know anybody on the street anymore, because somewhere between the last bust and boom, we’ve had about an eighty percent turnover rate.We may not be the Estates here, but the grossly inflated real estate prices of the past couple of years have created a kind of real-life Monopoly game: we’ve been sitting on St. James Avenue for our entire married life, and the people around us have just moved in at Marvin Gardens prices.
This is good for our finances, I’m sure; whether it’s as good for the street as a whole, I don’t know. My practical side says it doesn’t matter.We still have to crawl through the same old maze and react to the same old stimuli — we just rub shoulders with different rats now; another side of me, though, a side