State by State

by Matt Weiland

  Somehow I wrongly associated that situation with Hampton’s invitation. When I didn’t respond, his mother called my mother. I think it was Hampton’s birthday. Somehow I wriggled out of the invitation. After that, Hampton had a suspicious look in his eyes when he saw me.

  The distance between Exit 35 and Exit 37 isn’t more than five or six miles, but it’s probably the single stretch of pavement that I know best in memory and imagination.

  It’s easy to re-create the setting: in my father’s Firebird we made this journey, back and forth from Stamford to Darien, where my dad lived in the house we’d occupied before the divorce. Ironwood Lane. Probably a drive of no more than twenty minutes, but it seems longer. It seems in memory that I’m always in someone’s car, making this voyage of visitation. There is no place that more reminds me of the end of my parents’ marriage than this stretch of pavement.

  What did I see on these Merritt Parkway journeys? Although George Dunkelberger’s stunning art deco overpasses begin right at King Road, in Greenwich, it’s the ones you go under near New Canaan that feel memorable to me, like the Lapham Road overpass with its fleur-de-lis details, and the Comstock Hill Road overpass just before Norwalk that features an Indian relief sculpture by Edward Ferrari (who worked on many of Dunkelberger’s bridges).

  In 1971 or 1972 the landscaping on the Merritt, which was part of its initial charm, had not yet lapsed into woody overgrowth. In the later seventies, the various agencies in charge of the parkway decided that landscaping was too expensive (which is almost always what happens when government attempts oversight of the beautiful), and so the many local flowering plants that lined the road were allowed to die unreplaced. I can remember that bygone landscaping only dimly, because my memories are layered over with innumerable adult trips.

  Eventually, we came to Exit 37. If you travel south here, upon disembarking from the Merritt, you arrive in Darien, where I lived until I was nine, and where my father lived for a good five years longer, in the house where we left him. They filmed the original Stepford Wives here. Well, they filmed one sequence at Darien’s Good Wives Shopping Center, anyway, the name of which must have seemed too good to be true. My sister claimed her bicycle was in one shot. This was a badge of honor. We lived a couple of miles from the Good Wives Shopping Center, and everywhere around us were fancy houses with big lawns and lots of kids.

  Not long after we arrived, we met the family across Ironwood Lane from us, the Dawsons. As in my own family, the Dawson progeny numbered three. There was a girl my older sister’s age; a second daughter my own age; and then a boy, a couple years younger than my younger brother. We got very close with these Dawsons. They were either over at our house, or we were at theirs, throughout the late sixties. Mrs. Dawson was a bombshell. Mr. Dawson was, I suppose, charismatic. He’d been a professional tennis player for a while. He knew Stan Smith. He always had tickets for the U.S. Open. There were a lot of cocktail parties, featuring Dawsons, Moodys, and various groups of neighbors.

  My mother fell in love with Mr. Dawson. And then my father fell reactively into some similar relationship with Mrs. Dawson. Soon both couples divorced. By the time I was living in Stamford (and, later, in New Canaan, Exit 37), my father and Mrs. Dawson were seeing one another from across Ironwood Lane. At the same time, my mother was dating Mr. Dawson, who’d bought a farm just outside Redding (Exit 44). This was a big seventies mess, a Connecticut mess, but the worst part of it was we all loved these Dawson kids. We believed, for a time, that my mother and Mr. Dawson would marry. Which would make the Dawsons our step-siblings! In which case, why was I spending so much time trying to get Laurie Dawson, the middle daughter, to kiss me and to take off her clothes? She was going to be my stepsister! In fact, it was possible she was going to be my stepsister twice over!

  Exit 38 is where the Merritt Parkway ended after the first phase of its construction was completed in 1938. This exit is technically in Norwalk, which in the early seventies was the lower middle-class town in Fairfield County. My father’s parents lived there during the period I’m describing (1968—1975). Among the other prejudices that were harbored in my family was the prejudice that lower middle-class towns were homely and cheap. And so we used to drive through Norwalk at Christmastime to look at its garish Christmas displays. We laughed derisively. That my grandparents felt comfortable in Norwalk, however, hints at the class anxieties roiling beneath the surface of my family, as in the state generally.

  Exit 38 also leads to a neighborhood at the edge of New Canaan called Silvermine. There’s an art school there, and some colonial houses, and, of course, the world famous psychiatric facility called Silver Hill, where both Michael Jackson and Philip Roth allegedly did some work on their respective addictions. This neighborhood is where I lived with my mother and brother after we left Stamford. (My sister had gone off to school.) I guess New Canaan was considered a better fit for us kids. The schools were better than in Stamford, or so it was said. I went to East School in the sixth grade, where I briefly served as class president, and was, actually, kind of popular for a minute (despite the fact that I was having recurrent anxiety problems and throwing up a lot). After sixth grade, I went to Saxe Junior High School (just down the street from where they filmed some of The Ice Storm, based on my novel about these years), which was the middle school for the entirety of New Canaan. A lot of kids went to the private or parochial schools (like my New Canaan coeval, Ann Coulter, the quintessential model of a good New Canaan girl). But the majority of us went to Saxe, the good kids and the bad kids, the rich kids and the less rich kids, the black kids (such as there were of them), the Asian kids, the special ed kids, those new to town, and those whose families had been there for generations.

  While I was beginning at junior high school, my mother was breaking up with Mr. Dawson. Apparently he had found some new inamorata. My mother went into a long fit of despond, which coincided with the beginning of my own troubles.

  The junior high years were definitively the worst years of my life. Part of this had to do with the physical threats that were my daily fare. Since I didn’t go through puberty until I’d already left New Canaan, and was scrawny anyway, I was a frequent target of extortionists. Probably it was not as bad for me as for many others. The threats of bodily harm were rarely carried out.

  I don’t know why homophobia inevitably seems to be the single most important community-building principle of middle school life, but that’s how it was at my school. Saxe wasn’t overtly racist or anti-Semitic, probably because it was so homogenous. But it sure was homophobic. Faggot was the most frequently used epithet at Saxe. All social outcasts were fags—whether or not they had anything resembling same-sex libidinous cathections. A guy in town who’d been some kind of pedophile, name of Putnam, was so legendary among my fellow junior high students that aputt (short u sound) became shorthand for fag, in our circles, and thereby the worst slander of all. Fags were bad at gym, fags were good at school, especially in really faggy subjects like English or Math, fags were bad at shop, fags liked art or theater, fags didn’t have any girlfriends or weren’t going steady with anyone, and some fags didn’t even know what all this stuff meant.

  It certainly was a nickname used on me a lot, fag, and it didn’t help that I was trying to have sex with a lot of my guy friends at the time. I would have loved a goat to know what love was and was eager to explore bodies with anyone, any age, any race, any sex. Anyone who slept over at my house got a shy solicitation. I was turned down by a lot of friends, but some of them, boys and girls, were willing to experiment a little bit. This was my way of working out my parents’ spectacularly obvious and faithless inclinations as far as seventies Love, American Style sexuality went. My parents never kissed in public, nor expressed much, if any, affection for one another, but they seemed to have sexual adventures with great abandon, marriage being no inhibitor of availability. Perhaps it’s not surprising that I too had my double life, in which I was the earnest straight-A student while at the same
time, whenever the opportunity arose, I was trying to get my friends to take off their clothes and hold me. Some of these friends were football players, hockey players, guys who were, theoretically, not fags.

  There was no way this was going to end well.

  The last section of the Merritt Parkway was finished between 1939 and 1940. Probably the Merritt Parkway was completed as quickly as it was because the country was, consciously or unconsciously, preparing for wartime. If so, it’s appropriate that the parkway terminates right beside Sikorsky, the Black Hawk helicopter manufacturer. But before the Merritt terminates at Exit 52, we need to pause at Exit 44, which leads off toward Redding. When I was a kid this part of Connecticut was still genuine farm country. The farm where Mr. Dawson spent his weekends was up this way, for example. We followed tortuous roads in and around forests and reservoirs, until we arrived there, to loiter in his barn, playing in the straw.

  I remember the last trip we made up this way. I remember the oldest Dawson girl allowed that she was interested in and contemplating some assignation with the eldest boy of Mr. Dawson’s new girlfriend. I remember a wanton, decadent vibe to the get-together. My mother skulked around the premises like some evolutionary throwback, a housewife among swingers, like she didn’t know how not to be there. I couldn’t figure the whole thing out. Was the visit meant to be for our benefit?

  The middle Dawson, Laurie, my former love interest, had as hard a time as I did with all of this. I heard variously, in the years after, about her suicide attempts, her cocaine addiction, her marriage and divorce. Back in our era of turmoil, she had an ominous psychosomatic cough that never seemed to get better, coming and going with disturbing regularity. Everyone tried to persuade her simply to behave, as though persuasion would work.

  In 2001, she and I were back in touch briefly. She was living outside Washington, D.C., and I was meant to be there in September on business. We arranged to meet for dinner in Georgetown. I’d enjoyed talking on the phone with Laurie occasionally, but once I actually saw her, in the lobby of my hotel, I was uncomfortable about the whole encounter. For Laurie, this was not going to be a light, tragicomic conversation about the uncivilized Connecticut we once knew. For her, all of this hypocrisy and mendacity was dangerous and fresh. As we talked over dinner, she came up with ever more horrible stories: a certain man on our street had beaten his wife regularly, a certain man was so alcoholic that he lost his seat on the Stock Exchange and bought a liquor store at the shopping center, and so on. Everywhere was deceit, despair, and grim secrets. Her eyes burned with a need to get even.

  When dinner was over, I confess I was happy to get away. I felt guilty for being so happy, for feeling relieved. But this is just the truth of things sometimes. Sometimes sweeping away the past occasions a feeling of liberation. Was that what I felt, giddily returning to my hotel room?

  That dinner took place on September 10, 2001. Next morning, after I was evacuated from the National Endowment for the Arts (where my business had taken me), and while trying to manage a call on the hotel telephone to my wife, who worked downtown in New York City, the one message that did reach me was from Laurie Dawson. She’d been at Reagan National Airport right as the plane struck the Pentagon. She was there as the airport was emptied by the authorities. On foot, she headed for downtown D.C., but along the way, in a crowd of other evacuees, she’d fallen down an embankment and sprained a knee and a shoulder. She was in a hotel, she said, badly injured, and very scared. When I went to look in on her, full of foreboding, her hotel had Secret Service in front of it. Perhaps there was a Saudi prince inside? You had to present identification just to get to the concierge. Laurie came downstairs on crutches, completely distraught. She had a hundred theories about the implications of that day, and she lurched from one to another. But no matter what she said what she seemed to mean was that she’d never gotten over Connecticut.

  DELAWARE

  CAPITAL Dover

  ENTERED UNION 1787 (1st)

  ORIGIN OF NAME From Delaware River and Bay; named in turn for Sir Thomas West, Baron De La Warr

  NICKNAMES Diamond State, First State, or Small Wonder

  MOTTO “Liberty and independence”

  RESIDENTS Delawarean

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 1

  STATE BIRD blue hen chicken

  STATE FLOWER peach blossom

  STATE TREE American holly

  STATE SONG “Our Delaware”

  LAND AREA 1,954 sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Kent Co., 11 mi. S of Dover

  POPULATION 843,524

  WHITE 74.6%

  BLACK 19.2%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 0.3%

  ASIAN 2.1%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 4.8%

  UNDER 18 24.8

  65 AND OVER 13.0

  MEDIAN AGE 36.0

  DELAWARE

  Craig Taylor

  “We’ve got good watermelons down south because of the sandy soil,” the Butcher Shop Assistant says from behind the counter at Moore’s Quality Meats in Laurel, Delaware. It’s a bright autumn day and Laurel shimmers in the sun. When asked about the state of Delaware today, the Butcher Shop Assistant tells me about good soil, good produce, and what it’s like to be a small strip on a large map. One of her relatives ran into people in California who had never heard of the place. Delaware? Nope.

  Laurel is located down south in what’s known as “Lower,” the agricultural part of the state. It is home to what the Butcher Shop Assistant says is “like, four million chickens. We have a lot of them around here.” At Moore’s, they sell hot country sausage, stay open seven days a week, and engage in conversations with the customers that stretch on and on.

  “The upper part of Delaware is city-like,” says her co-worker. “I know we’re small but there’s a big difference between the two parts. The way people do things, people’s attitudes. It’s all separated by the canal.”

  “She’s studying.”

  “I’m studying to be a veterinarian.”

  “Which is a bit strange seeing as you work in a butcher shop,” says the Butcher Shop Assistant.

  “Which is a bit strange, I guess,” says her co-worker.

  “She’s not a vegetarian neither.”

  The co-worker shrugs.

  “People make fun of the way we talk. People from northern Delaware.”

  “I go across the canal,” says the Butcher Shop Assistant, “and I go up to New York, and they don’t know why I’m speaking so slow.”

  “To the northerners we’re ‘Slower Lower’.”

  “But I was down in Georgia for six years,” the Butcher Shop Assistant continues. “They made fun of the way I talked there too. They thought I was fast-talking down there. We’re right in the middle. Of everything.”

  The Retiree came out to live in Rehoboth Beach, on the Delaware coast, from D.C. “I moved out here before all the gays came, too. It’s a big gay town now. There’s no problems here with gay living, but they want to build a gays-only housing development in Rehoboth. What if I wanted to live there? What if I told them I thought gay meant happy, because it did mean happy at one point?”

  There is a gathering for greyhound owners scheduled this weekend and both beach towns, Dewey and Rehoboth, have dogs with thin faces prowling the streets at the end of short leashes. The motel signs read GREYHOUNDS WELCOME and on the boardwalk members of the fire department operate an animatronic puppy. The Retiree is wearing shorts with palm trees stitched on the legs. The heat is stifling so he chills Jujubes in his fridge and then carries them in his pockets to beat Indian summer. They feel to him like cold pebbles, he says. The tourists swarm around him in Rehoboth on weekends, shuffling past on the boardwalk. There are minivans parked illegally on patches of grass near his house, stuffed with purchases from the outlet stores just outside town.

  “They come from everywhere to get away from their sales tax,” says the Retiree. “The sales tax is our weapon. We’re small. Small like a thumb and useful like a thumb. Can you imag
ine this country without thumbs? We have a purpose and we make things a damn of a lot easier for the rest of the USA.”

  Just outside St. Georges, the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal flows quietly in the sunlight, a speedboat cutting up the still water as it disappears toward the coast. The canal is thirty-five feet deep and fourteen miles long, cutting rural from industrial, chicken farmer from credit card maker. Construction began in earnest in 1824 after a first initiative failed eighteen years earlier due to lack of funds.

  On this day the water is free of industry. The container ships that eventually took over from the schooners, the barges, tugs, and propeller steamers are nowhere to be seen. Long gone is any hint of the dirty industrial slog of thousands of Irishmen who were paid less than a dollar a day to keep the soft slides of the surrounding marshlands in place during the construction. Thanks to them there are still Cretaceous fossils and reptile bones littering the dredge spoils. Another recreational boat passes and its wake leaves waves lapping at the pebbles on the edge of this watery line.