by John Barth
Which august three-member body, a branch of our Heron Bay Estates Community Association, had reluctantly approved, back in the 1980s, the original design for 211 Spartina Court, a rambling brick-and-clapboard rancher on a prime two-acre lot at the very point of Spartina Point(e), with narrow but navigable Spartina Creek on three sides. It was a two-to-one decision: None of the three board members was happy to let a ranch house, however roomy, set the architectural tone for what was intended as HBE's highest-end neighborhood; two- and three-story plantation-style manses were what they had in mind. But while one of the board folk was steadfastly opposed, another judged it more important to get a first house built (it's owners were prepared to begin construction immediately upon their plan's approval) in order to help sell the remaining lots and encourage the building of residences more appropriate to the developer's intentions. The third member was sympathetic to both opinions; she ultimately voted approval on the grounds that preliminary designs for two neighboring houses were exactly what was wanted for Spartina Pointe—neo-Georgian manors of whitewashed brick, with two-story front columns and the rest—and together should adequately establish the neighborhood's style. The ranch house was allowed, minus the rustic split-rail fence intended to mark the lot's perimeter, and with the provision that a few Leyland cypresses be planted instead, to partially screen the residence from street-side view.
The strategy succeeded. Within a few years the several "drives" and "courts" of Spartina Pointe were lined with more or less im posing, more or less Georgian-style homes: no Cape Cods, Dutch colonials, or half-timbered Tudors (all popular styles in easier-going Rockfish Reach), certainly nothing contemporary, and no more ranchers. The out-of-synch design of 211 Spartina Court raised a few eyebrows, but the house's owners, Ed and Myra Gunston, were hospitable, community-spirited ex-Philadelphians whom none could dislike: organizers of neighborhood parties and progressive dinners, spirited fund-raisers for the Avon County United Way and other worthy causes. A sad day for Spartina Pointe when Myra was crippled by a stroke; another, some months later, when a For Sale sign appeared in front of those Leyland cypresses.
All the above established, we may begin this teardown story, which is not about the good-neighbor Gunstons, and for which the next chapter in the history of their Spartina Point(e) house, heavily foreshadowed by the tale's title, is merely the occasion. We shift now across Heron Bay Estates to 414 Doubler Drive, in Blue Crab Bight, the second-floor coach home of early-fortyish Joseph and Judith Barnes—first explaining to non-tidewater types that "doubler" is the local watermen's term for the mating stage of Callinectes sapidus, the Chesapeake Bay blue crab. The male of that species mounts and clasps fast the female who he senses is about to molt, so that when eventually she sheds her carapace and becomes for some hours a helpless "softcrab," he can both shield her from predators and have his way with her himself, to the end of continuing the species: a two-for-one catch for lucky crabbers, and an apt street name for a community of over-and-under duplexes, whose owners (and some of the rest of us) do not tire of explaining to out-of-staters.
Some months have passed since the space break above: It is now the late afternoon of a chilly-wet April Friday in an early year of the twenty-first century. Ruddy-plump Judy Barnes has just arrived home from her English-teaching job at Fenton, a small private coed junior-senior high school near Stratford, where she's also an assistant girls' soccer coach. This afternoon's intramural game having been rained out, she's home earlier than usual and is starting dinner for the family: her husband, a portfolio manager in the Stratford office of Lucas & Jones, LLC; their elder daughter, Ashleigh, a Stratford College sophomore who lives in the campus dorms but often comes home on weekends; and Ashleigh's two-years-younger sister, Tiffany, a (tuition-waived) sixth-form student at Fenton, who's helping Mom with dinner prep.
Osso buco, it's going to be. While Judy shakes the veal shanks in a bag of salt-and-peppered flour and Tiffany dices carrots, celery, onions, and garlic cloves for preliminary sautéing, Joe Barnes is closing his office for the weekend with the help of Jeannine Weston, his secretary, and trying in vain to stop imagining that lean, sexy-sharp young woman at least half naked in various positions to receive in sundry of her orifices his already wet-tipped penis. Quit that already! he reprimands himself, to no avail. Bear in mind that not only do you honor your marriage and love your family, you also say amen to the Gospel According to Mark, which stipulates that Thou Shalt Not Hump the Help. "Mark" being Mark Matthews, his boss and mentor, first in Baltimore and then, since Lucas & Jones opened their Eastern Shore office five years ago, in Stratford. That's when the Barneses bought 414 Doubler Drive: a bit snug for a family of four with two teenagers, but a sound investment, bound to appreciate rapidly in value as the population of Avon and it's neighboring counties steadily grows. The girls had shared a bedroom since their babyhood and enjoyed doing so right through their adolescence; the elderly couple in 412, the coach home's first-floor unit, were both retired and retiring, so quiet that one could almost forget that their place was occupied. In the four years until their recent, reluctant move to Bayview Manor, they never once complained about Ashleigh's and Tiffany's sometimes noisy get-togethers with school friends.
Perhaps Reader is wincing at the heavy New Testament sound of "Mark Matthews Lucas and Jones"? "Thou shalt not wince," Mark himself enjoys commanding new or prospective clients in their first interview. "Why do you think Jim Lucas and Harvey Jones [the firm's cofounders] hired me in the first place, if not to spread the Good Word about asset management?" Which the fellow did in sooth, churning their portfolios to the firm's benefit as well as theirs and coaching his protégé to do likewise. That earlier gospel-tenet of his, however, he formulated after breaking it himself: In his mid-fifties, coincident with the move from Baltimore to Stratford, he ended his twenty-five-year first marriage to wed the striking young woman who'd been his administrative assistant for three years and his mistress for two. "Don't hump the help," he then enjoyed advising their dinner guests, Joe and Judy included, in his new bride's presence. "You should see my alimony bills!" "Plus he had to find himself a new secretary," trim young Mrs. Matthews liked to add, "once his office squeeze became his trophy wife"—and his unofficial deputy account manager, handling routine portfolio transactions from her own office in their Stratford house, "where unfortunately I can't keep an eye on him."
But "Eew, Mom!" Tiffany Barnes is exclaiming in the kitchen of 414 Doubler Drive, where she's ladling excess fat off the osso buco broth. "Even without this glop, the stuff's so greasy!"
"Delicious, though," her mother insists. "And we only have it a couple times a year."
"We have it only a couple times a year," her just-arrived other daughter corrects her. An English major herself, Ashleigh likes to catch her family's slips in grammar and usage, especially her English-teacher mother's. Patient Judy rolls her eyes. "Dad says I should open a cabernet to breathe before dinner," the girl then adds. "He'll be up in a minute. He's doing stuff in the garage."
"Just take a taste of this marrow," Judy invites both girls, indicating a particularly large cross-section of shank bone in the casserole, it's core of brown marrow fully an inch in diameter, "and tell me it's not the most delicious thing you ever ate."
"Ee-e-ew!" her daughters chorus in unison. Then Tiffany (who's taking an elective course at Fenton called The Bible As Literature that her secular mother frowns at as a left-handed way of sneaking religion into the curriculum, although she quite re spects the colleague who's teaching it) adds, "Think not of the marrow?" Judy chuckles proudly; Ashleigh groans at the pun, musses her sister's hair, and goes to the wine rack to look for cabernet sauvignon, singing a retaliatory pun of her own that she'd seen on a bumper sticker earlier in the week: "Life is a ca-ber-net, old chum ..."
Sipping same half an hour later with a store-bought duck pâté in the living room, where a fake log crackles convincingly in the glass-shuttered fireplace, "So guess who just bought that house at the far
end of Spartina Court?" Joe Barnes asks his wife. "Mark and Mindy Matthews!"
"Mindy," Ashleigh scorns, not for the first time: "What a lame name!" Though only nineteen, she's allowed these days to take half a glass of wine with her parents at cocktail time and another half at dinner, since they know very well that she drinks with her college friends and believe that she's less likely to binge out like too many of them on beer and hard liquor if, as in most European households, the moderate consumption of wine with dinner is a family custom. Tiffany, having helped with the osso buco, has withdrawn to the sisters' bedroom and her laptop computer until the meal is served.
"That ranch house?" Judy asks. "Why would the Matthewses swap their nice place in Stratford for a run-of-the-mill ranch house?"
Her husband swirls his wine, the better to aerate it. "Because, one, Mark's buying himself a cabin cruiser and wants a waterfront place to go with it. And, two, by the time they move in it'll be no run-of-the-mill ranch house, believe me. Far from it!"
Judy sighs. "Another Heron Bay remodeling job. And we can't even get around to replacing that old Formica in our kitchen! But a renovated rancher's still a rancher."
Uninterested Ashleigh, pencil in hand, is back to her new passion, the sudoku puzzle from that day's Baltimore Sun. She has the same shoulder-length straight dark hair and trim tight body that her mother had when Joe and Judy first met as University of Maryland undergraduates two dozen years ago, and that Jean nine Weston (of whose tantalizing figure Joe is disturbingly reminded lately whenever, as now, he remarks this about his eldest daughter) has not yet outgrown. He and Judy both, on the other hand, have put on the pounds—and his hair is thinning toward baldness, and hers showing it's first traces of gray, before they even reach fifty ...
"Never mind remodeling and renovation," he says. "That's not Mark's style." He raises his glass as if in toast: "Heron Bay Estates is about to see it's very first teardown!"
... plus her generous, once so fine, firm breasts are these days anything but, and "love handles" would be the kindest term for those side rolls of his that, like his belly, have begun to lap over his belted trouser top. Men, of course, enjoy the famously unfair advantage that professional success may confer upon their dealings with the opposite sex: Unsaintly Mark, e.g., is hardly the tall/dark/handsome type, but his being double-chinned, pudgy, and doorknob bald didn't stand in the way of his scoring with pert blond Mindy—and what in God's name is Joe Barnes up to, thinking such thoughts at Happy Hour in the bosom of his family?
Thus self-rebuked, he takes it upon himself to clean up the hors d'oeuvres and call Tiffany to set the table while Judy assembles a salad and Ashleigh pops four dinner rolls into the toaster oven. As is their weekend custom when all hands are present, they then clink glasses (three wines, one diet Coke) and say their mock table-grace—"Bless this grub and us that eats it"—before settling into the osso buco. I love you all, goddamn it! lump-throated Joe reminds himself.
"So what do the Matthewses intend to put up in place of their teardown?" Judy asks. "One of those big colonial-style jobs, I guess?"
"Oh, no." Her husband grins, shakes his head. "Wait'll you see. You know that fancy new spread on Loblolly Court, over in Rockfish Reach?" Referring to an imposing Mediterranean-style stucco-and-tiled-roof house built recently in that adjacent neighborhood despite the tsk-tsks of numerous homeowners there.
"Ee-e-ew," comments Tiffany.
"Well, this morning Mark showed me their architect's drawings for what he and Mindy have in mind—Mindy especially, but Mark's all for it—and it makes that Loblolly Court place look as humble as ours."
"Ee-e-ew!" Ashleigh agrees with her sister: a putdown not of their coach home, which she's always happy to return to from her dorm even though their bedroom has become mainly Tiffany's space these days, but the pretentiousness, extravagance, and inconsiderate arrogance, in her liberal opinion, of even the Loblolly Court McMansion, which at least was built on an unoccupied lot.
A month or so later, on a fair-weather A.M. bicycle ride through the pleasantly winding bike and jogging paths of Heron Bay Estates, Judy and the girls and a couple of Tiffany's Fenton classmates pedal up Spartina Court to see what's what (Joe's in Baltimore with his boss and secretary at some sort of quarterly meeting in the Lucas & Jones home office). Sure enough, the Gunstons' rambling rancher and it's screen of trees have been cleared away completely and replaced by a building-permit board and a vast shallow excavation, the foundation footprint of the Matthewses' palatial residence-in-the-works.
"A perfectly okay house," indignant Ashleigh informs her sister's friends, "no older than ours and twice as big, and wham! They just knock it down, haul it to the dump, and put up Buckingham Palace instead!"
"More like the Alhambra," in her younger sister's opinion (Tiff's art history course at Fenton includes some architecture as well).
"Or Michael Jackson's Neverland?" offers one of her companions.
"Dad showed us the latest computer projections of it last week?" Ash explains with the rising inflection so popular among her generation. "Ee-e-ew! And he thinks it's just fine!"
"Different people go for different things," her mother reminds them all. "De gustibus non est disputandum?"
"See what I mean?" Tiffany asks her friends, and they seem to, though what it is they see, Judy prefers not to wonder.
"Anyhow," Ashleigh adds, "whatever's right by our dad's boss is fine with our dad."
"Ashleigh! Really!"
Tiffany's exaggerated frown suggests that on this one she sides with her mother, at least in the presence of nonfamily. To Judy's relief, Ashleigh drops the subject, and they finish their bike ride.
Over their early Sunday dinner, however—which Joe, as promised, has returned from Baltimore in time for, before Ashleigh goes back to her dorm—the girl takes up her cudgel again. It's one thing, she declares, to build a big pretentious new house like that eyesore in Rockfish Reach, if that's what a person wants? But to tear down a perfectly okay quote-unquote older one to do it is, in her opinion, downright obscene—like those people who order a full-course restaurant meal and then just nibble at each course, leaving the rest to be tossed out. Gross!
"Weak analogy," her teacher mother can't help pointing out. "Let's think up a better one."
"Like those people who buy a new car every two years?" Tiffany offers. "When their quote old one's in perfectly good condition with maybe ten thousand miles on it?"
"No good," in her sister's opinion, "because at least the old car gets traded in and resold and used. This is more like if every time they buy a new one they junk their perfectly okay old one."
"Good point," Judy approves.
"Or like Saint Mark Matthews," bold Ashleigh presses on, "dumping the mother of his kids for a trophy blond airhead half his age."
Alarmed, Tiffany glances from sister to mother to dad. But Joe, who until now has seemed to Judy still to have city business on his mind, here joins the conversation like the partner she's loved for two dozen years. "Beg to disagree, guys? Not with your analogies, but with your judgment, okay? Because what the heck, Ash: The ranch-house people weren't evicted or dumped; they put their place up for sale and got close to their asking price for it. Seems to me the whole business calls for nothing more than a raised eyebrow—more for the new house's design, if you don't happen to like it, than for the replacement idea itself."
"I think I second that," his wife decides.
"And Mindy Matthews, by the way, is no airhead," Joe informs his daughters. "She's sharp as a tack."
"Hot in bed, too, I bet," Tiffany makes bold to add. Her father frowns disapproval. Judy declares, "That's none of our business, girls."
"But what still gets me, Dad," Ashleigh persists, less belligerently, "is the extravagance of it! We learned in poly sci this week that if Earth's whole human population could be shrunk to a village of exactly one hundred people—with all the same ratios as now?—only thirty of us would be white people, only twenty would
live in better than substandard housing, only eight would have some savings in the bank as well as clothes on our back and food in the pantry, and only one of the hundred would have all that plus a college education! And you're telling us that this tear-down thing isn't disgraceful?"
"That's exactly what I'm telling you," her father amiably agrees. "We live in a prosperous free-enterprise country, thank God. Mark Matthews—whom I happen to very much admire—earned his money by brains and hard work, and he and Mindy are entitled to spend it as they damn well please. And their architect, builder, and landscaper are all local outfits, so they'll be putting a couple million bucks into Avon County's economy right there, along with their whopping property taxes down the line." He turns up his palms. "Everybody benefits; nobody gets hurt. So what's your problem, Lefty?"
