by John Barth
Up with the glasses again. Mark Matthews rolled his eyes, but most present seemed interested in Pete's argument. "At it's worst," he went on, "that slash between Us and Them comes to mean Us versus Them, as in race riots and revolutions and wars in general. But even here it's worth remembering that versus doesn't always necessarily mean inherently superior: It can be like Us versus Them in team sports, or the Yeas versus the Nays in a debating club, or some of the town/gown issues at the College that we try to mediate without claiming that either side is superior to the other."
Here he took the glasses of, as if to signal that the sermon was approaching it's close. "I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that some of Debbie's and my closest friends live outside these gates of ours."
"Amen," Joan said on his behalf. After which, and apologizing again for nattering on so, Pete called for a vote authorizing the Association to solicit bids and award a contract for construction of an automatically gated HBE Pass third lane at our development's entrance. When the motion passed, six to one, Amanda Todd good-naturedly reminded Mark Matthews, the lone dissenter, that "Us versus You doesn't mean we don't love you, Mark." To which that broad-beamed but narrow-minded fellow retorted, "You College people, I swear."
"Objection!" Amanda's husband called out.
"Sustained," declared Peter Simpson, rising from his chair and gathering the spec sheets and other papers spread out before him. "No need to pursue it, and thank you all for coming and making your opinions known." Offering his hand to Matthews then, with a smile, "Here's to democracy, Mark, and parliamentary procedure. Agreed?"
"Whatever."
And that had been that, for then. But en route back along sycamore-lined Heron Bay Boulevard to our condominium in "Shad Row," as we like to call it (punning on that seasonal Chesapeake delicacy), we Franks had tsked and sighed at Mark Matthews's overbearing small-mindedness versus Pete Simpson's more generous spirit and eminently reasonable review of the several senses of Us/Them. "Like when people born and raised in Stratford talk about 'us locals' and 'them c'meres,'" Joan said, using the former's term for out-of-towners who "come here" to retire or to enjoy a second home. "Sometimes it's a putdown, sometimes it's just a more or less neutral distinction, depending."
"And even when it's a putdown," her husband agreed, "sometimes it's just a good-humored tease between friends or neighbors—unlike Lady Broad-Ass's Us/Thems in our condo sessions," he added, referring to his Shad Run Condominium Association colleague Rachel Broadus, a hefty and opinionated widow-lady who, two years ago, had vehemently opposed the sale of unit 117 to an openly gay late-middle-aged couple from D.C., early retired from careers in the federal government's General Services Administration—even letting the prospective buyers know by anonymous letter that while it was beyond the Association's authority to forbid the sale, homosexuals were not welcome in Heron Bay Estates. A majority of the Association shared her feelings and had been relieved when the offended couple withdrew their purchase offer, although most agreed with Gerry that the unsigned letter was reprehensible; he alone had spoken on the pair's behalf, or at least had opposed the opposition to them. When in the following year Ms. Broadus had similarly inveighed against the sale of unit 218 to a dapper Indian-American pharmacist and his wife ("Next thing you know it'll be Mexicans and blacks, and there goes the neighborhood"), he'd had more company in objecting to her objection, and the Raghavans had come to be well liked by nearly all of their neighbors. "Even so," Gerry now reminded his wife, "Broad-Ass couldn't resist saying 'Mind you, Ger, I don't have anything against a nice Jewish couple like you and Joan. But Hindus? ' "
Joan groaned at the recollection—who on first hearing from Gerry of this misattribution had said, "You should've showed her your foreskinned shlong already. Oy." Or, they'd agreed, he could have quoted the Irish-American songwriter George M. Cohan's reply to a resort-hotel desk clerk in the 1920s who refused him a room, citing the establishment's ban on Jewish guests: "You thought I was a Jew," said the composer of "The Yankee Doodle Boy," "and I thought you were a gentleman. We were both mistaken." Rachel Broadus, they supposed, had heard of Anne Frank and had readily generalized from that famed Holocaust victim's last name, perhaps pretending even to herself that the Them to which she assigned the Shad Run Franks was not meant pejoratively. It was easy to imagine her declaring that "some of her best friends," et cetera. Gerry himself had used that edged cliché, in quotes—"Some of Our Best Friends ... "—as the heading of a "Frank Opinions" column applauding the progress of Stratford's middle-class African Americans from near invisibility to active representation on the Town Council, the Avon County School Board, and the faculties not only of the local public schools but of the College and the private Fenton Day School as well.
All the above, however, is past history: the HBECA lift-gate meeting and us Franks' return to Shad Run Road for a merlot nightcap on our second-story porch overlooking the moonlit creek (where no shad have been known to run during our residency) before the ten o'clock TV news, bedtime, and another flaccid semi-fuck, Gerry's "Jimmy" less than fully erect and Joan's "Susie" less than wetly welcoming. "Never mind that pair of old farts," Joan had sighed, kissing him goodnight before turning away to sleep: "They're Them; we're still Us." Whoever that's getting to be, he'd said to himself—for he really has, since virtual retirement, been ever more preoccupied with his approaching old age and his inevitable, already noticeable decline. To her, however, he wondered merely, "D'you suppose they're trying to tell us something?"
"Whatever it is," she answered sleepily, "don't put it in the column, okay?"
The column: Past history too is his nattering on about all the above to his computer for four work-mornings already, and now a fifth, in search of a "Frank Opinions" piece about all this Us/ Them stuff. By now he has moved on from Joan's "Us Franks" as distinct from "Them body parts of ours," or the singular "I-Gerry/ Thou-'Jimmy,'" to Gerry's-Mind/Gerry's-Body and thence (within the former) to Gerry's-Ego/Gerry's-Id+Superego, and while mulling these several Us/Thems and I/Thous of the concept Mind, he has duly noted that although such distinctions are made by our minds, it by no means follows that they're "all in our minds."
Blah blah blah: Won't readers of the Avon County News be thrilled to hear it?
Yet another Us/Them now occurs to him (just what he needed!): It's a standing levity in Heron Bay Estates that most of it's male inhabitants happen to be called familiarly by one-syllable first names and their wives by two-: Mark and Mindy Matthews, Joe and Judy Barnes, Pete and Debbie Simpson, Dave and Lisa Bergman, Dick and Susan Felton—the list goes on. But while we Franks, perhaps by reflex, are occasionally fitted to this peculiar template ("Ger" and "Joanie"), we're normally called Gerry and Joan, in exception to the rule: an Us distinct from, though not opposed to, it's Them.
So? So nothing. Has Gerald "Gerry" Frank mentioned his having noticed, years ago, that his normal pulse rate matches almost exactly the tick of seconds on his watch dial, so closely that he can measure less-than-a-minute intervals by his heartbeat? And that therefore, as of his recent sixty-eighth birthday, he had lived for 24,837 days (including 17 leap days) at an average rate of 1,400 pulses per day, or a total of 34,771,800, give or take a few thousand for periods of physical exertion or unusual quiescence? By which same calculation he reckons himself to have been mulling these who-gives-a-shit Us/Thems for some 7,200 heartbeats' worth of days now, approaching beat by beat not only his ultimate demise but, more immediately, Tom Chadwick's deadline, and feeling no closer to a column than he did five days ago.
Maybe a column about that? Lame idea.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
He believes he did mention, a few thousand pulses past, that the Shad Run Franks, while on entirely cordial terms with their workmates and with ninety-nine percent of their fellow Heron Bay Estaters, have no friends, really, if by friends one means people whom one enjoys having over for drinks and dinner or going out with to a restaurant, not to mention actually vacation-traveling together
, as they see some of their neighbors doing. They used to have friends like that, separately in their pre-Us lives and together in the earliest, pre-Stratford period of their marriage. Over the years since, however, for whatever reasons, their social life has atrophied: annual visits to and from their far-flung family, lunch with a colleague now and then (although they both work mainly at home these days), the occasional office cocktail party or HBE community social—that's about it. They don't particularly approve of this state of affairs, mildly wish it were otherwise, but have come to accept, more or less, that outside the workplace that's who they are, or have become: more comfortable with just Us than with Them.
As if his busy fingers have a mind of their own, To be quite frank, Reader, he now sees appearing on his computer screen, old Gerry hasn't been being quite Frank with you about certain things. E.g.:
— He and his mate share another, very different and entirely secret life, the revelation whereof would scandalize all Stratford and Heron Bay Estates, not to mention their family.
— Or they don't, of course, but could sometimes half wish they did, just for the hell of it.
— Or they don't so wish or even half wish, for God's sake! Who does this nutcase columnist take us for, that he could even imagine either of them so wishing?
— Or he has just learned that the precious, the indispensable Other Half of our Us has been diagnosed with ... oh, advanced, inoperable pancreatic cancer? While he sits scared shitless on his butt counting his heartbeats, her killer cells busily metastasize through that dearest of bodies. Maybe a dozen thousand evermore-wretched tick-ticks to go, at most, until The End—of her, therefore of Us, therefore of him.
— Or he's just making all this crap up. Trying it out. Thinking the unthinkable, perhaps in vain hope of it's exorcism, or at least forestallment. But such tomfoolery fools no one. While his right hand types no one, his left rummages in a drawer of the adjacent inkjet-printer stand for the reassuring feel of the loaded nine-millimeter automatic pistol that he keeps in there for "self-defense": i.e., for defending Joan and Gerry Frank yet a while longer from murder/suicide—which they agree they'd resort to in any such scenario as that terminal-cancer one above-invoked—by reminding himself that they have the means and the will to do it, if and when the time comes.
But they don't—have the means, at least; at least not by gun fire. There is no pistol, never has been; we Franks aren't the gun-owning sort. Should push come to shove chez nous, in our frank opinion we'd go the route that Dick and Susan Felton went last year: double suicide (nobody knows why) by automobile exhaust fumes in the closed garage of their empty-nest house in Rockfish Reach, with not even a goodbye note to their traumatized, life-disrupted offspring.
Well, we guess we'd leave a note.
Maybe this is it?
Nah. Still ...
Deadline a-coming: Tick. Tick.
Deathline? Tick.
FRANK OPINIONS: Us/Them
or,
Much Ado About
Assisted Living
LIKE ANY NORMAL PERSON, Tim Manning (speaking) used to think and speak of himself as "I," or "me." Don't ask me, the old ex–history teacher would start off one of his "His-Stories" by typing on his computer, who I think is reading or hearing this —and then on he'd ramble about his and Margie's Oyster Cove community in Heron Bay Estates, and the interesting season when they and their neighborhood were bedeviled (or at least had reason to believe they were) by a Peeping Tom. Stuff like that. I grabbed the big flashlight from atop the fridge, he would write, told Margie to call Security, and stepped out back to check. Or "I do sort of miss those days," Margie said to me one evening a few years later ...
That sort of thing.
But that was Back Then: from the Depression-era 1930s, when Timothy Manning and Margaret Jacobs were born, a few years and Chesapeake counties apart, through their separate childhoods and adolescences in World War Two time, their trial romances and (separate) sexual initiations in late high school and early college years, their fortuitous meeting and impulsive marriage in the American mid-1950s, their modest contributions to the postwar baby boom, and their not unsuccessful careers (he guesses they'd agree) as high school teacher (him), suburban-D.C. realtor (her), and life partners (them!). Followed, in their sixties and the century's eighties, by their phased retirement to Heron Bay Estates: at first Bay-Bridge-hopping between their city house near Washington and their new weekend/vacation duplex in Heron Bay's Oyster Cove neighborhood, then swapping the former for a more maintenance-free condominium halfway between D.C. and Annapolis (where Margie's real-estate savvy found them a rare bargain in that busy market), and ultimately— when wife joined husband in full retirement—selling that condo at a healthy profit, unloading as best they could whatever of it's furnishings the new owners had no interest in buying, and settling contentedly into their modest villa at 1010 Oyster Cove Court for the remainder of their active life together.
Amounting, as it turned out, to a mere dozen-plus years, which feels to Tim Manning as he types these words like about that many months at most. Where did the years go? He can scarcely remember—as has been becoming the case with more and more things every year. Where'd he put the car keys? Or for that matter their old station wagon itself, parked somewhere in the Stratford shopping plaza that he still manages to drive to now and then for miscellaneous provisions? As of this sentence he hasn't yet reached that classic early-Alzheimer's symptom of forgetting which keys are for what, or which car out there is their Good Gray Ghost (excuse him: his GGG, damn it, now that Indispensable Margie—his "better two-thirds," he used to call her—is no more), but he sure forgets plenty of other things these days.
E.g., exactly what "Tim Manning" was about to say before this particular His-Story wandered. Something having to do with how—beginning with the couple's reluctant Final Move three years ago from dear "old" Oyster Cove to Bayview Manor and especially since Margie's unassimilable death just one year later— he has found himself standing ever more outside himself: prodding, directing, assisting Tim Manning through the increasingly mechanical routines of his daily existence. Talk about Assisted "Living" ...
And who, exactly, is the Assistant? Not "I" these days, he was saying, but old T.M.: same guy who'll get on with telling this story if he can recollect what the hell it is.
Well, for starters: In a way, he supposes, "T.M." is replacing (as best he can't) irreplaceable Margie as Tim Manning's living-assistant. In the forty-nine and eleven-twelfths years of their married life, she and he constantly assisted each other with everything from changing their babies' diapers to changing jobs, habitations, outworn habits, and ill-considered opinions as their time went by. In more recent years, as her body and his mind faltered, he more and more assisted her with physical matters—her late-onset diabetes, near-crippling arthritis and various other -itises, their attendant medicos and medications—and ever more depended on her assistance in the memory and attention departments as his Senior Moments increased in frequency and duration. While at the same time, of course, they continued to assist each other in the making of life decisions.
Such as ...
Ahem: Such as?
Sorry there: got sidetracked, he guesses, from some sidetrack or other. Such as, he sees he was saying, their no-longer-avoidable joint recognition—after some years of due denial, so unappealing were the alternatives—that what with Margie now all but wheelchaired and her husband sometimes unable to locate the various lists that he'd come to depend on to remember practically everything, even the housekeeping of their Oyster Cove duplex was becoming more than they could manage. Time to check out Assisted (ugh!) Living.
Not long after the turn of the new millennium, they apprised their two grown children of that reluctant intention, and both the Son in St. Louis and the Daughter in Detroit (that alliteration, their father was fond of saying, helped him remember which lived where) dutifully offered to scout suitable such operations in their respective cities. But while the elder
Mannings quite enjoyed their occasional visits to Bachelor-girl Barbara and Married-but-childless Michael, they felt at home only in tidewater country, where they still had friends and former workmates. Dislocation enough to exchange house and yard, longtime good neighbors, and the amenities of Heron Bay Estates for a small apartment, communal meals, and a less independent life, most probably across the Matahannock Bridge, in another county. Although they went through the motions of collecting brochures up and down the peninsula from several "continuing care retirement communities" whose advertisements they'd noted in the weekly Avon County News ("Quality retirement lifestyles! Gourmet dining! On-site medical center! A strong sense of caring and community!"), and even took a couple of Residency-Counselor-Guided Personal Tours, they agreed from the outset that their likeliest choice would be Bayview Manor. Situated no farther from the town of Stratford on the river's east side than was Heron Bay Estates on it's west, Bayview was a project of the same busy developer, Tidewater Communities, Inc. It was generally regarded as being at least the peer of any similar institution on the Shore, and among it's residents were a number of other ex–HBE dwellers no longer able or inclined to maintain their former "lifestyles" in Shad Run or Oyster Cove, much less in the development's upper-scale detached-house neighborhoods. Depending upon availability—and one's inclinations and financial resources—one could apply for a one- or two-bedroom cottage there (with or without den) or choose from several levels of one- and two-bedroom apartments, all with a variety of meal plans. Standard amenities included an indoor pool, a fitness center, crafts and other activities rooms, a beauty salon, gift shop, and branch bank office, and periodic shuttle service to and from Stratford; also available were such extra-cost options as linen and personal laundry service, weekly or biweekly housekeeping, a "professionally staffed" Medical Center, and chauffeured personal transportation. For a couple like the Mannings who didn't yet require fully assisted living, the then-current "base price entry fees" ranged from $100,000 for a small one-bedroom apartment (refundable minus two percent for each month of occupancy) to just under $500,000 for a high-end two-bedroom cottage with den (ninety percent refundable after reoccupancy of unit by new resident when current occupants shift to Med Center residence or to grave). Housekeeping and other service fees ranged from $2,000 to $4,000 monthly, and meal plans from individual dining room meal charges for those who preferred to continue preparing most of their own meals at home to about $800 monthly for a couple's thrice-daily feed in the dining hall.
