Local Knowledge

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  “Good, fine. Well, actually, Lori is kind of at loose ends these days since the boys left … ,” he began, but, glancing at Richard and no doubt sensing as I did his irritation at our small talk, cut himself short. “Are you coming through with us?” he asked.

  “No, I’m just going to let you in,” I told him, digging out the keys from a side pocket of my bag, as we started toward the front door. “I’ve some errands to run. Leave these on the kitchen counter, if you don’t mind, and I’ll drop by and close things up a little later. You should find everything in great shape.”

  “I bet,” Eric said, adding kindly: “Goes without saying if Frank and Paul had a hand in the construction.”

  I saw Richard’s attention sharpen. He turned to me and was about to say something, when he was distracted by voices behind us on the drive. I turned with him to see Anne, Katie, and Max standing by the passenger side of my car talking to Rachel. I heard Anne’s distinctive laugh.

  “Anne, can we please get a move on here, please?” Richard called over to her, though I think he wanted both Eric and me to understand that his ill humor encompassed the two of us, as well. I quickly opened the door and then turned back to Eric.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Say hi to Lori for me.”

  Richard was facing backward toward Anne and the car, so he didn’t see Eric roll his eyes as he took the keys from me. “Same to Paul,” he added, then he went on into the house with Richard at his heels.

  I walked back to the car and around to the passenger side. Anne and Katie flanked Max, who was leaning into the car with both arms extended, talking excitedly to Rachel.

  “It’s a frog,” Katie told me in an awed whisper.

  “It’s a toad, actually,” Rachel told her. “Frog’s are usually greener and shinier. You see how brown and sort of dry this one is? That’s so he blends in with the dead leaves and twigs and things, and people can’t find him.”

  “I found him, though,” Max said.

  “Hi there,” Anne said, turning to me with a smile. Then she did something I was not at all prepared for: she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I could feel myself blushing, which I knew was ridiculous. New Yorkers probably embrace each other all the time. I’ve noticed how touchy-feely Nana is with so many of her clients. We’re a lot more standoffish here.

  “As you can see, we’ve forced ourselves upon Rachel,” Anne added, moving back. “But I can’t believe you’re old enough to have a teenaged daughter already, Maddie! And so beautiful! I would have known she was yours in a second, though, she looks just like you.”

  Rachel smiled shyly up at Anne, and then held her cupped hands out to Max and said: “Here you go. Mr. Toad says he’d prefer to be with you. Now take good care of him and make sure he gets plenty of bugs to eat.”

  “Why don’t you come play with us?” Max asked Rachel, reclaiming his prize, its scrawny legs scrabbling against the front of his T-shirt.

  “Another time,” I said for Rachel. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got to run now. We’re already late for an appointment in Northridge.”

  “You’re leaving so soon?” Anne asked. “But we just got here, Maddie. I had a million things I wanted to talk to you about. But, of course, what am I thinking? This is probably your one day off to get your own things done. And we’ve already held you up. Max, Katie—come on—say good-bye to Rachel. I’m sure we’ll see her again. In fact—I don’t know how busy you are, Rachel, but would you consider doing some babysitting for us this summer?”

  “I’m not a baby,” Katie said.

  “Sure, I’d like that,” Rachel told her. “In the evenings, anyway. I’m working for my aunt during the day.”

  “Terrific,” Anne said, walking with me around to the driver’s side. “I hope we haven’t made you late for wherever it is you’re going. And thanks so much for coming by and opening up for us. I can’t tell you how excited we all are about the house—especially now that we’ve discovered it has toads! I mean, what more could we possibly ask for? Let’s talk again on Monday, okay?”

  “I’m really sorry to have to run. But I’ll be back to lock up—”

  “Anne! Anne, will you get the hell in here!” Richard Zeller was standing on a small bedroom balcony on the second floor, his hands planted angrily on his heavy hips. Once again, he was dressed as though he’d come from a business meeting—or was going to one—though he’d taken off his suit jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. Sweat flattened and darkened the fabric under his arms and his forehead glistened beneath his thinning hair. He seemed to loom above us, oversized and slightly ridiculous, like the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” But I sensed even then that he was far from harmless, that his blustery impatience was merely obscuring some darker, heavier discontent. How, I wondered, did someone as considerate and friendly as Anne end up with such a domineering and self-centered man? It was none of my business, I told myself, but I couldn’t help feeling that she deserved better.

  The Zellers were gone by the time Rachel and I drove back to the house after the appointment with Dr. Orlanuk and shopping at Price Chopper and Wal-Mart. Rachel had insisted that I leave the room when Dr. Orlanuk examined her, but she emerged from the ordeal in her usual good spirits, though refusing to discuss the details. I filled a prescription for some pain relief medication he’d written for her and that, I was given to understand, was the extent to which I’d be permitted to become involved with the situation. Like her father, Rachel greets the world with easygoing humor, but it’s a guise, one that’s hard to penetrate. Push a little too hard, ask a question too many, and you bump up against the stone wall behind which their true feelings lie. A barricade upon which I’ve battered and bruised myself too many times. It’s a family trait, I think, an Alden thing. Bob and Ethan are like that, too. Hail-fellows-well-met, friendly to all, known by only a few.

  I’m the opposite, really. I’m reserved initially when I first meet someone. Wary and self-conscious. I see a lot of myself in Beanie, though not to her extreme. But then, when I begin to feel more confident and appreciated, my feelings start to unfurl like a morning glory on a warm summer day. I long to be known then—and to know. Paul once told me that he thought I was “greedy for intimacy.” Does it come from being a lonely only child? From having older, reserved, and emotionally distant parents? Of course, to some degree. But I think it’s impossible to know for sure what makes us what we are, what alchemy of pain and joy, loss and longing, turns one person into a caregiver—and another into a liar.

  Rachel came in with me to get the keys and I gave her a tour of the sun-filled empty house with its gleaming floors and soaring ceilings. It smelled of sanded wood and fresh paint. Our footsteps echoed up the uncarpeted stairs. We stood together at the balcony looking down on the enormous living room with the fireplace that took up almost an entire wall. I still couldn’t conceive of living there, having a big enough sense of self and entitlement to make such a room feel familiar, everyday. But I could imagine Anne here. I could hear her calling down to her children—something silly and endearing.

  “I think she’s beautiful,” Rachel said out of the blue. Neither one of us had mentioned Anne directly all afternoon, but it was as if she’d been reading my thoughts.

  “I do, too,” I said.

  4

  “I’m showing the Oak Hill property at three to the new people,” I told Paul as we pretended to have a sit-down breakfast with the girls. In fact, we were all springing up from the table at different moments—to get the orange juice or milk or another cup of coffee—the usual carnival act the five of us perform every morning. “Then, at six, I’m taking the Pattersons back to that house in Lakeview. I just know they’re getting ready to bite. I’m hoping you can pick up the girls again.”

  “Oak Hill?” Paul asked, lowering the Rambler. It was the last of the three spec houses he’d built for Nicky Polanski over the past two years and, since the Maple Rise sale, one of Nana’s hottest properties. “You really are getting up there
in the world, aren’t you?”

  “I told you about them—the Naylors. Anne Zeller referred me. Apparently, he owns a media buying company in the city. From what I can tell on the phone, they’re really, really loaded. It’s an interesting thing, but when I describe houses to my regular kind of buyer the first thing they ask is the price. But the Naylors? Their most pressing concern seems to be how many full bathrooms the house has. A fun fact for all you real estate mavens.”

  Yes, I was flying high. I was getting up there in the world. In the ten days that had elapsed since the Zeller closing, my professional life had taken off. Sure, it helps that it’s early summer, the best possible time to sell. Tourists and weekenders are streaming back into the area. The days are long, sun-filled, not yet too hot or humid. The peonies and lilacs are in full flower, the lawns that deep, spring-fed, beckoning green. The sight of a screened porch, flaking and rust-worn, that in the cold light of winter would certainly give a prospective buyer pause, on an early June morning, with a wisteria vine clinging to its sagging gutters, will suddenly flood that same person with some latent romantic yearning, short-circuiting what had been up until that moment a methodical, no-nonsense search. Whatever the reason, I now have urgent offers from clients who’ve been dithering for months about buying. I have three sales in negotiation along my usual lines—local, lower-income buyers whose concerns are primarily financing and taxes. And then I have the Naylors.

  “You came highly recommended by Anne Zeller,” Rudy Naylor told me when he called the week before. “I took her to lunch yesterday and, along with the rest, she told me about that new house you sold them. Sounds like just the kind of thing we’re looking for. I can’t take that commute to Amagansett another summer. Two hours from the city, that’s the limit for me now.”

  Nana seems delighted. Surprised, but obviously pleased for me. If she considers her work behind the scenes the real reason the Zeller sale ultimately went through so smoothly—and the Naylors rightfully hers—she keeps it to herself.

  “You’re definitely on a roll,” she told me. “I think you should just go with it for now. You can let some of my paperwork slide for the time being. Who knows? If things keep up at this pace, maybe we can talk about putting on another person. An assistant we all can share.”

  I’m not used to feeling this lucky, to being on a winning streak, or whatever. Paul and I learned early on to be cautious and practical, to keep our expectations in check. So I’m not entirely sure I like this giddy sensation, or the more keyed-up, chattier me it seems to induce. In fact, I’ve been so self-involved the past week or so, working late, and letting Paul pick up the slack, that I didn’t even notice until he told me when I got home around nine the night before that Lia had been running a fever.

  “She seemed a little droopy the last couple of days,” he told me as he hurried behind me up the stairs. “Then she had a kind of meltdown at dinner, so I checked her temperature. It’s one-oh-three.”

  “Oh, God. You should have called me at the office. I thought she was being kind of ornery. But I guess I just wrote it off to the weather.” The heat and humidity had both started to climb into the seventies the day before, making everybody a little cranky. But Lia’s usually impervious to external conditions. She’ll splash around in the pond until her lips turn purple and she’s shaking like a leaf, then kick up a fuss when I try to pull her out. She’s the last to be coaxed in from the cold, or out of the sun. I should have known better.

  “Mommymommymommy!” Paul had her in our bed, hemmed in by my needlepoint pillows, which she loves. Her fringe of bangs, cut short for the summer, had clumped into damp tendrils. Her eyes were glassy with unhappiness. She flung herself into my arms, crying: “Mommymommymommy!”

  “Do you think we should call George?” Paul asked, sitting down beside me on the bed.

  “No, let’s wait,” I told him as she burrowed between my breasts, her arms girdling me like a vise. Lia has always treated my body as if it was hers to do with what she wished, as though it was a thing—a refrigerator or couch, say—separate from me the person. “George’ll just say to see how she’s doing in the morning anyway. These things are usually worse at night.”

  “Mommymommymommy!” she sobbed, though I was beginning to realize she wasn’t that sick, or was already getting better. I would have worried a lot more if she hadn’t displayed these histrionics, if she’d lain mute and miserable in my arms. Lia is our drama queen, and she was playing true to form, milking the moment for all it was worth. I knew what she was angling for, and, more out of guilt than real concern, I intended to give it to her.

  “Can’t we let her sleep here tonight?” I asked Paul, who disapproves of the girls climbing into bed with us. He tries to pretend that it’s because of his convictions about good parenting, though we both know his concerns are more self-serving. My husband may keep a tight rein on his emotions, but he lets his libido run wild and free when it comes to our lovemaking.

  “Sure,” he said, getting up with a sigh. He wasn’t accustomed to putting in so much time with the girls, and I guessed he felt as exhausted as I did. So we slept with Lia between us, propped up on my throw pillows like some potentate flanked by palace guards, and we woke to find her fully recovered and demanding blueberry pancakes for breakfast.

  “I’ll pick up if you drop off,” Paul said as he stood up and began to clear the table.

  “Please, please, whoever comes to get us, please be on time this time,” Rachel said through a curtain of parted hair that she’d divided into thirds and was starting to braid. “By five o’clock, I’m ready to start drowning some of those kids. Just put them in a sack like a bunch of kittens and lower them—”

  “Rach,” Beanie stopped her, “don’t say that about kittens.” Beatrice, shortened to Beanie by Rachel when she was a toddler, is my nature child. She loves all animals, but especially cats. We now officially have three in residence and are, I suspect, the unofficial headquarters for a motley crew of strays that Beanie feeds on the sly out behind the barn.

  “I mean it, though,” Rachel replied. “Some of these new kids are just impossible. Spoiled like you wouldn’t believe. Like that girl Tova who told Aunt Kathy that she was fat and stupid, and that her house was a dump.”

  “Who is this Tova person?” Paul asked, as he poured the rest of the coffee into his thermos.

  “Some snotty little city kid,” Rachel said, pinning her braids back so they formed a kind of garland on the top of her head. She looked like Juliet, I thought, in her cotton peasant blouse with its embroidered yoke and belled sleeves.

  “We don’t talk about other people like that in this family,” Paul said, looking directly at Rachel. “I don’t care how they act. It’s not our place to judge or criticize. You got that?” His reprimands are often like bolts from the blue, frightening in their intensity and unexpectedness. Afterward, I usually realize that he was right to discipline the girls in whatever way he had, that I hadn’t been paying close enough attention to what they were saying or doing, or even that I’d given tacit approval to something he considered bad behavior. In general, though, I think of my daughters as good-natured and well-meaning. But, for reasons that I understand and forgive, Paul is continually monitoring them for flaws and prejudices and remains ever vigilant about keeping them on the straight and narrow.

  “Yes, Daddy,” Rachel said. “I’m sorry about what I said. But I have to tell you that sometimes I have to work really hard to keep my temper with that crew.”

  “Good practice for the grown-up world,” Paul said.

  The Naylors swept in and out of Oak Rise in about twenty minutes. Rudy Naylor was in his midsixties, I guessed: short, trim, evenly tanned, with a head of shiny black hair that looked like it had been shellacked on. She was a petite blonde of indeterminable age with a perfect nose and expressionless eyes, pouty lips and porcelain teeth. They seemed unhappy, I thought, or at least preoccupied. The temperature was hitting the low eighties by the time they arrived
, and he kept his white BMW idling so that the two tiny pug-faced dogs in the backseat could pant away in air-conditioned comfort. From their brief asides, I got the feeling that they cared more about the dogs than for each other or the elegant showcase house they were wandering through.

  “This could be a home office or a media room,” I pointed out when we reached the third floor, with its stunning views of the Catskills in the distance. “Or another bedroom, of course.”

  “Do you think you should go down and check on them?” she asked him, as though I hadn’t spoken.

  “No, we’re nearly done here. I just wish to hell you’d remembered to bring their water bowls. You know they don’t like drinking out of plastic cups. And on a day like this …”

  I had no idea how they really felt about the house when they left, though he shook my hand with what seemed like forceful sincerity.

  “Terrific property. Great value. You know what something like this would be going for in the Hamptons?” And then, perhaps realizing that I was not the right person to be confiding in about what a steal the place was, he abruptly opened the car door and muttered: “We’ll be in touch.”

  I ran the showing past Nana, who summed it up succinctly:

  “They’re seeing other brokers. Getting a sense of who has what. That’s fine. From what you’ve told me, though, Oak Hill is perfect for them. My gut says they’ll be back.”

  A little past four, Marge Patterson called to say that Gary had gotten tied up at work and that they’d have to reschedule. Briefly, I was tempted to call Paul and tell him I’d pick up the girls, and then I thought about all the filing that needed to be done. I was walking down the hall to Nana’s office to unload her out-box when the front door opened and Anne Zeller walked in with Max and Katie in tow. She was wearing a flower-splashed sarong cover-up and silver sandals. The kids were in their bathing suits.

  “Hey there! I’m so sorry to ambush you like this at work. I know how busy you probably are. But remember a couple of weeks back when we were talking about the area and you mentioned a swimming pond where everybody goes? Well, we spent the whole day dealing with movers and deliveries. And I think we’re going to just wither away and die if we don’t find some nice cold water to jump into.”