by Jonathan Dee
The first morning the temperature touched single digits, in early January, he went downstairs while she was still in the shower and walked barefoot—terrible idea—through the door that led from Penny’s kitchen into her cement-floored garage. It was a two-car space but half of it was covered by crap that belonged to her sons: skateboards, old lumber they thought they could make a ramp or a half-pipe out of, an outdated Nintendo console, a kind of junkyard of boyhood enthusiasms. All of it was already discarded, but he moved it gingerly anyway, stacking it against the walls or putting it on the sagging tool shelves, his feet freezing. The boys were a blank to him. Penny didn’t answer questions about them, not that he had many. Looking at all their broken or abandoned gear didn’t spark some desire in him to be a father or anything like that; what he felt, if anything, was a desire to hang out with them, to be like a stepbrother or something. It was an incriminating wish, at his age. Building a ramp out of scrap lumber was one of those dad-things a man Glenn’s age probably ought to know how to do, but he didn’t. He wouldn’t have the first idea, actually.
“What are you doing?” Penny said.
He looked at her in the doorway, holding a coffee cup, dressed for work. She was a few years older than he was; when she was dressed up, he felt it more. She had a little bit of a strong jaw for a woman, but her body was perfect for him, a body that most of his guy friends probably would have dismissed as bony. She had her hair up, which on the one hand he didn’t like, but on the other, there were few things he liked better than watching her take it down.
“Just moving some of the boys’ stuff,” he said. “Ice on the cars this morning. I want to be able to pull mine in here.”
“Okay,” she said, “but you’ll have to put everything back where it was before you go on Friday.”
So just re-scatter the junk across the floor, then? But he knew what the point of that was: she didn’t want her sons to know that he existed, that anyone had been in the garage or the house at all.
“Seriously?” he said.
“Seriously,” she said, but not unkindly, and she turned around to pour out the rest of her coffee.
—
Candace lived just off 7 south of Great Barrington, in a former tool-and-tractor storage shed that had been converted into four cheap but very modern-looking apartments; hers was on the second floor, facing the road, which meant it also faced the windows of the packie, whose owner—a congenitally suspicious fat man who sat every day in a sprung swivel chair behind the register, standing with difficulty whenever somebody came with their bottles to the counter—owned her building too. She sat drinking coffee at her little kitchen counter, on the living room side of it, as if someone else on the kitchen side had served her. She was listening to NPR, on very low volume, because even though none of her neighbors on either side had ever complained, she was conscious of them there. The radio was murmuring war news, protest news. She didn’t catch it all. It wasn’t that she was incapable of understanding; but the barely audible tones of the radio at dawn were really more about gently waking up her mind, about hearing a voice, any voice, originating outside that little apartment, than about learning anything.
When she felt ready, she put on her coat and walked downstairs to the parking area. The February cold made her take a deep breath, painful and invigorating at the same time. There was a little runoff ditch behind the square of macadam, with a layer of dirty ice on it as thin as the top of a crème brûlée. The worst part about Candace’s home was how it looked from the outside. Like a storage shed, basically, surrounded by curtain-thin lines of trees and uncut grass and mud. Either the landlord ran out of money before he could fix up the building’s exterior, or it just never figured into his vision at all. Most likely, she thought, he considered caring about such things to be a vanity, an affectation. These towns were full of men like him. Not just cheap and simple, but proud of it, superior about it. She was probably in her late teens before she figured out that her dad was one of these men. Every story he told was a story about how he’d outsmarted somebody. Her brothers had more than a little of this quality in them too.
Five minutes later, before the interior of the car was even warm, she was at work. Then another day of filling out evaluations, going through discretionary-spending reports submitted by the teachers or, more often, the custodians, and scrolling through emails from parents that had come in at odd hours the night before. She tried to do a conspicuously good job precisely because she knew that her job wasn’t entirely necessary, that the main reason there was a vice principal at Howland Elementary at all was because there was a lot of shit work that the long-tenured principal, her boss, had been able to negotiate his way out of having to do. She needed to make herself look essential even though she knew, better than anyone actually, that such was not the case.
There was an endless email chain—nominally among the parents, but she was looped into every Reply All—that particularly bugged her, as it had for going on two weeks now. A subset of the parents was concerned about security measures at the front door of the school. And there was no gainsaying their basic point, which was that there were zero security measures at the front door of the school. The chief custodian unlocked that door every morning (teachers and others who got there early had a separate entrance anyway), and he locked it again at the end of the day, unless it was an evening when the auditorium was being used. Candace happened to know that there’d been a few nights when some auditorium group had stayed later than agreed to and the custodian, who wanted everybody to pretend that his name was Ace, had gone home for the night without locking up at all, out of boredom or pique. Certain parents would probably stroke out if they knew about that.
So security concerns were fine and dandy, as her father might say. They probably ought to be more careful. But the email group was talking about something else, or so it seemed to Candace. They were concerned that the school, the elementary school, was vulnerable to attack.
What are those things called? The cement things that stick up out of the ground?
Bollards?
Yes thanks! Those. Come on, how much can those cost? Just some cement and four or five holes in the ground.
Exactly—the school admin is always crying poverty but I’ll bet you anything we could get somebody patriotic to donate the labor.
And the cement!
Shouldn’t have to donate it—isn’t this what we pay taxes for??
Candace’s irritation was hard to separate from the fact that one of the thirty-eight email addresses in the chain belonged to Patrick Kimball, [email protected], the married father of a sixth grader, with whom Candace had had an affair for a period of eight or nine months. It was now longer than that since the affair had ended, but it made her agitated just to see his name. Like her, he never contributed a post to the chain itself, he was just roped into it, silently complicit. Still, technically they were back to exchanging emails, which made her feel exposed and hopeful and furious.
She still saw Patrick’s daughter in the hallways, nearly every day in fact. She didn’t like her all that much, never had—socially the girl was ruthless, a little monster, and none too bright either—and it was hard for Candace to be unconscious of the bureaucratic sway she had over this brat’s life, and would have for another couple of years. Not to mention that, in some alternate universe, Candace was her stepmother. The universe of lovestruck saps, maybe.
She hit Reply All. Of course I understand the general concern, she wrote, but the issue isn’t just the cost of cement. School construction, of any kind, requires approval on the district level. I know from bitter experience that the first thing they require is an extensive description of why the work is necessary to the operation of the school. If anyone wants to take a preliminary whack at that question, I’d be grateful for the input.
She hit Send, knowing that the discussion, the ginned-up outrage, would just flow right around what she’d written like a stream around a rock, not to mention that it was too long a
message to expect most of them to read to the end anyway. But now she could at least take some pleasure from guessing the panic Patrick would feel when he saw her name in his inbox. She should have erased the subject line. That really would have put a scare into him.
For lunch she had a Diet Coke and most of a pack of wintergreen Life Savers. She wasn’t concerned about her weight or anything like that—she loved to eat—but some days she couldn’t bring herself to eat in the cafeteria, not even at one of the designated faculty tables; and bringing her lunch to work in a little brown bag just made her feel like she might as well adopt a few cats and get the whole transition to spinsterhood over with. Plus there was no fridge in her office; she’d been told she could share Ace’s. No thanks. Dinner at her parents’ tonight, so she could pig out there. That would make her mother happy.
She sat in on a science department guest presentation about lab safety, and then when she got back to her office there was an email from her principal: Great idea about the security proposal. District is giving out funds like candy for anything with the word security in it. Look forward to seeing proposal you come up with. Don’t be afraid to think big!
Everything was tied together, everything was connected. That was the problem with a small town like Howland, and also with the inside of her head. Part of what galled her about all this security nonsense, like they were hiding military secrets in the basement of Howland Elementary along with the gym mats and unfixable A/V equipment, was that on the fateful day itself she had actually broken down and used the tragedy as an excuse to contact Patrick: she’d written to him on his Hotmail account to try to get him to leave work and meet her, on the grounds that it seemed possible that the world was ending. She’d actually used the fact that her brother Mark was missing in New York City to cajole him into seeing her again. She felt like a psychopath afterwards, like a person incapable of knowing which of her own feelings were the real ones. The world was exploding and all she could think of was that there was no way he could refuse to see her now. And it hadn’t even worked. He hadn’t checked that Hotmail account until the next day, or so he said, not that there was ever any way of evaluating the truth of anything he said.
She drove the rolling back roads past the bare trees and rock-hard fields to her mom and dad’s house just outside Pittsfield, her headlights on though it wasn’t yet five thirty. Only the kitchen light burned at their place. Since selling their old home—the home in which Candace and her three siblings were raised—ten years earlier, the two of them had become phenomenally cheap, and would turn the lights off every time they exited a room. Candace dreaded visiting in winter because they would rather get through it, it seemed, by wearing every article of clothing they owned simultaneously than by turning up the thermostat even one degree. She didn’t remember anything like this from her childhood. They were on a fixed income now, it was true, but they weren’t that badly off; Candace gave them some money every few months and she was pretty sure Mark did too. It wasn’t about money, though. She wasn’t sure what it was about.
“Drink?” her dad asked. She’d started to take her coat off but then thought better of it.
“A short one,” she said. “I’d love a tall one but I have to drive home in the dark.”
“Well, now that you’re here, we can eat,” her mother said. It was quarter to six. “For goodness sake take your coat off! You can’t sit at the table like that.” This despite the fact that she wore at least two sweaters that Candace could see. “I’m glad you’re here. You have to talk to your father. I would love it if someone could get him to stop watching the news sixteen hours a day.”
Her father scowled. Candace said, “We can talk about current events all you like, but first please let me eat something. I’m starving to death. Is it lasagna?”
“Manicotti. I got it at Sam’s. Frozen but it’s pretty good.”
“We know that,” her dad said, “because we’ve already had it twice this week.”
Candace, after briefly, discreetly warming her hands over the baking dish, was already serving herself. “That’s better,” she said after a few bites. “Sorry. I couldn’t wait.”
They didn’t talk much. There wasn’t a great deal at the moment, in any of their lives, that seemed worth sharing, except for whatever it was her father was watching on the news, and that was a subject she didn’t want to open up until she was through her first glass of wine, if at all. As the oven cooled, it grew frigid in the kitchen.
“So are you part of these protests?” her father finally blurted out. Her mother theatrically sighed.
“What protests, Dad?”
“You know. Please let’s not hurt that poor misunderstood Saddam Hussein.”
“You see any protests like that going on around here? No. I’ve seen stuff on TV, like you. In the big cities, New York, London, Paris, wherever. Far away from here.”
“In New York. That’s the capper. New York of all places. In my generation New York would already be emptied of able-bodied young men, they all would have reported to the draft board on the spot.”
“You see?” her mother said.
“Dad, I do not have any strong feelings about it one way or the other.”
“Well, that’s just dandy,” Dad said.
“All I can tell you is that there are many, many channels on your television, and if whatever you are watching makes you this upset, you should change it. It cannot be good for you. I mean physically. Speaking of which, Mom, I will give you twenty dollars right now if you will turn up the thermostat five degrees until I leave.”
Her mother looked at her skeptically. “You’re cold?” she said.
—
The first Thursday evening of every month was the Town Hall open meeting, a proud anchor and vestige of classic New England–style democracy and a huge fucking pain in the ass of the usually humanity-loving First Selectman. It was supposed to be a general forum to discuss, in a transparent setting, some of the current challenges pertaining to the rather simple government of Howland; the problem was that only the most passionate, committed, crazy people, the ones who had something specific they really, really wanted or did not want, ever bothered to attend, and then they had zero interest in talking or hearing about any grievance other than their own. They all wound up yelling, even when it mostly sounded like they agreed with each other, and then they all wound up irritated at Marty for not resolving everything. They’d voted him First Selectman three times now, which was an honor and a responsibility (a full-time one, even if the job itself was only part-time); still, his role at these town forums was just to listen, and they didn’t seem to get that. So these quaint little monthly meetings inevitably turned into a collective failure of patience that sent him straight to the Bushmills bottle pretty much the second he got home, even though the doc had advised him not to eat or drink in the hour right before bed. Doing anything just once a month couldn’t be too dangerous, though. Sometimes he fantasized that the stress of it actually would give him another heart attack and he’d die in his office, and then everybody would be sorry for how they’d taken everything out on him, and then they could all go to the next Town Hall open meeting and get into a big fistfight about putting up a memorial to him.
Because that’s where the January and February monthly forums had ended up—arguing about memorials—and that’s surely where this one was going as well. Often the attendance was in the single digits, but tonight it looked closer to fifteen, and that couldn’t be good. Marty sat at a card table between his two fellow selectpersons, who were flanked by the town’s treasurer and its recording secretary. Rows of folding chairs sat facing them. Everyone was too close together. There was a stage behind them, but they never used it—too imperious, Marty felt; the space on the floor was more democratic but also more cramped.
Of course he sympathized. He knew he was too practical by nature, even in his heart. And if putting up some memorial to 9/11 victims meant they’d have to hope like hell it didn’t snow too mu
ch next winter because they’d have to cut back on their advance purchase of road-salt reserves, well, they were all adults—his neighbors and friends and customers, a lot of them—and he was their elected instrument, and it was not for him to command them that one consideration should outweigh another. Even if no one from Howland or any of the surrounding towns had died that awful day. Even if their closest connection to it was that Mark Firth happened to have been in the city that day for undisclosed reasons, in a hotel room no less, probably shacking up with one of the rich summer wives that hired him to redo their kitchens. Or that was the rumor the recording secretary couldn’t stop herself from sharing with Marty, anyway.
It was all the posturing that got to him, the wasted time, the passion contests. Right now, it was already eight forty-five and a couple of the regulars were just starting to hit their stride. Daisy Scoville, who apparently had too little to occupy her now that she’d turned over the day-to-day of her little café to her daughter, wanted to know if they could get an actual piece of one of the towers, a steel shard; she’d heard of some town in Pennsylvania that had gotten such a relic, and built a little park around it. She was fat and wore stretch pants and he felt guilty for how hard he found it to look straight at her when she was talking.
“So can we check into that?” she said.
Marty raised his head. “Any idea,” he said gamely, “of the associated costs?”
Daisy scowled. “I hardly think that’s the issue,” she said.
“Well, all due respect, it’s always the issue to some degree. You know, because you’re a regular at these meetings, that our last assessment—”
“The memorial should go at the school, I think,” Daisy pushed forward, “so maybe the county or the state will pick up whatever costs you’re so worried about.”
“The school,” Marty repeated. “Where at the school?”
“I was thinking between the upper and lower athletic fields.”
