The Locals

by Jonathan Dee

  “Did I?” she said.

  When nothing followed, Candace said, “For instance I noticed that the fridge is almost empty. Do you need me to go to the store?”

  “That’s because your mother lost her cards again,” he said. “ATM and credit. Again. So we have to cancel them, and then they make you wait however many business days for the new ones to show up.”

  His wife smiled as if this were a story about people she didn’t know.

  “Jesus,” Candace said. “Well, look, if you like, I can hold on to that stuff for her, since it’s hard for her to keep track of it. Give her, you know, cash as needed.”

  “That’ll be the fucking day,” her father said.

  “Honey!” her mother said, looking reproachfully at him. One day, Honey would probably be her name for all of them.

  “Yeah, Dad, that’s my master plan,” Candace said. “To get my hands on your millions.”

  After dinner there was moonlight enough for her to go out and clear the brush that had overgrown their mailbox. Then she washed the dishes. On a hunch she went upstairs and into her parents’ bedroom, and the sheets clearly had not been changed in some time. Or maybe Mom had started to change them and had just lost track and put the dirty ones back on. That had happened before. Candace’s father certainly could have dealt with it. But it was women’s work, and his life was full enough of humiliations without starting to take that on.

  He followed Candace into the bedroom, not liking it that she was in there at all. The news still blared from the oversized TV downstairs. “Been sleeping on those same sheets since Labor Day,” he said. “She doesn’t give a damn.”

  “Dad,” Candace said, “she forgets.”

  He snorted. “Believe me,” he said, turning to leave, “there’s things I wouldn’t mind forgetting. But that is a luxury I don’t have.”

  She drove home slowly in the dark, on the same back roads, quiet now. Her lips moved silently the whole drive. How had all of this—not her share, but her brothers’ too, her absent sister’s, all of it—fallen on her? How was that fair; more perplexingly, how and when had it happened at all? These people who had dogged her childhood, who’d reflexively smothered every manifestation of self-esteem, who’d poisoned her against the very idea of marriage (and that was still true, she never wanted it, the thought of dying alone was in no way scarier than the specter of dying trapped in the embrace of someone you hated and blamed for everything): how had these people become her problem? Whenever she called Gerry or Mark and told them to call their parents, or to go over there, they did it. If there was an expense, they would ask her how much and then write a check and mail it to her. Otherwise, she knew, they didn’t even think about it. She, too, longed not to think about it, to forget all about them as if they had died. But that was impossible now, and of course it was impossible to go back to the moment this whole unspoken arrangement had taken shape, whenever the hell that was.

  The next day, the principal had his secretary summon Candace to his office. He told her that her request to be promoted out of the classroom and into a job as assistant principal had been denied by the district.

  “I wasn’t asking to be promoted,” Candace said. “I had that job, I voluntarily stepped down from it to help everybody out—to help you out—and now I want it back.”

  “Well, they don’t see it that way. When you gave up that job, the job technically stopped existing, so now approval for an assistant principal has to be obtained all over again. They’ve conducted a review and they’ve determined that it’s not necessary, which is code for there’s not enough money in the budget for it. Which means a lot more work for me, by the way. I’m as unhappy about this as you are.”

  She stood in his doorway; she could see, even when he was sitting still, how every fiber of his being strained toward wanting this meeting to be over.

  “I quit,” she said.

  And she did it; her seventh-grade animal-bio class started in twelve minutes, but she didn’t go. She just didn’t. She walked out of the building and into her car and drove away from there.

  She thought about sitting in a bar—that seemed like what one did, right after doing what she’d just done—but they weren’t open yet and anyway she wasn’t truly in the mood. So she went home, and lay down on her bed, and her adrenaline went out like the tide.

  How was this her life? She hadn’t made the necessary effort to get away, as her sister had; she’d stayed and taken a job that forced her to pretend that the sons and daughters of people she’d known since her own childhood had it in them to be improvements over their parents. She was haunted by her unlived lives, by the various corpses of possibility. It didn’t matter what they were. Nothing about her life could be said to be temporary or provisional or experimental anymore. This was it.

  Whatever it was that had given Renee the escape velocity to get out of there and live a life that had nothing to do with Howland—the narcissism, the oblivious self-confidence, the shameless talent for ingratiation with men—Candace understood that these were terrible, unlikable qualities, yet for the first time she caught herself wishing she had them too. It must be nice to have so little to worry about that you can spend your days forwarding emails about Agenda 21 or whatever the fuck.

  She was thirty-four years old. Once in a while she would have this insight that she should really get into therapy, that her actions were being determined by some part of her that she didn’t even understand; but it never took more than a few minutes’ thought to come down from that idea. Because what kind of shrink were you liable to get up here, in the middle of nowhere? The kind not good enough to make it elsewhere, that’s what kind. A bitter, defensive washout, like her, like most people she had to talk to every day. She was going to ask such a person to explain her to herself? No thank you.

  Anyway, she could forget about such louche concerns as mental health now. Now the question was, where am I going to find another job around here?

  She waited until five o’clock, when she would normally be home from work, then she walked across the street and bought a liter of Chardonnay from her landlord. He didn’t meet her eyes.

  She got drunk and had a revelation. She wanted to do some good in the world. That was why she’d tried public school teaching in the first place. In her mind she eliminated anything further to do with kids, but there were plenty of adults who needed help, right? She should go to work for a nonprofit or a charity. Feeding the hungry, helping the poor. Even in the Berkshires you had your hungry and your poor. When she Googled such things, though, all she got were charities affiliated with various local churches, and that—working for a church—she would not do. Her mother’s mother had tried to indoctrinate them into the church when they were kids, with the bribe of a trip to McDonald’s afterwards, but that arrangement hadn’t even lasted a year before Mark and Gerry got kicked out of Mass for spitting at each other and Grandma said they could all continue on their path to hell for all she cared.

  So you had to think big—or not big, necessarily, but just outside existing structures. If what you wanted didn’t yet exist, where would you go to make it exist? Sometime during the night she had a thought. She was pretty drunk when she had this thought, but when she woke up the next morning it still seemed like a good one. When she got out of the shower her phone was ringing; it was the school, and she ignored it. Instead she called the main number for Howland’s Town Hall. When her call went to voicemail she checked the time and saw it was still only eight twenty. She left a message requesting a meeting with the First Selectman, to discuss a proposed new project; she spelled out her name, and said that she believed her brother was a friend of his. When five hours passed with no word, Candace just got in her car and drove over there. Bureaucracy was a state of mind, in a town that small.

  She’d been in the building before, but only a few times, when school budget meetings were held there. In the hallway, just where it cornered toward the old gymnasium, was a strange feature, no less strange
for having always been there: a “Food Bank,” more literally a card table holding up a display of donated canned goods and supplies for the town’s neediest. It looked temporary but Candace remembered it from previous visits. Maybe it was always the same food, like in a fallout shelter. It wasn’t enough to last a family more than two or three days. Not to mention that any local would sooner starve than accept public charity of that kind.

  Hadi had brought his own former personal assistant up from New York City—had persuaded her to move to Howland, the story went, husband and children too, by offering her a salary too life-changing to refuse. She exuded an intimidating professional bearing even behind her undersized desk in the anteroom outside the closed door of the First Selectman’s office. Candace asked to see him, and thought she would outflank the secretary by adding, “I have no appointment.”

  “I’m afraid he’s not in,” the secretary said. Her little desktop nameplate said Ms. Burrows. She had maybe five or six years on Candace, eight years tops.

  “It’s kind of a local custom, a tradition, to see the townspeople on a walk-in basis,” Candace said, making this up on the spot. “The whole my-door-is-always-open idea. Transparency in government.”

  “That’s interesting to know,” the woman said. “Still, unfortunately he’s not in.”

  Stymied, Candace walked back out into the empty hallway. She was starting to understand her own behavior as symptomatic of some kind of breakdown. Less than twenty-four hours ago, she had a job, she was a schoolteacher. She stood by the weird, lonely Food Bank and drummed her fingers on an unoccupied corner of the surface of the card table. The food there was horrible, unwanted, like a punishment for failing. Canned asparagus, a jar of pimentos, a six-pack of flavored water. It’s like they knew it was all for display anyway, so they figured, why waste something tasty? Just gather up the stuff no one wants, and it’ll stand for whatever it is that we want this Food Bank to stand for.

  Candace left the building and walked down Main Street to the Undermountain, to sit and have a cup of coffee: no point in rushing back home. She took a stool at the counter, beneath the faded Christmas decorations, and when she lifted her eyes from the list of specials clipped to the top of the napkin dispenser, there he was: Hadi, sitting alone in a booth, holding half of a patty melt in one hand, scrolling down on his BlackBerry with the other.

  For some reason he hadn’t taken off his bright red Canada Goose down jacket. Candace thought it looked like something no guy would wear unless his wife bought it for him. With a start she realized that he was now looking up at her, and that was because she had been staring at him. The diner was mostly empty—it was an odd hour for lunch—so she was able to speak to him in a normal voice from where she sat.

  “I hope you don’t mind if I ask for just a minute of your time,” she blurted out, and stood up and slid into the sprung booth seat across from him. He stopped chewing. She felt like she had breached security, even though the waitresses and the cashier ignored her. There was an aura that came from Hadi, for sure. He didn’t have that prickliness, that layer of self-protection, the locals usually had. He didn’t need it, she supposed—he lived a life in which things happened because he made them happen.

  “I’m eating,” he said simply. “Who are you?”

  “Candace Firth. Until—until recently I was the assistant principal at Howland Elementary School.” There was an inconsequential pause. “My brother is Mark Firth?” she said, wincing internally. “He’s your neighbor on Route 4, did some work on your house a few years ago?”

  Hadi smiled. “Sure,” he said.

  “Just so you know, I did try your office first, I had no idea you’d be here, but since you are here…I wanted to run an idea by you. Howland doesn’t have any kind of facility for women, a shelter, a safe haven for victims of domestic violence primarily. The nearest one is across the state line in Hillsdale, which creates problems in terms of public assistance, what with the two different states. The closest one in Massachusetts is all the way up in Pittsfield. For women who work, or have children, that shelter is too far away to be practical. It just occurred to me that such a shelter, for people who have nowhere else to go, is something that a town like this needs.”

  Hadi put down the sandwich half he’d been holding and wiped his fingers. “Where would this shelter be?”

  “I’m not sure,” Candace said.

  “I mean, it would have to be a place where a number of people could sleep. Right? A house. An existing house, probably.”

  Candace willed herself not to turn red.

  “And is domestic violence a particular problem in Howland?” he said—not meanly, but very rationally, almost as if Candace were no longer there. “Of course I understand it’s a terrible problem everywhere. Absolutely. But I mean are there any numbers, is there any way of measuring the proposed need?”

  “This idea,” Candace said, “is really just in the preliminary stages at this point.”

  He looked at her, not impatiently, but for an uncomfortably long time.

  “The public school system is a horrible mess,” he said finally. “Is that why you left?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. Her face felt hot. Who was this guy? She had the illusion—she recognized it as an illusion—that he could see right through her. Something about his money—for that’s what it was, of course: the money—seemed to put him out of reach of the usual run of social concerns, to lend him a sort of impartiality. Or maybe that was just a different way of acknowledging that he had no reason to care one way or the other about her. Which made him into a judge of sorts. She could offer him nothing.

  “When did you leave?” he said.

  “Yesterday. You’re right, I came to you too soon with this. Plus I don’t actually live here, I live in Great Barrington. But I thought you…I’m just at kind of a crossroads right now, and I’m trying to think of some small way to make the world better. Which doesn’t seem like it should be hard, at all, because the world is mostly a pretty terrible place. Right? Ironic. But anyway, it was a pleasure to meet you and I am sorry to have interrupted your lunch.”

  She walked slowly back along Main Street to where her car sat in the Town Hall lot, and she drove home, feeling calm, submissive now to ruin. She Googled “how do I apply for public assistance” and the next day she drove to Pittsfield to fill out the first of the forms. She did it that way, rather than asking Gerry, because she didn’t want her family to know until she was ready to tell them—ideally after she’d already lined up another job—but that didn’t work, her school phone number and email account were disconnected, so first Renee and then her brothers figured it out right away. They all consoled her and then they all got used to it. She applied for a few jobs she didn’t really want and she didn’t get them. Every day she tried to make herself leave the apartment at least once, unless it was too cold. She told Andrew, in an email, that she didn’t want to see him anymore, and his reply to her was so cruel she couldn’t even laugh at it. Thirty-nine was the number of weeks her benefits would last; that worked out to sometime in August or maybe September. She told herself she wouldn’t do the math until she got closer to the end. But then, before she was even halfway there, she got a call from Hadi’s secretary in the Howland Town Hall. The First Selectman was out of town on business but he wanted to invite her to apply for a job running Howland’s free library, on Mill Street. The current librarian had just announced her intention to retire.

  A librarian? That’s not what she had in mind back when she’d talked to him, back when she’d still had anything in mind at all. The Howland library was tiny, just two rooms and an office. Candace had only ever seen it through its windows. She wasn’t sure who used it. Maybe it was like the Food Bank, there only because it seemed unflattering for it not to be there. But what did it matter, she had no choice. And she had to admit it made a nice, ironic fit with the small-town, old-maid lifestyle to which it was now time for her to grow accustomed.

  —
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br />   Caldwell House stayed open to the public each year until November 1; after that, only the offices were heated, in the renovated warren of rooms off the kitchen. Karen was warned that a little stir-craziness could set in then, particularly on days when no one came in to work but her. In fact her predecessor in the job had been fired for having work calls auto-forwarded to her home number; it wasn’t that she was lazy, she’d said, but that she kept hearing scary noises upstairs.

  The house and grounds reopened after Memorial Day, but that was still a few weeks off; in mid-May there was the annual board meeting to prepare for. The board members, who were all from Boston or New York, liked to schedule it to coincide with the return of spring warmth and visual pleasantry. It made the drive there and back less onerous. Karen coordinated overnight accommodations for those who wanted them, arranged the catering, saw to special dietary needs or requests, printed out annual reports and quarterly revenue projections—it was a lot of work, and her understanding was that these society types were particularly impatient with mistakes. But what really stressed her out was when she asked the director, Ms. van Aswegen, who would be in charge of taking the meeting’s minutes, and Ms. van Aswegen answered her with a smile and a raised eyebrow. Karen had zero secretarial skills, and it’s not like she’d lied about that on her résumé. But her boss just told her to do her best and not worry so much.

  She was so worked up about it that she couldn’t sleep the night before the meeting, but the task turned out to be undemanding. The six old folks on the board—four men, two women—talked slowly and tended to say the same things over and over again; and then there were long stretches when they weren’t discussing anything foundation-related at all, just vacation spots and real estate and how the government was now totally out of control. Mr. Peck, who wore a bow tie, went on for almost ten minutes about the estate tax alone; Karen put her pen down as discreetly as she could. They went over the operating budget, asking only a couple of cranky questions about one-time expenses. Mr. Peck wanted to know why they’d paid for a new sign when they’d just paid for the last new sign two years earlier; the director cleared her throat and explained that the old new sign had accidentally been taken out by the town snowplow. Well, the town should pay for it, then, Mr. Peck said, and the director gently answered that the town had indeed agreed to reimburse them, but these things took time. Mr. Peck sat back and scowled, all his views confirmed. Then, just when it seemed like the afternoon was wrapping up, and Ms. van Aswegen was congratulating them all on another year of wise and excellent stewardship, her voice drifted to a stop as she and everyone else noticed Mrs. Elliot, who’d been driven from Brookline, raising her colorless hand in the air like a schoolgirl.