The Locals

by Jonathan Dee

  He told himself to be patient, to watch and wait and not get too drunk to drive to one or two other places; but then it was ten thirty and he was talking to some woman named Penny, from right there in Howland, who was out by herself because she said she got too depressed on Tuesday nights, when her two sons went to their dad’s, to stay home alone. She was a mom, and had been living in that whole world of moms and kids, which would account, Gerry thought, for his not having seen her before.

  “Did you grow up here?” he asked her. It was a sensitive approach to figuring out how old she was. It turned out she’d moved west from Chicopee at the behest of her ex-husband, who was looking for a likely place to open a wine store. He thought money just fell off of rich weekenders like fruit off a tree, she said. But at the end of the day it’s still a business, and you still have to know how to run it. He’d had no idea at all what he was doing. He didn’t even like wine. Gerry asked what happened after that, and she just smiled and put down her glass to make a gesture with her two hands, a simulation of something blowing up.

  She asked what he did for a living and he said he had a real estate business going with his brother. Older or younger brother? was all she asked about that. He didn’t tell her how he’d gotten into real estate in the first place or how his previous experience therein had ended. When she asked if he’d ever been married he didn’t tell her the story of his backing out of his wedding. It crossed his mind that there was very little, in the way of autobiography, he would choose to share with any woman whom he cared about impressing.

  But she seemed to have a good sense of which questions not to ask. She was thin, a little thinner than he usually liked. She wore a thin dress—calico, he wanted to say, though he wasn’t sure that was the right word—and old boots and a jean jacket. Don’t do it, he was surprised to catch himself thinking. Not the first one you meet, the first place you go. You are making a joke out of yourself.

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” Penny said, as if she were reading his thoughts. “And it’s the God’s honest truth. I don’t want to go home. Because I don’t like my house. In some ways I like it least of any place in the world.”

  “I feel that way too,” Gerry said, so softly he wasn’t sure she heard.

  “I mean it’s different when the boys are there. Don’t get me wrong.”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “But then when they’re not there. When I’m by myself. Sometimes I’m a little worried about, you know—” She turned to look at him, a small smile pulling at her mouth, and she opened her lips to form an O. Then she stuck her index finger in it, her thumb in the air. She flexed the thumb and her head jerked back.

  Gerry watched her until she turned back to her wine. “Me too,” he whispered. It seemed true, even though he’d just that moment thought of it.

  She laughed, not cruelly. “So what do you do when you feel scared of yourself?” she said. “Come here?”

  They were sitting at the bar side by side, facing in the same direction rather than toward each other. Gerry looked past the bartender’s bearded face to the mostly empty wooden tables, and the backwards Narragansett sign and his own rusty car in the parking lot. “Nothing I do means anything,” he said suddenly. “I just want to mean something. To stand for something. But it isn’t just me either. I feel like it’s all been, what’s that word? Like with gas?”

  “Pumped?”

  “Siphoned! Siphoned away from us. But by what? Or who, or whom I guess. I want to lead a life that’s more…”

  “Like your dad’s?” she said teasingly.

  “God, no. But it is back there somewhere, yeah. In the past. It’s not here now but I know it existed. Because otherwise how would I miss it?”

  She was looking at him wearily, but she was looking at him. He couldn’t tell whether she took him seriously or not.

  “Nobody wants to look inside themselves for what’s missing,” he said. “They all want to act like victims. But your first obligation is to yourself, isn’t it? I mean, that’s your first obligation to other people is to look after yourself. That seems like such a simple idea.”

  “It is not a world of men,” she murmured, and his eyes went wide.

  He paid her bar tab, and then he drove behind her—slowly, in case the trooper was out—until she pulled safely into her driveway. He was all set to leave at that point, but instead he stayed. There was sex, technically, but it didn’t amount to much; they were too bombed. Anyway, he was feeling something he didn’t want sex to distract him from. Not love—obviously it couldn’t be love. After she fell asleep he vowed to stay awake until the sun came up, just to watch her and to think, but he held out for about five minutes before he was asleep too. In the morning, thank God, she seemed like the same person. She came out of the bathroom and he thought for a moment she’d put pajama bottoms on by accident, but they were scrubs—she was a nurse or something.

  In the hallway between the kitchen and her front door hung photos of her sons, lots of them, in no particular order. He stopped to scan them, looking for the ones that were most recent. She watched him, her hand resting on the door latch.

  “There was a guy I was seeing,” she said. “The boys got to like him. That was another mistake I made.”

  “What happened?”

  “He hurt himself at work, and he went on disability. It made him so happy. To not have to work anymore, and still get paid. I couldn’t look at him the same way after that.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He had a government job,” she said evasively.

  He looked at her and put his hands in his pockets; his coat was already on. “Do you ever feel angry?” he said. “Like at people like that, who just skate by?”

  Penny shrugged, in a way that meant yes. “It’s just that nobody ever lifted a finger to help me,” she said. “And I wouldn’t want them to. I’d say no if they asked.”

  “I write this blog,” Gerry said. “It’s mostly for myself, I guess, though a bunch of people read it. Anyway, I write about this kind of stuff sometimes. The stuff I think you’re talking about.”

  “Oh,” she said, smiling. “A blogger.”

  “I didn’t mean it like it was any big—”

  “No, that’s interesting. So I can just Google you and find it?”

  “No, actually,” he said, “my name isn’t on it.”

  “Why not?”

  Gerry shrugged, but a warm feeling was coming over him; he worried he was blushing.

  “I was reading something the other day, in some blog somewhere, about privilege,” Penny said. “The idea of privilege. Apparently, we have all of it.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “White people, I gather. You and me. Although you more than me, of course, because you’re a man.”

  “You don’t say. Do you feel privileged?”

  She laughed. “Hell yeah, I wake up every morning feeling privileged as shit.”

  “I’ll tell you what I feel,” Gerry said, trying to keep his tone as light as hers, but feeling himself fail. “I feel like the world is trying to get rid of me. I feel threatened, but that’s not the bad part, the bad part is that everybody keeps shouting that I’m the one doing the threatening, that black is white, that up is down. It’s like Orwell. They think if they say up is down often enough, and loud enough, then we’ll believe it. And they’re pretty much right. It’s only recently I feel like I’m starting to understand what’s really going on.”

  “Well,” Penny said, and she stroked his arm, at the same time as she seemed to maneuver him closer to the door. “You can’t fix the world, right? But you can damn well protect what’s yours.”

  That night—that same night—he found himself putting an X through every Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday on his wall calendar, for the next two months. Those were the nights Penny’s children were with her. The X’s were so he would remember not to call her then. In the middle of the week, they went out. Historically, for Gerry, taking a girlfriend o
ut to a local bar, instead of staying in, would have been a sure sign that that relationship was spiraling toward its end. But this was something different. It was a good feeling, to show up someplace as a couple, and to know that they would leave that same way. They were drinking a lot, that was true, but at the same time, something about it felt dead sober, and safe. She was almost as good a drunk driver as he was, but after he found out she had a DUI he wouldn’t let her take the wheel at the end of the night anymore. They resented their fear of Trooper Constable, a fat-faced douche with a crew cut and a government-endowed power to ruin their lives. In the car, they would make fun of him until they were both in hysterics. It didn’t take long before the sex reached the kind of edgy pitch Gerry liked, and then it went beyond that. He felt unsettled, nervous, but in a good way: on the verge of something. In the mornings he would meet Mark at his home or at a site, too hungover to pretend otherwise, and even though he knew Mark assumed he was just getting hammered at home alone on a weeknight, like a pathetic alcoholic loser, Gerry didn’t say a thing to correct this impression; he would rather Mark think of him as death-bound and hopeless than expose to him any of what he was really feeling.

  He felt that there was some better, more disciplined version of himself, not far out of his reach. But it was difficult to get there. He even thought about going to church, giving that a try, but he would only have gone with Penny, and he could never see Penny on the weekends. Showing up at church by himself would have felt like walking into an AA meeting or something.

  One morning Mark asked Gerry’s advice about a problem with a tenant in Egremont. The cops had been out to the house twice in the last month. Mark thought there might even be some damage to the place, but the tenant was refusing to let him inside. Refusing? Gerry said. The tenant had changed the locks, which was a violation of his lease. But evicting people was hard, even when the grounds were unambiguous. The laws were rigged against it. Gerry suggested letting Barrett have a little talk with the guy, and Mark said that didn’t make much sense since Barrett was likely to side with anybody against him. When breakfast at Daisy’s ended, Mark handed his brother an envelope, inside of which was his quarterly dividend, seven thousand two hundred dollars. It wasn’t much, but then he hadn’t done much to earn it.

  In bed things went pretty far. Verbally too, which he’d never really been into before. It felt right to him, that was the weird thing: not like role-playing, but more like role-dropping. He loved it but then when the weekend came he welcomed time away from the intensity of it.

  One Saturday night in June, hot as blazes, there was another episode of vandalism on Main Street—two storefront windows broken, at the newsstand that sold cigarettes and at Creative Kidz. Three local teens were arrested within twenty-four hours, and the story about it in the next week’s Gazette was how Gerry, and most other people in town, first learned of the existence of the surveillance cameras.

  595 Housatonic Rd., Howland, 4.2 acres, 5 BR 2b modern. Asking: $1.4m. Sold: $1.5m. Time on market: two weeks. Broker: Reynolds & Ives, New York City.

  1080 RR #7, Lenox, .6 acres, 2 BR 1b ranch. Asking: $140k. Sold: $121.5k. Time on market: 15 months. Broker: Al Kimbrough, Kimbrough Century 21, Stockbridge.

  228 Bluebell Lane, Howland, 1.1 acres, 2 BR 1.5 b Colonial. Asking: $249k. Sold: $194.5k. Time on market: 9 months. Broker: C.J. Glassberg, Glassberg Realty, Stockbridge.

  2080 Route 343, Becket, 4 BR, 2b ranch. Asking: $310k. Sold: $45k. Time on market: 6 mos. Broker: none (bank foreclosure auction).

  9 Red Lion Rd., West Stockbridge, 11 acres, 8 BR, 3.5 b modern. Asking: $2.9m. Sold: $3.3m. Time on market: 3 days. Broker: Thomas Gibbons, New York City.

  MINUTES OF MEETING OF

  BOARD OF SELECTMEN

  July 17, 2006, 4:00 P.M.

  Present: Mr. Hadi, Mr. Allerton, Mr. Waltz,

  Ms. Burrows (sec.)

  Absent: none

  The meeting was called to order. Mr. Allerton suggested the assembled settle in for what might be an unusually long session. Mr. Waltz moved that the board order out for dinner; the motion carried unanimously.

  A proposal was put before the board for an annual Howland Film Festival, to be held in the fall, as a way of extending the tourist season, increasing off-season revenue and expanding Howland’s regional and national profile. Similar festivals in Long Island and New Jersey had generated tens of thousands of dollars in local revenue, according to the proposal. Discussion centered on the fact that such festivals typically have multiple screening venues, while Howland has only one, the Movie House, which has only one screen. The proposal originated with a summer resident who offered his home for opening and closing night parties. The challenges of securing the participation of some of the neighboring towns was discussed. The board agreed not to vote on the proposal. Mr. Hadi, who knows the summer resident who submitted the proposal, said he would convey the board’s findings to him directly.

  Debate was proposed by Mr. Hadi on the question of opposition to a cement plant being built in Hillsdale, NY. The plant is environmentally controversial but promises, according to Hillsdale’s Mayor, the establishment of 78 new full- and part-time jobs. Mr. Allerton questioned the efficacy of debating an issue over which the BOS had no jurisdiction. After some discussion, the issue was tabled.

  The food arrived, and a half-hour adjournment was declared.

  Mr. Hadi introduced two items of new business pertaining to the two taverns operating within the town’s limits: first, a midnight closing time, and second, a ban on smoking therein. Debate followed. Mr. Hadi raised the point, apropos of the curfew, that of Howland’s 17 reported crimes to date this year (three instances of vandalism, four home burglaries, ten moving violations including six DUIs), all but three had taken place after 1:00 A.M. on the day in question. Mr. Waltz stated that if you closed the Howland taverns at midnight, people would simply drive drunk to other bars in surrounding towns, then drive home when those bars closed, leaving Howland with even more inebriated persons behind the wheel. No further action on the proposal was taken. The BOS took up the proposed smoking ban: while the common health benefits were unanimously acknowledged, Mr. Allerton spoke in favor of the tradition and importance of personal freedoms, and asked to have read into the record the observation that “this is not New York City.” Mr. Hadi indicated his intent to explore whether he could impose these new measures, whose benefits no one formally disputed, unilaterally.

  Mr. Waltz reported that town expenditures for the previous quarter were the lowest in more than ten years, mostly owing to the sharp increase in private giving to the town’s various institutions. Mr. Allerton proposed the surplus be returned to the town’s taxpayers in the form of a rebate. Mr. Waltz proposed to read into the record the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper. He then withdrew that proposal. The measure in favor of the rebate was approved by a vote of 3-0.

  The meeting concluded with an official resolution of support for our troops overseas.

  Respectfully submitted,

  Anne Marie Burrows

  7/18/2006

  —

  Candace needed to talk to her brothers, so she asked them to meet her for breakfast; she didn’t get lunch hours anymore, and there wasn’t really room for the three of them at her place for dinner. Fine, Mark emailed, and suggested Daisy’s; no, anywhere but there, she said. When he asked her to please tell him that it wasn’t because of politics, she said you bet your ass it’s because of politics. That old lady’s a savage, and her ugly-ass daughter is worse. Seriously, have you seen her Facebook page?

  He had not seen it; he couldn’t imagine why his sister had, unless she was actually in search of things to feel offended by. He called her and said, “You have got to be kidding me, Candy. It’s an egg sandwich. Eating an egg sandwich is not a political act.” But she refused to budge on the vital issue of who would prepare their breakfast; just to get her to change the subject he agreed to go all the way to Great Barrington, to someplace called Grindhouse.
“I know where it is,” he said. “It’s the lesbian coffee shop, right?”

  “For God’s sake,” Candace said.

  Her workday didn’t start until nine; his started, these days, when he chose to start it. When she arrived he was already seated unhappily in front of a cappuccino with a floral design in the milk froth on top. “Nothing to eat?” she said.

  “They just have scones,” he said. “Zero protein in a scone.”

  The walls of the dimly lit café were hung with wood-block prints, all of them in identical frames, all by the same artist. Near the kitchen, a piece of paper was taped to the wall with the titles of the prints and their prices, which varied, for reasons Mark could not fathom.

  “It’s a gallery,” Candace said, reading his expression. “I mean it doubles as a gallery. It rotates every few weeks. A way for local artists to get their work seen, maybe even by somebody from the city.”

  “Local artists,” Mark said.

  “Oh my God, you sounded so much like Dad just now,” she said.

  Whatever it was she wanted to talk about, she wanted to wait for Gerry to arrive. But he didn’t. She pulled out her cell phone and left him a voicemail. They sipped at their coffee until it was gone.

  “I’m gonna have to go soon,” Candace said. “God damn it.”

  “So the library opens a few minutes late,” Mark said. “Will anybody really notice?”

  “Yeah, well, you might be surprised, actually,” she said. But she didn’t feel like describing it to him. Much of her daily clientele consisted of small children and their over-it mothers, who somehow had the idea that once their kids were inside the library door, they could close their eyes and take some mental time off. Like she was the town nanny or something. Some kids were sweet, others were little engines of annoyance and destruction. There was an irony to it that she didn’t particularly savor and that her brother was unlikely to miss: wherever she went, whatever job she tried to do, she somehow wound up in charge of other people’s kids.