Independence Day (70 page)

In fifteen minutes the Markhams have become longtime residents, and I their unwieldy, unwished-for guest. An invitation to come back, have lemonade, sit out back on nylon lawn chairs is definitely not forthcoming. They both squint from the pavement to the sun and the untroubled beryl sky as though they judge a good soaking rain—and not my paltry, unremarked watering—to be the only thing that’ll do their yard any good.

We have painlessly agreed on a month-to-month, with three months in advance as a security blanket for me—though I’ve consented to remit a month if they find a house worth buying in the first thirty days (fat chance). I’ve passed along our agency’s “What’s The Diff?” booklet, spelling out in layman’s terms the pros and cons of renting vs. buying: “Never pay over 20 percent of gross income on housing,” although “You always sleep better in a place you own” (debatable). There’s nothing, however, about needing to “see” yourself, or securing sanction or the likelihood of significant events ever having occurred in your chosen abode. Those issues are best dealt with by a shrink, not a realtor. Finally we’ve agreed to sign the papers tomorrow in my office, and I’ve told them to feel free to haul in their sleeping bags and camp out in their “own house” tonight. Who could say nay?

“Sonja’s going to find it real eye-opening here,” Phyllis the Republican says with confidence. “It’s what we came down here for, but maybe we didn’t know it.”

“Reality check,” Joe says stonily. They’re both referring to the race issue, albeit deviously, while holding each other’s hand.

We are beside my car, which gleams blue and hot in the ten o’clock sun. I have the Harrises’ accumulated junk mail and the Trenton
Times
tucked under my arm, and have handed over their keys.

I know that filtering up like rare and rich incense in both the Markhams’ nostrils is the up-to-now endangered prospect of life’s happy continuance—a different notion entirely from Irv Ornstein’s indecisive, religio-ethnic-historical one, though he might claim they’re the same. An abrupter feeling is the Markhams’, though, tantamount to the end of a prison sentence imposed for crimes they’ve been helpless to avoid: the ordinary misdemeanors and misprisions of life, of which we’re all innocent and guilty. Alive but unrecognized in their pleased but dizzied heads is at least now the
possibility
of calling on Myrlene Beavers with a hot huckleberry pie or a blemished-second “gift” pot from Joe’s new kiln; or of finding common ground regarding in-law problems with Negro neighbors more their age; of letting little dark-skinned kids sleep over; of nurturing what they both always knew they owned in their hearts but never exactly found an occasion to act on in the monochrome Green Mountains: that magical sixth-sense understanding of the other races, which always made the Markhams see themselves as out-of-the-ordinary white folks.

A police cruiser, our lone Negro officer at the wheel, finally passes slowly by, on the lookout for the Clio Street bombers. He waves perfunctorily and continues on. He is now their neighbor.

“Look, when we get all our shit moved in, we’ll get you over here for a meal,” Joe says, turning loose Phyllis’s hand and trussing a short proprietary arm even more closely about her rounded shoulders. It is obvious she’s informed him of her newest medical sorrows, which may be why he came around to renting, which may be why she told him. Another reality check.

“That’s a meal I’m happy to wait for,” I say, wiping a driblet of sweat off my neck, feeling the touchy spot where I was struck by a baseball in a far-off city. I have expected Joe to bring up the lease-purchase concept at least once, but he hasn’t. Possibly he still harbors subconscious suspicions I’m a homosexual, which makes him standoffish.

I take a guarded look up at the old brick-veneer facade and curtained windows at #44, where there is no movement though I know surveillance is ongoing, and where I feel for an uneasy moment certain my $450 is being held hostage to the McLeods’ ingrown convictions regarding privacy and soleness, having nothing to do with financial distress, lost jobs or embarrassment (which I would know how to cope with). I am, in fact, less concerned for my money than with the prospect of my own life’s happy continuance with this problem unresolved. And yet I’m capable of making more of anything than I should, and I might just as well take a more complex approach to the unknown—such as
never
asking them for another goddamned nickel and seeing what effect that produces over time. Today, after all, is not only the fourth, but the Fourth. And as with the stolid, unpromising, unlikable Markhams, real independence must sometimes be shoved down your throat.

On a street we cannot see, a car alarm (possibly the same one as before) sets off loudly, and at hectic intervals,
bwoop-bwip, bwoop-bwip
, just as the bells at St. Leo’s begin tolling ten. It makes for a minor cacophony: thirteen clocks striking at the same second. Joe and Phyllis smile and shake their heads, look around at the heavens as if they were breaking open and this was the only signal they would hear. Though they have decided to try being happy, are in a firm acceptance mode and would agree at this moment to like anything. It must be said, at last, that I admire them.

I take a parting glimpse at Myrlene Beavers’s, where the silver bars of her walker are visible behind the screen. She is watching too, phone in her quaverous grip, alert to fresh outrage. “Who are
these
people? What do they hope to achieve? If only Tom were alive to take care of it.”

I’m shaking Joe Markham’s hand almost without knowing it. It is good to leave now, as I have done the best I can by everyone. What more can you do for wayward strangers than to shelter them?

I
take a morning’s ride up into town now, bent on nothing special—a drive-by of my hot-dog stand on the Green, a pass of the parade’s staging grounds for a sniff of the holiday aromas, a cruise (like a tourist’s) down my own street to inspect the site of Homo haddamus pithecarius, whose appearance, irrespective of provenance—M or F, human or ape, freedman or slave—I have a certain natural interest in. Who of us, after all, would be buried minus the hope of being returned someday to the air and light, to the curious, the tentative and even affectionate regard of our fellow uprights? None of us, I grant you, would mind a second appraisal with the benefit of some time having passed.

I in fact enjoy such a yearly drive through town, end to end, without my usual purposes to spur me (a property-line check, a roof and foundation write-up, an eleventh-hour visit before a closing), just a drive to take a
look
but not to touch or feel or be involved. Such a tour embodies its own quiet participation, since there is sovereign civic good in being a bystander, a watcher, one of those whom civic substance and display are meant to serve—the public.

Seminary Street has a measly, uncrowded, preparade staticness to it all around. The town’s new bunting is swagged on our three stoplights, the sidewalk flags not flying but lank. Citizens on the sidewalks all seem at yawing loose ends, their faces wide and uncommunicative as they stop to watch the parade crew blocking the curbs with sawhorses for the bands and floats that will follow, as if (they seem to say) this
should
be a usual Monday, one
should
be getting other things done and started. Skinny neighborhood boys I don’t recognize slalom the hot middle stripes on skateboards, their arms floating out for balance, while at the Virtual Profusion and the former Benetton and Laura Ashley (now in new personas as Foot Locker and The Gap) clerks are shoving sale tables back to their storefronts, preparing to wait in the cool indoors for crowds that may finally come.

It is an odd holiday, to be sure—one a man or woman could easily grow abstracted about, its practical importance to the task of holding back wild and dark misrule never altogether clear or provable; as though independence were
only
private and too crucial to celebrate with others; as though we should all just get on with
being
independent, given that it is after all the normal, commonsensical human condition, to be taken for granted unless opposed or thwarted, in which case unreserved, even absurd measures should be taken to restore or reimagine it (as I’ve tried to do with my son but that he has accomplished alone). Best maybe just to pass the day as the original signers did and as I prefer to do, in a country-like setting near to home, alone with your thoughts, your fears, your hopes, your “moments of reason” for what new world lies fearsomely ahead.

I cruise now out toward the big unfinished Shop Rite at the eastern verge of town, where Haddam borders on woodsy Haddam Township, past the Shalom Temple, the defunct Jap car dealer and the Magyar Bank, up old Route 27 toward New Brunswick. The Shop Rite was scheduled to be up and going by New Year’s, but its satellite businesses (a TCBY, a Color Tile and a Pet Depot) began dragging their feet after the stock market dip and the resultant “chill” in the local climate, so that all work is at present on hold. I, in fact, wouldn’t be sad or consider myself an antidevelopment traitor to see the whole shebang fold its tents and leave the business to our merchants in town; turn the land into a people’s park or a public vegetable garden; make friends in a new way. (Such things, of course, never happen.)

Out on the wide parking lot, fairly baking in the heat, waits most of our parade, its constituents wandering about in unparade-like disorder: a colonial fife-and-drum band from De Tocqueville Academy; a regiment of coonskin-cap regulars in buckskins, accompanied by several burly men in Mother Hubbards and combat boots (dressed to show independence can be won at the cost of looking ridiculous). Here is a brigade of beefy, wired-up wheelchair vets in American-flag shirts, doing weaves and wheelies while passing basketballs (others simply sit smoking and talking in the sunshine). Waiting, too, is another Mustang regatta, a female clown troupe, some local car dealers in good-guy cowboy hats, ready to chauffeur our elected officials (not yet arrived) in the backs of new convertibles, while a passel of political ingenues are all set to ride behind on a flatbed truck, wearing oversize baby diapers and convict clothes. A swank silver bus parked all by itself under the shadeless Shop Rite sign contains the Fruehlingheisen Banjo and Saxophone Band from Dover, Delaware, most of whose members have postponed coming out. And last but not least, two Chevy bigfoots, one red, one blue, sit mid-lot, ready to rumble down Seminary at parade’s end, their tiny cabs like teacups above their giant cleated wheels. (Later on there’re plans for them to crush some Japanese cars out at the Revolutionary War Battlefield.) All that’s lacking, in my view, are harem guards, who would make Paul Bascombe happy.

From where I stop out on the shoulder for a look, nothing yet seems inspired or up to parade pitch. Several tissue-paper floats are not yet manned or hitched up. The centerpiece Haddam High band has not appeared. And marshals in hot swallowtail coats and tricorne hats are hiking around with walkie-talkies and clipboards, conferring with parade captains and gazing at their watches. All in fact seems timeless and desultory, most of the participants standing alone in the sun in their costumes, looking off much as the fantasy ballplayers did in Cooperstown yesterday, and much, I’m sure, for the same reasons: they’re bored, or else full of longing for something they can’t quite name.

I decide to make a fast swerve through the lot entrance, avoid the whole parade assemblage and continue back out onto 27 toward town, satisfied that I’ve glimpsed behind the parade’s façade and not been the least disappointed. Even the smallest public rigmarole is a pain in the ass, its true importance measurable not in the final effect but by how willing we are to leave our usual selves behind and by how much colossal bullshit and anarchy we’re willing to put up with in a worthwhile cause. I always like it better when clowns seem to try to be happy.

Unexpectedly, though, just as I make my turn around and through the Shop Rite entrance, bent on escape, a man—one of the swallowtail marshals in a hat, red sash and high-buttoned shoes, who’s been consulting a clipboard while talking to one of the young men wearing diapers—starts hurriedly toward my moving car. He waves his clipboard as if he knows me and has an aim, means to share a holiday greeting or message, perhaps even get me in on the fun as someone’s substitute. (He may have noticed my LICK BUSH sticker and thinks I’m in the mood for high jinks.) Only I’m in another mood, perfectly good but one I’m happy to keep to myself, and so continue swerving without acknowledging him, right back onto 27. There’s no telling, after all, who he might be: someone with a lengthy realty complaint, or possibly Mr. Fred Koeppel of Griggstown, who “needs” to discuss a negotiated commission on his house, which’ll sell itself anyway (so let it). Or possibly (and this happens with too great a frequency) he’s somebody from my former married days who happened to be in the Yale Club just yesterday morning and saw Ann and wants to report she looks “great,” “super,” “dynamite”—one of those. But I’m not interested. Independence Day, at least for the daylight hours, confers upon us the opportunity to act as independently as we know how. And my determination, this day, is to stay free of suspicious greetings.

I drive back in on sunny and fast-emptying Seminary, where the actual civic razzmatazz still seems a good hour off—past the closed PO, the closed Frenchy’s Gulf, the nearly empty August Inn, the Coffee Spot, around the Square, past the Press Box Bar, the closed Lauren-Schwindell office, Garden State S&L, the somnolent Institute itself and the always officially open but actually profoundly closed First Presbyterian, where the WELCOME sign out front says,
Happy Birthday, America! * 5K Race * HE Can Help You At The Finish Line!