White Elephant Page 2

  Their father had been an accountant for the IRS, their mother a housewife. Ordinary people could afford Willard Park then—teachers, government workers, hippies. That was the kind of people Ted still wanted to live among. Normal people, who did for themselves and for others instead of hiring everything out to strangers. People who believed in community. Soon the neighborhood would be all power brokers who pulled into their garages at night and drove off again in the morning. It would become a bedroom community as economically homogenous as it had been ethnically homogenous in the 1950s.

  Lucy’s family had been the first black family to move to Willard Park in 1959, before Ted was born. They bought the old Willard farmhouse and turned it into a café, naming it after their little daughter, who would later turn it from an ordinary sandwich place into an institution. The town had welcomed the family at a time when many Washington-area communities were still restricted, and diversity increased at a steady pace. These days Willard Park was a mixture of colors and nationalities, religions and sexual orientations. That made Ted feel proud.

  “What’s wrong, Teddy?”

  “Nothing, Terr. I’m good.” Ted spread out two paper napkins on the coffee table and handed Terrance a soda.

  “Only you can prevent forest fires, Ted.” Terrance pointed at him.

  Ted pointed back. He studied his brother’s mild, sweet face. Terrance was balder than Ted and a good thirty pounds heavier. He was like a distortion of Ted, what he would have been like if there had been complications at his own birth.

  “I went on a date last night.” Terrance put his hand up for a high five.

  His hand was warm. “With whom?”

  “A girl. She’s from Free to Be Me.” Free to Be Me was Terrance’s social group. It met once a month for pizza or bowling.

  “Good for you, pal.”

  Terrance closed his eyes. “Bay City Rollers,” he said.

  The nursing home wasn’t a bad place to work. There were pots of flowers and a shaded patio. The people were kind, for the most part. And yet, Ted felt guilty. He was the son who had it all: a comfortable job, a wife and daughter, and the family home. Terrance lived in a group home with three other disabled men and spent his days cleaning up after old people. He’d worked there for twenty years—longer than Ted had ever done anything.

  Routine worked for Terrance, Ted reminded himself. Terrance had practically had to be medicated after Coke changed its recipe in the 1980s, and he’d gotten so worked up when Giant closed its in-store bakery that the manager called security to remove him from the store. Ted had to walk him over to the bakery next door for a couple of mornings, until he got used to buying his morning muffin there every day instead.

  Ted’s dream—a small one, he knew, but a dream nonetheless—was to keep Willard Park the homey way it had been when he and Terrance were growing up, to make the town a constant his brother could count on in an ever-changing world.

  “Want to see her picture?” Terrance said, eyes popping open.

  “Whose?” He wiped mayonnaise off Terrance’s chin.

  “My girlfriend’s.”

  “Sure. Let me see.”

  Terrance took out a picture that had obviously been torn from a magazine, of a model with heavily lidded eyes and sunken cheeks. “We’re going to New York City. We’re going to stay in a hotel and drink Gatorade.”

  Ted looked at Terrance. “This is from a magazine, Terr.”

  Terrance smiled.

  “She’s a supermodel. You know that, right? Not your girlfriend?”

  Terrance put up his hand for another high five. “Got you that time, bro.”

  Ted laughed.

  Terrance pointed his finger in the air a few times, then toward the ground. Disco moves. “Bee Gees,” he said. “I’m John Travolta.”

  Ted took the offered earbud this time, singing along in a falsetto voice, his mood having turned from black, to gray, to the warm yellow of the sun.

  A SOLITARY PORCH SWING: CLICK. A MAILBOX PAINTED TO LOOK LIKE the Cape Cod behind it: click. A garden gate with a welcome sign on it. The bell at the top of the town hall. The fishpond shimmering with goldfish. Click, click, click. The lighting was wonderful, the sky a rich autumn blue in spite of the summery heat this morning.

  Allison saw the town differently when she walked with her camera—not as expanses of green or copses of trees or even houses in their entirety, but as tiny slices of the canvas that was Willard Park: the first golden leaf after summer. The autumn-toned hand-painted sign above Lucy’s Café. Click, click. It was different shooting photos with a real camera, using lenses rather than snapping away with a phone. There was a weight to it beyond the physical; it endowed her with a sense of responsibility to herself, and to the town.

  She and Ted had lived in Willard Park for nearly fourteen years, ever since the winter Ted’s mother died, followed, shortly thereafter, by his father. Ted’s announcement that his parents left him the house led to one of the first serious arguments of their marriage. They discussed selling it (“You’re joking. Tell me you’re joking, Al.”) or renting it out (“to strangers?”), but sentimentality and practicality had won out in the end (“no mortgage!”). They’d let the lease on their Dupont Circle apartment lapse. The lawnmower, the Volvo, and the baby soon followed. So much for the year backpacking around Europe, a plan Ted had agreed to only grudgingly anyway.

  Allison eyed the farmers’ market, snapping a shot of the wooden sign that advertised organic apples: click; a pyramid of homemade jams, a row of herbs in clay pots: click, click. She scanned a table full of brightly colored plastic toys—interlopers amid the artisan goods. Kaye Cox, toes polished in her high-heeled sandals, was handing over her credit card in exchange for a toy car. She waved when she saw Allison.

  Allison smiled and waved back, then put the camera to her eye and zoomed in on a tree: click, click, click.

  Allison wanted to like Kaye Cox. There was nothing wrong with her, really. So she was a little highlighted and made up for Willard Park—those were forgivable offenses. Allison should have stopped by to welcome them with brownies when they moved in a year and a half before, only she’d been so angry with them for building a castle on their block.

  She and the other neighbors might have forgiven them the sin of bad taste with time, but as the months wore on, the Coxes continued to disobey the unspoken rules of the neighborhood. They didn’t compost. They had pesticides sprayed on their grass. They didn’t join Friends of the Willard Park Children’s Library. They didn’t even recycle.

  Last spring Kaye had joined the town Beautification Committee, which seemed promising, but she immediately proposed banning fruit- or vegetable-bearing plants in excess of four feet—a pointed attack on Lucy, who grew corn and sunflowers in back of the café. The Coxes were like foreign visitors who had not read up on the local customs.

  Allison climbed the porch steps and opened the café’s screen door. It was cooler inside the white clapboard house; the wooden floorboards were wide, the walls painted a buttery yellow. The café smelled like the lemon candles that burned on every table. Lucy stood behind the counter blending a drink, her long gray hair in dozens of braids that spread over her shoulders like lovely silvery fish. She wore a yellow LUCY’S apron slung over an orange tank top.

  The café was known for its lemon bars and carrot cake, milkshakes and espresso drinks. It earned a spot on Washingtonian magazine’s “Best Of” list every year. Lucy made sure of this. When voting season came around, she asked every customer if they had voted yet and, if they hadn’t, took them straight to the website to show them how. Town residents kept a mug on a hook since Lucy accompanied the distribution of paper cups with a lecture. Allison snapped a photo of the eclectic mug collection.

  “I had an idea for your book,” Lucy shouted over the blender when it was Allison’s turn.

  “Okay. Shoot.”

  “An aerial shot of the town.”

  “How would I do that?”

  The whir
ring died. “A helicopter?”

  “A little overbudget, I’m afraid.”

  Lucy picked up the coffee can by the register. She crossed out the word “Tips” and replaced it with the words “Helicopter Fund.” She poured Allison’s coffee milkshake into a glass and handed her the metal overflow cup. “Bottoms up, gal. Trees still standing?”

  “Just a little chest pounding so far.”

  Allison stopped by the bulletin board on her way out. It was littered with flyers for babysitting and home services—one card offered “Husbands by the Hour,” which gave Allison pause. Myriad items were for sale, from strollers to aquariums to training wheels. Someone was offering cooking lessons, and the town Single Parents’ Club was having a barbecue. There were business cards from Nina Strauss, realtor, to Maggie Conifer, a college student offering editing services, “No job is too small!” to Monkey Mind Yoga, “Specializing in private and small group classes.” People were so industrious, so entrepreneurial, so brave, putting themselves out there for the world to consider. Choose me! they seemed to cry. Choose me! She understood the feeling.

  Allison found a table on the porch. She reviewed the photos she’d taken so far this morning as she sipped her shake. Not bad, if she did say so.

  She would thank Jillian on the dedication page of the book. “To my lovely daughter,” perhaps, or “My love and thanks to Jill . . .” Would Jillian be flattered or embarrassed by the gesture? It was Jillian’s model of the town that had inspired the book Allison was working on, after all: Willard Park: An American Dream. That’s what Allison wanted to call it, assuming the publisher approved. Once she found a publisher.

  She would fill it with photos of the town interspersed with Willard Park’s history and facts about the architectural styles and the oddities: the merry-go-round that used to be where the elementary school parking lot now lay, the peacocks one eccentric resident used to raise. She imagined a well-designed and informative book meant not only for residents, but for anyone who wanted evidence that idyllic towns still existed in America.

  Allison was pinning a lot on this project. She wanted it to be the answer to the question “What do I want to do when I grow up?,” a question that had haunted her since childhood. What was her passion? Her raison d’être?

  She was determined to make her mark. She was an artist after all. She’d studied photography in college and had managed a gallery near Dupont Circle before Jillian was born. In the meantime she’d become a prostitute. Well, that’s what it felt like. Allison was the photographer responsible for the nearly life-size portraits that hung on many a living room wall in Willard Park. They were traditional color photos of smiling parents and children dressed in their Sunday best—parents holding babies, children lined up staircase-style, in order of age; children in matching outfits gathered around doting parents. Oversize snapshots, in a word. They stared out at her accusingly whenever she entered one of her clients’ homes, reminding her that she’d sold out.

  A familiar, icy feeling swirled around her ankles and swept up her legs—the fear that she alone, of all the women she knew, had not made the transition from mother-of-a-young-child to woman-who-was-back-in-the-game. Jillian was in middle school now, for goodness’ sake. Allison had run out of excuses. She often thought she should get a real job, just to stop the angst, but what was she qualified to do? Work at a photo shop? She pictured herself behind a counter at the mall alongside a pimply teenager, handing out prints. Did photo shops even exist anymore?

  “Honey, honey,” an image of her friend Valeria came to mind, calling her back to herself. “Better to slit your wrists.”

  Valeria was a Spanish teacher at the middle school, her husband, Phil, a public radio correspondent who had been assigned to cover Paris. Paris! Allison wanted to be assigned to cover Paris! She and Valeria had e-mailed each other daily since they moved in July. Well, the e-mails had been daily at first. Now it was more like once a week or so, with the occasional WhatsApp message. Valeria was busy after all—brushing up on her French, dealing with the convoluted rules at Sofia’s school, trying not to incur the wrath of the landlady with the hypersensitive hearing. The only consolation for the fact that her best friend had moved away was Valeria’s constant reminders that expat life was kind of a pain.

  Allison poured the rest of the milkshake into her glass and drank it down to the bottom, chasing every last drop with her straw, then headed for home.

  When she reached the Coxes’ house, she stopped to consider it, as she often did, hoping, eventually, to convince herself it wasn’t so bad. The trouble was, it was so bad. There were two Ionic columns looking fabulously out of place on the porch, two stone lions the size of ponies, towers painted gold—was it gold leaf? It was as if Nick had thumbed through a catalog of architectural features, earmarked the gaudiest, and had them stuck on his house. The inhabitants of an entire zip code could have lived in it comfortably.

  One couldn’t, in all honesty, accuse Nick Cox of starting the “big house” craze in Willard Park. The tearing down and building up had started long before he moved in. It was slow at first, a knock down here, an addition there, but the pace had increased with time. Now houses wrapped in shimmering Tyvek slips were a common sight. Latino gardeners spilled out of trucks in the springtime along with wheelbarrows full of mulch and trees with round, burlap bottoms. Walking mowers had given way to tractor mowers nearly as big as the modest lawns themselves. The home gardener, in kerchief and garden gloves, a pair of clippers in hand, was becoming a rare animal in Willard Park.

  Allison looked past her and Ted’s little house, comfortably set back on their lawn, to the house Nick was currently building, rising skyward like Jack’s beanstalk. Until June a Cinderella-model Sears home had stood there, owned for the better part of the century by Miss Theodora Frey, vegetable gardener and birder extraordinaire, now resting peacefully in her grave behind the church. Or rolling in it. Nick Cox had told her he was buying the house for his diabetic mother. Cox had completely resculpted the backyard to add another daylight level. It was nearly blinding the way the sun hit the white facade.

  Nick was beside the new house, camouflaged in part by the leaves. There was something brutal about him, but it wasn’t unattractive. He was so tall and fit, Kaye so petite, that Allison thought Kaye was his teenaged daughter the first time she saw them, at the town cherry blossom parade. The way they’d looked, the children dressed in cheerful pinks and greens, you’d have thought they’d descended from the trees themselves.

  Good sex, Allison thought, not for the first time. Energetic. Acrobatic, even. It was a game she and Valeria played. Which couples had fun in bed, who wanted out of the marriage, who would split ten, fifteen years down the road.

  Valeria and Phil had sex three or four times a week, down from five to six times when they first got married. Valeria had mentioned this one day, laughingly saying they’d be down to just once or twice a week by the time Sofia put them in a nursing home. Allison had laughed—just once or twice a week!—when actually that sounded like quite a lot. She and Ted had never had it more than twice a week even when they were in college. Now it was down to once or twice a month.

  If that.

  She frowned, thinking. When had she and Ted last had sex? She thought back over the past weeks. He didn’t like to on weekdays, when he knew he’d have to be up by six thirty. He was tired on Friday nights, after work. So, a Saturday. Any recent Saturday? She couldn’t recall one. He often went to bed early, to read, then was out cold by the time she came to bed. They’d spent a week at a rental in Rehoboth earlier this month—had they had sex then? It would have been the perfect time, no work to wake up for . . . but no. She’d tried a few times, snuggling close in bed, rubbing his back, but he had just planted a big kiss on her cheek and wished her sweet dreams. July then. They must have had sex in July. Yes, she could remember the perfect storm of a Saturday night, when she raced to bed at the same time he did, not giving him time to pick up his book before she launc
hed herself into his arms.

  When was the last time he had initiated it though? She puzzled, thinking back through the summer and into the previous spring.

  Nick must have felt her standing there, staring. He looked over at her and tipped his hard hat. Allison nodded at him, a waggle of electricity wiggling through her despite herself.

  “Well, good morning to you, Mrs. Miller,” he said.

  “Mr. Cox, how do you do this fine day?”

  “I do very well, thank you. Very well indeed.”

  She laughed; when had they started this little game of theirs, referring to each other as “mister” and “missus”?

  “Be sure to leave a few standing, won’t you? For the sake of photosynthesis, Mr. Cox?”

  “I’ll consider it, Mrs. Miller. I can assure you I will,” he said, bowing a little, in a silly, courtly manner.

  Then he set the chain saw on the ground, put his foot on it, and pulled the starter. He touched its blade to one of the lesser trees near the new house. Its branches swung down to the ground, as if bowing in the presence of a higher god. A few other small trees followed suit. Then, without missing a beat, Nick Cox sunk the teeth of the saw into Jillian’s red maple, splitting it in two.

  2

  AUGUST 31—AFTERNOON

  I know you weren’t really considering Maryland,” their realtor, Nina Strauss, was saying, “but I just wanted to show you one neighborhood, if you still have the energy . . .”

  Grant, sitting in the backseat of her BMW, behind his wife, Suzanne, was going to shoot himself if he had to look at another neighborhood—but it was up to Suzanne, he reminded himself. It was totally up to her.

  Suzanne took a deep breath, sighed, and nodded, game. So Grant would be game too. They got on the GW Parkway and made their way up the Potomac. They had been looking at houses in Virginia for seven hours now. Seven.

  “It’s on the expensive side—I won’t lie,” Nina said. “But you won’t be sorry. It’s where I live. It’s idyllic. I don’t show it to just anyone.”