Famous Builder (10 page)

Mrs. Fox belongs in Hollywood.

I lean against my mother’s chair. She smiles, far from her troubles, giving herself over to the whole glamorous scene. More bright lights. My eyeballs thrum. My mother turns around and looks at me with a squinched forehead for what seems to be an extraordinarily long time.

“Are you okay, dear?”

I nod feverishly. I have never felt more energized and engaged in my nine-year-old life.

“He looks funny, doesn’t he?” she says to my father.

My father places a cool palm on my blistering forehead. My mouth is dry. “He’s hot. You better take him to the bathroom.”

The chair screeches back. The green lights flare, the floor buckling and sloping dangerously beneath my feet.

My mother whisks me past the crowd, down the hall into the ladies room. (The ladies room? What on earth am I doing in the ladies room?) But then I’m down on my hands and knees, throwing up into the cold white porcelain. My back is rubbed with circular motions. “Are you finished yet?” says my mother nervously, but it scorches my throat, this sluice, this orange bitter grit, until there’s nothing inside me. I’m dying, I’m sure of it; I’ll have to be taken by the rescue squad to the hospital. And yet, I feel as if I’m living for the very first time, pulled toward a new world of style, artifice, and self-invention.

I am ushered to the car. It is all too much for me. I spend the night dreaming of being blinded by the fabulous spangles of Mrs. Fox’s dress.

***

(Could it be our name? Would Mrs. Fox like us better if we were the Wanamakers? I have to admit there’s something undesirable and odd about Lisicky. No wonder we’re made fun of, my brother and me.
Robert Lisicky sucks his dicky.
Which sends my mother right to the doorstep of Mrs. Gold’s house after she learns that Brian has said these words to Bobby on the Bret Harte school playground.

I’m in my thirties when I finally learn the Slovak translation of Lisicky. It’s Fox. Actually, son of a fox.)

***

On the
Channel 6 News
, Francis Davis points to the whirling comma off Cape Hatteras called Tropical Storm Doria. We’ve spent the day in preparation. We’ve stocked the cabinets with Campbell soups and snacks; we’ve filled the yellow bathtub with water. I’m practically vibrating: the drama, the helplessness, the sense that we’re at the mercy of a hostile, indifferent force. The wind picks up right on schedule. The lights go dimmer. The rain comes down so hard that it leaks through the windows, spilling over the sill. The rafters sigh. I rush into Bobby and Michael’s bedroom (now that I’m getting older, I have my own room, which I’ve painted amber and blue, though it looks too much like a Sunoco station.) I watch them sleeping. Finally, I declare that we have to evacuate, that the tide is rising through the floorboards, that we must act quickly if we are to live. “Get up,” I cry.
“Live.”
I treasure the look of abject fear on their blinking, disoriented faces. Once I smile, they’re not only relieved but amused by my warped little prank.

We all crowd before the front window. The rain is horizontal now, pinging the glass like sleet. The mimosas thrash and weave in the floodlights. Within minutes it becomes clear that the braided blue ropes holding the Foxes’ 24-foot cabin cruiser,
Time Out
, are fraying. “That boat’s going to break loose,” says my father. His concerns are not entirely altruistic. Our boat, the 17-foot
Anney Ho Ho
(a play on Anne Homan, my mother’s maiden name), is docked due north. Already I imagine our beloved boat smashed, the fiberglass floating like matchsticks on the frothing black water.

My father raps repeatedly on the Foxes’ jalousie door. It’s two in the morning, the lights are off. Unlike everyone else in Anchorage Point, they haven’t prepared at all for the storm. Basket chairs, pagodas, tiki torches, a mirrored ball on a pedestal—all wait like potential artillery if the predicted winds of 100-miles-an-hour hit.

In our raincoats my mother and I huddle in the tiny passageway between our houses, where we watch my father. Mr. Fox answers the door with a look of drowsy indifference. They’ve been sleeping soundly, in spite of the shrieking winds and emergency sirens. Above, the power lines churn and lash the trees.

“Your boat—” my father cries.

Mr. Fox gazes out at the transformed lagoon with a grave expression. His visage says:
There’s nothing to be done about this.

“I’m out of rope,” my father says. “Do you have any rope?”

“Wait here,” says Mr. Fox. And he shuts the door to leave my father saturated in the soaking rain.

He returns after five minutes. Once he has his rope, my father races across the yard and, to my mother’s horror, jumps upon the deck of the heaving cabin cruiser. I don’t know whether he’s acting sensibly. Is this just another occasion to prove himself, and he’s thinking of Humphrey Bogart in
Key Largo?
“Christmas,” says my mother. “Why did I ever get married?” But after a few minutes he does manage to tie the boat to its moorings, and the wind lets up, just enough to allow him to jump onto the raft in safety.

“That should hold it,” my father says. He’s coughing; he’s out of breath. He hands over the portion of unused rope to Mr. Fox and wipes his stinging eyes with his fist.

“Big storm,” replies Mr. Fox.

Blue lightning over Ocean City. My father nods, and Mr. Fox walks back into his house without a suggestion of a thank you.

The next day the yard is spangled with roof shingles, wet newspaper, torn branches, assorted trash. Mud has swamped the end of the street. Our Russian olives have blown over. In fact, all the trees have been stripped of their leaves: winter vegetation three months ahead of schedule. But it’s oddly sunny and cool and dry. Pleasant, really. I’m humming “Shout from the Highest Mountain,” a song that I like from folk Mass, when I spot the Foxes’ cupola lying on its side by the lagoon. Obviously, it has blown off the roof and I stare at its battered louvers in a kind of horror. I can’t help but think of Charlton Heston and his hysterical, femmy outburst after he’s seen the wrecked Statue of Liberty at the end of
Planet of the Apes.

My father sits cross-legged on our dock, tightening the bolts with a wrench, when Mr. Fox spots him. I’m glad that he’s finally decided to say thanks, even though my father has already decided to forget about it.

He beckons my father with crooked finger. “Tony.”

He wants my father to help with the cupola. But it’s a demand, not a request. My father complies without hesitation, and in that single moment I see him perhaps more clearly than I’ve ever seen him before, someone suspended between the two worlds, professional and workman. And in Mr. Fox’s gesture, I see how the Foxes see him, my mother, us, how they will
always
see us. We’re beneath them. Although I’m peeved at my father’s acquiescence, I’m more peeved at Mr. Fox for taking advantage of his eagerness to demonstrate his worth. I turn, trudge back into our yard, and start raking up cordgrass.

***

In the wake of the hurricane, things shift ever so slightly between the Foxes and the Lisickys. Maybe we’re more confident now. Bobby, Michael, and I are far more likely to imitate Mrs. Fox’s cleaning rituals, to make gentle fun of her behind her back. Even our mother joins in on the play, and we love her willingness to parody her friend. We’ve grown tired of her impetus to control. When she says of our freshly painted shutters, “Are you keeping them blue?” we’re appalled. And there’s something mildly distressing about her jibes at the community, the latest of which includes putting a sign on the Sendrows’ front yard, beneath the heavy limbs of the mimosas: FOR SALE, CHEAP.

But we’ve truly always known what Mrs. Fox was made of. Recently she’s professed to touring the model homes at Rossmoor Corporation’s New World, a subdivision on the outskirts of Cherry Hill, and she claims to have loved the faux Mission-style ranchers, the fake Tudors, the “luxury modern French Provincials.” We’re perplexed. Everyone in my school knows that New World is bad taste, as embarrassing as the replica of the 1964 World’s Fair Unisphere that marks its entrance. We wonder if she’s secretly making fun of us. As summer draws to a close, I write a short song about her:
Grunting and groaning, gasping and whining—that’s Mrs. Fox. Sort of a cross between Moms Mabley and Wally Cox.

Our relationship with Mrs. Fox reaches its nadir just before Thanksgiving. Bobby and I are helping our father transport panels of unused sheetrock to Cherry Hill from Anchorage Point. We’re on the Black Horse Pike, halfway through the Pine Barrens, when guess who we see pulling into the passing lane? Bobby and I hide our faces with our hands. We sit in the back of the open station wagon, weighing down the panels to which my father has tied strips of red rags. To make matters worse, the muffler is broken, roaring. Oh, Tobacco Road. We’re traveling twenty miles under the speed limit, and because the water’s been shut off for the season, we haven’t showered in two days. Still, we wave and cry, “Hey, Mr. Fox. Hey, Mrs. Fox.” Their eyes look determinedly forward, deliberately obliterating us.

We talk about their dismissal endlessly for weeks. We enumerate the times they’ve behaved poorly, though we can’t help but be mildly entertained by the flamboyance of their bad behavior. Over the next several months I contemplate enacting a similar form of disacknowledgment, until something else happens. Early June, the night before trash day. In bed, lying awake, I listen to the causeway traffic, the distant boat engines, and … what? The melodic clinking of glass. I peer over my windowsill. Mrs. Fox carries what must be a trash bag full of beer bottles. She walks out beyond the edge of the yard to place it alongside the Garbers’ trash, then tiptoes back to her own yard, her shoulders sagging.

***

Sometime during the school year, while we’re back in Cherry Hill, the Foxes’ house is sold to Don and Anne Naughton, a retired couple from Millville, New Jersey. We’re not entirely surprised. The Foxes have owned another house in Florida for the past two years, and they’ve grown dissatisfied with their New Jersey neighbors—so many falling outs with former friends. The completeness of the transition doesn’t hit us right away, and though we’re a little sad, I’m still young enough to see change as essentially a good thing.

The Naughtons clearly don’t share the Foxes’ aesthetic commitments. They do everything possible to decimate the place, as they’re hell-bent on making the house maintenance-free. Vinyl soffits, vinyl siding, vinyl doors: how quickly beauty festers and fades. “They want a fishing shack,” my mother says sadly. The cupola is chopped up for firewood; the stepping stones are pulled out of the ground, stacked like concrete dinner plates beside the back door. Each week another piece of Mrs. Fox’s prized furniture from W. & J. Sloane is hauled out for the garbage man, and Bobby rescues and refinishes what he recovers. “Look what I have,” he cries one night. “The swag light. I have the Japanese swag light!”

Soon enough our house is beginning to look more and more like the Foxes’.

For a while we attempt to stay in touch. My mother writes a few letters in which she tells Mrs. Fox that the place just isn’t the same without her. They’re never answered, but we don’t quite mind. Then my mother sends a Christmas card. Three weeks into January we receive a postcard of a travelers tree on which Mrs. Fox says that she’s never been happier, that she has a pet heron named Lulu who perches on her dock every afternoon.
This is the best thing we’ve ever done. We should have moved out of that dump years ago. Love to Jack and Bobby.
“Jack?” I say aloud. “Why would she call me Jack?”

***

In Mrs. Fox’s absence we become friendly with the Dashers, who live directly behind the empty lot in which I once built my Ocean Harbour. They’ve installed a flag pole with a flashing red light on top, in imitation of the Bali Hai, which puts me off, if only because I’ve internalized Mrs. Fox’s taste. (One thing if it’s a restaurant; quite another if we’re talking about a private home.) We don’t know what to make of the Dashers. We are intrigued as much as we are appalled by them, and we probably wouldn’t have paid them much attention had Dolores Dasher not made a concerted effort to win over my mother, by pausing at the fence one day with a flounder wrapped in foil. They have a son named Timmy, who’s almost Bobby’s age. The Dashers are big people. They’re not exactly fat, but they’re trunky, like sequoias. The Dashers have density. They’re prone to making such statements as “We’re big salad eaters,” which Bobby, Michael, and I find particularly amusing.

Dolores Dasher and Timmy come over to our house frequently for dinner. By this time our living room has been walked totally uptown. In a matter of months, the entire place looks even better than Mrs. Fox’s, thanks to Bobby and his restorations. Initially I’m a bit surprised that my parents encourage Bobby’s work, but it coincides with his doing well in school. Never a committed student, he’s now getting As, and my parents attribute his scholarly success to his interest in design. And he’s never seemed more self-assured. At one point, he even asks Ann Naughton for Mrs. Fox’s beloved Danish armchair—he’s been looking for it every Sunday night in the trash—and amazingly she just offers it to him. “Oh, we’d probably just get rid of it, anyway,” says Mrs. Naughton with a benign, clueless chuckle.

The Dashers seem both resentful and in awe of our house, which we’re quite proud of by now. When they have us over for dinner, I can tell they’re a little embarrassed. Timmy’s G.I. Joe hangs by the dining-room table, and when Dolores catches me staring at it, she leaps up from her chair and yanks it off the wall.

Then something strange happens when we come back the next summer. Over the winter months the Dashers’ house has been completely remodeled. Not only have they purchased expensive kitchen appliances, but they’ve enclosed the porch and installed shag carpeting, which they rake dutifully every morning after breakfast. Even stranger is what they’ve done to themselves. Mr. Dasher, who’s six foot seven, has taken to wearing bell-bottom dungarees, while Mrs. Dasher has developed an attraction to bikinis into which she sews side panels to accommodate her hips. Everyone these days is talking about Anchorage Point’s most arresting vista: the newly blond Dolores Dasher weeding her petunia bed in a jumbo bikini patterned with black-and-white psychedelic swirls. The Dashers appear to be happier, but there’s an odd strain between us, which I can’t quite pinpoint. We still go to the beach and boardwalk together, but these mostly pleasant excursions are interrupted by occasional flashes of anger from Dolores. This anger comes to a head when Bobby, in a breezy, sardonic tone, informs Timmy that our Cherry Hill house is a “city-block long.” Mrs. Dasher, who’s spent much more time in the city than my brother, having lived in the same northeast Philadelphia row house for twenty-seven years, finds this observation patently offensive, and tells my mother about it. In sight of Mrs. Dasher, my mother tells Bobby that this isn’t true, that this isn’t nice, though she doesn’t sound entirely convinced. “So it’s
half
a city-block long,” Bobby says, and rolls his eyes. And Mrs. Dasher jerks Timmy home by the arm.