The Discomfort Zone (3 page)

It was true that the Bush tax cuts had put some extra money in my pocket, and that even those of us who hadn't voted for a privatized America were still obliged to be good citizens. But with government abandoning so many of its former responsibilities, there were now hundreds of new causes to contribute to. Bush hadn't just neglected emergency management and flood control; aside from Iraq, there wasn't much he
hadn't
neglected. Why should I pony up for this particular disaster? And why give political succor to people I believed were ruining the country? If the Republicans were so opposed to big government, let them ask their own donors to pony up! It was possible, moreover, that the antitax billionaires and antitax small-business owners who got antitax representatives elected to Congress were all giving generously to the relief effort, but it seemed equally likely that these people whose idea of injustice was getting to keep only $2 million of their $2.8 million annual income, rather than all of it, were secretly counting on the decency of ordinary Americans to help with Katrina: were playing us for suckers. When private donations replaced federal spending, you had no idea who was freeloading and who was pulling twice their weight.

All of which was to say: my impulse toward charity was now fully subordinate to my political rage. And it wasn't as if I was happy to feel so polarized. I
wanted
to be able to write a check, because I wanted to put Katrina's victims out of my mind and get back to enjoying my life, because, as a New Yorker, I felt I had a right to enjoy my life, because I was living in the number-one terrorist target in the Western Hemisphere, the preferred destination of every future lunatic with a portable nuclear device or smallpox dispenser, and because life in New York was liable to go from great to ghastly even faster than it had in New Orleans. I was arguably already pulling my weight as a citizen simply by living with the many new bull's-eyes that George Bush had painted on my back—and on the back of every other New
Yorker—by starting his unwinnable war in Iraq, wasting hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been spent fighting real terrorists, galvanizing a new generation of America-hating jihadists, and deepening our dependence on foreign oil. The shame and the danger of being a citizen of a country that the rest of the world identified with Bush: wasn't this enough of a burden?

I'd been back in the city for two weeks, thinking thoughts like these, when I got a mass e-mailing from a Protestant minister named Chip Jahn. I'd known Jahn and his wife in the 1970s, and more recently I'd gone to visit them at their parsonage in rural southern Indiana, where he'd shown me his two churches and his wife had let me ride her horse. The subject header of his e-mail was “Louisiana Mission,” which led me to fear another plea for donations. But Jahn was simply reporting on the tractor-trailers that members of his churches had filled with supplies and driven down to Louisiana:

Reading Jahn's e-mail, I wished, as I would ordinarily never wish, that I belonged to a church in southern Indiana, so that I could have ridden in one of those trucks. It would have been awkward, of course, to sit in a church every Sunday and sing hymns to a God I didn't believe in. And yet: wasn't this exactly what my parents had done on every Sunday of their adult lives? I wondered how I'd got from their world into the apartment of a person I didn't even recognize as myself. Throughout the autumn, whenever my eyes fell on the half-empty leather sheath, the absence of the scissors stabbed me afresh. I simply couldn't believe they'd disappeared. Months after my return, I was still reransacking drawers and closet shelves I'd searched three times already.

 

THE OTHER HOUSE
of my childhood was a sprawling, glass-fronted, six-bedroom rich person's retreat on a vast white-sand beach in the Florida Panhandle. In addition to its private Gulf frontage, the house came with free local golf and deep-sea fishing privileges and a refrigerated beer keg that guests were encouraged to make unlimited use of; there was a phone number to call if the keg ever ran dry. We were able to vacation in this house, living like rich people, for six consecutive Augusts, because the railroad my father worked for sometimes bought rail-maintenance equipment from the house's owner. Without informing the owner, my parents also took the liberty of asking along our good friends Kirby and Ellie, their son David, and, one year, their nephew Paul. That there was something not quite right about these arrangements was evident in my parents' annual reminders to Kirby and Ellie that it was
extremely important
that they not arrive at the house early, lest they run into the owner or the owner's agent.

In 1974, after we'd vacationed in the house for five straight years, my father decided that we had to stop accepting the owner's hospitality. He was giving more and more of his business to one of the owner's competitors, an Austrian manufacturer whose equipment my father considered supe
rior to anything being made in the United States. In the late sixties, he'd helped the Austrians break into the American market, and their gratitude to him had been immediate and total. In the fall of 1970, at the company's invitation, he and my mother had taken their first-ever trip to Europe, visiting Austria and the Alps for a week and Sweden and England for another week. I never found out whether the company paid for absolutely everything, including airfare, or whether it paid only for their meals and their nights in top-drawer hotels like the Imperial in Vienna and the Ritz in Paris, and for the Lincoln Continental and its driver, Johann, who chauffeured my parents around three countries and helped them with their shopping, none of which they could have afforded on their own. Their companions for the trip were the company's head of American operations and his wife, Ilse, who, beginning every day at noon, taught them how to eat and drink like Europeans. My mother was in heaven. She kept a diary of restaurants and hotels and scenic attractions—

and if she was aware of certain historical facts behind the scenery, such as Hitler's frequent visits to Berchtesgaden for recreational getaways, she didn't mention it.

My father had had serious qualms about accepting such lavish hospitality from the Austrians, but my mother had worn him down to the point where he agreed to ask his boss, Mr. German, whether he should decline the invitation. (Mr. German had answered, essentially, “Are you kidding me?”) In 1974, when my father voiced misgivings about returning to Florida, my mother again wore him down. She pointed out that Kirby and Ellie were expecting our invitation, and she kept repeating the phrase “Just this one last year,” until finally, reluctantly, my father signed off on the usual plan.

Kirby and Ellie were good bridge players, and it would have been a dull trip for my parents with only me along. I
was a silent, withdrawn presence in the back seat for the two-day drive through Cape Girardeau, Memphis, Hattiesburg, and Gulfport. As we were driving up the road toward the beach house, on an overcast afternoon made darker by an ominous bank of new high-rise condominiums encroaching from the east, I was struck by how unexcited I was to be arriving this year. I had just turned fifteen and was more interested in my books and my records than in anything on the beach.

We were within sight of the house's driveway when my mother cried, “Oh no!
No!
” My father cried “Damn!” and swerved off the road, pulling to a stop behind a low dune with sea oats on it. He and my mother—I'd never seen anything like it—crouched down in the front seat and peered over the dashboard.

“Damn!” my father said again, angrily.

And then my mother said it, too:
“Damn!”

It was the first time and the last time I ever heard her swear. Farther up the road, in the driveway, I could see Kirby standing beside the open door of his and Ellie's sedan. He was chatting affably with a man who, I understood without asking, was the owner of the house.

“Damn!” my father said.

“Damn!”
my mother said.

“Damn! Damn!”

They'd been caught.

 

EXACTLY TWENTY-FIVE YEARS
later, the realtor Mike and my brother Tom agreed on an asking price of $382,000 for the house. Over the Labor Day weekend, when we all gathered in St. Louis to hold a memorial service for my mother, Mike dropped in only briefly. She appeared to have forgotten the ardor of our initial meeting—she barely spoke to me now—and she was subdued and deferential with my brothers. She'd finally held an open house a few days earlier, and of the two prospective buyers who'd shown some interest, neither had made an offer.

In the days after the memorial service, as my brothers and I went from room to room and handled things, I came to feel that the house had been my mother's novel, the concrete story she told about herself. She'd started with the cheap, homely department-store boilerplate she'd bought in 1944. She'd added and replaced various passages as funds permitted, reupholstering sofas and armchairs, accumulating artwork ever less awful than the prints she'd picked up as a twenty-three-year-old, abandoning her original arbitrary color schemes as she discovered and refined the true interior colors that she carried within her like a destiny. She pondered the arrangement of paintings on a wall like a writer pondering commas. She sat in the rooms year after year and asked herself what might suit her even better. What she wanted was for you to come inside and feel embraced and delighted by what she'd made; she was showing you herself, by way of hospitality; she wanted you to want to stay.

Although the furniture in her final draft was sturdy and well made, of good cherry and maple, my brothers and I couldn't make ourselves want what we didn't want; I couldn't prefer her maple nightstand to the scavenged wine crate that I kept by my bed in New York. And yet to walk away and leave her house so fully furnished, so nearly the way she'd always wanted it to look, gave me the same panicked feeling of
waste
that I'd had two months earlier, when I'd left her still-whole body, with her hands and her eyes and her lips and her skin so perfectly intact and lately functional, for a mortician's helpers to take away and burn.

In October, we hired an estate liquidator to put a price tag on all the things we'd left behind. At the end of the month, people came and bought, and Tom got a check for fifteen thousand dollars, and the liquidator made whatever she hadn't sold just disappear, and I tried not to think about the sad little prices that my mother's worldly goods had fetched.

As for the house, we did our best to sell it while it was still furnished. With the school year under way, and with no eager young Catholic parents bombarding us with offers, we dropped the price to $369,000. A month later, as the estate
sale loomed and the oak leaves were coming down, we cut the price again, to $359,000. At Mike's suggestion, we also ran a newspaper ad that showed the house under a Yuletide mantle of snow, looking the way my mother had most liked to see it pictured, along with a new tag line (also a suggestion of Mike's):
HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS
. Nobody went for it. The house stood empty through all of November. None of the things my parents had thought would sell the house had sold it. It was early December before a young couple came along and mercifully offered us $310,000.

By then I was convinced that the realtor Pat could have sold the house in mid-August for my mother's suggested price. My mother would have been stricken to learn how much less we took for it—would have experienced the devaluation as a dashing of her hopes, a rejection of her creative work, an unwelcome indication of her averageness. But this wasn't the big way I'd let her down. She was dead now, after all. She was safely beyond being stricken. What lived on—in me—was the discomfort of how completely I'd outgrown the novel I'd once been so happy to live in, and how little I even cared about the final sale price.

 

OUR FRIEND KIRBY,
it turned out, had charmed the owner of the Florida house, and the beer keg was fully operational, and so our last week of living like rich people unfolded amicably. I spent morbid, delicious amounts of time by myself, driven by the sort of hormonal instinct that I imagine leads cats to eat grass. The half-finished high-rises to our east were poised to engulf our idyll, even if we'd wanted to come back another year, but the transformation of a quiet, sandpiper-friendly beach into a high-density population center was such a novelty for us that we didn't even have a category for the loss it represented. I studied the skeletal towers the way I studied bad weather.