ii.
As I come down off the porch, heading to catch the train, I glance at the yard. I’ll have to blow the leaves soon. They’ve been gathering on our lawn, too many to rake. We use blowers to blow them out to the street where, once a month, the township sends out trucks for loose-leaf pickup. The trucks are equipped with a nozzle that sucks them up and mulches them. I’d liked trees before we bought our house. Now, I’m not so fond. “The shade’s good,” our realtor said. “Nature’s air conditioning.” And it works in summertime. The first floor is cooler. But now it’s autumn, and the trees shit on our lawn, just like that man this morning. Leaf-by-leaf, a layer of deciduous excrement piles up, and it’s one more thing, just one more thing. I walk to the edge of our driveway and stare at the spot where he’d done it, where I’d washed off the real shit today.
Was it worth it? Buying a house?
When we rented, the landlord took care of everything. The windows leaked, we called the landlord, he sent a guy to caulk them. The toilet backed up, he sent a plumber. Whenever it snowed, someone shoveled. Last winter, here in our house, it snowed six times, and each time, I’d had to shovel. I look at our driveway. What’s it, eighty feet? Eighty feet of shoveling. My back ached for days. But this is the dream, the goal we’d set ourselves. We’d saved, bought the house, got married, had a kid. You buy a house, you control what happens there. You pay and eventually own, and when you’re old, you have a place to die. Only it doesn’t happen that way anymore. People are living longer, and if you live long enough, you become feeble. You can’t take care of yourself, so your kids put you in a home and sell the house to pay for it, and you die in a little square room that smells of piss.
I saw it happen to my grandparents. They lived in a twin around the corner from where I grew up. They raised six children there. My grandfather trudged off to work every morning, home at dusk. My siblings and I would see him in summertime. He’d amble down the street, swinging his lunchbox. “What do you say?” he’d call to us. We’d shrug and say, “Nothing much, Grandpa.” They lived in that house forty years. Then Grandpa started to shake. He liked to work in the yard, and he fell. His face was bruised. Grandma started forgetting things. I was in my twenties, and I’d stop to see them. Grandma would ask, “How’s work?” and I’d tell her, “It pays the bills,” and five minutes later, she’d ask again. They had six kids, but those six kids were grown with families of their own. My dad and his siblings weren’t being cruel by putting their parents in a home. They simply weren’t equipped to deal with their conditions. My father organized the sale of the house, and my grandparents lived in the nursing home until they died. I’d visited them there. An eight-by-twelve room with a TV and twin beds. Grandma didn’t know who we were, and grandpa couldn’t move on his own. He had nightmares, hallucinations. He told my dad that he’d lived a good life and got to see his kids grow up. I wasn’t there, but I picture him doddering, eyes closed, far from home. He and grandma had tried to escape soon after they arrived, and they’d been fitted with ankle bracelets that sounded an alarm if they left the floor. I see grandpa, a strong man become weak, stubble-chinned, waxy/translucent skin, girding himself, telling his son it was all right when it wasn’t.
Our house is nice, at least. The trees are pretty this time of year, October, golden-hued leaves hovering above a slate-gray roof, red brick facade. Yet, as my gaze turns toward the roof, I remember I’ll have to call about having the gutters cleaned. Another item on a never-ending to-do list.
As I wander down Elmwood Lane and turn right onto Hawthorne, I try to avoid thinking about the lawn shitter or my wife being mad at me or even my grandparents dying in a home. I walk at a pace to outrun my thoughts, but as I turn the corner, something clinks on the sidewalk. I stop and adjust my bag and notice my keys on the ground. I stoop to grab them and check my pants. The hole in my pocket has opened again. Justine has patched it twice, and twice I’ve torn through the lining. I’ve had these pants for years, black slacks, work attire. I don’t own many pairs, and those I do, I rotate: wear each one once a week, launder, repeat. All my pants border on unpresentable. I’d worn a hole through the crotch in one that Justine had mended, but it’s still noticeable: a dark blue rift of thread bisecting the black cloth. It’s better when the holes are in places people can’t see, but I sit in a cube all day, corresponding via email, so it usually doesn’t matter.
On the off chance I have a meeting, I have one nice pair of pants, three ties, three button-down shirts. Shirts are important, so I invest more in them, but I always pull them off the clearance rack. This is something my mother taught me: keep an eye on store widows and circulars for sales, head for clearance. My siblings and I used to make fun of her: “You know how much this cost?” we’d say, pretending to hold up a shirt. “Two hundred dollars! You know how much I got it for? Fifty-seven cents!” But our impersonations weren’t far off.
My mother clipped coupons, went shopping on double coupon days. She bought a Sunday paper each week for the coupon books and saved hundreds of dollars, and while my siblings and I had never gone to school looking rich, we’d never reflected the lower-middle class we came from either. My mother stayed at home to raise us. She taught us to shop on a budget, and though we’d made fun of her, the lessons stuck. Money’s tight now that we have a kid, and as Sadie grows, I don’t want her getting picked on for how she looks. It seems foolish to spend much on things she’ll outgrow, but style matters to kids. I don’t want to see her sulking around the house because we can’t afford to help her blend in. I’d seen it happen to too many kids in school—kids with frayed hand-me-downs, sweatshirts with slogans like, “So Many Books, So Little Time,” accusations of off-brand shoes, getting your gear from K-mart. All these kids were targeted, torn apart, shamed. We’re not poor, but Justine and I both have to work to get by. She managed to save and take six months off when Sadie was born, but she had to return to the office, and I skimp on things like new pants to cover daycare.
I grip the keys and drop them in my bag. As I stand, I wave to our neighbor, Hailey, who jogs past. I see her every morning, rounding the corner. She wears earbuds, so we never speak, just nod and wave. She and her husband Bill live two doors down. They have kids a few years older than Sadie, and though we don’t know them well, we stop to chat whenever we see them. We make small talk, but nothing more. I watch her go past and wonder if her efforts to keep trim are more for herself or her husband, which is something I’d never utter aloud, but I’m thirty-five and I feel it. Fear of the paunch. On weekends, I run, too. On weeknights, I use an exercise bike in the attic. I do crunches, pushups, lift weights. Whether I do this for myself or Justine, I can’t say, though I want her to find me attractive.
A few weeks back, we attended a block party. Almost all of the men had guts hanging over their belts, almost all were ten to fifteen years older than me, fanned out across Hawthorne Avenue—eating, drinking, talking, chasing children, gazing vacantly off into space, as though presenting me with a cross-section of what I could expect from my not-so-distant future. The gut thing bothered me, the idea of being overweight, near obese. I was reticent to judge them based on this, waging an inner war against seeing this in a negative light, my id and ego going at it, cultural and primal drives waging a battle, understanding that weight is nothing to hold against a person while not wishing to gain it myself. I feared it as a sign of acquiescence to aging, to becoming docile, especially if you weren’t built that way, if it hadn’t been something they carried their whole lives, if it wasn’t a glandular thing but something that occurred from sitting on your couch or in your office, overeating, not moving enough.
We met these men and their wives, and I wondered whether they were happy. They put on smiles, seemed content. But I wondered how many wives had married fit men, men of ambition, only to find themselves waking up next to paunchy, balding husbands whose best years were behind them. How many men had married supportive women, engaged partners, only to find themselves waking up next to someone who no longer cared about their dreams. Not that I knew enough to pass judgment. Not that I should have been passing judgment if I did. Culture was right in this regard: even if I didn’t want to resemble them, even if I’d do all I could to avoid becoming like them, at least in this aspect, their lives weren’t mine to live. I could keep the judgments I passed to myself. I didn’t know what had led them here, what decisions they’d made, the demons they grappled with. My own measures of success have changed over the years, and weight wasn’t any benchmark. Thinking it was, was superficial. But then, I’d think: What makes a person successful? Money? Family? Achievements in career? Or some amorphous, immeasurable idea of spiritual contentment? I hadn’t sorted this out. But I feared the paunch. Something about it screamed, “I’ve given up. I don’t care anymore.” But maybe giving up was better. Maybe they were happier, beyond the subjective judgments of peers, society, the culture-at-large. And yet, did anyone ever escape? Was escape even possible?
Sometimes I worry that at thirty-five my best years are behind me. In my twenties, I’d wanted to be a novelist. I’d wanted to write a masterpiece, something people would read and study for years. Now I just want to write something true, something that expresses myself honestly, something that conveys a sense of what it means to be human, in all our greatness and shame, nobility and pettiness. Yet, as I strive toward this, it seems as difficult, if not more so, than crafting fiction. Each thought that strikes me as true is later contradicted by another that seems just as true. That, or the thought is incomplete, beyond expression in words, and I realize how changeable I am, how what I see as truths aren’t truths but opinions based on mood.
Still, I struggle to get them down and succeed for a moment before I’m frustrated and start over. Other people’s ideas seep in. I take on opposing points of view—my wife’s, my siblings’, my parents’, my coworkers’. And as I adopt them, it changes me. I’m never the same person day-to-day, but an ever-evolving amalgam of the experience of days. And I wonder if it’s easier in other pursuits. Is failure followed by striving followed by failure the norm, the only way one achieves anything of worth? Are self-doubt and reflection necessary for success?
At the block party, one of our neighbors greeted us. He was friendly, welcoming. “Hi, I’m Jason,” I said. He told me we’d met at the Davis’s barbeque. I couldn’t remember meeting him, much less his name. When he turned away, I asked Justine, and she laughed. She couldn’t remember either. Justine wandered off while I stood there, listening to him. He was a lawyer, and as a group of other neighbors gathered around, he launched into anecdotes, amusing things that had happened in court, backstage conversations in judges’ chambers he wasn’t supposed to share, the time he’d almost been held in contempt. Each story set him in a flattering light. He was skilled but fallible. His faults were minor. The stories had a rehearsed feel, but in situations like this, one falls back on rehearsed material. You don’t venture into uncharted terrain but read the crowd, play to them.
“So I’m boiling,” he said, “I’m citing code after code, and each time the defense objects. And the judge overrules it. And so, the defense cites a code, and the judge asks him to read it off, because it doesn’t sound right. But the defense can’t cause he hasn’t brought his book. So I threw mine at him. Here, I yelled. Next time bring your own! I thought they were gonna find me in contempt, but the judge cut me some slack. He understood. He told me so afterward…”
This is what I do, I thought, whenever I write. Even when I pretend otherwise, I never reveal myself in an unflattering light. I hold my worst thoughts back from the page, and standing there, I felt the hollow despondent sinking of a fraud. I’m always preforming, presenting a version I want the world to see, letting little foibles through to make me seem real while holding my true faults back. And yet, is there any way to avoid doing this once a witness enters, once there’s an audience? In science, it’s called the observer effect: the idea that merely observing a phenomenon changes that phenomenon. And why should we be above this? At some point, don’t you have to accept that self-awareness is a ubiquitous facet of life, that everyone manipulates their image to cast themselves in the best possible light? If you were sincere all the time and said what was on your mind unfiltered, you’d be just as obnoxious. And wouldn’t this be its own type of fraudulence? Is the only way to get at truth to describe experience without commentary? And even without commentary, would it be truth?
The lawyer carried a silver martini shaker, which is one way of keeping that despondent, fraudulent feeling at bay. And I realized I’d been drunk at the Davis’s barbeque, which was why I couldn’t remember him. I’d held forth on Huck Finn the same way he was speaking about his job, and the memory, triggered by my own behavior mirrored in someone else, embarrassed me. Yet, what was so embarrassing about telling a story to entertain your neighbors, even if you rounded off the rougher edges with drink? Someone had read Huck Finn at the Davis’s. They’d mentioned it. I started in on how it was one of my favorite books, how I’d read it a half-dozen times. We’d made a connection, me and the neighbor who’d read it. It was brief. I couldn’t remember the neighbor now, but we’d passed the time pleasantly.
Still, that was months ago. I was sober now while listening to the lawyer. His wife came over. I was sure she’d heard these stories. She smiled, touched his arm. That’s marriage too—acting like you haven’t heard the same stories ad nauseum, finding polite ways to steer the subject elsewhere. The lawyer and his wife looked to be in their late-forties, still together. What made it work? What makes marriage continue after the initial excitement has vanished, after you’ve had kids and don’t have time for each other, after your kids are grown and you find yourself living with someone you don’t know anymore?
I looked down the length of Hawthorne Avenue where our neighbors had convened. How conventional—a block party. Picnic tables and potato salad. A local band playing Bruce Springsteen covers on a porch. Justine and I had moved to the suburbs to raise kids. I’d grown up here, and there was stability, safety. My mother and father lived a quarter-mile away. And yet, it was boring.
I watched the neighbors and their kids, running around, playing. Sadie was having fun. She was walking up to people, saying hello. She ran between the bushes while Justine followed.
“She’s so cute,” neighbors said, and I smiled and thanked them, though they were stating the obvious. Our daughter has big brown eyes and rosy cheeks and gets this wherever she goes—grocery store, park. She looks like Snow White. I watched and thought how nice it was, how nice and homogenized, convenient and comfortable. I knew comfort was a trap that results in mediocrity. I knew this in my teens, just as I know it now, but I did nothing to avoid it. Rather, I fell headlong into it because it was familiar, because I like being comfortable. I’m okay with this, I thought. I chose it, and I’m all right with it. But how does one live with the recognition of his own mediocrity?