The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford Read Free Book Online Page B

Lavallette, New Jersey, ought to seem like Nirvana to a smiling little brown man born in a wattle hut in the Himalayas is both true and not true. Deep in his hectic night’s sleep, with his estranged wife in her estranged home in the Amboys, his teenagers up late noodling on their laptops with SAT reviews, his Infiniti safely “clubbed” in the driveway, Mike (I would bet) wonders if this is really
it
for him. Or, might there not be just a smidgen more to be clutched at? Real estate, the profession of possibility, can keep such dreams fervid and winy for decades.
    Haddam, therefore, makes him as nervous as a debutante. It makes plenty of people feel that way. All that serenely settled, arborial, inward-gazing good life, never confiding about what it knows (property values), so near and yet so far off. All that pretty possibility set apart from the regular social frown and growl. Haddam’s rare rich scent is sweetly breathable to him—as we drive past out here on 206—there behind its revetment of Revolutionary oaks and survivor elms, from its lanes and cul-de-sacs, its wood ricks, its leaf rakage, its musing, insider mutter-mutter conversations passed across hedges between like-minded neighbors who barely know one another and wouldn’t otherwise speak. Haddam rises in Mike’s mind, a citadel he could inhabit and defend.
    It’s just not likely to happen. Which is fine as long as he doesn’t venture too close—which he’s almost done—so that his immigrant life flashes up in grainy black and white and not quite good enough. This, of course, happens to all of us; it’s just easier to accept when the whole country’s already your own.
    “You know, when Ann and I moved to Haddam thirty years ago, none of this was out here,” I say to be encouraging as we pass a woodlot soon to be engulfed beside Montmorency Mall. COMMERCIAL SPACE FOR SALE is advertised. “Not even a deer-crossing sign.” I smile at him, but he frowns out ahead, his seat pressed close-up to the wheel, his mind in another place, across a gulf from me. “If you lived here then, you wouldn’t be home now.”
    “Ummm,” Mike grunts. “I can see that, yes.” My attempt doesn’t work, and we are for a time sunk in reverential silence.
             
    A mile into Montmorency County, 206 drops into a pleasant jungly sweet-gum and red-clay creek bottom no one’s quite figured how to bulldoze yet, and the old road briefly takes on a memorial, country-highway feel. Though we quickly rise again into the village of Belle Fleur, old-style Jersey, with a tall white Presbyterian steeple beside a sovereign little fenced cemetery, and just beyond that, a seventies-vintage strip development, with two pizza shops, a laundrette, a closed Squire Tux and an H&R Block—and across on the facing side of the road two deserted, dusty-screened redbrick Depression houses (homes to humans once) from when 206 was a scenic rural pike as innocent and pristine as any back road in Kentucky. Another double-size wooden sign with big red lettering spells an end to the houses: OWNER WILL SELL, REMOVE OR TRADE. It’s a perfect site for a Jiffy Lube.
    Mike takes a left past the church and commences west. And right away the atmosphere changes, and for the better. Somewhere out ahead of us lies the Delaware, and all can feel the relief. Though Mike’s now consulting his watch and a scribbled-on pink Post-it while the road (Mullica Road) leaves the strip development for the peaceable town ’n country housing pattern New Jersey is famous for: deep two-acre lots with curbless frontage, on which are sited large but not ominous builder-design Capes, prairie contemporaries and Dutch-door ranches, with now and then an original eighteenth-century stone farmhouse spruced up with copper gutters and an attached greenhouse to look new. Yews, bantam cedars and mountain laurels that were scrubby in the seventies are still young-appearing. The earth is flat out here, poorly drained and