We met with a Mr. Don Greenway, who closed the deals. If you'd been taken into his office blindfolded, you'd have thought it was in some elegant downtown complex. Plush carpeting, track lighting, a massive map along one wall showing the various phases of the housing development. You'd never have known you were in a complex of mobile homes bolted together as a temporary sales office.
"You're making an excellent life decision," said Greenway. I wondered whether it was his real name. It sounded like one of the streets in Phase Two. And then I remembered, it was the name of the street where we'd looked at an available lot.
I pointed to the map. The areas where construction was under way were shaded green. But several networks of streets, which surrounded a small creek that meandered through the area, remained in white.
"Are you not going to build there?" I asked.
"Eventually," said Greenway. "Those are subject to zoning approval by the town council. Some of the council members seem concerned by its proximity to an environmentally sensitive area, that some little salamander is at risk, but they don't understand that Valley Forest Estates will complement the natural attributes of this area, not detract from them. Now, will you be wanting a bidet? We find many customers, particularly those who've come from Europe, like to have at least one." I was unfamiliar with the sensation of having my ass hosed down from below, and said we would be fine with conventional American fixtures.
We put our house on Crandall up on the market, and sold it in two days. There was a brief bidding war. There were, evidently, people who wanted into our neighborhood as much as we wanted out. We got $20,000 more than our asking price, moved to the new house once the builders had completed it, with no mortgage, and a bit of money left over in the bank. In the basement, we created a walk-in-closet-sized darkroom for Angie, and then finished off the rest of it so the kids would have someplace to hang out with their friends.
"If we make any," said Angie, struggling to show her gratitude about the darkroom. "I bet everyone who lives out here is a loser."
I should have felt liberated once we settled in, free of my downtown paranoia. But I still took precautions, still locked the car when I parked at the nearby plaza on a milk run, still insisted on driving Angie to her friends' houses once it was dark. Sarah, on the other hand, thought she could let her guard down now that we lived in the suburbs. A key left in the front door was no big deal. Hey, there's no crime out here. No one's stuffing little girls into refrigerators. "What's the point in living in this godforsaken sterile Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip world if we have to be looking over our shoulders as much as when we lived on Crandall?" she asked.
I guess with me, old habits die hard.
So here we are. It's been nearly two years now, and the reviews are mixed. There's no decent Chinese takeout nearby, no SF bookshops, no Mrs. Hayden, no walking to work, no walking to school. A pound of butter means a five-minute drive to the closest convenience store. We live in a house that is indistinguishable from any other on the street, prompting Paul to rename the subdivision Clone Valley. It was this struggle to distinguish our home from the others that spawned his sudden interest in gardening. The massive garage jutting toward the sidewalk like a whale's mouth trying to swallow passersby is the predominant architectural feature of our home. There isn't a tree within a fifteen-block radius that could cast a shadow. And the closest video store has one hundred copies of the car crash movie The Fast and the Furious, but if you asked the kid behind the counter for that Irish flick where the townsfolk conspire to trick the lottery officials that the local winner is still alive, he'd say, "Is that the one by Tarantino?"
I wouldn't deny that there were tradeoffs, that we had given up eclectic for sterile for the sake of a ground-floor laundry room. But I had something now that I couldn't count on when we lived on Crandall.
I had peace of mind. We had minimized our risks.
Chapter 4
I didn't sleep well that night, after the incident with the car keys and hiding Sarah's car down around the corner. This might have had something to do with the fact that I slept on the couch in the family room, which is leather, which meant the covers kept slipping off, and every hour or so I would wake up, freezing from neck to toenail.