“This is the problem with America.” She tapped the tabletop, grateful for a digression to take them away from the past, away from even an hour into the future. “Here”—she indicated the Price Chopper with a perfectly polished nail—“you get ninety-five brands of toilet paper. But I don’t need ninety-five brands of toilet paper. Nobody needs ninety-five brands of toilet paper. But we expect it. We’re Americans: we’re entitled to it! But we don’t need it. But we think we do need it, so we build these, these behemoths — no offense—”
“Behemoth is better than a lot of other things you could have said.”
“Like monstrosity.”
“For example.”
“These behemoths that are so big they have to be built where nobody lives. You have to drive ten, fifteen, twenty minutes to get to them. Then your family of four buys enough for four families because you drive a tank and live in a house the size of a tennis court. You have all this room, so why not fill it?” She could have cried for joy at the absurdity of the debate: not a word in twenty years, and within an hour, as intuitively as retired lab rats remembering their way through the old maze, they began the course of playful bickering. No matter the obstacles in their way.
“Claudia?”
“Hm?”
“Yoo-hoo. Where did you go?”
“Oh. Just that the carbon footprint of these kinds of construction is astonishing.”
Nick, who’d stopped by the office merely to grab a set of plans on his way to the site of his newest monstrosity, admitted that the hundred-acre development he’d envisioned as a slam dunk — two hundred half-acre lots, two- to four-bedroom colonials each, yes, with a two-car garage — had become a burden, a blight.
“A behemoth,” he said, “right up the ass.”
It haunted his days, kept him up at night. The announcement hardly qualified as an invitation, but somehow not ten minutes later, Claudia found herself bouncing along beside him as the big red Escalade turned off the paved road and, like a needle lowered onto a record, followed a well-worn groove through the weeds.
The tall, dry grass that grew along the ruts brushed against the car with a drawn-out shussssssh as Nick talked excitedly about what he had in store. He asked if she’d heard of Compton’s Mound. “Rust-eaten iron gates. Rubbled headstones. It’s straight out of Scooby-Doo. All that’s missing is a groundskeeper dressed like the Swamp Thing.”
“I have heard of it. Benji’s girlfriend is one of your rust-eaten iron-gate crashers.”
“You mean those ‘Save Compton’s Mound’ crazies?”
Tell him, Claudia ordered herself. Tell him, but shook off the idea like a shawl in the summer heat. “She thinks you’re Hitler.”
“Was she one of the ones who chained herself to the gravestones to keep the backhoes from leveling them?”
“I don’t know if she’s that devoted. She seems devoted. She has a T-shirt and everything.”
“From the shit I’ve been getting, you’d think I was trying to tear up Arlington. This, by the way, was a family plot. For the most part.”
“The qualifications.”
“I don’t need to make qualifications. It’s private land. There are thirty graves here, total. A few of them soldiers who died in the Revolutionary War.”
“And you want to dig them up? Maybe you are Hitler.”
“Just because you fight in a war doesn’t make you a hero. Even if it did — heroes get forgotten. History gets forgotten. The last burial here happened in 1860, and nobody’s delivered a daisy since. Going in should have been.” He bulldozed one palm across the other to illustrate the simple, satisfyingly boyish transaction he’d been denied.
“Haven’t you seen Poltergeist?” Claudia couldn’t refrain from asking. “Bad things happen when you build on a cemetery.”
They passed fallen trees and little ponds gone acid green with algae.
“We don’t want to build over the bodies. What kind of monstrosity-maker do you take me for? We’re going to move them. To Glenlawn. My parents are buried in Glenlawn.”
“That’s where my parents are going,” Claudia said, as if naming the destination of their next vacation.
“It has fountains. And weeping willows. It’s lovely.”
“So displacing the dead from their eternal resting ground really makes you a humanist.”
“But then come the historical societies,” said Nick, ignoring the jab. “Saratoga. Bemis Heights. Even Alluvia has one. They’re all over this part of the state, protecting every last log George Washington ever peed on. ‘There are soldiers buried there!’” His imitations were, as she remembered them, passionate but limited: everyone sounded like Jerry Lewis with a cold. “‘This is hollow ground.’ One of them actually said that to me. ‘Hollow ground.’ Maybe it was Benji’s girlfriend. Is she dumb?”
“I don’t think so.”
“These people,” he mused venomously. “The women would be happy churning their own butter while the men spend their weekends reenacting the Battle of Freeman’s Farm. It’s all spinsters and Second Amendment wackadoos.”
“A humanist and a patriot,” Claudia said, her hand finding its way to the console between them, her fingers, as if drawn by a magnet, tantalizingly close to his leg.
And Max, on the porch.
“Why do you care? If it’s your property? It is your property, right?”
“It’s mine. But contrary to popular belief, not all publicity is good publicity. The average resident of your high-end housing community wants to live outside the shadow of death and desecration.” He changed tack and said, wounded, “You know what those T-shirts say? ‘Amato & Sons Need to Develop… a Conscience.’” He shifted the Escalade into park and turned to face her. “I have a conscience.”
“I know you do, but…”
“But. What? I don’t have a conscience?”
“Not that. I was going to say the kind of developments you’re talking about? If you think about it? They’re the opposite of communities, Nick. People living like that wave to the neighbors across their half acre of lawn, and that’s it. There’s no interaction. Maybe a Halloween block party, but no public life to speak of. People are more likely to get in the car and drive to buy sugar than borrow a cup from the neighbor next door.”
“Who still borrows sugar? You sound like you might like to churn some butter yourself.”
“Are you calling me a spinster?”
He stared down at the rings on her left hand.
They turned to look out the window at the view afforded by the noonday sun: the clustered cemetery with headstones like broken teeth, the distant trees, a stretch of purplish mountain painted across the horizon.
“It’s beautiful,” said Claudia, “in a tumbledown sort of way.”
He gave a quick, devilish smile and asked, “So what would you do, Madam Architect? You’ve got a hundred acres. No cemetery. No redcoats.”