But then Tommy and Elaine split up, and overnight things began to change. Little stuff, mostly. For instance, Joy had always worn her hair straight and long, which Griffin loved, but one day he came home and found her shorn and styled. “I can blow it dry,” she explained. “Ten minutes and I’m done.” He doubted it could possibly take that long. Then, other things. Instead of keeping one or two bras on hand for when they visited her parents, Joy’s top drawer was suddenly crammed full of them, and when he asked about this she replied that she couldn’t very well go through her whole life braless, could she? A rhetorical question, apparently. Not long after this she told him, “I woke up yesterday morning, and for some reason I was thinking about Truro.” Remembered, “for some reason,” that the life they were now living wasn’t what they’d planned. Okay, it had been fun, she admitted, but was all this moving around and jaunting off to Mexico natural? (Again, rhetorical.) The whole time she was growing up, she reminded him, not counting the place they rented in Maine, her family had lived in just two houses, the one in Syracuse and the other, after her father got transferred, in Orange County. “It’s time we stopped pretending to be your parents,” she concluded, “and started pretending to be mine.”
If this included a gated community in Sacramento, Griffin wasn’t so sure. Still, until Joy put it into words, it hadn’t occurred to him that this was what they’d been doing. He’d always assumed that the way they lived was, if anything, a repudiation of his parents. Certainly that was how they viewed it. Their son choosing to live on the West Coast? Who wrote television scripts instead of books? Who’d chosen a profession where you didn’t get summers off? Why, he didn’t even own a decent tweed jacket. But okay, point taken. Yet, even if their nomadic ways were an unconscious reflection of his parents’ behavior, did that mean that it was now time to start consciously reflecting Joy’s? Worse, he suspected that his wife’s just happening to remember the Great Truro Accord “for some reason” wasn’t entirely credible. Her whole family loved to interfere in their lives, and he sensed their shadowy presence behind the string of changes. Was it her sisters-one newly overweight, the other newly religious-who’d convinced her it was time to start wearing a bra again, to get a more “grown-up” hairstyle? For years now Jill, whom Joy talked to on the phone every other day or so, had been wondering out loud, “Do you kids think you’ll ever settle down?” Or, as her father, who gravitated to sports metaphors, put it, “What’s your endgame, is what I’d like to know.”
Griffin assumed that the true subject here was children. Joy’s sisters had started their families right after they married (or, in Jane’s case, according to his arithmetic, a couple months before), whereas he and Joy were pushing thirty without a breeding time line. But maybe it wasn’t just about kids. “You aren’t a real adult until you have a mortgage you can’t afford,” Harve liked to observe. “That’s when you find out if you can hit the long ball or if you’re just hoping to draw a walk.”
Harve could speculate and philosophize all he wanted, but in one respect, real estate, the terms of the Great Truro Accord actually worked in Griffin ’s favor. Joy hadn’t forgotten her dream house. Far from it. But that house simply didn’t exist, at least not in Southern California, and even if it had, given the breathtaking home prices in and around L.A., they wouldn’t be able to afford it. He would’ve sworn they were in complete agreement about this, but suddenly the whole house issue was on the table in a new and unexpected way. The outrageous cost of real estate here, Joy now argued, was actually a reason to buy something as soon as possible, even if it was a crappy tract house in the Valley (Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift!). Harve agreed, not that Griffin cared. Every year they didn’t enter the market put them that much farther behind the eight ball (Jesus, now a pool metaphor). It would be different, Joy conceded, if they’d been putting money aside toward a down payment, but here too they’d been imitating Griffin ’s parents by meaning to save rather than actually saving. Maybe money did talk, as people claimed, but all it said to them was goodbye. Her parents, she said, were not only ready to help but anxious to. (They’d discussed this? When?) “They want to,” Joy said, exasperated, when Griffin categorically refused. “They loaned money to both my sisters, and they want to do the same for us. They don’t understand our reluctance.”
His own parents understood perfectly. His mother was particularly adamant that borrowing money from Harve and Jill was a bad idea. “Good God,” she said. “Imagine owing money to people like them.”
“That’s a bit harsh, Mom, given that you’ve only met them once,” he chided her, but thinking as he did so how strange it was that he always ended up defending Joy’s parents to his own, an impulse he otherwise kept under control. He had, in fact, imagined vividly what indebtedness to her parents would mean. In practical terms, every Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and Fourth of July invitation would have to be accepted. Nor would paying back the loan nullify such obligations. Worse was the attendant symbolism, because accepting their money would be a tacit admission that they needed it, and Harve would brag about “helping them out” long into the future. Griffin was pretty sure he made better money than Joy’s father ever had, but accepting this loan would cede to him the high economic moral ground. Harve could lay claim to a kind of fiscal virtue, and Griffin himself would become, by implication, the wastrel who needed assistance. This was, of course, an ungenerous view of his in-laws’ motives, one he didn’t go into with his mother. “They mean well,” he told her, damning them with faint praise. Though even this, his mother thought, was overly generous. “Boorish know-nothings” was how she remembered them from that single meeting. “Proud of their ignorance.”
“Maybe you just know different things.”
“Did you or did you not tell me they belong to a country club, that they live in a gated community?”
Which was his mother in top form. Catch her in one unkindness and she’d quickly hopscotch to another. Attempting to corner her was like trying to put a cat in a bag; there was always an arm left over and, at the end of it, claws.
“Call your father,” she advised. “He and I may not agree on much, but I’m certain he’d never want to owe money to anyone who plays golf. Bartleby would agree, too, if he ever said anything.”
Actually, he happened to know that his father himself had taken up golf after Claudia left him. His doctor at the time, himself an avid player, had suggested it as a way to relax-strange advice, Griffin thought, since the sport had pretty much the opposite effect on him, though that probably had less to do with the game than that he usually played it with Harve.
In lieu of offering to loan them the money herself-had Griffin actually imagined she might?-his mother continued to explain why he’d be wise to reject the offer of someone who had. “Remember your Thoreau,” she counseled. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.”
“That’s all well and good, Mom, but Joy’s talking location, location, location.”
“Then save. When you have enough for a down payment on a crappy three-bedroom ranch out there, you’d have enough for a real house back East, maybe even a place on the Cape. I could visit you there. I’ve missed you.”