"It's not a bad idea for a story, but no, I'm being serious."
"You're overreacting."
"Am I?"
"It's called security, and I have no problem with it. We have security gates here, security cameras. It's why our crime rate is almost nonexistent. It's why people like to live here."
"You sound like an advertisement."
"Barry?" She shook her head, thought of saying something else, didn't.
"Let's just play tennis."
But he wasn't ready to let it go.
"What about that old lady peeking at us from behind her drapes? What about the people walking by?" "I think it's nice," she said. "They're watching out for us."
"They're spying on us."
"Isn't this what people are trying to recapture, this sense of community, this idea that everyone looks out for everyone else? Isn't that what they mean by the 'good old days'?"
"But that was natural, it evolved on its own. It wasn't imposed on people."
"We had a "Neighborhood Watch' in California, for Christ's sake! It's the same exact thing!"
"No, it's not the same thing." He walked over to where she had put the You can and dropped his ball inside. He picked up the can. "Let's go home," he said. "I don't want to play anymore."
"I do."
"Fine. Then play by yourself. But I'm going back. I'm not going to stay here to be monitored and spied on."
"You're an asshole," she said.
They left together, walking in silence back up to the house. Maureen checked the mailbox on the way in, but it was empty. There was a piece of pink paper attached to the screen door, however, that was fluttering in the slight breeze and drew their attention. It was tucked into the top of the grating that covered the door's lower half, and they walked up the porch steps. Barry pulled out the paper and held it so they could both read.
It was a form, obviously a duplicate of an original, and the heading at the top read Exterior Maintenance Review.
Beneath the heading was a short paragraph explaining that the Bonita Vista Homeowners' Association Architectural Committee had conducted a review of the property and had determined that the subsequent maintenance was required. There followed a list of actions, two of which had check marks next to them: "Paint chimney chimney cap" and "Clean pine needles and cones."
They'd been gone only half an hour or so--forty-five minutes at the most--and it was hard to believe that in that time someone had inspected their house and lot for all of the possible violations listed on the form. It was also a little disconcerting. While she knew it was legal, she didn't like the fact that people had been on their property while they were gone, snooping around. There seemed something sneaky about it, something wrong. Why couldn't the inspection have been conducted while they were at home?
But she didn't want Barry to know she felt that way. He was no doubt furious and incensed at such a violation of their privacy, and as petty as it was, she was glad. It served him right.
He stared at the form. "Pinecones?"
It was rather small and silly, she had to admit, and she had half a mind to call up Chuck or Terry and ask why they were being harassed for such minor details, but she was mad at Barry and wanted him to be irritated and annoyed.
"I guess you're going to have to do some yard work," she said.
The day was beautiful, the blue sky filled with gigantic white clouds that drifted lazily from east to west, and Barry decided to write outside on the deck rather than coop himself up in the house in front of the computer. If he came up with anything good, or anything usable, he could type it up later.
He picked up his notebook, defiantly cranked up the stereo volume despite the fact that the music playing was an un defiant James Taylor, and pushed open the sliding glass door.
"Turn that down!" Maureen yelled from the bottom floor.
"I won't be able to hear it outside!" he shouted back.
"Buy a Walkman!"
Barry ignored her, went outside onto the deck, and settled into a chair; but he was not surprised when a moment later the music was abruptly cut off. There was a tap on the glass, and he glanced over to see Maureen grinning at him.
"Thanks a lot," he said.
"My pleasure."
She returned downstairs to where she'd been working on the computer, and he turned his attention to the page before him.
The blank page.
He stared at the lined paper. Ever since they'd moved here, he'd had a scene from the movie Funny Farm stuck in his brain. In the film, Chevy Chase moves out to the country because he wants to write a novel, and in the initial tour of the new house with his wife, he finds a perfect room for his studio where there's a bird cheerfully chirping on a branch outside the window. Later, he's sitting at his writing desk in front of his typewriter and a blank roll of paper, completely blocked, and this time when the bird chirps happily outside, Chase throws a cup of hot coffee at it.
That had been Barry's greatest nightmare, that he would be unable to write in these gorgeous surroundings, and even today, as he sat on the porch, pen in hand, there was the small nagging fear at the back of his mind that he wouldn't be able to come up with anything, that the creative juices wouldn't flow.
But he needn't have worried. As always, he had no problem tapping his imagination, and soon his pen was flying, describing the feelings of a young boy forced by his psychotic sister to eat cereal made from the bone dust of their cremated mother.
A woman walked by on the road in front of the house, and he caught her eye and waved. She gave him a thin smile, waved back, then hurried on, obviously eager to be away from him.
So much for small-town friendliness.
He looked at her retreating back. Now that he thought about it, the sociability quotient of their neighborhood seemed to have gone down over the past week or two, the dinner invitations they'd received upon first arrival no longer extended. He wasn't complaining--they had friends here now: Ray and Liz, Frank and his wife, Audrey, Mike and Tina Stewart--but still it was odd, and he wondered why it had happened, whether they'd broken some unwritten code and made some hideous social faux pas, or whether their newness and novelty had worn off and everyone who wanted to meet them had done so.
The woman rounded a bend in the road, disappearing behind the pines, and Barry looked down at his notebook, flexed his fingers one more time, and resumed writing.
The weather changed quickly, as it often did here in Utah. He'd been sweating in the June heat, then suddenly thick white clouds blocked the sun, and there was a measurable drop in temperature--a full eight degrees according to the Sierra Club outdoor thermometer Maureen had installed on the wall next to the door. The sweat cooled on his skin.
If what Ray said was true, July would bring the monsoons, and then they'd really see some schizo id weather. Barry was looking forward to it. As a native southern Californian, his exposure to different seasons had been through movies, books, and television, entirely secondhand, and it was nice to finally experience for himself the vagaries of Mother Nature.
He broke off for lunch some six pages later, his right hand starting to cramp. He felt good about what he'd written this morning. If it went this well every day, he'd be able to write for six months out of the year and take the other six off. Or crank out two books a year instead of one. Probably the latter. Writing was a notoriously fickle and unstable business, and no matter how well he was doing, there was always the possibility that he could be stone cold in a year and find his fiction unsalable . It was the nature of the beast, and even if he hadn't had a borderline-obsessive work ethic, he would still feel the need to strike while the iron was hot.
But inspiration wasn't that consistent, and although there were days when he finished twenty clean pages, there were others when he eked out only a single paragraph that more often than not had to be rewritten the following day.