Vacationland Read online

  Soon after I left for college, my mother and father bought a house here, just south of Vermont, in a very small town. It is not a fancy house. My mom wanted something on one of the little rivers that trickle through the hill towns, but they are hard to come by, as construction near the river is banned now and the housing stock that remains sometimes gets washed away. So she settled on this house, a 1979 ranch home designed by an engineer instead of an architect, which means the one bathroom faces directly into the living room. It sits on the shady side of a hill in a sparsely populated rural community that advertises itself as a “right-to-farm” town on its sign, which means if you smell manure you are not allowed to complain. The house was inexpensive. It didn’t sit on a river but a sluggish brook, which quickly turned into a mosquito bog once the beavers got at it.

  It was their weekend home. They would drive two hours from Brookline on a Friday afternoon. My father would watch movies and make spaghetti and my mom would smoke cigarettes and read mystery novels and eat Stouffer’s creamed chipped beef. If they went outside they’d maybe look at some old junk for sale in barns, or go to that one falling-down hotel on the Mohawk Trail that served day drinks to the snowmobilers and had those sausages that we liked. And then they’d head home. My mom knew how to live.

  Over the years my girlfriend and I would visit them and enjoy the same things, including the cigarettes, very, very much. And then my girlfriend and I got married. A month later my mom was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and eight months later she died. My father attempted to go to the house a few times but found it emotionally unbearable, and so he offered it to us for a dollar. At the time I was a freelance writer for magazines, and I think he presumed—reasonably—that this would be my one chance to ever have an asset in my life. He asked if we could keep up with the taxes and expenses, and the answer to that was no. But I did have a dollar, and I missed my mom, so I took it.

  My wife and I have now owned the house for twice as long as my mom did, and because my wife teaches high school and I am barely self-employed, we can enjoy it for long stretches of the summer and winter in the exact ways my mom and father did (movies, creamed chipped beef), but now minus the smoking. We compensate for that part with gin and Scrabble. When we had children we were forced to acknowledge that the house had an outside, and we started squinting into the sun and getting to know our neighbors, who are scattered and few. Our daughter and the daughter of the family across the street became best friends when they were three. And even now as teens Hodgmina’s and her friend’s brains lock together the moment they see each other, speaking a kind of twin language from morning to night while my son beats the shit out of the Penguin’s goons on Arkham Asylum for the PlayStation 3 for the same period of time. It is an incredible privilege to give them access to such a different way and pace of life (we don’t have Arkham Asylum in Brooklyn).

  We even thought about moving there when it became clear that a family of four could not live in New York City on a teacher’s income and the money earned from 750-word magazine articles on cheese and barn jackets. But then I went on television, and my father’s worst fears for me receded. Thanks to television we were able to spiff up the house and finish a basement bedroom. We didn’t think to move the bathroom, but we did add a deck off the kitchen offering a pretty good view of the hills and the bog when the sun is up. When darkness falls it is total, and at night before bed I check the basement and garage for serial killers. After more than a decade of this I have begun thinking they aren’t going to show up. It is peaceful.

  We have not been back for a while for reasons that I will explain later in this book. And this makes me anxious for all kinds of existential reasons, but also because the last time we were there I left four large contractor bags full of rotting food waste piled in the garage. This has become something of a habit of mine. It’s not a responsible thing to do if you own a house or simply want to be part of civilization. It is absolutely an invitation to a raccoon heist.

  But leaving the garbage to steep and decay for months on end is my system, and I have a very good reason for it, which is this: there is no garbage collection in rural western Massachusetts; so you have to drive your garbage to the dump; and I do not feel like doing that.

  I never feel like going to the dump because it is a twenty-five-minute drive away, it is very rarely open, and when it is open, it scares me. It’s not intrinsically scary. It’s really just a small transfer station: a compound of recycling sheds and Dumpsters and barrels circling one big pit with a compactor in it. I like systems, and I enjoyed perfecting the protocol of each hole and sticky chamber, figuring out which is for redeemables and which is for cardboard and which is for corrugated cardboard. I will happily lose myself in the madness of small distinctions, and the fact is that sorting out your life garbage and getting rid of it is always cathartic, even if the task is merely literal and it makes your car and hands smell like old milk and beer.

  Yes, the yellowing Stonehenge of refrigerators loitering by the Large Items shed was creepy: removing their doors only makes them seem hungry for children to crawl into them and die. But obviously they could do no harm now. And then there was the sad city of broken and abandoned toys lined up on the low concrete wall by the compactor. Parents don’t want to throw their children’s youth away, so they lay the evidence here like offerings and mark them “FREE” and walk away. I am sure by the end of the day they are all thrown into the hole by the men who work at the dump. But this isn’t really scary: just monumentally sad. It gives you something to think forlornly about as you drive home.

  No. My terror of the dump was deeper and began the day my father handed me the keys to the house and said, “There is no garbage collection in rural western Massachusetts. You have to take the garbage to the dump.”

  And then he said the chilling words I will never forget: “If the men who work at the dump ask where you live, tell them that you are staying with Jackie Brown.”

  This is not a Quentin Tarantino reference. My father is not a big fan of the movie Jackie Brown. Rather he was referring to the actual person, Jackie Brown, who had been my mother’s colleague in the nursing department of Beth Israel Hospital and later one of her closest friends. Jackie grew up in Greenfield at the bottom of our hill and still had a house—a small box perched over the North River she had bought with a friend—over in the neighboring town of Colrain.

  My father isn’t a liar. We had stayed with Jackie Brown many times when I was younger, the three of us going out to see Jackie and sit around and do nothing by the river. My mom and father would take the second bedroom, and I would sleep on the sofa by the cast-iron stove. She was our introduction to the area, and her house was the inspiration for my mom’s half-failed quest to find her own sit-around-and-do-nothing house next to a river that ended with this house by a bog, where I stood now with my father, confused.

  My father explained that the dump is not in our town, but the neighboring town of Colrain, and so technically we were not allowed to dump our garbage there. But it’s still the nearest dump. So, should the guys at the dump ever ask, I was to tell them this lie: “I am staying with Jackie Brown in Colrain.”

  I did not like any of this plan. As I have mentioned, I am an only child. This makes me a member the worldwide super-smart-afraid-of-conflict-narcissist club. And let me emphasize: afraid of conflict. Since I had no siblings to routinely challenge/hit me and equally no interest in playing sports, I had grown up without any experience in conflict. I therefore had no reason to imagine that confrontation of any kind, ranging from fighting to kissing, was not probably fatal.

  So I didn’t want to break the rules. I loved rules. In any situation I wanted to know what all the rules were so that I could follow them, perfectly, thus assuring not merely approval but also love . . . from every single person on Earth. So no, I did not like being put in a position where I would have to lie to some Dumpmen. The chance of failure seemed high, th
e chance of unanimous global affection ready to plummet.

  I am still not sure why I didn’t simply ask where we were supposed to dump our trash (the answer is: Greenfield). Perhaps on some level, for once in my life, I wanted to challenge myself. So after a long period of hoarding garbage anxiously in the garage, I would finally take a deep breath, shove it all into the rental car, and drive to the dump. As I drove I would rehearse my story. “I am staying with Jackie Brown in Colrain, I am staying with Jackie Brown in Colrain, I am staying with Jackie Brown in Colrain.” I would say this out loud in the car, changing inflection and emphasis, like an actor or a schizophrenic. I’d try to sound confident. Sometimes I would yell it.

  I did this for seven years: the muttering drive to the dump, the anxious preshow sorting and dumping of recycling before the moment of truth—circling up to throw the contractor bags into the big hole, all (illegally!) bearing “Town of Colrain” garbage tags, and then (illegally!) buying new tags from the Dumpmen in their little tollbooth next to the contractor, and waiting for the question, “Where do you live?” Seven years passed. My wife and I had our first child. And the Dumpmen never asked.

  But then something happened: Jackie Brown died. Like my mom, Jackie was diagnosed with cancer. Like my mom, she succumbed quickly. I didn’t get to say good-bye to her. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough. Maybe I couldn’t go through saying good-bye again, so soon. But I would be lying if I told you that in all my shock and mourning, I didn’t also think to myself: Shit. There goes my alibi. Now what was I going to tell the Dumpmen? This is a small town, surely the Dumpmen would know soon that no one would be staying with Jackie Brown in Colrain ever again.

  I had to come up with a new story. And I had to come up with it all on my own. I was a grown-up now and a homeowner. I couldn’t rely on my father anymore. I was nervous, but I am a storyteller by training, so I set to work, and I did it. I came up with a new story to rehearse over and over again on the way to the dump, and this is it.

  I would arrive at the dump, and the Dumpmen would say: “Where do you live?”

  And I would say, “Good question, guys. And here is the answer. You know how my family and I used to stay with Jackie Brown in Colrain? Oh, maybe you don’t, because you never asked. That seems very rude to me, because I was always ready to tell you. But let’s put that behind us. Because this is a small town in rural western Massachusetts, I am sure you have heard that Jackie Brown has died. Yes, it is very sad. Now my family and I are helping to clean out her house and get it ready to sell. And this”—here I would gesture to the contractor bags—“is her death garbage.”

  At which point they would be so reverent and ashamed that they would step aside and never doubt me again.

  This story sustained me for quite a while, and my drives to the dump were peaceful. Years passed this way. My wife and I had a second child. But by the birth of our son, my death garbage story began to expire. Jackie’s house was only three rooms small: how many old magazines and mattresses and bedding and memories could we still be pulling out of it? What’s more, as I became more familiar with the culture of the area, I gradually and darkly realized my story was never plausible. Because, I had observed, should a person die in rural western Massachusetts, you do not clean out her house and sell it. You take what you want, padlock it shut, and leave it for nature to reclaim.

  By the end, I was flying blind. But even so, the Dumpmen never asked. Not for seven years, when the dump was overseen by the sunken-cheeked guy with the long cigarettes who looked like Dr. Johnny Fever; and not for the next seven years when he was replaced by the guy who looked like Larry the Cable Guy, but even so, I liked him. They were always nice, and I am sorry I never learned their names. It was only recently, after fourteen years, that I realized they would never ask. It finally struck me: they do not care. They work at the dump. They probably are not paid well enough just to work at the dump, never mind worry about the provenance of the bags of food waste and mouse bodies you have come to throw in their hole.

  Coming from Park Slope, Brooklyn, where I now live, it never occurred to me that humans, when armed with authority, no matter how small, would not use that power to sanctimoniously cudgel their neighbors at every opportunity. I have never joined the Park Slope Food Coop, for example. I have heard too often of the shamings that are doled out if you request that they stock the morally incorrect brand of hummus.

  Even when no clear authority applies, the residents of Park Slope stand ready to scold. I once barely dodged a speeding car as it blew through a light on a residential street. I yelled at the driver to slow down (this yelling doesn’t count as confrontation; he was long gone), only to be immediately yelled at myself by a woman on a bicycle for standing in the bike lane while I was yelling. We both agreed that a speeding car was our common enemy, especially right near the elementary school that my own children attended and probably hers too. But we would clamber atop the bodies of a hundred run-down children if it would help us reach the moral high ground first.

  So it took me almost a decade and a half to understand that in rural western Massachusetts, at the dump, they aren’t interested in humiliating you to make themselves feel better. They just want you to toss your trash and enjoy the sunny day and have a lollipop before you go. (They always have lollipops, by the way, a little basket of them on the windowsill of their office. They are the brand of lollipops called Dum-Dums, as if to say, “Congratulations, dum-dum: you threw your trash away.”)

  You would think that all this would come as a relief to me, but I actually felt worse. What happened to the rules? Had they changed, and now my trash was legal? Or was there never a rule against dumping across town lines? Or was there still a rule, but it was an unspoken rule: the worst kind of rule.

  Whatever the case, it became clear that my father’s fear was always fictional. I am certain now that the Dumpmen never, ever asked him where he lived either. But then, maybe twenty years ago, he woke up in the sweaty grip of a dark imagining: What if they do? I don’t want to go to Dump Jail. I have to come up with something to tell them! I have to craft a story, a story so good that I can pass it on to my son, like a monogrammed wristwatch of neurosis that I can shove up his rectum!

  (That is a Quentin Tarantino reference. Not Jackie Brown, but Pulp Fiction.)

  I love my father. It’s not his fault that he made up a fear and, in order to make it feel more real to him, gave it to me. I was obviously built to receive it.

  As a father now myself, it’s sobering to think about how the smallest comments will ripple through your children’s lives, with some leaving permanent warps. I wish I could tell you that is why I tell my own children not to lie to the Dumpmen. To know there is no Dump Jail. I wish I could tell you my children now throw the garbage in the hole unafraid, that they look the Dumpmen in the eye and address them by name while I watch from the car proudly (though always ready to gun the engine and abandon them should things go south). But the truth is they just sit in the car, reading Archies and surfing the internet, waiting for me to dump the bags and come back with Dum-Dums. I must console myself in the certainty that I am helping them and damaging them in other ways I cannot see.

  Mongering

  I don’t like riding on city buses. Those things can go anywhere. There are no tracks, and their routes and stops are a collective fiction. What if something goes wrong? I am confident that even if the driver decided to try psychedelic mushrooms for the first time that morning, I would probably not die: no Hyundai or streetlight can fight a city bus, the blunt, slow, armored whales of the streets. But I could end up at some destination I did not choose, which to me feels almost worse.

  But I am not only a creature of pure fear. In fact, growing up as an only child gives you a unique, stupid kind of courage, one that is doubled if you are white and well-off and well loved by parents who love each other. I had a protective confidence in my own specialness, which allowed me to, for example, grow
my flat, greasy hair to my shoulders, put a black fedora on top of it, wear a bolo tie, carry a briefcase, and go to high school that way, every day.

  By tenth grade I was cultivating all sorts of loathsome affectations. I read the plays of Athol Fugard and Tom Stoppard. I played the viola, because it was less popular than the violin, and then I added the clarinet, because the saxophone seemed a cliché. It was important that I play two instruments so that I not get too good at either one, lest I ruin my status as a teen genius dilettante.

  I do not know why I was not bullied more. I think I may have presented too many hate targets for bullies to get a bead on. One time I was standing outside WMFO, the Tufts University radio station where I had talked myself into a Friday afternoon slot. That was the sort of thing I would do. Mostly the deejays were Tufts students, appropriately. But WMFO high-mindedly kept a few slots open for “members of the community.” I would guess they were supposed to go to marginalized voices, working people from the neighborhood, and local activists; not affluent high schoolers from Brookline who simply wanted to play the same Billy Bragg song over and over again. But somehow the station went for it, and now I had finished my shift and was starting the long walk to Porter Square to catch the train back home (there was a bus; I wouldn’t take it). A car full of angry townies pulled up alongside me. They stared hard at me for a while. The one guy’s dull, watery eyes searched me up and down as if to say, Where do I begin with this specimen? Finally he barked, “Liberal!” and they peeled out. That was the best he could do. It was fine. I really couldn’t argue with them. My father had once worked for Mike Dukakis.