The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [104]
When I reached the end of this new prosperity and took the still more abandoned stretch of road toward my old neighborhood, I felt myself calm a bit. Here the land had begun to be sold and quartered like so much meat, but there were also dilapidated houses tucked up between trees or, more sadly, so near the road that they would never be able to escape the influx of population despite shut-up windows or white-noise machines. The occupants of these old houses wouldn’t even know what a white-noise machine was. Things such as noise-cancellation headphones or expanded cargo holds were foreign concepts to them. As members of my parents’ generation, they sat and suffered until death, and I had reached the age where I glimpsed why this seemed preferable to keeping up.
There was one man who had taken matters into his own hands and built a ten-foot cinder-block wall around his entire property. He regularly sprinkled the top with broken beer bottles, which spilled over the side. No matter how many fines or threats of demolition came from the county, he would not tear the wall down. The war between the city officials and this homeowner had been going on for a decade with seemingly no end, and though he had made the local papers repeatedly, there was never a picture of him. I had begun to think of him as a homunculus who contained within him all the fears of modern man. There were no pictures of him because he looked like all of us. His fear had made him into a phantom who changed shape behind his walls. He was my mother, hiding in the linen closet. He was my father, drawing shadows on sheets of plywood. He was Natalie, afraid of loneliness, or Sarah, stealing change. He was me as I passed his house at 7:23 on a Friday night, going to Mrs. Leverton’s. I hoped, as he roared and thundered and fought off every lawsuit or claim, that he would survive forever or, if not, would at least die thrashing and spent long after all our deaths.
I drove into Phoenixville proper, the old part of town, where revitalized businesses still shut down at five p.m. and the streets were empty except for small clusters of activity that revolved around insular community projects. I saw Antipode, the sculpture gallery, all lit up. It was a hub for the arty in the area, and I had gone there more than once. It had been the scene of my drunken date with Tanner. He and the owner, surrounded by people much younger than they were, had engaged in a one-upping concerning each other’s relevance.
“That was the saddest display I’ve seen in a long time,” I said as the two of us stumbled out onto the sidewalk.
“Oh, shut up!” he had cried. “What have you ever done?” And our companionable misery began.
Antipode was bright but quiet tonight. I saw movement toward the back. A show was being hung. Down the block, the wheeled carts of the Paperback Shack, which were brought in each night, had been knocked over onto the sidewalk and into the road. The owner, a lone old woman, stooped to pick them up, no doubt regretting her attempt to stay open longer for the sake of attracting after-work customers.
I pulled over into an empty spot and got out. I gathered up a group of tattered romances strewn in the road, their busty cover art faded from long days in the sun. But what caught my eye was a heap of moldy poetry books, seemingly adhered to one another, that had fallen as one. The names appeared Russian to me. Quickly I scanned the titles and knew immediately: these were the books Mr. Forrest had donated to the local library thirty years ago. “They are deficient in their Russians,” he had said to me.
I startled the woman when I said, “Excuse me,” and held out the two stacks of paperbacks.
She spit toward me, spraying my hand as well as the books.
“I’ll