Alternate Side(9)

“Without Ricky and Charity, this whole house falls apart,” Nora said to Charlie, tapping the message from George, whose patronage had later given way to some minor dispute with Ricky, probably over a bill. “We can do without your car. We can’t do without them.”

“It’s your car, too,” Charlie said.

Nora didn’t think of it as her car, but she said nothing. She hoped that the acquisition of the space in the lot would make Charlie stop talking about selling the house. This, too, was George’s fault, and had increased her antipathy toward him to the point that she barely acknowledged his pugs when they trundled, bow-legged, across her path, breathing asthmatically. George was a person of serial allegiances: to the writer who was researching the block and would give all of them free copies of his book if he could just take a quick look around their houses; to the roofer who was willing to repair flashing and gutters cheaply; to the salvage yard that had period doors that could be made to fit the jambs with only a bit of tweaking. He would send out missives vouching for the writer, the roofer, the manager of the salvage yard. “Mom, there’s a new George-o-Gram on the floor by the door,” Rachel would say.

This always ended in disaster, and disavowals. The writer never found a publisher. The roofer did half the job and then disappeared. The tweaking meant the doors looked dreadful. But his latest had sucked them all in, or at least all the men. An appraiser had estimated the market value of all their houses. He’d expected to be paid afterward, as people often did, and George had stiffed him. But before that George had gotten him to cough up some numbers. Charlie had come home from his morning walk with Homer, and said, “We should put this place on the market as soon as we can get it into shape.”

“What? What are you talking about? It is in shape. And it’s our home. Why would we sell it?”

Sherry Fisk told the same story, and Linda Lessman, who lived across the street, and George’s wife, Betsy, had probably heard the same sales pitch, too, although the other women never saw her much, nor, it seemed, did George. The houses on the block, like most of Manhattan, had appreciated so much they constituted a lottery prize. The women saw them as homes, the men as real estate. Charlie would be reading the Times on the weekend, and he would suddenly look up thoughtfully and say, “If we sold this place, we could buy a great old house in Savannah and bank the rest.”

“I don’t want to live in Savannah,” Nora said.

“You’ve never even been to Savannah, Bun,” Charlie said.

“You’ve never been to Savannah. I went there for work. It’s a beautiful place. I don’t want to live there. I live in New York. I have a job here, remember?”

“There must be museums in Savannah.” Or Charleston. Or Santa Fe. It depended on which town with reasonably priced housing was featured in the paper that week.

Nora hoped the parking lot would insulate her from Charlie’s sense that they could no longer afford to live in their house because it was too valuable for them to do so. Of course there was really no earthly reason to have a car in New York City, but Nora knew enough not to mention it. Their children did not even have driver’s licenses, although they were twenty years old. Rachel had driven up over a curb her second time out in the car, turned to her mother, and said, “See,” and had never, as far as they knew, driven again. Oliver had let his learner’s permit expire. He came home from college on the train. Rachel hitched a ride with whichever suburban kid was willing to pass through Manhattan in exchange for gas money.

Still, Charlie insisted on having the car. It was used to transport his clubs to golf courses on Long Island and in Westchester County. There was a small stone house upstate they had owned when the kids were small, although they had sold it when Rachel and Ollie were in middle school. Charlie complained that they’d gotten to the point that they never used it, but the truth was they’d never used it much anyhow, mainly for Thanksgiving dinner and as a base from which to cut down a tree at a tree farm and bring it back to New York for Christmas. And Nora remembered how much Charlie had actually hated the drive, the kids wailing in the backseat—I have to pee I’m so hungry she’s touching me with her foot he smells so bad he’s farting am not are so. “If you don’t stop that I’m going to leave you by the side of the road,” Charlie had yelled at the end of one Thanksgiving weekend, and both children had started to sob. “I’m never going in the car with Daddy again,” Rachel said that night as Nora tucked her in. “Me neither,” yelled Oliver from his room next door. “Copycat,” Rachel yelled back.

“Daddy didn’t mean it,” Nora said.

“He sounded like he did,” Rachel said.

Nora remembered that before George had gotten a space in the lot, he had insisted loudly to anyone who would listen (after a while no one would listen) that it was absolutely unnecessary to pay for parking. George had been one of those New Yorkers who had a second job—or, as far as any of them could tell in George’s case, a first one—gaming the alternate-side parking rules of the City of New York. Like some odd circus act, the cars wove around, away from the dirty curb, over to double-park across the street, then in behind the traffic cop and the street cleaner to pull back to the curb, often into the very same spot they’d occupied just minutes before.

“Let me give you a tutorial,” she had heard George say one morning to a young man who had just moved onto the block. “See the sign? No parking, nine to eleven, Monday and Thursday. So what you do is, you sit in your car and you check for the agent. Don’t jump the gun! Wait until she’s coming up on you or ticketing the guy behind you who forgot or overslept. Then you move out and up. It’s easier than it sounds because you’ll probably be following the guy who was parked right in front of you. You sit tight on the other side of the street, the Tuesday-Friday side, and wait for her to get to the end of the block, wait for the street cleaner, boom! You finish the circle and you’re good to go.”