Free Famous Builder by Paul Lisicky

ad? a billboard?—prompting them to take a detour from Ocean City, New Jersey, where they’d spent the afternoon pushing me down the boardwalk in my infant stroller. It was nearly 5:00 P.M., August 1960. Sunburnt, thirsty, they pulled into Anchorage Point past strings of snapping pennants. WATERFRONT WONDERLAND. MODEL HOMES FROM $12,990. They drove around and around the single completed loop, gazing at the spinnakers on the bay, the humble skyline of Ocean City. Soon they were talking to Isabel Falone, the developer, with whom they stood outside the landscaped model home. The future glittered before them: yacht clubs, restaurants, shopping centers, marinas, beaches. Three thousand homes, the most extensive waterfront development in the state. I have no idea how Isabel Falone might have appeared then, but I’ve given her a black French twist, dark eyeliner, and seriously red lips. She’s a force to be reckoned with, a hybrid of Bill Levitt and Jacqueline Susann.
    Before 6:00 P.M. my mother and father had placed a $1,000 down payment on the single model available, The Sea Breeze, a waterfront three-bedroom rancher. If only he’d known that Isabel Falone’s Anchorage Point Development Company would file for bankruptcy not two days later. For years I imagined Isabel Falone literally running from continent to continent away from my screaming father. I’d decided she’d made off to Buenos Aires where she ran down the boulevards, hiding her French twist with a sheet of clean newspaper.
    In retrospect, I’m surprised that that bit of lousy luck never prompted my father to forgo his dream of owning a summerhouse. His dedication to the pursuit of pleasure is certainly not in character. Why didn’t he turn his attention toward something harder, more demanding? But he was fierce, optimistic in those years. The son of Eastern European immigrants, he’d made a little money, and he wasn’t going to let anyone turn him away from the door. And he genuinely loved Anchorage Point. He couldn’t forget the color of that lagoon. Freshly dredged, it was a rich Caribbean beryl, an enormous outdoor aquarium through which you could see all eight feet down to its clean sandy bottom. Minnows, sand sharks, blue claw crabs: every few seconds they flashed up to the surface, scuttled away, then flashed again. And the water temperature was just to my father’s taste, cool enough for swimming laps. So my parents bought one of the existing forty-four houses—one not that much different from the one they’d hoped for and lost—next to a middle-aged couple from Huntingdon Valley.
    ***
    I’m a little troubled by my parents’ relationship to the house. It seems to me they don’t take it seriously enough. It’s not that they don’t take care of it, but their work goes only as far as cutting the lawn every two weeks, sweeping beach sand from the floors. All around us, however, our neighbors stamp the once-identical houses with their signatures. The Bertmans, for instance, put up a basket-weave fence enclosing yucca, sunflower, dusty miller, and prickly pear. Two houses, down the Brunos side their house with raw textured planks resembling California redwood. The Ansteys even talk about adding a second story in order to take advantage of the views across the marshes and bays. Hammers start banging at 7:30 A.M., followed by the shredding circular saws. People have forgotten how to relax. No one seems to remember that these are vacation houses. Boats stay fastened to their docks, squeaking and rubbing as they go up and down with the tide.
    Could it be that the house is entirely too modest for my father, and he’s cultivated a relaxed attitude? On one level, its sheer austerity—pebbled roof, vertical wooden trim, its two modest double-hung windows facing the street like two expressionless eyes—must not fit the bill. He’d prefer something bigger. But bigger costs money (they’ve already given up on Seaview Harbor, the more expensive lagoon