Free Famous Builder by Paul Lisicky Page A

development closer to the ocean), and my father obviously wonders whether it would be appropriate to take on a larger monthly payment. Aren’t all his brothers and sisters working overtime? And isn’t his mother getting older, less mobile, waking up in the middle of the night to talk about her fears of the “poor house”? So he makes a pact for us to live simply. The house will embody one thing alone: we’re not going to be something we aren’t. Which is finally more difficult than you’d think: who are you if you’ve essentially recreated yourself?
    The Foxes, who have struck up a friendship with my mother and father, gently encourage them to take a look around. They stand at the property line and point out our crabgrass, commenting breezily upon the punched holes in our screened porch. The chain-link fence, which encloses our entire yard, seems to be a particular point of contention. I’ll be ashamed of its grave practicality myself a few years into the future and cite several reasons for it to be replaced, but my father has installed it so he won’t have to worry about finding Bobby or me floating facedown in the lagoon.
    It’s interesting to me that my parents don’t seem to mind the Foxes passive-agressive jibes. I can’t tell whether they just don’t hear them, or don’t care, consumed by problems of their own. The work goes on next door. One day several dump trucks spill enough bleached stones to cover the yard six inches deep. On another the wooden picture window is replaced with a sleek two-panel sliding glass door. “Custom,” Mrs. Fox assures us. This in addition to redwood planters, a cupola/weathervane, floodlights, a patio, stepping stones, a short pier into the lagoon. Inside, the work has been even more extensive, the stuff of neighborhood myth. They’ve filled it with sleek, understated furniture and have installed appliances that indicate they’ve taken the house seriously, quite seriously, in fact: a pale pink refrigerator, a front-loading washer, and most intriguing to me, a General Electric wall oven in which Mrs. Fox allegedly never cooks anything. Not that I’ve seen any of this. Children aren’t allowed in the Fox house. Not even her own grandchildren, Jonah and Jonathan, who must stay with their parents at the Port o’ Call Hotel in Ocean City.
    Nor is Mrs. Fox’s mother, for that matter. Well, she’s allowed, but not welcomed. During Mrs. Halvorsen’s single weeklong stay, she sits all day on the carport and stares morosely at the lagoon. Mrs. Fox makes no secret about her feelings for her mother. She calls her “Muz,” which my own mother finds particularly disrespectful, though forgives. Mrs. Fox tells my mother about the time when, as a teenager, she came home to find Muz naked in bed with another man, a man she’d met in some bar, and how they kept at it (“fucking,” she whispers), while she went into the bedroom to scratch holes in the wall.
    “Whoore,” she grimaces, twisting the pronunciation to sound like sewer.
    My mother’s mouth falls open.
    “That’s right, Annie. I’m not afraid to say it. My mother, a whoore. ”
    “What’s a whoore? ” I say later. I stand with my mother in the tiny kitchen, high on my tiptoes, and stir chicken Rice-A-Roni while she empties a brick of frozen peas into a saucepan.
    “Whore,” my mother says, correcting me.
    “Whore.”
    “A woman who sells dances,” she says without missing a beat.
    I cock my head. Selling dances: I cannot think of anything more delightful.
    ***
    I love our seashore island. Its elevation, a mere six inches above the high waterline, both alarms and mesmerizes me. I love nothing more than those new moon nights when the lagoon actually spills onto the yard for a few hours and leaves behind piles of cordgrass that we must rake, gather, and deposit in the trash. But there’s more to my enchantment than that. Surrounded on three sides by flooded green marsh, Anchorage Point’s topography satisfies