Free Trophy House by Anne Bernays

Street where our house is, sounds baleful, at least to my ears; streetlights; ice on the sidewalk people are supposed to scrape and often don’t; whackos muttering and gesturing as they make their way up the street; etc. If this sounds like I’m fed up with civilization, that’s not far off the mark. If I thought human beings had managed to pull themselves out of the muck of primitive existence and its violence, bestiality, cruelty, and sloth, then maybe I wouldn’t mind it so much.
    But at least I could walk around the corner and buy some of the Middle Eastern food I love.

Chapter
4
    I GATHERED A FEW of my more presentable clothes—pants with a visible crease, a couple of sweaters and shirts, a pair of real shoes, along with most of the perishable food, and deposited them haphazardly in the trunk of the Saab with its seven Truro stickers. We headed toward Boston on Route 6. It’s not the most eye-catching stretch of highway; in fact, it’s boring, having few vistas and little to break the wall of heavy trees on either side of the road, a good many of them infected with some sort of crinkly brown blight. I had a subdued Beth for company; along about Sandwich she stuck those little black things in her ears and listened to a CD that reached my own ears as a high whistle. She had that slightly queasy look that suggested she was thinking about Andy, on whom, in spite of the facts, she had turned a rosy light. You can’t say it often enough: people believe what they want to believe, no matter how weighty the evidence against doing so.
    There wasn’t, thank God, much traffic on a weekday in mid-September. The usual plumbers’ and contractors’ vans, a few SUVs crammed with junk not to be used until next summer. As we approached Sandwich and the Sagamore Bridge, my heart did its familiar dip of resignation. I hated crossing that bridge and returning to a life that in many respects was easier and more convenient—food shopping, nearby dry cleaner, drugstore and post office within easy walking distance, and friends to have lunch with. But somehow the convenience had a stifling effect on me. Living in Watertown meant a dozen decisions a day rather than two or three, and an urban landscape interchangeable with any fairly prosperous middle-class city in the U.S. I don’t want to sound like Thoreau, because as far as I’m concerned he was a self-righteous prig: I’m more spiritual than you are because I own only one tin cup and a pencil I made myself. My Truro life isn’t about being spiritual—whatever that means—but about not having “things” and commitments pressing against you all the time. On the Cape I have my work and my meals, a few protest meetings to keep me on my toes, and my trusty telephone lifeline. My existence there is spare but hardly primitive: I seem not to want anything—that is, any material objects—beyond what I already have.
    We got stuck, bumper-to-bumper, as the Boston skyline loomed. The so-called Big Dig, a sweeping abstract notion, animated, that involved removing a long stretch of elevated highway while not disturbing traffic coming and going, had, for the past five years, jammed cars together just when they most needed to hurry. We put up with it mostly in silence, counting on the powers that be to do it right while it costs taxpayers huge bucks and opens itself up to continual claims of mismanagement and fraud. Typical city troubles.
    I had to pee and there was nothing to do but sit in the car stoically and wait while the traffic jam slowly, so slowly, sorted itself out. Beth said, surprising the hell out of me, “I’m thinking of quitting my job.”
    I asked her why, while trying not to sound happy about it.
    â€œThe things I do are so unmeaningful. Lipstick, eye shadow, fasting for your figure. Should you have cosmetic surgery or Botox at sixteen, or should you wait until you’re twenty-one?