The Last of Main St.
Joel, the man who actually does the farming, refuses to answer any questions about the owner. “If it’s none of my business, it certainly isn’t any of yours,” he says, one Sunday afternoon. He’s stepping ever so carefully, you might even say, tenderly, between rows of perfectly planted string beans and peas. It took two years of these Sunday visits before the man would talk to me.
Joel’s a typical, tight-lipped Yankee, gentle as hell with his vegetables but as hard as a stone with humans. Sixty odd (like extremely odd) years old, he wears steel rimmed glasses, knee-high green rubber boots, and overalls. The lines on his face are literally etched in dirt, in earth. He works this piece of rocky, New England land and drives home to a mail-order Russian wife. “She kept the house pretty nice when she got here,” he says on the same afternoon. “Now she just wants to sit around or catch a ride on one of those motorcycles that race through town on Sundays. I don’t know what I’m going to do with her.”
“Bury her in the basement,” I, suddenly, hear my husband mutter. Because while cradling four of his prize heirlooms and babying them into straw baskets, Joel has also dropped a few bombs about the Jews. “I”m a reader,” he says.” Went to Bowdoin. I write, too. But it’s a Jewish cabal, the publishing business. There weren’t any Jews up here when I was a kid, just some summer people. I guess there’s probably more of em, now.”
“Yeah,” I want to say. “Like my husband who’s standing behind you, giving you the fucking finger.”
At any rate, it’s the realtor who pulls back the dirty white curtains and reveals the story of the house. It’s straight out of that Jimmy Stewart movie, It’s A Wonderful Life. Only in this version, the irascible, greedy Mr. Potter is played by a woman. A woman, who like Mr. Potter, is also in a wheelchair.
“It’s one old lady, no family. Just a nephew,” the realtor tells us. “You ever see him smiling on his tractor. Well, you’d be smiling, too. He inherits it all. His aunt she was a loan officer at the town bank. She’d help people who were having problems with their loans. Some help. She’d pay off what they owed then buy the property for next to nothing. There was no plumbing in that house till fifteen years ago. She pumped water from the well. That’s how cheap she was. She had a stroke a while ago. There’s a nurse living in there with her, now. But nobody, I mean, nobody owns as much land in this town AND the next town than her. And they don’t come any meaner, believe me.”
I believe her. My father had a massive stroke at 53 and turned into a cantankerous, stingy Mr. Potter, too. But for some reason, I’ve always romanticized the Yankees. Their tough, shut mouthed insularity. The fact they hate owing anyone, anything. Maybe that’s why I’m so shocked to learn that this town, a small New England town still full of locals, is suffering the same miserable and terrifying fate as the rest of the country. I figured the Yankees would be immune; that they were too smart to be so stupid.
Before escorting our realtor out the door, she “shares” one last story about Main St. ”I call this the infinity effect,” she says. “I had a family in August. The house they’re buying is a real colonial. Same family for generations. 1.3 million. The guy calls me and says he’s lost his job in Danbury. They’re not moving. We’re two days before the closing, right? So he’s also lost his hundred grand deposit. But the family is all packed up and ready to go. So’s the family that he’s buying the house from. But here, here’s the kicker..There’s also the family that sold their house to the family that owned the colonial.
Like I said, it’s crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Wow, there a million stories in the Naked Real Estate Market. This was just one of them.
We sold our previous place, the one we fondly remember as The House of Doom, last summer. We put it on the market in October, after is was clear I wasn’t going to be practicing law for awhile.
We knew we were going to take a beating. When we finally sold. (to a stockbroker, because his fiance really wanted our house) We made the deal. When we’re leaving to sign the contract, I said to Rose, here’s where we learn the difference between the beating that hurts and the beating that kills. Boy, it did hurt. But we were then only people in that very upscale neighborhood to sell last year.
Unlike the half dozen others who tried, we didn’t kid ourselves about the market.
Because I grew up in Yankeeland, I don’t romanticize Yankees. Romanticizing real people is the route to great disappointment. They come in all sizes, from the real great, the really formidable and down to the really backward and obnoxious. They are as greedy and gullible as everyone else.
It is crazy, but all too real. By the way we caught some of the stuff from our realtor, who is a real nice lady.
In the end, we got out alive. So many haven’t.
I just wanted to leave a comment, and I chose this post because it’s so beautifully rendered. I love your writing and I love this blog.
The 200-lb monkey post was pretty fucking funny too. (See, just one per comment, I promise.)
Keep it up!
Campaspe, Been reading your blog for ages. Am total flick freak and just wondering if you’ve read Darcy O’Brien’s A Way of Life, Like Any Other. If not, run don’t walk. Many,many thanks for being among the faithful. It’s lonely here at the bottom.
How remarkable. I’ve never met a non-Jew (I know the word is “gentile”, but I’m not sure that’s a word gentiles are supposed to use) named Joel, much less an antisemitic one. And you didn’t even seem to notice it. Maybe it’s a yankee thing, like all those pilgrims and puritans with their obscure old test names.