When I walked into the kitchen to make my morning coffee, I found Mo on her knees in front of the dishwasher, head and shoulders hidden inside the machine. The lower rack, half full of plates, sat on the floor.
“How’s it going?” I said, splashing yesterday’s dregs into the sink. I filled the pot with fresh water.
Mo said nothing, which meant she was frustrated. In the five days since we’d moved to Blackwater, the washer had been acting wonky, taking way too long to finish a cycle. The machine appeared new, and it cleaned the dishes well enough. It just cleaned them slowly.
“Are we sure it’s broken?” I said.
She backed out of the unit and felt around the control panel. “You don’t call three hours to wash a load of dishes broken?”
I was struck by a vision of Mo ripping off the panel and going wrist-deep into the wires and circuits, making the problem—if there even was a problem—worse. “Sometimes if you do nothing,” I said, “things have a way of fixing themselves.”
She looked at me like I was a dipshit. “It’s not going to fix itself.”
“You sure?” I filled the coffee maker. Scooped the ground beans into the basket. “It broke itself, didn’t it?”
She stood and pushed the washer door shut. “I just need an hour and the owner’s manual.”
I brought her in for a hug. “You’ve got this.” Time to capitulate. Chairman Mo was in her intractable mood. Crushing all dissent and criticism. Besides, she did, almost certainly, have this. Her dad was an automotive engineer who could repair about anything. He’d taught her well. I, on the other hand, am not handy at all, as Mo loves to remind me. When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail, she says. But when you’re a Tim Whitney, every nail looks like an excuse to whine like a kindergartener.
I broke the hug. Poured us both coffee.
“What’s your plan for the day?” she said. Sounded a tad like an accusation.
Our move was nearly complete—boxes unpacked and flattened, internet connected, TV operational—so I was excited to finally set up my photography studio in the spare bedroom. I told her my plan: sort through the darkroom supplies, arrange the light stands and octaboxes.
“Shouldn’t you mow the lawn first?” she said.
“Why?”
“Jeez, Tim. I don’t know.” She twirled her hair. The absurdity of Dr. Maureen Kramer, PhD, pretending to be a ditz made me snort. “Why does anyone mow a lawn?”
I reminded her that we didn’t own a mower. We’d always rented, so we’d never needed one.
She extended her pinky as she sipped her coffee. “We’re fancy now,” she said. “We can buy a mower.”
Thanks to her new job, the teaching position that had brought us to South Carolina from Wisconsin, we could no doubt afford a lawnmower. Check that. Mo could afford a lawnmower. She was the breadwinner. I was the trailing spouse. A liberal, enlightened trailing spouse. A feminist, even. So I had zero man-of-the-house concerns about my wife making twice as much as me. I’d be happy—no, lucky—to mow a lawn she’d be mostly paying the mortgage on. But did I have to do it that very morning?
“Another thing,” she said. “On your way to Home Depot, drop off the cardboard at the recycling place.”
“I’m all fired up to work on the studio,” I said. “The grass can wait ‘til tomorrow.”
Mo smiled and patted me on the head. “Don’t want to make a bad impression with the neighbors.”
*
If you know Blackwater, South Carolina, it’s probably because you’ve been stuck in traffic here on the way to Sunrise Beach. And of course you know Sunrise Beach. One of the top vacation spots on the East Coast. Even if you’ve never gorged yourself at a Sunrise-style seafood buffet or taken a spin on the SunWheel, you’ve seen the billboards and commercials: Sunrise Beach is America’s Beach! Sunrise might be the postcard-famous destination, but Blackwater, ten miles inland, is the county seat, holding the courts, governmental offices, and Tidelands University, where in one week Mo would begin her first semester as a tenure-track English professor.
I’d been perfectly happy with our Milwaukee status quo. Late nights in the darkroom, cocktail in hand. Lazy mornings with a coffee and the New Yorker. The sweet life of a photographer/waiter married to a brilliant, hilarious grad student. But maintaining that status quo would have required, what? Hoping that Dr. Mo, newly-minted PhD didn’t land a teaching job? Angling for my wife to fail? What good would rooting against her have done, anyway? This was Mighty Mo Kramer, force of nature, a king tide that would rise with or without me.
Until she was hired at Tidelands, I’d never been to Sunrise Beach. Still, I’d spent enough time in the ocean over the years to know one thing: when the tide snatches you, don’t fight it. Go limp.
Mo searched online for the dishwasher manual. I collected the flattened boxes from the garage and slid them into the back of our Subaru. Not even 9:00 am, and the humidity already squeezed like a blood pressure cuff. I was wearing August appropriate clothing—Japandroids shirt, skate shorts, Converse All-Stars with no socks—but my physiology was still calibrated to the Great Lakes. The jog I’d taken the day before felt like it would end in a coronary event.
Slamming the hatchback door, I noticed an FJ Cruiser, the same sport-yellow as my first Walkman, parked in the neighbor’s driveway. The ass end of the vehicle was covered with stickers, probably fifty of them, stuck to the spare tire cover and the bumper, the back window and the rear side panels.
I slid into their yard, aiming to get a closer look. Decals for a fishing outfitter, a motocross team, and one that was either an extreme energy drink or a death metal band. Nothing to suggest we might share interests—until I noticed stickers for a kayak company in Asheville, craft brewery in Atlanta, ski resort in Utah. Kayaking and beer drinking and skiing? I dug all those activities. I’d built actual friendships on less.
Then one decal jumped from the background like a black thumping heart. As soon as I saw it, I couldn’t un-see it.
National Rifle Association, it read. Life Member.
Back in high school, when my buddies and I got caught smoking weed behind the Hart Park concession stand, my mom told me, “You can’t choose your family, Timmy. But you can choose your friends. So choose wisely.” What about your neighbors? I wondered now. In buying this house, had Mo and I chosen wrong?
We’d moved to a bright red state, so I wasn’t surprised to see an outward manifestation of conservative beliefs. Even Wisconsin, birthplace of progressive icon Fighting Bob La Follette, had shaded red in recent years. God and guns—Catholic and hunting, respectively—had always been important in the Badger State. Surely there’d been firearms by the hundreds-of-thousands stashed within twenty miles of our duplex on Milwaukee’s Upper East Side. But not on our block. And certainly not next door. One of our neighbors was a doula. Another ran a vegan co-op. Among our crowd, drinking from a plastic bottle made you a climate-killing troglodyte. Flashing an NRA sticker would have sent somebody into a hemorrhagic stroke.
It’s not like I needed everybody in Blackwater to be a Japandroids fan or be able to recognize an Avedon portrait. But still, wouldn’t life in the South be more fulfilling if we lived among people with whom we shared a few touchstones?
“Easy, Wauwatosa,” Mo would have said if she’d been standing there with me, Wauwatosa being the nickname she pulled out whenever I was being a pretentious jerk. Her pronunciation of my suburban hometown, with an emphasis on the first two syllables (Wah-wah) rather than the last two (Tosa, as us Milwaukee locals called it), was a shorthand way of criticizing my elitism. She would not have brooked my concerns about the gun owner next door. She’d have reminded me that diversity was one thing we’d loved about living in the city. And if you value racial diversity, shouldn’t you also value social-class diversity? Political and cultural diversity? The knock on progressives, she’d say, was that we were hypocrites. The minute diversity became inconvenient, the minute it cost us something, we forgot all about it.
I would have conceded everything. But still: NRA for life? Tough to get past.
*
Two hours later, I returned from Home Depot. I was tempted to check on Mo and the dishwasher, but if she’d taken apart the control panel and the guts were now scattered across the counter, I didn’t want to know. Instead I stayed outside and set up the mower. Screwing the handles into place turned out to be easy enough that even I, every-nail-is-an-excuse-to-whine Whitney, could do it.
I stood in the driveway and took in the scene: newly assembled mower in the foreground, set against the backdrop of the house. Still life with garden equipment. Picture of provincial domesticity. Hard to believe I’d once been a buzzworthy big city photographer. Long time ago, but it didn’t feel so long.
I’d been shooting pictures—sometimes professionally, sometimes as art for art’s sake—for twenty-five years. Upon graduation from Marquette, I moved to Chicago, where I steadily rose from unemployed–psychology-major-who-owned-a-nice-camera to waiter-who-liked-to-take-pictures to photographer-who-waited-tables. Then, after nailing a few shoots for bands who’d signed major-label deals in the post-Nirvana feeding frenzy, I spent two whole years as a rock photographer. Period. No qualifiers necessary. I shot Local H and Triple Fast Action. Fig Dish and the Smoking Popes. Veruca Salt included one of my photos in the package for their second album. For a brief window in the ‘90s, my skill set matched the alt-rock aesthetic that was in favor. I had two go-to techniques: filters and fisheyes. But a photographer could only make it so far on gimmicks. Eventually my phone stopped ringing. I tumbled from rock photographer to photographer-who-waited-tables to waiter-who-dabbled-in-photography to plain old waiter. No longer able to afford Wicker Park, I limped home to Milwaukee.
Five years later, Maureen Kramer walked into the coal-fired pizza place where I worked. Just 27 to my 34, she was the more fully functioning adult even then, in the third year of her PhD program at UWM. We started dating, then moved in together. She dazzled me with the clarity of her vision for the future—hers and mine. She was going to be a big-time novelist, teach college. She would not be partnering up with a thirty-something pizza slinger.
“It’s gourmet,” I said. “We’ve got burrata. We’ve got morels.”
“Could be.” She tied my apron strings, straightened my name tag. “But you smell like Domino’s.” She dug out the AE-1, the camera my dad had given me second-hand as present for graduating from Wauwatosa East. “You’re a photographer,” she said. “Go take some pictures.”
I walked Brady and Water streets, Canon in hand, thrilled to be reminded of what I loved about photography. Freezing the world. Controlling it. Deciding what belongs in the frame and what doesn’t. I assembled a solid portfolio, then bought an engagement ring. Mo graduated, got the Tidelands job, and now here I was, gearing up to cut the grass of the first house I’d ever owned.
*
I yanked the starter cord and bisected the lawn on the diagonal, just as my dad had taught me, (give it the old Wauwatosa Slant, son), as opposed to the back-and-forth method (completely lacking flair) or, worse, the ever-decreasing-laps-around-the-perimeter strategy (workmanlike but ugly). As I alternated directions, I found the rhythm, leaving stripes that were two different shades of green. The stripes grew shorter and shorter until I was left with a tiny triangle that reminded me of the mostly-crust remnant slices on a round pizza that’d been cut into squares.
Halfway finished with the front, I kept hold of the dead man’s switch and inspected what I’d mowed so far. All good, with one exception. On the unmowed half stood a huge ant hill—no, more than a hill, a mountain. I weaved a diagonal path to Ant Everest and stopped, considering my options. Only two, really. Over or around. The mound stood three inches taller than the front of the mower. Could I really blast over it? Going around, however, would be an admission of defeat. Damn thing marred the geometric intentionality of the Wauwatosa Slant. An insult to aesthetics. An ink blot on a Piet Mondrian. A hairy mole on a Christy Turlington. The ants must go down, and they must go down hard.
I backed up to get momentum on my side, then pushed forward, delivering upon the colony an existential disaster, a Category 5 hurricane of high-carbon, nickel-alloy steel. As I passed over the hill, I surveyed the damage. Panic on the streets of Antville. And what frenzy the mower stirred up, my size ten-and-a-half Chuck Taylors shut down. With both feet, I stomped on the decapitated mound and twisted, Chubby Checker style. A hurricane followed by a Godzilla rampage. The historian- and philosopher-ants would spend the rest of their lives struggling to make sense of the cataclysm.
When I reached the end of the diagonal, I turned about-face and saw a man standing next to the FJ Cruiser. A year or two older than me. Thirty pounds heavier. He looked in my direction. I tried to avoid eye contact, because then I’d have to make the is-this-guy-worth-shutting-off-the-mower-for calculation. The front yard was so close to finished. Don’t stop now. Meet him during the halftime changeover between front yard and back. But before I could complete the next diagonal and turn the 180°, he waved hello. I silenced the engine, thinking there’s no surface on the planet as smooth as a lawnmower handle in the seconds after the motor stops.
“That’s some fine-looking St. Augustine,” he called from his driveway. “Beats hell out of centipede.”
What was the Jeopardy category? I had no clue. Places visited by Ponce de León? Atari games? He walked over, wearing khaki carpenter pants and a maroon-colored t-shirt that read Alford Construction. He pinched up his pant legs and crouched down, taking a few blades in his fingers. A-ha. Types of Grass for two-hundred, Alex.
“St. Augustine is good, then?”
“Chinch bugs like it,” he said. “But if you had centipede, the mole crickets’d like that.”
He stood and we shook. “Bobby Alford,” he said. His palm was softer than you’d expect from somebody in the construction business. Then again, his name was on the company swag. You don’t get callouses giving orders.
He pulled a Camel soft pack from his hip pocket. Offered me one. I shook my head no thanks. He fired a Bic, then turned away from the breeze to light the cigarette. I could now read the back of his shirt, which declared in 72-point caps, IT TAKES A REAL STUD TO BUILD A HOUSE.
“You’re in construction, huh?” I said, consciously smiling. NRA member or not, this was our new neighbor. Stifle the judgment.
“General contractor.” He exhaled a contrail. “Custom new-builds, mostly. In the Yankee ghetto.”
“Yankee ghetto?” A word like ghetto was awfully freighted with meaning to drop into a chat with a stranger. I braced myself for the inevitable day when he would start a conversation with, I’m the furthest thing from a racist, but . . .
“Just messing with you.” Bobby laughed and smacked me on the shoulder in a friendly way. “It’s what I call Sunrise Woods. All those new developments over there, filled with Northerners like y’all.”
I chuckled. “How’d you know?” But anyone who heard me pronounce ghetto with my elongated Wisconsin “o” could tell I wasn’t a Southerner.
“You don’t drive a truck, for one thing.” He winked. Pointed at the Subaru. “Wisconsin plates told me.” Wesconsin, he pronounced it. “What line of work you in?”
The Outback wagon had already sent a message, surely. Code-writing avocado eater? Snowflake social worker? I hesitated. It sure didn’t take a real stud to shoot a picture. I started telling Bobby about how Mo’s job at Tidelands had brought us to Blackwater, but then, from my right ankle, a prickly sensation. And another. Then one from inside my left shoe. I looked down and saw ants swarming over both feet, at least a dozen per Converse.
“What the hell!?” Another bite. Another. Each pinprick followed by waves of radiating itch.
Bobby dropped the Camel. Stomped it out with a boot. “You got a hose?”
We didn’t. I shook my head.
“Hang tight.” He hustled toward his side yard.
I tried to pull off my right shoe while hopping on my left, regretting my choice not to wear socks. My sweaty foot seemed vacuum-sealed inside the sneaker. I tugged and pried. Clawed at the laces. No dice. One ant crawled in the left ventilating hole as another crawled out the right. I’d almost worked the laces loose, but now an ant was tearing-ass across the surface of my hand. I blew it away with a puff of breath and then tried the shoe again. Success. I hazarded a look inside. A half-dozen ants flared across the insole. I slammed the Chuck to the ground, flicked the remaining ants from my right foot, ankle, and calf, and started ripping at the laces of my left shoe.
Bobby was back, dragging a hose. “Make quick with those laces.”
I pulled one end too hard and left a knot. Untangling while balancing on a bare foot that was somehow both burning and numb, was impossible. I dropped to the grass, hoping I wasn’t sitting on the very ants I’d just rid myself of.
“Calmness, man.” Bobby squeezed the nozzle trigger. “Deep breaths.”
Finally the laces came free. I pried off the sneaker and sent it flying. Flicked more ants from my skin. Fuck-fuck-fuck, it burned.
“Stand up.” Bobby fired a hard line of hose water at my legs and feet. The first blast was hot because the water had been resting inside the hose on a summer day. The heat and pressure felt orgasmic.
“Gotta spray away the poison,” he said. “Makes it better. But just a little.” With the hose he drew a series of vertical lines, from my kneecaps down, switching from leg to leg like he was power washing a mold-stained fence. “Fire ants, buddy. Woo-wee, they’ll light you up.”
In bed the night before, a cockroach had nearly flown into my mouth—not crawled, flown. Fire-spitting ants? Flying roaches? The insects down here had superpowers.
“Have you ever seen a roach with wings?” I asked him.
“You mean a Palmetto bug? They don’t hurt nothing,” he said. “You got tiny roaches, that means your house is dirty. Palmetto bugs? That just means you live in South Carolina.” He pulled out another cigarette and looked at my feet. Red splotches the size of dimes had already formed. “What did you do, anyway? Step right on ‘em?”
“Only after making them angry first.” I told him about pushing the mower through the anthill.
“I got some black market chemicals in the garage could take that mound out for you.” He looked like he was joking. Maybe. “But I can’t say insect control is one of the permitted uses on the label.”
“No worries,” I said. “We’ll call somebody.” That’s when I remembered the dishwasher. Mo had surely disassembled it by now. “Do you know an appliance guy, by any chance?” I told him how the washer’d been taking forever to finish a load. “My wife’s inside right now, DIY-ing it to death.”
He stubbed the unfinished cigarette on the sole of his boot and deposited the filter in his pocket. “Lemme go see.”
*
We found Mo not in the kitchen but instead on the couch, reading the newest Meg Wolitzer.
“You fixed it already? I asked, amazed. The itch was torturous, but I tried not to show it. I didn’t want to be the snowflake avocado aficionado Bobby probably thought I was.
“My dad always told me you can’t fix anything while you’re mad at it,” Mo said, closing her book. “First, you’ve got to forgive it for breaking.”
“Smart man,” Bobby said.
She stood, smiling at him. “I don’t know if I’ve reached forgiveness, but my blood pressure’s definitely lower.”
Mo’s dad was an engineer, not a monk. Still, if that nugget of new-agey wisdom kept her from disemboweling the dishwasher, I was all for it. I told her that Bobby’d offered to look at the machine.
Mo shot me a look, the kind that only registers between spouses. You doubt me?
She led us to the kitchen. “The thermal fuse, maybe?”
Bobby read the label inside the unit, raised the door, and looked at the logo on the front. “When’s the last time you bought a dishwasher.”
“Never,” Mo said.
“This came with the house,” I said.
“It’s new,” Bobby said. “That’s the problem. It’s high efficiency. Water saving. Energy saving.”
“How does running twice as long save energy?” Mo asked.
“Don’t make sense,” he said. “But all my houses have ‘em. Sometimes if you run the hot water in your sink first, that speeds it up.” He nudged the door closed. “Point is, it ain’t broke.”
“Ha!” I elbowed Mo in the ribs. “Can you say that again, Bobby?”
“Say-what, now?”
“How it’s fixed.” I was talking to Bobby, but I was looking at Mo.
She put her hands on her hips. “Oh, I see.”
“Wasn’t never broke,” Bobby said.
“Would you say it fixed itself?” My grin was halfway to shit-eating.
“Don’t be a dick,” Mo said, but she was smiling.
Take that, madame chairman. I might not know how to fix a broken thing, but at least I knew not to fix a not broken thing.
“So nice to meet you, Bobby,” Mo extended her hand. “Thanks for the help.”
“And thanks for the quick thinking with the hose,” I said.
“Welcome to the neighborhood.” He turned toward the front door. “If y’all need anything, let us know, all right?” He walked out.
I had to admit that so far, Bobby seemed super-nice. Good to know that even if we couldn’t be friends, we could at least be friendly. And maybe the NRA sticker would be the worst of it. Hopefully he’d never upgrade to a black lawn jockey. Or, God-forbid, a Confederate flag.
I didn’t say any of this to Mo. Not yet. Nothing about my dumbassery with the fire ants and nothing about my Bobby concerns. For one thing, my feet were itching too bad. I needed to find where we’d unpacked the calamine lotion. For another, I knew how Mo would respond if I told her the story.
“Let me get this straight, Wauwatosa,” she’d say. “Within five minutes of meeting you, Bobby hosed an ant counterattack from your pasty feet and, as an encore, settled the great dishwasher debate.”
“That’s right—”
“Jesus, man. Who cares about his politics? Look at his actions. He was way more generous to you than you would have been to him.” She’d circle the room, like she does when she’s lining up an argument, a lioness stalking her intellectual prey. “All this judgment, Timmy, is a function of your neediness. What you want most, from me, from the neighbors, from the stickers on the damn cars, is never-ending reassurance. You don’t believe in yourself, so you’re dependent on external cues. Visual cues. Aesthetic cues. You want everything you see to send one uniform message.”
“What’s the message?” But I’d already know.
She’d grab me by the shoulders, look me in the eyes, and say, “You, Timothy Whitney, are not a failure.”
But maybe I was.
I now lived in a small, Southern town. In a little ranch house. With a second amendment superfan for a neighbor.
Retreating home from Chicago way back when had stung. This time? Trading Milwaukee—and its museums and galleries and good restaurants—for Blackwater, by-God, South Carolina? Cripes.
But I didn’t tell Mo the story. So here’s what she said: “Thanks for calling in an expert. Even if it pissed me off at first.”
“You were ready to field strip that machine,” I said. “Somebody needed to rescue it from you.”
This time she pulled me in for the hug. Mo was the best thing in my life. Better, by far, than I deserved.
“You know what’s great about you, Tim Whitney?” She kissed me on the cheek. “Even when I hate what you’re doing, I love what you’re trying to do.”
