Closure

CLOSURE The furniture they sold on eBay was picked up a week before formal eviction. They were left with a narrow bed, two laptops, two cell phones, and the usual accumulation of household chattel. It was late afternoon. Golden sunshine poured on the bare parquet -reconciliation was in the air. His firm steps echoing in the empty room, Allan approached the bed where she sat. “Can we leave this place with our old love, exactly the way we were before this whole mess . . . ?” She lifted her head, pushing strands of brown hair away from her face. The agreement in her glance was sincere and unconditional. Eda was not an eye-rolling woman. She came from strong Scandinavian stock; her silence was meaningful. As foreclosure became inevitable, squabbling over finances spilled over into every little thing, sometimes assuming a hateful visage. Alan lost his job as the general manager of a regional tanning studio franchise in Western Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh. More than half of the outlets were closed. People in the area, having their share of blistering economic times, evidently decided to cut back on this luxury. All attempts to find another position, even if it involved relocation or cuts in income and status, failed. He became despondent. A master’s degree in business administration was supposed to protect him against involuntary unemployment. And he still owed a good chunk of money on his student loan. Eda’s one-person interior decorating business, called “Candlelight Farm,” had dried up. Yet she started well. As a graduate of the prestigious Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, she quickly built up clientele in neighboring exurbia. But the recession sapped her business too. Even occasional inquiries had stopped and the bedroom she had turned into “office and studio” had been totally inactive since the “Bank Repo” sign appeared in the front yard. Given the relentless rise in home prices until 2007, and their combined income at the time, they could not be considered reckless -- only ambitious and trusting. The all too familiar trouble began when the elegant-looking property dipped under water. It carried a negative equity; they owed more on it than it was worth. Their shared dynamism and go-get-it temperament made them collide over the smallest detail as they tried desperately to stop the ticking clock of foreclosure. The shrill voice of hidden threats and nasty insults snuck up on them with treacherous deliberation, like alcoholism in the old movie, “Wine and Roses.” Savvy and practical as both were, they never knew what would happen next. For some days, even weeks, the situation did not look hopeless. At one point, the lending bank suspended payment obligations for three months, allowing the couple to pull their finances together and explore the possibility of getting assistance under the “Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan.” Nothing worked. The local HUD counselor determined that they were not eligible for direct support. The assistant manager at the bank kept repeating the options with growing impatience, knowing the answers beforehand. Qualification for any solution

was contingent on a flow of income and that was not to be seen. At least they escaped from the claws of a foreclosure rescue company that demanded up-front payment to take over their debt and turn them into renters. The real estate agent who sold them the house three years ago warned: “You would see no end of complications. I’m telling you, I know how operate. They come up with a new demand and then with another until them too. You would be throwing good money after bad. Believe me, I talking about. Of course, this shouldn’t go any further. I’ve never Please!”

these people you default on know what I’m said this, OK?

Finally, they had to throw in the towel. The bank manager asked them into his office and told them “you are insolvent” in a tone that sounded like “you are toast.” Alan was the first college graduate in the family. They were so proud of him. His father, a former noncommissioned army officer -- with two consecutive tours of duty in Vietnam -- had a good job at the county surveyor’s office until a stroke took him out of the labor force. His mother was a supermarket cashier. There were uncles and cousins but he could not ask them for help. He was close only to his parents and to a maternal cousin, a guy known for his entrepreneurial ambitions. Unfortunately, all his business ventures had capsized and the last one wiped him out. He took out a business license as a trader, used his house as collateral to borrow money up to his ears, and imported a mother lode of gourmet chocolates from Italy, hoping to sell the stuff with a good markup to local restaurants, coffee shops, and boutiques. As luck would have it, a storm knocked out the electricity in the area soon after the cases arrived on an unexpectedly hot early spring day. By the time refrigeration was restored, all the bars and tablets were deformed and unsellable. He gave away most and ate the rest. He probably meant it when he said that if he ever saw another piece of chocolate in this life it would be too soon. On Eda’s side things were much better. Her parents lived near Bismarck, North Dakota and an uncle, down the Missouri River, on the East side of South Dakota. That’s where the solution came from, first tossed around as a joke, then discussed with disbelief, and finally accepted as the only reasonable alternative. Uncle Joe had a 320-acre farm and ranch. When he found out about what was happening to Eda and her husband he invited them to move in with his family. Eda politely refused but as things got worse, the exchanges with the uncle became more and more substantive. The question and answer sessions included Alan too, who sat next to Eda as she typed their answers on the computer. Joe explained that because of “rural flight” it was impossible to get enough manpower to work the farm at its full potential. “There is plenty of room for more soybeans and corn, corn, corn.” His voice turned husky when he said: “They are building another ethanol plant just 27 miles from here.” In a three-way phone conversation he told them: “The greens you eat are as organic as you pick them and you can forget about factory farm eggs, ja?” “Sounds good,” Edna and Alan answered in unison.

“Don’t expect frontier and pioneer life or ‘Grapes of Wrath.’ The combine I want to teach you how to operate, Alan, is air-conditioned. And there is music, theater, and arts in Sioux Falls. Kimberley and I go there often with the kids. Ja.” “Wonderful, Uncle Joe,” Eda agreed. “It’s a good life, serious and productive, and healthy. Plenty of fresh air . . . My high school English teacher told us way back . . . now how did it go? . . . ‘We are the stewards of blossoming and fruiting Earth.’ It’s from some poem. We get our hands and boots dirty but we don’t ruin our nerves with multitasking. So, pardners, do we have a deal?” Eda visited the farm as a young girl and remembered seeing beautiful sunsets through the branches of cedar trees; listening to the intermittent cluck-cluck of wild pheasants as she wandered the mossy shore of the pond. It was a deal. It had to be. Then the final notice without the possibility of reinstatement arrived. It specified the day. They decided to wait it out. On the eve, Alan pulled down the Old Glory his father gave him, carefully folded it and put it along with the two laptops into the station wagon already loaded with clothes, utensils, and assorted objects of sentimental value. He drove the car out of the garage and parked it at the curb. They sat at the fountain that Eda had designed. When lit, it could be seen from the house at night with the statue of a Greek athlete in the middle. Torso bent, the youth was eternally ready to throw his discus into the woods. People thronging on the terrace and around the kidney-shaped swimming pool during the house-warming party admired it as if it were fireworks on the Fourth of July. Alan called his parents on the cell to say good bye. He repeated the promise to visit but could not stop his mother’s tears. Dad talked again about “Nam.” “I learned that man is at his best in crisis,” he said. “Malice, greed and pettiness disappear in combat. Danger and dependence on one another bring out the best in us.” After hearing these words for so many years, Alan could finally relate The electrifying tension of being on the edge, to confront the radical took him over. He became aware of juices he never knew existed. Now he going right away, jumping with both feet on the ground from a hovering just like his father in the late 60s.

to them. presence felt like Huey --

They did not leave. The original decision of “until the last minute” prevailed. They sat on their soon-to-be abandoned wrought-iron garden chairs, talking and joking, reminiscing and planning. It was love all over again. They had coffee with stale doughnuts for breakfast next morning. Somehow they were certain that Eda got pregnant during the night. Commotion outside. The Sheriff Department’s cruiser arrived. Stir around the front door, then brutal, loud knocks on the open door.

Two deputies entered the house. They showed neither compassion nor contempt as they told them “Folks, it’s time to vacate the premises” and repeated the essence of the notice they were in the process of pasting on the wall: “You are enjoined from return for any reason or under any pretext -- what-so-ever.” Holding hands, each carrying a plastic traveling bag, the couple passed the neglected, weed-tangled bushes on the pathway to the front gate. There was a little crowd outside -- some neighbors and curious passer-bys. “Good luck, Alan, good luck Eda!” someone yelled. A woman with damp eyes pressed the two-year old boy she was holding closer to her chest. But the pity streaming toward this presumed modern-day Adam and Eve -- freshly chased from Paradise; shameful, in dire need of fig leaves -- never registered. They were intoxicated with deliverance, as if they had passed an entrance exam to a higher plane of dignity and freedom. Isn’t to be free, after all, to be open to all possibilities? A single-engine plane buzzed high in the blue sky as their car rasped away without self-pity or scorn. Will others follow them to touch the Earth, to reclaim a footing on it in a halfconscious act of homecoming? Goodness knows.