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Property Value By Dan Barcan | Trying to do too much, he nearly dropped first a dish, and then his son, when the phone rang. He gathered himself, put the plate on the table, and grabbed the receiver as it rang again. By the time he had greeted the caller, she was already into her script. "Good evening, sir, is there a Mr. Verano available?" said an artificially cheerful but human voice on the other end. Verano hated to speak to inanimate objects; he felt they were mocking him in some strange way, in that they had nothing to prove, being machine, and he always did, being man. He wasn't much happier with this development, though. "What is this, a sales call? I got a lot going on here," he said in a growl. Verano was a thin, sloping man who wore twenty extra pounds that stuck out like a costume around his waist. His frame bowed under wrinkled khakis from work and a rotting t-shirt, corporate slogan faded to crunchy colored dots that he picked at while he wedged the phone between ear and shoulder. He was barely listening, thinking up his next line. Verano acted most aggressive towards those who deserved it least, waiting to hear if their responses would show surprise or apology or heighten the pitch of the belligerence. He relished the contrast between the human interaction most people expect and his sudden, whining brand of anger and force, even as it blended with the almost immediate shame that followed. If the other conversant fought back, he pretended he had done nothing, waited for an apology. If they flinched, he pushed harder. The voice on the other end gave no indication of having noticed his tone. "Sir, I'd like to offer you the opportunity to take advantage of some of Get Out!'s tremendous savings on personal outdoor leisure products." Trina Meriwether said the company name just as she had been trained the week before, heavy on both words and the exclamation point, which made her feel ridiculous, and she always fumbled through the next lines: "America loves the great outdoors. A good backyard hammock is an investment, not a purchase. Invest in yourself." She didn't really see any difference between those words, having no investments and few purchases herself, and so she could never figure out what word to emphasize; consequently she felt she had little idea what she actually might be saying to these people. It was at this point that she became furious - though silently so - with them, which, she had noticed even in only one week on the job, matched up nicely to the point when most people became angry with her. She sighed an almost silent breeze of chagrin and resignation and stared at the clock in front of her, red digits showing fourteen, fifteen, sixteen seconds. Americans might like the great outdoors, but they didn't like being told what was what, and they didn't seem to like being told, however indirectly, to buy hammocks. "You're selling hammocks there? I'm trying to get dinner on the table. Jesus -." His youngest son ran towards the back door, trying to follow the dog into the small, disappointing yard. "Hey - Billy! Come back here!" Verano lunged for his older boy, phone still under his chin and baby in his arms, and caught him by the straps of his overalls. The leap towards the door took him too far from the phone's cradle to hang up, which is what he preferred to do. But now he had two kids writhing in his hands, fighting his concern, feeding on each other's energy, and he had no time for that luxury. He fought her as best he could. "Yeah, well," he said in a voice that had lost most of its growl and substituted weariness in its stead, "we can't fit that crap in our yard." He looked out his back door at the patchy grass, or, seen differently, patchy dirt. The dry remains of early spring flowers and two cherry tomato plants hung like death masks against the wooden fence. There was actually, he noted, just the right amount of space between the post at the corner of the Gilwin's fence and the brick of his aging garage for a hammock. Trina went on, though he was not listening. "But before you say no, think about this: Americans spend almost twenty-seven hours per person working on their lawns every year, and only eight hours enjoying them. Isn't it time to change all that, sir? Or perhaps you'd be interested in the -" she winced, hating the sheer stupidity of the awful, awful name of their best selling-chair - "the Out to Pasture, our.our most popular chair." Lyle, her grating supervisor with unconvincing hair plugs and a mouth teeming with bluish teeth, insisted that his callers describe things as "most popular," or, "a big hit," rather than, "top-selling." Lyle said, as they all tried not to stare at his mouth or his head, "People like goin' with the flow, bein' on that bandwagon, keepin' up with those Joneses. Nobody likes gettin' sold something." Trina Meriwether could hear, she could almost feel those g's being lopped off of his words and tossed away like ends of bread loaves, and it offended her. To Trina, Lyle was the human equivalent of diet soda, of a man-made pond at the edge of the highway - both had the shape of something worth trying, but both were so wrong, so polluted and bitter and downright annoying as to be complete wastes of time. He heard nothing. He looked over the fence at the neat rows of tomatoes, lettuce, and peas that Marjorie Gilwin planted and brought over every two weeks this summer, the gift basket laden with equal helpings of vegetables, pity, and old-fashioned curiosity. Marjorie Gilwin was dying to know exactly why Nancy had packed up the car and driven off just after the Memorial Day Parade, with no sign of her even five weeks later. The Gilwins got less sun, but they managed, through what Verano could only assume was the careful allocation of exactly all of their non-working and sleeping hours to lawn care, to maintain a flawless carpet of Zoysia grass from fence to fence. "We got a hell of a big garden out there, Miss." He made himself smile, as if she could see him. "No place for a hammock. Sorry." "A garden?" she said, unaware, in her excitement, of her departure from the script. Lyle forbade this kind of chatter, but the Get Out! Employee Handbook made no specific mention of such a ban. "Well, that must be nice, Mr. Verano." Human conversation threw him from his script as well. "Well," he began carefully, "it's ok. Lot of work. What, you don't have a garden? Pretty easy to start one." He looked from yard to yard again. "No, no." She sounded conversational, such a telemarketing novice that she had not yet internalized the first rule: sell or hang up, but move quickly. Calls equaled money, talk was anything but cheap. "I'd love it, but we just live in a teeny apartment. We've got no room for one. Maybe someday, when we buy a house." She laughed the obviously false laugh of people unsure of what to say next but certain they want whatever it turns out to be to sound friendly and non-confrontational. The clock hit five minutes and reset to zero with an electronic click, taking Trina with it. No personal calls; that was in the handbook. He didn't hear the fake laugh. He didn't hear the part about buying a house, or that she had no room for a garden. He did not hear her say that she lived in a teeny apartment or the click of Trina vanishing. In huge red letters, backed by a screaming soundtrack of train announcers over claxon horns and Army buglers, blared the word "we." His hitched the boys up on his hips, gathered them with his bony arms. He looked again at the two yards, representing the range of possibilities on Baker Avenue, and to the table, with food cooling in foil containers and serving dishes with plastic wrap still waving from their rims, and he heard the empty static hiss of the phone where Trina Meriwether used to be. He held the phone to his ear anyway, lobe sweating to the hard plastic end, and he wished Trina was still on the line. He wished Nancy was on the line, actually, or anyone, for that matter. It could be anyone. He still wanted to talk about hammocks and gardens and Marjorie Gilwin and things for dinner. Maybe he'd put the boys on and they could talk too. Just five more minutes, even. |
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