Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2010

Pastel Dreams  
Nathan Holic

On Friday, you close a refinance in Avalon Park, one townhouse in a long row, and the owner tells you that he thought about walking away because of the mold problem.
“Mold?” you ask. “This place is brand-new.”
“Foreclosure two units over,” he says. “They opened it up and there was water running out the door.”
“They left the water on?”
“For days. Floors, ceilings were ruined.”
You’ve seen quite a bit by now, all around Central Florida, where it seems as if “metropolis” status was conferred overnight, the population doubling in the last decade or two and the pine forests and Old Florida swamps and cypress domes leveled to make way for hundreds of khaki-colored housing developments, the adjustable rate mortgages impregnating wishful Puerto Ricans and disgruntled Northerners with American Dream aspirations—everyone gets a house, everyone gets a house!—and you even made your own business off the paperwork. But still, you’ve never seen this sort of thing in a place like Avalon Park, and you wonder how it could have ended like this: perhaps it was just retaliation against the bank, some dirtbag who was pissed off about the “raw deal” he got? But this is Avalon Park, 1950s suburbia resurrected with an expensive corporate spell, Pleasantville on steroids.
So it must have been something far worse.
A woman, you think.
And she certainly never thought it would end like this, did she? Sitting at the edge of the second-floor bathtub and turning the faucet handle one last time, cold water splashing against a stopped drain. The bathroom all empty now, save for soap scum on the tiles, toothpaste stains in the sink, cracked shower curtain rings on the rod above her.
Yes, it was a woman. Here in Avalon Park, a place that seemed to delight in images ripped from decades-old Good Housekeeping magazines—its billboards showcased housewives at the sink, watching children play soccer in the backyard while Daddy walked through the front door, smiling and holding his briefcase—a woman scorned would be only fitting.
            A woman who sat at the bathtub, who declared that she would wait five more minutes for her husband—no, her fiancé, much more tragic, and you decide that his name is something innocent but suspicious, like Simon—she would wait five more minutes for her fiancé Simon to arrive, and if he did not…she would surrender this townhouse and any dreams that she’d imagined for their future together. Yes, Simon is her fiancé, and they’d purchased this home in Avalon Park together, but it’s been two weeks since she’s seen him, since that final fight over…finances? No. Well, maybe that was part of it. Children. Children were more important.
Simon is just like you, probably, afraid that he isn’t fit for fatherhood, that he couldn’t even keep this home and this relationship alive, so how could he raise children? And yes, Simon travels, too, just like you. All over town. All over the state, maybe even the entire Southeast. Simon is an EMT, you decide, and years before, when she first met him, he’d just returned from a stint with FEMA in New Orleans, face weathered as if he’d just returned from front-line combat. Even then, she sensed in him a touch of the adventurous, a dash of reckless ambition. And although she chided him for his frequent all-nighters, for the tire marks he left in the front lawn when he grumbled home, drunk, she knew from the start that this was a possibility, that he might leave and never come back. That her marriage was built on a Florida sinkhole.
So now? Two weeks. And after they’d both discussed what to do with the damned townhouse? In foreclosure, hoping for a miracle. So she shut off the power, spent today packing.
            “Did you know her?” you ask your client.
            “What?” the owner says. He’s clearing space from his kitchen table, collecting envelopes and flyers into a teetering pile at one edge so that you can lay the refinance paperwork flat on the table and he can sign on the document’s necessary lines twenty or thirty times, and then you can both go about your days. The interior of this particular townhouse isn’t as nice as you expected for Avalon Park, either, looks like a mish-mash of former college furniture tossed together haphazardly: black hundred-dollar futon as the living room couch, white Wal-Mart kitchen table, particle board entertainment center from Best Buy. And this guy? It’s noon, and it looks as if he’s just woken up, just slipped on a pair of jeans from the floor, a baseball cap from the futon.
            “The woman from the foreclosure,” you say. “Did you know her?”
            “How’d you know it was a woman?” he asks.
            “Oh.” You scratch your neck. “Just a guess?”
            But maybe—like this man—they were further from their dream than they even knew.
            You imagine her fingers dangling in the bathtub, water level rising.
            You imagine her looking around the home, empty now, but she can remember what it looked like three years ago, after Simon begged his father for money for a down payment on a townhouse whose monthly mortgage seemed reasonable (“Do you even know what ‘adjustable rate’ means?” his father must have asked, but Simon was persistent…that’s one thing she loved about him, that he was a man and he would get things done), after she applied for credit cards at Lowe’s and Rooms-to-Go. Resale value, Simon kept saying, and she liked that; it sounded smart, hell, was the same sort of thing you said about the house you bought for yourself and Stacy. And so they installed hardwood floors, plantation shutters. Custom ceiling fans, stainless steel appliances, maybe the same brand—Whirlpool—as you. There was a feeling back then, even though she knew—you knew—that they couldn’t afford the leather couches and the 52-inch flat-panel HDTV, that this was the start to something great. Avalon Park: 1,800 acres of freshly built town centers and pastel-colored colonial homes and dog parks and lakes with fountains, new subdivisions sprouting from the dirt daily. A dream for her, whose father worked as…a grocery store butcher? Yes. She’d hang a porch swing, buy flowers to plant below windowsills, send children to “A” schools, host Thanksgiving, and her parents would travel from Valdosta and they’d tell her that she’d made something of herself.
            “Yeah, it was a woman,” the owner tells you now. “Hope they arrest her.”
            “But no mold here?”
            “Thank God, man. Thank God for that. But her next-door neighbors are fucked, and we’re probably going to see this shit in our next HOA payment.”
            You lay the first binder-clipped batch of paperwork onto the table, one page immediately stained by a glob of duck sauce or Tabasco or something. The owner spits on his finger, tries to rub the sauce from the table, then shrugs.
            “Almost made me want to walk away,” he says, “if I couldn’t get this refinance. Everyone else is doing it.”
            “Here in Avalon?” you ask.
            “You ain’t driven around?”
            “I don’t come out this far, not often.”
            “Avalon Park,” he says. “Isn’t what they sold us, I’ll tell you that.”
            “Hmm. Didn’t know that.”
            So now, you imagine that…maybe she learned that hers was not even the only home mired in foreclosure here in this unincorporated Orange County development, the same as Stone Creek, your own “gated community” on the opposite end of Orlando where you will return in a few hours to your own empty home, surrounded by dozens of forgotten-about two-story units with “For Sale” signs pounded into weed-thick front yards. Maybe that’s what set her off, finally, after two weeks of waiting for Simon. She drove around the neighborhood, counted at least fifty properties whose yards had gone wild, oak branches careening into windows. They were everywhere, these shattered dreams, you know it, she knew it, but still, she was not concerned about “everywhere.” She was concerned about “here,” this townhouse, her reckless fiancé—who said he had a plan to get them out of this mess, but who had now left her saddled with a property that had devalued $150,000 since its purchase. “Underwater,” he kept saying.
            Two weeks since she’d seen him, and no doubt he had a plan. The only problem: Simon’s plan didn’t include her. (But you included Stacy…it was Stacy who said she was finished with your ideas and your investments, who no longer wanted her name attached to yours.)
            And you see the water cresting the bathtub’s rim, breaking into one, two, three glassy streams careening over the porcelain. Water collects at her feet now, so she stands, backs out of the empty bathroom.
She’s stripped anything of value from the home…the stove, the shutters…it’s in the U-Haul outside. Simon’s things? They’re still here, and if he’d shown up, maybe she’d have stopped the water and helped him pack and they could still start over somewhere else together. But he left her, and even though both their names are on the mortgage, the bathtub runs; she wants this to happen, you want this to happen; soon, the water will spill out into the hallway, onto the hardwood, will seep into the floors, through the ceiling, down the stairs.
Through the wall, she hears the neighbor—maybe she suspects that he deals drugs, and probably Simon spent far too many nights over there, smoking, drinking—playing Guitar Hero again, so loud that it rattles her mirrors, but though she is angry, she can still hear the noise of the bathtub, water building, building, and this makes her feel good, imagining all of Avalon Park—her house, his house, the neighbor’s house, the entire pastel dream—dripping, melting, washing away.
“We done?” your client asks, signing the final form.
            You wonder if there is something wrong with you, that this is what you imagine, that no matter where you go, you stare at front doors and into windows and come away with a tragedy.
            “You do this shit all day, huh?” he says.
            “That’s right,” you say. You slip the papers into a FedEx envelope that you will ship to the sponsoring bank; upon receipt, your contract is fulfilled, and—for a few hours’ work—you will earn a respectable fee.
            “Sounds boring,” he says.
            “Sometimes,” you say. He has looked through thirty pages of banking language, but in that time, you’ve convinced yourself that you can smell the mold and the washed-out dreams. In that time, you’ve convinced yourself that this was your own fiancé, that this was Stacy, waiting for you at the bathtub, and that if you can just rush home, she will still be there. But she’s gone now, and still you own your home in Stone Creek, twenty minutes from Avalon Park, and somehow this is worse than Simon and the U-Haul and the empty bathroom and the flood and mold, because they all have new lives and you are still trying to convince yourself that there remains a twitch of life in your own dead dreams.

Nathan Holic teaches Composition and Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida. He works as a Project Editor with Casperian Press, and currently serves as the Comic Editor for The Florida Review.  His fiction has appeared in The Portland Review, Iron Horse Literary Journal, The Roanoke Review, The Saranac Review, and elsewhere.