Excerpt from Famous Builder

Famous Builder 1

In a deep socket of an empty acre lot in South Jersey, a wiry boy with dark eyebrows, burnished blond hair, and thick lenses in his glasses clears pathways through the milkweeds, trying to preserve as many of the leafy, muscular stalks as he can. He works harder than he's worked in weeks, so hard that he doesn't even hear his father's car engine in the distance, or his mother ringing the cowbell for him to come inside for dinner. This is Telegraph Hill: the first community he's built that he's genuinely proud of, from the curving of the cul-de-sacs as they wind through the woods, to the discrete street names he's penned in meticulous, Early American script on scraps of faux-antique wood he's pilfered from his father's workshop: Saybrook Road, Weston Drive, Lavenham Court, Henfield Road. No wonder his fingers are cracked and cut, his toes sore from using the front end of his sneaker as a tool.

The wind rustles the weeds. He's about to back up the slope, to look out over his first fully wooded community. His belief is so deep that he can practically see the lanterns trembling on, the hushed couples stepping up the sidewalks toward The Northfield, the most recent two-story model (vertical rough-hewn siding, copper-hooded bay window). Then Tommy Lennox, his neighbor, walks towards him with a football tucked beneath his arm, the faintest suggestion of a smirk around the corners of his lips. "What's that?" Tommy says.

A ripple, a blush to his skin. The boy's pleasure has been so private, so intimate, that he might as well have been making love to the land. He can't even raise his eyes. "A development," he says finally.

He swelters inside his shirt. The boy imagines Tommy stepping through the community casually, knocking street signs aside, crushing the tall can that stands for the silo at the entrance. Sweat drips down the center of his back. But when the boy finally lifts his head, he's surprised to see the animation in Tommy's face, the quizzical expression that suggests he's waiting to be shown around.

In no time at all, Tommy is building his own development, Willow Wood, in the open land beside the single pine along the back of the lot. He's out there every day, just as the boy is, digging with his mother's garden shovel, replanting tables of moss until the knees of his pants are soaked through. But why doesn't this feel right? The boy doesn't have the heart to tell Tommy that straight streets intersecting at right angles went out with 1949. And what to make of the names Tommy's assigned to them: Motapiss Road, Vergent Court. They practically carry an aroma, suggesting all sorts of things no one likes to talk about: flesh, death, the mysteries of the body. At least Tommy's sister has the good sense to know that she should pay attention to what's attractive. Although Cathy Lennox's "Green Baye" is entirely misnamed (what bay? what water?), the boy cannot help but be impressed with the added e, and with the skillful way her streets meander down the slope.

Still, neither of their projects can stand beside the elegance and understated good taste of Telegraph Hill.

Today all the neighborhood children roam the field, some down on their knees, others carving out streets, all squinting, foreheads tightened in concentration.

The boy looks up at the houses across Circle Lane where he and his friends spend their time when they're not in school or out here. Of course, it would be their misfortune not to live in a real development, but in a neighborhood in which all the houses are decidedly different from one another, with no consistent theme. Although his mother tries to invoke the word "custom" as often as she can, he's not having it. Most of his fifth-grade classmates live in the newest developments, where the wood-plank siding is coordinated with the trim (sage green with aqua, barn red with butter), always that pleasing sense of order and rhythm. Truth be told, he frets about living in a place with no name. Just to say "Timberwyck" or "Fox Hollow East" or "Wexford Leas" and be entirely understood! His dilemma even seems to bewilder that substitute teacher with the kind face and the gray, washed-out hair in whom he confides on day.

"You don't live in a development?" she says. "How could you not live in a development?"

Flushed, he turns away.

"Have you talked to your parents?"

He shakes his head. He steps back from himself watchful, distant. Silent boy, ghost, so weightless and emptied he barely has a body.