Any Place I Hang My Hat by Susan Isaacs

Author:Susan Isaacs [Susan Isaacs]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781453219690
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2011-04-15T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

LIKE SO MANY of the gated communities I’d seen in Florida during the Bush-versus-Gore mess, Hibiscus Pointe in Boca Raton had a security booth with an overlarge sign on the window announcing the security guard’s name, so that even residents with fairly advanced cataracts could see RODRIGO. Rodrigo, actually, was worth seeing: noble head, manly brows, luscious lips that needed only a touch of ChapStick.

“Hi. I’m here to see Rose Moscowitz. My name is Amy Lincoln.”

He pressed his computer monitor touch-screen two or three times, then flashed an Antonio Banderas knowing look that said, You would find me wickedly amusing, although his actual words were: “Yes, Miss Lincoln, she’ll meet you at the clubhouse. Do you know where it is?” When I shook my head, he punched a key. A printer wearily exuded directions. The gate rose slowly.

Speed bumps every twenty feet or so along Hibiscus Boulevard made sure I didn’t get anywhere at a New York clip.

I wondered if anybody from New York could truly love this life. Probably, because more and more people wanted to live this way. It wasn’t only rich whites. And not just in Florida, either. All over the country, I’d noticed the haves of all races, colors, and creeds hurrying to get themselves guarded so that their have-less and have-not fellow citizens could not steal their botanical prints. I wondered if this wouldn’t be the true Reagan-Bush legacy: not a return to the laissez-faire, invisible-hand capitalism of Adam Smith, but a slide into a tsarist state, where government existed to enrich the rich.

I was minutes from meeting my grandmother. Clutching the steering wheel as if it were a lifesaver, I drove at the prescribed fifteen miles per hour past single-family homes and blocks of two-story attached houses the signs pointed out as villas. There appeared to be three permissible colors for residences in Hibiscus Pointe: muted pink, pale apricot, and cirrhotic yellow. The development did not seem particularly Floridian. I had no sense an ocean was ten miles away. The Pointe was a fungible community with palm trees that, but for the humidity, could have been in Phoenix.

Rose Moscowitz: The more I thought about meeting her, the more my broken ribs throbbed as if my pounding heart were attached to them. I slowed to about ten miles per hour, fearing that in this unstrung state, I’d mistake the accelerator for the brake and run over a urologist in a golf cart. After a couple of wrong turns onto Orchid Circle and Bird of Paradise Way, I got to the clubhouse, large and apricot, with a red-tiled roof. I gave over the car to a valet named MIGUEL and walked inside, into a blast of air that could have originated in Antarctica.

No men waited in the marble-floored, crystal-chandelier-lighted frostiness of the clubhouse lobby. Chairs and couches, upholstered in dark green chintz decorated with pink, red, and yellow hibiscus, were mostly occupied by women of a certain age, i.e., the age that would qualify them to be grandmothers of people my age.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.