I hated having to go back down to Florida for Christmas—especially after leaving school and starting life on my own. What was I going back to? A drive-in movie theater whose last movie before it closed was Lawrence of Arabia; a grocery store with two refrigerated cases filled with ice cream sandwiches, its concrete floor strewn with sand; an old clapboard inn that had been gutted by a fire; a decrepit pier on pilings above a receding lake; a grid of sandy streets on which some people from Pennsylvania had built small stucco houses when they founded the community in the 1920s. There was nothing to do at night but lie in bed reading while listening for the whistle of the old freight train, the dog barking down the street, the squirrels and raccoons racing across the roof, the sound of my parents breathing across the hall that made me think of the ship my mother had taken me on when we traveled to New York, when she lay on the bunk bed beneath mine, telling me that the way to fall asleep was to relax my entire body, starting with my fingers and toes. Unfortunately, we were not on a ship in the middle of the ocean—though I might as well have been. Ten years after my parents had retired, I was the only person my age on our street who had not moved away and married. I was the only member of my generation walking out in a navy-blue cashmere sweater with his father’s scalloped potatoes to the community park where the neighbors gathered a few days before Christmas to build a bonfire and share a meal. The reason was simple: I was not about to marry and start a family of my own.

  Years later the daughter of a neighbor who’d flown to Florida from San Francisco to take care of her dying father, a retired air-conditioning salesman who lived across the street from us who had prostate cancer, remarked to me with breezy nonchalance as we took a walk one day, “Everybody here knows you’re gay, you know.” Gee, no, I wanted to say, I didn’t. But I went on pretending anyway. Walking out with my father’s casserole to the Christmas party, I was still the dutiful son, unlike all the other boys my age on that street who’d moved away and already started families of their own. Having to return at Christmas—which is, after all, the celebration of a baby—made me so depressed that I tried thinking up excuses that would absolve me from having to make the trip, anything that got me out of going back to Florida, which felt, for so many reasons, so much like returning to a prison that it seemed right that the actual penitentiary in which the serial killer Ted Bundy was incarcerated was just twenty miles away.

  By that point I’d stopped trying to lighten the drive home from the airport with my father with conversation. We simply drove in silence. I even began taking a bus from Jacksonville to Starke to reduce the distance he had to drive to pick me up—till Greyhound discontinued the route. One thing remained the same, however. The boredom of the place had made of my mother such a devotee of television that I knew she would not come out to greet me if my arrival coincided with a dramatic moment on Donahue.

  There was never a fire in the fireplace when it got cold, because when we tried to have one the living room filled up with smoke. But it was very pleasant in December—the reason, I suppose, for Florida’s popularity. But it was not just that; it was good to be home. The scent that greeted me when I walked into the house at Christmastime, a mélange of the Pine-Sol and Lemon Pledge the cleaning lady used every other week on the furniture, warmed my heart; the gleam of white terrazzo floors, the comfort of the house. By Christmas the camellias my father planted were in bloom, the kumquat covered with bright golden fruit, the poinsettias red, the lake a silver-blue. The camellias that fell from the bough decomposed on the ground in the same shape they had on the branch, while in the sky above, the fantail of a jet caught the last rays of sunset, a sunset so luminous the bands of color seemed to be submerged beneath a layer of ice. At night the slender scimitar of a new moon floated high above the live oaks, and as I lay in bed listening to the freight train rumbling through town I wondered how I could ever have not wanted to come back.

  Nevertheless, the fact that for many years I was still carrying the casserole to the Christmas party in my cashmere sweater, the only unmarried child my age on that street turning up each year, was a source of deep embarrassment. The communal cheer the neighbors exuded, standing around the bonfire in the cold night, with whiskey and beer in hand, all of them part of the Great Chain of Being, made me feel like a fraud. I had nothing in common with them; I was not going to reproduce. I had stopped wearing a suit and tie to church, but after Mass nothing had changed: my mother stood on the steps talking to people, while I fled to the airless car.

  After Christmas a wonderful peace descended on the town; the humiliation of the annual Christmas party was behind me. No one ever asked how long I was going to stay. In New York I was still working as an office temp, typing up reports on American attitudes toward Speedo bathing suits at ad agencies or proofreading loan agreements at law firms in Midtown office buildings late at night—there was no reason to go back to Manhattan. That way I witnessed the other seasons. In March the yard turned into a coral reef composed entirely of azaleas, camellias, and dogwood. In April the reef crumbled into a fine white dust that settled on the hedge like talcum powder after a car went down our dirt road. In May every Wednesday the widow across the street who brought us a tin of homemade rum balls at Christmas waited in a green pantsuit outside her house to be picked up for bridge at the Women’s Club by her best friend. Then, just when everything was so parched that even the azaleas had started to droop, there was the sound of thunder and the daily monsoon arrived.

  Lightning in the seventies, it seems to me, was more dramatic than it is today. Mrs. McAfee across the street would go into her closet and close the door, sit on the floor, and play solitaire until it stopped, while my father went out onto the back porch to sit in one of the folding chairs and watch, as if he were at the theater. My mother, who told us not to use the telephone or the shower because we might be electrocuted, stood behind the louvers of the front door crying to my father, “Get in here now, you fool! Why are you doing this to me?” while he sat and watched the sheets of rain cascade into the driveway, relieved momentarily of the depression into which the idleness of his retirement had degenerated.

  Once it got so hot that a ceiling fan was no longer enough to let one fall asleep at night, my father turned on the central air-conditioning—like the bishop blessing the shrimp fleet in Tarpon Springs. The house changed character from a breezy tent to a shadowy cave. During the day the lamps were lighted, the curtains and shades all drawn. The only sound was the air issuing from the vents along the baseboards, like that of a patient on a ventilator. Our household god was the inventor of the thing that makes modern Florida habitable, which must be why, I discovered one day while taking a tour of the Capitol in Washington, one of the two statues representing the state in its rotunda is of the man who invented air-conditioning.

  There always seemed to be a congressional hearing of some sort on TV during those years; the reason didn’t matter. Together we watched the funeral of JFK, the riots at the Democratic convention, the Watergate hearings, all of it presided over by Walter Cronkite. In between these historical events there was the low clink of the golf ball hitting the pin as my parents sat in the shadowed den, watching yet another PGA tournament and, every four years, the gymnastics and platform diving at the Olympics that transfixed me. In the meantime the peninsula on which we lived, a hunk of Florida swamp that a man named Mr. Peters had divided up into lots shortly before he died, experienced a building boom. Some of the new people worked at the mine that the Dupont Corporation owned outside town, where they dredged up the sand to extract a mineral used in house paint; others for a smaller company that was mining sand itself off Highway 21. The rest were retired couples.

  And just about then, as if to prove to the latter that Florida is indeed a fearful fraud, a drought began, a drought so severe that the Big Lake separated into several bodies of water cut off from one another by dry land on which trees began to grow. As we drove back from Gainesville there would be rain all the way, and then, a few miles from home, the pavement was dry. Someone on the town council got a grant from the federal government to build drainage ponds and culverts all over town to facilitate runoff during storms, but—as if our hubris had angered the gods—it stopped raining altogether. My father decided to cut down our big pines because it was thought they drew lightning; and the common park that had been a thicket of palmettos and grapevines when we arrived, a remnant of unspoiled Florida, was cleared by the neighbors because they said palmettos harbored snakes, though it seemed to me it was because people needed an outlet for their energy. My father grew so bored he began drinking, so much my mother threatened to leave him. By that time the train tracks that ran through town had been ripped up and converted to a bike trail, the nightly whistle was gone, and shortly afterward a shopping mall was built outside of town, along with a Hardee’s, a Burger King, and a McDonald’s, not to mention a karate school, a computer store, and a health food shop, because so many people from Jacksonville had moved to town.

  My parents had long since traded in their convertible—too jaunty, too young—for a Chevrolet Caprice so big one could have hung a chandelier from the roof. Trips to Chicago shrank to trips to the grocery store and the golf course on the edge of town. Florida was where they lived, where I kept coming back, though nobody asked me questions anymore about what I was doing. One day, when I was sitting in the back seat of the car as we were waiting for a railroad train to go by on our way to the mall, my mother turned back to me and said, apropos of something I forget, “You are a separate person, you know,” but I felt I wasn’t. I couldn’t get away from them, which is why I kept coming back to Florida.

  Change is an omen of death, Santayana says in a book I can no longer find. It started, I see now, when my father’s favorite neighbor, a retired high school janitor, came down with pneumonia and died. Before very long my father became everybody’s favorite pallbearer. Another couple moved to assisted living in Jacksonville without even saying goodbye because, we learned later, one of them had begun to show signs of dementia. Mrs. Price took a cruise and returned with a respiratory illness that put her in the hospital, and then the grave two weeks later. It used to be “See Naples and Die”—now it’s Alaska. The widow across the street who played bridge at the Women’s Club and brought us a tin of homemade rum balls every Christmas vanished without a word of goodbye because her closest friend, another widow, had decided it was time for them to move into a home in Jacksonville. And then the childhood friend my mother had stopped to have lunch with the day they were searching for a place to live expired after a struggle with cancer. And Mr. Sullivan, the banker from New Jersey who lived down the street, became so depressed in his retirement that when he walked around the park every day beside his wife—six times equaled a mile—the blue eyes behind his glasses were glistening with tears even when he smiled and said hello.

  Not long after that the Sullivans went back to New Jersey. The reason for such a move was always the same: to be near the children. The handsome Irish priest who loved to quote Shakespeare after a few drinks had long since been assigned another, more remote parish in western Florida, and the young homosexual who hung around with rich widows my mother’s age turned into an alcoholic real estate agent a few years after graduating from the University of Florida. One winter when I was living in New York he called me from his hotel and asked if I could recommend places to go, but I was so afraid that if I gave him what he wanted it would acknowledge the homosexuality we had in common that I recommended some jazz spots in the Village, which were obviously not what he was looking for. But I could not take the risk. He drank; he gossiped; he was going back to Florida. Shortly after returning, in fact, he fell apart. After spray-painting obscenities on one of his favorite hostesses’ cars he was banished, as in medieval times, from the county by a local judge, and after that moved up the coast to manage an antiques store on St. Simons Island, where he died in his forties of diabetes.

  The only time my parents came to visit me in New York I showed them nothing of my private life. The things we did were so touristic that one day my mother asked me, when we went to a diner for lunch, to choose a song from the jukebox so she could know what sort of music I liked. It was her way of trying to understand my generation—her way of trying to understand me—that knowledge I kept from them so unfairly because I could not imagine sharing the truth with them. I perused the selections, knowing all along that the sort of music I liked could be found only in dance clubs downtown at four in the morning in a crowd of homosexuals, and chose a song by Carole King: “It’s Too Late.”

  Leaving Florida, nevertheless, I always felt regret; though when I found myself back in New York my mother’s voice on the telephone seemed so shrunken and small, I vowed that I would never waste time in that town again. How could I? I was not responsible for her happiness; she wanted me to live, and life was wasted every day I was there. Look how the noiseless spider, the relentless metronome, the secret thief, had staked their claim on even these two people, these once glamorous parents who had turned into a pair of country mice. Indeed, I’d made a firm decision that there was no reason to waste another moment of my life in that dismal town, even on visits, when one day in September I picked up the phone and learned that my mother, a week after slipping in the shower on a ship going up the coast of Alaska, had fallen at my sister’s and broken her neck.

  The next day I flew north to live with my sister and her family till our mother had finished with rehabilitation, and then flew back with her in a wheelchair to Florida.

  By the time I went back to Florida with my mother the neighborhood had changed. People who lived on the street had died, many of them taken away—weeping as they were driven off—just before that happened to the places their children lived so the children could take care of them, although that meant they ended up in communities where they knew no one but their offspring. A decade later, after my mother died, there was only one set of the original neighbors left—the McAfees, a couple who lived across the street in a house designed by a local architect overlooking what had once been the Big Lake. It was her second marriage; her first husband had been a wealthy man from Atlanta whose philandering she could no longer stand. Mr. McAfee had retired as the personnel director of the subsidiary Dupont operated outside of town. After retiring he continued his work in human services, going around to all the new neighbors, knocking on their doors, and welcoming them. His wife continued to play solitaire in her closet during thunderstorms, and once cable television was installed, she started collecting dolls she found on the Home Shopping Network. The UPS truck was pulling up before their house every day, it seemed, until she began to fail and was moved to a nursing home near town that today is a puppy shelter—a small establishment with only six beds that I’d rejected for my mother because I assumed it couldn’t offer sufficient care. But that was not the reason I didn’t visit Mrs. McAfee there. Having spent time in another nursing home, the one in which my mother was installed after her return to Florida, had made visiting one not easier, but harder. I was like doctors and nurses after they retire: they’re in no mood to give you sympathy for your medical problems. Nor could I bear the idea of seeing this woman—so fastidious she wore jewelry when walking her dog—in a hospital gown; instead I watched her husband’s car go down the street every day on his way to visit his wife with the Lhasa Apso to which they were both so devoted yapping on his shoulder.

  One evening while driving home from a visit to his wife, the medicine my neighbor was taking to suppress hiccups made him so drowsy he fell asleep and lost control of the car, which left the road, continued airborne for a short distance, and then landed on top of someone’s mailbox. Neither my neighbor nor the dog was injured, and Mrs. McAfee died without ever knowing that her Oldsmobile had been totaled.

  My neighbor seemed to take the loss of both his wife and their Oldsmobile with equanimity. When, however, he told me a year later that the dog had died, he wept. He could scarcely mention the dog’s name six months after this event without crying. It was the dog’s death, I think, that led Mr. McAfee to say he was “ready to go now anytime the good Lord wants.” Instead his son came down from Maine to get him. My neighbor sent his offspring back to Maine alone, but compromised by putting his house up for sale, and went back to work pulling weeds. I took comfort in the fact that houses took forever to sell here, because I didn’t want to lose him; after my mother died I’d had enough of change. I continued to walk across the dirt road between our houses almost every day to visit him: the last vestige of the old neighborhood. Time seemed to stop. Life, after all these deaths, had resumed a certain order. It was a dry spring. One day succeeded another. I liked coming back from my nightly walk and seeing, at the end of the drive, the lighted window of my bedroom, a perfect place to read, and then turn off the lamp and lie there listening to the patter of animal feet on the roof.

  When I finally went up onto the roof one day to inspect it I could see Mr. McAfee kneeling on his lawn, pulling weeds under a conical straw hat, as patient as a farmer in a rice paddy. What I could not identify were the animal droppings scattered on the roof. The roof was in bad shape—plants were growing out of cracks in the tar and gravel; dead branches broken off the live oaks lay strewn across the shingles. The entire roof obviously needed to be patched or replaced. Yet I did nothing about it—because I had no desire to go through the commotion that involved. When it rained I simply lay on my bed watching stains spread on the ceiling like Rorschach tests.

  One day not long after he’d put his house up for sale I went over to visit Mr. McAfee and found him sorting through albums of old photographs. He was sifting through the accumulation of fifty years of life in Florida. Some of the snapshots were of the neighborhood boys when we were adolescents who lived to water-ski. I did not tell him I’d idolized his son; I simply looked at the photographs of the two of us holding slalom skis in some far-off America that no longer existed, the one where water-skiers sent up arcs of water that caught the setting sun each time they swerved to recross the wake. That same day I told him I was thinking about building a fence between my yard and that of my neighbor on the east side, a relative newcomer who while I was away on a trip, I was convinced, had come onto my property and trimmed the lower branches of a magnolia tree, a tree I’d planted years ago to blot out the sight of his new house, thereby obscuring his view of the lake. When I asked the man sifting through photographs if he thought a fence was a good idea he replied without looking up, “Well, that depends on how long you plan to stay in Florida.”