659: What Denny meant ...
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 7 concludes
WHAT DENNY MEANT when he said that the resort seemed out of place was what a large chunk of the population of Babbington thought: that Babbington would be better off without the resort, which most of the people who lived in the older part of town called “the motel.” The resort had been a controversial topic throughout Babbington since it was first proposed, long before construction began. As the buildings began to take shape, opinions formed, and subsequently, with every small step toward completion, more and more of the opinions solidified.
Nothing like the resort had been built in the town before, and to many Babbingtonians it seemed folly to build anything like it now. Ariane’s father resisted even looking at it, but finally he gave in to his wife’s prodding and made a Sunday excursion to see it, while it was still under construction. They pulled up across the street, near the River Road Marina, where boats out of the water for the winter were shrouded in flapping canvas. Mr. Lodkochnikov was astonished to find so many of his acquaintances and fellow baymen there with their families, parked along the street, come to see the progress on a Sunday, when they could examine it without being seen, give it a good look without feeling that they were intruding on something that wasn’t any of their business—or, more accurately, to look it over when there wasn’t likely to be anyone around to try to make them feel that they were intruding on something that wasn’t any of their business. It was a social occasion, an outing like the town picnic on the Fourth of July in Bolotomy Rocks Park. People were visiting one another’s cars, leaning on the fenders, smoking, and talking.
Mr. Lodkochnikov looked the resort over for half an hour or so. He crossed the street. He walked up and back, from one edge of the resort property to the other, staying in the road, where no one could tell him he didn’t have every right to be, never setting foot on the property itself. Then he crossed the road and joined a cluster of his cronies who had assembled to hear what he would have to say.
For a while, he said nothing. They all stood around. Now and then someone would murmur something or other, and someone would agree, in a murmur, and someone would demur, in a murmur. Then Mr. Lodkochnikov cleared his throat and spat. His friends were silent. Now he would speak.
“It’s not a Bottomy thing,” he said.
“Nope,” said one of his cronies.
“Sure ain’t,” said another.
“Not a Bottomy thing.”
(“Bottomy” is the name for Babbington used by Babbingtonians whose families have lived in the town for several generations. They—and people who want to be mistaken for them—call themselves Bottomers or Bott’mers or Bottoms or Botts. Bottomy is an elided version of Bolotomy, a corruption of the Native American name for the place that the English later called Babbington.)
In a way, Mr. Lodkochnikov was right. The resort was an invasive presence, like the intrusion of a speck of foreign matter into an amoeba. The resort was the first indication of a change that would alter the town in ways that not many were able to predict then. It was the thin edge of the wedge, the very first move away from local control to control from outside. This “resort motel” was owned by a distant corporation that owned many similar resorts in towns that the directors of the corporation considered similar to Babbington, and it would be managed by a man who had never lived in Babbington before. From this invasion, it wouldn’t be a long trip to a Babbington colonized by fast-food outlets and branches of national department stores that would displace the dusty local stores on Main Street, stores that sold necessities, stores managed by people who had lived in Babbington long enough to know what Babbingtonians considered necessities, restaurants in which the cooks followed the recipes in their mother’s heads, clothing stores owned by people who chose the stock to meet the local tastes, rather than to alter them. In a time that seems very short to me now, Babbington would become a branch of something, a suburb of somewhere else, rather than a place of its own. Today, there are no farms left in Babbington, and the bay is so badly polluted that the clam harvests are puny and fishing is insignificant. It used to be that the grocery stores in town, even the stores that were part of chains, like the Babbington outlet of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, sold fish fresh from the municipal docks where Ariane was wrestling with Denny. The clever breadwinner would save some money by stopping at the docks on the way home from work and buying clams or fish directly from the boat. Eels, crabs, and flounder—they were local and delicious. They were part of the town’s appeal. Everything that outsiders found attractive about Babbington was local and delicious—like Ariane. It isn’t hard to imagine an advance man for the motel chain standing in the darkness, looking out across the small intervening distance and admiring the local product, the girl in the convertible under the street lamp on the dock, and envying the boy with her. To him, she would have been exotic in the same way that the local fish was exotic.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 659, Mark Dorset considers Small Town Life and Lore; Language: Dialect; and Change, Evolution, Mutation from this episode.
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