A Crime in the Neighborhood Page 12
The police had no leads. They would say only that they believed the murderer was someone from the area. Possibly even someone who had known Boyd. Possibly anyone we all might have met.
By Sunday, parents had begun letting their children play outside again. The morning stayed quiet; from our porch I could hear the perky, anodyne drone of cartoon voices, like a bee hum. By that afternoon bicycles began flashing past our house. Steven went down the block to shoot baskets with Mike and Wayne Reade. Julie locked herself in the bathroom to tweeze her eyebrows and came out looking red and furious. Across the street in the Sperlings’ yard, two visiting little girls in pink bathing suits ran squealing through the sprinkler while Mrs. Sperling and their mother sat on the front steps, leaning their elbows on their bare knees.
It was right around this time, day number three, when the tower of complimentary Peterman-Wolff magazines stacked on top of the television reached over my head, that my mother told Aunt Fran and Aunt Claire to stop calling.
Ever since their last visit, my aunts had telephoned two or three times a week. They thought my mother should take up golf; they had read that exercise was a “mood enhancer,” a phrase that made Julie choke on her chicken leg when my mother repeated it at dinner. They thought she might want to join a women’s encounter group. They recommended the benefits of knitting, yoga, consciousness-raising sessions, long bubble baths.
“Have you heard anything?” they would ask.
After the murder, both of my aunts had called every day.
“You’ve got to stop this,” my mother told Aunt Claire one night. “You’ve got to believe that I’m fine.”
From where I was sitting in the living room, I could see her as she paced back and forth in the kitchen, pulling the phone cord taut.
“Listen,” she said. “I appreciate your concern, but you’re making me feel like something’s wrong with me.”
Finally she paused by the refrigerator, the phone cord trailing behind her. “What does this do for you, Claire?” she said, in a flat tone I’d never heard her use before.
One rainy night that same week, we all came home from a movie to find Mr. McBride leading a well-dressed young Iranian couple into our basement to look at the boiler. My mother closed the door softly behind us, flushing as she stood in the hallway with her back against the jamb. Julie and Steven instantly evaporated, running up the stairs to their rooms on the balls of their feet.
“Please. Go right on ahead,” my mother told Mr. McBride, who, with his black suit and steepled eyebrows, looked like a mortician surprised by a reanimated client. “Don’t mind us. Go anywhere you like. Bathrooms, closets, anywhere. We’re just … we’re just—”
But she couldn’t seem to decide what it was that we were just doing in our own house, so she looked at the neat little Iranian couple, rustling in their pale linen clothes behind Mr. McBride.
“We’re selling our house,” she said. “Of course, you know that already.” She paused to laugh helplessly. “My daughter Marsha—this is Marsha.”
The Iranian couple looked at each other, then at Mr. McBride. My mother, intercepting this glance, added hurriedly, “If you have any questions, any … anything, we’ll be right here.”
She smiled one of her broadest smiles. The belt from her raincoat trailed on the floor by her feet, her heavy black purse dangled from one shoulder, and mud had splashed on her sneakers. The couple stared curiously for a long moment, as if we were some sort of rare, drab creatures they didn’t expect to encounter again; then silently they turned together toward the basement and filed down the basement steps. From the hallway, I could see the basement’s bare lightbulb glint off their sleek, bluish hair as they murmured near the Ping-Pong table.
“Hi, Lois,” said Mr. McBride, shifting in his crow-colored suit. “Didn’t hear you drive up.”
My mother smiled harder.
“Heard anything from Larry?” he asked after a moment, looking hesitantly down his long nose. “He’s quit the firm, you know. Officially, I mean. Resigned. We had a letter.”
My mother held her smile a moment longer, then she turned away. “I hadn’t heard.”
“Well, anything I can—Money. If you need any—?”
“No,” said my mother, turning quickly back around. “We’re all right for the moment, thank you, Harold. Shouldn’t you get back to your—?” She tilted her head toward the basement.
“Oh,” said Mr. McBride. “Oh, right.”
My mother kept her raincoat on, as if she were the uninvited visitor, pretending to sort through some old mail on the dining-room table. After a few minutes, the Iranian couple filed back up the steps ahead of Mr. McBride, their patent-leather shoes gleaming as they crossed the hall’s parquet floor. Looming again by the closet, my mother apologized twice for disturbing them.
“I hope you got to see everything you need to see,” she said. “Don’t let us rush you.”
They gazed liquidly at her. Then the man reached for the door to open it for his wife, and with a little start, my mother stood aside.
“Sorry to surprise you like that, Lois,” mumbled Mr. McBride, hunching his shoulders as he followed them out.
“No, no. My fault. Mea culpa,” said my mother gaily. She waved from the doorway as the Iranian couple tucked themselves like a pair of gloves into Mr. McBride’s hearselike black Oldsmobile.
But the front door had not quite shut before she hurled her purse across the living room. It hit the stack of magazines on top of the television and the whole column collapsed, washing magazines across the floor. A checkerboard of faces suddenly grinned up at us—young women’s faces with red lips and long eyelashes, men’s faces with their mouths open in speech, President Nixon’s face, Chairman Mao’s face, George McGovern’s face, George Wallace’s face, faces of movie actresses, athletes, businessmen, a whole population of faces, as if the days and weeks of the last few months had literally acquired faces. Faces of people we didn’t know. Faces not looking at us. Faces that wouldn’t care if we lived or died.
Upstairs, Julie and Steven came onto the landing. I could see them peering down the steps as, still wearing her raincoat, my mother began rushing around the room snatching up magazines and tossing them into corners. Damp hair stuck to her forehead. She grunted and stooped, her face and neck turning red, looking somehow animal in her wrinkled tan coat and spattered sneakers. I suddenly pictured her the way I’d seen her that night with my aunts, naked with a towel on her head, pink scar snaking into that dark shrub of hair.
When she had hurled most of the magazines across the room, she thundered over to where I was hanging on my crutches in the front hall, rushing up so close that I could see the fine mesh of perspiration clinging to the hair above her lip.
For a moment or two we stared at each other. I don’t know what she saw in my face—fear, repulsion, maybe simply surprise, which can be bad enough in certain circumstances. Maybe she saw the color of Ada’s hair on top of my head. Whatever it was, it made her do something she had never done before, and never did again. Panting, almost wheezing, she jerked back her arm and slapped me hard across the face.
I fell over, and my crutches fell on top of me before clattering against the floor. Almost immediately I felt a peculiar satisfaction. Then something dark and cold swept through me, a close and desperate feeling, like drowning.
“Mom,” Julie screamed from the top of the stairs.
The next moment my mother was on the floor pulling me onto her lap. Julie and Steven had gathered around us, but I could only see their bare legs and ankles from where I was lying. My mother said: “All right, it’s all right.”
She rocked me under the front-hall coat rack, her neck smelling moistly of rain and talcum powder. A vein throbbed against my cheek. I held myself very still, counting the beats until I couldn’t tell if I was counting my pulse or hers, or both of ours together.
“What’s going on?” Julie said, her hands hovering around her face. “Are you guys all right?”
said Steven, at exactly the same moment. They sounded frightened and confused and uncertain about whether they wanted to understand what had happened.
A rumble in my mother’s stomach seemed to come from mine. She stroked my hair and patted my back as the buttons on her raincoat dug into my collarbone.
“Are you okay?” Julie kept asking in a high-pitched voice. “Mom?” She had started to cry, shivering a little. “Mom? Mom?” She and Steven leaned toward each other, their faces identically smooth and worried.
“I’m fine,” said my mother at last, getting up. “I’m sorry—”
And that was when the phone rang. We listened to it ring again and again.
And we all knew: it could be my father calling. It could be him, at last, calling us from Nova Scotia.
I can picture him now just as I pictured him that night. He’s standing in an old-fashioned red wooden phone booth on a dark street, cars hissing past him, the collar of his jacket pulled up around his chin. The reflection of rain sliding down the glass of the booth slides down the side of his face. He bends toward the black phone box, bracing one hand against the side of the booth. His sideburns have grown longer. Someone has mended the earpiece on his aviator glasses with a safety pin. His voice says: Hello? Hello? He says, I miss you. I’m coming back. This has all been a big mistake.
Ringing filled the whole house, ringing louder and louder, closer and closer, until finally the ringing pushed us apart and my mother ran to answer it. A moment clicked by while she pressed the phone to her ear, staring down at the kitchen linoleum, her other hand touching her forehead.
“Hello, Fran,” she said at last, turning away from us. “Yes, of course I’m fine.” She turned around again, and then again, the phone cord wrapping gently around her neck.
Nine
It was Wednesday, July 26th, six days after Boyd Ellison had been murdered, and if you hadn’t known what had happened in our neighborhood, the street would have looked like any other suburban street in America.
The fathers all left for work in their white shirts and dark ties at their usual time, maybe even a fraction earlier than usual. Mothers went back to hanging out laundry in the backyard and tying scarves over their hair rollers before driving to the Safeway at the mall, although they looked over their shoulders more often, and peered into the back seats of their cars before getting in. The children went back to day camp and summer school, or if they were children like Luann Lauder, they went back to performing minor acts of vandalism.
Down the sidewalk, past our house, Mrs. Lauder was dragging Luann, who was dressed as a majorette in a red skirt and tunic with pom-poms on her short white boots. “What’s wrong with you?” Mrs. Lauder said, twice. She gave Luann a yank that made her pale yellow hair flap up and down. “I’ve told you and told you.”
Luann hung her head, but I could see her peering out of the corners of her eyes.
Just that morning at breakfast, my mother had told me: “You’re spending too much time alone. I want you to see if Luann can play with you today.” When I protested, my mother said: “If you don’t go over there this morning, I will sign you up for day camp.
“And leave that notebook here,” she added. “I’m tired of seeing you drag that thing around.”
“You just want to read it.”
“That’s not true.” My mother looked up from her toast. “But to be honest, I find it unnerving that a healthy child your age spends most of her time scribbling.”
“I’m not healthy,” I shouted. “I have a broken ankle.”
But even I was getting sick of collecting “evidence” about how Mr. Sperling across the street had had to change a flat tire before leaving for work one morning, or how long it took old Mr. Morris to water his rosebushes, or how Mrs. Morris had dropped a bottle of cranberry juice on the front walk while carrying in the groceries, which broke and splashed on the cement and onto her tennis shoes. Or even how Mr. Green next door had spent Sunday morning clipping the grass that edged his brick patio with a pair of poultry scissors. So as I watched Mrs. Lauder propel Luann down the sidewalk, I looked forward to asking her what she had done wrong.
What she had done, it turned out, was write “pissant” one hundred times behind the headboard of her bed in red crayon. Her mother discovered Luann’s handiwork while vacuuming after breakfast and when she yelled, Luann had run off down the street. Apparently, this wasn’t the first time that she had exercised artistic license on her wallpaper. “One time,” she confided that afternoon when we were alone together. “One time I drew a picture of my mom and dad naked.”
Mrs. Lauder had set us up in the backyard with Luann’s old dollhouse and two glasses of orange Kool-Aid. “You girls enjoy yourselves,” she said, managing to smile at me and frown at Luann at the same time. “I’ll be right inside.”
In silence we drank our Kool-Aid, regarding each other with interest and disdain over the rims of our glasses.
We finished at the same instant and set the glasses down on the little tin tray Mrs. Lauder had left. Then Luann sighed and took a pair of Barbies out of the dollhouse and laid them, both unclothed, on the grass. One had lost a hand but otherwise appeared haggardly intact. The other doll, however, was a magnificent sight. Luann had cut off all its hair, exposing the roots in its plastic skull, and completely tattooed its body with different colors of Magic Marker. She had drawn snakes around its arms, made its breasts into red-and-black targets, given it a verdant bush of green pubic hair surrounding a brown phallic blob. The face was colored half black and half purple. Pushpins stuck out of both eyes.
“This one’s named Roy,” she said, holding up the doll. “The other one’s Tiffany. Which one you want?”
When I said I wouldn’t touch either one, Luann shrugged and made both dolls sit in the grass facing each other. “Watch here,” she said. “Roy likes Tiffany but she don’t like him.”
For a few minutes Roy and Tiffany exchanged spirited repartee, with Luann as their medium, mostly concerning what Roy would like to do to Tiffany and how repellent Tiffany found Roy. “I’m going to bite your boobies,” Luann intoned for Roy. “I wouldn’t go on a date with you for a million bucks,” said Tiffany.
After exhausting the possibilities in this vein, Luann made Roy leap on top of Tiffany, where he smacked himself against her while she cried: “Help! Help!” And he growled, “This is what you get for being so hoity-toity.”
“Now I put them back in their house,” said Luann. “So they can nap.”
“How come Roy has breasts?” I asked sarcastically. I had found this display extremely exciting, but would have suffocated myself before letting Luann know it. I was also nervous that Mrs. Lauder might have seen us from the kitchen window and would report Roy and Tiffany’s adventures to my mother.
“Roy’s all mixed up,” explained Luann, calmly laying her Barbies in their pink-and-white living room with a piece of real shag carpeting, where she had also housed a collection of Diet-Rite bottle caps, a tampon, two empty pill bottles, and a rubber mouse. “He don’t know which way he’s going.”
“You should see what I’ve got under the sink at home,” I said after a moment, feeling that somehow I had lost standing. “I’ve got three kinds of mold growing in jars.”
“One time Roy made Tiffany strip in front of the entire navy,” Luann continued. “But an admiral saved her and kicked Roy’s butt.”
“Some of my mold has grown blue fur.”
“Roy always comes back, though.” Luann folded her arms. “He’s always ready for more.”
For a moment we both contemplated the quiet dollhouse, where Roy and Tiffany now dozed peacefully amid the wreckage. Across the street, Baby Cameron Sperling began to wail.
I imagined little Mrs. Sperling standing by his crib in her nightgown, bursting into tears herself, which she had told my mother she sometimes did when he wouldn’t go to sleep. “It’s a lot to manage,” she once said in a shaky voice. “A family isn’t an easy thing at all.”
“You know who is weird,” I said, leaning forward. “I think Mr. Green next door is really weird.”
“Yeah?” Luann looked up.
“He sits outside at night and when slugs come out, he pours salt on them and they dry up while he watches.”
“Huh,” said Luann. Her eyes flickered back to the interesting chaos inside the dollhouse.
“I think he puts out poison for dogs,” I said. “He wants the Morrises’ dogs to eat the poison if they pee on his lawn.”
“I got bit by a dog once.” Luann reached into a bedroom to extract a torn gold lamé ball gown. “He bit me right on the face under my eye.”
It irritated me to have to wangle for Luann’s attention. She was a stupid eight-year-old, hardly worth noticing, a human housefly. All she deserved was a good swat. But as I was formulating this opinion, it occurred to me that if you can’t get such a person to pay attention to you, then you were even less worth noticing.
“Mr. Green built a barbecue pit in his backyard,” I said loudly. “He hides in the bushes with a net and waits for peoples’ dogs to walk by. He likes to barbecue their bodies and drink their blood. First he skins them, to make a coat.” The image of quiet, dumpy Mr. Green dressed in a coat of dogskins pleased me; it seemed to suit his essential foreignness, the way wooden shoes suited Dutch people. I pictured him standing on wintry tundra wearing earmuffs made out of the Sperlings’ cat.
“My uncle’s a minister. He says you got to eat the blood and body of Christ.” Luann delivered this information as neutrally as if her uncle had recommended wearing suntan lotion.
“That’s totally different,” I said. “That’s not the same thing I’m talking about.”
“Look at Roy!” Luann yelled. “He’s after her again!”
Sure enough, Roy had awakened from his refreshing nap to seize Tiffany by her strawlike hair. The ensuing struggle rocked the foundations of the dollhouse. Bottle caps rolled. Tiny plastic purses and shoes flew out of the windows. It seemed only a few minutes later that my mother appeared on the back steps to call me in for dinner.