A Crime in the Neighborhood Read online

  Or she might hang up the phone from talking to Aunt Fran and immediately dial Ada’s number to say, “Listen to this, I just talked to Frannie. She’s bought a new Sears dishwasher—well, you know her, you’d think she’d bought the Waldorf-Astoria. ‘Why don’t you just move into it,’ I said. ‘It sounds a lot fancier than your house—’”

  Naturally my mother never said any of the things she reported herself as saying. Maybe Aunt Claire had complained briefly about the dog’s shedding; maybe Aunt Fran boasted for a moment about her dishwasher. But for my mother to render these details realistically would be to miss a chance of celebrating her latticelike relationship to her sisters. She loved to talk about one sister with derogatory intimacy to another. And whatever self-criticism she was likely to entertain she also leveled at them, so that she was continually admiring her own flaws in the others. “We’re all touchy,” she might say proudly. “You know us.”

  The only one who sometimes escaped this X-ray attention was Ada. Ada was the baby of the family, even several inches shorter than the other three. As a child she had been unusually self-absorbed and was therefore considered artistic. She spent hours in her room with scissors and a pile of magazines, cutting out movie stars and pasting them into little booklets she made out of stapled construction paper. The movie stars were then given bits of dialogue in balloons, most of which concerned Ada herself. “Isn’t Ada the cat’s pajamas?” Rita Hay-worth asks David Niven in the one booklet that survives. “Isn’t she the bee’s knees?”

  In keeping with her artistic nature, Ada seemed more exotic to me than my mother or my other aunts. She had grown her hair long, when most women her age wore bubble cuts and shags. Her hair was a bright auburn and she liked to sweep it back from her forehead with her hands and bunch it between her fists. She had a fondness for silver bangle bracelets that clinked whenever she swept back her hair, and when she laughed her eyes disappeared. Privately, I believed, or hoped, that I resembled her; in fact, my hair is the same color, although curlier.

  But Ada was always different from the rest of the family, and it wasn’t simply that she was more attractive. She not only looked soft, ripe, and pliant, and seemed to feel that way, but she appeared to consider this quality enough to recommend her to anybody. Her laugh was slow and full; her gestures were languid, even when she meant to be in a hurry. Her arms plumped near her shoulders, and under her flimsy embroidered peasant blouses, her full breasts swayed, braless. My mother and aunts could be self-critical to the point of paralysis, but not Ada. Ada liked how she looked. I’ve known a few women like that since, who truly think they are beautiful or sexy and become so, even if they’re plain, and I’ve always been a little afraid of them, as my mother and her older sisters sometimes seemed a little afraid of Ada. Sexual preoccupation is an imperious thing, and when it’s in full color, it makes all other preoccupations look slightly beside the point.

  Oddly enough, my mother felt protective about Ada. “Oh, she’s had a lot on her mind,” she would argue if Fran or Claire accused Ada of laziness when she failed to send Christmas presents or forgot their birthdays. My mother had a certain admiration for vanity, for its vividness, the way scrupulous people can admire hucksters. “You know Ada,” she would say with a laugh. “She’s a little distracted by herself.”

  And until the year Boyd Ellison was murdered, the sight of Aunt Ada in our kitchen, long hair curling loose down her back, sitting at the Formica table doodling on a paper napkin while my mother made dinner, was as familiar to me as the sight of my own brother or sister. Ada had accepted her role as the family artist and, with financial help from her older sisters, had gone to art school for a year before dropping out to marry Uncle Roger, who managed a steakhouse in Bethesda called The Flaming Pit.

  Ada taught art classes at an elementary school in Rockville. She had no children of her own.

  “It’s Little Miss Marsha, the Martian Girl,” she always said when I came home from school; then she asked me what was “new.” She listened seriously to whatever I told her and often drew a picture of what I described. When I was finished talking, she’d hand me the napkin. If I had done well on a quiz, she drew a crown. If another child had hurt my feelings, she drew a picture of that child being pierced by arrows or getting run over by a truck.

  “Come on, Ada,” my mother sometimes said. “That’s not nice.”

  “Come on yourself,” Ada would laugh, sweeping back her hair.

  But most of all I remember her smell, a disturbing smell, provocative, fruity—I can smell it now just thinking about it—a smell something like moist apricots. Sometimes when she spoke she would hood her upper lip like a horse trying to nibble a carrot. Of all the sisters, she had married first, at eighteen.

  “Well, you know Ada,” said my mother, when anyone asked why.

  I mention all this history as a roundabout way of saying that despite the natural resentment any timid woman holds for a bold one, I believe my mother loved her sister Ada more than she loved my father. Simply, she trusted her. She trusted her as one trusts someone fully comprehended, which may not be a good idea as there is no such thing. Ada was a safeguard, an ally, part of my mother’s future plan, which she had learned early to prepare and maintain. Her betrayal was far more shocking to my mother than my father’s betrayal, which she had always more or less expected. In all the cruel, elaborate jokes they crafted together, my mother never imagined a sister would play one on her.

  Two days after that cold February evening when my mother sailed our plates through the air, Aunt Fran and Aunt Claire arrived for a visit.

  They appeared at the front door clad in nearly identical outfits of pastel blouses and tweedy slacks, and Aunt Fran was wearing desert boots. They were leggy, stoop-shouldered women, edging past forty, with short toast-colored hair and worried brown eyes, more angular versions of my mother. Aunt Fran was the tallest, with a big jaw and a skinny neck. Aunt Claire had kindly, popped eyes, which made her look like a Boston terrier.

  Every time my mother told one of her Mayhew Girls stories, I always pictured Fran and Claire as elegantly insouciant, the sort of women who made wisecracks and wore scarlet lipstick, who drank martinis and didn’t eat the olive, who could sprint in high-heeled shoes. Every time I saw them, I had to remember all over again how ordinary they looked; but this time their ordinariness seemed deliberate. Aunt Fran carried both of their plaid suitcases, while Aunt Claire toted along an enormous half-finished needlepoint of the Eiffel Tower with a leftward tilt. As they strode toward the house from the car, they looked like a matched set of army nurses. “Hi, kids,” they shouted as they stepped through the door, in rough sweet voices that might have demanded hospital corners and sterilized gauze.

  When Aunt Fran bent to kiss me, a sharp whisker prickled my cheek. She smelled of peanuts and wintergreen Life Savers. “For you,” she murmured, slipping into my pocket a bag of sourballs.

  That night my sister and I slept in sleeping bags on the floor of my brother’s room to free up enough beds. Suddenly our house filled with raspy whispering female voices, a sibilant, maddening sound to a child who is afraid to know why her father drives off to work red-eyed every morning, while her mother spends her mornings vacuuming ferociously, up and down the stairs, through every room, her mouth set like a gladiator’s.

  My father had confessed. Why or how I do not know; my mother has never said, and she is not easy to question. But apparently during this time an attempt was made “to work things out.” Ada stayed banished in her brick townhouse in Bethesda, painting watercolors of fleshy peaches and pears, while her two eldest sisters drove back and forth in our Oldsmobile station wagon bearing messages, conferring, theorizing, solemn as a pair of generals. A hectic excitement surrounded them both: Aunt Fran had left her husband and son in Milwaukee, and Aunt Claire had left her two daughters and her husband in Detroit. As difficult an occasion as it must have been for them, it was still a vacation. They bought packs of Kools as soon as they arrived, thoug
h both had quit smoking, and drank white wine before dinner. After dinner they draped their long legs across the sofa, displaying at last a hint of insouciance, and blew perfect smoke rings at the ceiling.

  The rest of the time Aunt Claire stitched at her pillow while Aunt Fran hunkered onto the floor to do stretching exercises, their hoarse voices hoarsening as time went on, and during the day they persuaded my mother to go shopping for shoes. At least, I remember her, during that period, wearing several pairs of new platform shoes, which looked like hooves.

  My aunts took turns corralling the twins and me into the station wagon as soon as we got home from school to herd us off to the mall. Trailing whichever aunt had accompanied us, we would buy chewing gum and jawbreakers from the drugstore, then wander past shop windows, stepping on the heels of one another’s sneakers, snickering at the negligees in the window of the Coy Boutique, always ending up at the pet shop to watch the tropical fish avoid each other in their aquariums. This diversion was to give my mother more time to “talk” to the aunt who had remained behind. But when we returned, she would be sitting silently on a kitchen stool, staring at the gold flecks in the Formica tabletop.

  Perhaps the twins and I talked about our parents among ourselves that week. Perhaps one night I cornered my sister, Julie, and asked her what she thought was happening. But I don’t think I ever did. She and Steven had each other for confidantes—they were twins after all, and at fourteen plunged into intrigues with each other and their friends that I found unfathomable until I got to be fourteen myself.

  Also Julie despised me. Whenever I asked her anything she mimicked my questions back at me in a lisping voice. She had a passion for British novels in those days and had adopted an affected Oxford tone straight out of Evelyn Waugh, which made every nasty thing she said sound even nastier. “The Child,” she and Steven called me, “Marsha the Swamp,” or simply “Swamp.”

  My aunts spent hours talking to my mother. Their voices sailed out from the living room, swooping back to a whisper if my mother reminded them we might be listening, only to rise again, flapping upward like shorebirds. When she arrived, Aunt Claire had given me a conch shell from Bermuda. I remember being embarrassed by the shell’s glossy pink interior, which looked to me like an exaggerated version of my mother’s broad upper lip. My mother had never had what you could properly call a harelip, but her lip was wide and gently peaked at the top. “Go on,” said Aunt Claire, when I hesitated to press my ear next to the shell’s opening. “Hear the ocean talking.” From then on the cloistral roar of the conch shell was what I always imagined when I passed the living room and heard my aunts’ voices.

  They both thought my mother should give my father time, that he needed to get “it” out of his system. “Not that we’re excusing her,” they often said, sometimes in unison. “Don’t think that for a minute. You know us.” Vigorously they nodded their cropped, delicate-looking heads.

  Who knows why my father decided to stay in the house during that week. Perhaps he thought it was a show of strength or, more likely, an act of atonement. In the early mornings before he left for work, and in the evenings after he got home, my father drifted through the house like smoke from my aunts’ cigarettes. He played “As Time Goes By” and the easier parts of “Moonlight Sonata” before dinner on our upright piano in the living room; but now he didn’t ask me to turn the pages of his music books, and he made more mistakes than usual. In the evenings after dinner he mixed Scotch and milk in a Flintstones glass and drank it standing up by the refrigerator.

  Sometimes he paced back and forth on our screened porch. More often he disappeared. I began hunting him through the house even after I was supposed to be in bed, finding him in odd places like the basement near the boiler or in the kitchen hovering by the back door. Late one night I found him standing outside his own bedroom.

  “Hi there,” he said. He looked like someone waiting to be called into the dentist’s office.

  We stood a few moments together, examining the hallway’s orange carpet with its rushing pattern that always reminded me of goldfish swimming upstream. Here and there the carpet had worn thin in places; some of the goldfish had nearly vanished.

  “You know,” my father murmured, looking at the carpet and twisting a button on his cuff. “You know a lot’s been happening around here. A lot of changes. Not about you, though. None of this is about you, sweetheart.” He smiled at me sadly. “So you just keep on with what you were doing, Marsha honey. Do whatever you need to do.”

  “But I wasn’t doing anything,” I said.

  “That’s all right.” He seemed anxious to reassure me, but uncertain about the direction this reassurance should take.

  That night, cross-legged on my bed in my pink nightgown, I wrote him a note on a strip of notebook paper. “Hi, Dad. This is from your daughter Marsha. Bet you’re surprised to find a note in your pocket. I just wanted to say you do whatever you need to do, too!” This last bit didn’t sound quite right, but I couldn’t think how to change it and I was suddenly very tired, so I stumbled downstairs and slipped the note into his overcoat.

  A night or two later, I sat watching Laugh-In on television in the living room with my father and the twins. I had been sitting close to my father’s armchair, holding his hand by the wrist, when halfway through the show I suddenly felt I had to see my mother. I wanted her in that way of very young children, a muddled, weepy kind of lust.

  I searched first in the kitchen, then in the basement, finding traces of her everywhere—a coffee cup with lipstick prints, a crumpled tissue. Finally, as I padded into the dark upstairs hallway in my stocking feet, I heard first her voice and then my aunts’ as they talked in her bedroom.

  From what I could hear, they were getting ready to trim one another’s hair, and Aunt Claire was proposing to give my mother a henna rinse in the bathroom.

  “Take off your blouse,” one of them ordered. My parents’ bedroom door had been hung backward, so that it opened into the hallway; it stood partly ajar, and almost without thinking, I stepped behind it.

  “You know, you’re going to have to face up to the situation,” Aunt Claire was saying. “Confront it. Then you have to go on.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” said my mother.

  “Of course it is,” said Aunt Claire. “But it’s still true.”

  “What you have to do,” Aunt Fran said, “is forget about dignity.”

  “Believe me,” said my mother. “Dignity is about the last thing on my mind these days.”

  I edged around so that I could squint through the crack between the hinges and the doorjamb, hoping, and fearing, but hoping more intensely, that my aunts would take off their clothes. I believed they would still be wearing that pillowcase underwear I had heard about, and I wanted to see what it looked like—I even pulled my glasses out of my pocket and put them on in anticipation of this possibility. I was also interested in seeing their breasts, which I imagined as fleshy megaphones topped with glowing red doorknobs. That’s what breasts looked like in Steven’s drawings, which he hid under his bed. He called them “tooties.” Why I assumed my mother’s breasts, glimpsed occasionally in her bedroom or in the women’s changing room of our community pool, were not “tooties,” I’m not sure, except that nothing belonging to my mother seemed unusual to me then, or seemed to belong to anyone but her.

  My mother and my aunts abruptly stopped talking, and for an instant I thought they had seen me behind the door. But then they began again, talking now with the stiff casualness of people who are forced off a subject that interests them.

  “It’ll give you a lift,” Aunt Claire told my mother, standing close behind her. She ran her fingers slowly up the back of my mother’s hair while they both stared at themselves in the mirror over the dresser. “Auburn highlights. That’s all it is.”

  “I don’t know,” said my mother in a querulous voice.

  Aunt Fran sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled off her sneakers. “You have the
cutest figure, Lois,” she said, smiling at my mother’s back. “Really. What a nice little package.” She leaned over and gave my mother a swat on the bottom.

  Staring gravely at herself in the mirror, my mother turned her head from side to side, Aunt Claire’s fingers still sifting her hair. “You don’t think I’ll look silly?”

  Aunt Claire slid her hand out of my mother’s hair and let it rest loosely on her shoulder. “You’ll look beautiful. You look beautiful now.”

  “Ha,” said my mother.

  “Oh, you don’t know.” Aunt Fran pushed her green tweed slacks down around her hips. She stood up to wriggle them down to her knees, then stepped out of them and left them crumpled on the floor. She wore plain white underwear, a fringe of dark hair curling tightly out from under the white fabric at the top of each of her legs. As she unbuttoned her blouse, I could see the front of her brassiere, a bit of lacy panel. She let her blouse hang open and sat back down on the bed, crossing her legs. “You’ve always been the beautiful one.”

  “I am not,” said my mother, but she smiled a little into the mirror, one corner of her broad lip lifting.

  “Much more beautiful than Ada,” said Aunt Claire.

  “Ada’s getting fat,” said Aunt Fran, gazing again at her own long, muscular legs.

  “I don’t want to talk about Ada.” My mother moved away from Aunt Claire and headed toward the bathroom, out of my sight. Aunt Claire raised her eyebrows at Aunt Fran, who shrugged.

  “Take off your blouse and skirt,” Aunt Claire called after my mother. “And bring out the scissors. We’ll trim your hair first while the henna dissolves.” She sat down with a bounce on the bed next to Aunt Fran and began unbuttoning her own blouse. “All I want is about an inch off the ends. How much do you want?”

  “Oh I don’t care. I had my hair cut last week. I’m just doing it to be part of things.”

  Aunt Claire smiled as she pulled off her blouse. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere at all. Instead of the two cones I’d been expecting, a pair of small, flattened-looking eyes confronted me, oatmeal-colored save for the brown, protruding, button iris—bizarre, almost horrible, plain human flesh.