A Crime in the Neighborhood Read online

  Meanwhile, every evening my mother walked around our house by herself, opening closet doors and looking into them, opening cabinets, pulling open drawers. Down in the basement she sorted through carefully labeled boxes of winter clothing, old toys, and Christmas ornaments, only to repack them all again. One afternoon I came home to discover every single one of those repacked boxes stacked on the curb to be thrown away. Over the next few weeks, she threw out boxes of books, boxes of photographs, mysterious boxes marked only “Attic” or “Keepsakes.” Some boxes had no labels at all. After a while, I don’t think she herself knew what she was throwing away.

  At night, while we were in bed, she cleaned. Sometimes we woke to the rumbling of furniture being shifted downstairs, or the chatter of plates being run in the dishwasher for a second or third time, or the crash of the silverware drawer being emptied so that she could tear out the old shelf paper. She washed all the windows, a job that must have taken days. She scrubbed the kitchen’s linoleum floor, which had yellow and green squares. One morning, all the yellow squares were white.

  Around the house, she began wearing one of Steven’s baseball shirts and a pair of his outgrown basketball sneakers. He was already as tall as she, and his feet were two sizes larger. She looked surprisingly young in his clothes, despite the deepening lines that ran from the wings of her nose to her mouth. One day I told her I liked her more the way she looked before. For a long moment she gazed at me, an exclamation mark of grease on her forehead. Then she said, “Too bad.”

  Her biggest project during this period was refinishing the dining-room table. She and Steven carried it out to the screened porch and put newspapers on the floor. For the next two weeks, my mother stood out on the screened porch at night in all kinds of weather, first sanding the tabletop by hand, then each of the legs, then staining the whole thing twice, and after that adding a coat of clear varnish. The table became a lovely cherrywood color that glowed on evenings when she decided to light the candles. She called the table her “piece de resistance.”

  For the first few weeks of my parents’ separation, Aunt Fran and Aunt Claire called my mother every day. “Oh, hi,” she’d say in a toneless voice that let me know it was an aunt, not someone for whom she had to sound cheerful. “No, I’m okay.” She was usually on the telephone with one or the other of them in the afternoon when I came home from school. While I opened the refrigerator, my mother would watch me from her kitchen chair, one elbow on the table, swinging the long phone cord like a jump rope, slapping it against the floor.

  If around this time she noticed the little shrine of snapshots on top of my bureau—photos of my father doing yardwork, my father eating a hamburger at Uncle Roger’s restaurant, my father paddling a canoe on the C&O Canal—she never mentioned it. Perhaps she guessed my secret: that I was beginning to have trouble picturing him whenever I wasn’t with him. I would close my eyes to concentrate and after a few moments I would summon his ginger-colored sideburns, then his small ears, then his aviator glasses, then at last his long face would come into focus, smiling apologetically, his blue eyes small and indistinct behind his glasses. If I made myself look hard enough I could catch their expression, which was sometimes distracted and sometimes kindly and sometimes slightly cold.

  In an attempt to remain loyal, I also tried to remember the things he cared for and review them before I went to bed. Every morning in the shower he liked to belt out several bars of “Singin’ in the Rain.” He loved thick socks and the melancholy light of evenings in late summer. He loved to mow the grass because he said that mowing released the lawn’s tender smell. “Nectar and ambrosia,” he often said when he sat in his chair before dinner with his glass of Scotch and a bag of corn chips. He celebrated little necessities and comforts in a way that reminded you that nearly anything could be transporting if you put your mind to it.

  He was a true voluptuary, in his own modest way, with a voluptuary’s genius for softening the world around him. After he moved out on that cold Tuesday morning, our house began to seem drafty, full of hard surfaces and stale smells.

  The separation was hard on him, too. One Sunday, about six weeks after he’d left our house, my father and I were sitting cross-legged on the floor in his apartment eating grapes while he watched a football game on TV. The twins lay reading old TV Guides on the sofa bed, whispering to each other. With the puritanism of teenagers, they had taken my mother’s side almost from the beginning. Between themselves they referred to Dad as “Dud,” although they stayed rudely polite while they were with him.

  Outside, the sky had turned the color of an old pie tin. The wind lashed up the bare branches of the horse chestnuts across the street and drove sticks and candy wrappers across the sidewalk.

  Meanwhile I was pretending that we were Polish refugees, and that my father’s apartment was a boxcar. We were heading for the border, where my father had figured out a way to save us all, and even Julie was grateful. I listened to the crowd cheer on TV and ate another grape. This was the last of our rations. I pictured myself thin and pale, being carried by my father through the snow.

  “How about we order a pizza?” he asked at a commercial break.

  I reached out to punch his leg, just to touch him. Then I looked up and saw his cheeks were wet. I asked why he was crying and behind me felt the twins stop reading their comic books. My father wiped his face with his sleeve and said he was allergic to the varnish his landlady had used on the woodwork.

  Did my mother see Ada during that time? I like to think she must have, at least once. For all her energetic stoicism, she was only human.

  They would have made arrangements to meet at the mall, somewhere public, like wary people on a blind date. My mother would have wanted no chance of hysterics, on her part or Ada’s. In different ways, they were both circumspect women. Instead of weeping and scratching each other with their fingernails, they walked around and around the upper floor of the mall, two tall women in bulky parkas and leather boots, my mother carrying a purse with a broken strap, which she had mended with an old diaper pin. Their elbows pointed at each other; otherwise, they might have been shopping the Presidents’ Day sales. But they kept their voices down and stared at their boots, ignoring the rack of gauzy negligees whenever they circled past the Coy Boutique.

  Occasionally their elbows bumped, which made them stagger apart. Ada watched my mother’s face, looking for an opening, a chance to begin excusing herself.

  She had never meant for things to go so far. From what I’ve gathered, Ada was the most prosaic and nearsighted of the Mayhew Girls, the one who, in the company of the sister she was betraying, the husband she was cheating on, and the man she was sleeping with, would be truly interested in the state of her nail polish.

  Can’t we just forget about all this? she might have said, with a trace of a whine.

  But that’s not quite right, the whine part. Ada was also the most fun of the sisters, the one who laughed most easily, the one most willing to forgive a slight. Every Christmas they all gave one another earrings, but my mother and my aunts always seemed to buy one another pearl studs while Ada gave them long dangling silver earrings with moonstones or turquoise or jade. They made meatloaf or pot roast for family dinners; she made lamb curry or chili relleños. “Hey there,” she cried when she saw you, as if you were someone she had been hoping to see. She was almost beautiful; she was almost generous. She was a relief to have around.

  So: Can’t we just forget about all this? she might have said, with the trace of a smile, because she actually believed forgetting was possible.

  But my mother walked on. Perhaps she shook her head. Perhaps she made a chopping motion with her free hand, the one not gripping her purse strap. Perhaps she, too, wore a trace of a smile. This is what she had come for, after all, the gritty pleasure of denial.

  Both of their faces stayed white. When they left the mall, they walked separately over the dirty snow to their cars, parked at opposite ends of the parking lot, and each sat f
or a few minutes behind the steering wheel before starting her car and driving away.

  One cloudy afternoon in late March I came hope from school ahead of the twins to find a note pinned to the front door. SHOPPING, it read—in a couple of the letters the ballpoint pen my mother had used had driven all the way through the paper. It wasn’t like my mother to be gone when I came home from school, but in the last few weeks she hadn’t been like my mother in so many other ways that this one seemed hardly remarkable.

  I had just turned around to hunt for the spare key hidden under the front steps when Aunt Ada’s old red VW bug pulled into the driveway.

  “Hey there,” she called.

  She was wearing a pair of dark sunglasses and a yellow sweater with white appliquéd sunflowers around the collar, which matched her big white plastic sunflower earrings. The frames of her sunglasses were white plastic, too, and almost square, which made her face look like a house with dark windows.

  “Hey,” she said again softly as I came up to the car. When she saw me looking at her earrings, she said, “Aren’t these cute?” She unclipped one and handed it to me. “Keep it. When we meet again, we’ll recognize each other because we’ll be the ones wearing only one earring.” Her square sunglasses were impenetrable and she smelled strongly of drugstore lily-of-the-valley perfume.

  Then suddenly she laughed. “Oh come on, kiddo. It’s just me. It’s just Ada. I mean, I’m not that bad.” She did look just like Ada, with her silver bangle bracelets and her auburn hair the same color as mine, so familiar that I had to smile.

  She smiled back, then lifted up a piece of sketch paper that had been lying on the seat beside her. “I drew a picture. I came all the way over here to show it off.”

  In charcoal pencil, she’d drawn a woman looking through a telescope. Far in the distance, a tiny figure was walking away over a hill. That was what the woman was seeing through the telescope.

  “That’s me.” Ada angled one finger through the window to point to the woman. Her fingernail was dirty; most of the pink polish had chipped off. “And that’s your mom.”

  I backed away again, gripping my bookbag against my chest.

  “Oh honey. I didn’t mean to scare you.” Ada pulled the picture back into her car, then sighed and leaned her head against her seat. Her throat looked long and pale. Now that she wasn’t looking at me I could see her eyes behind her sunglasses and they looked smaller than before; the upper fold of her eyelid drooped. Her hair was shorter too, and darker. Altogether she did look different, not so much altered as sunk into some part of herself that I’d never noticed before. She closed her eyes, her chest slowly rising and falling. Her head lolled to the side. I thought she might be falling asleep.

  Across the street, Mrs. Morris came outside and stood on her front steps, but after I waved to her she turned around and went back inside. Finally, Ada opened her eyes.

  “Can I ask you a favor, Marsha?” She paused, looking down at her hands on the steering wheel. After a moment she said: “Don’t tell your mom that I came by here this afternoon. Please? I guess I’ve decided that what I was going to tell her wasn’t such a good idea after all.”

  “What were you going to tell her?” I put one foot exactly ahead of the other, toe to heel. Then I took two steps back, heel, toe, heel. I wished she would go away. My mother could come home at any moment. While I didn’t understand the full extent of their estrangement, I knew enough to recognize that Ada didn’t belong in our driveway.

  As if she understood, Ada suddenly started the car. It took a minute to get revved up, choking into action like an old lawn mower. She made a face, leaning against the wheel, her cheeks flushed now and damp-looking. Then she said something that I couldn’t hear over the noise of the engine.

  Her face looked unbalanced without both earrings; although if you had walked past her, it might have taken you a minute to figure out what was wrong, like one of those trick pictures where it turns out that the girl has only four fingers or a button-up shoe on one foot and a laced shoe on the other. I thought about running after her with the other earring, but before I could make up my mind, she had driven halfway down the street and was too far gone for me to catch up with her. So I went inside and hid the earring in my underwear drawer.

  A couple nights after Ada’s visit, Uncle Roger came to our house and he and my mother stayed up very late talking in the living room. Uncle Roger was Greek. Doudoumopolous was his last name; for many years it was the longest word I could spell. He had a high, creased forehead and heavy-lidded brown eyes with broken capillaries netting the corners. My mother once told me that he had been handsome when he was younger—actually, her word was “slick”—but his flamboyant black mustache always reminded me of seaweed. That night he blew a kiss to where I stood blinking at the top of the stairs, but he didn’t say hello.

  “Go to bed,” my mother told me from the landing, putting up her hand like a traffic cop. Her bare heel was the last thing to vanish into the living room; I saw it lift right out of the back of her shoe.

  For a few minutes I listened to the dip and swell of their voices, although I couldn’t hear what they were saying; after a while I sniffed the brown stink of Uncle Roger’s cigar, something my mother had never before allowed in the house.

  “Good-bye,” said my mother when Uncle Roger was leaving. I woke up to hear the screen door bang. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather we keep this little episode to ourselves.”

  The “episode,” I found out much later, was that Ada and my father had slipped away together for a weekend.

  That part doesn’t surprise me when I think about it now. People who have gone so far always go a bit further. One careless step—then it hardly matters what carelessness follows. Or at least, that’s how it can seem to the person who has been careless.

  But I’m no longer sure I understand why Ada came to see my mother just before she and my father went off for their secret weekend. Maybe she wanted to be talked out of it. Or was she counting on my mother’s bitterness to goad her into doing what she’d otherwise lost heart for?

  I imagine her driving her little red car up our street, muttering to herself, repeating whatever phrases she had rehearsed, knuckles whitening as she gripped the steering wheel. Those small bright eyes, that defiant mouth, the rounded shoulders, all that dense, fox-colored hair. She hadn’t meant to let go of her sister so easily—or to be let go of. But then, when she arrived, my mother wasn’t there, only me clutching my book-bag. And she lost her nerve.

  But for what kind of fight? That’s the question that keeps needling me—whether in the end Ada persuaded herself that she loved my father or hated my mother. It had to have been one or the other for her to do what she did.

  Or could she simply have made a terrible mistake? And once she was caught in the middle of it, she couldn’t see how to get out of it. Or maybe she even fell in love with her own confusion—there was her grand passion, her way at last to be different, extraordinary, to make her sisters stop claiming that they knew who she was. For a little while at least, her mistake might even have looked like bravery.

  Because the truth is, mistakes are where life really happens. Mistakes are when we get tricked into realizing something we never meant to realize, which is why stories are about mistakes. Mistakes are the moments when we don’t know what will happen to us next. An appalling, exhilarating thought. And while we entertain it, the secret dreaming life comes groping out.

  So my father and Ada snatched a couple of days together, went to the beach, probably Virginia Beach because it was close. They would have rented a motel room with a view of the ocean, a little cement balcony where they could sit in the evening with their drinks. They wore their coats, a cold ocean breeze chapping their faces as they glanced back and forth between each other and the sand. They watched the waves scrolling in toward shore, gazed past the surf to a flat, wide distance. That span encouraged them; perhaps it looked like an open margin between themselves and the rest of the wor
ld.

  Four

  In April the Chiltons moved out of the house next door, taking their sweet cross-eyed baby and leaving their broken picnic table and a square lawn full of crabgrass for the man who moved in. His name was Mr. Green. I woke up one morning and fumbled on my glasses to see an orange moving van parked on the street and chairs and tables being carried out of it.

  “Somebody’s moved into the Chiltons’ house,” I announced at breakfast.

  “Have they?” said my mother, from behind the newspaper. She had begun sitting at my father’s place at the table; no one sat at hers. “How do they look?” she said eventually, turning a page of the newspaper.

  “Regular,” I said. “It’s a man.”

  I was pleased to be the first to notice our new neighbor; it gave me a kind of claim on him. Otherwise I noted only that he appeared to be a bachelor, which was unusual in our neighborhood but satisfied me because now I wouldn’t have to worry about meeting strange children and having to invite them to play Ping-Pong in our basement. Nothing could be expected from me regarding Mr. Green, except courtesy, so I waved to him that afternoon when Julie and I walked home from the mall. He was unloading boxes from the van. I remember that he paused to balance a box on one knee in order to wave back. He was a squat man, with a pinkish face, blandly familiar, although he didn’t actually resemble anyone I knew. When he bent his head, I saw that he had a bald spot, shaped like a heart.

  “He looks like a creep,” said Julie.