A Crime in the Neighborhood Page 5

  It had been wet in March and early April, then suddenly it got very hot. In just a few days, our big front yard went from a brown mat to a seething tangle of color. Lilacs and wisteria bloomed, and the azaleas and the crab apple tree. Tulips, daffodils, irises driving up like spears. Blooming saturated the air, seeping in through open windows and under doors and into the sofa’s upholstery. The storm drains clogged with apple blossoms; all the car windshields gathered greenish pollen, frothing against the windshield wipers.

  A kind of lawlessness infected everything. Next door, eight-year-old Luann Lauder decorated herself with toothpaste one Sunday morning and ran across the lawn in only her underpants. Boyd Ellison appeared on the playground one afternoon with a ten-speed bicycle he said was a birthday present but which looked just like our neighbor David Bridgeman’s bicycle, which had recently been stolen. Blue jays screamed all day long. Even the grass looked an unearthly green, as it does right before an electrical storm, when the air starts to hum and your hair stands on end.

  And yet our neighborhood was anything but lawless. With its tidy lawns, pruned dogwood trees, and sputtering lawn mowers, Spring Hill still strikes me as the most wonderfully inoffensive of places whenever I drive through it. Our house was the oldest one on the block, a bungalow throwback to when people used to summer by the river. We had a screened front porch, shade trees, and a wide front yard set up on the top of a hill, with a view of half the street.

  In 1972, Washington suburbs like ours were dowdy, provincial places, like the city itself. The Whitehurst Freeway still ran past an old rendering plant, which smelled so rankly of boiled hooves in the summer that motorists rolled up their car windows even on the hottest days. The Whitehurst emptied behind the battery-shaped Watergate Complex, still known only as elegant apartment buildings. Locusts banged against the screen doors of houses all the way up Capitol Hill. The spring before, millions of locusts had crawled out of the mud after a seventeen-year sleep, buzzed like madness for a week, then died. Their fat brown bodies piled up in drifts, so that we wore rainboots when we ran outside. The whole city filled with a drowsy insect racket on summer nights, which radiated from the pavement right into the trees.

  As I remember it, the Washington suburbs didn’t get expensive until the Reagan years. During his presidency, money exploded into towns that had been shabby, somnolent, often little more than two gas pumps, a Baptist church, and a post office. Suddenly every backwater had a foreign car dealership, a gourmet grocery, and a colonial-style brick bank. Malls erupted. Office parks moved into Rockville; the computer industry swarmed up around the Beltway. Across the Potomac, Roslyn of the pale green willow trees disappeared beneath a wilderness of skyscrapers. Jaguars and Mercedeses backed up along Sagamore Road, twisting out past the defunct amusement park by the river. If my father had remained a real estate broker, we could have been rich. Little houses became big ones, while big houses became mansions, and the bigger the houses got, the less their inhabitants seemed to know about the people who lived near them. Until finally what you had were “residential areas,” places where someone could be murdered on the next block and you wouldn’t know who he was.

  Nowadays our old neighborhood is settled mostly with young lawyers, a few systems analysts, maybe a lobbyist or two, maybe a retired two-star general. Twenty years ago mostly low-level government workers lived there, GS 3s and 4s, along with a few insurance adjusters, pharmacists, and small-business owners. They drove Chevrolets and dented Ford station wagons. They kept bowling trophies on the mantel in the paneled den and invited their neighbors over for iced tea and mixed nuts while their kids played skidoo in the rumpus room. Even though it was rumored that the brick Defense facility behind the mall was really the president’s secret underground bunker, where he would be hidden away during a nuclear war while the rest of us melted, none of our neighbors seemed particularly nervous about the future.

  Their politics were desultory and middle-of-the-road. Most of them had voted for Nixon; they had also voted for Kennedy two terms before. For them, as for the rest of the country, Kennedy had been a romantic choice. Nixon seemed more pragmatic. It was there in the flat ring of his voice, the way he said, “My fellow Amaricans.” The times demanded pragmatism. There were the Soviets to consider, the Chinese, the student protests, the war in Vietnam. Nixon, with his shovel face, his unhappy, determined little eyes, could handle them. He was thrifty and basic. He had no illusions. He was someone you could trust.

  Of course it was still early in 1972. Our neighbors called Nixon Tricky Dick, like everyone else, but joking about crooked politicians was just a way of looking savvy; they didn’t believe he was any worse than any other politician. Or rather, they didn’t yet believe that there was no such thing as good government—just a few bad politicians. Neither did they lock their doors at night, or dream of applying the word “dysfunctional” to families.

  Vietnam was so distant for most of them, a glimpse of jungles or rice paddies on the evening news. The Cold War seemed frozen far away. About as activist as our neighbors got was to sign a petition my mother had circulated in January to save the patch of woods behind the mall from being made into a parking garage.

  In those days I still loved the quiet brick view of the Morrises’ and the Sperlings’ split-levels from our porch, with their box-shaped lawns and square-trimmed hedges. I loved the sight of metal trash cans lined up on the street every Wednesday morning. I loved neat leaf piles. I also loved the quickening smell of lighter fluid and charcoal on summer evenings, when every house became a campsite, the street became a river, and we ran through dark backyards to the sinuous burble of television sets.

  Then my father left, and a few months after that Boyd Ellison was killed behind the Spring Hill Mall, and what happened in our neighborhood began to seem less and less like what happened in neighborhoods.

  My fifth-grade teacher, Miss Sullivan, had begun reading a few pages from The Hound of the Baskervilles every afternoon before the final bell while the class drew pictures in their notebooks or rested their heads on their desks. Those boggy, sulfurous moors haunted me like something out of a recurring dream; every afternoon I sank into them, my hair knotted by the wind, my eyes bleared with staring into the yellow night, relaxing only when I crept through the fog and the drafty gloom of the Baskerville mansion back into my seat at Clara Barton Elementary School. Whenever Sherlock Holmes noticed a small detail, one I knew would turn out to be important later, I would grip the edge of my desk and hold my breath. One afternoon my face must have turned red because I heard someone laugh. Miss Sullivan looked up and fixed her maidenly trout eyes on me.

  “Marsha,” she said sadly. “Is there a joke you’d like to share with the rest of the class?”

  The trick, I realized, was to notice everything.

  And so it was that the day after Mr. Green, our new neighbor, moved in, I began keeping a notebook in which I documented my travels through our house. I noted the worn patches in the hallway’s Oriental runner, the scuff marks on the stairs, the scorch at the back of the lampshade in the living room. The screen was coming away from the screen door in one corner, curling away from the metal frame like a leaf. The volume-control knob had fallen off the hi-fi, leaving a forked metal bud. Steven had spilled India ink on the sofa, and if you turned over the left cushion, you found a deep blue stain shaped like a moose antler. I had never realized our house contained so many damaged things. Soon it seemed I couldn’t look at anything without finding something wrong with it.

  On the cover of my notebook, I wrote “Evidence.”

  Mr. Green was not an especially interesting person, but around this time I also began noticing him, at first casually while I sat on the porch. Every morning he left his house carrying a bag lunch and a thermos of coffee. He climbed into his car, carefully backed out of his driveway, then drove off down the street, keeping an eye out for children on bicycles.

  In the evening he returned, always at the same hour. Mothers would be cal
ling through screen doors for their children to come in for dinner; in shirt sleeves and loosened ties, fathers dragged green garden hoses onto their lawns to water the shrubbery. I think he must have been between forty-five and fifty. His most distinctive feature, aside from the bald spot, was a long nose that seemed at odds with the pink anonymity of the rest of his face. This was the Mr. Green I began to follow every evening, and in reverse every morning as I sat on the screened porch listening to the catbirds squall in our crab apple tree.

  Mostly he moved methodically from his house to his car, or from his car to his house, only varying this pattern to mow his lawn with a chattering push mower, or to pull a few weeds that sprouted, always in the same place, beside his front stoop. On weekend afternoons he sat in his shady backyard, where an enormous copper beech rose like a waterspout from its pool of dirt. But other than his initial wave the day he moved in, we hadn’t exchanged any greetings.

  Then one Saturday evening that spring, as I crouched near the fence in our backyard, I heard a man’s voice say, “Hello there,” and I looked up to see a gray shadow; and then suddenly there was Mr. Green looming bulkily from behind a lilac bush.

  I’d been singing to myself as I built an ant village in the dirt in a shaded corner that I’d always considered absolutely secret. It made my heart turn to realize that someone had been watching while I constructed tiny ant ranchettes and ant apartment buildings and sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” a song that always brought me to tears, which is why I sang it.

  “Hi,” I said, blinking back at him.

  We regarded each other for several moments. “What you building there?” he said finally, lilac leaves brushing his head as he cracked his knuckles.

  “It’s a science project.”

  “Aha,” he said, beginning to edge away.

  “For school.” I felt emboldened by his lack of interest. “Last year we studied amoebas.”

  “Ameobas,” he repeated.

  “You can only see them through microscopes. Even then you have to look carefully. We also looked at a cow’s eyeball under a magnifying glass.”

  “Yes,” he said, as if he’d already known this. “Well, goodbye there,” he added.

  And he walked slowly across his backyard, past his copper beech tree and his aluminum chair, up his two back steps and into his house. This was perhaps the first private conversation I had ever had with a man who was not my father or one of my uncles. It left me with a peculiar feeling fluttering between excitement and disappointment, and something else that even now I’m not sure how to name. It wasn’t really much of an encounter, and yet it has remained troublesome enough to make me wonder if that small violation, that quiet little intrusion, was what first set me against Mr. Green.

  June arrived. School ended. Hurricane Agnes slammed into town, tore off tree branches and knocked down power lines and left lake-sized puddles in the street. A few days later the twins snuck in to see an R-rated thriller at the MacArthur Theater and were graphic for days afterward. They began interrogating each other with flashlights, one barking questions while shining the flashlight into the other’s eyes. When did you last have sex with a chicken? Have you ever eaten a pig’s testicle? Was the pig still alive?

  By then my mother had taken my father’s college beer stein from its place on the living-room mantel and recast it as a toilet-brush holder in the downstairs bathroom.

  Because she refused to allow him to come to the house, my father often met us on Saturday afternoons in parking lots, sometimes at a bowling alley or skating rink, sometimes the mall. Steven always made a point of shaking his hand, telling him everything that had happened all week in a rush of over-confident chatter. Julie stood a little apart, smiling a cryptic smile she had practiced in the bathroom mirror. I waited until he had finished with the two of them so that I could be lifted into the air and embraced all alone, and wedge my face into his crisp white shirt, and wrap my arms tight around his neck.

  One warm Saturday, not long after the hurricane, my father met us in the mall parking lot and presented each of us with a water-resistant wristwatch with a striped cloth wristband. He said he was going on a little business trip, maybe for a couple weeks. To Delaware, he said. A real estate convention. Then maybe a short vacation. Three weeks at the most. He presented my watch to me and said the time would go by “in no time.”

  “That’s a pun, honey,” he added. Then he hummed a few bars from “As Time Goes By.” “Marshamallow,” he said, squatting on the pavement in front of me. “Let’s not cry, sweetheart.”

  “Oh God,” muttered Julie. “Spare us, Junior Sarah Bernhardt.”

  She had dressed to annoy my father, squeezing herself into an old black satin sheath dress of our mother’s, which had moth holes in the bodice. She had lined her eyes with black eye pencil and given herself a beauty mark the size of a thumbtack above her upper lip.

  “I thought we were going bowling,” she added, one hand on her hip.

  My father cleared his throat and tried to pry my arms from around his neck. “Not today.”

  “What are we doing today?” said Steven.

  “Today we’re just going to talk.”

  I stepped back. The twins groaned and rolled their eyes. Julie put her other hand on her hip.

  “I wanted to tell you kids.” My father paused and straightened up, then leaned against his car. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, to let you know, that I am sorry everything has worked out this way. I wish it could be different, but it is what it is.”

  “What?” said Julie.

  “What what?” said my father, looking surprised. He had been regarding us very earnestly.

  “The way what is?”

  He flushed behind his aviator glasses. “Our lives. Your mother and I—”

  “Oh,” said Julie. “I know all that.” And she took her hands off her hips and turned away. “You know what,” she told Steven. “I need to get some stuff from the drugstore.”

  “It can wait, can’t it?” said my father.

  “Dad,” Julie said balefully. “I am having my period.”

  Steven snickered.

  “All right,” said my father helplessly.

  “I’m having my period, too,” said Steven, following Julie and her sheath dress across the parking lot, although he had stopped snickering by then and looked back once or twice, his silky little ponytail wagging.

  After they had disappeared, my father and I leaned against the car. A seagull flew overhead, which was unusual this far inland. I pointed out to my father that it must be lost.

  “Listen,” he said at last. “About this little trip I’m taking. It isn’t much. You’ll hardly notice I’m gone. It’ll be all right.” Gently, he patted my head. “I’ll be back soon.”

  Even then I knew he was lying.

  Actually, that’s not true. I would like to think I was prepared for what happened next; but in fact I was used to believing what my father told me, so as I trailed after the twins later that afternoon on our way back home, my thoughts were probably no more anxious than the thoughts of any child whose parents are separated and who is being ignored by her older siblings.

  My father had not looked especially grave that afternoon. His aviator glasses were not askew; his hair was not standing on end. Instead, as I remember that day now, he looked only subdued squatting in the parking lot of the Spring Hill Mall, holding me at arm’s length.

  “I’ll be back soon,” he said, without a catch in his voice.

  In my imagination, a seagull circles and circles overhead, the afternoon sun glinting off his outstretched wings. My father bends over me. His sideburns tickle my cheek. “It is what it is,” he whispers. “What is it?” I whisper back.

  On our way home the twins and I saw Boyd Ellison ride by on his bicycle. He was standing up on the pedals, leaning over the handlebars, intent as a wizard. If he waved at us, I don’t remember now. “Queer bait,” said Julie, as he flashed by. Steven said, “I wonder why Dad g
ave us these watches.” “Who cares,” said Julie. “Mine is hideous.”

  Later that same afternoon, to escape the sneering accents of the twins reading aloud from their yearbook (“Mary Alice Neider simply scintillated in the Junior Class production of Love’s Labor’s Lost”), I clawed as high as I could up the crab apple tree and hid inside the leaves.

  It began to be evening. A radio was on in the Lauders’ house next door and I heard snatches of words, mostly about poll results; it was an election year and even I understood the difference between Democrats and Republicans. We were Democrats. The air cooled and from the branch where I sat picking off lichen I could smell mown grass and road tar and hear kids on the next block scream Red Rover, Red Rover. They seemed to be calling in the evening, which drifted closer and closer as cars drove into driveways, screen doors sang and slammed, and here and there a light switched on. Until suddenly everything was blue.

  My mother came to the porch door to call me in for dinner. She stood looking at our yard, twining her hand in her hair before she called me again. After a few moments, she walked slowly onto the dark grass, calling, “Marsha? Marsha Martian?”

  She passed close to my tree, one hand now fingering the collar of her blouse. I could see a fork of white scalp through her brown hair and a dab of ketchup on the pale inside of her arm near the elbow. Bits of wet grass stuck to her sandals. If she had only looked up and to the left, she would have seen me watching her through the crab apple leaves. But she didn’t look up. She walked to the daylily bed and for a long time she simply stood there, smoothing her cotton skirt. At last I saw her reach into the loose collar of her blouse and lightly hold her throat.

  She looked over the hedge into our new neighbor’s yard, where his boatlike Dodge was anchored in the driveway. A light flicked on in his kitchen. “Marsha?” called my mother again, higher this time; as she spoke my name the brassy, jungly opening bars of a jazz tune wavered out from Mr. Green’s kitchen window. Across the street, the Morrises’ sprinkler began to spurt. A gray cat crept into the yard with something dangling from its mouth, then slithered into the hedge like an eel. My mother swayed a little by the daylilies, pressing the balls of her feet into the grass, her skirt brushing her bare knees.