A Crime in the Neighborhood Read online

  As I shifted in the tree to get a better look at her, pushing leaves from my face, a spiderweb ghosted over my hand and all in a single rush my mother slipped away and I lost my grip on the branch I was holding, and felt myself slide, hitting my head against another branch, and felt myself fall, and fell clear to the ground.

  The wind was knocked out of me, and for one wild, cottony moment I thought I was dead.

  By the time I sucked my breath back my mother was crouched over me, lifting me under the arms. “You’re okay,” she kept saying, panting hard. She pounded my back, beating between my shoulder blades.

  Her lips made a perfect O as I turned my face toward her. It took a good several minutes for either of us to realize that I had broken my ankle.

  In the excitement of rushing me to the hospital, where I had X rays and then got my ankle swaddled in an important-looking white plaster cast that stiffened to my knee, my mother forgot to check the mail and it wasn’t until Sunday afternoon, after we had finished eating tuna salad and rye bread and dill pickles for lunch, and she had washed the dishes, and put them away, that she found the note from my father, handwritten on a memo pad that said at the top “From the desk of Lawrence Eberhardt.”

  “Lois,” it read. “By the time you read this I will be on The Road. Ada and I have decided to make a Go of it. I know this will be hard for you to Understand, but none of this is meant to hurt You or the kids. That is the truth. Love, Larry.”

  My father had not gone to Delaware for a real estate convention. He had not even driven back to his apartment on MacArthur Boulevard after meeting us in the mall parking lot. He did not appear at his office on Monday to sit behind his Scandia blond-wood desk with the green-shaded fake brass library lamp and the glass jar full of peppermint drops. That Saturday, after saying good-bye to us, my father picked up Ada in Bethesda and together they drove all the way to Connecticut, where they spent the night. The next day they drove to Maine and took a ferry to Nova Scotia.

  All this I discovered later. I found out about the note that night by listening in on the upstairs extension in my mother’s bedroom, with my ankle propped on a pillow, while she talked to my aunts, one after the other, on the kitchen telephone.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said Aunt Fran, when the note was read to her. “Oh, Lois. I’m sorry, but this is ridiculous.”

  “It may be ridiculous to you—”

  “What I don’t get,” continued Aunt Fran without listening, “is why he wants her so much.” I could almost hear her add: Or why she wants him.

  “You know how I picture myself in ten years?” my mother said. “I picture myself enormously fat and living in a trailer home with the blinds pulled down. No one visits me and I eat potato chips all day long. The only way anyone knows I’m there is that occasionally an empty potato-chip bag flies out the window.”

  “Lois. That will never happen.”

  “How do you know? Nobody knows what could happen to me.”

  “Nobody ever knows what could happen,” scolded Aunt Fran.

  Across the street the Morrises’ lights went out. Four houses away David Bridgeman, still mourning his stolen bicycle, was practicing “Greensleeves” on his recorder, making quavering alto sounds as I looked out at the streetlights and at the lit-up pools of lawn.

  Aunt Fran said, “Why do you think he left?”

  I could hear my mother shift on her kitchen stool. After a moment she said, “I don’t know. He’s always thought he was missing something. Some grand destiny or something. She’s the same way. You know Ada.” She stopped and made a sound deep in her throat.

  Then she shifted on her stool again, scraping it against the floor. “Marsha? Marsha? Are you on the upstairs phone? I want you to get off this instant.”

  My ankle throbbed as I eased my cast off my mother’s pillow. “Do you have some medicine I could take?” I said in a small, tragic voice. “My foot hurts.”

  Later, after I was sent to bed with two orange-flavored Bayer aspirins, I picked up the upstairs extension again as my mother spoke to Aunt Claire.

  “He once told me that he hated being able to predict how his life would turn out. He said it made him feel like he was already dead.”

  “Well this is certainly something unpredictable,” said Aunt Claire.

  “He’s a real romantic,” said my mother. “Romantics are usually bastards, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  My mother almost never used bad language and it sounded mispronounced coming from her. Aunt Claire coughed. “Well,” she said. Through my mother’s bedroom window I could see the blue light of the Lauders’ TV set through their living-room windows next door. A June bug banged against the screen.

  “Do you think he’ll be back?” Aunt Claire murmured at last.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think he left expecting to come back?”

  My mother didn’t answer.

  Aunt Claire coughed again. “I suppose he’s not coming back anytime soon. He’s confused,” she added gently after a while. “And probably ashamed. We have to remember that. Ada’s also responsible. I’ve said all along that she’s jealous of you. She may even be the one who gave Larry the idea.”

  A dog barked from a few streets away. Then after what seemed like a long time, my mother said, “A week or so before Larry left, I told him that I’d filed for a divorce.”

  “Well, didn’t he want one, too?” Over the telephone wires, Aunt Claire’s voice sounded tinny and insistent. “Lois?” she said. “Lois, are you still there?”

  Far away a siren wailed. An ambulance was on its way to Sibley Hospital. The Morrises’ terriers began to howl from inside their house. “Help,” shouted someone on a television show the Lauders were watching, but then the laugh track started so I knew it was a comedy.

  My mother was in the living room the next morning before breakfast spraying Lemon Pledge on the coffee table. When I made it to the kitchen, I saw that she had already thrown away the paper shopping bags that had been wedged between the wall and the refrigerator, scrubbed the dish rack, scoured the sink, polished the toaster, and shaken out all the burnt-toast crumbs. She had even washed the wooden rack of spice bottles and alphabetized them.

  “Hi Martian,” she said. “Twins still asleep?” She was dressed in an orange middy blouse and a khaki skirt, clothing I had never seen her wear.

  “I’ve been doing a little baking.” She pulled a pan of snail-shaped sweet rolls out of the oven and set them on top of the stove. She patted me on the shoulder. “All right. Don’t get hiccups. Want a cup of coffee?”

  She had never offered me a cup of coffee before; she always said it would stunt my growth. But as I stood there staring she poured a little coffee into a mug, adding milk almost to the brim. She set the mug on the kitchen counter and put a sweet roll on a plate. Then she held my crutches while I climbed onto one of the kitchen stools, and she sat next to me while I ate.

  “Listen, I know you were on the other phone last night,” she said when I had finished my sweet roll.

  Her thin face seemed thinner and her eyes looked red, but she was making an effort to sound composed. “Okay, it’s all right, although please don’t make a habit of it. But I’m going to make a suggestion. You’ll feel better if you find something to do. My advice is to find some kind of hobby this summer.”

  “I have a mold experiment,” I said. “I am growing three kinds of mold in jars.”

  “Well, that’s a start.” She got up and poured herself a cup of coffee.

  That afternoon she cleaned every room in the house, including the attic, and then she washed the car. Every morning that week she baked something different for breakfast: coffee cake, blueberry buckle, pineapple-pecan muffins.

  Meanwhile the twins played backgammon tournaments on the front porch, only occasionally allowing me to play and never letting me win. My mother shampooed the carpet. She did the laundry and sewed new buttons onto whatever clothing of ours had lost them. She to
ok us along grocery shopping and bought eight bags of food, which she made us help her unpack. Every night she fixed something out of the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, or she let the twins select recipes they found hilarious. One night they decided to make Creole Shrimp in a Rice Ring and Polka-Dot Melon Salad.

  “Rodney, you gourmet fiend,” cried Julie. She and Steven often called each other Rodney and Felicia, which they thought sounded aristocratic.

  They were wearing aprons and bickering in brittle English voices, elbowing each other out of the way. My mother was upstairs lying down. I sat in the kitchen and watched them fuss around the sink, first making melon balls, then chopping the shrimp with a knife and throwing the shells down the disposal. If my father’s disappearance had upset them, they certainly weren’t going to tell me. Instead they spent more and more time as Rodney and Felicia, until it was beginning to seem as if the twins had also left town.

  “You’re not taking the mud veins out of the shrimp,” I said.

  “What do you know about mud veins,” said Julie.

  “It’s shrimp poop.”

  “Oh please,” said Julie. “Oh disgusting.”

  “You’ve heard, Swamp, haven’t you”—Steven looked at me over his shoulder—“that if Mom and Dad get divorced you’ll probably have to be put up for adoption.”

  “There’s a new law.” Julie tossed her hair out of her eyes. “It says all children under twelve become wards of the state if their parents split up.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Oh yes, old Swampy thing,” said Julie. “Sad, really.”

  “Rotten luck, old girl,” said Steven.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Of course, no one may want to adopt you.” He pitched a paper towel into the trash can. “Then you’ll have to go to an orphanage.”

  “Ever read Oliver Twist?” said Julie, coming at me. She had fingers like pliers, which could leave a mark that lasted for hours after she pinched you.

  “No,” I cried. “Shut up. Shut up.”

  “Pathetic case, Felicia,” said Steven.

  “Simply awful, Rodney,” sighed Julie, backing away.

  I stumped out of the kitchen and worked my way upstairs to find my mother. She was lying on her back on the bed with a washcloth draped over her eyes.

  “Mommy,” I began. “Julie and Steven—”

  “Hush,” she said fiercely, not moving her head. “I am thinking.”

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked.

  My mother pulled the cloth off her face. “Survival,” she said.

  Five

  A week and a half after my father and Ada disappeared, my mother decided to sell our house.

  Although I have never understood it, her decision was understandable. Twice she’d been left by a man with no provision for the future; this time she had something worth money—a house and everything in it. The deed was in her name because ironically my father had believed his investments were safer that way, in case any of his clients ever sued him.

  A red, white, and blue “For Sale” sign appeared on our front lawn, lonely and inimical against the soft grass and rhododendrons. To sell the house, my mother used a realtor from my father’s own agency, a cadaverous man named Harold McBride, whose long fingers were double-jointed, so that he could bend his thumb back to his wrist.

  “So sorry for your troubles, Lois,” he said the first time he showed up, towing a young Japanese couple wearing matching blue blazers. “So sorry. Anything I can do to help.”

  “So sorry,” echoed the couple standing behind him, looking confused.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said my mother, and opened the door for them.

  Years of dusting and despising china goose girls wafted back to her, like the potpourri smell of the Coy Boutique: Keep your lips shut. Wear an undershirt and a bra. Be prepared. Like her own mother, faced with four fatherless girls after the war, she managed.

  Quick as if she were gutting a fish, she emptied the joint checking and savings accounts into a new account in her name. Our allowances were cut off, something I accepted, but the twins complained about it and Julie threatened to sell her clothes. “Go ahead,” said my mother. “But I get fifty percent since I bought them in the first place.” When I asked her if we had any money, she said, “Enough. For now.”

  She began phoning numbers listed in the want ads she’d circled in the newspaper. She wrote up a work schedule for the four of us and taped it to the refrigerator: MONDAY. Marsha—set table. Julie—dishes. Steven—trash. Lois—grocery shopping/dinner. TUESDAY. Marsha—sweeping. Lois—laundry/dinner …

  My mother’s first job was selling magazine subscriptions part-time over the telephone.

  From noon until five every weekday afternoon, she sat at the kitchen table with her ankles pressed together, talking to strangers across the country. As she dialed each number she frowned as if she had bitten down on a leaf of sandy lettuce. But you could tell when a customer picked up the other end of the line because her eyes widened and her eyebrows shot up. “Hel-lo. This is Lois Eberhardt with Peterman-Wolff Communications Distribution. Are you aware of our special summertime offer of two, yes that’s right, two popular magazines of your choice for the low, low price of…. No? You haven’t heard of our offer?” Her voice was so surprised it made her forehead wrinkle.

  She had a basic script to follow, plus a fact sheet filled with alternative responses depending on a customer’s questions. She said she could get “canned” if she deviated from a single line. Supervisors from Peterman-Wolff Communications Distribution could listen in on our telephone; they would report her if she even asked, “How’s the weather in Sandusky?”

  This rule made sense to my mother. “When you have a successful formula,” she told us, “stick with it. That’s the law of nature.”

  Her own formula for those days rarely varied. Breakfast at exactly seven-thirty on the front porch, with the radio tuned to a news station, and the card table set the night before. Orange juice, Shredded Wheat, coffee for her, milk for me, Fresca for Julie—who was dieting—and nothing for Steven, who usually slept through breakfast. We sat on collapsible director’s chairs. Although I was allowed my nightgown and Julie wore a T-shirt and an ancient pair of gym shorts, my mother now wore lipstick and earrings even when she wasn’t planning to go out on an interview, dressing neatly in a skirt, blouse, and sandals. Once breakfast was over and the dishes washed, she went over the want ads, or made up a grocery list, or put in the laundry. She never mentioned that by then Uncle Roger had traced my father and Aunt Ada to a tiny Nova Scotia seaport called Annapolis Royal, where they were living in a rented room. I discovered all of this by eavesdropping.

  Monday and Wednesday mornings were the times she reserved for job interviews—selling magazines was what she called “a stopgap.” That summer she interviewed for secretarial jobs, administrative-assistant jobs, clerk-typist jobs, saleswoman jobs, receptionist jobs. For each interview she dressed up in one of her suits—she had two, a cherry-colored linen ensemble from Woodward & Lothrop and almost the same thing in a salmon pink nubbly fabric—and then spent half an hour turning in front of her bedroom mirror, trying to see herself from every angle. “How do I look?” she would ask Julie, holding her arms away from herself. “Do I look professional?”

  She always came home around eleven-thirty for lunch before she began her telephone calls. Our lunches were as unvarying as breakfast: carrot sticks and cheese sandwiches. On Sundays, my mother made twenty cheese sandwiches—two slices of bread/two slices of American cheese/a smear of butter—and stuck them in the freezer. Every weekday morning she would take four out to thaw. We had to economize, she said.

  “How was it?” Julie would ask, if she had been to an interview.

  “Oh, you know,” she’d say, looking into her plate. “It’s a lengthy process.”

  At five o’clock, she hung up the phone, spent twenty minutes tabulating the day’s sales in a specially prov
ided Peterman-Wolff vinyl-covered logbook, then reapplied her lipstick and went outside to sit in what was left of the sun in the side yard, joining Julie and Steven, who were oiled like sardines and splayed in two folding lawn chairs they had dragged partially behind the rhododendrons. They had begun smoking cigarettes that summer and always just before my mother came outside there would be an important flurry of tossing butts under the rhododendrons. Julie would fan the air with a magazine. Steven dug out breath mints for both of them.

  “If you tell,” Julie warned me from under her tennis hat, “I will put Nair on your eyebrows while you’re asleep.”

  But I had no intention of telling on them. Their smoking seemed daring and mature, and secretly I loved hearing them drawl, “Cig, darling?” at each other, in low nasal voices.

  Although breakfast and lunch were spartan, dinner became increasingly ambitious. I missed my dinnertime ritual of standing beside my father as he sat on the piano bench, turning the page of music for him whenever he gave a nod. But my mother tried to make up for this loss by whistling Cat Stevens tunes as she prepared dinner in the kitchen. Not only did she set the table with her Minton china and sterling flatware every night, she tuned the radio to a folk-rock station, lit candles, and put fresh flowers in a vase. She made cold cucumber soup and salads with artichoke hearts. She made things with olives. One night for the twins’ birthday she roasted a pair of Cornish game hens and served them sprinkled with shredded coconut, which made them look like shrunken heads.

  Sometimes we discussed politics at dinner, my mother’s new favorite subject.

  “What do you think about this,” she might say. “Did you know that John Mitchell has resigned as Nixon’s campaign manager?”

  Julie would squint at her plate; Steven tapped his front teeth with his fork.