A Crime in the Neighborhood (16 page)

“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.

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.
”

For a few minutes neither of us said anything. Luann picked at a mosquito bite on her calf. I began to feel I was boring her.

“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.

“That must have been fun,” she said, as I lurched into the kitchen on my crutches. “You two looked like a regular pair of co-conspirators.”

“I don't look anything like Luann,” I snapped.

That evening I locked myself in the upstairs bathroom and stood on the pink bathmat scrubbing myself with a washcloth and soapy water, thinking about Roy and Tiffany. I stuck my head in the sink and ran water over my hair and worked in some shampoo and then rinsed and dried my hair with a towel. I shook a little baby powder into my palm to rub between my legs.

“Well aren't you Miss Clean,” said my mother, as she bent to kiss me goodnight.

Right around this time I began going through the twins' rooms whenever they left the house. I'm not sure what I thought I was looking for as I checked under their beds and opened their dresser drawers, trolling among loose socks, underwear, gum wrappers, wadded tissues, but the act of
searching excited me. It seemed that if I only looked hard enough I
would
find something, something I needed to find. What I would do with whatever I found remained unclear, but by that point I was too sunk in the habit of looking to care. Both of the twins had hidden candy in various places around their rooms, behind books, under the rug: toffees, caramel creams, red Swedish fish, licorice bull's-eyes, candy you could filch from open bins in the Safeway. Whenever I found a piece of this stale, ill-gotten candy, I ate it meditatively, letting it stick to my teeth.

I did find a few odd, revealing things, all of which I carefully recorded. In Julie's room I discovered a cardboard ring box full of tiny polished stones, a nickel-plated P.O.W. bracelet, and a baby-food jar containing the intricate corpse of a wolf spider. I also found a poem she had written, slipped between the night table and the baseboard: “Who am I / I am Nobody / I have no Face / I have no Body / I can Only Cry,” which I thought was a very good poem, although I couldn't understand how someone with no face could cry.

Then one morning, when the twins had gone to Amy Westendorf's house up the hill because she had a swimming pool and her father had a basement mini-bar stocked with airline liquor bottles, I was poking through Steven's room when I uncovered a shrine to bathing suits in his closet. The entire back wall had been plastered with magazine pictures of bosomy women in bikinis. In the center, set a little apart from the others, he had pinned a picture of a tall gleaming black woman in
a leopardskin. She gazed challengingly out of the photograph, her lips drawn back, one leg thrust forward as if she meant to leap right out of the closet.

Followed by the eyes of this intimidating woman, I bumped gingerly through the room, trying not to move anything without putting it back in the same place. But something about her savage expression filled me with a new kind of daring. For the first time I lifted Steven's mattress, which made me tremble, although nothing was there. But under his bed I found a broken compass and an unopened pack of Juicy Fruit gum, both of which I pocketed, and also a small, square foil package that held, when I opened it, a mysterious pale balloon.

His room, I noted, had acquired a seamy smell, like the clothes hamper when it hadn't been emptied in a while. Julie's room, on the other hand, reeked of the same drugstore lilies of the valley that Ada had smelled of the last time I saw her, a disturbing connection that suggested some sort of clandestine understanding between them. It also suggested that Julie had swiped this perfume, since my mother never wore it and would never have permitted Julie to buy perfume herself. I toyed with the idea of spraying it here and there throughout the house, just to see what sort of reaction it caused, but rejected the idea without examining why.

As usual, I emerged from this small orgy of intrusion feeling exhilarated and guilty. To redeem myself, I decided to help my mother by doing housework, maybe even offer to weed a flower bed. But when I wobbled into the kitchen on my
crutches, my mother frowned and turned her back on me, concentrating on whomever she was wheedling into buying magazines over the phone. When I tried to get her attention by skipping the phone cord, she clamped her hand over the receiver. “I can't talk to you right now,” she rasped. “I'm working.”