A Crime in the Neighborhood (7 page)

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 gave 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.

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.