A Crime in the Neighborhood (8 page)

“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 took 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.

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 provided 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.

“He
says
it's got nothing to do with that bugging business. He says his wife asked him to quit.” My mother raised one eyebrow. “You know what I think?

“Men don't quit their jobs because of their wives.”

She had begun drinking white wine with dinner, something she had never done before. As dinner went on her political speculations became alarming.

“This whole country is going insane,” she muttered one night with grim enthusiasm. “Nothing works right anymore. Nothing happens the way it's supposed to. We'll all probably get blown up tomorrow.”

“Mom,” said Julie. “We're eating.”

As for Watergate, which from the beginning she followed on the news as avidly as the other mothers on the street followed
Guiding Light
and
General Hospital
, my mother's main observation was that it proved that the government was more stupid than criminal. “Those break-in guys were morons,” she said, more than once. “They got caught because of a dumb mistake. A
mistake
. That's all it was. If they hadn't made a mistake, nobody would have ever known and everything would have gone on the same.”

This seemed to strike her as a painful, even devastating truth.

“Just you wait, children,” she announced one evening, not long after the Japanese couple toured our house. “This break-in stuff is going to turn into a big disaster. Sometimes things like this start small, but then they get out of control. That's what happens. It doesn't take long for a lousy mistake to turn into a crime.”

“Dear Dad,” I wrote in my Evidence notebook:

How are you? I am fine. My favorite TV show is the Partridge Family. I think it would be wonderful to be the Partridge Family and drive around in a school bus to play concerts. You could play the piano and sing. I would play the guitar. Guess what, I have the hiccups. Today it rained like crazy. Julie and Steven are being pigs as usual. I got a puzzle from the drugstore. It is hard! Well I really don't have much to say. So I will say it in some short words! Bye Dad!

Too bad I didn't have his address. Some of my letters were very affecting, I thought.

Around the middle of July—July 20th to be exact, three and a half weeks after my father and Aunt Ada disappeared—I was sitting on our porch with my notebook in my lap reading
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
. Every now and then I scanned the street with a pair of pink plastic binoculars I'd gotten for Christmas. From the kitchen, my mother's voice faltered through her telephone calls, stiff and cordial, speaking Peterman-Wolff as if it were Portuguese. Julie and Steven had gone to the mall to flip through magazines in the drugstore and, since their allowances had been canceled, to shoplift packs of gum from the candy racks.