Neighborhood Watch (7 page)

“Sometimes I wonder if I’m just a copier,” he said. He didn’t say any more and I didn’t ask what he meant, though now, of course, I understand.

At the trial, witnesses reported seeing him at the library as often as three times a week. His library records put it closer to once a week, though naturally there were days he came in without checking books out. Gretchen, another assistant librarian, bitter about my promotion over her, described Geoffrey as almost constantly standing at my desk or walking beside my shelving cart. This was a dig, too, as any librarian will tell you. Shelving should have been my lowest priority, a job easily relegated to students or volunteers.

“What did you think, overhearing their conversations?” the DA asked Gretchen.

“I felt embarrassed mostly,” Gretchen said. “They were a little sophomoric, the way they went on about books. I wondered how much she was trying to impress him.”

“Can you define
sophomoric
?” The DA sounded annoyed. First rule for witnesses: Don’t talk above the jury’s heads.

“When someone tries to sound smarter than they are.”

I don’t think Gretchen hated me all those years we worked side by side before Geoffrey came along to interrupt the quiet and skew the balance. I think she hated her life, which included a husband she didn’t seem to like and a live-in mother-in-law. Geoffrey represented a pleasure most of us had long ago stopped imagining. A man stopping by to say hello, to lean across our beige desk and make a joke. Of course I sounded sophomoric at times. Who wouldn’t? Now I wonder who else he was manipulating, giving up portions of his writing day to.

“Did it ever sound like flirting?” the same lawyer asked Viola.

“In my mind, any conversation that goes on longer than it technically needs to while working is a flirtation. So, yes.” Viola sounded so unlike herself saying this, I wondered if she’d written it down somewhere and memorized her line.

“Did it seem
sexual
to you?”

“Oh, no.” Her eye flicked over for a second to mine. “I never saw that.”

In the end, my coworkers did me far more harm than good, though I don’t blame them. They were librarians, keen observers with sharp memories. During the trial, I’ll admit, I liked hearing their stories—the validation, after everything, that my friendship with Geoffrey hadn’t all been in my head.

It surprised me that no one ever mentioned how we started eating lunch in the garden behind the library. We never planned our meetings, we just wandered outside and found each other. We’d eat and talk as if we were in the middle of a longer story we could never finish. “So where were we?” Geoffrey might say when I sat down. “Oh, right. Tenth-grade English. Your first lesbian teacher.”

He told his own stories, full of teen-boy pranks where he was the ringleader and Paul was a background player. Neither of them had been good athletes, which meant they never joined Little League or Pee Wee football. The afternoons of their youth were free for trolling through the woods at the end of their street. “We built teepees and stored food and berries to live off of if we ever had to.”

I loved hearing his stories. The ones Paul told were mostly from high school, after Geoffrey had already become a star writer for the newspaper with a column titled “In Steadman’s Stead.” “All the school jokes came from his columns,” Paul told me. “The principal quoted them, the teachers, everyone.” Alone with me, Geoffrey told stories that predated the discovery of his writing talent. Maybe for obvious reasons. His career was stalled; he faced an uncertain future. But sometimes I wondered if there might be more to it, if for some reason every reminder of his writing life was painful to him.

I remember the lunch hour when I told Geoffrey the truth about my father’s illness, how he’d had bleak patches on and off throughout my childhood, and then, at the age of forty-four, drove himself to the hospital in the middle of the night and told them he hadn’t slept in fourteen days. He stayed there a month and came home a changed man: heavier, paler, with hands that trembled too much to open the vials of pills he’d returned with. We didn’t know what to say to the stranger he’d become. For months, his only conversation was about nurses and fellow patients from the hospital. “Eventually we got used to it,” I told Geoffrey, looking not at him but at a spray of orange daylilies. “He never went back to work after that. Never drove. Never left the house really, except to go out in the yard a bit. He loved to garden. That’s what he did when he met my mother.”

I’d rarely spoken about my father the way I did with Geoffrey that day, revealing facts that are unimaginable for people who haven’t lived with mental illness.
He never worked again. Never left the house.
“Sometimes I think he was criminally overmedicated in that hospital and never had the courage to wean himself.” Geoffrey nodded. Part of me felt insecure at having spoken so candidly, part of me wondered,
If I offer more details, will he use them?
“He stopped drinking alcohol because of the meds and instead put cough syrup into his tea. At night if his hands were shaking too much, I did it for him.”

“Hmm,” he said, closing his eyes and nodding.

I hoped he was thinking:
Good detail. Usable
. “You have an incredible memory,” he once said, which kept me talking. The irony is that I
did
have an unusual memory. I could recall the names of old teachers, of classmates I hardly knew, details about what the popular girls said as they lined up the apples slices and cottage cheese they ate for lunch.

I remembered everything except for the episodes I forgot completely.

Eventually I told him the truth about my parasomnia episodes, though I framed it as a thing of the distant past. “I used to be quite a sleepwalker,” I said.

“
Really?
What was that like?”

“Usually I’d wake up and be in my sister’s room, trying to take her things.”

“You’d steal in your sleep! I love it!”

“She’d yell at me and that would be that.”

He laughed and clapped like an audience waiting for an encore. This was how we’d portrayed ourselves to each other, as smart and flawed people, perpetual outsiders trying to fit in. “Eventually it got a little creepier than that,” I admitted. “Food started disappearing in the middle of the night and I wouldn’t remember anything, but I’d know that I’d eaten it.”

His smile faded a fraction into concern. “What kind of food?”

“Bulky things. Half a loaf of bread. A stack of crackers. In the morning I’d wake up covered in crumbs.” I wanted to strike the right note, get him to laugh again.

He didn’t. “Wow. Did your parents know?”

“Not really. They thought we had a terrible problem with mice.” This was initially true. Then they assumed my father was to blame. “I’m pretty sure it stopped when I was in high school, but about halfway through college it started again.” I wasn’t sure why I was telling him this when I’d never told anyone before. “I was living in a suite with five other girls. We had a mini-fridge. I remember moving in and seeing all that food and thinking,
I wonder if this is going to be a problem?
”

I tried to make it a funny story, though I knew it wasn’t. I didn’t know the other girls well. I was coming off the loneliest year of my life. Geoffrey’s smile said it was fine, he was ready to laugh, so I kept going: “Sure enough, the first week a package of hot dogs disappeared in the middle of the night. There was a wrapper in the garbage and no sign that any of them had been cooked. Another morning I woke up and discovered I’d eaten a stick of butter.”

I tried to blame the boys’ suite across the hall. We talked about putting an alarm on the fridge. But I had enough evidence—greasy smudges on my sheets, vile stomachaches all day—to know that I was the culprit we were trying to catch, and that if it came out, it would be no laughing matter. It was unheard of and disturbing, a window to the possibility that I didn’t just grow up in the disturbing presence of my father’s unhappiness but contained the possibility for it somewhere inside of me.

I kept going because Geoffrey was laughing hard by then. “I had developed a thing for greasy raw meat, apparently. It was like I had the opposite of anorexia. I begged the school doctor for prescription sleeping pills and that seemed to do the trick. I’m the only person who’s ever lost five pounds in a month by staying in bed.”

 

 

Now I study the book that I’ve just pulled down from Trish’s shelf. As if it were not disturbing enough that Geoffrey was pretending to have read this as a teenager, I remember him inscribing a copy of his favorite Ken Kesey book to me with the exact same closing:
Friends Always (I hope)
. I was thrilled with the sentiment, the vulnerability I read into the parenthetical add-on.

I try to imagine what this means. I don’t remember ever seeing Geoffrey and Trish together or hearing him mention her. I tell myself,
If he was writing about a teenage girl, it wasn’t preposterous for him to befriend one.
I dig through Trish’s desk drawers crammed with notes and old school papers to see if I can find any more evidence of his presence in her life. At the bottom of the deepest one, I find a dog-eared blue spiral notebook with
DIARY KEEP OUT! PRIVATE!
written across the front.

It’s so old I can’t imagine finding any real secrets in here. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen when she was keeping this diary, full of complaints about her brother, John, and a surprising number of mentions about our neighbors. On the second page I find Helen Baker-Harrison’s name, with a story about her dog. And then one about Barbara Baylor, who apparently offered to buy some of Trish’s “specially written poetry.” There’s even a mention of me, whom she’d seen that day at the library. Mysteriously, it says: “She seems better these days, which is nice.”

It worries me to read this, but it also reminds me of the Trish I knew. The perky, happy girl. The friendly teenager, waving from the bus stop and starting conversations. “I like the new bush you planted, Mrs. Treading! I told your husband!” she’d say. What other teenager offered such comments unsolicited? I had no children for her to babysit, no money to pay her for chores, yet she seemed eager to talk, and noticed the little things you assume teenagers don’t. Once I passed her as I walked to work wearing a new winter coat and she clapped her hands and said, “Oh, it’s nice, Mrs. Treading. A lot better than that old one!” I could hardly believe it. It
was
better than my old one. In fact, I’d spent an hour in the store trying it on. I fell in love and spent too much. “I’ll wear it for the next fifteen years,” I promised Paul when he saw the price. Money had become a point of contention between us after we figured out that our mortgage payments took more than half of our paychecks. Hearing her say this made me think it was all worth it.

Trish wasn’t perfect, of course. I saw her once smoking a cigarette at the bus stop, and thought:
She’s a girl with secrets.
She smiled and waved, folding her cigarette into the palm of her hand. “Hi, Mrs. Treading! How’s the library? Anything new?”

“Fine,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “You know, the usual.” Did she want to hear that I’d been put temporarily in charge of the mystery/suspense section? Did she pretend to care so she could laugh at me later with her friends? Sometimes she was impossible to figure out.

“I was thinking about coming down there for a book.”

What else could I say? “Oh, good! What book?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Should I tell her I could see the lit cigarette inside her cupped hand? That it wasn’t so long ago that I’d done a little smoking myself? She looked at me that way sometimes: as if she wanted to be my friend.

Now it breaks my heart to remember how much I liked Trish and how I tried not to let that show, limiting our conversations, ending them before anyone saw us. How did such a girl fall out so grievously with her parents? In her diary, the closest I can find to a clue is this:
Mom is making more rules about who I’m allowed to invite home. No one from school, no one from the neighborhood. She says they need to be home anytime someone from outside the family is here.

In my own family, I was the one who cut us off from the prying eyes of the outside world. By the time I got to junior high I lived in fear of anything that might draw attention to my home life, the silent dinners we ate, the ubiquitous TV. By ninth grade, there was evidence of my father’s strange temper—holes kicked in the walls, covered with LOVE! posters that made our house look like it was wearing Band-Aids. I thought it was imperative to keep people away.

As I keep reading her diary, I give Trish credit for having the bravery I didn’t in the face of odd parents. By December, she’s turned thirteen and smoked pot with Alan, who rides on her bus. By February she’s gone home with Tommy, a greasy-haired viola player who asked her if she would mind taking off her shirt.

I waited until my freshman year in college to embarrass myself in such stupid, self-destructive ways. I arrived an innocent eighteen-year-old, and within three months I was passing out regularly in lounges and dorm rooms I didn’t recognize. I put on the performance of a wild girl for seven months, dancing on coffee tables, inviting boys I’d just met back to my dorm room because its sterile plainness was a thrill—
Look around, go ahead! There’s nothing to see!
In March of that year, I sobered up quickly when I discovered I was pregnant and had no idea who the father was. At the time I thought of it as a humiliating wake-up call. The school doctor knew, but no one else had to, I decided. I told him I’d be fine going into Stamford alone for the procedure. I took a bus and brought a backpack full of textbooks. Afterward, I lay on the gurney and read my Japanese history book. In the years that followed, whenever I thought about those first months away from home, I felt a wash of embarrassment and, frankly, relief that I hadn’t paid a steeper price. I didn’t know, of course—it never occurred to me—that there might still be a price to pay.