A Crime in the Neighborhood (2 page)

The cause of my own parents' divorce was predictable enough. My father began seeing another woman. What spins their story in a slightly different direction is that the other woman happened to be my mother's younger sister, her favorite sister, Ada.

My mother never much trusted men. In her opinion, they lacked character. When she was seven her own father died of pneumonia after falling asleep drunk on a Baltimore park bench in the snow, leaving his wife with four little girls and no life insurance. They moved in with my mother's grandparents, who were well-to-do, but six months later her grandfather had a stroke and spent his last three years in bed, rattling the brass headboard with his good hand. It was soon revealed that he, too, had neglected to prepare for anyone's future, and after paying off the night nurses and the funeral bills, six
females found themselves close to broke just as World War II was ending.

They managed. The two women took in sewing, did some typing, ate corn flakes for dinner, and, with a loan from a great-aunt, finally moved to Bethesda and opened a gift shop that specialized in Hummel china figurines. My mother says she and her sisters grew up tough and sober, qualities they believed their male forebears had lacked. While they dusted those porcelain shepherd boys and goose girls, they planned how to be unbreakable.

“Always pay for your own movie on a date,” they told one another sternly. “Never say thank you unless you mean it. Get respect.”

Their loyalties lay strictly with one another, especially when it came to men. They knew how fragile men could be, how easily they succumbed to a cough, to a palpitation. Hadn't they seen it? Males, they confided, carried diseases. Sitting cross-legged on their beds at night, they demonstrated for one another how to kiss boys with lips sealed shut. Wear an undershirt
and
a bra, the older ones instructed the younger ones. Be prepared.

My grandmother used to say she had given birth to one daughter with four heads, an uncomfortable image that seems unlikely coming from the plump old lady I remember dozing by the radiator in her brown wool slacks and pink fur house slippers. But the image was true enough in its way. My mother
and her sisters liked to exact unified vengeance when one of them was mistreated, usually by way of carefully orchestrated, malicious jokes. In one story my mother liked to tell, her sister Claire dated a boy who then lied to his friends about having sex with her in the back of his father's car. Two days later, the results of this boy's yearly physical examination, signed by the school nurse, were “stolen” from the school infirmary and appeared on a bulletin board. The report graphically detailed the boy's unfortunate condition as a hermaphrodite and recommended surgical intervention. I have forgotten which sister forged this document, but apparently the forgery was so excellent that no one believed it was a fake until the school nurse stood up during an assembly and declared she'd had nothing to do with it.

My mother and her sisters always figured in these stories as a hilarious, vindictive sorority: Fran, Claire, Lois, and Ada, the fabulous Mayhew girls—funny, brazen, compassionate, and ruthless, a private female army. The Mayhew Girls, that's how I thought of them. Like the title of a book.

My mother and her sisters were all very tall, which may be why the fast put-down happened to be their particular talent. “This big,” they would say, holding a thumb and forefinger two inches apart when some miscreant boy passed by. It was left to him to decide if they meant a specific part of his anatomy or only his general character.

As I still imagine them in these stories, the Mayhew Girls are always dressed in nunnish black ankle-length skirts, white
blouses, and seductive, shiny patent-leather pumps. They wear red lipstick, but their underwear is sewn by their mother out of old linen pillowcases. They smoke cigarettes and toss around slangy phrases like “Hey, Daddy-o” and “Catch you on the flip side”; yet they perform brilliantly in Latin, shouting lines from Virgil in the bathtub, writing
“panis”
instead of “bread” on grocery lists, quizzing one another on verb conjugations while they pluck their eyebrows. Like my grandmother, I had a hard time as a child separating one aunt from another. In my mother's stories, virtually no separation existed.

Of course, that was my mother's story. The true story, if there is such a thing, must hover somewhere closer to misery. The fifties weren't a time to be odd, and four lumbering girls with no father and pillowcase underwear must have felt unbearably unusual in suburban Maryland. Most likely they stuck together because they felt left out of any other group they tried to join. Their devotion to one another was defensive, reflexive, parochial. Us/them.

Which is probably why they exaggerated so cruelly about one another. “Claire called the other day,” my mother might tell Ada as they sat at the kitchen table stirring their coffee. “I had to listen for two hours while she complained about how much the dog sheds. ‘Why don't you just
harvest
the damn thing,' I said. ‘Make it into an afghan.' Well, you know Claire—”

Or she might hang up the phone from talking to Aunt Fran and immediately dial Ada's number to say, “Listen to this, I
just talked to Frannie. She's bought a new Sears dishwasher—well, you know her, you'd think she'd bought the Waldorf-Astoria. ‘Why don't you just move into it,' I said. ‘It sounds a lot fancier than your house—'”

Naturally my mother never said any of the things she reported herself as saying. Maybe Aunt Claire had complained briefly about the dog's shedding; maybe Aunt Fran boasted for a moment about her dishwasher. But for my mother to render these details realistically would be to miss a chance of celebrating her latticelike relationship to her sisters. She loved to talk about one sister with derogatory intimacy to another. And whatever self-criticism she was likely to entertain she also leveled at them, so that she was continually admiring her own flaws in the others. “We're all touchy,” she might say proudly. “You know us.”

The only one who sometimes escaped this X-ray attention was Ada. Ada was the baby of the family, even several inches shorter than the other three. As a child she had been unusually self-absorbed and was therefore considered artistic. She spent hours in her room with scissors and a pile of magazines, cutting out movie stars and pasting them into little booklets she made out of stapled construction paper. The movie stars were then given bits of dialogue in balloons, most of which concerned Ada herself. “Isn't Ada the cat's pajamas?” Rita Hay-worth asks David Niven in the one booklet that survives. “Isn't she the bee's knees?”

In keeping with her artistic nature, Ada seemed more
exotic to me than my mother or my other aunts. She had grown her hair long, when most women her age wore bubble cuts and shags. Her hair was a bright auburn and she liked to sweep it back from her forehead with her hands and bunch it between her fists. She had a fondness for silver bangle bracelets that clinked whenever she swept back her hair, and when she laughed her eyes disappeared. Privately, I believed, or hoped, that I resembled her; in fact, my hair is the same color, although curlier.

But Ada was always different from the rest of the family, and it wasn't simply that she was more attractive. She not only looked soft, ripe, and pliant, and seemed to feel that way, but she appeared to consider this quality enough to recommend her to anybody. Her laugh was slow and full; her gestures were languid, even when she meant to be in a hurry. Her arms plumped near her shoulders, and under her flimsy embroidered peasant blouses, her full breasts swayed, braless. My mother and aunts could be self-critical to the point of paralysis, but not Ada. Ada
liked
how she looked. I've known a few women like that since, who truly think they are beautiful or sexy and become so, even if they're plain, and I've always been a little afraid of them, as my mother and her older sisters sometimes seemed a little afraid of Ada. Sexual preoccupation is an imperious thing, and when it's in full color, it makes all other preoccupations look slightly beside the point.

Oddly enough, my mother felt protective about Ada. “Oh,
she's had a lot on her mind,” she would argue if Fran or Claire accused Ada of laziness when she failed to send Christmas presents or forgot their birthdays. My mother had a certain admiration for vanity, for its vividness, the way scrupulous people can admire hucksters. “You know Ada,” she would say with a laugh. “She's a little distracted by herself.”

And until the year Boyd Ellison was murdered, the sight of Aunt Ada in our kitchen, long hair curling loose down her back, sitting at the Formica table doodling on a paper napkin while my mother made dinner, was as familiar to me as the sight of my own brother or sister. Ada had accepted her role as the family artist and, with financial help from her older sisters, had gone to art school for a year before dropping out to marry Uncle Roger, who managed a steakhouse in Bethesda called The Flaming Pit.

Ada taught art classes at an elementary school in Rockville. She had no children of her own.

“It's Little Miss Marsha, the Martian Girl,” she always said when I came home from school; then she asked me what was “new.” She listened seriously to whatever I told her and often drew a picture of what I described. When I was finished talking, she'd hand me the napkin. If I had done well on a quiz, she drew a crown. If another child had hurt my feelings, she drew a picture of that child being pierced by arrows or getting run over by a truck.

“Come on, Ada,” my mother sometimes said. “That's not nice.”

“Come on yourself,” Ada would laugh, sweeping back her hair.

But most of all I remember her smell, a disturbing smell, provocative, fruity—I can smell it now just thinking about it—a smell something like moist apricots. Sometimes when she spoke she would hood her upper lip like a horse trying to nibble a carrot. Of all the sisters, she had married first, at eighteen.

“Well, you know Ada,” said my mother, when anyone asked why.

I mention all this history as a roundabout way of saying that despite the natural resentment any timid woman holds for a bold one, I believe my mother loved her sister Ada more than she loved my father. Simply, she trusted her. She trusted her as one trusts someone fully comprehended, which may not be a good idea as there is no such thing. Ada was a safeguard, an ally, part of my mother's future plan, which she had learned early to prepare and maintain. Her betrayal was far more shocking to my mother than my father's betrayal, which she had always more or less expected. In all the cruel, elaborate jokes they crafted together, my mother never imagined a sister would play one on her.

Two days after that cold February evening when my mother sailed our plates through the air, Aunt Fran and Aunt Claire arrived for a visit.

They appeared at the front door clad in nearly identical outfits of pastel blouses and tweedy slacks, and Aunt Fran was wearing desert boots. They were leggy, stoop-shouldered women, edging past forty, with short toast-colored hair and worried brown eyes, more angular versions of my mother. Aunt Fran was the tallest, with a big jaw and a skinny neck. Aunt Claire had kindly, popped eyes, which made her look like a Boston terrier.

Every time my mother told one of her Mayhew Girls stories, I always pictured Fran and Claire as elegantly insouciant, the sort of women who made wisecracks and wore scarlet lipstick, who drank martinis and didn't eat the olive, who could sprint in high-heeled shoes. Every time I saw them, I had to remember all over again how ordinary they looked; but this time their ordinariness seemed deliberate. Aunt Fran carried both of their plaid suitcases, while Aunt Claire toted along an enormous half-finished needlepoint of the Eiffel Tower with a leftward tilt. As they strode toward the house from the car, they looked like a matched set of army nurses. “Hi, kids,” they shouted as they stepped through the door, in rough sweet voices that might have demanded hospital corners and sterilized gauze.

When Aunt Fran bent to kiss me, a sharp whisker prickled my cheek. She smelled of peanuts and wintergreen Life Savers. “For you,” she murmured, slipping into my pocket a bag of sourballs.

That night my sister and I slept in sleeping bags on the floor
of my brother's room to free up enough beds. Suddenly our house filled with raspy whispering female voices, a sibilant, maddening sound to a child who is afraid to know why her father drives off to work red-eyed every morning, while her mother spends her mornings vacuuming ferociously, up and down the stairs, through every room, her mouth set like a gladiator's.

My father had confessed. Why or how I do not know; my mother has never said, and she is not easy to question. But apparently during this time an attempt was made “to work things out.” Ada stayed banished in her brick townhouse in Bethesda, painting watercolors of fleshy peaches and pears, while her two eldest sisters drove back and forth in our Oldsmobile station wagon bearing messages, conferring, theorizing, solemn as a pair of generals. A hectic excitement surrounded them both: Aunt Fran had left her husband and son in Milwaukee, and Aunt Claire had left her two daughters and her husband in Detroit. As difficult an occasion as it must have been for them, it was still a vacation. They bought packs of Kools as soon as they arrived, though both had quit smoking, and drank white wine before dinner. After dinner they draped their long legs across the sofa, displaying at last a hint of insouciance, and blew perfect smoke rings at the ceiling.

The rest of the time Aunt Claire stitched at her pillow while Aunt Fran hunkered onto the floor to do stretching exercises, their hoarse voices hoarsening as time went on, and during the day they persuaded my mother to go shopping for
shoes. At least, I remember her, during that period, wearing several pairs of new platform shoes, which looked like hooves.

My aunts took turns corralling the twins and me into the station wagon as soon as we got home from school to herd us off to the mall. Trailing whichever aunt had accompanied us, we would buy chewing gum and jawbreakers from the drugstore, then wander past shop windows, stepping on the heels of one another's sneakers, snickering at the negligees in the window of the Coy Boutique, always ending up at the pet shop to watch the tropical fish avoid each other in their aquariums. This diversion was to give my mother more time to “talk” to the aunt who had remained behind. But when we returned, she would be sitting silently on a kitchen stool, staring at the gold flecks in the Formica tabletop.